Linnear 01 - The Ninja (56 page)

It became time to try something else and he slashed upwards with his kneecap, heard Saigo’s grunt and, almost simultaneously, a soft metallic click in front of his face. Saw a small blade, glinting in the moonlight, standing out like a deadly toothpick from between Saigo’s first and second finger knuckles. A conjurer’s trick. But it was no illusion. He turned his head away as the blade moved infinitesimally towards his eye. There was a peculiar odour and his nostrils flared briefly. Then it was gone and he was concentrating on stepping up the pressure of his forearm against the hand with the blade. He pushed upwards, using all the available leverage. Sweat had broken out along the line of his hair and now it drooled with cruel slowness down his forehead threatening to blur his vision.

But the deadlock was breaking as, bit-by-bit, he brought the hand backwards, away from him. Then he was free and on his feet. His chest heaved with the intense exertion of the past few moments. He staggered a little, waiting for Saigo to stand. When he did, Nicholas attacked, but perhaps the blow to his collarbone affected him more than he had thought because he was just a little off balance and, as Saigo countered his thrust, he seemed to take an inordinately long time to react.

Now Saigo was at him, seeming faster than ever before. Barely he was able to deflect a fork-strike, but he failed to counter a sword-strike to his neck.

He went down then in a heap. Coughing and gasping, he could not seem to fill his lungs with air. On his back, he saw Saigo standing over him, grinning, as if he knew there would be no more resistance.

Tried to stand up but he had no legs. He used his hand, raised them. Or thought he did; no feeling there, either. He blinked several times, unbelieving. Trapped within a useless body. He glanced down. His hands lay like pale flowers, part of another world. He felt the pounding of his heart unnaturally loud in his inner ear. But that was all.

Saigo bent over him, a sardonic smile on his face. ‘Did you think I came unprepared this time?’ he said, almost amiable, as one friend to another. ‘No, it has all been planned from the very beginning. Yes, Nicholas, even down to Yukio’s involvement. She knew about it all. In fact, some of this was her idea. Surprised?’

Nicholas could only open and close his mouth soundlessly like a fish dying of the air. His tongue worked like an idiot’s. No, he thought wildly. No, no, no. It’s a lie. It must be.

‘Well, you shouldn’t be. Didn’t I tell you she was a whore? Surely she told you we were lovers. Yes, I thought so.’

He turned away and in the half-light Nicholas saw him reach over towards the bed. He grasped Yukio’s sleeping form, dragged her across the counterpane. A lamp in front of Nicholas went on and he blinked slowly while his eyes adjusted to the glare. Like having the sun in his eyes. Yukio! he cried out silently. Yukio!

Saigo had her sitting up now. He had a small capsule in his hand. He broke it in half, waved it under her nose. Her head went back and he followed with the capsule. She shook her head from side to side as if wanting to get away from the expelled contents.

Her eyes came open and her features arranged themselves in a slow, sensual, slavish smile. Her arms came up around Saigo’s shoulders. He kissed her roughly and her lips opened like a flower. Yukio!

Careful to continually stay within Nicholas’s line of sight, Saigo caressed her. He rubbed her breasts so that her nipples stood out hard and quivering. He spread her legs, rubbed her there. Yukio began to pant. His fingers came away wet.

He turned her over, bending her across the bed. Her buttocks were pale globes in the harsh light. He dropped his black silk pants. They puddled around his ankles. Spreading her thighs,

he rummaged again, anointing his phallus. Then he rammed himself into her anus.

Yukio cried out as he moved on her flesh. From his vantage point Nicholas could see the reddened member sliding in and out. He tried to close his eyes but the gruntings and pantings overwhelmed him, pummelling his brain until his eyes flew open in self-preservation.

Yukio’s arms were flung out over her head, her fingers clutching convulsively at the counterpane, drawing it up into bunched, sweaty hillocks. Her eyes were squeezed shut. Her thighs writhed against the bed, pressing her mound down in time to Saigo’s thrusts.

All at once, she gave a cry. The counterpane shredded between her frenzied fingers and her thighs drew up convulsively and she shuddered powerfully.

At that moment, Saigo withdrew and a tiny moan of disappointment escaped her lips. His reddened member flicked upward at every pulse.

Saigo bent over Nicholas, flipped him over. It was only then that-Nicholas understood the true nature of what was happening.

He felt the first burning penetration, heard Saigo’s heavy grunt, felt the great weight of him upon his shoulders and buttocks, coming into him again and again like the tide.

The Colonel returned home quite late.

He sat for a long time behind the wheel of his car smoking his pipe, thinking of nothing. It seemed like days since he had smoked it last and he savoured the mellow bite of the dark tobacco on the back of his tongue and against the roof of his mouth. He thought he might want a drink in a little while.

The moon was a dim smudge low on the horizon, ready to rest for the night. Whatever remained of it. The Colonel slowly rolled up his side window, preparatory to getting out, but he was abruptly suffused with a curious kind of lethargy that left him incapable for the moment of taking any action no matter how minuscule.

I suppose that is to be expected, he thought.

He looked towards the darkened house and he thought of Cheong asleep on the futon. How he cherished her. How he had failed her. And himself. And especially Nicholas. He had done the only possible thing but he knew that it was far from enough. He had bolloxed it long ago. Tonight just took some of the sting out of it for him.

What he thought of now was lying to Cheong. He had never done that before and he had no strong desire to do it now. Still, there was no help for it; he understood all too well the consequences of the alternative.

At last he climbed out of the car, shut the door behind him with a soft thunk. The night seemed terribly still.

He went silently around to the side of the house, found the small pile of leaves Ataki had left for the morning’s burning. Kneeling down, he set it to flame, listening meditatively to the crisp crackle, inhaling the pungent odour.

He stared into the fire. Odd what one remembers, he thought, in times like these. Like a submarine suddenly surfacing, the memory came to him of the bright summer afternoon when he had been locked in the crucial meeting with Prime Minister Yoshida, debating the specific consequences of the Korean War with John Foster Dulles, General Bradley and Defence Secretary Johnson. Dulles was in Tokyo because among the first American troops being sent into Korea were those who had been occupying Japan since 1945. But that left the bases and approximately a quarter of a million U.S. dependants left unprotected in Japan. The Americans were, of course, against this and they proposed the commencement of a Japanese military. It was a bombshell proposal because such a force would be in direct violation of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution written in 1947: ‘Land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.’

In the best of American traditions, Johnson assailed Dulles’s stance and the P.M. reacted negatively to Dulles’s plea for Japanese remilitarization. However, it was clear that something had to be done. The Colonel proposed that the existing Japanese, police force be expanded to approximately 75,000 men, calling it a National Police Reserve. ‘We will have an effective army i without having to call it mat,’ the Colonel had said.

For Dulles, of course, this was not enough, but Yoshida, seeing that the Colonel had given him a way out without any loss | of face, readily agreed. The plan would have to be, by definition,

Top Secret. Even the recruits, Yoshida insisted, must not know the true purpose for which they were being trained.

The P.M. then set up the Annex of Civil Affairs Section within the existing bureaucracy to be responsible for recruitment and training, and an American officer was put in charge.

Afterwards, Yoshida had asked the Colonel to remain. Tension still laced the room like rancid fruit and the P.M. suggested they take a walk in his gardens.

‘I owe you a great debt of thanks,’ he had said after the usual amount of conversational courtesies which, even in such a signal situation, could not be ignored.

‘The problem is, sir, that the Americans still do not understand us.’ He saw Yoshida glance sideways at him. ‘Perhaps they never will. They have been here a long time.’

The Prime Minister smiled. ‘Remember, Colonel, that there was a time when we did not understand the Americans.’

‘But there is, I think, in Japan, a greater ability for cultural absorption.’

Yoshida sighed. ‘Yes. Perhaps that is so. But, in any event, I’m most grateful to you. Mr Dulles was most anxious to back me into a corner. What he was no doubt leading up to was a Japanese involvement in the Korean War. Why else ask for a sudden enormous military buildup here?’ He shook his head, his small hands clasped behind his back. ‘It is unthinkable, Colonel, for us to send troops into Korea.’

Unthinkable, the Colonel thought now, kneeling in the brittle night. That time we avoided the unthinkable, by the grace of God. Now it had happened.

The fire was going strong. He reached the cord out of the pocket of his dark nylon jacket, dropped it into the centre of the tiny conflagration.

He was not surprised to see that the knot in its centre was the last to blacken and fall into ashes.

Said goodbye to Mount Aso, hello to Mount Fuji.

It rained most of the way back, drops beading the windowpane, streaking in fat rivulets as they combined. The low sky was black, filled with evil, fulminating clouds. A stiff wind out of the north quarter plummeted the temperatures; winter was here at last.

Nicholas shifted uncomfortably from one buttock to another, finding it painful to sit normally. Someone farther along the car kept fiddling with the tuning dial of a transistor radio: brief bursts of rock music interspersed with a dry, cultured voice announcing the news. Saburo, the leader of the Japanese Socialist Party, was under fire again for his ‘structural reform’ policies which the Party had adopted a little over two years ago. Speculation was that he would be out soon.

Just north of Osaka, the rain turned to hail, pattering against the windows as it tap-danced along the hull of the train.

Nicholas, scrunched down in the seat, shivered slightly despite the adequate heating. Vaguely, as if the feeling belonged to another person and he had, perhaps, got his lines crossed, he felt hungry. But he had not left his seat since he had boarded this train at Osaka, had collapsed into it. Any movement at all seemed a chore to him now. Perhaps, before they pulled into the station at Tokyo, he would be obliged to relieve himself. He preferred not to think about that now. But then any kind of thought was difficult at the moment. His mind was a wind tunnel, leaves whirled by the same currents, creating precisely the same patterns no matter how many times the tune was replayed.

Hear the groaning, feel the heat on his face: the light - shade off the lamp? Shadows moving, rising, falling, larger than life. Saigo, oddly, making the bed. Yukio, dressed in skirt and blouse, packing rather mechanically. He tried to say something but it was as if his mouth had been packed with dry sand. Was his larynx paralysed as well?

Saigo took her by the arm, bag in her other hand. They both had to step over him to reach the door. Lay there like a quadriplegic, eyes blinking salt sweat and tears. He strained to see her face but it was in partial shadow, her long hair swinging across her cheek.

Saigo stopped her with a word in her ear, leaned backwards and down, his face, shiny with sweat, hovering just over Nicholas’s.

‘You see how it is now, don’t you? There’s a good boy.’ He sneered. ‘And don’t bother coming after, him? There’s really no point. Because this is goodbye. No sayonara this time. Get it?’ He reached out, patted Nicholas’s cheek almost tenderly.

‘If we ever meet this way again, I’ll kill you.’

Shadows looming - were they really people? - and then gone, just the after-image, dark on his retinas. He closed his eyes at last and concentrated on breathing.

The paralysis began to fade some time after dawn, he estimated. He could not be certain of the time because he must have fallen asleep at some point. Only knew that when he awoke just before eight, he could move his fingers and toes.

Within the hour he could stand and even walk steadily. He went into his own bathroom and stayed there for a long time.

His first stop was the warehouse. The character of the street was totally different in the daytime. This was near the centre of the business district and during the day the area was jammed with traffic and pedestrians.

He tried the front door but it was locked. After two complete circuits of the place, he was convinced that there was no other way in. Picking the lock was out of the question.

He went into a near-by teahouse for breakfast, sitting at a table that gave him an oblique but clear view of the building’s front! He drew a blank and after an hour gave up.

While paying the bill, he asked directions to the local police station. It proved to be a short walk away. He was sent up to the second floor of the wood and brick buildings. The place smelled of cement and turpentine.

The sergeant on duty sat behind a desk that was as battered and scarred as a war veteran. He was a small man, rather young, with a very yellow complexion and a wide moustache meant to disguise his splay teeth. His uniform was so neat that Nicholas could see the creases in his blouse.

He seemed sympathetic, even helpful. He took down all the particulars, including the address’ of the warehouse. But his eyebrows shot up when Nicholas told him what was behind the red lacquered door on the third floor.