Linnear 01 - The Ninja (3 page)

‘I fell in love with the campus,’ he said, deciding to answer her by starting at the beginning. ‘Of course, it was the beginning of February, but I could imagine the red brick walkways lined with flowering magnolia and dogwood, quince in among the ancient oaks.

“The course itself - Sources of Oriental Thought - wasn’t really too bad at all. The students at least were inquisitive and, when awake, fairly bright - some of them startlingly so. They seemed surprised that I was interested in them.

‘I was curious about this, at first, but as the semester wore on, I came to understand what it was all about. The other professors giving the course had appallingly little time to devote to the students; they were extremely busy researching their latest books. And when they were actually teaching, they treated their students with contempt.

‘I remember sitting in on a class just after mid-term. Drs Eng and Royston, who taught the meat of the course, announced at the beginning of the session that the mid-term papers had been graded and were ready to be returned. Royston then proceeded to give his lecture. When the bell rang, Eng asked the students to remain seated and, with perfect precision, laid out four piles of papers on the floor at the front of the hall. “Those students with last names beginning with letters A through F will find their papers here,” he said, pointing to the pile on his right. And so on. Then they had both turned away and left the hall before the first students even had time to kneel, scrabbling through the piles.

‘It was degrading,’ Nicholas said. ‘That kind of lack of respect for another human being is something I just cannot tolerate.’

‘So you liked teaching.’

He thought that a curious thing to say. ‘I didn’t mind it.’ He made himself another gin and tonic, squeezed a section of lemon before dropping it into the ice-filled glass. ‘In the end it was the other professors who made the semester seem long to me. I don’t imagine they thought too much of me. After all, the halls of academe are rather closed. Everyone there is bound by the stringency of the situation. “Publish or perish” has become a cliché, I suppose. But for them it’s a reality which they must face every day.” He shrugged. ‘I imagine they resented my status. I had all the best parts of their life without any of the responsibilities.’

‘And Royston and Eng. What were they like?’

‘Oh, Royston was okay, I suppose. Rather stuffy in the beginning but-he thawed a bit later on. But Eng’ - he shook his head - ‘Eng was a bastard all right. He had made up his mind about me before we had-even been introduced. The three of us happened to he in the lounge one afternoon. “So you were born in Singapore,” he said. Just like that. Standing over me, peering down at me through his round wire-rimmed spectacles. That’s what they must have been; they were far too old-fashioned to be called glasses. He had a curious manner of speech, his words emerging clipped, almost frozen, so that you could imagine them hanging in mid-air like icicles. “A disgusting city, if you will pardon my saying so. Built by the British, who had no more regard for the Chinese than they did for the Indians.”’

‘What did you say?’

‘Frankly, I was too stunned to say much of anything,’ he said gloomily. ‘The bastard had hardly said two words to me all semester. He took me quite by surprise.’

‘You had no snappy rejoinder.’

‘Only that he was wrong. I was conceived there.’ He put down his glass. ‘I asked Dean Whoolson about it subsequently but he merely brushed it off. “Eng’s a -genius,” was how he put it. “And you know how that sort is sometimes. I must tell you, we are damn lucky to have him here. He almost went to Harvard but we snared him at the last moment. Convinced him of the superiority of our research facilities.” He patted me on the back as if I were the department mascot. “Who ever knows with Eng?” he said. “Perhaps he thought you were Malay. We all must make allowances, Mr Linnear.”’

‘I don’t understand that,’ Justine said. ‘You’re not Malay, are you?’

‘No, but if Eng thought I was, he might have reason to dislike me. The Chinese and the Malays were constantly at each other’s throats in the Singapore area. No love lost there.’

‘What are you?’ She seemed abruptly quite close to him, her eyes enormous and very luminous. ‘There’s an Asian hint in your face, I think. In your eyes perhaps, or in the height of your cheekbones.’

‘My father was English,’ he said. ‘A Jew who was forced to change his name so that he could get ahead in business and then, during the war, in the Army. He was a colonel.’

‘What was his name? Before he changed it, I mean.’

‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me. “Nicholas,” he said to me one day, “what’s in a name? The man who tells you that there is some significance in his name is a bare-faced liar.” ‘

‘But weren’t you ever curious about it?’

‘Oh yes. For a time. But after a while I gave up looking.’

‘And your mother?’

‘Ah. That would depend on whom you spoke to. She always maintained that she was pureblood. Chinese.’

‘But,’ Justine prompted.

‘But in all likelihood she was only half Chinese. The other half was probably Japanese.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that I was ever certain. It’s just that she seemed always to think like a Japanese.’ He smiled. ‘Anyway, I am a romantic and it’s far more exciting to think of her as a mixture. An unusual mixture given the mutual animosity historically between the two peoples. More mysterious.’

‘And you like mysteries.’

He watched the sweep of her dark hair, sliding across one cheek, hiding the eye with the crimson motes. ‘In a sense. . Yes.’

‘Your features are all Caucasian,’ she said, abruptly switching topics.

‘Yes,’ Nicholas said. ‘Physically I take after my father, the Colonel.’ He put his head back on the couch, his hair touching her outstretched fingers for a moment before she moved them back, curling them into a fist. He stared up at the patterned pools of light playing upon the ceiling. ‘Inside, though, I am my mother’s son.’

Doc Deerforth never looked forward to the summer. This was a curious thing, he thought, because it was invariably his busiest time. The influx from the city never ceased to astound him, the migratory pattern of almost the entire Upper East Side of Manhattan, as fixed and precise as the geese flying their arrowhead formations south in the winter.

Not that Doc Deerforth knew all that much about Manhattan, not these days, at least; he had not set foot in that madhouse in over five years and then it had been only to pay a brief visit to his friend Nate Graumann, New York City’s Chief Medical Examiner.

He was quite content to be out here. He had his daughters who, with their own families, visited him regularly - his wife had died of leukemia over ten years ago, turned to a faded photo - and his work as doctor in West Bay Bridge. Then there was his ancillary M.E. work for Flower at Hauppauge. They liked him there because he was thorough and inventive; Flower kept asking him if he would come to work for the Suffolk County M.E. but he was much too happy where he was. There were friends here, plentiful and warm but, most of all, he had himself. He found that, essentially, he was happy with himself. That did not stop the occasional nightmare, however, from creeping through like a clandestine burglar on the loose. He would still wake up, drenched in sweat, the damp sheets twisted clammily about his legs. Some nights he would dream of white blood but he dreamed of other things as well, dream symbols of his personal fright. At those times he would get up and pad silently into the kitchen, making himself a cup of hot cocoa, and would read, at random, from one of Raymond Chandler’s seven novels, finding within that spare inferential prose-style a kind of existential calm amid his private storm, and inside thirty minutes he had returned to sleep.

Doc Deerforth stretched, easing the ache that sat like a stuck pitchfork between his shoulder blades. That’s what comes of working all hours at my age, he thought. Still, he went over his findings once again. It was all there, black and white, the words piling together into sentences and paragraphs, but now he was seeing the meaning for the first time, as if he were an Egyptologist who had at last stumbled upon the Rosetta Stone.

Another routine drowning, he had thought, when they had called him out to Dune Road. Of course he did not mean that. The word routine had no place in his vocabulary. Life was the most precious thing in the world to him. But he need not have become a doctor to feel that way. Living through the war in the Pacific Theatre had been enough. Day after day, from his disarrayed jungle camp during the bitter fighting in the Philippines, he had seen the cascades of small one-man planes guided by their kamikaze pilots as they plunged headlong with 2,650 pounds of high explosives in their blunt noses into the American warships. The cultural chasm between East and West could be summed up by those aircraft, Doc Deerforth had always thought. The Japanese name for them was Oka - the cherry blossom. But the Americans called them baka - the idiot bomb. Western philosophical thought had no place for the concept of ritual suicide inherent in the Japanese samurai of old. But that was it, really. The samurai survived, despite all obstacles that had been put in his path. Doc Deerforth would never forget the haiku which, so the story went, had been written by a twenty-two-year-old kamikaze pilot just before his death; this, too, was tradition: ‘If only we might fall
Like cherry blossoms in the spring -
So pure and radiant!’ And that, he thought, was how the Japanese felt about death. The samurai was born to the a glorious death in battle.

And all I wanted was for the war to end with my skin intact and my mind unbent.

And it had come to pass, except for the nightmares that haunted him like hungry vampires newly risen from the grave.

Doc Deerforth got up from behind his desk and went to the window. Beyond the fluted layers of the oak leaves that shaded this side of the house from the long afternoon’s heat, he saw the expanse of Main Street. Just another weekday in the summer. But that world now seemed a million miles away, as remote as the surface of another planet.

Doc Deerforth turned back into his office and, scooping up the manila folder and its contents, went out of the house, down Main Street towards the one-storey ugly red brick building housing the Fire Department and, beyond a courtyard parking lot, the Village Police.

Half way there, he ran into Nicholas, who was just coming out of the automated doors of the supermarket loaded down with groceries.

‘Hello, Nick.’

‘Hey, Doc. How are you?’

Tine. Fine. Just on my way to see Ray Florum.’ They had met, as most residents of West Bay Bridge did eventually, along this same Main Street, introduced by mutual acquaintances. It was difficult here, even for the most devoutly reclusive, not to make friends even if they were only of the ‘Howdy’ variety. ‘Just got back from Hauppauge.’

‘That body they found yesterday?’

‘Yeah.’ Doc Deerforth turned his head quickly, spat out a bit of food that had lodged itself between his teeth. He was glad of this diversion. He felt a genuine fear of confronting Florum with what he had. Besides, he liked Nicholas. ‘Hey, you might’ve known him. Didn’t live too far from you along Dune Road.’

Nicholas smiled thinly. ‘Not very likely -‘

‘Braughm’s his name. Barry Braughm.’

Nicholas felt a queer sense of vertigo for just a moment and he thought of Justine’s words on the beach the day she had run into him. You know how incestuous this place is. She couldn’t know how right she was.

‘Yes,’ Nicholas said slowly. ‘I knew him. When I was in advertising, we worked together at the same agency.’ ‘Say, I’m sorry, Nick. Did you know him well?’

Nicholas thought about that for a time. Braughm had had a brilliantly analytical mind. He knew the public perhaps better than anyone at the agency. What a shock to find him suddenly gone. ‘Well enough,” he said, thoughtfully.

Swinging her around. Slow-dancing into the night, the screen door bang open, the record player sending the music rolling in languorous ribbons, drowning the tide. Moving in stereo. Her arms had trembled when he had first taken them, guiding her out onto the porch. But it was the right thing to do. The perfect thing. She loves to dance, first off. And it was perfectly acceptable for him to hold her this way, even though, quite clearly, rock was sex and dancing was, subliminally, the same thing. What matter? She would dance.

She shadows me in the mirror And never leaves on the light…

In giving herself up to the rhythms she was sensual, a kind of glossy exoskeleton dissolving at her feet, unearthing an ardour rich with substantive and elemental fury.

Some things that I say to her They just don’t seem to bite…

It was as if the music had freed her somehow of her chains, of her wounds - inhibitions was a word with far too few ramifications to serve the situation - of her fear, not of him, not of any man, but of herself.

She says leave it to me

And everything will be all right.

With her shoulder touching his and the music filling another room, she said, ‘I grew up reading. At first it was anything I could get my hands on. While my sister, always so good with people, was out on dates, I would be gulping down one book or another. Curiously, that didn’t last long. I mean, I kept on reading but I quickly became quite discriminating in what I read.’ She laughed, a rich happy sound that surprised him in its wholeheartedness. ‘Oh, I had my phases, yes indeed! The Tremayne dog books and then Howard Pile - I adored his

Robin Hood. One day, when I was about sixteen, I discovered de Sade. It was rather forbidden reading then and therefore exciting. But beyond that, I was struck by much of his writing. And then I had this fantasy that that was the reason my parents had named me Justine. However, when I was older and asked my mother about it, she said, “Well, you know, it was just a name that your father and I liked.” It must have appealed to her Continental leanings, I imagine; she was French, you see. But then, oh how I washed that I had never asked her! My fantasy was so much better than the reality of it. Well, what can you expect? They were both banal.’