Linnear 01 - The Ninja (18 page)

There was swift movement above her and her silk teddy shredded, parting from her body. She was naked now. Her mind was filled up with Terry now because she was quite certain that this terrifying being would rape her; this secret knowledge of why he had come outraged her and calmed her at the same time. Death seemed to stand away, only a visitor at this feast instead of the guest of honour.

She felt his body over hers, not hot, not cool, but somewhere in between. His was not flesh, but neither was it marble. She felt somehow as if she were being lifted into a cradle, the position familiar. She closed her legs, locking her ankles, resisting him still.

So it was with a great sense of shock that she felt him grasp the pool of her thick hair, pulling it up, winding it with one hand into a long twisted cord.

She stared upwards, above her head. There was sufficient light for her to see it, standing straight as a sword, blacker than the night.

Then, guided by him, it came down, wrapped around her neck. Until, nooselike, it began to tighten about her throat, however, she failed to understand what was about to happen. But as she fought for every breath, her nostrils flaring because his other hand still covered her mouth, ‘she knew that her body was far from his mind. Was he hard? Would he come? Her mind was like a pond filled with squirming eels, monstrously debating these lewd questions while her lungs filled less and less with air.

No! Please! Take me, don’t kill me! Don’t! Please! She tried to scream what her mind formed but the words only came out as animal grunts, further terrifying her. It was as if his inhumanity had somehow managed to strip her of her humanity.

The cord of her hair tightened as he heaved on it, arcing his back precisely as if he were making violent love to her. The muscles of her throat spasmed involuntarily; her lungs burned as if with a corrosive. This can’t be happening, she thought. I can’t die. I won’t! No no no no - I

And then she was fighting, fighting to perform the most basic of functions which had become as difficult as climbing a mountain. Each breath was the most desperate of struggles.

She fought like a tigress, clawing at him with her nails, punching and slashing, using her knees and thighs in an effort to dislodge him, to deflect him from his monomaniacal purpose, but it was as useless as if she were fighting a brick wall. She was powerless against him. He was beyond the living. He was death.

As she choked on her own vomit, rising again like an inexorable tsunami, before her eyes bloomed the final firestorm. As her lungs filled with fluid, as she laboured still for life, Eileen heard clearly the whistling, abrupt and diabolical, directly over her head and, looking skyward, saw the shadow of the lone bomber, coming like an unexpected eclipse, riding before the sun, saw part of it falling away towards the earth, as if it had contemptuously defaecated on the Floating Kingdom, blossoming like a black flower in the bright blue and white sky.

Concussion. The furnace heat of hell. And light like the core of ten thousand exploding suns. Oh, my poor country!

Ashes, floating in the hot wind.

Terry said sayonara to Vincent through the taxi’s opened window. The day’s rain had given the city no relief from the sultry heat and humidity of midsummer. It reminded him of Tokyo.

‘I’ll call you soon,’ he told Vincent.

‘Right. Let me know if you have any ideas.’ Vincent leaned his elbows on the sill of the window.

Terry laughed. ‘I still think you and Nick are making more of this than is there.’

‘We aren’t making up that poison, Terry,’ the other said seriously. ‘Or the katana wound.’

‘I don’t know, buddy. There are an awful lot of madmen in this city. What would a ninja be doing here, anyway?’

Vincent shrugged, having no good answer.

‘See?’

‘Hey, Mac,’ the cabdriver growled, turning around. Time is money and I ain’t got all night. If you’re gonna gab why doncha do it on the street, huh?’

‘Okay,’ Terry said, ‘we’re off.’ He turned his face sideways, smiled and waved to Vincent as the cab pulled away from the kerb.

He gave the driver his address and settled back in the seat. Somehow he regretted not telling his friend about the visitor to his dojo in greater detail. He might have, he supposed, if they had not got so involved in this case that Vincent had been drawn into. Trust him to fabricate something like this. It was the kind of mystery that was just up his alley. Vincent was, Terry suspected, quite bored. Not so much with his job -there were, God knew, enough mysteries there to hold his attention. No, it was more that he was bored with being in

America. Perhaps he wanted to go home.

With this, his thoughts turned to Eileen, waiting for him at home. At last all obstacles were washed away. Patience, my sensei used to tell me, can often be one’s most important weapon. You are too impetuous, my boy. Slow down and enjoy the pace which you yourself set. Abruptly, he remembered the caviar.

He leaned forward, his mouth near the grille bolted to the thick-scarred plastic partition separating him from the driver. ‘Hey I’ he called. ‘I forgot. I’ve got to make a stop at the Russian Tea Room before you take me to the address I gave you.’

The driver cursed and shook his head. ‘I’m gettin’ ‘em tonight all right. Couldn’t you’ve told me soona, fella? Now I gotta go back down Ninth an’ cut ova - right into the teeth of th’ traffic.’ He spun the wheel and, squealing, the cab swerved in mid-flight. There came the answering blare of horns, mingled with shouts and the screech of jammed-on brakes. Terry’s driver leaned out of the window and shot his finger into the air. ‘Fuck off, y’sonsabitches!’ he cried. ‘Why doncha learn how tuh drive, yuh assholes yuh!’

Terry took out a pencil and a piece of paper on the way over to the Russian Tea Room, found himself writing down the name, Hideoshi. Then, after it, Yodogimi and, finally, Mitsunari. When he had finished, he stared at what he had written as if they were alien scratchings found on the side of a hill.

The cab jerked to a halt and the driver turned to him. ‘Do me a favour, Mac. Don’t leave me standin’ here holdin’ my dick, know what I mean?’

Terry shoved paper and pencil in his pocket and hurriedly left the cab.

It took him only a few minutes to place his order with the maitre d’ hotel and pay for his two ounces of fresh Beluga. When he returned to the cab, the driver took off as if they were being chased by hijackers. ‘Get’s so yuh can’t tell any more,’ he said, eyeing Terry in the rear-view mirror, ‘know what I mean? Guys come into the cab lookin’ as straight as can be. They ask yuh to stop and right away they take a powder, couldn’t find ‘em with a battalion, know what I mean? Used tuh be able to tell, years ago; not now. Want me tuh go through the park?’

‘Sure,’ Terry said. ‘Yeah. That’ll be fine.’

It did not take long; the park was as still as a tomb, seeming detached from the surrounding sparkle of the high-rise buildings, pristine in the darkness.

He went up the steep stone stairs of the brownstone, whistling softly. He was half way to the third floor landing when he began to discern the Mancini music coming through the door of his apartment. He smiled to himself, feeling warm and confident. Ei loved Mancini.

He turned the key in the lock and went in.

Immediately he knew that he must get into the bedroom. He slammed the door and was in perfect darkness, crouched, then rolling and scrambling across the living room.

He had smelled/seen/tasted/felt the differences in the apartment and had acted accordingly. He had heard nothing save the music. Mask, he thought. I might otherwise have stopped before I even opened the door. I’m certain I would have. Goddamn that music t

Eileen! his mind cried out just as he was hit.

He was perhaps three-quarters of the way to the half-open doorway to the bedroom. He was struck viciously four times in the first second of the attack. He blocked three blows successfully but that allowed the fourth to get through. It smashed into him just above his right kidney. All the breath went out of him and he keeled over as his leg went numb. He rolled awkwardly across the floor, simultaneously aware of the low light seeping out of the bedroom and a heavy sweetish scent.

A blow whistled through the air near his left ear but he was already rolling away from it. The edge of a table exploded against the side of his face, shards chattering through the air like angry insects. He drew his legs up, kicked out with the soles of both feet in concert. He grunted with the effort, heard an answering sound and then he was up and running as best he could, his right leg dragging a bit behind him.

He went through the doorway at full speed, grabbing its edge as he did so, slamming it to behind him. He turned around thinking: Time. I’ve got to have time.

The broken figure, one leg still upon the bedspread, drove all rational thought from his mind. His legs turned to water and he felt as if the searing edge of a knife blade were prowling through his guts.

Her face was shadowed and dark, shrouded by wayward tendrils of the night-black hair wound tightly around her neck. Her arms were flung upwards, over her head; her breasts were covered in vomit. His eyes were drawn to the dark patch between her thighs. There were no marks on her body.

He did not have to touch her to know that she was dead but he bent to it anyway because part of his mind said that he must he absolutely certain. He cradled her head in his lap until he heard the sound from beyond the door.

Almost unseeing, he got up, crossed to the opposite wall. His cold fingers closed upon the cool lacquered leather of the slightly curved scabbard that hung on his wall. He brought it to him with great deliberation; the whisper of the naked blade as he unsheathed it was the loudest sound he had ever heard. Louder even than the splintering of the wooden door as it buckled inwards under the enormous force of the karate kick.

The ebon figure stood in the doorway, the bokken in his left hand; his right was empty. It was not until this ultimate moment of their confrontation that Terry allowed the thought to surface as a reality. He trembled involuntarily.

‘Ninja,’ he whispered. He barely recognized his own voice, so clogged was it with emotion. ‘You have chosen death in coming here.’

He leaped upon the intervening bed, striking forcefully with his katana. It was, he realized instantly, a stupid move, for there was no solid support and therefore not nearly enough power behind the momentum of his strike.

Deftly, with almost no effort, the ninja avoided his strike without even lifting his bokken; no need to cross swords, he was saying. You are not even good enough for that.

The ninja whirled away into the darkness of the living room and Terry had no choice but to follow. Dimly he knew that he was playing into the other’s hand; that the background of battle was just as important as the battle itself. He sprinted over Eileen’s corpse, his heart constricting, his blood turned to ice. To hell with it 1 he thought rashly. I can defeat him on any ground. Thus, in his sorrow and his rage, he turned away from all he had been so painstakingly taught.

In the living room, where Mancini played on obliviously, he saw limned the outline of the bokken and immediately went after it.

But the ninja was already in motion, on the attack, and Terry lifted his katana into the darkness, bracing for the expected force of the blocked blow against his blade. Thus he was totally unprepared for the violently percussive shock against his exposed chest. He was flung back more than five feet as if by an explosion. He staggered, his ribs and sternum on fire. He ached all the way up to his jaw. ‘What - ?’ he coughed, confused.

The ninja was again a blur, driving in again. Terry instinctively raised his katana, though he was unsure of the point of attack; his vision seemed blurred.

A second blow came against his chest and he flew backwards, going down on one knee. The katana in his right hand seemed to weigh as much as a human body. His lungs laboured and he was disoriented.

The third blow hit him just as he had staggered to his feet. This time he perceived what was occurring even as he was slammed back into the wall. He heard rather than felt a crack as if a roof beam had given out and he felt a curious wetness on his left side. Ribs, he thought dully, his seething mind still filled with what was happening to him. It was like a dream; no possible reality could be so fantastic.

Another blow bounced him off the wall and the katana pin-wheeled from his grasp, a dead star whirling through space. He glanced down at himself, saw the fractured ribs protruding through his rent flesh. The blood was black as ink, running out of him like tap water down a drain.

It was straight out of the Go Rin No Sho. It was the classic Body Strike of which Musashi wrote. Strike with the left shoulder, he wrote, with the spirit resolved, until the enemy is dead. Learn this well. The ninja had, Terry reflected almost disinterestedly. He cared little for his own life now, not with

Eileen lying dead in the next room. But to kill this monster, yes, this still had substance for him.

He began to move forward, up the wall, then off it. But his body refused to respond quickly. He reeled, his eyes on the moving ninja, crossing his arms in front of him to ward off the blow.

It had no effect. He crashed backwards with a grunt of pain, his sternum splintered from the enormous force of the repeated blows. The bone shot through his body as effectively as shrapnel. He looked up once from where he was huddled against the moulding, into the eyes like stones, thinking, Musashi was right after all. The softly swaying Mancini music rang in his ears, recalling Eileen to him. Her warmth suffused him like a lighted fuse, burning its way through him until it reached his brain.

Blood came out of his mouth as he called to her in a voice as fragile as rice paper. ‘Eileen,’ he called. ‘I love you.’ His head lolled and his eyes slid shut.

The ninja stood dominant in that black void, seeming scarcely to breathe. He stared at the body before him without emotion. For long moments his senses quested for any sound out of the ordinary. At length, satisfied, he turned away, moving silently across the room. From beneath the sofa he drew out his duffel bag and, drawing open the zipper, carefully placed his bokken next to its brother on the top of the contents. In one motion he had closed the bag and hefted it, quitting the apartment without a backward glance.