“Say hello to Greer Garson for me,” Lucas said dutifully, for she had played the female lead.
If their phones were tapped, nothing was gained by using names other than their own, and they never spoke in code, but Dr. MaceMaskil liked making contact this way. It made him feel safer than he might otherwise have felt.
He launched straight into his story about how he’d been in the Alumni Affairs Office when Setsuko Nozawa barged through the door, obviously with some kind of buzz on, drugs or liquor, hard to tell which, and demanded to know the address of one Lucas Drackman. She might have been upset about something, but she might also have been nothing more than nervous; her behavior was so peculiar that it was difficult to tell which. The secretary behind the counter, a busty redhead named Teresa Marie Hallahan, who for some time had been hot for the professor, of course informed the distressed visitor that the university guarded the privacy of alumni, whereupon this Nozawa person became belligerent. When Dr. Mace-Maskil spoke up for Miss Hallahan and university policy, the Nozawa creature turned her fury on him, became incoherent, and left in a huff.
“Who the hell is Setsuko Nozawa?” Lucas asked.
“I gather she owns a dry-cleaning shop. I thought you must know her somehow.”
“I never heard of the crazy bitch.”
Dr. Mace-Maskil believed him, and that was a relief. If Lucas had neither done Nozawa a great kindness nor killed someone for her, then he was far more likely to believe his mentor than a weird woman who’d thrown a fit in the Alumni Affairs Office.
“When did this happen?” Lucas asked.
“Fifteen minutes ago. I came straight from there to my office phone here at the school.”
“Why does the bitch want my address?”
“She wouldn’t say. But it was so strange, so very strange, I thought you should know.”
“Yeah, all right. I’ll think about it, look into it. My plate’s kind of full right now, but I’ll get to it. It’s good to know you’ve got my back.”
After they disconnected, the professor went into the bathroom, got on his knees in front of the toilet, and threw up.
74
According to the eventual testimony of Aurora Delvane, after she returned from her run in the park that day, she showered, washed and dried her hair, and painted her toenails before she came downstairs and found Lucas with Reggie “Gorilla” Smaller, Tilton, and Fiona in the kitchen, where for one last time they’d been reviewing details of the impending operation. Aurora hadn’t needed to be there, for she wasn’t an active participant in the scheme; she was an observer, their chronicler, who would one day write about their exploits and the deep philosophy that motivated them.
As Aurora entered the kitchen, Lucas racked the wall phone, turned to the group, and said, “What the hell was that about?” He recounted his conversation with the professor, whom he referred to as “a total butthead I should have offed years ago.”
No one knew what if anything to make of the story about the erratic dry-cleaning entrepreneur, and Aurora Delvane asked, “What is this, Jap Day or something?”
Lucas frowned. “What’d you say?”
Fiona came around the table, eyes narrowing with each step. “Yeah, what’d you say?”
Aurora told them about the gay guy from New Year’s Eve, who was at that moment ensconced on the bench in the park, directly across the street. “But he’s a big old nobody swish. He’s reading that Capote book, the one everybody’s reading, been a bestseller forever, so you know it’s for dunces.”
Intrigued, Lucas retrieved a pair of binoculars from the study, and they all went to the front room. After Lucas watched the bench-sitter for a minute, Fiona took the binoculars and studied the man.
She hissed, “Yoshioka.”
“You mean the tailor?” Aurora asked. “The nice little guy across the hall, you never see him in anything but a suit?”
“He’s a sneaky, treacherous sonofabitch,” said Fiona Cassidy. “Nozawa in Illinois, this guy in the park and on that bench of all benches, Yoshioka sniffing around on the sixth floor, him and his security chains. It’s Jap Day, sure enough.”
A conversation ensued, during which they argued heatedly about whether Fiona might be excessively paranoid. They all properly and wisely embraced paranoia as being essential to their survival and success; but though paranoia could be a good thing, it could also be too much of a good thing. If one of them, for instance, began to suspect that among them lurked a Bilderberger, the other four had to conduct a friendly intervention and get him back on a rational track. In this case, the five reached a relatively quick consensus: Fiona wasn’t off the rails; there must be some connection between Yoshioka, Nozawa, and this big guy in the chokeberry shadows.
Tilton said they never should have used Apartment 6-C for bomb-making, that Fiona should have cooked the pudding and packed the pots right here in the house. That ticked off Lucas, who reminded Tilton that the house was a two-million-dollar asset, not a place where you made bombs or tested flamethrowers. If Fiona blew herself to bits, that would be sad, even a tragedy, but blowing up the mansion would be something else altogether; blowing up the mansion would be a serious loss of capital. Besides, if the house was damaged by a bomb blast, the FBI would be all over the Drackman Family Trust and all over Lucas himself; even dumb bears knew not to crap in their dens.
Basically, they had two options. One, cancel the operation planned for that morning and hope to reschedule it, snatch Yoshioka instead, and torture the truth out of him. Two, proceed as planned, rather than running for the tall grass like a bunch of cowards, and then extract the facts from Yoshioka afterward.
Even if the guy in the park was conducting surveillance, they could leave the house by the back, walk a couple of blocks along the alleyway before coming out to a main street, flag down a taxi, and take that to the rented Quonset, once an auto-repair garage in an industrial district, from which they were staging the operation.
“Look,” Lucas said, “it’s weird, all these Japanese, but who are these people really? I mean, we have a tailor, a dry cleaner, and some squish, we don’t know what he does, if anything. We’re not dealing with Elliot Ness here. I say we go forward as planned, make this a day to remember, and later we squeeze Yoshioka until we pop the little rotten tomato.”
Lucas nearly always got what he wanted, certainly not because of metaphors like the rotten tomato and not merely because he knew how to manipulate and motivate people, but also because he was a spooky dude who seemed to be perpetually on the edge of violence. His four compatriots agreed with him: the operation was on.