Linnear 01 - The Ninja (65 page)

Now it was Nicholas’s turn to incline his head.

‘But you came to us for a reason,-did you not? And now the time has come. It has begun.’

‘I regret to say, sensei, that it began some time ago.’ And he told the old man about the murders.

Fukashigi sat quite still and there was silence for a time after Nicholas had finished. His head swivelled and his cool gaze swept over Nicholas’s face. ‘When you joined us you took certain vows, just as you did at every step of your training. You must have known what was commencing the moment you discovered the shaken fragment. Yet you took no action. Now, perhaps because of that, many people - three of them your friends - are dead.’ His cold eyes seemed as luminous as beacons on a foggy day. ‘Are you dead, too, Nicholas?”

Nicholas watched the backs of his hands, stung by the old man’s words. ‘Perhaps I never should have come to the West. I think I was merely trying to outrun my karma.’

‘You know better than that. Wherever you go, it will be the same for you.’

‘It sounds like a curse.’

‘If one chooses to see one’s life in those terms, men it is. But I am surprised that you should think in such a curiously Western mode.’

‘Perhaps America has changed me as it did Vincent.’

‘Of course only you can know the truth of that -‘

‘I don’t know any more.’

‘I suspect that is only because you do not fully comprehend it yet.’

‘I am bound up inexplicably with Saigo - and with Yukio -yet-‘

‘Acceptance of karma should not be confused with fatalism We are all, to a great extent, masters of our own fate. But also we must learn to bow before the inevitable: this is the true meaning of acceptance and it is only this which brings the harmony without which life is not really worth living.’

‘I understand all that,’ Nicholas said. ‘It is the specifics that still elude me.’

Fukashigi nodded his head and, reaching inside his robe, he withdrew a series of rice paper sheets which had been folded very carefully. They had about them the look of age. Fukashigi handed them across to Nicholas.

‘This letter is from Kansatsu. I am following his express instructions in giving this to you now.’

It was a plain black Ford sedan.

Doc Deerforth tried to make out who was in it but the late morning sunlight spun like a nova across the windshield, completely obscuring it.

He watched the sedan long enough to make certain that it was following Justine’s brick-red roadster and, still mindful of and not a little curious about Nicholas’s warning, he spun the wheel of his car and set off after them both.

He had had a call out along the west end of Dune Road earlier that morning and had come east to look in on Justine. He had still been some distance away when he had seen her take the roadster east. That was when he had picked up the black Ford.

He stayed well back and turned in after seeing the brick-red roadster stop at Flying Point. But, curiously, no one emerged from the black Ford. He waited impatiently for what seemed a long time. He got out of his car, on the point of following her down the beach, when the black Ford started up. Slowly it began to pace her along the beach road.

Doc Deerforth went hurriedly back to his car and got in.

He was sweating profusely by the time he came round the last turn and saw the sedan parked some way from the beginning of Gin Lane.

He was grateful he had not lost it. The traffic was light and he had had to hang back farther than he would have wanted.

More than once the Ford had disappeared for long moments around a serpentine turning.

Now he knew where they were both headed. He recognized Raphael Tomkin’s house immediately.

The soles of his shoes crunched on gravel as he got out of the car. He snapped down the sunglass attachment to his glasses against the fierce glare.

Now he could see into the black Ford. It was empty.

It was quite still here. There was a lone cardinal in a tall pine but it would not sing. He could no longer hear the boom and hiss of the surf, and the lack of that sound was like white noise clattering like thrown stones through his brain.

He began to walk towards the Ford. All sound seemed heightened in the hush. Not even a breeze stirred the high treetops. It was very hot.

The black Ford was nearer now, hulking like some sinister castle in the desert. Who would follow Justine? And why? Look after her, Nicholas had said. Startled, Doc Deerforth realized he thought of the two of them as if they were his own kids. Just an old man’s foolishness, he admonished himself. I miss my two girls, is all.

His shirt was soaked, sticking to his skin like loose folds of ancient flesh. Just as it did, he reflected, in the jungle so long ago. And abruptly, he staggered, experiencing a fierce stab of vertigo. It’s the malaria, he thought, steadying himself against a resinous tree trunk. My own form of malaria. Because it’s the summer. In the fall, it will pass.

He ran one hand along the burning flank of the Ford, and, bending a bit, peering into the interior. There was nothing to see.

He was still stooped over like dial, an old, balding man, sweating in the heat of the afternoon, when the shadow stretched itself across the side of the black sedan.

For a long moment, Doc Deerforth stared at it. It recalled to him a moment in a ballet he had seen a long time ago in the city: the entrance of the Dark Angel. On either side of him, his daughters - they were still young then - had cried at the vision. Black wings clouded the sun and he was abruptly cold.

He began to turn, heard the weird whirring sound at that same instant. A blur on the periphery of his vision and instinctively he raised his arm in front of his face.

Then something had wrapped itself about his’ ankles and he was dragged off his feet. Metal links scraped and dug painfully into his flesh. He gasped and twisted, feeling like a fish on a line.

He looked down. A long chain with a weight on its end was strung taut, pulling him into a stand of dense poplars beyond which stretched long fields of corn.

He rolled, puffing; tried to sit up. There was a blade at his throat.

He looked up. Before the sky, as rich a cerulean as he had ever seen it, he saw a face - at least part of one - that made him shudder. All the breath went out of him.

He stared into eyes as dead as stones, madman’s eyes. So different from those others long ago; yet the same. The ninja, Doc Deerforth thought. His mind seemed to freeze with the thought, as if there could be no room in the world now for anything else. His life seemed to shrivel down to the size of a pea and, disappearing altogether, become totally insignificant.

Cicadas chimed; flies buzzed. He was back in the Philippines, back in the tent, tied to the table.

And the soft, knowing voice said to him, ‘Why have you followed me?’

‘Why have you followed the girl?’

There was absolutely no change of expression in those staring eyes, of that he was quite certain. But, without warning, the ninja jerked on the chain and the saw-toothed steel links bit through skin, sawing into tissue, ground against bone.

Doc Deerforth’s head flew back and breath whistled through his half-open lips. Blood drained from his face.

‘Why have you followed me?’

The words came again and again like a litany, a friar’s prayer at day’s end - what did they call mat? Vespers?

‘Why have you followed me?”

Time ceased to exist as the pain rose and fell like the tide -now faster, now slower, so dial he had no clear idea of when it would make his jaws clamp together in a rictus, make the sweat fly off him as he jerked this way and that, make his thighs tremble and the muscles in his legs turn to water.

At some point, it was impossible for him to say when, Doc Deerforth knew that there was something different about this one. He was at once more cruel and less removed. And there was an elemental power to him mat frightened him to the very core. It was as if the devil himself had come to strip him of life.

That it was his time to die, Doc Deerforth had no doubt. There would be no last-minute rescue this time and he was far too weak and old for muscular heroics. But a human being, until the very moment of’ death, has certain powers that can only be relinquished voluntarily. Neither time nor terror had dominion over these few last possessions.

The ninja now had one knee across Doc Deerforth’s heaving chest. Gently, almost reverently, he took up Doc Deerforth’s right hand and, using only the tips of his fingers, broke the thumb. He waited just the right amount of time - the shock had worn off and the pain was a sharp throbbing. He broke the index finger. And so it went, one by one, slowly and inexorably.

Doc Deerforth shuddered, heaved and sighed. He whispered the names of his daughters, of his long-dead wife. He felt, rather than saw, the ninja crouching low to hear his faintly expelled words. A curse and then a sharp crack. Pain flared as his right wrist shattered.

Someone, someone, he thought hazily, will have to call the kids. Then the pain blanketed him and his nerves, vibrating, screaming with agony, pitched him at last into unconsciousness.

A child’s high cry perhaps decided Doc Deerforth’s fate. It was close at hand and Saigo, abruptly deciding that nothing could be gained from prolonging this game, took up the other end of the saw toothed kyotetsu-shoge and slit Doc Deerforth’s throat with the double-edged blade.

‘From the beginning,’ Nicholas read, ‘your father was suspicious of Satsugai. From the first time they met, the Colonel understood that behind the man’s vast power in the zaibatsu stretched a hidden network of immense size and strength. He suspected, quite rightly, as further investigation bore out, that Satsugai was deeply involved with the Genyosha. They were, perhaps, most responsible for sowing the seeds that led to the fateful decision to institute the pre-emptive strike at Pearl Harbor.

‘Your father wished to crush the forces of Genyosha and it was to this end that he intervened on Satsugai’s behalf when the SCAP tribunal was ready to try him for war crimes. He thought that leaving Satsugai free to pursue his plans would eventually lead to the arrest of the Genyosha main body itself.

‘It was a good plan except that Satsugai discovered it. Now he was eternally in the Colonel’s debt - a man who was out to destroy him. This he could not abide. Satsugai was of the old school and most honourable. He knew that he could not touch or interfere with the Colonel in any way.

‘Therefore, he sent his son, Saigo, as his emissary of death, sending him into Kumamoto to the most feared of all the Kan-aku na ninjutsu ryu, the Kuji-kjri.

‘Over the years, the Colonel came to understand the nature of his folly. He had gambled heavily and lost. Now Satsugai was forever beyond the law and this had been the Colonel’s doing.

‘Your father was an Englishman by birth yet he could not have been more Japanese had he been born here and he came to a decision that was uniquely Japanese. He killed Satsugai himself.’

Stunned, Nicholas raised his eyes. And because of that shame to the family, Cheong had committed seppuku.

‘Continue reading,’ Fukashigi said gently. ‘There is more.’

‘Your father was a fine warrior, Nicholas, and thus none suspected him. Until, that is, Saigo returned home. With the basic elements of Kan-aka na ninjutsu already at his disposal, it did not take him long to divine the truth. This knowledge he kept to himself and, while stoking the fires of his hatred in the secret depths of him, he meanwhile presented only the image of a grief-stricken son to the outside world. For already a plan of vengeance had formed in his mind.

‘Thus he contrived to be home several times when he knew Itami was corning to your house for the afternoon, when you would not be home. I cannot say whether it happened the first or the second time but it scarcely matters.

‘You must know by now what amazing yogen’ - chemists - ‘the Kuji-kiri are; how many different and subtle ways they are taught to kill a human being without ever touching him.

‘This, I fear, is what happened to your father. Saigo murdered him with slow poison.’

Nicholas felt tears come to his eyes so that he had difficulty focusing on the last several sentences. His fingers gripped the thin rice-paper leaves, shaking.

‘Here I must extend to you my most profound apologies. Even though I am not ninja, I feel responsible, at least in part, for your father’s death. He was a great friend to me and I feel - even now after the initial sorrow has left me - that I should have known.

‘You have become the symbol of my atonement. That you are reading this now with, I trust, my esteemed friend Fukashigi beside you, is proof of that. I am long past knowing.

‘I imagine that you were quite surprised on arriving at the Tenshin Shoden Katori ryu to find that payment for your long study had already been made in full.

‘I trust you understand why I had to do that before I died and pray Amida Buddha that you will forgive an old man’s lapse.’

He saw the brush-stroke characters of Kansatsu’s name through the well of tears as he cried for the Colonel, who had tried, in his own way, to tell him, and for Cheong. He felt now as if the years had been stripped from him like the red and gold leaves of autumn. And now he wept, too, for his friends, who had loved him and whom he had loved in return. Time enough for them all now.

Beside him, silent as sunlight, Fukashigi sat deep in contemplation, thinking about the cruelties time inflicted upon the young.

‘Did you come here to dry out?’

‘That’s a bit direct, isn’t it?’

‘Sorry.’

‘That’s all right. I suppose I deserved it. But, no, I’ve already done my drying out.’

They sat within the immense oval of the starry living room. Fully half the walls were glass, open to the sunlight of the beach and the sea. Above them, the skylight was like a faceted diamond, the largest in the universe, so Justine had always believed when she was younger. Now, in the morning, the tardy sun had not yet slipped across its faces and thus they were bathed - as at evening - in a most flattering indirect light.

The couch upon which they both sat was completely circular with two breaks, as angular and distinct as the fitted edges of a Chinese sphere puzzle which someone had once given to Justine and which she could never quite conquer. They sat on opposite sides of the morning, their backs as rigid, their eyes as wary as a pair of cats’ on unfamiliar territory.