“I got it,” Micky answered.
The two men stepped out of the car and I followed. We went to the trunk, where Micky opened the lid, then put his foot up on the bumper, pretending to tie his sneaker. He took the small automatic out of his ankle holster. Art took a Glock out of the case and loaded it. Then they drifted slowly to the curb side of the car, using it to block them from the man in the blue sedan. I noticed that Micky edged forward a little, as if shielding his partner.
“Connor, you head up to the house,” Micky directed. They both held their pistols down along their legs, not making a show of it. I started to move and heard the sedan’s door open. I felt the muscles across the top of my shoulders tense up. Then I heard my brother.
“Oh, fer Christ’s sake,” he said disgustedly. A slim girl with long blonde hair bounded out of a neighboring house, and gave the driver of the car a hug. “That girl’s got ’em coming and going. I can’t keep track.”
“Show them your guns,” I said. “I bet it’ll cut down on the dating traffic.” Art and Micky looked slightly sheepish. Micky opened up the trunk again and took out the pistol cases.
A kid on a skateboard growled by. He had on hugely baggy pants and a black knit hat that made him look like a moron. But he spotted the guns easily enough. Micky saw him gawk and gestured to the house with his head.
“Let’s go inside.”
Any house with kids in it is littered with things big and small. Inside Micky’s, it looked like the footage you see of neighborhoods where tornadoes have touched down. It was dim in the entryway, and we skirted cautiously around the toys. Micky made a false step and we heard a loud crunching sound. He cursed under his breath.
The kitchen had some cups in the sink. A few Cheerios dried sadly on the table. Micky wiped it off with a ratty sponge and we sat down. My brother rummaged around in the refrigerator and found some cans of beer. I opened a series of cabinets, looking for snacks. I found Baggies, Pop-Tarts, Band-Aids, and other essential ammunition in the war for successful parenting. I finally located an open bag of pretzels on top of the refrigerator. Simple fare, but manly.
I looked at the two detectives. “You guys a little on edge for any reason?”
Micky shrugged. “Some guys are back on the street. It’s been years, but ya never know when someone with a grudge will show up.”
“Hell of a way to make a living, Mick,”
My brother took a sip of beer and closed one eye as he looked at me. “It’s a wonderful world.”
The two detectives drank silently. I knew that they had found something, but they didn’t seem particularly eager to share it. Yet I could pick up that sense of suppressed emotion cops have: men who had been disappointed too often to show much excitement, but it was there anyway.
I couldn’t stand it. “So what else have you found out?”
Art licked beer foam off his lips. “Well. We’re looking at Sakura’s business dealings, but there’s not much there. So we went back yesterday and worked some angles.”
“Angles?” I said.
He nodded. “We went back and spoke with the secretaries.”
I nodded back in appreciation. From my perspective at the university, these were the people who really knew what was going on.
“I thought you questioned them pretty good first time around,” I said.
“Yeah, we did,” Micky admitted. “But we mostly asked them about Sakura. His schedule. His day. So we went back.”
“And?” I said.
“OK,” brother said, warming to his topic. “The guy wasn’t really dong much at work anymore. Showed up one or two days a week. Mostly, the secretaries said, he was using the office to make calls, mail stuff. Things like that.”
“Can’t blame him,” Art said, remembering the place. “You should have seen the offices Sakura had, Connor. Nice. Corporate. And the people who show up there tend to fit that mold, too.”
“Riffraff tend to be kept down in the streets,” Micky agreed.
“How’d we get in?” Art wondered out loud.
Micky ignored him. “Well, anyway, I asked the receptionists if Sakura was up to anything else. You know, while he used the office.” He took another sip of beer and went on. “Now get this. He was obviously pretty well known for his skill in,” he looked up at me, “… you know…”
“Shodo,” I said.
“Yeah. He had started doing things with that. Appraisals. Some museum consulting. The day before the murder, he had sent some calligraphy off to another appraiser for a second opinion. I got the name and address from the FedEx receipt.”
“So what’s so special about it?” I asked. Micky didn’t react for a minute.
Then he looked at Art triumphantly, and held up a hand. “Same day as the murder, someone came to Sakura’s office. An Asian. Asking about some calligraphy he claimed the old man was looking at. You had to hear the receptionist describe this guy. She said he was spooky.”
“He have an accent?” I asked.
Micky nodded. “Yeah. His English was fluent, but accented. A big guy, she said. Huge. The guy said that the stuff was his property and he wanted it back. He got all worked up, she said. She got flustered and mentioned the FedEx. He told her that Sakura wasn’t authorized to send the document anywhere else. He almost blew a gasket.”
“So?” I said again.
“So,” Micky replied, “they gave him a Xerox of the receipt so he could track it down. To get rid of him.”
“Notice that he didn’t ask to call Sakura,” Art pointed out to me.
“Yeah. Like maybe he knew he wasn’t gonna be answering the phone anymore,” Micky concluded.
“Did he leave a name?”
“Wong,” Micky said.
“It’s a common name. Like Smith,” I said.
“And probably fake,” Art grunted.
“If I could get a look at this calligraphy, it might give us a motive,” I said.
“Ooh, good point. Sherlock,” Micky cracked. “So what’s the next question you’re gonna ask?”
“Well… where’d the package go?” I said.
“It got sent to Georgia,” Micky said.
The two cops talked for a while about the possibility of lifting some latent prints from the office that could match the crime scene. The dim likelihood of getting a positive ID. The mysterious Asian visitor. And the fact that someone would probably get to take a trip below the Mason-Dixon line to try to find the missing calligraphy.
“The South,” Micky complained.
“They say it’s gonna rise again,” Art offered.
“More than I can say for Sakura,” my brother concluded.
Yamashita hates crowds. He has trained for a long time to be able to spot the subtle muscular shifts that signal murderous intent. But if you put him in a room with a crowd of people, he gets antsy. The Japanese say that everything has
ki
, a type of energy that can be sensed if you’re good enough. And Yamashita certainly was. The more mystically minded would say he is so sensitive to the energy force people give off that he’s overwhelmed.
I was trying to be open to the whole invisible-world stuff, so I asked him about this issue with crowds and tried out the ki explanation. We were standing around after a training session. The students had bowed and shuffled away. Some nursed bruises. All were worn out. I held a wooden training sword in my hand. It was made of white oak and the handle was discolored from the sweat and grime that had been ground into it over the years. After a good workout, Yamashita seems pleased with the world, and is often more talkative than usual. As his senior student, he’s also a bit more forthcoming with me. So I brought up the issue.
His bald, bullet head swiveled to look at me. The brown eyes glittered faintly. You can never tell whether it’s amusement or the excitement of the hunt that does it. My master let me squirm for a moment and then replied.
“I like it. It is a colorful explanation. The intense ki of crowds.” He made a slight rumbling noise deep in his chest. It’s his version of a chortle. “If I were writing for one of the cheap magazines American martial artists consume so avidly, I would use your explanation, Professor.” He always calls me that, even though he knows I’m not a faculty member at the university. Sometimes I think it’s a mark of respect. Other days, I can’t be sure.
We walked over to the weapons rack, where I placed the
bokken
down. He smiled a little at me. “I assume your question is sincere?” It was a rhetorical question. He knew that I had learned a long time ago not to waste his time.
“So…” he began in the characteristic Japanese way. “It is true that crowds present a mix of sensations. Noise. Heat. Smell. Even, I suppose, ki. But ki is like smoke, Burke. When you try to grab hold, it eludes you.”
“Do you mean you can’t sense ki in crowds, Sensei?” I am a plodding student, but I persevere.
“Oh, the ki can be sensed. Certainly. It is there. Always. In crowds, there is ki in great abundance.”
“And is this upsetting to you?”
He looked at me sharply. “Upsetting?” As if the idea had never occurred to him. “I think, no. The problem with crowds has nothing to do with ki.”
“Then what is it, Sensei?”
“Burke,” he said as if to a child, “too many people, too many intentions. It has nothing to do with ki,” A student bowed as he left the training hall floor and Yamashita bowed forward a fraction in acknowledgement. “Crowds,” he said to me finally, “make it hard to see someone coming at you with a short weapon.”
My master is a mystic with unique perspectives.
Changpa Rinpoche was scheduled to speak at the American Museum of Natural History as part of the opening for a traveling display of Himalayan artifacts. I should have been struck by the coincidence, but then it dawned on me that Yamashita probably knew this before he gave me the lama’s book. He’s full of tricks.
What was interesting was my teacher’s urge to see the Tibetan. I spent some time trying to figure this out. There were commonalities here. They were both probably about the same age. Both men were outcasts of a type—adherents of strange and foreign practices far from home. They labored in a foreign land to bring insights to people not always capable of understanding them. There must be a type of isolation in this kind of life. And loneliness. So maybe Sensei was drawn to him for this reason. It made me think of Yamashita in a different way. But then, again, they were old friends.
I wrangled some VIP tickets from a friend who worked in the research department there. His parents were farmers on Long Island’s North Fork, past Riverhead: stocky, perpetually sunburned people who made an increasingly difficult living growing potatoes and flowers in the sandy soil of Long Island. Their son, the archaeologist, labored indoors, digging in different ways.
Yamashita and I arrived the night of the holy man’s lecture and, if Sensei were a child, he would have been bouncing up and down on his toes. He looked, of course, totally placid when we got off the B train at the 81st Street subway station, but I had been with him too long to be fooled. We made our way up to the first floor toward the theater they were using for Changpa’s lecture.
I love this museum. I’d been there countless times and never get tired of it. We walked through the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall—TR shot and donated much of the big game trophies here. Part of it may have been guilt, but maybe not. TR didn’t strike me as a guy with much self-doubt. Besides, his father had been one of the founders of the museum in the first place—a well-connected philanthropist probably responsible for getting Ulysses S. Grant to lay the cornerstone for the first museum building on the West Side.
But I could tell that Yamashita wasn’t really interested in the trivia I was sharing with him about the museum. He was anxious to see the Tibetan. And this revelation heightened my own curiosity about Changpa. So I guided him quickly through the exhibit halls. As we sat down in the packed auditorium, I began to ask Yamashita something. His hand came up. “Hush.” He was focused on his anticipation, enjoying it with a deep focus. Like a predator drowsing in the sun.
So I watched the crowd.
There was the usual mix of people: senior officials from the museum, a smattering of academics and graduate students. It was even rumored that the local real estate magnate who had largely funded the exhibit would attend. I wondered how a Tibetan monk would relate to that old gangster. The event had also drawn many people from the community: aficionados of things Asian. And others, some looking eager for enlightenment, others just looking for entertainment. It’s the lifelong bipolar condition of many Americans.
We sat on the end of one row toward the rear of the big room. Yamashita would put up with only so much, and he liked to be in a position that gave him some defensive options.
Changpa Rinpoche was ushered in with all the fuss of any prestigious visitor. He had been in the news lately, advocating for greater freedom for occupied Tibet and appearing at rallies outside the U.N. I suspected that the Chinese were not crazy about him. So I wasn’t surprised to notice that there were uniformed security guards as well as plainclothes people scanning the crowd. The audience was a typical jumble of voices and gestures, but I watched the mass of people with a seriousness not too different from that of the guards. My sensei’s habits are rubbing off on me.
Changpa was a teacher, a lama, dressed in the saffron and deep red robes of a Tibetan Buddhist monk. His title,
Rinpoche,
was an honorific meaning “Precious Jewel.” He was thicker than I had imagined, more energetic looking. It’s a bias, but I tend to picture noodley, pale bodies when I think about the effects of long periods of seated meditation. I’m sure I wasn’t alone—everyone expects him to be a clone of the Dalai Lama. But he wasn’t. He looked more like a wrestler—solid and competent. But he had the same calm, gentle look as his more famous colleague.
He mounted the stage to applause. A small platform with cushions had been set up for him to sit upon. A simple vase filled with flowers stood next to it, echoing the yellow and crimson of his robes. Behind him, a large banner with calligraphy hung down against the stage’s curtain.
“Can you read that?” I murmured to Yamashita. It looked like Sanskrit, with curves and angles and diacritical marks.