“But you must move beyond a focus on technique. And this is where things of the heart come in, Burke. You must keep your spirit strong. And open to things… And, if you cannot best this one using kendo techniques you must use what you know.” I grunted in acknowledgement. My teacher looked at me. “The understanding is here,” he said forcefully, clapping his hand on his stomach. “Consider: every art specializes in something. Which means it neglects something else. This is like
shikaku
.”
Shikaku. The dead angle. Just behind and to one side of an opponent. Out of the range of vision. In the blind spot. And, for a fighter, the dead angle. If you could get there, you dominated your enemy.
A call from across the room notified us that the last match was about to begin. Yamashita gazed at me once, the look flat and without encouragement, and then flowed up and away like smoke. He was like an idol with dead eyes, demanding worship but giving little in return.
If it was a familiar feeling, it was irrelevant. I pushed it down and away, checked the knots that fastened my armor to me. Put on my helmet and gloves. Picked up my sword and waded in.
There really wasn’t time to think. I parried and evaded, counterattacked and tried to hold on to the center. But it was difficult. My teacher was right. This man was well on his way to mastering the art. He drove in relentlessly, seeking a gap in my concentration, waiting to lash out with a decisive stroke. My opponent used the small, snapping jerks designed to score points in kendo. It was blindingly fast and evading it made me sweat even more—if such a thing were possible.
He was pressing me. I could feel it. Is this what Yamashita had wanted me to sense? The feints were designed to get me off guard, to break my posture. I used my sword to parry his gambits, watching for the telltale signs that warned of a lunging attack.
Everyone telegraphs something of their intentions before they come at you. But the better they are, the more subtle it is. With novice swordsmen, you can see the attack forming in the tilt of the head, a rocking back as if gathering momentum. The tip of the sword dips slightly. For this man, there was none of that. That I could see. There was just a sensed pressure. The knowledge of imminent danger.
The next attack didn’t explode at me so much as it flowed in an accelerating continuum, a smooth, highly compressed generation of force and intent. My hands rose up slightly to cover the unfolding technique. It wasn’t a conscious action on my part. But it was as if there were a wire linking his sword to mine: as his rose, mine rose with it. It made his strike less than perfect: he hit me, but not without the clattering of swords as I parried. Then he whipped his sword down, pushing mine with it. It was a subtle, tight force and it caught me by surprise. His sword tip made a small circle, and as it levered against my weapon, it broke my grasp. My sword went flying from my hands. I was unarmed and at his mercy.
But here is where the killing fury comes in. You just never give up. Rationally, I was through. But I was operating with something else. I saw his sword wind up for the finishing blow and a strange part of me welcomed it. I shot in on a tangent. His attack took place simultaneously. We were moving so quickly that he was still focused on the mental image of me as a target. But he was focused on a place where I was no longer standing.
Because I had slid into his dead angle. I grabbed his collar with my left hand. I had stretched my right hand across his throat. His forward momentum carried his legs forward; my arm jerked his chin back and to one side. I pivoted and sent him crashing to the floor. He lay there stunned for a second, and I stood above him, panting. The he scrambled to his feet and came at me. And I was ready.
“
Yame!
” The order came to stop.
We backed warily away from each other, but the sensei had seen enough. At the command, we all lined up again to bow out. I took my helmet off and I’ll bet you could see steam rising off my head. After the formal ending, I got to thank each person I had crossed swords with, sitting and bowing to everyone in turn. There was a faint roaring in my ears.
With his helmet off, I saw that my last opponent was a young man. His blonde hair was dark with sweat, but he had the square jaw and pale eyes, the good looks that I associated with high school athletes and actors. He smiled, and his teeth looked even and white. But the expression didn’t touch his eyes. They were still burning with the desire to take the match to a real finish.
The hold of discipline is strong, however. We bowed, hands flat on the floor, torsos lowered over them. “Burke,” I said.
He sat up from his bow and looked at me silently for a few seconds, without expression. Then the smile came again. It had a hard edge to it, tinged with a curious type of self-satisfaction.
“Stark,” he said. “Travis Stark.”
I watched him get up and move away. Slowly, the room and its details began to swim back into my awareness. Students were tying up their armor and congratulating each other. Asa and Yamashita were inking promotion certificates at a table.
By the door, two men entered and spoke to a student. They flashed police badges and looked around in that universally suspicious way policemen have. Both had bristly mustaches. The one with sandy hair was bigger and thicker. The other cop was smaller, thinner, and crankier looking, although they both had their professional cop faces on.
My teacher saw them and stood up quickly. He made a gesture at the cops as if trying to shoo them away. They paused. Then the two swordsmen came out from behind the table.
Yamashita and Asa sat down in the formal position and gestured for me to do the same. Then, Asa formally promoted me to the fourth dan—black belt rank—in kendo. I received the certificate he proffered, taking it in both hands as a sign of respect. Asa bowed to me and to my teacher, then rose and left without another word. Yamashita looked at me and then glanced at the cops, who were heading our way.
I held the certificate in my lap, silent. My hands trembled slightly. You might think it was muscle fatigue; in reality, it takes a while to bleed off the psychic energy of a match like that.
Yamashita nodded slightly to me. “So. An interesting performance. But it was not decisive. Perhaps if we had let it go on… one of you certainly would have won.”
“It would have been me,” I said. My voice was flat, but I gave him a look that said there wasn’t any argument.
“So?” he said, and broke into a smile. “I would expect no less. And now you see the point of the exercise.” He bowed in dismissal and left me in a smooth, silent glide.
I could hear bits of the quiet conversation the two cops were having as they approached me. “I’m telling you,” the bigger one was saying, “there’s a stylistic link here. These costumes make these guys look like Darth Vader.”
His partner didn’t reply. He had a white streak in his hair and a disgusted look on his face. They hovered about me and I got up to meet them.
“Well?” I asked them expectantly. My tone wasn’t the friendliest. This guy with the streak in his hair had bugged me way before he had started to go gray. He was my older brother Micky.
He smirked at me. “You look like shit,” my brother the cop said. “But I think we need you.”
I held a hand up to my ear. “What was that?”
“Stop dickin’ around,” Micky said.
I gestured with my hand at my ear again. “Huh?”
“We need you,” he said, biting the words off one by one.
His partner, Art, was a bigger man. He smiled at me. He also enjoyed needling Micky. It was part of a very complex relationship.
“I’ll bet it hurt you to say that,” I commented to my brother, and winked at Art.
“Oh, yeah,” Art said happily, nodding. Micky was silent.
I gathered up my gear and changed. My muscles felt loose and disconnected. People talk about a “runner’s high” after exercise. But in the martial arts world of Yamashita Sensei, you often just emerged stunned, bruised, and trembling. I’ve been at this for a while, however. Aside from the distant ache of new bruises I just felt slightly relaxed.
But I wasn’t going to stay that way. When I came outside, the two policemen were waiting for me. We were heading for a place where the violence was less contained and all the bloodshed was real.
They argued about who would drive. “You sure you’re up to it?” my brother Micky asked.
His partner, Art, is pretty good-natured, but questions like this bother him. “Hey, get off my case,” he snapped. “What, you think I’m not up to it?”
Micky held up his hands in mock surrender. “Just asking. You don’t want to tax things.” He went to the passenger door. Art moved past him, grumbling, and got behind the wheel.
I sat in silence in the back and let the flow of the trip calm them down. This crabby exchange was typical and the tense atmosphere didn’t last long. Eventually, Art started to talk again. “So we say to ourselves,” he began saying to me as we drove crosstown toward the East River, “why not share the wealth?”
“Hey, asshole,” my brother Micky said, “you want to drive so badly, how about using two hands?” Now he was cranky.
Art was driving with his right hand and waving the other one around. It made me worry. Not too long ago, someone had sliced his right hand off with a sword. They had bagged it in ice and stuck it on the gurney when they wheeled Art away. No one paid much attention. The guy with the sword had done other damage and everyone expected Art to die.
He hung on. Micky and I tracked the swordsman down. Eventually, it came to a head on a steamy night in midtown Manhattan. I don’t like to think about it too much. The only good thing was that, at the end of it all, I didn’t die.
Neither did Art.
He spent quite a bit of time in ICU, hooked up to machines. I wonder if the doctors felt left out from the start and reattached the hand immediately just to have something to do. It turned out to be a good thing. Art got better and Micky would have refused to work with a partner that looked like Captain Hook.
Now we were rocking along the FDR drive with a cop’s casual disregard for speed limits. He swerved around other motorists in long swooping moves that would have induced motion sickness in the less stalwart.
I was sitting in the back of their car. The shocks were mushy. The back was awash in clipboards and old newspapers. A paper coffee cup rolled wetly around on the floor. I inched the window down a bit and sipped at the air in quiet desperation.
“I gotta say, Connor,” Micky commented, watching the scenery whiz by, “I thought, ‘no way’ when this call came through. I mean, come on.”
“Strange,” Art said in a thick, choked up weird voice.
“Let me get this straight,” I said, and tried to focus on something other than Art’s atrocious driving. “The Brooklyn cops called you in on a homicide because some bright light had read about what happened to us last time?”
“Famous, we are,” Art said in that same voice.
“Yeah, well,” my brother responded. “We got some Japanese guy. Apparent homicide victim. The only clue? Some calligraphy.”
“Come on!” I protested.
“Mystery, there is. And danger,” Art intoned.
“Art, I swear to God if you don’t cut that Master Yoda shit out right now I’m gonna go insane!” my brother yelled.
Art just chortled and swung around a slow-moving vehicle. “Yeah,” he said in his normal voice, “so we thought we’d bring you with us to take a look.”
“Great,” I said.
“You bet.” Art smiled as he glanced up at me in the rearview mirror. We coasted onto the ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge. “Only one change in plans,” he said, looking at my brother.
“Oh, yeah?” Micky asked skeptically.
“Yeah. If there’s a guy with a sword, you go after him this time.” Then Art put both hands on the wheel, as if suddenly remembering something disturbing. Micky looked at the side window, his face a mask.
There was a variety of uniformed types milling about the house when we arrived. Cops have a herding instinct. Most of the workday is indescribably boring. So when something big happens, they’re drawn to it. From all over. There were marked and unmarked cars sitting at various angles along the street. The nicely tended trees tended to break things up, but you could hear the chatter from a number of radios, like the sound of nasty insects. There were a few plainclothes guys smoking on the sidewalk and a few patrolmen in the traditional blue uniforms of the NYPD milling about. They all seemed to have large, square automatics riding on their gunbelts.
I looked at Art and Micky. They wear rumpled sportcoats and pants whose manufacturers claim never need ironing. This is not true. I, for one, had left my shinai in the trunk of the car and, bereft of a belt loaded with cop hardware, I felt conspicuously under-dressed.
How Art and my brother got sent from Manhattan on this call was anyone’s guess, but they threaded their way through a variety of suspicious uniformed people. We stopped briefly to ask questions at numerous points, getting shunted farther and farther back through the house and eventually into the yard at the rear.
Where the total crime scene experience was in full swing.
A guy in his early fifties was standing outside the hut and talking with a woman from the forensics squad. His suit was a stylish olive three-button number, but it was slightly wrinkled at the thighs. His hair, which was a speckled iron gray, looked freshly cut. Various people kept coming up to him to give brief reports. He didn’t say much. His face looked tired.
“Lieutenant Strakowski?” Art asked. The man turned to look at us with a “what now” expression.
“You the guys from Manhattan?” he asked. Micky and Art flashed their shields, introduced themselves, and shook hands. All part of one big happy club.
Strakowski turned to look at me. “You are?” Cops don’t waste much energy with the niceties. Micky and Art tried to explain my presence as if subtly conscious of my shameful lack of an appropriate firearm.
The Lieutenant nodded. “Oh, yeah. You’re the guy I read about. With the swords and all.” He turned to Micky. “He doesn’t look that dangerous.”