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    The Pagan Mask
    The Pagan Mask
    The Pagan Mask
    Ebook242 pages4 hours

    The Pagan Mask

    By Tony Masero

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    About this ebook

    Jason White is leading a solitary life as an art restorer and small time forger when an old friend from London’s East End asks him to attend a strange ritual undertaken by his boss, head of a Japanese crime syndicate. Jason is commissioned to take on an unusual task of archaeological detection and track down a missing mask, an item deemed to have powerful mystical significance and possessing strange magical properties. Rival gangsters uncover his mission and are determined to stop him by any means. Jason must call on his old criminal family connections to help him and what follows is an all out war between East and West on the streets of London.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTony Masero
    Release dateJan 16, 2017
    ISBN9781370050598
    The Pagan Mask
    Author

    Tony Masero

    It’s not such a big step from pictures to writing.And that’s how it started out for me. I’ve illustrated more Western book covers than I care to mention and been doing it for a long time. No hardship, I hasten to add, I love the genre and have since a kid, although originally I made my name painting the cover art for other people, now at least, I manage to create covers for my own books.A long-term closet writer, only comparatively recently, with a family grown and the availability of self-publishing have I managed to be able to write and get my stories out there.As I did when illustrating, research counts a lot and has inspired many of my Westerns and Thrillers to have a basis in historical fact or at least weave their tale around the seeds of factual content.Having such a visual background, mostly it’s a matter of describing the pictures I see in my head and translating them to the written page. I guess that’s why one of my early four-star reviewers described the book like a ‘Western movie, fast paced and full of action.’I enjoy writing them; I hope folks enjoy reading the results.

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      Book preview

      The Pagan Mask - Tony Masero

      THE PAGAN MASK

      Tony Masero

      Jason White is leading a quiet life as an art restorer and small time forger when an old friend from his East End days asks him to attend a strange ritual led by an underworld boss of the Japanese crime syndicate, the Yakuza. Jason is commissioned to take on an unusual mission of detection and for this he must use all his skills to track down a missing mask, an item of powerful mystical significance and possessing strange magical properties. The journey leads him down a troubled path discovering the serpentine history of the mask but vicious rival gangsters discover his intentions and are determined to stop him. Jason must call on his old criminal family connections to help him and what follows is an all out war between East and West on the streets of London.

      A Hand Painted Thriller

      Cover Illustration: Tony Masero

      Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations,

      or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or

      mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the

      written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

      Copyright © Tony Masero 2017

      Smashwords Edition

      Had not the gateposts in the river thus stood firm but crumbled with the years. What trace would now remain to tell me of the past?

      Lady Sarashina (1008 - unknown)

      As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams

      Chapter One

      The upholstery in Toyota Camry was a soft and immaculate ivory kidskin leather that matched the paintwork outside. It was the kind of hide usually found in days gone more properly covering a lady’s hands in the finest of gloves. The luxurious car idled silently as they waited for the lights to change.

      Jason White felt distinctly ill at ease, sitting on the pale leather in his paint encrusted jeans.

      Tom Kazuo took a quick glance away from the Baker Street rush hour traffic and smiled. He still managed enough Japanese blood to force the upper half of his handsome face to remain immobile, only the lips moved.

      ‘Pretty good, eh, Jase?’

      His voice was soft and confident with a touch of London accent overlaying the sibilance of his original tongue.

      Jason tenderly passed his hands over the responsive leather, allowing himself a quick and almost erotic stroke before taking them away. Guiltily he searched for any impression his grubby hands might have made on the pure hide.

      He looked across at the driver, a flash of anger superseding his momentary guilt, ‘Look, what’s this all about, Tom? You call me out of the blue…. What’s it been? Ten years….’

      Tom’s lidded eyes remained fixed on the lights, his fingers lightly resting on the steering wheel, waiting for the yellow.

      ‘Anyway, it’s something like that,’ Jason went on. Tom continued his impassive silence and it irritated Jason, ‘Is this thing really yours?’ he burst out in annoyance waving a hand vaguely around the car’s impressive interior.

      Tom Kazuo accelerated and pulled away easily just before the light turned green, the Toyota’s multivalve engine barely audible. He shook his head.

      ‘Nope, belongs to my boss.’

      Jason was suddenly suspicious, ‘What are you into? Ten years ago you couldn’t even afford a night off from your mother’s take-away joint, let alone drive around in a machine like this.’

      ‘My mother’s dead. I work for a very important man now, Jason. Things have changed for me….’

      Jason was mollified, ‘Sorry to hear about your mum, she was a nice lady. But who is this guy, is this the one who wants the restoration work done?’

      ‘Yep, that’s him. Mister Kodana, he has a fine collection, you’ll like it.’

      ‘In that case I’m glad you gave me time to put on my business suit,’ said Jason, looking down accusingly at his frayed and paint spattered work jeans, as if it was all Tom Kazuo’s fault.

      ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to take care of that before we go any further.’

      Tom hauled the car majestically off the main thoroughfare and turned into a narrow mews. He pulled to a stop alongside a peeling, green painted double-door garage with a small brass plate affixed to the brick wall. It read; ‘Kuro Trading. Reg. Office.’

      ‘Okay, Jason, come on inside.’

      Tom slipped out of the car without removing the key or locking up and rapped on the garage door.

      One of the doors opened immediately as if the knock was expected. An elderly Japanese, obsequiously backed away as they entered, his head tilted respectfully in an awkward half bow.

      ‘That’s old Nodu, the caretaker,’ Tom explained, otherwise ignoring the old man. ‘Come on, through here.’

      They walked past corridors of high metal shelving stacked with card packing cases and lined by heaps of opened wooden crates. It was a huge, dimly lit place, far bigger than the outside allowed. Obscurely, Jason noted in the darkness the sleek outlines of brightly coloured surfboards standing in serried rows like bizarre multi-coloured tombstones on parade.

      Bleak strip lighting suddenly flickered on above their heads as the old caretaker ran an arthritic hand down a bank of switches.

      ‘Here,’ said Tom, tossing a stack of cellophane wrapped shirts in Jason’s direction. ‘Pick something that fits. There’s suits on a rack behind, socks and shoes over there.’ He pointed at more piled boxes.

      ‘What d’you mean?’ asked Jason a little belligerently.

      ‘I mean, get changed. There’s no way you’re going to see Mister Kodana looking like some bohemian nightmare.’

      ‘Shit! This is pushing it a bit, Tom.’

      ‘What are you complaining about? It’s all free, just get on with it, we haven’t got long.’

      If Tom had ever had an accent it had disappeared a long time ago, now he sounded as much a Londoner as Jason. Lazily, he leaned his slender frame against a tall crate and studied his childhood friend as he selected a white cotton shirt and grey double-breasted suit and started to undress.

      ‘You still got the moves, Jase?’ he asked. ‘You still doing Karate? For a carrot-head ten stone wimp you look in pretty good shape.’

      ‘Uhuh, still do a bit. I always enjoyed the kata, you remember that?’

      ‘God! What sweat box that club was.’

      ‘….And tough.’

      ‘With half the East End coloureds in there feeling their minority what’d you expect?’

      Jason tugged on the shirt and found he had left most of the shaping pins still in, cursing he pulled the shirt off again.

      ‘Who is this Kodana, Tom?’

      ‘That would be, MISTER Kodana.’

      Jason shrugged, ‘Okay, Mister Kodana. He must be important, you never used to be so bloody fussy about protocol.’

      ‘You should know by now, Jase,’ teased Tom. ‘That’s just the way with us Orientals.’

      ‘You?’ huffed Jason. ‘You’re about as oriental as fish and chips.’

      ‘Just you mind where you’re pulling that zip,’ said Tom straight-faced as Jason fumbled with the trouser fly.

      ‘Least you look a little better now.’

      Tom slid the lustrous white Toyota fish-like back into the late northbound traffic.

      ‘I look like a fucking bank clerk, and you know it! Now, come on Tom, give, what’s going on here?’

      ‘Alright,’ Tom allowed. ‘You’re on your way to see a very important ceremony take place. Believe me, you don’t know how important. My boss is about to become Kobun to the Oyabun of the company we both work for.’

      ‘What’s all that mean in plain English?’

      ‘Well, Oyabun is a kind of protector, an advisor or helper, in Japan he’s a kind of father figure. Literally the word means ‘father role’ and Kobun means ‘child role’.

      ‘So, it’s like some kind of adoption?’

      ‘There’s a bit more to it than that. The Oyabun, Mister Toyama is head of the Kuromaku-kai, a very large conglomerate in Japan and my boss has been running the European side of the subsidiary Kuro Trading for some years now. He’s done well, very well. So Mister Toyama has decided to make him his adoptive successor.’

      ‘Sounds like a private affair, how come my presence has been requested?’

      ‘He’s a busy man, Jase. This is the only time he can see you. Look, if you’re the same as you always were when we were kids you’ll badly need some money, I’d bet on that. Well, I remembered you were an artist, into restoration of Old Masters and all that so when Mister Kodana asked me to find someone local who knew something about the Japanese way and also antiquities, you just came to mind.’

      ‘Why not bring in a Japanese? This fellow must have the money to fly someone in.’

      ‘There’s a time issue involved. You’ll understand, he’ll explain it all.’

      They circled the grey walls of Lord’s Cricket Ground and turned off into a side street.

      ‘Fancy houses,’ Jason observed, noting the number of wall-mounted security alarms sprouting with same regularity as the For Sale notices in his own East End street. Along the silent and narrow side road the houses were decorated with dainty flower-laden window boxes set in front of heavily barred windows. Jaguars and Alfa Romeo’s sat indifferently parked nose to tail with all the pristine sparkle of a car showroom. Tom drove them past the impressive display and on to the end of the dead end street and stopped beside a black doorway set in a high, grey brick wall.

      ‘This is it,’ said Tom, his brow furrowed seriously. ‘Now, Jason, best behaviour, huh? This is important stuff. Behind that wall you’re going to be going back about five hundred years.’

      With a cynical expression, Jason violently elbowed the car door shut; annoyingly it closed with a barely audible clunk.

      ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said, with one arched eyebrow. ‘If I pick my nose somebody’s going to call in the Lord High Executioner.’

      Tom looked at him humourlessly across the roof of the Toyota, ‘You poke one finger up those freckled nostrils and I’ll cut it off myself.’

      ‘Inscrutable bastard,’ mumbled Jason, uncomfortably unsure if Tom was joking or not.

      Tom buzzed the entrance panel and identified himself in rapid Japanese. Electronic bolts shifted and the door swung back to reveal an elegantly laid out garden. To find such a large private area of tranquillity in busy central London took Jason’s breath away for a moment. In the centre stood a large Bhutan pine tree and around its base amidst carefully arranged rocks and shrubs, a stream ran down across a landscaped lawn to a lily-covered pond alive with the ponderous shapes of colourful Koi.

      With Tom leading they followed a pathway of paving stones weaving around the perimeter of the garden. The house, rising beyond, was a redbrick Victorian monster. It loomed over them with frowning eaves and dark lead-lined windows and it seemed to Jason to have all the welcoming promise of a graveyard mausoleum.

      The front door, set with obscurely patterned stained glass panels, was opened on their arrival by a sumo-sized solemn looking Japanese man. Rather oddly in such a setting, he was dressed in a short black kimono and wore a light blue headband with trousers the same colour tucked into knee-high black stockings.

      Before he could utter a word of protest, the man had spread Jason’s arms and run expert hands along his ribs and down the length of both legs.

      ‘Hey! What’s….’

      Tom put a finger to his lips, ‘Hush, Jase. It’s necessary.’

      ‘I thought this kind of thing only happened at airport security,’ Jason sighed. He gave an eyebrow show of suffering as the Japanese checked his inside leg and even under the lapels and around the collar of his suit. Satisfied, the man bowed briefly and indicated a doorway to the right of a small entrance hallway.

      ‘Wait in there, Jason. I’ll be back in a moment,’ said Tom. ‘I just have to change into formal clothes.’

      Jason nodded and went on into the small gloomy room. It was obviously a study-cum-library of sorts. To one side, a huge antique flat-topped desk in dark mahogany squatted grotesquely by a single leaded window overlooking the garden. The desktop was empty except for stacks of wooden cigar boxes lined up neatly in one corner.

      Two walls of the room were covered from floor to ceiling with shelves. Paperbound books embossed with Japanese characters filled each level. Idly, Jason took one down and thumbed the columns of symbols inside. He had only a very rudimentary understanding of the spoken language and none of the written and with a shrug he replaced the book.

      Behind him a heavy, dark green felt curtain covered the remaining wall. Jason lifted it aside and discovered that he had been standing in an antechamber of sorts and that another much larger room lay beyond. Huge studio windows set in the ceiling provided light from the fading evening outside and at one end, picture racks rose from the floor level up to an ornate minstrel’s gallery that looked down from a heavily decorated ceiling. It reminded Jason of old black and white photographs he had seen of Victorian artists studios.

      Across the sea of a plush, midnight blue Persian carpet, a plump tan leather armchair sat opposite a solitary picture resting on an easel. There was a tired scent of stale cigar smoke and loneliness in the air and it gave the room a flavour of elderly bachelorhood.

      ‘I see you have found my hideaway, Mister White.’

      The cultivated tones in unaccented English came from the doorway behind him and Jason turned quickly and guiltily dropped the curtain. A tall Japanese man stood there.

      ‘Mister Kodana?’ he asked. ‘I’m sorry, curiosity got the better of me.’

      The slender grey man smiled calmly. Jason reckoned he must be in his early fifties and in spite of a waif-like thinness; he had a presence that Jason was immediately aware of. It was an air of stillness, an economy of movement and gesture that indicated a profound sense of inner security.

      ‘It’s quite alright,’ said Kodana.’ I’m sorry you have been kept waiting. We are about to begin now, I hope you will not object to waiting until after the ceremony so we may discuss our business.’

      There was barely a trace of query, the polite request inherently carried the hint of order within it and was offered in the natural manner of one who was used to being obeyed.

      ‘Thomas will take care of you, I will leave you in his capable hands,’ he turned to leave. ‘Until afterwards then.’

      Tom appeared around the door as soon as Kodana had left, he now wore a purple kimono and a wide sleeved black overtunic. The hilt of a single sword jutted from the sash at his waist.

      ‘My, Thomas!’ taunted Jason with a teasing grin. ‘You certainly look the part.’

      Tom ignored the bait, ‘Come on this way,’ he ordered brusquely, his features set and only registering a look of serious concern.

      Chapter Two

      They climbed a narrow, discretely creaking wooden stairway, the boards covered with a patterned carpet held in place by polished brass stair rods. As he followed Tom, Jason thought that the effect of the whole building was more in keeping with a nineteenth century pre-Raphaelite painting than with the traditions of ancient Japan.

      The Victorian architects had obviously economised on the stairway to allow greater space above for, after leaving the central staircase they immediately entered a darkened hall that surprised Jason with its space, even though it was full of people.

      Across one end of the big room a large black curtain hung from ceiling to floor, at its centre a white chrysanthemum shaped symbol lay outlined by two sheaves of rice and a tier of Japanese characters. Beneath the curtain, raised on a dais and sitting cross-legged sat an elderly white-haired Japanese with over-large ears and a broad flat nose. He wore a simple pale blue kimono with delicate gold embroidery.

      Before this Buddha-like figure rested the room’s only item of furniture, a low black lacquer table with two bowls and a set of smaller dishes resting on it.

      Smouldering incense sticks filled the room with a wispy, unmoving cloud that hazed the soft lamplight and muted all sound. Kodana was in the process of making a deep bow before the old man as they entered and in the gloom Jason could only gradually distinguish that the rest of the room was full of silent Japanese men, all kneeling in rows and all clad in the same black kimonos identical to the one the doorman had worn.

      Tom indicated a place on the tatami-mat covered floor at the rear of the room and Jason knelt as the others, resting on his heels. Tom dropped down beside him, whispering from the corner of his mouth.

      ‘Jase, I’m going to translate for you. Just listen, don’t say anything, okay?’

      Jason nodded, his eyes still fixed on Kodana and the old man who had now been joined by three others on the dais.

      ‘The old man is the boss, Toyama Yoshio. Two of the men at the back are the Kobun’s guarantors. The other fellow, the one in white, is a Shinto priest.’

      As Tom explained the priest stepped forward and with ritual slowness took two small wooden blocks from his wide sleeves, he then clapped them together sharply and began a chant in a high-pitched voice.

      ‘He’s reminding the spirits that all members of the organisation are present to witness the proceedings. He’s telling them that rice, whole fish and salt are prepared as is the custom, and asking them to smile on these arrangements.’

      Jason eyed Tom doubtfully, ‘They really reckon there’s some kind of ghostly metaphysical presence here?’

      Tom stared him to silence reprovingly.

      One of the guarantors leaned forward and rearranged the fish in a ceremonial pattern whilst the other filled the two bowls from a

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