The Nicholas Linnear Novels (19 page)

A blow whistled through the air near his left ear but he was already rolling away from it. The edge of a table exploded against the side of his face, shards chattering through the air like angry insects. He drew his legs up, kicked out with the soles of both feet in concert. He grunted with the effort, heard an answering sound and then he was up and running as best he could, his right leg dragging a bit behind him.

He went through the doorway at full speed, grabbing its edge as he did so, slamming it to behind him. He turned around thinking: Time. I’ve got to have time.

The broken figure, one leg still upon the bedspread, drove all rational thought from his mind. His legs turned to water and he felt as if the searing edge of a knife blade were prowling through his guts.

Her face was shadowed and dark, shrouded by wayward tendrils of the night-black hair wound tightly around her neck. Her arms were flung upward, over her head; her breasts were covered in vomit. His eyes were drawn to the dark patch between her thighs. There were no marks on her body.

He did not have to touch her to know that she was dead but he bent to it anyway because part of his mind said that he must be absolutely certain. He cradled her head in his lap until he heard the sound from beyond the door.

Almost unseeing, he got up, crossed to the opposite wall. His cold fingers closed upon the cool lacquered leather of the slightly curved scabbard that hung on his wall. He brought it to him with great deliberation; the whisper of the naked blade as he unsheathed it was the loudest sound he had ever heard. Louder even than the splintering of the wooden door as it buckled inward under the enormous force of the karate kick.

The ebon figure stood in the doorway, the
bokken
in his left hand; his right was empty. It was not until this ultimate moment of their confrontation that Terry allowed the thought to surface as a reality. He trembled involuntarily.

“Ninja,” he whispered. He barely recognized his own voice, so clogged was it with emotion. “You have chosen death in coming here.”

He leaped upon the intervening bed, striking forcefully with his
katana.
It was, he realized instantly, a stupid move, for there was no solid support and therefore not nearly enough power behind the momentum of his strike.

Deftly, with almost no effort, the ninja avoided his strike without even lifting his
bokken
; no need to cross swords, he was saying. You are not even good enough for that.

The ninja whirled away into the darkness of the living room and Terry had no choice but to follow. Dimly he knew that he was playing into the other’s hand; that the background of battle was just as important as the battle itself. He sprinted over Eileen’s corpse, his heart constricting, his blood turned to ice. To hell with it! he thought rashly. I can defeat him on any ground. Thus, in his sorrow and his rage, he turned away from all he had been so painstakingly taught.

In the living room where Mancini played on obliviously he saw limned the outline of the
bokken
and immediately went after it.

But the ninja was already in motion, on the attack, and Terry lifted his
katana
into the darkness, bracing for the expected force of the blocked blow against his blade. Thus he was totally unprepared for the violently percussive shock against his exposed chest. He was flung back more than five feet as if by an explosion. He staggered, his ribs and sternum on fire. He ached all the way up to his jaw. “What—?” he coughed, confused.

The ninja was a blur, driving in again. Terry instinctively raised his
katana
, though he was unsure of the point of attack; his vision seemed blurred.

A second blow came against his chest and he flew backward, going down on one knee. The
katana
in his right hand seemed to weigh as much as a human body. His lungs labored and he was disoriented:

The third blow hit him just as he had staggered to his feet. This time he perceived what was occurring even as he was slammed back into the wall. He heard rather than felt a crack as if a roof beam had given out and he felt a curious wetness on his left side. Ribs, he thought dully, his seething mind still filled with what was happening to him. It was like a dream; no possible reality could be so fantastic.

Another blow bounced him off the wall and the
katana
pinwheeled from his grasp, a dead star whirling through space. He glanced down at himself, saw the fractured ribs protruding through his rent flesh. The blood was black as ink, running out of him like tap water down a drain.

It was straight out of the
Go Rin No Sho.
It was the classic Body Strike of which Musashi wrote. Strike with the left shoulder, he wrote, with the spirit resolved, until the enemy is dead. Learn this well. The ninja had, Terry reflected almost disinterestedly. He cared little for his own life now, not with Eileen lying dead in the next room. But to kill this monster, yes, this still had substance for him.

He began to move forward, up the wall, then off it. But his body refused to respond quickly. He reeled, his eyes on the moving ninja, crossing his arms in front of him to ward off the blow.

It had no effect. He crashed backward with a grunt of pain, his sternum splintered from the enormous force of the repeated blows. The bone shot through his body as effectively as shrapnel. He looked up once from where he was huddled against the molding, into the eyes like stones, thinking, Musashi was right after all. The softly swaying Mancini music rang in his ears, recalling Eileen to him. Her warmth suffused him like a lighted fuse, burning its way through him until it reached his brain.

Blood came out of his mouth as he called to her in a voice as fragile as rice paper. “Eileen,” he called. “I love you.” His head lolled and his eyes slid shut.

The ninja stood dominant in that black void, seeming scarcely to breathe. He stared at the body before him without emotion. For long moments his senses quested for any sound out of the ordinary. At length, satisfied, he turned away, moving silently across the room. From beneath the sofa he drew out his duffel bag and, drawing open the zipper, carefully placed his
bokken
next to its brother on the top of the contents. In one motion he had closed the bag and hefted it, quitting the apartment without a backward glance.

Behind him, Mancini played on, the slow bittersweet melody hinting at lost love, cascading through the room. A deep groan escaped from Terry’s cracked lips as he coughed more blood. He lifted his head and, blindly, began to crawl toward the bedroom, not even understanding why, knowing only that he must.

Inch by agonizing inch he moved, crossing the threshold at last, stopping only when he lay panting, drooling blood, beside Eileen’s corpse.

Before his face was a cord and, reaching up, he yanked on it. The phone crashed down onto his left shoulder but he was beyond feeling this minute drop within the vast pool of pain that encompassed him. His finger trembling, he dialed seven slow digits. The ringing of the receiver was like the tolling of a far-off temple bell.

But Eileen seemed suddenly so far away from him and he knew she needed him. The receiver slipped through his wet fingers. He crawled across the last miles.

“Hello?” It was Vincent’s voice that came dimly through the abandoned instrument. “Hello? Hello!”

But there was no one now to hear him. Terry lay face down on the black fan of Eileen’s hair, his eyes open, unseeing and already glazing over, the blood like a second tongue moving from his lips to hers.

In the living room, the music was finished.

L
OOK HERE, NICHOLAS,” THE
Colonel said one dark and dismal afternoon. Storm clouds hid the crown of Mount Fuji and, occasionally, forked lightning lit the sky; afterward, the distant roll of thunder.

The Colonel, in his study, had in his hands a lacquered box. On its top was painted a dragon and a tiger, entwined. Nicholas recognized it as the parting gift given to his mother and father by So-Peng.

“It is time, I think, for you to see this,” the Colonel said. He picked up his pipe and a zippered pouch of moist tobacco, digging both pipe and forefinger into its depths, filling it. Striking a wooden kitchen match on the edge of his desk, he drew strongly on the pipe, getting it going to his satisfaction before continuing. His long forefinger tapped the top of the box, the tip tracing the lines of the two creatures emblazoned there.

“Nicholas, do you know the symbolic meanings of the dragon and the tiger in Japanese mythology?”

Nicholas shook his head.

The Colonel blew out a cloud of blue aromatic smoke, gripped the pipe stem with his teeth at one corner of his mouth. “The tiger is lord of all the land and the dragon, well, he is emperor of the air. Curious, that, I’ve always thought. The flying serpent, Kukulkan, of Mayan mythology, though he was depicted as being feathered, was also lord of the air. Interesting that two cultures so far from each other should share a major slice of mythology, don’t you think?”

“But why did So-Peng give you a Japanese box?” Nicholas asked. “He was Chinese, wasn’t he?”

“Uhm, a good question,” the Colonel said, puffing away. “One to which, I am afraid, I do not have a satisfactory answer. It is true that So-Peng was from the province of Liao-ning in northern China, but he made it clear to me that his mother was Japanese.”

“Still, that doesn’t explain the box,” Nicholas pointed out. “It’s true enough that you were going to Japan, but this box is ancient, not easily acquirable, especially at that time.”

“Yes,” the Colonel replied, stroking the top, “there is little doubt that this had been in his family—quite probably brought by his mother to China—for some time. Now why should So-Peng give this to us? I mean this specific item. Surely it was no whim; he was not that kind of man. Nor, do I think, was it mere coincidence.” The Colonel rose now and stood by the rain-streaked window. Condensation had made the panes into frosted decorations; winter’s chill had not totally been left behind.

“I pondered this for a long time,” the Colonel said, staring out the windows. He rubbed a small oval, clearing a line of sight as if he were carefully looking out a besieged fortress’ apertures. “All the way from Singapore to Tokyo, in fact. So-Peng had asked us not to open the present until we had reached Japan and we respected this request.

“At Haneda Airport, we were met by a contingent of SCAP personnel—we had, of course, flown over in a military transport. However, someone else was waiting for us when we landed. Certainly your mother recognized her immediately and so did I, just by the description I had been given by Cheong of her dream. It was Itami and she looked precisely as your mother had dreamed she did.” He shrugged. “Somehow, I was not amazed. One grows used to such… phenomena, here; it’s a part of life in the Far East, as I’ve no doubt you will soon learn.

“I was curious, the rapport your mother had with Itami. It was as if they had known each other all their lives; as if they were sisters, rather than sisters-in-law. There was absolutely no culture shock as there might have been when a young girl brought up in a tiny Chinese village meets for the first time a grand lady of urban Japanese society. Now this was so even though your mother and Itami are totally different kinds of people.” The Colonel turned around to face his son. “All the differences you see in them—the warmth in your mother, the steel-like aloofness of Itami; the happiness of your mother, the sadness of your aunt—none of these differences mattered to either of them.

“This, too, I thought about for some time and what I decided was this: although So-Peng told me in so many words that he possessed no knowledge of Cheong’s true heritage, yet his present was an oblique way of telling me otherwise.”

“You mean Mother is Japanese.”

“Perhaps part Japanese.” He came and sat down next to his son, putting one hand on his shoulder lovingly. “But, Nicholas, this is something you must promise never to discuss with anyone, even your mother. I tell you now because—well, because it was information passed on to me. So-Peng believed it was important, therefore it must be, though I myself put little stock in that sort of thing. I am English and a Jew, yet my heart is with these people. My blood sings with their history, my soul resonates with theirs. What use is my lineage to me? I want to make this quite clear to you, Nicholas. I did not renounce my Jewish name; I merely dropped it away. Now I suppose it can be argued that this is the same thing. Not so! I did this not by choice but by necessity. England, as a rule, does not like Jews; never has done so. I found, when I changed my name, many doors opened to me that had hitherto been quite shut. There’s a moral question to be answered here, I know. Should one attempt to go through? Yes, say I, and devil take the hindmost. But that’s my view. And while my soul is with the Japanese, I am neither Buddhist nor Shinto. These religions hold no particular meaning for me, save for scholarly study. In my heart, I have never renounced my Jewishness. Six thousand years of struggle cannot so easily be bought out. The blood of Solomon and David, of Moses, runs in your veins, too. Never forget that. Whether you choose to do anything about it is purely your concern; I would not tamper with so private a matter. Yet it is my duty to tell you, to give you the facts, as it were. I hope you understand this.” He gazed solemnly at his son for a long moment before he opened the tiger and dragon box, the last gift of the enigmatic So-Peng.

Nicholas looked down, stared into the brilliant fire of sixteen half-inch cut emeralds.

Nicholas had been studying bujutsu for nearly seven years now and still felt as if he knew almost nothing. He was strong and his reflexes superb; he went through the drills and exercises with a great deal of concentration and assiduousness but without any special love or feeling. This surprised and concerned him. He had been fully prepared for the hard work, the difficulty, for it was exactly this kind of effort which interested and absorbed him the most. What he had not reckoned on was any indifference on his part. It was not, he reflected one day during floor exercises at the
dōjō,
that he had in any way changed his mind about wanting to learn bujutsu. In fact, if anything, this desire had increased. It was—well, very difficult to put. Perhaps there was no spark there.