Bill Pronzini - Quicksilver

“Likewise. So tonight we can both find out.”

“All right. But I’m not going to take any public bath. I’d be too embarrassed.”

“How about a private bath with me later on?”

“I don’t think we’d both fit in the tub.”

“There’s always the shower.”

“Mmm. We’ll see.”

Yeah, I thought, you bet we will.

She said, “But right now I’m hungry. I imagine you must be too.”

“Starving.”

“Well, we’d better go out somewhere. I don’t have much here. What do you want to eat?”

“Do I get a choice?”

“Within reason.”

“I want a New York steak about three inches thick,” I said. “With sauteed mushrooms and a baked potato loaded down with sour cream and chives and bacon bits. And some sourdough French bread. And a pint or two of good ale.”

“I’ll just bet you do. And how is your diet going, anyway?”

“Peachy keen,” I said.

“How much weight have you lost so far?”

“Two pounds.”

“Is that all? You should have lost more than that. You haven’t been cheating, have you?”

“No, I haven’t been cheating. I’ve been grazing a lot, according to your mad dictates. And eating eggs-cartons of eggs. Cluck, cluck.”

“That’s good. I mean that you’re not cheating. But you shouldn’t eat too many eggs.”

“What?”

“They’re full of cholesterol.”

“I thought you told me to eat eggs three times a day.”

“I did not tell you that. I said they were high in protein and you should have them once or twice a day. Two meals and four eggs, maximum. With grapefruit to counteract the cholesterol.”

“I hate grapefruit.”

“Does that mean you haven’t eaten any?”

“I didn’t know I was supposed to.”

“I told you. Don’t you ever listen?”

“Not when somebody’s trying to get me to eat grapefruit.”

“Selective hearing,” she said, “that’s what you’ve got.”

“Nuts,” I said. “I don’t care what you say, I’m going to have a steak tonight. Just the thought of one makes me weak.”

“I never said you couldn’t have a steak. It’s the baked potato with all the trimmings and the sourdough bread and the two pints of ale you can’t have.”

“Then what do I get with the steak?”

“Black coffee and a green salad with lemon juice.”

“Green salad with lemon juice. God.”

“It’s good for you. Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t care,” I said. “Just so long as we get there fast.”

We ate at a place in one of the large downtown hotels that specialized in steaks. They sliced any cut of meat to order right in front of you, as soon as you came in, and I told the chef I wanted a sixteen-ounce New York done rare. Normally I like my steak medium rare, but tonight I was after red meat, the bloodier the better. It made me feel primitive as hell, like a caveman out on his first date.

When the steak arrived at our table I managed to eat it like a civilized human being, if just barely. I was even able to get down most of the green salad with lemon juice. Kerry watched me with a little awe in her expression. You’d have thought she had never seen a starving man wolf food before.

After the waiter cleared away the remains we sat and talked for a while over coffee. My stomach was full and I was happy. It doesn’t take much to make me happy-just a good meal, an attractive woman, a pulp magazine to read, and a job to do. Maybe I was a primitive, after all.

I let her pay the check for a change. She could afford it; she was a highly paid copywriter for one of San Francisco’s largest ad agencies and I was only a poorly paid private eye who was going to be even more poorly paid once I had to start divvying with Eberhardt. Then we went and got my car and I drove over to Pine and straight out to Tamura’s Baths. The sooner I got my little talk with Ken Yamasaki over and done with, the sooner I could go have an Italian shower with Kerry. Italian showers were much better than Japanese baths. The kind I had in mind were, anyhow.

The building that housed the baths was nondescript enough-a narrow brick structure, two stories high, flanked by an apartment house and a corner grocery. I found a parking space two doors down and we walked over to it through a drizzle that was more mist than rain. A luminous clock in the window of the grocery said that the time was 9:35.

At the door to the bathhouse, Kerry said, “Are you sure it’s all right for women to go in here?”

“You don’t see any signs that say otherwise, do you?”

“No, I guess not.”

The only sign of any sort was tacked up alongside the entrance. It said TAMURA’S JAPANESE BATHS HOURS 10 A. M.- 10 P.M. DAILY. I moved past it and opened the door and let Kerry precede me into a narrow, gloomy hallway illuminated by a single Japanese lantern. At the far end was a set of stairs leading upward.

It was quiet in there; I couldn’t hear anything except silence when I shut the door. The stairs took us into an anteroom that contained some rattan chairs, two more lanterns, and a reception desk with nobody behind it. To one side was a screened archway that probably led back to the baths.

We waited fifteen or twenty seconds and nothing happened: nobody came into the anteroom, nobody made any sounds anywhere else in the building. Finally I called, “Hello! Anybody here?” All that got me was an echo and more silence.

Kerry said, “Where is everybody?”

“Good question. The place can’t be closed; it’s not ten yet and the front door was unlocked.”

“Maybe we should go look behind that screen.”

“That must be where the baths are.”

“So? Are you afraid I’ll see something I’ve never seen before?”

“Fat chance of that.”

She stuck her tongue out at me.

I went over and around the screen, with Kerry at my heels. Another corridor, this one lighted by more lanterns, with several doorways opening off it and another doorway at the far end. The first few doorways opened into dressing cubicles, all of them empty, a couple in which towels had been carelessly tossed on the floor; the ones beyond opened into the bathing areas. There were four of these — large rooms separated by movable, opaque screens, each room containing a waist-deep sunken tile tub large enough for half a dozen people, with bamboo mats on the floor around the rim. None of the rooms was occupied, although a few of the mats appeared to be wet.

“So this is what a Japanese bathhouse looks like,” Kerry said. “It’s a little disappointing. I expected something more exotic.”

I didn’t say anything. Something was wrong here; I could feel it in the air now, like little stirrings of bad wind. The place shouldn’t have been empty, not with the front door unlocked. And if those towels on the floor and the wet mats were any indication, the people who had been here had left in a hurry. Not too long ago, either.

We were standing inside one of the bathing rooms. I said abruptly, “Stay here a minute, will you?”

“Why? What’s the matter?”

“Just stay here. I’ll be right back.”

I left her before she could argue and went down to the end of the corridor. The door there was open about halfway; on the other side I could see part of a desk with a lamp burning on it and some filing cabinets. An office-Tamura’s, maybe, if somebody named Tamura still ran the place. I put the tips of my fingers against the door and shoved it open all the way.

The first thing I saw was that the desk chair had been overturned. Then I saw the scattered shards of broken glass, and the spots of red on the wall. And then, when I took two steps inside and another two sideways, I saw the rest of the blood, on the floor and on the lower part of the wall, and the Japanese whose blood it had been.