The Nicholas Linnear Novels (66 page)

Then something had wrapped itself about his ankles and he was dragged off his feet. Metal links scraped and dug painfully into his flesh. He gasped and twisted, feeling like a fish on a line.

He looked down. A long chain with a weight on its end was strung taut, pulling him into a stand of dense poplars beyond which stretched long fields of corn.

He rolled, puffing; tried to sit up. There was a blade at his throat.

He looked up. Before the sky, as rich a cerulian as he had ever seen it, he saw a face—at least part of one—that made him shudder. All the breath went out of him.

He stared into eyes as dead as stones. Madman’s eyes. So different from those others long ago; yet the same. The ninja, Doc Deerforth thought. His mind seemed to freeze with the thought, as if there could be no room in the world now for anything else. His life seemed to shrivel down to the size of a pea and, disappearing altogether, become totally insignificant.

Cicadas chimed; flies buzzed. He was back in the Philippines, back in the tent, tied to the table.

And the soft, knowing voice said to him, “Why have you followed me?”

“Why have you followed the girl?”

There was absolutely no change of expression in those staring eyes, of that he was quite certain. But, without warning the ninja jerked on the chain and the saw-toothed steel links bit through skin, digging into tissue, ground against bone.

Doc Deerforth’s head flew back and breath whistled through his half-open lips. Blood drained from his face.

“Why have you followed me?”

The words came again and again like a litany, a friar’s prayer at day’s end—what did they call that? Vespers?

“Why have you followed me?”

Time ceased to exist as the pain rose and fell like the tide—now faster, now slower, so that he had no clear idea of when it would make his jaws clamp together in a rictus, make the sweat fly off him as he jerked this way and that, make his thighs tremble and the muscles in his legs turn to water.

At some point, it was impossible for him to say when, Doc Deerforth knew that there was something different about this one. He was at once more cruel and less removed. And there was an elemental power to him that frightened him to the very core. It was as if the devil himself had come to strip him of life.

That it was his time to die, Doc Deerforth had no doubt. There would be no last-minute rescue this time and he was far too weak and old for muscular heroics. But a human being, until the very moment of death, has certain powers that can only be relinquished voluntarily. Neither time nor terror had dominion over these few last possessions.

The ninja now had one knee across Doc Deerforth’s heaving chest. Gently, almost reverently, he took up Doc Deerforth’s right hand and, using only the tips of his fingers, broke the thumb. He waited just the right amount of time—the shock had worn off and the pain was a sharp throbbing. He broke the index finger. And so it went, one by one, slowly and inexorably.

Doc Deerforth shuddered, heaved and sighed. He whispered the names of his daughters, of his long-dead wife. He felt, rather than saw, the ninja crouching low to hear his faintly expelled words. A curse and then a sharp crack. Pain flared as his right wrist shattered.

Someone, someone, he thought, hazily, will have to call the kids. Then the pain blanketed him and his nerves, vibrating, screaming with agony, pitched him at last into unconsciousness.

A child’s high cry perhaps decided Doc Deerforth’s fate. It was close at hand and Saigō, abruptly deciding that nothing could be gained from prolonging this game, took up the other end of the saw-toothed
kyotetsu-shoge
and slit Doc Deerforth’s throat with the double-edged blade.

“From the beginning,” Nicholas read, “your father was suspicious of Satsugai. From the first time they met, the Colonel understood that behind the man’s vast power in the
zaibatsu
stretched a hidden network of immense size and strength. He suspected, quite rightly, as further investigation bore out, that Satsugai was deeply involved with the Genyōsha. They were, perhaps, most responsible for sowing the seeds that led to the fateful decision to institute the preemptive strike at Pearl Harbor.

“Your father wished to crush the forces of the Genyōsha and it was to this end that he intervened in Satsugai’s behalf when the SCAP tribunal was ready to try him for war crimes. He thought that leaving Satsugai free to pursue his plans would eventually lead to the arrest of the Genyōsha main body itself.

“It was a good plan except that Satsugai discovered it. Now he was eternally in the Colonel’s debt—a man who was out to destroy him. This he could not abide. Satsugai was of the old school and most honorable. He knew that he could not touch or interfere with the Colonel in any way.

“Therefore, he set his son, Saigō, as his emissary of death, sending him into Kumamoto to the most feared of all the
Kan-aku na ninjutsu ryu
, the Kuji-kiri.

“Over the years, the Colonel came to understand the nature of his folly. He had gambled heavily and lost. Now Satsugai was forever beyond the law and this had been the Colonel’s doing.

“Your father was an Englishman by birth yet he could not have been more Japanese had he been born here and he came to a decision that was uniquely Japanese. He killed Satsugai himself.”

Stunned, Nicholas raised his eyes. And because of that shame to the family, Cheong had committed
seppuku.

“Continue reading,” Fukashigi said gently. “There is more.”

“Your father was a fine warrior, Nicholas, and thus none suspected him. Until, that is, Saigō returned home. With the basic elements of
Kan-aku na ninjutsu
already at his disposal, it did not take him long to divine the truth. This knowledge he kept to himself and, while stoking the fires of his hatred in the secret depths of him, he meanwhile presented only the image of a grief-stricken son to the outside world. For already a plan of vengeance had formed in his mind.

“Thus he contrived to be home several times when he knew Itami was coming to your house for the afternoon, when you would not be home. I cannot say whether it happened the first or the second time but it scarcely matters.

“You must know by now what amazing
yogen
”—chemists—“the Kuji-kiri are; how many different and subtle ways they are taught to kill a human being without ever touching him.

“This, I fear, is what happened to your father. Saigō murdered him with slow poison.”

Nicholas felt tears come to his eyes so that he had difficulty focusing on the last several sentences. His fingers gripped the thin rice-paper leaves, shaking.

“Here I must extend to you my most profound apologies. Even though I am not ninja, I feel responsible, at least in part, for your father’s death. He was a great friend to me and I feel—even now after the initial sorrow has left me—that I should have known.

“You have become the symbol of my atonement. That you are reading this now with, I trust, my esteemed friend Fukashigi beside you, is proof of that. I am long past knowing.

“I imagine that you were quite surprised on arriving at the Tenshin Shoden Katori
ryu
to find that payment for your long study had already been paid in full.

“I trust you understand why I had to do that before I died and pray Amida Buddha that you will forgive an old man’s lapse.”

He saw the brush-stroke characters of Kensatsu’s name through the well of tears as he cried for the Colonel, who had tried, in his own way, to tell him, and for Cheong. He felt now as if the years had been stripped from him like the red and gold leaves of autumn. And now he wept, too, for his friends, who had loved him and whom he had loved in return. Time enough for them all now.

Beside him, silent as sunlight, Fukashigi sat deep in contemplation, thinking about the cruelties time inflicted upon the young.

“Did you come here to dry out?”

“That’s a bit direct, isn’t it?”

“Sorry.”

“That’s all right. I suppose I deserved it. But, no, I’ve already done my drying out.”

They sat within the immense oval of the starry living room. Fully half the walls were glass, open to the sunlight of the beach and the sea. Above them, the skylight was like a faceted diamond, the largest in the universe, so Justine had always believed when she was younger. Now, in the morning, the tardy sun had not yet slipped across its faces and thus they were bathed—as at evening—in a most flattering indirect light.

The couch upon which they both sat was completely circular with two breaks, as angular and distinct as the fitted edges of a Chinese sphere puzzle which someone had once given to Justine and which she could never quite conquer. They sat on opposite sides of the morning, their backs as rigid, their eyes as wary as a pair of cats’ on unfamiliar territory.

Tall frosty drinks sat on the tables in front of them, untouched, as if for either of them to take the first sip would be to admit defeat.

“How long will you stay?” That was not what Justine had meant to say. She had wanted to say, “I’m glad” because she found that she was. No one wanted a lush for a sister. It was as if her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth when she wanted to say something nice to Gelda. I really can’t give her anything at all, she thought in wonder. Not even the tiniest thing. She felt a wave of shame wash over her like her mother’s long hands, slippery with soap, bathing her.

When she was older, she would wait until everyone had left the house. She would take a bath and emerge, moist and warm, one great snowy towel around her thin body and another smaller one wound about her long hair like a turban. And, as if she were in some far-off Byzantine city—that must have been from her constant reading—she would flop down on this very couch, her back against the foamy cushions, her legs up and dangling over the back. Thus positioned, she would turn her head, watch the slow wheel of the day as it streamed in through the skylight and by its shape and its position in the room could divine the precise time of day without ever looking upward or out the window or at the great clock on the mantelpiece behind her. But nevertheless its heavy sonorous ticking caused her to dream of the sunlight as drops of honey, seeping in through the panes of the skylight, onto her out-thrust tongue.

In just this way she amused herself while Gelda was off with her friends.

With a start, she realized that she had missed Gelda’s answer. That was all right; she hadn’t meant to ask the question anyway and now had no interest in the response.

“You can stay here as long as you want,” Gelda said.

“Oh, that’s all right. I have to be going, anyway.” But she made no move to get up and Gelda chose not to pursue the matter further.

“You’ll excuse me, then.” Gelda rose and went through one of the narrow gaps between the couches. “I’ll be around.” She put her hands on the back of the couch. “You always loved this room best, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Justine said, somewhat surprised.

“I always imagined you would have slept out here if Mother would have allowed it.”

“Yes. That would have been nice.”

“Well.” Gelda’s fingers plucked at the fabric. She looked down at her hands, then toward where Justine lay half sprawled on the cushions. “You’ll say good-bye before you leave, won’t you?”

“Sure.”

Then she was alone in the house—the servants were gone for the weekend—as she had been when she was a child, and her gaze quite naturally fell to the portion of the morning which the skylight let in, reflecting on what it might be like to be a great lady in some time past when there were no cars or phones or even electricity—she always adored candlelight and oil lamps to her meant taking to the sea for years at a time, hunting down the whales, imperiled and exhilarated at the same time. It was something she, as a woman, would never know. Down to the sea in ships and back again with enough oil for all the lamps in Nantucket. I should have, she thought, been born a Starbuck.

And that was how Saigō found her, alone and dazzled, lost within her imagination. She never knew that she had passed into unconsciousness or that anything was done to her while she was out. She might have been sleeping. But she was not.

He worked over her for fifteen minutes, one ear alert for the most minute sound that might herald an interruption. He could not afford that now. He hoped that it would not occur because it would necessitate dragging her away from here and this he did not want to do. She was relaxed here; it was a place she trusted. That made what he had to do that much easier.

During this time, Justine’s eyes were open and it could even be said that she saw, in a manner of speaking. But what she saw was only his face; transfigured, like a geological fault line after an earthquake. There was only a little familiarity among the change. It had become a face that was more than human.

It became the ground she walked upon, the food she ate, the water she gulped thirstily down, the air she breathed. It became her world and, finally, her entire universe.

Thus she listened as it spoke to her, this thing—being—which engulfed her, far larger than the diamond that shone above her head. What he did to her was to hypnosis what the atom bomb was to a bow and arrow. Here the will of the individual did not loom like an unbreachable wall, stopping them from doing that which they could not do had they been conscious. Now all was possible, for this was different. He was ninja. This was the Kuji-kiri and, beyond that, the
Kōbudera
, that which even his
Kan-aku na ninjutsu sensei
feared.

It was magic.

He waited patiently until Nicholas set aside the sheets of rice paper, stained now with tears. It was the end of the long steamy afternoon; the city was slowly cooling as the bloated sun slipped behind the backs of the high steel and glass buildings. But that was outside. In here the West could not intrude. Here the eternalness of the East defied time, shrouding them both. Somewhere, a runic chanting like the call of the cicadas when day is done.

“Kansatsu felt it most prudent to wait this time to tell you, Nicholas. Had you been told sooner, you would have, no doubt, sought Saigō out and you were not ready then. He would have destroyed you as easily as he could have done that night in Kumamoto.”