The Key to Midnight

cursing. The unrelenting denigration and humiliation. Periodically they had locked him in a closet, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for two or three days. No light. Food and water only if they remembered to provide it…
        At first, as he journeyed through his troubled past, his voice was supercharged with hatred, but gradually hatred gave way to hurt, and he found that he was grieving for the child he might have been and for the man into which that child might have grown. That was another Alex Hunter, lost forever, who perhaps would have been a better - certainly a happier - person than the Alex who had survived. As he talked, the memory sludge gushed from him in much the way that guilt might, flow from a devout Catholic in a confessional, and when at last he stopped, he felt mercifully cleaner and freer than ever before in his life.
        She kissed his eyes.
        'Sorry,' he said, ashamed of the pent-up tears that blurred his vision and that he was barely able to hold back.
        'What for?'
        'I never cry.'
        'That's part of your problem.'
        'I never wanted them to have the satisfaction of seeing me cry, so I learned to keep everything inside.' He forced a smile. "This is the man you're relying on. Still have any confidence in him?'
        'More confidence than ever. You seem human now.'
        More than ever, she wanted to make love, and so did he. But he needed to exercise the iron will and self-control that his monstrous parents had unwittingly taught him. 'With you, Joanna, it's got to be right. Special. With you I want to wait until I can say those three little words and mean them. For the rest of my life, I'll carry with me every detail of the first time we make love, and from now on I don't intend to lug around anything but good memories.'
        'And neither do I. We'll wait.'
        She turned out the lights, and they lay together on the bed.
        Shadows pooled around them. They were beyond the direct reach of the thin streams of morning sun that drizzled through the narrow gaps in the draperies.
        Holding each other, kissing chastely, they were neither lovers nor would-be lovers. Rather, they were like animals in a burrow, pressing against each other for reassurance, warmth, and protection from the mysterious forces of a hostile universe.
        Eventually he dozed off. When he woke, he was alone on the bed. At first he thought that he heard rain beating on the windows, but then he realized it was the sound of the shower, coming through the half-open door from the adjacent bathroom.
        In a peculiar but comfortably domestic mood, he returned to the guest room, showered, and changed the bandage on his left arm. The shallow knife wounds were healing well.
        By the time he dressed and got to the kitchen, Joanna was preparing a light breakfast: shiro dashi, white miso- flavored soup. Floating in each bowl was a neat tie of kanpyo, paper-thin gourd shavings, topped by a dab of hot mustard. The soup was properly served in a red dish with a gold rim, in keeping with the Japanese belief that a man 'eats with his eyes as well as his mouth.'
        In this instance, however, Alex was at odds with traditional Japanese wisdom. He couldn't look away from Joanna long enough to appreciate the presentation of the shiro dashi.
        Outside, a chill wind stripped dead leaves from a nearby mulberry tree and blew them against the kitchen window, startling him. It was a scarecrow sound, dry and brittle -and somehow more ominous than it should have been.
        Streaked with rust-maroon the same shade as dried blood, the crisp brown leaves spun against the glass, and for a moment he half thought that they were about to coalesce into a monstrous face. Instead, the capricious wind suddenly carried them up and out of sight into the dead sky.
        For a long time Joanna stared at the mulberry tree. Her mood, like his, had inexplicably changed.
        After breakfast, Alex called Ted Blankenship's home number in Chicago. He wanted Ted to use Bonner-Hunter's contacts in England, respected colleagues in the private-security trade, to dig up all available information on the United British-Continental Insurance Association and on the solicitor J. Compton Woolrich.
        He and Joanna passed the remainder of the morning with the Chelgrin file, searching for new clues. They didn't find any.
        Mariko joined them for lunch at the