at the tall man’s throat.
The assailant jumped back and pulled him over again.
Hinge was losing his strength. His breath came in small gasps as the wire cut deeper. He rolled in the wet sand, grabbed the Leash and pulled the assassin toward him. The tall man lurched forward and landed close to the water’s edge on his hands and knees.
The storm-swept beach was lit up for a second by an arc of lightning. Hinge saw the soggy face of his killer, and his eyes bulged.
Spettro!
He stuck his tongue in the end of the cigar and spat the dart straight at Falmouth’s face. But the wind and Falmouth’s sudden move toward Hinge conspired to ruin his aim. The dart hit Falmouth’s jacket in the shoulder. He brushed it away as he collided with Hinge, and the two men went down in the wet sand again.
The surf rolled up over their feet.
Hinge was terrified. He began to growl like a dog, twisting and scrambling away from the water, clawing the sand with the hand that held the knife while he pulled at the deadly collar with the other. Falmouth grabbed his ankles and dragged him into the surf. In the flash of lightning, Falmouth could see the terror in Hinge’s eyes. And he could hear the scream of horror trapped in his mangled throat.
He’s afraid of water, Falmouth thought. Hinge is afraid of water.
The Texan thrashed frantically as the gentle surf washed over him. Gagging, gasping for air, he reached out blindly for Falmouth, slashing the darkness with his knife.
Falmouth rolled him into deeper water. Hinge could not last much longer. The wire was doing its job. Now, if he held Hinge underwater, it would be all over. Suddenly Falmouth felt a vise on his throat. Hinge’s thumb and fingers dug into the flesh. His hand was like iron. Then Falmouth felt the knife pierce his side. The blade burned into his flesh.
For a moment Falmouth thought, He’s got me, the bloody cowboy’s neck must be almost cut in two and he’s still fighting. Even in the water, Hinge was far from beat.
He twisted hard, twirling Hinge with him into still deeper water, holding him under with the Leash. He groped with his other hand, found the knife still sticking in his side, pulled it free and let the tide carry it away. He grabbed Hinge’s hand with his own and tried to pry the fingers loose, but it was like trying to pry open a possum trap. Falmouth’s lungs burned as he and Hinge tumbled in the sea, then he broke the surface and gulped air. He hauled Hinge to the surface by the wire and stared at the grotesque obscenity that death had made of Hinge’s face.
He took Hinge’s thumb in his fist and broke it and pried the fingers away from his throat and fell against the rock piling and dragged himself out of the water. And be lay on the rocks in the driving rain, massaging the sash in his side and his bruised throat. A moment later Hinge’s body bobbed to the surface, face down, and Falmouth watched it, bumping against the rocks, while he got his wind back.
Inside the cottage, as the storm raged on, O’Hara’s mind flashed back and forth, like the lightning, between now and the past, between Jamaica and Japan. But then he felt her, heard her begin a tiny chant to herself, felt the wetness, and felt her hand, searching for him and finding him, and he felt her vibrancy flowing into him and felt her soft skin against him and it was the way she smelled and moved and whispered and touched and kissed. It was the way she cried out and it was her silence. It was the way he felt inside her.
And for a while there was no Japan.
‘Well,’ said the Magician, ‘Lavander’s dead. I just picked up Kingston radio on the shortwave. They’re callin’ it a mugging. Throat slit, pockets cut out, like that.’
He had been holed up with his computer, Izzy, chipping away at the code in Lavander’s book, since their return to St Lucifer early that morning.
‘It’s really no big surprise,’ O’Hara said.
‘No, but I’ll tell you what is,’ the Magician said. ‘Another body drifted into Montego Bay with the tide. White male. No identification yet, but it appears he was strangled.’
‘Strangled?’
‘Yeah, but let’s worry about one homicide at a time,’ said the Magician.
‘We blew it in Jamaica. That’s the short and the tall of it. The question is, Where do we go from here?’
‘Yes, we don’t have much to show for our trip,’ said Eliza. ‘A dead man and a book we can’t read.’
‘I can break that code,’ the Magician said confidently. ‘I been workin’ on it all morning, just a matter of time. It’s a letter code, I can tell from the sentence structure.’
‘What’s that mean?’ Eliza asked.
‘What it means is, the code substitutes one letter for another. Okay? Like a is given the value z or b or g of whatever the goddamn code calls for. Something simple so Lavander could memorize it. See what I mean? Who the hell can remember twenty-fuckin’-six different letter substitutions, right?’
‘Lavander might. He was supposed to be some kind of nutty genius,’ O’Hara said.
‘So how is Izzy going to solve this problem?’ Eliza asked.
‘It’s an anagram, a simple goddamn anagram,’ said the Magician. ‘Some words are obvious, like “the” and “and” are the three-letter words used most in the language, okay? Then there’s repeaters, like certain letters repeat more than others, vowels and double-letter combinations. T, 1, n, like that.’
