“Different people find different things in the arts,” I finally commented. It was something I had thought a great deal about. “Competence. Control. Balance. Belonging…”
“It is like a really specialized club,” Sarah said, shaking her head as if in amazement. “Or a family…”
“Sure,” I told her. “The people who stay in it are probably attracted for a constellation of reasons. The physical aspect is important…”
“It’s almost addicting,” she said. “I know that if I skip kyudo practice, I feel out of sorts for days.”
“That’s a good thing,” I told her. “I knew that I was finally getting into training when I would go even when I was sick. And it would make me feel better.” I saw her looking at me with a puzzled expression. “Well,” I finished, “at least it feels good when it stops.”
“But it’s not just the physical stuff, is it Burke?” she pursued hopefully.
“No,” I had to admit, “it’s not. You were probably closer to the mark when you spoke about family and belonging.”
“Is that important for you?” she said.
I shrugged in acknowledgment. “I come from a big family, so belonging to something like that comes natural.”
“Belonging and approval,” she said.
I looked at her. Her face was open and relaxed, and if she knew just how strong a chord she had struck, she gave no evidence of it. “Big family,” I shrugged, “you learn to do things to get noticed.”
“The same thing with college life, I bet,” she commented. Sarah set her elbow on the table and rested her chin in a hand. Her eyes were wide and brown. She waited.
We had
miso
soup while I told her just how weird life at the university could be. Of how hard it is to be accepted there. People outside the academy are often surprised. I think they fantasize a red brick and ivy universe where nerdy people with bad glasses band together, lost in deep thoughts.
Many of my colleagues are lost, but in more profound ways. I sometimes think that advanced education is a bad thing. For many people, the effect of knowing so many different facts about life is that they are powerless to choose a path for themselves with any confidence. It makes them distracted and cranky. So the image I have of academia is one of a place filled with tremendously bright, insecure people. They do have bad glasses. And atrocious people skills. They are distracted, yet vicious when aroused. At Dorian, the nerds had filed teeth, like cannibals.
Sarah’s eyes got wider. “I guess it must make going to the dojo a relief.”
“Yeah, it is. At least until Yamashita starts putting you through your paces.”
She brightened at the mention of his name. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like him.” She paused and then added, “OK, maybe with the exception of Changpa Rinpoche. Interesting that they knew each other before coming to New York.”
“Sensei is a remarkable man,” I said. “He’s just full of surprises.” And there must have been some expression on my face I wasn’t aware of.
“You’ve got mixed feelings,” she said with certainty. “You care for him a great deal, but there’s also strain, right?” she asked.
I pushed my soup away. “We’ve been through… a lot.”
“So I gather,” Sarah said. “Changpa Rinpoche thinks very highly of your teacher. He also says that not all self-knowledge is pleasant to gain.”
It was true enough, but I was pretty tired of hearing it. Sarah must have sensed that. She sipped her wine in the sudden awkward silence. She set her glass down and reached out with her hashi, setting the last dumpling carefully on my plate. She concentrated hard on managing the chopsticks, and a pink tip of tongue appeared in the corner of her mouth. “Good things come to those who wait,” she told me. I smiled and she smiled back.
“How do you like working with Yamashita?” I asked, diverting the subject away from me. I knew that my sensei had taken her under his wing and was working to invest her archery with some of the contained ferocity he taught to those of us training with the sword.
Our entrees came, and the pause gave her some time to think. “Remarkable,” she finally said. “You think you’re finally getting the hang of something, and he peels back a layer and shows you something else. Something new…”
I grinned ruefully and nodded. “With Yamashita Sensei, there’s always something more to learn. But,” I said, “he seems to reveal things on his schedule, not yours.”
“So you develop patience?”
I paused, and for a moment it was as if I were back in the dojo with my teacher, looking at his scrolls. “Sometimes he drives me crazy,” I admitted. “But sometimes… you get a glimpse of something…” I trailed off. Sarah smiled and patted my hand.
We got down to serious eating then. I managed not to embarrass myself. I grew up in the same place where my brother Micky learned to eat. At times, we can exhibit something the really polite might call gustatory avidity.
Eventually, Sarah and I got back on the topic of the murder investigation.
“So what do you think is going on here?” she asked. “I mean, is it OK for you to tell me?”
I waved her concern away. “I’ve got to talk about it with someone. I keep coming up with dead ends when I try to see a motive. My brother the detective tends to favor some kind of direct motive. He thinks it’s got to be something that’s either a personal grudge or maybe connected with money…”
“The source of all evil,” Sarah commented.
“Filthy lucre,” I agreed. But they haven’t been able to come up with anything.”
“Could it have been valuable?”
“We don’t think so. Sakura seems to have shipped it off for a second opinion to this guy Hoddington…”
“The second victim?”
I nodded. “Right. But the package wasn’t insured like something that was valuable.”
“Value is relative,” Sarah said. “I mean, look at what you do with Yamashita. From a purely economic perspective, it’s a waste of time.” I took a breath to speak and she held up her hand. “I know, I know, I’m just making a point here.” I settled down and she continued. “It’s valuable to you for different reasons.” I nodded. “So maybe it’s the same with the calligraphy Sakura had.”
“That’s the thing I’m trying to figure out,” I told her. “I know that the written word has tremendous significance in Asian culture. Partially, it’s just the result of the effort it takes to master a non-phonetic system. You’ve got to memorize something like twenty thousand characters to be literate. Plus they’ve got this whole aesthetic dimension to handwritten documents.”
“But that’s not it, is it?” She said. Sarah was a pretty smart person.
“No,” I admitted. “Sakura had found something in whatever he was examining that didn’t seem right to him, so he wanted Hoddington’s advice. From the phone records, it’s obvious to me they also spoke about it. But I don’t know what they were looking at and why it’s so important to someone. And there aren’t many people who spoke with Hoddington right before he was killed.”
I told her about sifting through his papers. And the photographs that were taken during his last days. “From what you say about the background in the pictures, it sounds like he was at some kind of target range. I’d like to get a look at them,” she said.
Which is how we ended up at my apartment. Micky had given me copies of some of the documents from Georgia that I needed to study. I had them spread out on the big banged-up wooden table I garbage-picked when Dorian re-did its library reading room. I’d been making a tally of items on a pad of long yellow legal paper, but hadn’t made much headway. Micky drew the line at copying the crime scene report, but he had gotten the negatives of Hoddington’s snapshots and made extra copies for me.
“Here,” I said to Sarah.
She went through them quickly, nodding with certainty. “This is a
matoba
, she said, “the target house for an outdoor kyudo range.”
“I couldn’t be sure,” I told her.
Sarah shook her head as she thought. “Sure. Really good dojos have outdoor shooting ranges like this one. Look,” she said, tracing significant points with a slim finger, “you can see the
azuchi
behind the target—the clay bank that stops the arrows. And look at the target in the picture…” It was a white circular target, and the only mark was a red dot in the center. “This is a classic
hoshi mato
.”
“A star target?” I asked, doing the translation.
“Yep, that’s what they call them. The other type used is the
kasumi mato.
It looks like the standard bull’s-eye. Anyway,” she said, getting back to the matter at hand, “this snapshot was taken from the shooting hall of a pretty good archery dojo.”
“Not many of them down South,” I ventured.
“Not many anywhere in this country,” she said. “It should narrow things down for you considerably.” I made a note on my pad while she shuffled the pictures around. “As a matter of fact, at least one of these people looks vaguely familiar…” She thought for a minute. “I wish I had my book here.”
“What book?”
She smiled. “
Fundamentals of Kyudo
. All the students have it.”
I went over to a bookcase and pulled it out. “Here,” I said sheepishly. Sarah looked at me in surprise.
“Branching out, Burke?”
I shrugged. “Well, it seems important to you, so I thought I’d take the time to learn about it.” As I handed the book to her, Sarah gave me a wry smile.
“How nice,” she said.
But she was still focused on the issue at hand. I guess for an archer, a target is hard to let go of. She found one of the snap-shots that showed Hoddington with a group of people. Then she began paging through the book.
“Ha!” Sarah said. “I knew that face looked familiar.” She opened the book to me and I saw a photo of a Caucasian archer working under the tutelage of an older Japanese man. “Hoddington knew the author of this book.”
“Robert Marinaro? You’re kidding,” I said.
“The community of kyudoka is pretty small. Marinaro’s pretty well known because of the book.” She flipped to the back flap, where a brief blurb told you about the author. “You see?”
The blurb told me that, in addition to his mastery of Japanese archery, Marinaro had a master’s degree in Asian Studies. From the University of Georgia.
“You are the best,” I said. She smiled brightly. We were close together by the table, and I leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the lips.
She moved her hand, and the photos spilled to the floor. Sarah quickly bobbed down to get them, and the small motions of collecting the scattered pictures had a grace to them that was an echo of her actions in kyudo. She handed them over without a word, looking at me with a slight flush in her cheeks.
A warm tension hung in the air around us, the vibration of things left uncompleted. “Sarah,” I started.
She swallowed. “I know,” she said quietly, but with an odd hesitation in her voice. “Let’s take things a little bit at a time, OK?”
The she touched me lightly on the chest, a gentle pressure, and looked significantly at the pictures in my hand. I let out a quiet sigh and turned for the phone. I needed to get in touch with Micky and Art before someone else made the same connection Sarah just had.
It’s not unusual in a dojo for a new student to seek out a more advanced person to guide him. The
sempai
, or senior, is supposed to look out for the new student, the
kyohai
. The relationship is typically one that forms spontaneously. It’s rare that a teacher goes out of his way to create one. But Yamashita had made a promise to Changpa to assist with Stark’s training. And, in turn, the lama would work with me in my spare time between trying to solve mysteries and getting jumped on city streets. But my teacher made it quite clear that I was responsible for Stark. A promise had been given to the Rinpoche. It was my obligation to see that it was fulfilled.
And I had to admit that Stark was good. He had the knack, the inborn kinesthetic sense of the natural athlete. It took years of hard training for me to get to where I was. Stark had an easy connection with his body that made his acquisition of technique seem almost effortless. You watched carefully in the first few lessons to see the potential in new students. It was clear from his style of movement, even at this relatively early stage in training, that Stark had tremendous potential.
Stark had told me that he was dan ranked in kendo and jujutsu, and that he hoped to study extensively with the elusive Kita. And what I saw as Stark practiced with us was an individual whose innate potential had permitted him to advance quickly. But if there was promise here, there was also imperfection. His training had lacked some of the subtleties I had come to expect from working with Yamashita. Stark was all excitement and power. He projected a spiky, unsettling energy. It was both impressive and vaguely troubling at the same time.
He also lacked humility.
Stark was fine when Yamashita was around, subdued and pliant, but he pulled no punches with me: “Look, Burke,” he murmured at one point during the Sunday training session, “I’ve been around a while, you know? Yamashita’s got a good reputation, but come on…” He was obviously skeptical. “The real reason I’m here is to keep an edge on while I wait for the call from Master Kita.”
The real reason you’re here is because the Rinpoche pleaded for you
, I thought. His attitude would make for a tough time between the two of us. I was supposed to shepherd him through training, but I wondered whether he could learn. Someone like Stark was so focused on himself that he would be deaf to the lessons his teachers presented. And part of me was aware of the subtle parallels between the two of us in this regard. But you couldn’t really make the comparison, I reassured myself. Then I swallowed my annoyance. I looked at Stark when he made the comment and said, “Well, stick around. You may learn something from Yamashita Sensei.”
Stark smirked. “We’ll see. So far, you guys don’t seem to do much of the bang and crunch.” He stretched his broad chest. “That’s what I’m into.”
I looked down at my hands and stretched them a little. When you tensed them just right, my muscles ache with the memory of old wounds. “You ever heard of humility, Stark?” I told him. “You may learn some here.”