Linnear 01 - The Ninja (14 page)

There’s a man here who wishes to practise today.’

‘So? We can handle it. Sign him up.’

‘I think you had better take care of this one yourself,’ she said.

‘Why? What’s the matter?’

‘Well, for one thing, he’s asking to see you. And for another, I’ve seen the way he walks. He’s no student.’

Terry smiled. ‘You see how our fame has spread? That piece in New Yor^ was great.’ But when she did not respond, he said, ‘That’s not all, is it?’

She shook her head. ‘The guy gives me the creeps. His eyes …’ She shrugged. “I don’t know. But I wish you’d handle it.’

‘Okay. Listen, give him a cup of tea or something. I’ll be right there.’

She nodded, giving him a thin smile.

‘What was that?’ Vincent said in his ear.

Terry uncovered the mouthpiece. ‘Oh, nothing probably. Just a client who’s spooked Ei.’

‘How is she?’

Tine.’

‘And the two of you?’

‘Oh, you know. About the same.’ Terry gave him a quick laugh. ‘I’m still waiting for her to say yes. I’ve been on one knee so many times, I’ve worn out four pairs of trousers.’

Vincent laughed. ‘We still on for dinner tonight?’

‘Sure. As long as it’s an early one. I want to see Ei tonight.’

“Sure thing. Just some questions I’d like to ask you. Nick was going to come but -‘

‘Hey’ How is he? He called just before he went out to the Island. Has he been loafing all summer?’

Vincent laughed. ‘Yeah. Until I got hold of him. He’s got a new woman, too.”

‘Good,’ Terry said. ‘About time.. The ties are still very strong, huh?’

‘Yeah.’ Vincent knew only too well what Terry meant. ‘He sends his love to you and Ei. He’ll be in soon, I’m sure, and he’ll stop by.’

‘Good enough. Hey, my new client will no doubt bite Ei’s head off if I don’t run. See you at seven. ‘Bye.’

He hung up and went across the room and around the corner to meet Mr Wonderful.

As Terry came up, Eileen Okura felt some of her apprehension dissipate. She had been startled by two separate elements. First, she had not heard the man’s approach. Second, his countenance was unusual. He stood now precisely as she had first seen him, duffel bag on his back, sunglasses swinging from the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. The skin of his face and his hands was far too white for an Oriental’s. But, she saw, as she glanced at his throat where his shirt was open, this snowy colour predominated only in those areas, for his chest was a darker, more natural hue. It was as if he had been in some kind of hideous accident. An explosion, perhaps, affecting the exposed areas of his flesh. Yet, for all that, it was his eyes which held her. They looked utterly dead, black stones dropped into a stagnant pool of water, they could not conceivably retain any form of emotion. And it was these same eyes which regarded her now as if she were some specimen, stripped and laid out on a sterile surface, ready for dissection. Eileen felt a brief chill wash over her.

‘Watashi ni nanika goyo desu ka,’ Terry said to the man. How may I help you?

‘Anata ga kono dojo no master desu ka?’ Are you the master of this dojo?

Terry seemed to ignore the abrupt and therefore extremely impolite mode of the other’s speech, said, ‘So dsu! Yes.

‘Koko de renshu sasete itadakitai no desu ga.’ I wish to practise.

‘I see. Which disciplines are you interested in?’

‘Aikido, karate, kenjutsu.’

‘For aikido and karate I can surely accommodate you. But as for kenjutsu, I am afraid that it is quite impossible. My instructor is away on vacation.’

‘What about yourself?’

‘Me? I have given up teaching kenjutsu.’

‘I require no instruction. Practise with me for an hour.’

‘I-‘

‘It is better than filling out forms.’

‘That it is. My name is Terry Tanaka. And yours?’

‘Hideoshi.’

A name from out of the past. Terry nodded. ‘All right. Miss Okura will give you the necessary forms. The charge is forty dollars an hour.’

The other nodded curtly. Terry half expected him to produce a plastic wallet filled with travellers’ cheques but instead the man peeled off one hundred and twenty dollars in twenties from a roll he kept in his front right-hand trouser pocket.

‘Sign there,’ Terry said, pointing. He nodded towards a small doorway at the far end of the room. ‘You can change in there. Do you have your own robe?’

‘Yes.’

‘All right. Fine. The dojo proper is one flight up. Which discipline do you prefer to begin widi?’

‘Surprise me,’ Hideoshi said, walking away. He disappeared through the doorway into the darkness of the locker-room beyond.

Terry turned his head away, saw Eileen staring at the empty doorway across the room. There were no shadows. The light filtering in through the half-drawn blinds which covered the high narrow windows, was diffuse enough to put a patina on her glowing skin. She looked slim and tiny, he thought. A pale ballerina about to perform her half of a difficult pas de deux.

‘Who is he?’ Her voice seemed like a whisper in the high-ceilinged room. Above their heads came the thump of the floorboards.

Terry shrugged. He was a big man, perhaps six feet, with wide shoulders and narrow waist and hips. His face was flat, the eyes black above very high cheekbones. He told Eileen what had transpired.

‘You’re not going to do it, Terry?’

He shrugged. ‘Why not? It’s only an hour’s practise.” But he knew what she meant and his heart was not nearly so light as his words sounded. He was, along with Nicholas, one of the greatest kenjutsu masters now living outside Japan. At thirty-eight, Terry had already spent three-quarters of his life studying kenjutsu, the ancient Japanese art of swordsmanship. His reason for abruptly abandoning it within the past year might not be altogether easy for a Westerner to understand.

In the first place, no martial art depended solely on physical discipline. In fact, a great percentage was mental. Long ago, he had read Miyamoto Musashi’s Go Rin No Sho. It was perhaps the greatest - treatise on strategy in all the world. Though written in just a few short weeks before the great warrior’s death, its knowledge was timeless, Terry thought. Today, he was well aware, many prominent Japanese businessmen mapped out their major corporate advertising and sales campaigns with Miyamoto’s principles in mind.

Just about a year ago, he had picked up the Go Rin No Sho once again. But, in reading it, he had now found what he believed to be quite different and darker meanings hidden within the logic and vaults of imagination. To devote oneself so religiously to the domination of others was not, he felt, what life was all about. He had been disturbed by dreams, then, black portents without form or face, all the more real and frightening for that. He had felt compelled to rid himself of the volume, throwing it out in the middle of the night, not even waiting until morning.

In daylight, the feeling had remained. He felt as if he had taken a wrong turning in the dead of night and, without warning, had found himself on the lip of a great abyss. There had been a temptation to look over the edge but with it had come the knowledge that if he did he would surely lose his balance and tumble forwards into the darkness. Thus Terry had stepped back and, turning away, had put his katana away forever.

And then today, this strange man who called himself Hideoshi appears. Terry shivered inwardly, too much in control to let Eileen see his true emotions. Besides, he did not want to alarm her.

It was surely some kind of omen, for he had no doubt that the man knew well the teachings of Miyamoto. But even beyond this, there was no doubt in his mind that Hideoshi was a haragei adept. The concept, stemming from two words, hara, meaning centralization and integration, and ki, meaning an extended form of energy, was more than intuition or a sixth sense but, as Terry’s sensei had said, ‘a true way of perceiving reality’. It was akin to having eyes in the back of your head, amplifiers in your ears. Yet haragei could work both ways: being an ultra-sensitive receiver also made one an excellent transmitter if one came within a certain distance of another haragei adept. Terry had picked this up instantly.

‘Just another Japanese off the plane from Haneda,’ he said nonchalantly to Eileen. He would not, under any circumstances, have told her what he really knew about the man.

‘Well, there’s something odd about him.’ She was still staring at the black doorway, which seemed to gape at her like the mouth of a grinning skull. ‘Those eyes -‘ she shuddered. ‘So impersonal, like - like cameras.’ She took a step towards Terry. ‘What’s he doing in there so long, do you think?’

‘Meditating, no doubt,’ Terry said. He picked up the phone, stabbed the intercom button. He spoke softly and briefly to someone on the third floor, informing him of the new client. He cradled the receiver. ‘He’ll be another twenty minutes at least,’ he said to her. He stared at her long black gleaming hair. Brushed back and unbound, it rushed like a night-dark stream over her shoulders, down her back in a thick cascade, ending at the tops of her buttocks. She started and he said, ‘What is it?’

Her head turned. ‘Nothing. I just felt you staring at me.’

He smiled. ‘But I do that all the time.’

‘At night, yes.’ Her eyes stayed serious, her pouty lips firm and straight. ‘Don’t do it here, Terry. Please. You know how I feel about that. We work together and we -‘ Her eyes met his and for just an instant he felt his heart lurch within him. Was that fear he had glimpsed there lurking like a prowler in the night?

He reached out a hand, pulled her gently towards him. This time she did not resist and; as if seeking warmth, she allowed herself to be cradled, her arms tight around him. She felt safer here, with him so close.

‘Are you okay, Ei?’

She nodded wordlessly against his muscles but felt the tears welling up like deep pools witfiin her eyes. Her throat constricted and she could not think why. ‘I want to come over tonight,’

she heard herself say and she immediately felt better.

‘How about every night?’ Terry said.

It was not the first time he had said this, though it had been in different ways before. Eileen’s response had always been the same, yet now she knew the source of the churning inside her, knew that when he asked her again this evening, as he surely would, her answer would be yes. ‘Tonight,’ she said softly. ‘Ask me tonight.” She dabbed at her eyes. ‘When should I come over?’

‘I’m having dinner with Vincent. Why don’t you join us?’

She smiled thinly. ‘Uh-uh. There’s too much you guys talk about that I have no interest in.’

‘We’ll cut that all out tonight. Promise.”

She laughed then. ‘No, no. I don’t begrudge you that. Bushido is important to you.”

‘It’s part of our heritage. We wouldn’t be Japanese without it. I’m not yet mat assimilated into Western culture - I’ll never be - that I can forget the history of my people -‘ He paused, seeing her shudder, her eyes flutter closed.

‘My people,’ her words a ghostly echo. ‘Bushido. I shall die for my Emperor and my beloved homeland.’ Tears welled from beneath her lowered lids, turning to minute rainbows. Behind them were galaxies of pain. ‘We survived the great firestorm in March’ - her whispered words like the shouted cries of the dying - ‘when the American armada dropped almost three-quarters of a million bombs filled with napalm; when two hundred thousand Japanese civilians were roasted or boiled alive; when half of Tokyo was cindered; when, the following morning, as you walked down the street, the wild wind took the charcoaled corpses and blew them away like dust.”

‘Ei, don’t -‘

‘We moved out, then, away from the war, to Hiroshima in the south but, quite soon, my parents, terrified by all the rumours, packed me off to my grandparents who lived in the mountains.’ She looked at his face without really seeing it. ‘There was never enough food and slowly we began to the of starvation. Oh, it was nothing very spectacular, merely a kind of all-pervading lassitude. I would sit in the sun for hours unable to think of anything. It took me hours to comb my hair because my arms would hurt, keeping them lifted like that. That was for me. But for my mother and my father there was Hiroshima and the light that fell from the sky.’ Her eyes focused and she looked at him steadily. ‘What is there for me but shame and hurt? What we did and what, in turn, was done to us. My poor country.’

‘That’s all forgotten now,’ he said.

‘No, it’s not. And you, of all people, should understand that. It’s you and Vincent and Nick who talk constantly of the spirit of our country. How can you celebrate the one without feeling shame at the other? Memory is selective, not history. We are what we are. You can’t arbitrarily excise the bad, pretend it never existed. Nick doesn’t do that, I know. He remembers; he feels the hurt, still. But I don’t think you and Vincent do.’

He wanted to tell her of his recent thoughts but he found that he could not. Not now, at least. It was the wrong time, the wrong place, and he had a highly developed sense of these things. Tonight, perhaps. Tonight he would see that it all came down. He watched the diffuse, artist’s light on her satin-skinned face, her long slender neck, her slim compact body. It was impossible to think of her as being forty-one; she did not look a day over thirty, even in harsh light.

It was just about two years since they had first met, a year since they had become clandestine lovers - at least as far as those at the dojo were concerned; of course all their friends knew. In that time she had never asked for more, never wanted to know about the future. It was he who, lately, had felt the need for more. And recently he had become aware that, at least partially, the ending of his love affair with kenjutsu had been, simultaneously, the beginning of his love affair with Ei. Now, it seemed to him with pristine logic, that there was nothing more important in life than being with her. The dojo, which he had opened nearly five years ago, was well established and he was more than satisfied that it could run itself for a short while. Time enough for a marriage and a long, leisurely honeymoon somewhere far away. Paris, perhaps. Yes, definitely Paris. It was Ei’s favourite city, he knew, and he had never been there. All that remained was for him to ask her. Tonight.