Sensei (3 page)

Yamashita nodded slightly and Red Top moved forward.

"I regret that I was unable to welcome you properly to my dojo. I am equally distressed to say that I do not know who you are or what you want, since we have not been properly introduced." The words came out quickly but were carefully pronounced. Sensei doesn't really have much of an accent, but when he is annoyed his words are very precisely formed. I don't know if Red Top was picking it up or not, but there wasn't one of us who doubted that Yamashita Sensei was really ticked off.

"Mitchell Reilly, Sensei." He bowed, properly this time. Ken caught my eye. Mitch Reilly ran a notorious jujutsu school, pretty much specializing in combat arts of the one-hundred-ways-to-pluck-their-eyeballs-out variety. He was a mainstay of the non-traditional African-American martial arts community. He was built like a refrigerator and I could see his knuckles were enlarged from the damage too much board breaking creates. Mitch Reilly had the reputation of being a really savage competitor, a fair technician, and a guy staggering under the weight of a giant ego.

"So, Mr. Reilly. I must assume that there is a reason for your presence here. The school is hard to find and only a man in need of something would make a journey through such a dangerous neighborhood."

Reilly looked contemptuous. "No problem. I can take care of myself."

"And," Yamashita continued, "the obvious care with which you have selected your... charming costume tells me that you are, perhaps, interested in ... ?" He let the question hang in the air.

I sat and watched the steam start to come out of Reilly s ears. I have to admit, he got it under control fairly well, which was a sign that he was probably a dangerous man. When the faint trembling stopped, Reilly finished Yamashita's sentence.

"A match," he said. "I'm challenging you."

You had to admire him. The guy pulled no punches. He was probably five years older than I was in his early forties and had been banging around the martial arts for at least two decades, and now felt he was ready to take on the closest thing the New York area had to a bona fide master. Most people don't even know Yamashita exists. He came to New 'fork years ago from Japan for reasons none of us can fathom and hones our technique with a type of quiet brutality. The senior Japanese sensei send their most promising pupils to him, but he's never appeared in Black Belt, hasn't written a book divulging the ancient, secret techniques of the samurai elite, and doesn't have a listing in the Yellow Pages. Which was why Reilly's presence and his challenge was so odd.

You could see Yamashita's quandary. Reilly was fairly dangerous in a savage, commonplace kind of way. Yamashita was a harsh teacher, but he never needlessly put any of us in danger of serious injury. It was beneath Sensei's dignity to accept the challenge, but you could almost hear the clicks in his brain as he weighed various other options. Would this match serve any type of purpose in terms of teaching his students? Who would be the most appropriate opponent? Ken was a senior student and could be a logical choice. We all knew and Sensei did too that his wife had just had a baby and that a great deal of Ken's mental energy was not totally focused on training at this time. He was good (even on his bad days) but a match like this was bound to be one where both parties limped away. Ken didn't need that right now and Yamashita knew it.

Yamashita's head swiveled along the line of students, weighing each one for potential, for flaws, like a diamond cutter rooting carefully around a draw of unfinished stones. The more experienced among us sat, trying to be totally numb about the situation, not really focusing on Reilly, listening to the hum of the fluorescents and the faint rumble of trucks. The newer students sat in various states: the smart ones were secretly appalled at the prospect; the really dense were excited.

When he called me, I tried to feel nothing. "Professor," Yamashita said. Ever since they found out I teach in college, the nickname has stuck. It could have been worse. Early on I had worked out at a kendo school where the Japanese kids simply called me "Big Head."

I bowed and scooted up to the front. In this situation, you sit formally, facing the sensei, which put me right next to Redly.

"This is Dr. Burke," he told Reilly. "I am sure you will find him instructive."

Reilly jerked his head around to size me up. I looked back: flat eyes, sitting there like a blue lump with relaxed muscles, no energy given to the opponent.

"You think you want a piece of me, asshole?" Out of the side of his mouth, like he'd picked it up from old Bogart movies. I swung around you could see a slight jerk before he realized what I was up to and bowed, saying nothing. Silent. Passive. A shade. Heiho was keeping yourself in shadow.

Reilly looked back at Sensei. ""You must be joking. I'm not fucking around with this piece of shit."

Yamashita is funny about foul language. He spends his days teaching people how to do serious harm to others, but he has this real thing about keeping conversation civil. Part of it's just that Japanese politeness, but I think the other part is that he is a man dedicated to an art that celebrates control of one sort or another, and foul language strikes him either as the result of a bad vocabulary and poor imagination or as a lack of mastery over one's temper. In either case, this kind of language is forbidden in his dojo. Reilly may not have known it, but he had just committed a gross breach of etiquette.

"I am sorry, Mr. Reilly. I regret that we cannot accommodate you in your request for a lesson. You are clearly not ready for any serious training." With that, Yamashita looked right through him and stood up like he was preparing to leave the floor.

"Wait a minute..." Reilly shot up and looked like he was going to reach for the old man. Which was how I got to wondering about whether I could poleax him. I was targeting him for a knuckle strike right below the ear (I figured with any luck I could dislocate his jaw), but there was really no need. Yamashita had about reached the limits of his patience.

As Reilly came at him, Yamashita shot in, a smooth blur. There was an elbow strike in there somewhere before he whipped Reilly around to break his balance. Then Yamashita was behind him, clinging like a limpet and bringing Reilly slowly down to the floor. The choke was (as always) precisely executed: the flow of blood to the brain was disrupted as he brought pressure to bear on the arteries and Reilly was out cold.

Yamashita stood up and beckoned to Reilly's pals. "Remove him. Do not come back." Not even breathing hard. They dragged Reilly off the practice floor and trundled him away.

"What a foolish man. An arrogant and violent man." He looked around at us all, then turned to me. "I am surprised at you, Burke. I would have tried for the jaw dislocation. Work on your reaction time, please."

He glided away and the lesson ended.

THREE The Smell of Money

I live in Brooklyn because the rents are cheaper and Yamashitas dojo is there, but I work in Bloomington, a planned suburb on Long Island that, among its other unremarkable features, harbors the pedestrian university that employs me.

Of course, it's not that I really work there. Dorian, like many other colleges, pays a horde of part-time teachers to do the dirty work of modern education. As an adjunct instructor I labor in obscurity so that the full-time professors can think deeply in a measured, quiet, unpressured life that, in my more bitter moments, I think must be like the early onset of Alzheimer's.

A part-time college instructor typically makes about an eighth of the pay of a real professor, with no benefits, medical coverage, or job security. Everyone loves us because we're cheap, docile, and actually teach for a living. For our part, we labor on in the blind hope that we will somehow be plucked from anonymity and elevated to full-time status, where you work about nine months out of the year.

So I wandered in that day, my bag crammed with unmarked student tests and a collection of battered paperbacks, with the resignation of a gladiator who knew that his sword was made of lead.

The letters for appointments for next semester were due out today, and I was not particularly optimistic.

The battered common room where I had staked out a claim to an ugly industrial gray metal desk and lopsided typing chair was fairly quiet as well. My mailbox, one in a series of slots labeled with neatly typed paper slips (easily replaced), was filled with the usual junk. There was an announcement about an upcoming faculty meeting they insist on sending these things to adjuncts, even though were not eligible to attend a perky newsletter for resume-writing workshops and other forlorn hopes; a flyer on blue paper advocating attendance at a continuing education seminar, "Selling Real Estate with Feng Shui," and a message that I was wanted in the dean's office.

Dorian is a small, obscure place, but even small ponds have big fish. I headed down the hallway toward the administrative offices. The university's brick buildings are old and heavy with the accumulated aroma of particulate matter: dust and plaster for certain, asbestos probably, and old paper. The halls smell old and used except when you approach the dean's suite. Here, the paint is brighter and everything smells like furniture polish and new carpets.

I once heard a full professor say that a dean had the education of a philosopher, the heart of an accountant, and the soul of a weasel. Joseph Ceppaglia was a slim, gray, academic weasel of the first order. He had a mop of salt-and-pepper hair, which he patted absently in moments of thought; a Douglas Fairbanks mustache; and every other month he tried to stop smoking through a variety of useless stratagems. He was slim and articulate, wily, and immensely pleased with himself.

He didn't get up from behind the desk, just swiveled around to see me better. "Hey, Burke. What have you been up to?" I didn't know it then, but it would be a question I'd hear asked more than once. The dean was chewing nicotine gum furiously and bending a paper clip back and forth.

And he had a plan. Which was how, the next day, I ended up in "officer country," waiting to meet the president.

This is not something mere mortals look forward to at the university. President Peter Domanova was an old-style autocrat. He was notorious for firing people on the spot, for denying tenure recommendations, and generally outraging the rank and file. He did have a few good points: sometimes he fired people who deserved it and, most important for the university, he was a relentless shmoozer who had managed to raise quite a few dollars for the institution.

Occasionally you caught glimpses of him churning across campus with any number of flunkies in his wake, but most contact with the troops took the form of various combative memos that ended up in everyone's mailboxes. The president thought of himself as something of an intellectual. He had graduated from Oxford, so maybe at one time this delusion actually held some water. He was on the far side of sixty now, however, and although he could be eloquent and charming, mostly Domanova came across as a cranky snob.

Ceppaglia had told me to "dress nice" for the meeting, which meant that I had to wear the one good blue suit I owned. The men in my family call them "wedding and funeral rigs." The dean had been a font of gratuitous advice about what to wear and what to say. But, true survivor that he was, Ceppaglia escorted me to the door of the presidential suite, wished me luck, and hightailed it out of there before I did something that got us both fired.

I sat in the muted air of the reception room while prim and efficient secretaries shuttled to and fro. Phones chirped discretely.

The furniture was cherry and polished and dust free. It was like being in a bubble.

Then the presidential portal opened. Polite laughter and the sound of gruff instructions spilled out into the hush and a cluster of harried suits tumbled out of the office, gazing back in there with the fixation of men who are still fascinated with their latest brush with death.

I was up. My basic plan for this interview was to say as little as possible, make the president feel I was competent, and escape with my life.

President Domanova beckoned magisterially from behind a desk the size of a pool table, inviting me in, and actually got up to shake my hand.

"Dr. Burke. Good. Good." He had an exaggerated Mediterranean accent of some sort, all rolling r's and carefully enunciated sentences. He talked as if he enjoyed the way words felt as they came out. "The Dean tells me that you are an accomplished Orientalist. Sit down."

The president tended to talk at you, not with you. The sentences came out in tight little clusters, abruptly. They had more to do with some weird internal dialogue he was having in there than with anything occurring on the outside.

I shook hands, nodded at my Oriental expertise, and sat down.

Domanova picked up some papers and gave them a quick glance. "A decent university degree," he mused. "Some articles in minor scholarly journals, two books, with one forthcoming."

He looked up as if he was thinking, "you have been teaching for us for how long?"

He knew the answer as well as I did. It was right there in front of him. "Three years, sir."

"Three years." He smirked. "With our illustrious historians."

"Yes."

He got a bit more animated then, putting both hands flat on the slab in front of him and looking at me intently. "They are a total embarrassment, Burke. I wonder you can tolerate them."

What do you say to something like this? That adjuncts are on the bottom of the university food chain and that down there you get acclimated to a great deal of murk? I just sat there.