The Nicholas Linnear Novels (59 page)

One day he came home from his studies earlier than usual and found the Colonel still outside. He was huddled inside his old English greatcoat. It seemed far too big for him now.

Nicholas skirted the house, went to sit beside him. He was appalled to see the sharp bones standing out along the ridges of the Colonel’s cheeks.

“How are you?” he said. His breath frosted in a miniature cloud in front of him.

“Fine,” the Colonel said. “I am just—tired.” He smiled wistfully. “Just tired, that’s all.” His thin hands fluttered like birds. The backs were dark with liver spots. They settled restlessly on his thighs. “Don’t worry about me. You know, I am thinking of taking your mother away somewhere for a rest. She’s still not gotten over this thing. She needs to get away from here for a while. Forget all about grief. Your aunt hangs on to her now as if she were her only lifeline. It isn’t fair.”

“It’ll be all right, Dad.”

The Colonel sighed. “I don’t know about that. The world is changing. It’s become too complex. I’ll never understand it. Perhaps you will. I hope so.” He rubbed his palms up and down his thighs as if they ached. “Nothing’s the way it once was.” He looked away, into the sky. The last of the geese were moving south in giant vees; two fingers lifted triumphantly: the victory sign. “I had such dreams when I came here. There was so much I could have done.”

“And you have. You’ve accomplished so much.”

“Like ashes,” the Colonel said. “I feel as if I’ve done nothing, merely slid with the tide, taken by forces I knew nothing of.” He shook his head. “I cannot escape the feeling that perhaps I didn’t try hard enough.”

“How can you say that? You gave them everything. Everything.”

“I thought it was the right thing to do. Did I do wrong? I can’t say now. I’m pulled in two directions. I wish I had given them more, gone to Washington, pleaded our case there. I wish I had given them less, spent more time with you and your mother.”

Nicholas put his arm around the Colonel’s shoulders. How thin they had become. Where had all the hard muscle gone? Not even to fat. It had just disappeared.

“It’s all right, Dad.” Such an inane phrase, connoting nothing. He seemed tongue-tied. “It’s all right.”

What was it he really wanted to say?

But something irrevocable had taken place in the Colonel’s life and it wasn’t all right.

Despite repeated trips to the physician, despite a prescription of potent pills, eating and, finally, injections, he continued to lose weight until there was nothing more anyone could do to sustain him. Ten days after his talk with Nicholas in the Zen garden, he died in his sleep.

The funeral was immense. Most of the arrangements were taken care of by the American military in Tokyo. Mourners came from all over the Pacific and President Johnson sent a personal envoy from Washington. Nicholas thought this man’s presence highly ironic, given what he knew of his father’s failed ambitions. The Americans had been unwilling to listen to him in life but were anxious to extol him in death. He could not help but resent the man, despite his charm and extreme courtesy, seeing in him not a little of Mark Antony.

The Japanese government, as was its wont, was somewhat more honest. The Prime Minister himself attended, as did many members of the Diet. The Japanese would not forget the Colonel’s awesome contributions to their country and they paid their debt—some time later, after a decent interval, Nicholas was approached for training for a high-level governmental post. He politely declined, pleased nonetheless.

As requested in the Colonel’s will, the American Army rabbi conducted the ceremony, which no doubt nonplussed many of the attendees, especially those who had believed they knew the Colonel well. The rabbi had known the Colonel for a long time and when he spoke the eulogy it was with enormous conviction. It was, in retrospect, quite a beautiful ceremony.

“The Tenshin Shoden Katori
ryu
is the only answer now.”

“I believe that is so. Yes.”

“I want to leave and I do not want to leave.”

“I understand this fully, Nicholas.”

Kansatsu’s cat’s eyes were bright and alive.

He and Nicholas knelt facing each other. Around them was the gleaming empty expanse of the
dōjō,
a deserted beach in the sunlight.

“What will happen to me—there?”

“I am afraid that I cannot tell you. I do not know.”

“Will I be safe?”

“Only you can answer that. But the strength to be so is within you.”

“I am glad you came to the funeral.”

“Your father was a fine man, Nicholas. I knew him well.”

“I did not know.”

“No.”

“Well…”

“I have prepared your letters of introduction. These include your graduation certificates—with highest honors—from this
ryu
.” His eyes, focused on Nicholas’ face, were unwavering; bits of flashing jet. He withdrew from his wide sleeve three tightly rolled sheets of mulberry paper tied with a thin black cord. He extended them and, when Nicholas touched them, it was the only physical link between them. “Remember,” he said, “there is a chain. Thin. Link by link it goes. Take care you discover the identity of the next link on lest the chain break in your hands and you are left defenseless.” Then he handed over the sheets. His hand lowered with a kind of grave finality.

“
Sayonara
, Nicholas.”

“
Sayonara, sensei
.” Tears filled his eyes so fully that he could see only a blur rise and leave the room.
I love you
, he thought. It was what he had wanted to say to the Colonel that day in the Zen garden and hadn’t.

He heard no door click shut but abruptly he knew that he was alone in the house of cedar.

Oddly, the first thing he noticed was that the woodbine had died. Ataki no longer came, and during the last weeks the Colonel had been too ill to think of hiring a replacement. The hedges, always so carefully pruned even in winter, were spiky with branches left unchecked. The ground was hard with ice and frozen snow.

He felt a rising desire to run inside and tell Cheong that he was leaving but he was so uncertain of her response that he lingered awhile outside.

Above him the sky was a rich cobalt blue with just a few tracings of high cirrus clouds and, farther down, orange along the horizon where the sun slid through the thick haze. Far away, he thought he could hear the rumbling drone of a 707 coming down at Haneda.

Now he might have regretted canceling his dinner date with a couple of school chums in the city; he had told Cheong he’d be home late this morning. But, the decision being made to leave for Kyoto where the new
ryu
was located, he had felt the need for completion. And that would not come until he had told her.

Inside, the house was quite still as it had been since the moment he had returned home from Kumamoto, as if that had become some inexplicable nexus point in all their lives. Loss had followed gain and he wondered now if it had been worth it. He thought once more of the lady of Roku-No-Miya and her certitude of the implacability of fate. Thought, too, of the Colonel’s conviction that he had been taken by forces he knew nothing of. Life could not be so cruelly unfathomable.

He went through the darkened hall, wondering that none of the lights had been lit.

The kitchen was deserted. No one answered his call. He shrugged off his coat, threw it over the back of a chair, went toward the back of the house. Stillness nodded deferentially to him, ancient as time.

He came, at length to his parents’ room. The thin paper
shōji
was closed but, beyond, a light was on and he caught the edge of a shadow, moving.

He hesitated, reluctant to disturb Cheong if she was about to rest. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would take her to the grave and together they would kneel before the marker of new cedar, lighting the incense and saying the prayers in English and in Japanese.

The shadow moved again and he called out her name softly into the falling night. No answer came and cautiously he opened the
shōji.

He stood perfectly still, one foot in, one out, staring. All the breath had gone out of him. His head pounded and he felt a shock at the base of his neck as if from contact with a live wire.

All the tatami save one had been taken outside. The
futon
was folded in a neat pile in the far corner. One round white paper-shaded lamp was on against the right wall. Beyond, outside the glass panels of the far wall, lay the blue-whiteness of the snow, virgin, without one footprint to mar its granular surface. It seemed unnaturally pale against the black backdrop of the cryptomeria and pine forest. There were no lights in the sky.

The one remaining tatami had been placed in the center of the room; the surrounding wood floor seemed naked, like raw flesh with the skin stripped away. On it Cheong knelt with her back to him. She wore a formal light gray kimono with obi. The one with the pink roses embroidered across it. Her back was bowed, her head down as if in prayer. The light gleamed on her blue-black hair, immaculately coiffed.

At her right side tiny Itami knelt, sitting at right angles so that he could see her profile. She, too, was dressed formally in a midnight-blue kimono, sleeves edged in crimson, milk-white obi.

The absolute stillness of the room was a tangible force, a rigid barrier holding him from further movement, even from speech.

Then one sound came, as sharp and near and startling as the first break of thunder from an unexpected storm.

It was the slither of steel against a sheath.

Cheong’s right arm moved with unnatural speed and for the briefest instant Nicholas’ mind was unaccountably filled with the sight of bursting cherry blossoms, impossibly pink against green foliage. Now that it had commenced, the transition from absolute motionlessness to rapid movement was irrevocable.

Saw the blade flashing platinum as its length caught the lamplight, as blinding as the sun, slashing inward in the blur of conviction that was necessary. Into the left side of the abdomen.

A thin cry like a startled bird but no fear and the body remained still. A slight tremoring, the perfect folds of the silk disturbed, an eyelash’s flutter just before the violent jerk with both hands on the hilt, left to right, horizontally across the abdominal cavity. Only now the shoulders shook somewhat and he could hear a gasping as of a bellows desperately working. Droplets of sweat rolling down her forehead, dropping, darkening the tatami.

This must be a dream.

Saw the tension come into her elbows as she brought the blade upward toward her sternum. Such strength and force of will many men did not possess.

With infinite slowness, as if settling by degrees, fists still locked around the hilt, Cheong’s body began to crumple forward, still in total control, a living monument. Her forehead touched the floor before the edge of the tatami.

As if that were a signal, Itami now moved. Her right hand fled to her side. With a harsh rasp, the
katana
, previously hidden within the folds of her kimono, was nakedly revealed and, standing now, she raised it high over her head. The blade commenced its downward motion with a hot hissing sound as if those fearful shades of steel were anxious to feel the warm flesh part.

In an instant, Cheong’s head was cleanly severed from her neck. Only then did the body lose its control and collapse completely. Blood seeped darkly, neatly, just a little of it as if sprinkled there by a decorator.

“No!”

At last released, Nicholas sprang across the room. Itami, staring down at the beautiful head, black and white and crimson, did not even look up.

“What! What!” He could not think. His tongue seemed an impossible weight in his mouth and he resisted the desire to rip it out. He could look at nothing but the body of his mother. And her head.

“It is done now, Nicholas.” Itami’s voice seemed distant and gentle at the same time. The bloody
katana
was at her side. “She is a child of honor.”

S
OMEONE BEGAN SCREAMING, EVEN
before the lock shattered and the heavy door slammed inward in a crack of thunder.

The room was a shambles.

A bulky shape ran past him, across the room to the open window.

He began to struggle with it immediately because it had been his stupidity that had brought this on and if he did not work it out right now he would he no damn good in the next few hours and that would without a doubt prove fatal. He did not want to die.

Noted in passing the woman spreadeagled on the bed. Her flesh appeared to have been oiled, the light lying in long sweeps whitening the skin. Chinese.

He had known just as they had banged open the front door to Ah Ma’s, in the wake of the
tsunami.
Took you bloody well long enough, he berated himself. Hideyoshi was not the ninja.

The woman stared not at him but at the muscled legs crisscrossing hers, wide shoulders at the edge of the stained coverlet, head off the bed at an odd angle. It was she who was screaming. The silken bond held her from moving. Her eyes were wide enough for him to see the whites all around. She might have been a madwoman and he saw why.

Upside down, Philip looked at him reproachfully, tongue half bitten through between his teeth.

The screaming seemed to go on and on in cadence, as effective as a siren.

“There’s another way,” Nicholas had said. “A better way.” He dipped half a dumpling into its dark brown spicy sauce, popped it into his mouth. “I don’t want any of your men getting hurt.”

Croaker looked at him quizzically. “You’re a strange bird, you know that? It’s what we get paid for, us cops—taking risks.”

They were in a dumpling house on Elizabeth Street between Canal and Bayard. The place was crowded, the noise level high.

“Reasonable risks,” Nicholas pointed out. “The ninja’s a sorcerer of death. They’re not going to be prepared for him.”

“Aren’t you being just a little bit melodramatic?”

“No.”

Croaker put down his chopsticks, pushed his plate away from him. A waiter immediately came to clear it away. “All right. What’s your idea?”