Tengu Read Free

still
hear the radio somewhere outside. It was playing “Samba Pa Ti.”
    Silently, the
powerful man gripped the inside of her thighs. Her head was lying back on the
rug now, and her hands were clenched in paralysis over her breasts. Her entire
nervous system was dislocated, and she was already dying. The man let out a
deep, suppressed hmphas he pulled her thighs further and further apart,
stretching every muscle and sinew. Through a haze of pain and disbelief, Sherry
heard something crack in her groin, although she could no longer feel anything
below her waist.
    The man let her
tumble from his upraised knee onto the rug. He stood up, keeping a hold on the
ankle and the thigh of her right leg. With deliberate care, he planted his
black silk slipper on Sherry’s pubic bone, to give him balance and leverage,
and then he twisted her leg around as if he were trying to tear the leg off a
chicken.
    She was lucky
she couldn’t feel it. The ball of her thighbone was wrenched out of its socket.
Then the skin and flesh were screwed around so tightly that they tore apart, in
a grisly welter of burst arteries. The man gave Sherry’s leg one more turn, and
ripped it right away from her body.
    He stepped
back, and looked down at her. Her breathing was shallow with shock, and her
face was already blue. Her eyes were clouded over. The man wiped his hands,
first on his robes, then on the drapes. He didn’t seem to know what to do next.
    Sherry realized
she was dying. She didn’t know why. She could see the man looking down at her,
and she tried to think how she could ask him. It didn’t really matter, of
course. Nothing mattered when you were dead.
    Her last
thought was that she wished she could see her home in Indiana just one more
time.
    The man in the
yellow robe watched her die, his mask impassive. Then he walked back out the
broken French window, and stood in the morning sunlight, still and thoughtful,
as if he had just returned from a long and unexpected journey.

CHAPTER TWO
    A s Sherry was dying, Mrs. Eva Crowley was parking her slate-colored
Seville Elegante on a red line close to the twin towers of Century Park East.
She switched off the motor and sat in the driver’s seat for a while, watching
her pale blue eyes in the rearview mirror. Well, she thought, this is ‘it. This
is where my life is pasted back together again, or lost for good.
    ‘She climbed
out of the car and locked it. Normally she never bothered, but this morning she
felt the need for as many mundane rituals as possible–not only to keep herself
from trembling with fear, but to delay the moment when she was going to have to
stand face to face with Gerard and tell him: “Choose.”
    Gerard hadn’t
come home now for three nights in succession, and Eva Crowley had had enough.
She had sworn j to herself in the small hours of the
morning, as she lay hugging her husband’s crumpled pillow, that she was going
to finish for good all the pain and humiliation of being a cheated wife. No
more evenings with only Dan Rather, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and her sleeping
twin daughters for company. No more false sympathy when Gerard called from the
office to say that work had snowed him under again, and I’m sorry, Evie, I just
have to keep at it all through the night.
    Today, Gerard
Crowley, the self-made president of Crowley Tobacco Imports, was going to be
forced to make up his mind.
    As Eva walked
across the plaza toward the entrance of Century Park East, her footsteps echoed
on the concrete paving, and she could see a distant and severe image of herself
in the glass doors, approaching with all the inevitability of her own fate.
    She was a
petite, slender woman, with ash-blonde hair drawn back in a bun. Her face was
pale and perfectly oval, like a blanched almond. For the frightening and solemn
Tengu performance which this day demanded of her, she was wearing a dark gray
suit with a pencil skirt, and black stiletto shoes. She could have been going
to a board