Repairman Jack [02]-Legacies

He was about to give up and call it a day when he spotted Clayton stepping from his building. He walked east. He seemed to be in no hurry.

Yoshio followed him to the West Twenties where he saw him enter a club called Prancers—"All Live! All Nude! All Day!"

Yoshio sighed. He knew this routine.

He spotted the sign for a dojo spread across a set of second-floor windows down the block. To kill some time, he climbed the steps and peeked in. After only a few minutes of watching the lazy, overweight instructor, Yoshio left in a fury. If this was a representative example of the way the martial arts were being taught in America, then… then…

Then they needed someone who really knew what he was doing. Someone like…

Me. Yoshio grinned at the thought. My students would be the best in the country. My dojo would kick the rice out of every other dojo.

And I would have all this delicious food at my fingertips, every day, for the rest of my life.

It was a thought worth pondering…

6.

"You're really going to Florida?" Gia said.

Jack lay on the couch in his apartment, content and thoroughly spent after a leisurely hour of lovemaking with Gia. She lay curled against him, her head on his shoulder, her breath warm on his chest.

"Just to make him happy."

"And maybe just to shut him up?"

"Hopefully, that too."

"What happened to this firm resolve to tell him in no ' uncertain terms that you would never move to Florida?"

Jack shrugged, and the motion lifted Gia's head.

"I tried," he said, "but I just couldn't do it. The poor guy is so sincere. He wants so badly for me to succeed."

"Does he think you're such a failure?"

"Not so much a failure as a guy with no plan, no agenda, no rudder, so to speak. And in that sense I think he feels he failed me." Jack felt his contentment slipping away. Why had Gia brought this up? "That's what makes it so hard. It'd be easy to blow him off if he'd been a bad father. But he was a good one, always making an effort to be involved with his kids, and he can't understand where he went wrong with his youngest. So he keeps trying, figuring sooner or later he'll get it right."

"He did leave you a rudder of sorts," Gia said, staring at him with those blue wonders. "You've got a moral compass, a value system. That must have come from someone."

"Not him. He's a citizen. A white-collar, churchgoing, taxpaying veteran of Korea. He'd have a stroke if he knew the truth."

"You're sure of that?"

"Absolutely, positutely, one hundred percent sure."

"And so you're going down to Florida."

"Sure as hell looks that way."

"Can Vicky and I come along? At least as far as Orlando?"

"Hey, now there's an idea," he said, brightening. He kissed her forehead. "Disney World. We've never been there. And the Universal place. I want to see 'Terminator 3-D.'"

Maybe Florida wouldn't be so bad after all. For a week.

"Let's do it."

And then it was time to get dressed and pick up Vicky.

But "3-D" stuck in Jack's brain for some reason, and he treated Gia and Vicky to a late-afternoon IMAX 3-D movie.

Vicky loved it, but Jack came away disappointed. All that screen, those neat 3-D glasses… you'd think they could do something better than close-ups of bugs and fish. Why not a real movie—like a 3-D IMAX haunted house? That would be something to see.

They found a restaurant called Picholjne nearby, where they had dinner and made plans for going to Florida. Vicky was ready to bounce off the walls with excitement, and Jack found himself beginning to look forward to the trip.

What better way to see Disney World than with a child? he thought, drinking in her smile and her bright eyes.

The only time Vicky stopped talking about Mickey and Donald was when the fabulous dessert tray came by. She had two.

7.

Thomas Clayton had emerged from the strip joint after two hours and walked directly back to his apartment.

This, Yoshio had learned, was one of the patterns of Thomas Clayton's life. Very sad, he thought. He didn't know much about him, but felt sorry for him. This was a lonely, lonely man.

And with this Yoshio himself felt a rare pang of loneliness, a sudden yearning for home. Not for family, for he had none, and not for Tokyo, for New York had given him his fill of big cities. No, he wished he were booked into a little ryokan on Shikoku, overlooking the misty vistas of the Inland Sea.

He realized that he had wasted the day. All of the principals seemed to be in a holding pattern, as if waiting for something. But for what? Tomorrow, perhaps?

If so, Yoshio would wait with them.

His stomach didn't feel right. Perhaps the grease from that shish kebab meat—supposedly lamb—he had eaten while waiting for Thomas Clayton this afternoon. He decided to take a break from American food. He stopped at a restaurant in the East Fifties with a superior sushi bar. He spent a number of hours there, sipping Sapporo Draft, nibbling sashimi, and speaking Japanese.