Enzan: The Far Mountain (18 page)

Chapter 18

It was like driving down a long tunnel that never came to an end. The snow caught the headlights and swirled around us. It was exhausting. The eyes kept wanting to focus on the tiny flecks of bright snow, but I had to keep squinting into the darkness beyond them instead. I ached. My eyes burned and I felt my focus slipping.

“Talk to me,” I told her.

“What? She had been lulled by the steady thump of the windshield wipers and the drone of the tires on the snow, and now she was wedged into the corner where the seat met the car door, staring out into the night. She faced me with a look of startled anger.

“I’m falling asleep,” I explained. “Talk to me.”

“What the fuck do you want me to say?”

I sighed. “I don’t know. Anything. Tell me about yourself.”

She wiggled into a more upright position and I could feel the anger pulsing off her. “Tell you about myself! I’m Miyazaki Chie and I’ve been kidnapped. I’m trapped in a car at gunpoint, stuck in the middle of a snowstorm. How’s that, you asshole!”

I grimaced a small smile. “It’s a start.” She had started out calmly enough, but the last few words came out in a loud shriek. It made my head throb.
You asked for it, Burke
.

I wiggled around in the seat and worked the pistol out of my coat pocket. I handed it to her.

“Here.”

She started to reach out, then hesitated as if it might be a trick. I put the weapon in her lap. She hesitated, then snatched it up, pointing it at me.

“It’s empty,” I told her. “I threw the magazine away with Lim’s car keys.”

“You bastard.”

I shrugged. “I don’t like guns much. Don’t know enough about them to really be comfortable with them around. It seems to me a loaded gun is just a small disaster waiting to happen.”

“But at the rest stop …”

I waived a hand. “I just didn’t want you to cause any trouble there.”

“You lied to me.” She sounded strangely petulant.

“You’re not used to that by now?” I said. I regretted it as soon as the words came out of my mouth.
When would I learn to keep my mouth shut?
She didn’t answer. She had lowered the pistol onto her lap, but kept a grip on it. The muzzle was pointed my way. Maybe she thought I was lying about the bullets. I got the sense she didn’t know much about guns either. Maybe she was hoping there was a round in the chamber. For a moment I felt a stab of anxiety—did I clear the action when I threw the magazine away? I couldn’t remember. I took my eyes off the road long enough to get a fleeting look at her: eyes narrowed, shoulders tense, hand gripping the pistol. And I knew she had seen the doubt flash across my face.

She waived the gun slightly in a tight circle. “You’re not really sure it’s empty, are you, Burke?”

I just shrugged, a gesture that could have meant anything. I figured I needed to bluff this one out.

“Basic rule is never point a gun at someone unless you intend to use it,” I said. The wipers thudded back and forth. The tires growled through the snow. I was weary.

“If you’re gonna shoot me, Chie, let me know so I can slow down a bit,” I told her. “That way at least one of us walks away.”

We had come off the interstate and were navigating a series of state roads that trended south in the narrow river valleys of upstate New York. The hills shielded us from the worst of the nor’easter. But these roads were plowed infrequently and they rose up and wound down the hilly terrain, forcing me to reduce speed. But I was pushing it as hard as I could, still feeling the drift and slide in the turns, worried I’d put us in a snowdrift in the middle of nowhere. I checked the mirror for any traffic coming up behind us, but there wasn’t a light to be seen. We were alone out there, two crazy people on the road. She didn’t say anything and I took my foot off the gas. The car slowed down and eventually crunched to a stop. I left my hands on the wheel and turned to face her.

Chie kept the pistol pointed my way. Then she made a small growling noise of disgust, thrust the pistol at me, and turned quickly to face the front of the car. I shoved the thing back in my pocket. She crossed her arms in front of her, angry, cold. Maybe both.

“Where are we?” She was still angry, but resigned.

“We’re back in New York State.”

“Heading south toward the city?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” I heard her swallow. She licked her lips and I felt the skin on my face puckering: we were both getting parched from the car’s defroster. I handed her the water bottle I had bought. She sipped at it cautiously as if she were afraid it, too, was part of my plot. “You’re not going to make me go back to my family?” She said it quietly, as if afraid of the answer she might get.

I had been mulling that precise question over for a while, arguing with myself. I had agreed to find her and to get her out of Lim’s hands. To make sure she was safe. I’d done that, after a fashion. Now the real question was what would I do next. I was pretty sure the Miyazaki wanted Chie back in their custody. But she was a grown woman. Ultimately, she could do what she wanted. Actually, I thought ruefully, she already seemed to embrace that concept fully. It was none of my business. But I did have an obligation to see her safe. Whatever the specific details of the Miyazaki family’s expectations, certainly just making sure she was safe was the core of what they wanted. So if I could determine she was basically OK and get her away from Lim, hadn’t I fulfilled the essence of my commitment?

I was splitting hairs. I knew that. The family would not be pleased. But I had made a minor career of frustrating people’s desires for me. Generating disappointment was a type of Burke art form. And part of me remembered Mickey and Art and their warnings. The Miyazaki proposal was one that, if fulfilled, would make me a kidnapper. I had no desire to go to jail. And, more importantly, I didn’t think that would really help her.

Besides, there was more to it than that. I knew things now that I hadn’t when I started. I had an extra obligation to do what I could for her. I wasn’t sure how much I would ultimately be able to help her, but I had to try.

“No,” I finally answered her, more a sigh than a statement. “I’ll get you back to the city. That’s all. Away from Lim.”

If she was relieved, she had a funny way of showing it. She turned on me, furious again. “What’s your issue with Lim?”

The energy from her anger filled the car. The force of it was startling; it made me momentarily stupid. I shrugged defensively. “Well,” I said, “for one thing, he’s a creep.”

“You don’t know the first thing about him!”

“He’s using you, Chie.”

“Ohh … bullshit.” She braced one hand on the dashboard and the other on the seat, pressing her torso all the way around to confront me. I’d stirred her up and now she was completely out of her reverie and back in full furious mode. “Did it ever occur to you that I was using him?”

I nodded, remembering the roshi and his talk on hypersexuality: rebellion and connection in one muddy, tangled package.

“Works that way in a lot of relationships,” I said, with more confidence than I really felt. “But there’s more to it than that …”

“Oh, please. Now you sound like a shrink.”

I smiled at that thought. “I’m about the farthest thing from a shrink you could find.”

She eased back away from me, her eyes narrowed. “So … who are you? And,” she slammed herself back into the seat, eyes rigid on the road, “what the fuck is this all about? Can you just answer me that?”

“Well, yeah,” I said quietly, “at least partly.”

So I told her about me, how study in Asian culture had gotten me hooked on martial arts. How I’d eventually worked my way through a Ph.D. and slammed around dojo. “I used to think I was a scholar with a unique research specialty,” I told her. “Now I realize I’m just a dojo rat with an advanced degree.”

And then, I explained, I met Yamashita and my world changed. It wasn’t just the things he could do, the things he taught me; it was the sense of being part of something special, a tradition that stretches back centuries, an organization where membership is open only to those with the will to endure a harrowing apprenticeship and the ability to absorb its lessons. Some people thought it was delusional, a lifetime pursuing skills that were largely irrelevant two centuries ago. I’d had a woman in my life once who saw the dojo as some sort of psychic black hole sucking me in deeper and deeper. I had a family that shook their heads in consternation at my life, even now. But it was a place where I belonged, I lamely concluded, a life that gave me a sense of meaning.

Chie didn’t know what to say to that. “The martial arts …” She shook her head. “Back home it’s for the old-timers, traditionalists who can’t let go of the past and the jocks in high school and college who can’t let go of the present …” She glanced at me. “It’s weird, Burke.”

It was an accurate characterization of my life. I was in a car in what the radio was telling me was the worst snowstorm since the 1800s, traveling with a drug-abusing nympho whose dysfunctional family had hired a complete stranger to kidnap her. She may have been right.

“Probably like a lot of people’s lives,” I said. “I’m not asking you to live it. It just makes sense to me.”

“And that,” she said, smacking the dashboard with a palm, “is precisely what I think. It’s my life, right? Nobody needs to approve of it but me.”

I frowned, realizing I had walked right into that one.

“There’s a bit more to it than that,” I started to protest.

“Oh bullshit,” she spat. “My family doesn’t like the fact that I party too much, that I fuck whoever I like? Tough shit. It’s my life. They’ve got no business butting in.” She crossed her arms and finished. “And neither do you, Burke.”

I took a breath. Concentrated on making the correct turn on the road ahead, slid through the process, and got us on the last leg of the trip for the night. “Fair enough,” I admitted. “But hear me out.” She started to talk, but I held up a hand. “Just let me finish. There are some extra pieces to this.”

She wasn’t particularly receptive. “Like what?” Grudgingly, looking out the side window to show just how little interest she really had. She couldn’t be seeing much: the bluish wash of snow and dark forest, the reflection of the instrument panel on the glass. Maybe the ghost image of her own face.

“Well, first off there were the photos of you …”

“I told you I didn’t send them!”

“I believe you,” I replied. “But someone sent them …”

“So what? It’s my personal life.”

I didn’t rise to the bait. “Yes. But someone sent them. Based on the analysis I had done, it was someone who had access to your cell phone and someone who also had Internet access from the place at Mattson’s Peak.” She said nothing.

“It was Lim, Chie.”

Now it was her turn to shrug. “So?”

“So why would he do a thing like that, I wonder. Just to get to your father?”

“He doesn’t even know my father.”

“Hmm. But he knew how to get in touch with him, didn’t he? Talk about weird …” I let the statement hang in the air for a time.

“Why would he do that, Chie? What did he want?”

“I told you,” she snapped. “Lim doesn’t know my father. He wouldn’t have wanted anything.”

“Yeah, I wondered about that. I figured your family is rich, so maybe it was money he was after—a simple extortion case? The more I poked at it, the more I wondered. And then there’s the whole Korean thing.”

“I told you I don’t know anything about that.”

“Yeah, and again, I believe you. But from what I can tell, Lim has some connection with these people. Serious people, Chie.” I looked at her and, for the first time, she met my gaze. “Serious as in ‘throw Burke off the cliff’ serious, Chie.”

She mulled that over for a while. “So why,” she began. “I mean, why get involved?”

I shrugged, feeling the ache in my neck and shoulders. “In the beginning, just to do an errand that would keep people from bugging Yamashita. But then it got more complicated in a hurry …” I thought for a moment. “Neither of us is going to be safe until I get to the bottom of it. And besides, there’s something else.”

“Ooh,” she said. “That’s so fucking cryptic. What do you mean?”

So I told her.

The rest of the trip was quiet. For most of the drive I had been feeling my way along, having a general sense of where I needed to go. Now that I was getting closer, the roads were familiar and I could relax. The snow was still coming down—the radio said it would most likely continue for at least another day and the entire Northeast was shut down—but by this time the demands of driving through it were familiar. We were almost at our destination.

I knew that we’d never be able to reach Manhattan. Roads and bridges were closed; the main arteries open only to emergency vehicles. But I wanted to get us both somewhere safe where we could ride out the storm and where I could figure out my next steps. It occurred to me that the roshi’s monastery would be perfect: isolated and remote, a few hours’ drive from the city. Plus, I needed to see Yamashita. I had something for him.

The monastery has a broad parking lot carved out in the side of the road and a winding path that leads onto the grounds and the main hall. The lot had a few cars in it, all of them smothered in snow and now nothing more than vague, rounded domes. The area had been plowed early on in the storm but was filling up again and the snow had drifted across the main entrance. I didn’t so much park the car as I gunned it up and over the drift and aimed it toward a distant berm, burying the nose of the vehicle and lurching to a final stop. I shut the wipers down and snowflakes slid across the glass, stopped, reached out to others, and started to create a fuzzy, opaque web that thickened with each second.

Chie and I waded our way toward the entrance. The snow was up above my knees and in places the drifts reached Chie’s waist. We were both winded when we reached the wide covered porch of the main building. I rang the bell and when the door opened, we practically fell inward.

The receptionist didn’t act particularly surprised at our presence—we weren’t the only lost pilgrims blown their way that night—but he took one look at me and called the roshi, who arrived in short order with a gangly man wearing a scraggly ginger beard and the dark grey outfit of a novice.