He must have read that on my face, because it became obvious that he realized that his enthusiasm was lost on me. I got the impression that he loomed large in his own imagination and it grated on him that I wasn’t impressed with him or Kita. His voice got a little meaner, showed a bit of the fang hidden by those white caps on his teeth.
He nodded toward Yamashita. “I hear that he’s some kind of master, too, Burke. But I’ll bet he’s not at Kita’s level. Maybe second class, huh?” He paused. “What’s that make you?” It was supposed to needle me.
“His student,” I said simply. Then I walked away.
Stark was a jerk. He worked in a business where humility was a personality flaw and surface appearances were the ultimate reality. I was probably something of a mystery to him. I have the tubular build and strong legs of a martial artist. There is over-developed musculature in my hands and forearms and back, but it’s not very noticeable. It probably confused him that I had fought him to a standstill that day in Asa’s dojo. Stark might hope to study with Kita, but it might be something very different from what his L.A. perspective anticipated. Life out there made for a very different set of expectations.
I went over and stood by Yamashita. He had a toothpick in his hand. One end was covered in red colored cellophane. My sensei was eyeing it as if measuring its offensive capabilities.
“Have you seen enough, Sensei?”
He nodded. “Oh, yes. As always, Professor, excursions with you are quite interesting.”
“Sorry we didn’t get more time with Changpa.”
Yamashita blinked. “He is a remarkable man. It was good merely to see him again.” He blinked. “I recognized that man Stark, of course, from Asa Sensei’s dojo. He may have promise…”
“I can’t believe Changpa uses that joker for security,” I said. I told him about the connection with Kita.
“Have you considered, Burke, that the Rinpoche tolerates Stark not because there is a need for security, but because Stark himself needs to guard something? It is, perhaps, an act of compassion on the lama’s part.” It was an insightful comment from a man who was my taskmaster. He’s a strange blend of brutal energy and subtle insight. Yamashita placed the toothpick down on the table. “We may go now.”
“You know they thought we were after Changpa,” I commented as we made our way through the reception.
“I am not surprised. We reek of danger,” he said. I snorted appreciatively. Yamashita’s humor is extremely low key.
“As far as I can tell,” I said, “none of the guys Stark’s got working security know what they’re doing.”
“True,” my master said. “But they are dangerous nonetheless.”
“These guys?” I asked skeptically.
“Oh yes. Were you to fight them, it is highly probable they would lose their balance. And they are so large… if they fell on you, I am afraid you would be crushed.”
“That would be bad,” I agreed.
The museum itself was not open for browsing that night, but we were lucky that the reception gallery was located right next to one of my favorite exhibitions—the Northwest Coast Indians. I don’t know what it is. I had first seen this place when I was maybe eight years old, and I never lost the feeling I got then. Maybe it was the sheer dense mass of the heavy wooden totem poles, the intricate, stylized art in red and black, but the testimony of the vividness and imagination of a people from another place and time struck me most forcibly here.
And there was the canoe.
A huge wooden Haida canoe dominated a hallway. It had to be thirty feet long, filled with life-size rowers wielding intricately carved paddles, all of them frozen in time as they labored over an imaginary sea toward 77th street. In the bow stood the chief, cloaked in a straw rain cape. The mannequins were Asian-looking, and something about the stout, remote figure standing there and looking off into the distance reminded me of Yamashita.
You had to admire these people. When you really got up close to the boat, it struck you just how gutsy they were. They would take vessels like this out into the churning waters of the Northwest coast to hunt whales. I could imagine them, scanning the dark surface of the heaving sea on a foggy day, listening for the telltale sigh of a whale breathing in the murk. Watching for the glimpse of slick skin as something humped up, just below the surface. Alert for the dorsal fins of a pod of Orcas. For all its size, the boat was a fragile thing against the immensity of the sea and its creatures. For me, it captured the essence of human life: an enterprise composed of equal parts daring and desperation.
I wondered what the lama would think.
Yamashita and I walked out of the light and noise of the reception, down the main entrance to the street. I thought some more about the relationship between Yamashita and Changpa, but said nothing as I followed my sensei down the street. I thought of the Haida chief, scanning the dark waters. What we can see is often not what is really there. I thought of Micky and Art and the Sakura murder. Sometimes things are hidden.
I glanced over the looming darkness of Central Park and into the sky. The ambient light of cities tends to obscure the view. But I knew, overhead, that stars dusted the night sky. They wheeled in patterns, made manifest only in silence and patience.
In the morning light of rural Georgia, the mist in the valleys was gray and cold-looking, shreds pulled through the wet tops of trees. Slowly, the cloud cover was burned away, and the hills humped up like waves, stretching to the horizon. There were small sounds. The rustle of squirrels. Wind in tree limbs. The door to the cabin stood ajar, like a mouth open in silent surprise. Everything was hushed in the aftermath. From within, there was a faint rustling sound that grew slowly fainter as the morning breeze died.
It had been cool at dawn this high up, the night’s cold still laying in the hollows like the memory of a dream. You could smell the damp of pine needles in the air. Dogwoods flowered ghostly white in spots along the slopes. The scholar was an early riser who liked to watch day come to his retreat. But he was an old man used to comfort. He had watched for a moment, then turned to his cabin, the scent of coffee hurrying him back inside.
He turned the lights off as the sun grew stronger. The rays slanted across the old wooden table, washing golden bars across the papers that lay there. He carefully cleared a spot for his coffee mug and picked up a pencil, slowly editing last night’s work. He moved hesitantly at first, then warmed to his task like an athlete who feels his muscles working themselves once more into readiness.
The sabbatical was drawing to a close. He had used the time off from his university post to come up here, away from the distractions of daily life, and write. The cabin was littered with reference books, notes, and photocopies of manuscripts. He came down from the lonely country cabin only for supplies and to pick up the important mail that his departmental secretary bundled together for him, but the months had been a quiet time that he treasured.
The birds had been calling since well before first light. Their noise came and went, pushed by the wind. But it was never really silent up here. You could hear the odd car or truck winding down the blacktop down by the river, tires whining faintly into the distance. It was a vaguely comforting sound. It was only during the last few days that he had grown increasingly apprehensive at his isolation. Yet he didn’t hear the intruder approach—the carpet of pine needles muffled his steps.
It must have been the birds that alerted the scholar. He had grown used to their noise. And when they stopped, shocked mute by something, the awareness of their silence grew slowly in him until he got up, curious as to why the morning song had ended.
The door wasn’t locked, but the intruder kicked it open anyway. He must have come upon the older man like a storm, all motion and unexpected violence. A force that could not be opposed.
The intruder slammed him down to the floor. Then the questioning began. There was not much in the way of conversation. The scholar had something of the ability to read a situation well. He played the game of Go for years and he had what the Japanese referred to as “a quick read of the board”: the scholar could see where the stones lay and come to an intuitive grasp of things. The telephone warning now made some sense: he knew why the intruder was here. And the scholar was equally certain that he would not divulge what the intruder wanted.
It all seemed so remote to the old man. All this anger over what amounted to a point of pride, hardly worth pursuing. Maybe it was age: things that seemed sharp and clear to others began to soften for him, like objects viewed through mist. In the cool morning light, the blossoms on the trees outside still heavy with dew, the intruder’s urgency seemed out of place to the old man. The scholar wondered whether he should just tell the man what he wanted.
Years ago, the scholar had been a soldier. And he had learned in the long slog through Normandy something about stubborn pride and the limits of what could be endured. So he set himself in silence.
The intruder almost pleaded for the information from the scholar. But the scholar was hard and stubborn. He lay, frightened, but flushed with pride in his fight. He believed himself set like stone against any persuasion. But he was wrong.
His master had given the intruder a hard apprenticeship; the student learned to see things with a cold clarity. The bulky form of the scholar, still so stubborn in old age, was filled with weakness.
The intruder wrapped a wire around the scholar’s neck, twisting it tightly and jerking the old man to his feet. He yanked one of the old man’s arms around, torqueing the joints and forcing compliance as he directed him toward the stove where the coffeepot simmered.
The intruder’s voice took on some of the coaxing nature of a teacher leading a wayward pupil. He asked the scholar calmly, patiently, for the information. Such a simple thing. An address. A location. Then, with each refusal, he brought the old man’s hand closer to the stove.
The scholar bucked as the heat began to sear him. But the intruder held him tight, coaxing him, promising relief. But insisting on an answer.
There was just a scream. And deep down, the old man realized that he could not supply all of what the intruder wanted. He simply did not know some of the answers. Up to that point, despite his fierce determination to resist, the old man knew he could agree to talk. Now, with a jolt of deep, despairing insight, the old man realized that even full cooperation would not be met with mercy.
The intruder withdrew the scholar’s hand and began again. This time more slowly. He sensed that he was close to getting a response. The trick, he came to learn, was not to rush the process. Torture is a squeamish business. But to be done correctly, it can’t be rushed. To do so just short-circuits the whole process. And all you get are screams.
The intruder wanted information. So he learned to go slowly. He confused the scholar’s ignorance for endurance and, as he pressed him once again with questions, the intruder was the source of his own undoing. The pain shot up the old man’s arm to the jaw, and the wave of nausea engulfed him as his heart began to flutter. He collapsed to the floor, and the intruder realized that something had gone wrong. And that the information he thought that the old man had was quickly receding beyond his grasp.
The intruder looked at the old one lying on the cool ground, clutched up tight into a ball of agony. He tried to think of his next step, to envision another way to get what he sought. But he couldn’t hold the image: it was blurred by the frustration of once more failing in his appointed task.
The old man was moaning quietly. The intruder felt a fleeting type of contempt for him: old, broken, humiliated. But then a curious compassion came over the intruder. So he reached down and tightened the wire that was still wrapped around the scholar’s neck. The intruder’s hands were strong, and the sudden tension cut off almost all but the beginning of the scholar’s sudden gasp. The wire cut into the flesh and muscle of the neck, cutting off the old man’s air. Then the blood flow stopped to the brain, diverted as the wire cut the artery. The scholar finally lapsed into unconsciousness and the blood pooled, faintly steamy in the cool cabin.
The killer finished the job and then stood up, curiously calm in the golden wash of morning. He looked out over the rolling hills that stretched away from him, the valleys still churning with mist. As always, the mountains offered a promise of serenity. He would wait and watch. The diligent seeker would be shown the way.
There are different types of pain. My sensei has shown me that. Is there a benefit to the insight? Sometimes I wonder. Years ago, I had once protested, but Yamashita looked coldly at me. “What did you expect when you took up the sword?” he asked. It was something I tried to remember daily. It tends to put things in perspective.
Yamashita called me that evening with a cryptic request: we were to meet in Midtown. He gave me the time and the location, but there wasn’t even the hint of explanation. I’ve grown used to it: the teacher-student relationship is pretty cut and dry in Japanese culture. Yamashita wasn’t asking me to meet him. He was telling me.
“Do I need anything?” I asked. Sometimes he takes me to other dojos and we put the locals through their paces. I wanted to know whether I needed a uniform. Weapons.
“Your presence will be adequate,” Yamashita replied. Then, as an afterthought, “Bring your credit card. Perhaps we can have dinner.” On my end, the phone went dead.
He was standing at the address he’d given me, but he wasn’t alone. Seeing Yamashita in street clothes was slightly disorienting: I always pictured him in the dojo, a solid, grounded figure swathed in the ritual robes of the martial arts. But now my teacher stood there amid the less hurried crowds of Sunday Manhattan with another Asian, a somewhat larger man draped in a tan raincoat against the intermittent drizzle. It was Changpa Rinpoche.
“Hello, Dr. Burke,” the lama said. He didn’t shake hands, just inclined his head and torso slightly forward. His eyes crinkled from the half-smile he gave me.