Sensei (20 page)

I could hear a voice inside me, one that sounded a lot like Micky's, ask what is going on? And why tell this guy anything? But I didn't listen to it. And in retrospect, I should have. "Yeah," I replied simply, "he's out chasing some lead right now."

"Well, let's hope it works out." Akkadian didn't sound very sincere, but what else was new? "So, whattaya think? Can you two come down?"

I thought that I didn't really want to see Bobby Kay just now. I had bigger concerns. Part of me was feeling guilty about having kept Micky in the dark for so long. I wondered whether the visit might help him. I ran through the pro's and con's of Bobby's request in my mind.

Bobby said he had some clues that could help me. Pro.

Bobby was also a shameless creep and it could just turn out to be a wild goose chase or some dopey scheme for him to make money. Con.

Tomita would come at a later hour. It was his way. I could be pretty sure it would be OK to head to Manhattan tonight. Yamashita's dojo was the locus of action and there would be plenty of time to get back. We probably wouldn't miss anything if we went. Pro.

Micky had told me to stay put. Con.

But this might help him out. Pro.

I stopped at that point, happy with the persuasiveness of the last idea. Looking back, I know it was as stupid as a kid rigging a game of "eeme-meenie-mmee-mo " to get the desired outcome. But, as someone once said, the heart has a mind of its own.

Sometimes, I also wonder whether I was secretly glad to be escaping the danger that hung around the dojo like a heavy, oily cloud of vapor, invisible but real for all that. To this day, I'm not sure. I quietly told Yamashita about the call. He nodded silently in agreement. Then he stared meaningfully at the pistol still in my hand. I gave it to him, and it was replaced with the smooth feel of the tanto.

"Where is your car?" Softly, to keep Mori unaware.

It was around the block. Yamashita digested this, then said quietly, "You go first. I will meet you at the car."

As I moved toward the front door, Mori's shooter tried to stop me and I told him I was just heading out to pick something up at the corner store. The fact that I wasn't carrying Micky's gun seemed to reassure him. From his perspective, only a lunatic would give up a weapon like that. And, with a shrug, he let me go. Eternal vigilance is a real conversation killer. I was glad to get out. Being away from the tense atmosphere, from Yamashita's relentless training and the barely controlled tension of Mori and his shooter, made the whole situation seem so unreal. Moving down the street toward my car that night, things almost felt like normal. I saw the plainclothes unit sitting there, but nobody stopped me. They were there to watch people coming in, not going out.

Yamashita appeared out of the shadows and joined me.

"How'd you get out?" I asked.

"I used an old ninja trick: I slipped out the back door while no one was looking."

The night was hot, traffic was light, and, as we approached it from a distance, Manhattan had that orange glow it gets in the summer, a pulsing aura generated by the play of pollution,

trapped heat, and escaping light. The water of the East River looked hard and black as we drove over the bridge. High-rise buildings were brownish-gray in the murk, dappled in random patterns by lit windows.

Midtown at night is never really at rest. It's lit with sodium lamps along the streets and avenues, a higher-visibility twilight spiked by the brighter wash of light leaking from small stores and restaurants. But when I slowed to get a look at the building where we were heading, the Samurai House looked dark. It made me worry, and rekindled the runaway paranoia that I had developed recently, You can drown out the shouting of inner voices only for so long.

I parked up the block and Yamashita and I walked slowly down the sidewalk toward the entrance, scanning the street for anything out of the ordinary. This was Manhattan, however, and even on a good day it was hard to do that. There was the usual road traffic. Sports cars with tinted windows rocked over the uneven street surface, the pulsing bass of souped-up stereos clearly audible even at a distance. Pedestrians hustled by, anxious to get through the relatively deserted commercial block and into some air conditioning. There were buses. Taxis. The occasional piece of litter a paper receipt or a coffee cup was crumpled in the gutter, inert in the breathless night air.

When I looked through the glass entrance, the lobby lights of Samurai House were turned way down. No security guard was in sight. But when I tugged at them, the doors to the lobby opened.

"Hello?" I called. Yamashita ghosted in beside me and stood stock still. I checked the doors to the office complex to my right. They were locked, which was odd: I expected to find Bobby there. A brief spurt of annoyance washed through me: was Bobby Kay playing some weird game? I stood for a moment, thinking. But Yamashita had trained me well over the years. My body did the things it was supposed to do, even when the mind was not functioning well.

Even as a jumble of thoughts and emotions flashed through me in a swirl, there was a part of me that was working more systematically. It was listening. Sensing. Feeling.

You usually hear all sorts of noise in places like this. The wash of the ventilation system, street sounds bleeding in from the outside, the muffled clump of people in other parts of the building. But in the lobby of Samurai House, the waterfall's whisper tended to mask most other sounds. I could feel the faint press of cool air on my skin, the slight give of the lobby carpet under my feet. My eyes adjusted to the dimness from the low lighting. I stood there passive, one more shadow in a universe of shades. Waiting.

And then I knew. It was that sudden certainty again. A jolting rush of that animal intuition, arriving with such clarity that I found it simultaneously startling and impossible to doubt. They talk a great deal about the state called mushin in the martial arts. It's the point where the body and the mind develop such an intimate and immediate connection that you know, you react without conscious thought. Standing there, a washed-out shadow lost among all the others cast by faint light, I felt the hair on my forearms stand up, and the electric cold spread up and across my shoulders.

I sensed him.

I can't explain how I came to this awareness, but I did. I knew it with a visceral certainty. Was it a sound? A smell? A phantom pulse in air pressure? Even now, I don't know. Yamashita would say it doesn't matter. It was enough that I knew.

A glance at my teacher confirmed my intuition. He was immobile, but you got the feeling of an almost unbearable intensity building in him. He sensed danger as well.

I slowed my breathing down and strained in the silence for a clue. I could feel my eyes widen and the muscles in my face tense up. Without thinking, I had crouched down slightly, knees bent, body ready to move. Find the center. The hara.

On the other side of the lobby, a faint glow from the gallery and dojo area registered in my peripheral vision. Lights were on in there somewhere. We headed toward the dojo slowly, gliding across the lobby space in front of the waterfall. I could sense the minute increase of humidity the falling water created there, and I was hoping that it would mask the sound of my approach while I was simultaneously fearful that it was doing the same for him.

Because Tomita was here. Somewhere. Waiting.

A small, panicked version of the animal in me bleated in protest. It wasn't supposed to be like this. There was no backup from Micky. No trap for Yamashita to spring on Tomita. Despite my teacher's presence, I felt alone, and the realization came with sickening clarity that Micky had been right all along. Evil arrives on its own terms, not on yours.

I was imitating Yamashita, creeping at a glacial pace, edging through the lobby, trying to move carefully, but that's only a partial explanation. I felt like a dreamer being pulled by an irresistible force toward something horrible. It was like being caught in the grip of a magnetic field. Or an undertow. And I fought against it, even though I knew I had to go in there. Because there was a dissonant chorus sounding off inside my head, each voice clamoring for attention. There was fear. And anger. Panic. A brief urge to run.

But I didn't, because over it all, a sudden voice, quiet but implacable, silenced everything. You are meant to meet him. It was what Yamashita had feared. What he trained you for. Tomita is in there. He's waiting for you, the voice said. And I was afraid.

It was the last despairing peep of that animal, frantic to be acknowledged. So I did. I am afraid, I admitted. But I kept moving. Not toward Tomita. Toward the one lesson my teacher could not guide me through.

I know I should have been using the techniques that Yamashita had taught me. Maybe kuji-in would have helped me focus. But, at that moment, it was all I could do to maintain breathing discipline and not let the sweat that was popping out on my forehead unnerve me. I blinked and moved forward, wading through an invisible force that pushed me forward and pulled me back at the same time.

And the image that flickered across my mind right then was not the warrior's grid of power, the figure that Yamashita had cut into the air on a quiet afternoon, laboring to etch it into my brain.

It was, instead, a hard face, cast in bronze, staring out at the world from the shadows of an old and familiar place. And that image came with its own mantra, one Yamashita had never taught

Michael the Archangel defend us in battle, that we may not perish in the fiery judgment.

I went m.

The setup in the cavernous room hadn't really changed since the night I had last been there. As things had turned out, I never got to walk through the display, but the exhibits were still there, dimly shrouded in the weak security lighting, like treasures abandoned in a cave. One of the major elements in the display, a facade of wood beams and shingles simulating the entrance to a Zen temple, jutted into the display space along one wall. It was essentially a latticework of beams capped with the distinctive curved roof you find in shrines. A wooden gate stood symbolically across the opening. A workman's scaffolding was pushed up against the faux temple, in preparation for the dismantling of the exhibit. The performance space was still there. A few lights, recessed into the ceiling, cast sporadic circles of brightness on the floor. The rest was dense shadow.

I edged into the room with Yamashita, hoping my vision would adjust in time. But there was no rushing attack as we entered, no figure exploding from the black wedges of shadow. Instead, in the corner to our right, was a figure. It was perfectly still for a moment, as if frozen into place by something I could not see.

We moved toward Bobby Kay and the motion seemed to galvanize him. He approached us and broke into that horsey grin of his.

"Hey, Burke. I'm glad you could come." He looked at Yamashita and ducked his head deferentially. "Both of you."

Yamashita seemed not to hear him. He was gazing off into the room's dark corners, his thick head slowly moving to maximize his sensitivity to sight and sound.

"What's the deal, Bobby?" I was certain there was danger here. I couldn't believe this idiot couldn't feel it.

He gestured toward the temple facade. "Something's turned up. I think you should see it."

"What?"

He made a come-along motion, "You've got to see it. I can't believe it. I mean, that it should turn up ..." He started to head toward the temple.

I grabbed his arm. The contact made his head jerk and his eyes narrow slightly, like an animal's.

"No. Right here is good enough," I told him.

He pulled his arm out of my grip with a sullen shrug of the shoulder. Then his face broke into a sly grin and he looked first at me, then at my teacher. "It's the bokken, Burke. Ittosai's sword. It's been returned."

"Where?" It was the first thing Yamashita had said to him.

Again the gesture toward the temple. "I'll show ya. There's some sort of note with it, but it's in Japanese. Maybe one of you can figure it out."

Yamashita began to move along with him.

"Sensei," I hissed in warning.

He held out a hand to tell me to stay put. "I will go, Burke. Ki o tsukete"

It was the traditional swordsman's call to awareness. My teacher felt what I did. He was sending me an instruction. And a

warning.

There was a faint light within the temple display. The gate was slightly ajar. A long, cloth-wrapped shape rested inside the temple facade, only thirty feet away. Akkadian was babbling away about the sword's mysterious reappearance, but Yamashita paid him no heed. He was focused on the object, with examining it, and returning to me.

In his haste, he got ahead of Bobby. My sensei pushed aside the heavy gate and entered the small space. He knelt to examine the object. Bobby lagged behind, resting a hand on the gate. Then, too late, I saw he wasn't resting. He was pushing.

The gate jarred closed and the vibration shook the scaffolding. Akkadian made a motion and I heard the metallic click as a lock snapped into place. Yamashita launched himself against the gate, but for once his timing was off. He thudded against the barrier, and the scaffolding began to shift. I shouted a warning. My teacher turned and had time to raise one arm to protect himself from the collapsing pipes and boards. Then he was borne down.

The noise the crash and splintering of wood, the ringing of metal pipes as they hit the floor was still reverberating when I got over to him. Bobby had scuttled out of the way across the room toward a dark corner. The gate was locked and I peered in to see my teacher. But when I reached Yamashita, he was looking across the room.

My teacher was cut on the head and banged up, but the most critical injury was the arm he had used to try to ward off the collapse. He held it with that ginger pose that tells you all you need to know.

I knelt and looked at him as well as I could through the lattice of heavy wood. "It is broken," he grimaced. I started to spin around to find Bobby Kay, but my teacher's voice restrained me.

"Burke," he hissed, "it is a trap. Beware."

"Come on," I said working the lock, "let's get you out of this."

Yamashita closed his eyes in weary resignation. "It is too late for that." He looked off into the darkness and swallowed. '"You must go there." I shook the gate in token protest, but we both knew what he meant. I stood slowly and turned around, away from my teacher.

Bobby Kay stood on the other side of the room and spoke. "I told you they would come," he said.

He was talking into the darkness at the far corner. I came up to him and he backed away.

A low hissing shot from the shadows. "Fool! He was to be restrained, not injured!"

Bobby blanched at the venom in the voice from the darkness. "I told you," he said again. His voice shook a bit. "Now give me the sword."

I was half-listening to the conversation, but much of my attention was on the visual field and the silent, invisible currents of ha rage I was alive to the threat that hung in the air, dancing in the darkness just out of reach. I had learned my lesson. Even as I looked at Bobby, I angled myself a bit so I could catch any movement out of the corner of my eye.

"You set this up Akkadian," I said, my voice choked with the last vestige of fear and the rise of anger. Something stirred in the murk. I turned all the way around toward the far corner of the room. Bobby had started to move in that direction. I watched him as he got nearer to the shadows.

For a moment, I wanted to ask why. I wanted to scream at him. At the situation. At whatever lurked across the room. But there wasn't time. Things began falling away, all the useless distractions of emotion and random thought. I felt it, like the sensation of a series of weights falling, one by one, from my back.

There was a smooth movement in the dark and a figure began to emerge into the light. Events were accelerating and yet, simultaneously, I had the sensation of acute perception and a slow, elastic lengthening of time. Things appeared sharper, clearer. They moved with a slow, fluid inevitability.

Bobby thought he was slick, but he was way out of his league. Whatever deal he thought he had cut, Tomita would never let him walk away. After the fight was over, if Tomita survived, he would finish off his witness. It would take about three seconds.

I couldn't let that happen. Because once Tomita was done with Bobby, he would go after Yamashita.

I swallowed with the realization that another human being in this room wanted to kill me.

After that point, events, though drawn out, also seem a bit blurred in my memory: not a sequence of actions, but a long, fluid thread that spools out in my mind.

There was a host of visual and aural images being processed. And I was experiencing a series of sensations that made some of what was taking place seem remote. Increasingly, only the force emanating from Tomita seemed sharp and real.

Bobby asked for the sword again. This time, the voice that answered was clear. The accent was Japanese, but that was no surprise. The sound was remarkable, however, for the sense of power it projected. "No," it said. "You get it when I am finished. When both men are dead."

Bobby was closer to him and must have caught a glimpse of the expression on Tomita's face, because you could see the effect: Akkadian stopped dead in his tracks and backed up. All the way to the door. I moved into the center of the room. I faced the figure, trying to remain aware of everything around me. But the background sensations were getting fainter and fainter in the face of the energy Tomita threw off.

I stood there, eyes narrowed as if they could peer through the shadow, breath rising and falling in an easy, soundless rhythm. Waiting. A rock.

He came forward. He was clad in dark street clothes but was barefoot. "I am Tomita," he said and bowed.

When you know something of an individual's past, you believe you can read it on his or her face. Tomita's was unremarkable in its Asian features: a small nose, high cheekbones, the dark eyes. He was not particularly tall, but his compact form gave the impression of a tremendous energy harnessed and compacted by years of relentless training.

There was a half-smile, grimly amused, that played across his face. But behind that, there was rage. It made him seem to swell, grow fuller and more menacing. I tingled with an awareness of how dangerous this man was. I remembered Yamashita's assessment of his skill, even at the beginning of his training with the Kunaicho, all those years ago. What would he be like now? I thought of the crime scenes I had studied. I got a fleeting image of Reilly, crumpled on this very floor. The crime scene reports for Ikagi and Kubata. And I thought of Art.

But now the time for thinking was at an end. Tomita had bowed to me, and I needed to return the courtesy. Do not let your eyes drop from him, Yamashita had said. I didn't.

I looked at him again as if truly seeing him for the first time. What I saw was no longer just the typical visual impression you get of a person; it was one element that would help me form a strategy. On the street, you merely look at people. Here, I needed to see.

Tomita smiled and gestured to the floor. It was a very tight smile, a social nicety and not a barometer of an internal state.

His white teeth glittered briefly: a flash of bone, not of emotion. I slipped off my shoes; my feet were bare. We both sat down warily, simultaneously obeying the dictates of etiquette and watching, alert for the slightest offensive movement. We were like springs being wound into a casing, tightly coiled for action. I used tatehiza, a sitting posture preferred by old-time warriors on the battlefield. Beginners don't like it much, but it's easier to spring up from it than from some of the more formal postures.

He saw my strategy, of course, and nodded affably in my direction. "Yes," he said thoughtfully. "You would know that..."

Tomita raised his voice but never took his eyes off me. "You have taught him well, Sensei!"

I could hear the faint rustle of movement as Yamashita, in evident pain, stood and addressed his old pupil.

"There is no need for this," Yamashita said.

"Ie, Yamashita-san," Tomita said with venom. "There is every reason. I have dreamed of this. For years, I burned with shame at what you did... at what the others did. You could see the rage building within him, leaking out as he spoke.

"Tomita!" Yamashita protested.

It took a visible effort for Tomita to calm himself. "When that happened, I felt as if things had come adrift. Only training served as a tether."

Tomita rose slowly and walked toward my sensei, gazing at him as you would at a caged animal. There was contempt there. But Tomita only moved a few steps in my teacher's direction. I sensed fear as well.

"I knew someday that I would face you, Sensei," the younger man told Yamashita. "I worked for years to perfect myself. To be able to show you..." he swallowed, "... just how wrong you were."

"You know the decision was not mine alone," Yamashita rasped out. "I could do no different."

Tomita snorted in disgust. "It is a weak answer. To think, all these years, I hesitated to confront you." Tomita laughed, a hard, short noise with no joy in it. "I should have seen earlier how weak you really were."

"Let me out," Yamashita coaxed. "We will see."

Tomita's eyes glinted as he smiled. "In time. If that idiot Akkadian had not damaged you, it would have been glorious. As it is now, it will merely be the end of the ritual..." Tomita glided back toward the center of the room, where I stood. He continued speaking but with his back to my teacher.

"Life's surprises are endless. And I have always struggled to see the purpose in it." He sighed. "You have helped me see, Sensei. You have brought me humiliation ... and now disappointment. But after all this time, I have come to truly see. There is a curious liberation to it all, nehl The sense of being untethered. Free of restraint and able to act as you wish. It took me years to forge my will to this end."

His eyes didn't really seem like they were registering my presence; they were focused on some inner reality. But now they bore into me. "You would not understand, Burke. You gaijin never grasp the essence of the arts."

"I think I've grasped the fact that you are nuts." My voice started out raspy but gained in strength.

Tomita smiled ruefully and shook his head. "Of course. You cannot see it." Again his voice was raised for his old teachers benefit. "You have made many mistakes, Sensei. You should never have turned me away...."

"It was not in my power to prevent," Yamashita said.

"How convenient," Tomita replied contemptuously. Then he returned to his thoughts. "You should never have come to this country. You have squandered your heritage. The gift that the gods gave us ..."