Sensei (14 page)

I thought of Yamashita. His silences and the sense you had of trying to pierce through a shield any time you looked at him. His unpredictable nature. The ways in which he made you feel both awe and fear, often simultaneously. I nodded.

"I'd know Mick. He wouldn't hide something like this from me. It's too important."

"Everyone lies, Connor. Even your teacher."

"You don't know him."

"Buddy boy," my brother said, taking another drink, "don't be fooled, you think he's so special..." The contempt in his voice was palpable.

"Fuck you, Mick."

"Fuck you, Connor." The height of brotherly debate.

I waited. All I got was sullen silence. The cubes rattled as he drank. "Ahh, I don't see how this is gonna help with anything," I finally prompted. "You got anything else?"

"Not yet."

"Any new leads?"

"Hey! I'm working on it," he snapped.

"YDu're not working on anything but a hangover."

Micky made no response.

'"&u gonna let this guy walk? After what he did to Art?" I demanded.

"No one's getting away," my brother said. He sounded like doom.

"Then what?" I persisted.

He waved his glass vaguely. "I got some things to work on." Then Micky seemed to deflate a bit in the chair and he mumbled something at me.

"What!" I demanded.

Micky leaned forward and said something, but it was low and to himself.

"No," I insisted. "What'd you say?"

"Nothing," my brother protested.

I don't know what I was madder at, the whole situation, Micky's accusation of Yamashita, the fact I had to defend him, or the nagging doubt I felt. Something gave inside me. I stood up, reached down, and grabbed him by his lapels.

"Tell me what you said, you dumb fuck!"

I must have touched something raw and hurtful way down inside him. He jerked to his feet. I heard the bottle go over. I wasn't expecting the sudden move and fell backward, tripping over a piece of furniture in the dim room. I sat sprawled on the floor as he stood swaying over me, furious.

"Don't push it, Connor! You and all that martial arts bullshit. I shoulda had myself more together, but I was too busy payin' attention to you."

"Whadaya mean?"

"You asshole! I never shoulda let you come along last night."

"Wha..."

"Don't you get it?" he yelled. "We had vests in the trunk! We had vests in the trunk and I forget to make Art put his on!"

I thought for a minute that he was going to attack me. Then he retreated back into himself, collapsing into the chair. I looked at him in the silence and slowly got to my feet.

Micky had the hard-edged fatalism of a cop. He knew, more often than not, that the worst thing that can happen usually does. You hear about the guilt of survivors. Old soldiers and anyone who works on the sharp end of things know about it. The feeling that you could have, should have done more, or something else, to stave off the disaster. It doesn't matter whether someone is just wounded or blown away. Whatever the event, you still get the intimate revelation of your own mortality, the electric brush with death's close passage. The secret joy that it wasn't you whose number was up. All those feelings get mixed into an acid stew that can eat away at you, drop by drop, over days, or years, or a lifetime.

In a sense, it's not rational. In another sense, it's totally understandable. At least that's what I told myself. People crave certainty. And control. We spend our lives erecting coping mechanisms, little games we play to preserve the illusion of safety. The plain fact of the matter is that bad things happen. And when they do, all our efforts at staving them off are revealed as inadequate, delusional. The innocent finger-crossing of a child in the face of the killer's bludgeon.

I took a deep breath and tried again. "That's crap and you know it. It's not my fault. And it's not your fault either, Mick." He didn't respond. "We didn't do anything wrong. Ronin did."

My brother just grunted.

I tried another tack. "You know Art doesn't blame you."

Micky just sat there and I went on. "Do you think if your positions were reversed that Art would do what you're doing? Blaming yourself? Feeling sorry for yourself? A guy like that?"

Micky leaned toward me, his face ghosting into the shadow thrown by the lamp. "Don't you tell me what kind of guy he is. I know."

"Yeah. Even last night..." In my mind's eye I saw Art gasping in the dark as the EMTs worked on him. "He was trying to tell us something."

My brother took a deep breath and looked at me like he was both surprised and disappointed. "Connor, Art just had some fuckin' nut job try to empty the whole clip of a 9-mm into him. think he was together enough to send a message home?"

Micky gave a harsh snort. "He was making noises, but they were just sound. Art's brain was already shutting down, Connor. His body just hadn't caught on."

I didn't believe it, mostly because I couldn't face it. I still held out hope. So did the surgeons; every day Art hung on was a good sign. Micky and I sat for a while longer, looking out into the yard where the night grew stronger with each passing minute. The kids' voices drifted in, muted sounds from another world. It was probably what Lazarus heard. My brother sat there like a stone, deaf to the call.

I finished the whiskey and set the glass down next to him. As I got to the screen, I turned.

"It doesn't matter, Mick," I said. I got nothing from him in response. "It doesn't," I prodded. Through the screen, I could see Dee toweling the kids off as they came out of the pool. The image was softened by the filtering of the screen door and the arrival of full darkness. The sheer normalcy of the scene pulled at me, but I looked back into the room one last time.

"We're going to have to get him, Mick. It's personal now." I said it softly hoping for a reply. Ice cubes tinkled softly. I went outside, closed the sliding screen door, and walked away.

I went home and sat alone in my apartment.

It was hot. The windows at both ends of the railroad-flat-style houses that lined the block were wide open, worshipers praying for a breeze, waiting for a blessing. I sat down on the floor in the position known as seiza, which is used for meditation in the iojo. I waited as well.

The masters advocate letting all conscious thoughts bubble off in trying to attain what they call "no-mind" as a way to deal with the challenge of life. My thoughts churned, but they didn't bubble off. I waited for calm. For insight. For a plan.

What I got were mental images of the platform. Of Art. Of o or

Asa. Of my brother drinking in the dark.

The apartment is the place where I sleep and write. I looked about it in a harsh, introspective state of mind. I had a corner where I do work on the computer. It was lined with books and papers. They were like bricks in a wall. It seemed to me that I used them for a variety of reasons.

I studied history. Did I do it because the past was safe? A place you could observe without responsibility? "You could argue about its interpretation, sure. But you never had to really act to shape the outcome.

And what about Yamashita and his art? It was archaic, a step removed from things. I trained day after day in the choreography of a lost age, the urgent moves of battles lost or won a long time ago. I was a fighter who never fought, the disciple of a teacher who hid as much as he revealed.

And now I was confronted, it seemed simultaneously, with all the things I had worked so hard to elude. Questions of trust. Of responsibility. Of life and death.

And I could sit there, pretending to meditate. But deep down I knew one thing with a subtle, yet sickening, certainty: I was afraid.

From off the sea, a breeze stirred and moved the curtains. Out in the Narrows a ship's horn sounded like the distant moan of a lost soul.

I went to bed. The only insight I was left with was the one I had given Micky earlier: it was personal now.

Shamans chant in the dark to summon the dead. People have peered into the depths of caves for thousands of years, hoping the voice that sounded from the blackness could tell the future. It usually ends badly: what we want to hear most is almost always something we will regret learning.

It had rained in the night. When I went for my jog by the Narrows that ran between Staten Island and Brooklyn, the morning sun made the blacktop of the pathway steam. The air was warm and thick with a rich mixture of dust and exhaust, saltwater, grass. The day was heating up and the moist air was thickening with particulate matter. It made the distant hulk of Staten Island look dreamy and indistinct. I pounded my way along, trying to think of nothing. Instead I thought of everything. I was none the wiser for the experience.

There was a knock on the door. Dee stood there with her husband.

"Is he sober, Dee?" I asked. She laughed and gestured at him.

My brother looked miserable. He squinted at me. "What kind of fucking question is that?" Micky said.

"A good one. Are you?"

"Well," he admitted, "I'm a little under the weather."

"Under the weather? That's one way of putting it. Dad always used to say he had 'the malaria." "

"I may have that too," my brother admitted.

"Ignore him," Dee said. "He's just being a baby."

After considerable back and forth, they trundled a box up the stairs into the apartment. It contained Micky's copies of the Ronin case files. Technically, he wasn't supposed to have them. It was against departmental regulations. But like most cops Micky figured that the ends justified the means.

Finally, Micky sat huffing in a chair. Dee put a six-pack of Coke directly in front of him. Micky pulled a can off and held the cold aluminum to his forehead for a minute. Then he popped the tab. "We need to look at all this stuff, Connor. Think about some things." He said it like there was some significance there for me, but I didn't get it.

Dee helped me uncrate the files. Micky sat in a chair, sipping the Coke. He was green.

"OK," he began, taking a deep, exploratory breath, "here's what we've got. Asa's statement confirms that this guy is middle-aged and Asian."

"D'you talk with him again?"

"Not yet. I'm on leave, remember?" He seemed like he wanted to say more about it, but went off on a different tangent. "We don't know what would have happened the other night, but the MO seems the same. I gotta assume this guy is our killer."

"OK." I nodded.

"DNA samples from the other crimes match up."

never got any fingerprints that you could check from Samurai House, did you?" I asked.

He sat back again with his eyes closed. "No." It seemed like the word took a lot of effort.

"What about..." I hesitated, "... the gun." I meant Art's gun, but I couldn't bring myself to say it.

Micky opened his eyes and looked at me. "We got partials. They're still running 'em down. Right now, we got zip. And if we gotta go through Interpol, I wouldn't hold my breath."

Remembering Art made me think of his advice: when you hit a wall, you go in a different direction.

I sat down across from my brother. "What was it Art said trips most killers up, Mick? Pattern?"

He nodded. "Yeah. And predictability."

"So what do we have here?" I said it gently, because he was wincing at the sound of my voice. "What's the pattern?"

He made a concerted effort to pull himself together. The copies of the file were spread out on the coffee table like the scattered bones of a carcass. Micky started to gingerly push the papers around. Dee silently offered him a fresh Coke. Out of his vision, she put a hand to her lips and warned me into silence.

My brother moved slowly at first. He began pulling things out and making groupings, pausing to sip at his drink frequently. Gradually, the tempo built up. Papers got arranged, spun around, compared. His watery, bloodshot eyes moved from spot to spot. He sat back and covered his face with his hands, moving it around like the skin was made of rubber.

Micky gestured at the reports. "It's always the same. He's into this martial arts shit. You look at the list, and all the victims are connected by the arts. And killed by them."

"The pattern holds with Asa," I commented. "The other victims were somehow ambushed or lured into some sort of duel. And," I said significantly, "as far as we can tell, the victims had no connection to the killer."

"That we know," my brother objected.

"And neither does Yamashita," I finished pointedly.

My brother made a face. "Bullshit. You gotta start thinking clearly about this, buddy ..."

"OK, OK," Dee said to calm us. "At least we agree that the link is Japan." We both looked at her. "I mean, it's obvious. Most of the guys he killed or tried to kill were Japanese."

"Reilly's the exception," I said.

"Reilly's also unusual in that there was a theft associated with that homicide," Micky added grudgingly. I could tell that he wasn't letting go of the whole topic of Yamashita.

"Well, they're all into the Japanese martial arts," Dee continued. "And this guy is ... I dunno, tracking them down. Looking for something."

"And the trail leads here," Micky said quietly. "The messages at the crime scenes tell us that. There's gotta be a connection between the victims. And Ronin's lookin for his next one here. So there's something we don't see. Something right under our noses."

"Come on," I said, knowing where he was headed, "not that angle again."

"The shoe fits, wear it," he said with rising conviction. "You may not want to hear it, but there's something your pals the sensei are not tellin us."

I took a deep breath and tried to stay calm. I remembered last night's debate: we hadn't gotten very far. "OK, lay it out for me again, Mick."

He shrugged. "Seems obvious. Ronin's after somebody in New

&O J

York. Someone linked to the victims in LA and Phoenix. So let's think about it." His voice was getting stronger and harder as the words began to match the quickening cadence of his thoughts.

"All the victims are martial artists," Dee offered. She was looking at a National Geographic.

"Good chance whomever he's hunting now will be one too." My brother eyed me.

"OK," I nodded. "What other links do we have?"

"Both Ikagi and Kubata were at the top of their game," he answered. "They were so good they were involved with the emperor."

"They were pretty well known. In the public eye," I commented. '"Yfou could see how they'd be chosen."

"True," he admitted ruefully. "But look at it from a slightly different angle. Let's assume we got a Japanese national, traveling alone, looking for somebody. He's stopping off at various cities. With the first two victims, we don't see much time wasted in terms of the homicides. Ronin kills Ikagi in LA and within a few days he shows up in Phoenix and snuffs Kubata. Then he breaks into the Samurai House, grabs some junky sword, and whacks Reilly. But he hangs around. Why?"

I thought it through. "Because Reilly was not who he was after."

"Maybe Reilly was part of the message," Dee said quietly. "Or maybe he just got in the way. I mean, why steal the sword?"

"It pissed off the local sensei pretty well," Micky said. "Maybe that was the whole point." He sat back again and sipped at his Coke, his eyes far away. "Think about it like a hunter, you know, like in India when they hunt tigers. They're not sure where the tiger is, so they send those guys out into the bush to make a racket..." he looked at me for help.

"Beaters," I said.

"Right. They do something to flush the tiger outta the grass."

"Are you telling me that the whole thing with Reilly was done just to get a reaction out of somebody? Come on," I said.

"Yeah, I do," he said with grim conviction. "The theft wouldn't have made any kind of splash some junky old wooden sword. But you link it with a killing and the papers are all over it." The expression on Micky's face was dead certain.

"I don't think Reilly's murder was an accident," he continued. "It was designed for effect. Just like with the first two. These killings weren't accidents. And the next time, the attempt in the subway, that was no fluke either ..." he looked up at me, "except his message got crossed and he ended up with the wrong sensei!"

"There are alternative explanations," I offered. "There have to be."

"Bullshit," Micky growled.

"I can't believe Yamashita has anything to do with this," I protested.

"Bull. Shit." I could see my brother starting to fume. Only his hangover was delaying the explosion.

Dee snorted in amusement at the two of us. "Look, how long will you two go around and around like this?" We shrugged.

"Connor, I know you don't like to hear it, but think it through," Dee said. I opened my mouth to speak, but she smiled and went right on. "No, no, no. It's my turn. Let's go with your idea that your teacher isn't involved."

I nodded in eager agreement.

"OK," she said, "but we agree that the murderer is looking for someone, right? At the first murder scene in LA, were there signs of a search? Same in Phoenix?"

Micky looked through the reports. "Yeah," he grumbled.

"OK," Dee nodded. "The killer's looking for someone. He doesn't know where he is. The first two victims weren't random.

They somehow gave Ronin clues. They lead him to New

But he doesn't know where, exactly. And so maybe he comes here to find out. And tries to do it through this guy ..."

"Reilly," I answered.

"Sure," she said. "He was a pretty big martial arts name?" I nodded, "You'd expect him to know things? Know people?" I nodded again. "So there you are: this guy that the killer is looking for is like the other victims. A martial artist. He's really good but really hard to find. The killer wanted Reilly to tell him."

I started to get an uncomfortable feeling, a vague tingling. Dee seemed unaware of the effect of her words on me. She flashed the National Geographic at me. "There's an article here about the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. There's some link between the two Japanese men who were killed and the Japanese emperor, right?" I nodded.

Dee was still looking at the magazine. "Did you see this picture?"

It was a shot of the Imperial Guards training in kendo. They're pretty distinctive because they train in uniforms that are snow white. I said so.

"So," she concluded. "Work this angle. I mean, come on," she looked at me, eyes and mouth wide open in mock stupidity, "who do you know among the Japanese martial artists in New York who's good. And hard to find." She waved the picture at me. "And dresses like these guys?"

I stayed quiet because I didn't want to have to supply the name.

My brother rubbed his temples with his fingers and watched me. He poked at the paper on the table in front of him. Schedel's notes were there. "First, the Mirror Man in LA," he murmured.

"Huh?" Dee asked.

"The first victim, Ikagi. His pen name for calligraphy was "Mirror Polisher," " I said wearily.

"Then the Jewel Guy in Phoenix," Micky added, with a bit more energy.

"His nickname was the Jewel of the Budokan," I told Dee without prompting.

"So who's next," Micky asked. "Mirror, Jewel,..." He let the question hang in the air.

And, after a time, the answer struck me. Hard. "Sword," I said.

He looked up at me with a hard light growing in his bleary eyes. "That mean something, Connor?"

"It's the imperial connection," I admitted slowly, with growing dismay. I was still righting it hard. "The imperial regalia were three items given to the first emperor by the gods: a mirror, a jewel, and a sword."

"There's the pattern," Micky breathed. "Both victims outside New Ysrk were connected to the Japanese emperor. So ... first the mirror, then the jewel, then the sword."

"Reilly's got no connection like that," I pointed out.

"Forget Reilly," Micky said. "He's window dressing."

Dee made a face. She pointed at me. "No. Think about him. Why's he important? What's he guarding? What gets stolen? What gets all the local Japanese all hot and bothered?"

"The sword," I sighed. But I brightened a bit. "Asa's a pretty well-known kendo master." I looked at Dee. "It's the way of the sword. Maybe Ronin was after him"

"Let it go, buddy boy." Micky shook his head slowly from side to side. "We know that Ronin was not expecting Asa to show up down in the subway. He was looking for someone else."

"Who was he expecting? Who fits?" Dee asked simply.

"The intended victim should have some connection with the pattern," I said. I was on my feet and walking restlessly around. Dee and Micky remained quiet and simply watched me as I

added up the pieces of the puzzle. I tried not to, but there was no avoiding it.

"Yamashita," I breathed finally, as I slumped into a chair. "He signs his calligraphy kenjin. Sword Man."