Linnear 01 - The Ninja (13 page)

‘This I have no doubt you already know. But what you arc not aware of and what I tell you now is that, of them all, it is your mind alone which has cleaved most closely to my own. This has touched me deeply, for it has happened naturally, with no urging from myself. It is what you yourself wanted and what you now possess.

‘Now, on the point of our last farewell - for I fear that we shall never see each other again - this is for you, for your Colonel, for your child about to be born, for your children yet to be conceived. This I give you gladly, with all my love. It comes from me, from Chia Sheng, from the long line of our families. In all the world there is only one. And its contents, too, are the sole sentinels, their like not to be found in any quarter of the globe. This is my legacy. Use it as you may.’ His old hands, their long fingers, over which the skin was stretched like patented parchment, extended, pushing the box slowly across the table until it passed over the centre meridian. At that point, as if they no longer wielded any power, they relinquished their hold, withdrawing over the empty red expanse of the table to the old man’s lap.

The Colonel, holding Cheong’s trembling hand in his, stared into So-Peng’s eyes. He meant to say something but, whirling upon itself, his mind paralysed his tongue and there he sat, on the near side of the table, as if in a world apart, watching a man who was obviously as important as he was mysterious, not knowing who he was, what he did or why he might be so important, yet, despite that, understanding it all for the first time.

Both the Colonel and Cheong fell in love with the house and its grounds in the suburbs beyond Tokyo. MacArthur had, perhaps quite properly, requested that the Colonel find suitable lodgings within the city proper, to be more accessible to his work. However, he could find no such place, at least none that could satisfy both him and Cheong.

Thus they travelled outside of the city and, almost immediately, came across the house. It was in an area that had, miraculously, escaped the destruction that had devastated fully half of the city and much of the outlying suburbs.

It lay on the eastern verge of an enormous forest of cryptomeria and pine within which the Shinto temple blossomed like some other-worldly flora whose grace of design, quiescence and natural humility instantly bewitched the Colonel’s mind, speaking to him more eloquently than even the country’s finest speakers the eternalness and dignity of the Japanese spirit. And always when he came in sight of it he thought of So-Peng.

No one knew who had inhabited the house before the Colonel and Cheong moved in, not even Ataki, the wizened old gardener. It had been there, abandoned, for years, he had told the Colonel, though he had come faithfully every day to tend the grounds, and time had dimmed remembrance. Perhaps, the Colonel thought with a certain degree of resignation, he just did not want to say. In any event, it was now the Colonel’s.

The formal garden in front of the house was breathtaking, complete with complexly flowering bonsai trees and a shallow stone pool filled with blue-eyed goldfish with • fins like fine, gossamer veils (the Colonel quickly bought a tank, setting it up in the kitchen, one of the house’s few Westernized rooms, for their warm winter’s sojourn).

In the back of the house was another kind of garden altogether, a Zen pebble rectangle with four jutting rocks placed at significant points by the original artist within the uniform expanse, looking, the Colonel thought, like islands jutting from beneath a perfectly calm sea. However, Nicholas pointed out, when he was old enough to speak, they were most surely mountain peaks rising above a cloudbank: this comment much to the delight of both the Colonel and Cheong. But in any event, the Zen garden was, ironically enough, a place of perfect peace and meditation in a country half-dead, mutilated and charbroiled, struggling now towards a new kind of survival.

Nicholas adored the house and the grounds with an unquenchable passion. He was drawn, over and over, to the Zen garden, where Cheong would often find him sitting thoughtfully, head held in his hands, gazing out over the stark serenity of the rising rocks amid the precisely arranged pebbles. After a time it would be the first place she would look for him.

Nicholas could never decide whether he loved the garden best when he was alone there or when Ataki would come with his water and his rake - to keep the earth beneath from drying out and to make certain that the pebbles were properly aligned -for he adored both the intense solitude of the place (‘It’s like,’ he told the Colonel once, ‘you can hear your soul breathing’) and watching the old man’s preciseness and deft economy of movement with the pebbles, which were worn so smooth that Nicholas firmly believed that their origin must have been some point on the island’s shoreline, for only the constant action of a motion-filled sea could create such stupendous smoothness.

It appeared to Nicholas that the old man’s motions were so utterly effortless that he scarcely seemed to expend any physical energy at all. When he was perhaps six he had asked Ataki how it was he moved the way he did, and when the old man answered with one word, ‘bujutsu’, Nicholas went to the Colonel straightway to ask him what it meant. It was no good badgering Ataki, for he would only tell you what he wanted you to know.

‘Bujutsu,’ the Colonel said, putting down his cup of tea and folding lengthwise the newspaper he had been absorbed in dissecting, ‘means, collectively, all the martial arts of Japan.’

‘Then,’ Nicholas said clearly, ‘I want to learn bujutsu.’

The Colonel regarded his son. He had learned quite quickly that Nicholas never said anything lightly and that now, if he said that he wanted to learn bujutsu, he was quite prepared to take it on; superfluous for the Colonel to tell him how arduous a task it was likely to be.

The Colonel got up from the table and, putting his arm around his son’s shoulders, opened the shoji - sliding paper and wood walls - so that they could walk outside together.

They stood by the edge of the Zen garden but Nicholas noticed, on looking up at his father, that the Colonel seemed to have fixed his gaze far beyond its border, indeed, beyond even the last boundary of their land, to the rising green swords of the cryptomeria forest.

‘Do you know, Nicholas,’ the Colonel said in a rather floating voice, ‘that within the perimeter of the Shinto temple at the centre of the forest lies a park - a small one, mind you - that is said to contain forty different species of moss?’

‘I’ve never been there,’ Nicholas said. ‘Will you take me?’

‘Perhaps one day,’ the Colonel replied, his heart aching, for he knew that there was never enough time and he was here to do a job, a monstrous, bloody, awful job that, nevertheless, needed to be done and, furthermore, needed him to get it done right; these years had been more than enough to grind down a man of lesser courage and perseverance than the Colonel. But each time his tired mind seemed on the verge of faltering, he would recall So-Peng and his son, encompassed in the same thought, and he would go on, through another long night and the subsequent longer day until the weekend came and it would begin all over again. ‘But I have never seen that park either, Nicholas. Few save the Shinto priests of that temple have viewed it.’ The Colonel took some time now before he continued. ‘What I mean to say is that you wish to go where few nowadays would wish to go - and there are many specializations.’

‘I wish only to start at the beginning, Father. That is not so much to ask, is it?’ Nicholas looked up again.

‘No,’ the Colonel said, tightening his grip upon his son’s shoulders. ‘Not too much.’ He thought for a moment, his lean face wrinkled along the firm brow. ‘I tell you what,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll speak to your aunt about it, all right?’

Nicholas nodded, his gaze lowering from his father’s face to the mountains thrusting blindly out of the clouds.

The person to whom the Colonel had referred was, in fact, Itami. Nicholas, knowing her origin, had never really considered her his aunt. Perhaps, after all, this was because he had disliked her for as long as he could remember, and having once formulated this opinion, could never get himself unstuck from it.

It would be no great surprise to learn that his instinctual dislike of her was only an offshoot of how he reacted to the presence of her husband, Satsugai. In a boy who, from birth, had been taught to attain within himself a calmness of spirit, like a cool guiding stream, it was most disconcerting to come in close contact with Satsugai. He felt, at those times, like an ineffectual moon whirled about by the proximity of a nova. Great turbulent currents, powerful eddies, disturbed his tranquillity, and this inability to return to a semblance of inner balance until Satsugai had left frightened him.

On the other hand, his aunt in no way created the same effect on him. She was an exceedingly small and delicately boned woman, beautiful though, in Nicholas’s opinion, the perfect symmetry of her face could not compare to his mothers features.

Itami always wore formal Japanese attire. She was constantly attended by servants. Her diminutive size made all the more fascinating her rather charismatic nature. She was, the Colonel had told him, a member of one of Japan’s greatest and oldest houses, of the bushi class. She was a samurai lady. She had been married to Satsugai for eleven years and he, as far as Nicholas knew, was a wealthy and influential businessman.

Then there was Itami’s son, Saigo. He was a year older than Nicholas, a large burly boy with deep brooding eyes and a cruel and calculating disposition. He spent much time with his father but, on the many occasions when the two families assembled, it was inevitable that Nicholas and Saigo should be thrown together.

It seemed to Nicholas that the other boy hated him almost on sight. Why this should be so he could not imagine. Not until much later. But then he reacted as any boy in any part of the world might to such unadulterated hostility. He returned measure for measure.

It was, of course, Satsugai who had put Saigo up to it. This knowledge, when it came to him, only increased Nicholas’s hatred and fear of the man. But then it was also Saigo who introduced Nicholas to Yukio. As it is said, all things in life balance themselves out.

Don’t they?

Second Ring

THE WIND BOOK

I

New York City\West Bay Bridge, Summer Present

When the man with the mirrored aviator sunglasses emerged from the depths of Pennsylvania Station on the Seventh Avenue side he did not look around him; nor did he walk immediately to the kerb, as did most of his fellow passengers, to wave a raised hand to hail a cruising taxi.

Instead, he waited dutifully for the light to change and, when it did, went quickly across the avenue, ignoring the light rain. By the way he walked and, perhaps because of the rather long black duffel bag slung obliquely across his muscular shoulder, one might have thought he was a professional dancer; he moved as effortlessly and as gracefully as the wind.

He wore a short-sleeved navy silk shirt and cotton slacks of the same deep blue, charcoal-grey suede shoes with -almost no heel and soles as dun as paper. His face was rather wide; deep lines were scored downwards from each side of his mouth as if he had never learned how to smile. His black hair was cut short and brisly.

On the east side of Seventh Avenue he went by the crowded facade of the Statler Hilton Hotel, crossed Thirty-second Street and, passing up the green and white awning of the Chinatown Express, ducked into the McDonald’s next door.

Inside, he went swiftly through the garish yellow and orange interior to a line of telephone booths along one wall. At the side of the extreme left-hand booth was a row of telephone, directories encased in steel bindings to discourage theft and vandalism. They hung down in a stand waist-high like quiescent bats in a cave.

The man in the sunglasses pushed up the Yellow Pages book. Its cover was torn and defaced and the bottom edges of a large hunk of the centre pages were mutilated as if someone had attempted to eat them. He leafed through the book until he came to the section he wanted. He ran one forefinger down the page. Near the bottom, it stopped and the man nodded to himself. He already knew the address but, out of long habit, liked to double-check his information.

Once more outside, he recrossed the avenue, walking west at a brisk pace along the width of the Madison Square Garden complex, and caught an uptown bus on Eighth Avenue. It was crowded. He stood in the hot and airless interior. The bus smelled of stale sweat and mildew.

At the Seventy-fourth Street stop he swung off and walked up one block. There he turned off Central Park West and headed west towards the Hudson River. The rain had ceased for the moment but the sky remained clpse and dark, as if hung over from a long night of revelry. The air was completely calm. The city steamed.

He found the address approximately midway between Columbus Avenue and Broadway on the nordi side of the street. His nostrils flared for an instant as he mounted the steps of the brownstone. He opened the glass and wood outer doors and stepped into the tiny vestibule. Before him was a modern steel and wire glass door securely locked. There was a buzzer on the wall of the vestibule which he pushed firmly. Just above it was a discreet brass plate on which was etched TOHOKU NO DOJO and, above that, a small oval speaker grille.

‘Yes?’ came a tinny voice from the grille.

The man with the sunglasses leaned slightly to the side. ‘I wish an appointment,’ he said.

He waited, one hand already on the knob of the inner door.

‘Please come up. Second floor. Around to the left as far as you can go.’

The door buzzed and he pushed it open.

He could smell the tang of sweat, tinged with the piquant spices of exertion and fear. For the first time since setting foot in the city, he felt at home. Contemptuously, he tossed this feeling aside. He went swiftly and silently up the carpeted stairs.

Terry Tanaka was on the phone to Vincent when Eileen came up to him. Seeing the look in her eyes, he asked Vincent to hold the line and, putting his palm over the phone, said, ‘What is it, Ei?’