The Key to Midnight

interruption as an excuse to glance away from him. She closed her eyes and sipped the cognac as if to savor it without distraction. In that self-imposed darkness, she realized that while he had been staring into her eyes, he had transmitted some of his own intensity to her. She had lost all awareness of the noisy club around her: the clinking of glasses, the laughter and buzz of conversation, even the music. Now all that clamor returned to her with the gradualness of silence reasserting itself in the wake of a tremendous explosion.
        Finally she opened her eyes. 'I'm at a disadvantage. I don't know your name.'
        'You're sure you don't? I've felt… perhaps we've met before.'
        She frowned. 'I'm sure not.'
        'Maybe it's just that I wish we'd met sooner. I'm Alex Hunter. From Chicago.'
        'You work for an American company here?'
        'No. I'm on vacation for a month. I landed in Tokyo eight days ago. I planned on spending two days in Kyoto, but I've already been here longer than that. I've got three weeks left. Maybe I'll spend them all in Kyoto and cancel the rest of my schedule. Anata no machi wa hijo ni kyomi ga arimatsu.'
        'Yes,' she said, 'it is an interesting city, the most beautiful in Japan. But the entire country is fascinating, Mr. Hunter.'
        'Call me Alex.'
        'There's much to see in these islands, Alex.'
        'Maybe I should come back next year and take in all those other places. Right now, everything I could want to see in Japan is here.'
        She stared at him, braving those insistent dark eyes, not certain what to think of him. He was quite the male animal, making his intentions known.
        Joanna prided herself on her strength, not merely in business but in her emotional life. She seldom wept and never lost her temper. She valued self-control, and she was almost obsessively self-reliant. Always, she preferred to be the dominant partner in her relations with men, to choose when and how a friendship with a man would develop, to be the one who decided when - and if - they would become more than friends. She had her own ideas about the proper, desirable pace of a romance. Ordinarily she wouldn't have liked a man as direct as Alex Hunter, so she was surprised that she found his stylishly aggressive approach to be appealing.
        Nevertheless, she pretended not to see that he was more than casually interested in her. She glanced around as if checking on the waiters and gauging the happiness of her customers, sipped the cognac, and said, 'You speak Japanese so well.'
        He bowed his head an inch or two. 'Arigato.'
         'Do itashimashite.'
        'Languages are a hobby of mine,' he said. 'Like swing music. And good restaurants. Speaking of which, since the Moonglow is open only evenings, do you know a place that serves lunch?'
        'In the next block. A lovely little restaurant built around a garden with a fountain. It's called Mizutani.'
        'That sounds perfect. Shall we meet at Mizutani for lunch tomorrow?'
        Joanna was startled by the question but even more surprised to hear herself answer without hesitation. 'Yes. That would be nice.'
        'Noon?'
        'Yes. Noon.'
        She sensed that whatever happened between her and this unusual man, whether good or bad, would be entirely different from anything she'd experienced before.

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    5
        
         The man with the steel fingers reaches for the hypodermic syringe…
        Joanna sat straight up in bed, soaked in perspiration, gasping for breath, clawing at the unyielding darkness before she regained control of herself and switched on the nightstand lamp.
        She was alone.
        She pushed back the covers and got out of bed with an urgency sparked by some deep-seated anxiety that she could not understand. She walked unsteadily to the center of the room and stood there, trembling in fear and confusion.
        The air was cool and somehow wrong. She smelled a combination of strong antiseptics that hadn't been used in that room: ammonia, Lysol, alcohol, a pungent brew of germicidal substances unpleasant enough to make her eyes water. She drew a long breath, then another, but the vapors faded as she attempted to pinpoint their source.
        When the stink was gone altogether, she reluctantly admitted that the odors hadn't actually existed. They were left over from the dream, figments of her imagination.
        Or perhaps they