Linnear 01 - The Ninja (19 page)

Behind him, Mancini played on, the slow bittersweet melody hinting at lost love, cascading through the room. A deep groan escaped from Terry’s cracked lips as he coughed more blood. He lifted his head and, blindly, began to crawl towards the bedroom, not even understanding why, knowing only that he must.

Inch by agonizing inch he moved, crossing the threshold at last, stopping only when he lay panting, drooling blood, beside Eileen’s corpse.

Before his face was a cord and, reaching up, he yanked on it. The phone crashed down onto his left shoulder but he was beyond feeling this minute drop within the vast pool of pain that encompassed him. His finger trembling, he dialled seven slow digits. The ringing of the receiver was like the tolling of a far-off temple bell.

But Eileen seemed suddenly so far away from him and he knew she needed him. The receiver slipped through his wet fingers. He crawled across the last miles.

‘Hello?’ It was Vincent’s voice that came dimly through the abandoned instrument. ‘Hello? Hello!’

But there was no one now to hear him. Terry lay face down on the black fan of Eileen’s hair, his eyes open, unseeing and already glazing over, the blood like a second tongue moving from his lips to hers.

In the living room, the music was finished.

II

Tokyo Suburbs, Spring 1959-Spring 1960

‘Look here, Nicholas,’ the Colonel said one dark and dismal afternoon. Storm clouds hid the crown of Mount Fuji and, occasionally, forked lightning lit the sky; afterwards, the distant roll of thunder.

The Colonel, in his study, had in his hands a lacquered box. On its top was painted a dragon and a tiger, entwined. Nicholas recognized it as the parting gift to his mother and father from So-Peng.

‘It is time, I think, for you to see this,’ the Colonel said. He picked up his pipe and a zippered pouch of moist tobacco, digging both pipe and forefinger into its depths, filling it. Striking a kitchen match on the edge of his desk, he drew strongly on the pipe, getting it going to his satisfaction before continuing. His long forefinger tapped the top of the box, the tip tracing the lines of the two creatures emblazoned there.

‘Nicholas, do you know the symbolic meanings of the dragon and the tiger in Japanese mythology?’

Nicholas shook his head.

The Colonel blew out a cloud of blue aromatic smoke, gripped the pipe-stem with his teeth at one corner of his mouth. ‘The tiger is lord of all the land and the dragon, well, he is emperor of the air. Curious, that, I’ve always thought. The flying serpent, Kukulkan, of Mayan mythology, though he was depicted as being feathered, was also lord of the air. Interesting that two cultures so far from each other should share a major slice of mythology, don’t you think?’

‘But why did So-Peng give you a Japanese box?’ Nicholas asked. ‘He was Chinese, wasn’t he?’

‘Uhm, a good question,’ the Colonel said, puffing away. ‘One to which, I am afraid, I do not have a satisfactory answer. It is true that So-Peng was Mandarin, but only half so. He made it clear to me that his mother was Japanese.’

‘Still, that doesn’t explain the box,” Nicholas pointed out. ‘It’s true enough that you were going to Japan, but this box is ancient, not easily acquirable, especially at that time.’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel replied, stroking the lid, ‘there is little doubt that this had been in his family - quite probably brought by his mother to China - for some time. Now why should So-Peng give this to us? I mean this specific item. Surely it was no whim; he was not that kind of man. Nor do I think it was mere coincidence.’ The Colonel rose now and stood by the rain-streaked window. Condensation had made the panes into frosted decorations; winter’s chill had not totally been left behind.

‘I pondered this for a long time,’ the Colonel said, staring out of the windows. He rubbed a small oval, clearing a line of sight as if he were carefully looking out of a besieged fortress’s apertures. ‘All the way from Singapore to Tokyo, in fact. So-Peng had asked us not to open the present until we had reached Japan and we respected this request.

‘At Haneda Airport, we were met by a contingent of SCAP personnel - we had, of course, flown over in a military transport. However, someone else was waiting for us when we landed. Certainly your mother recognized her immediately and so did I, just by the description I had been given by Cheong of her dream. It was Itami and she looked precisely as your mother had dreamed she did.’ He shrugged. ‘Somehow, I was not amazed. One grows used to such … phenomena, here; it’s a part of life in the Far East, as I’ve no doubt you will soon learn.

‘I was curious, the rapport your mother had with Itami. It was as if they had known each other all their lives; as if they were sisters, rather than sisters-in-law. There was absolutely no culture shock as there might have been when a young girl brought up in a tiny Chinese village meets for the first time a grand lady of urban Japanese society. Now this was so even though your mother and Itami are totally different kinds of people.” The Colonel turned around to face his son. ‘AH the differences you see in them - the warmth in your mother, the steel-like aloofness of Itami; the happiness of your mother, the sadness of your aunt - none of these differences mattered to either of them.

‘This, too, I thought about for some time and what I decided was this: although So-Peng told me in so many words that he possessed no knowledge of Cheong’s true heritage, yet his present was an oblique way of telling me otherwise.”

‘You mean Mother is Japanese.’

‘Perhaps part Japanese.’ He came and sat down next to his son, putting one hand on his shoulder lovingly. ‘But, Nicholas, this is something you must promise never to discuss with anyone, even your mother. I tell you now because - well, because it was information passed on to me. So-Peng believed it was important, therefore it must be, though I myself put little stock in that sort of thing. I am English and a Jew, yet my heart is with these people. My blood sings with their history, my soul resonates with theirs. What use is my lineage to me? I want to make this quite clear to you, Nicholas. I did not renounce my Jewish name; I merely dropped it away. Now I suppose it can be argued that this is the same thing. Not so! I did this not by choice but by necessity. England, as a rule, does not like Jews; never has done so. I found, when I changed my name, many doors opened to me that had hitherto been quite shut. There’s a moral question to be answered here, I know. Should one attempt to go through? Yes, say I, and devil take the hindmost. But that’s my view. And while my soul is with the Japanese, I am neither Buddhist nor Shinto. These religions hold no particular meaning for me, save for scholarly study. In my heart, I have never renounced my Jewishness. Six thousand years of struggle cannot so easily be bought out. The blood of Solomon and David, of Moses, runs in your veins, too. Never forget that. Whether you choose to do anything about it is purely your concern; I would not tamper with so private a matter. Yet it is my duty to tell you, to give you the facts, as it were. I hope you understand this.’ He gazed solemnly at his son for a long moment before he opened the tiger and dragon box, the last gift of the enigmatic So-Peng.

Nicholas looked down, stared into the brilliant fire of sixteen half-inch cut emeralds.

Nicholas had been studying bujutsu for nearly seven years now and still felt as if he knew almost nothing. He was strong and his reflexes superb; he went through the drills and exercises with a great deal of concentration and assiduousness but without any special love or feeling. This surprised and concerned him. He had been fully prepared for the hard work, the difficulty, for it was exactly this kind of effort which interested and absorbed him the most. What he had not reckoned on was any indifference on his part. It was not, he reflected one day during floor exercises at the dojo, that he had in any way changed his mind about wanting to learn bujutsu. In fact, if anything, this desire had increased”. It was - well, very difficult to put. Perhaps there was no spark there.

Perhaps it was his instructor. Tanka was a stolid, solidly built man who believed a great deal in repeated movements and, it seemed, nothing else. Over and over, Nicholas was obliged to perform the same manoeuvre. Again and again until he felt that the sequence had been engraved upon his brain and nerves and muscles. It was boring work and he hated it. Hated, too, the fact that Tanka treated them as if they were children not yet ready for the adult world.

Ever and again, he would find himself looking over to the far side of the dojo where Kansatsu, the ryu’s master, taught, individual classes with a select few of the older students. He longed to be there instead of here on the dung-heap of un-specialized exercises.

He had come to join the same ryu as Saigo - as had been said, through Itami’s intervention - and it galled him further that his cousin, being older and having joined the ryu earlier than Nicholas, was thus far ahead. This point Saigo brought up to him at every opportunity. At the dojo he was openly contemptuous of Nicholas - as were many of the other students, because of his occidental aspect, feeling that bujutsu, being one of the most traditional and sacred of Japanese institutions, should not be open to a gaijin, a foreigner - and never referred to Nicholas as his cousin. However, at home it was quite another matter. He was scrupulously careful to be polite to Nicholas. For his part, Nicholas had given up trying to talk the matter out with Saigo after the third unsuccessful attempt.

Truth to tell, Saigo was a thorn in Nicholas’s side at the dojo. When he could have been so much help to the other, he invariably went out of his way to make everything more difficult, even going so far as to become the unofficial ringleader of the ‘opposition’.

One evening, the work over with and the showers taken, Nicholas was dressing when five or six of the boys came up in ones and twos until they had surrounded him.

‘What are you doing here?’ said one of the largest boys. ‘This is where we sit.’

Nicholas said nothing, continuing to dress. Outwardly he took no notice, but inwardly his heart was beating like a triphammer.

‘Don’t you have anything to say?’ said another boy. He was small and younger than the others but was seemingly emboldened by their surrounding presence. He laughed derisively. ‘Maybe he doesn’t understand Japanese. Do you think we’ll have to speak to him in English like they do with the apes in the zoo?’ Everyone laughed.

‘That’s right,’ the big boy said, picking up the cue. ‘I want an answer, ape. Tell us why you’re here in our spot, stinking it up like a spot of venereal disease.’

Nicholas stood up. ‘Why don’t you go off and play somewhere where your jokes will be appreciated.’

‘Look, look I’ cried the small boy. “The ape speaks I”

‘Shut up!’ said the big boy, and then to Nicholas: ‘I don’t much care for your tone, ape. I think you’ve just said something you’re going to regret.’ His right hand chopped downward towards Nicholas’s exposed neck without warning. Nicholas blocked it and then they were all crowding into him.

Through the melee he caught a glimpse of Saigo on his way out, oblivious to the raucous disturbance. He called out his name.

Saigo checked and came over. ‘Hold on 1’ he yelled, shouldering his way through the crowd. He shoved them back against the wall, giving Nicholas some breathing space. ‘What’s going on here?’

‘It’s the gaijin,’ the big boy said, his fists still clenched. ‘Making trouble again.’

‘Oho, is that so?” Saigo said. ‘One against six? Hard to believe.’ He shrugged, slammed the edge of his hand into Nicholas’s stomach.

Nicholas pitched forward onto his knees, his forehead touching the floor as if in prayer. He retched, tried to fill his bursting lungs with air. He gasped like a fish out of water.

‘Don’t bother these people any more, Nicholas,’ Saigo said, standing over him. ‘Where are your manners? But what can you expect, fellows. His father’s a barbarian and his mother’s a Chinese. C’mon.’ He led them away, leaving Nicholas alone on the floor with his pain.

She had come with her attenuated procession quite unexpectedly during the middle of the week, throwing the entire household into a state of unmitigated panic, initiated, of course, by Cheong, who felt that the house was never clean enough, the food never fine enough, her family never well dressed enough to suit Itami.

She looked like a tiny doll, Nicholas thought, a perfect porcelain thing to be put on a pedestal inside a glass case, protected from the elements. In fact, Itami needed no such exterior protection; she had a will of iron and the power to promote it, even with her husband, Satsugai.

Nicholas watched clandestinely from another room as Cheong herself performed the elaborate tea ceremony for Itami, kneeling on the tatamis before a green lacquered table. She wore a traditional Japanese robe and her long gleaming hair had been put up with ivory sticks. He thought that, at that moment, she had never looked so beautiful or so regal. She was a far cry from the icy aristocracy of Itami, yet perhaps even because of that he had far more admiration for his mother. Of Itami’s kind of woman there were plenty in books of photographs he had seen of an older, pre-war Japan. But oh, Cheong 1 There were none to touch her. She carried with her a nobility of soul that Itami could never hope to attain, not in this life, at least. Though Itami was strong, her magnetism was nothing compared to Cheong’s power, for she wielded an inner tranquillity that was as profound as the utter stillness of a hot summer’s day, a living jewel, unique. She was, as Nicholas thought of it, of a whole cloth and this he respected and admired above all else.

He had no great desire to talk to Itami but it would have been very bad manners for him to leave the house without acknowledging her presence; his mother would be furious and, quite naturally, blame herself. This he did not want and thus, some time later in the afternoon, he pulled open the shoji and stepped through.

Itami looked up. ‘Ah, Nicholas, I did not know that you were home.’

‘Good afternoon, Aunt.’

‘Excuse me a moment,’ Cheong said, getting effortlessly to her feet. ‘The tea is cold.’ For some reason she would not overtly use the servants when Itami was around. She left them alone and Nicholas began to feel uncomfortable under the mute scrutiny of Itami’s gaze.