Sensei (9 page)

"Summer in the city," Micky commented. "I'll bet there are thousands of Japanese tourists in town."

"How're you gonna run him down?" I said.

Micky smiled evilly. "That, bro, is what newly minted detectives are for."

"Most Japanese tourists will be traveling in groups," I suggested. "This guy probably won't."

"Ya see? It gets better and better. We've got it narrowed down a bit more." He paused for a minute and looked significantly at Art. They didn't say anything, but I got the sense of messages flying back and forth through the air. Messages I was not meant to hear.

Art sat forward in his chair and began to speak very slowly and clearly to me. "So think about this, Connor. The link is through Japan. And the martial arts."

I said nothing, just sipped some beer and watched him work.

"So there are three prominent martial artists," he continued. "And this guy is ... I dunno, tracking them down."

"You sure?" I asked him. He shrugged.

"Oh yeah," Art said. "The sequence is too tight." He ticked the points off one by one. "LA ... Phoenix ... now here. All within days of one another. The killer is traveling. Messages seem to pretty much bear that interpretation out: all that "I am coming, I am here' shit."

"High drama," my brother agreed.

But something was bothering me. "Ya know, I don't see Reilly as being in the same class as Ikagi and Kubata. Not at all."

Art nodded. "There's a link between victims we don't see yet."

"Ya follow a trail, it's because it leads to something," Micky said quietly. "The trail leads here. The calligraphy confirms it. In LA, it was just the signature, a kind of general announcement. Then Phoenix and a type of warning. But here, the message is that he's arrived."

"Question is," Art commented, "who's supposed to be getting the message?"

"There's something we don't know about that's happening right under our noses," Micky groused. "Someone local is reading that message and knowing what it means."

"What!" I couldn't believe it.

The expression on their faces told me they were disappointed. So my brother filled me in.

"There's something your pal the sensei is not tellin us."

"Come on," I said. "This is all speculation. We don't really know anything for sure."

"It feels right to me," my brother said flatly. He looked questioningly at Art.

"My gut says 'yeah." too," his partner replied. And they waited with that quiet cop intensity for me to say something.

"Maybe whoever is doing this is just a lunatic," I protested. "The victims might not be linked."

"Then why kill them?" my brother asked.

"I know something about Ikagi," I said. "He was a pretty prominent karate instructor. Real old school. Very well respected. Kubata was too. I can dig around and see what I can find out. But they're both celebrities of a type."

"Celebrities?" Micky sounded incredulous.

"Well," I shrugged, "in the martial arts world."

"Connor," Art said, "are you saying that Ikagi and Kubata got whacked because Ronin thought they were famous?" He was dubious. "I dunno. We'll keep it in mind.... But what about Reilly?"

I shrugged.

"I still think there's a connection," Micky finished.

I shrugged again.

BOo

"But think of the fun we could have," Art said with glee. "A celebrity."

"Killed by a stalker." Micky had that look in his eye.

Art continued. "A celebrity stalker."

"Don't do this," I pleaded. But it was too late.

Micky went on. "A samurai celebrity stalker."

Art pointed triumphantly to the ceiling. "A psycho samurai celebrity stalker."

Which seemed to sum it all up nicely.

We sat for a while longer and swirled more beer around in fresh cans, like witches stirring a potion. As I went outside, Micky was punching numbers into the phone. Working the angles.

"Connor," he called, and I turned back into the room.

"Yeah, Mick?"

"Something like this ... we know what we're doin'. Trust me. Talk to Yamashita for us."

I nodded that I would, but I didn't feel too good about it.

At the heart of both sound and movement there is vibration. Yamashita wants us to be sensitive to sound; he says it has a message. Different types of activity, different places, have distinct aural signatures, he insists. They lay bare the essence of an activity, its spirit. Remaining open to the message that sound sends can help the warrior. Or so my sensei maintains.

The end of the semester at the university has the repressed, tense sound of papers shuffling, like the chitinous noise of frantic insects. I had sensed it all week, even as I grew increasingly distracted by the murder. When I closed my eyes to rest them from the strain of grading papers, I saw the stark finality of Reilly, collapsed and cold at the crime scene. And on the wall, the message that he was here. Ronin. The name spoke of a man adrift. Or free. But from what?

My brother was much more grounded. He was waiting for a DNA report, but it didn't slow him down. While I was still thinking about killers and exotic martial arts techniques, he got right down to the nitty gritty of police work. "It's not like the movies," he preached to me. "Whoever this guy is, he needs to eat. A place to sleep." Micky believed grunt work would eventually lead us to the killer. But there was vibration here as well: the sense of the ticking of a clock, of time slipping away. Because Ronin was out there.

I had taken a quick look at things from my end, trying to get some information on the two victims. Anything that might give us a clue to Romn's identity. And how he chose his victims. The martial arts world is like that of a lot of other fringe interest groups. You'd think it would be a small place, but once you started looking, you found all sorts of organizations, causes, and publications. The mainstream popular martial arts world is pretty well covered by periodicals like Black Belt and Karate/ Rung Fu Illustrated, but there are a host of others that spring up overnight and fade away almost as quickly. I found a library that kept back copies of the most well established and used them as a starting point.

Of course, the library collection was not complete the martial arts reading public is poor but enthusiastic and tends to steal back issues with shocking regularity. I was able to plug some of the holes by consulting the back lists that get included with every month's issue. I used a contact at Dorian's library to request copies of missing back articles I felt might be useful. Like my brother, I would have to wait on some things, but I plowed ahead.

It was a fairly tedious process. I sat at a series of battered wooden tables, leafing through back issues that were limp and slightly aromatic with age. I clacked through innumerable computer search engines and Web sites, using up all my spare change printing relevant articles. It was a familiar sort of grind not much different from academic research, really. By the end of the day, most of the information was coming together.

Ikagi was a fairly prominent karate sensei. The name was vaguely familiar to me even at the onset. There was coverage of him on and off over the years in the magazines I looked at. He had made a big splash when he first came to this country in the

'80s. He had a tremendous pedigree: a gifted fighter and teacher who at one time had been honored by being asked to help train the emperor's guards. In short order he became a well-established instructor in LA. He was a big proponent of introducing weapons training known as kobudo into the more mainstream Japanese karate styles. We already knew that a jagged piece of a training staff had been used to kill him. In the weeks before the killing, Ikagi was in the news for helping out with choreography and technical advice for a new movie. It was the third or fourth installment of a shoot-'em-up where the wisecracking star is eventually stripped down to a sleeveless undershirt and takes a volume of punishment that would disable a platoon of Navy Seals. When it hit theaters, you would be able to glimpse Ikagi's ghost as an extra in one of the group fight scenes.

But there was more to him than this. For all his success, Ikagi was a sensei who never lost sight of the real purpose of training. He was quoted in one article as insisting that the true pursuit of karate was not in perfecting fighting technique but in the spiritual development Ikagi referred to as "mirror polishing." The phrase had strong links to Shinto and Zen Buddhism, and Ikagi had even adopted the name "mirror polisher" when he did calligraphy. From the various things I read, I got the sense that Ikagi was both tremendously skilled and unusually balanced in his approach to the martial arts.

Kubata, the Phoenix victim, was already known to me by reputation. He had been in this country for only a few months before he was killed. Welcome to the Valley of the Sun. He was part of a concerted effort to popularize kendo here and had launched a series of ambitious seminars that attracted a nationwide audience. Part of it was the result of the impressive charisma the man obviously possessed they didn't call him the Jewel of the Budokan for nothing. But I also suspected, after a generation of training, that there were thousands of judo and karate students whose joints hurt too much to continue with their arts and were looking for something else. Not a week before his death, he had been prominently featured on the cover of one of the national martial arts rags with the caption: "Master Kubata Introduces the Art of the Sword." I knew of any number of teachers who had been laboring at this very goal for years, but modesty had not been one of Kubata's failings.

The two men were prominent and skilled martial artists. They were both Japanese. But other than that, I got no sense of how they were connected. And Reilly's connection was still unknown.

Which brought me to a dead end. So I considered Ronin. Micky looked at the basics. I followed that line of thinking from my own perspective. I thought that someone like Ronin needed not only a place to live, but also a place to tram, you don't acquire those types of skills like you buy a suit of clothes. It's a high-maintenance commodity, which is why so many people begin studying the arts and so few persevere long enough to learn anything. In a consumer society, where everything is fast and easy, learning the martial arts is not. To make matters worse, martial skill requires practice. Constant practice and constant conditioning. And then more practice.

I explained to Micky and Art that training would probably eat up a big part of Ronin's day and be expensive. It narrowed things down somewhat: we had a much better chance of trying to find him by locating likely places where he could train.

At this skill level, some of your training takes place alone: you run, stretch, lift weights, whatever. But if you're serious about dealing with people, then you eventually have to confront a live adversary. You need bodies to work with, muscle and bone to leverage around.

For Ronin, however, the kind of place he would need would be special. It would need to be tough. And mean. This type of place the City had in abundance. But he seemed to gravitate to the Japanese arts. I'd look for him in a dojo but not some storefront school that was part day care and part yuppie commando fantasy center. The people in it would also have to be very skilled, which cut down the potential number of likely places considerably. I also thought, given the type of things that he would be training in, that there would have to be a high tolerance for injury. When this man practiced, there would be a good likelihood of collateral damage. It narrowed the list down even more.

I had some ideas, but this was a bit out of my league. It forced me to do the one thing that I wanted to avoid. I needed to talk with Yamashita.

I used the excuse that I needed to know about likely places to look for Ronin. The Japanese sensei like to pretend they ignore everyone except their equals. Believing they have no equals gives them license to appear totally disinterested in the great wash of humanity's inferior attempts at the fighting arts. Don't be fooled. The sensei watch everything from WWW wrestling to street fights. Their eyes don't blink as they bore into their subjects. They see and remember. And endure.

Yamashita didn't give me much. I spoke to him during a pause in a training session, so maybe he was focused on something else, but his whole manner seemed odd. I sidled in through the door and bowed, removing my shoes. I waited for the lesson to close and approached him.

Generally speaking, my teacher strides the practice floor in isolation. Even when not teaching, people watch him covertly. The way he moves, even the way he breathes can show you something. It was unusual that he should be approached and even more unusual that I did so in street clothes. But I bowed again, apologized for the intrusion, explained myself quietly to him and hoped he would have a suggestion that could help.

He didn't look at me when he answered the question. And he seemed pretty vague for the most part. Not particularly helpful. I've given up trying to anticipate his moods and chalked it up to some sort of Zen state, figuring that in his brain he was seated in an empty space, staring through nothing. But I was mildly surprised by the fact that, after I pushed him for a little more information, he began to appear almost visibly agitated by the whole thing. This was unusual in a man devoted to the idea that emotions be kept hidden from the world. It wasn't that Yamashita didn't have emotions. It was just that permitting others to see them gave potential opponents an advantage. As a result, his usual flat affect wasn't repression; it was heiho.

I mentioned Ikagi's name and saw no reaction in those dark eyes. He had heard something about the man's death, he admitted. It was only natural. But he was unaware of any connection between that incident and Kubata's murder. When I explained the theory Micky was working on, he dismissed it with a short chop of the hand.

"This country is a violent place, Professor. All those cowboy movies, no? Kubata Sensei's murder ... I hope your brother does not waste his time chasing illusions. There is no mystery here. Only tragedy."

But I insisted that Redly s death proved that Ronin was now in New York. And that he was a martial artist. If so, I wanted to help find him. And that's why Yamashita's insight would be helpful. In the end, I got little concrete information from him, despite my wheedling. Only a warning.

"This man you seek, Burke..." he stared off blankly at the wall for a moment, then finally turned those hard eyes on me and started again. "Human beings are conduits of power. Training focuses that power. Directs it. People like the one you seek... they are like..." again the pause, "they are like electrical cable. Yes? Cable with cracked insula ton They leak anger. It is powerful. And dangerous. But it is the result of a flaw, not of real strength."

He held up his hand in the tegatana, arm extended in a loose arc designed to maximize the flow of energy, of ki. "They leak power, Burke, because of flaws in themselves. In their training. It appears impressive. Some people are seduced by it. But it is wrong. It is not the true Way."

And then he said, in the contradictory manner I have come to almost expect from him, "Such training is deeply flawed. But these people are very dangerous. I wish you would avoid them."

"I'm not looking for a fight, sensei. We're just trying to track this killer down."

Yamashita shifted slightly on his feet and appeared to get more rooted to the ground. As if that were possible. "It does not matter what you wish. You place yourself in danger."

I was curious. "Are you saying, Sensei, that I would not be able to fight someone like this?"

His eyes narrowed. "Don't be an idiot, Burke. It is a child's question, who would win, who would lose! This man whoever he is is a killer." When he gets mad, my teacher grows quieter, more focused, more eloquent. "Evil has its own energy, Burke. Getting too close to it allows it to pull at your spirit. It is most unwise."

And he wouldn't say anything more than that.

Micky and Art planned to visit places where the types of body men they were familiar with would train. I could imagine it. They would slog through a number of dingy gyms, a universe filled with mats stained with skin grease and sweat and decades-old heavy bags patched with duct tape like victims of bad triage, you went downstairs or into an alley through a door and into a space where the bricks had been painted with diluted whitewash sometime during the Eisenhower administration. The clank of free weights hitting the ground would compete with the staccato rhythm of speed bags and the deeper thuds of bodies hitting the mat in a roped in area farther back in the cavernous space.

The men training there would be mostly young and thickly built in the functional way you get when you leverage people's bodies around for a living. There was no Spandex worn here. There was lots of tape on hands and feet. Some of the denizens would take one look at Micky and Art and duck away, feigning a renewed interest in training. My brother would probably shoot his partner a look as well. Everyone recognized everyone else.

In those places the aural signature communicated effort and frustration, the quest for dominance. And anger. The air would be thick with the psychic radiation, spiky with sudden thuds and clanks, the visual field rendered gritty by bad light and human effort.

Micky and Art would ask whether anyone new had been training. They would be greeted with blank looks or faked attempts at thinking. They would go through the motions, leaving their cards and asking if anyone remembered anything or saw anything to give them a call.

They left the more exotic locations to me, figuring I'd have better luck. I knew some guys in some of the tougher dojo in New York. They weren't exactly friends, but you got to know people over the years, if only because when you bang on someone and they bang back, you tend to remember them.