The Key to Midnight

magazines, and newspapers on the dresser, and she'd remade the bed while he'd been gone. The drapes were open; he preferred to keep them drawn. What else? He couldn't see anything out of the ordinary - and certainly nothing sinister. But something was wrong. Call it intuition: He'd experienced it before, and usually he'd found it worth heeding.
        Alex set the bottle of Asahi on the vanity bench and approached the bathroom with caution. He put his left hand against the heavy swinging door, listened, heard nothing, hesitated, then pushed the door inward and stepped quickly across the threshold.
        The late-afternoon sun pierced a frosted window high in one wall, and the bathroom glowed with golden light. He was alone.
        This time his sixth sense had misled him. A false alarm. He felt slightly foolish.
        He was jumpy. And no wonder. Although lunch with Joanna had been immensely enjoyable, the rest of the day had been a grinding emery wheel that had put a sharp edge on his nerves: her irrational flight from the Korean at Nijo Castle; her description of the oft-repeated nightmare; and his growing belief that the unexplained disappearance of Lisa Jean Chelgrin had been an event with powerful causes and effects, with layers of complex and mysterious meaning that went far deeper than anything that he had uncovered or even imagined at the time it had happened. He had a right to be jumpy.
        Alex stripped off his shirt and put it in the laundry bag. He brought a magazine and the bottle of beer from the other room and put them on a low utility table that he had moved next to the bath. He bent down at the tub, turned on the water, adjusted the temperature.
        In the bedroom again, he went to the walk-in closet to choose a suit for the evening. The door was ajar. As Alex pulled it open, a man leaped at him from the darkness beyond. Dorobo. A burglar. The guy was Japanese, short, stocky, muscular, very quick. He swung a fistful of wire shirt hangers. The bristling cluster of hooked ends struck Alex in the face, could have blinded him, and he cried out, but the hangers spared his sight, stung one cheek, and rained around him in a burst of dissonant music.
        Counting on the element of surprise, the stranger tried to push past Alex to the bedroom door, but Alex clutched the guy's jacket and spun him around. Unbalanced, they fell against the side of the bed, then to the floor, with the intruder on top.
        Alex took a punch in the ribs, another, and a punch in the face. He wasn't in a good position to use his own fists, but he heaved hard enough to pitch off his assailant.
        The stranger rolled into the vanity bench and knocked it over. Cursing continuously in Japanese, he scrambled to his feet.
        Still on the floor, dazed only for an instant, Alex seized the intruder's ankle. The stocky man toppled to the floor, kicking as he fell. Alex howled as a kick caught his left elbow. Sharp pain crackled the length of his arm and brought a stinging flood of tears to his eyes.
        The Japanese was on his feet again, moving through the open doorway, into the drawing room, toward the suite's entrance foyer.
        Blinking away the involuntary tears that blurred his vision, Alex got up, staggered to the doorway. In the drawing room, when he saw that he couldn't reach the intruder in time to prevent him from getting to the hotel corridor, he plucked a vase from a decorative pedestal and threw it with anger and accuracy. The heavy ceramic exploded against the back of the
dorobo's
skull, instantly dropping him to his knees, and Alex slipped past him to block the only exit.
        They were breathing like long-distance runners.
        Shaking his head, flicking shards of the vase from his broad shoulders, the dorobo got up. He glared at Alex and motioned for him to move away from the door. 'Don't be a hero,' he said in heavily accented English.
        'What're you doing here?' Alex demanded.
        'Get out of my way.'
        'What are you doing here? A dorobo! No. You're more than just a cheap burglar, aren't you?'
        The stranger said nothing.
        'It's the Chelgrin case, isn't it?'
        'Move.'
        'Who's your boss?' Alex asked.
        The intruder balled his chunky hands into formidable fists and advanced a single threatening step.
        Alex refused to stand aside.
        The dorobo withdrew a bone-handled switchblade from a jacket