Deshi (12 page)

I looked at Yamashita. He was sitting very quietly, regarding Changpa with a look of patient expectation. The lama followed my gaze and saw the expression on his old friend’s face. My teacher is comfortable with silence. He uses it like a tool. Or a weapon.

“After our meeting the other evening,” the lama began, but seemed uncharacteristically at a loss for words and stopped talking.

“What troubles you, Rinpoche?” my master asked quietly.

The monk glanced around him as if to check for danger. “Of late, there have been disturbing events at the Dharma Center. Our offices were broken into. Staff members have been followed. There have been threatening phone calls…”

“So what did the cops say?” I asked. Maybe it was impertinent, but I was getting tired of sitting there like a lump.

The lama shrugged. “They were as helpful as possible, but were not particularly reassuring. I would hope that perhaps you, given your background and your contacts with the police, could help me in this matter.”

Changpa’s sense of what I was capable of seemed curiously at odds with what I had seen so far of his perceptive ability. I was an overeducated martial artist who had gotten into a scrape or two. And my brother was a cop. But that wasn’t the kind of thing that would inspire confidence in most people.

I looked incredulously at Yamashita, but he stared back in all seriousness. “Well, sure,” I said slowly, “I’ll do what I can, but is that all you want?”

Again the flash of his eyeglasses. “No, Dr. Burke. There is much more. It is why I have sought both you and your master out.”

Yamashita became very still.

“The search for knowledge sometimes brings with it the problem of power,” Changpa said carefully to us both. “Your Way is a perilous path—the allure of strength and violence.” His voice took on a wondering, almost dreamy tone. “The temptation must be acute.” He seemed to gather himself and sat back in his seat.

“I have known your teacher for years. And I assume that, as his pupil, you are capable of walking the knife edge of this Way without succumbing to temptation,” he said firmly. “You know danger and fear and struggle, yet I do not sense the dark shadow of illusion around you.”

We sat for a time. Changpa cleared his throat. “There are dark shadows surrounding the Dharma Center. And around Stark. They draw him down a pathway and I fear for him. And those whose lives he touches. I would ask that you attempt to guide him, for I can take him no further.”

But there was more to it than that, I’d bet. Maybe my teacher wanted me to learn from this guy and was going to help out with Stark. But there was a dark urgency here. Maybe all my teacher’s stress on haragei was having an impact on me. I pressed the lama for more.

“But why us?” I said slowly and distinctly to Changpa, an echo of my earlier question that indicated I wasn’t satisfied. “Why seek your old friend out? Now?”

Changpa sighed. His eyes closed as he spoke. “I told you of my vision—high places and valleys… of danger.” His lids fluttered and opened.

I nodded to encourage him.

“You and your teacher were in the vision as well.”

10
PATHWAYS

I should have been at the office, but I had begged a few days off from my dean. He seemed relieved to see me go. He’s the administrative version of those circus acts that spin plates on long sticks. My absence gave him one less unstable object to worry about. So instead I sat, legs folded under me, and waited. Yamashita and I faced a line of prospective students hoping to be admitted to his dojo. The room was silent, but the faint sounds of morning traffic vibrated through the walls. It’s a cavernous building, an old renovated warehouse off the beaten path in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. Merely getting there is an adventure, but it’s just the beginning.

The students had been ordered into
seiza
, the formal seated posture used for meditation in the martial arts, and they had complied with a smooth and easy familiarity. Now my teacher and I waited. Anyone who has been around a dojo long enough can sit like this for a time. But twenty minutes or so of motionless sitting on a hard wood floor gets to even the best of us. And Yamashita watched for the telltale flickers across faces, for the minute shifts of body weight, that would telegraph discomfort.

Being accepted as Yamashita’s student is not a cut and dried thing. He’s always probing and testing. Judging. These novices had been recommended by some senior Japanese teachers, but Yamashita was a skeptic at heart. He would take the students grudgingly through the initial phases of training, but always with the unspoken, although obvious, expectation that they would not endure. And to test them, he would keep them off balance, physically and mentally. I should know: he’s done it to me for years. I’m not sure whether the fact that I’m still around is a testament to my skill or my sheer persistence. But now I was on the giving end of the process, working with Yamashita on testing the novices.

So they would wait in discomfort for a time. Orders would be slow in coming. Or they would be delivered with a lightning rapidity. And, above all, Sensei would work to show the new pupils just how inadequate their individual skill levels were.

They came from a variety of backgrounds. There were karate black belts here. I recognized one of them. He had earned his ranking in a school where I once saw an unwary student have a finger literally snapped off by a front kick that unfolded like a whip. Basic rule in fighting: try to keep your hands clenched. And your fingers on.

There were a few compact judo players, thick muscled and big shouldered. One had cauliflowered ears from the rough experience of tournament play. And sitting at the end of a line was Travis Stark. I sighed inwardly at the sight of him, but tried to keep focused on the class as a whole.

Yamashita’s combat system hearkens back to the old days, when fighters were expected to be competent with a variety of weapons. Modern styles tend to narrow the focus somewhat. As a result, one of the first things we do with novices is cross-training. Nobody gets in the door here unless they’ve got a few black belts to their credit, they’re in good physical condition and know enough about various things to keep from being seriously injured. But they’ve all got a propensity to favor one type of technique over another. And Yamashita wants to break them of bad habits early.

So all the karate types get put through matwork—the ground techniques of grappling systems. The judo guys work on blocking and striking. And people who use the wooden sword known as the bokken are introduced to the basics of Yamashita’s version of sword handling. Then they all rotate.

My teacher assumes that these students are generally competent and have a basic grounding in unarmed arts. The weapons skills are a bit more varied. Many martial artists start in the more mainstream styles and gradually gravitate toward the sword arts. But there’s a great deal of variety out there and most of them have never seen anything like Yamashita Sensei. Over the next few weeks, all of these people would be tested in ways they had never expected.

But for now, the dojo was still. The active training had not yet begun.

Sensei’s bullet head swiveled slightly toward me. I leaned forward to catch his quiet words.

“What do you think of them, Burke?”

I scanned the double line of students. Most of them had their eyes almost closed, using meditative techniques to deal with the waiting. It was hard to tell anything significant about them from just looking at their faces. Can you read something of a person’s character so easily?

“I’ll know more when I see them train,” I said.

“Try to see without seeing,” Yamashita urged me.

Oh boy, here we go.
But I worked on slowing the breath and opening myself to whatever vibrations were supposed to be out there. There was perhaps a slight tension, an expectancy, in the air. But that wasn’t a shocking insight. I regarded them all through half-closed eyes. Was there a certain resentment there? After all, these were the cream of the crop from another dojo. Maybe they didn’t like waiting around.

I looked at Stark, just another form in a well-worn practice uniform. He was fit and tanned and good-looking, a poster boy for martial training. There was something wrong with him, however. The question was, did I sense it, or did I just dislike the guy?

“Some of these students will not make it,” I told Yamashita. I sat back contentedly. Pretty cryptic of me. I almost smiled, but my teacher was looking at me and I thought better of it.

Then Yamashita grunted and rose.
“Hajime”
he said. Begin.

Two hours later, I was soaked with sweat. I looked around the room and took the measure of the students. They were looking equally worn. A few were rubbing their wrists at the spots where I’d cracked them (lightly) with my bokken. But they all looked game enough. And there was something more.

There was a difference in the way they thought about Yamashita. I could sense it. It was partially revealed in the wary tracking of his movements, the tense expectancy in the ways they watched him. If they had doubts about Sensei, they were gone. Burned away in the heat of this very basic introduction to the world of Yamashita Rinsuke.

He glided up to me. The skin of his face had a slight sheen to it that may have been caused by exertion, but his uniform was impeccable and he wasn’t even breathing hard. At least one trainee was doubled over in the corner with cramps.

Yamashita looked at the group contentedly. “Now we are ready for some serious practice,” he told me.

I smiled slightly. “What would you like me to do next?”

“You have other tasks to accomplish today, Professor. Your brother wishes you to call on him. And the Rinpoche’s needs must not be neglected. I will take the class from here. You may go…”

In a way, I was relieved. Micky needed me. But I was also conflicted. Yamashita may have sensed my feelings and held up a hand. “You are needed here, Burke. But others have greater needs at this point. Return tomorrow morning. They have much to learn.” And without waiting for my acknowledgment or agreement, he stalked off, sure in the fact that I would obey.

I got changed and made a call to my brother. When I left the dojo, the bark of Yamashita’s commands could be heard even on the street. Pedestrians glanced warily at the building’s walls, as if afraid that wild animals would break out. I shifted the shoulder strap on my bag to a more comfortable spot and headed to see Micky.

We’ve pursued different pathways in life, but we share a few things in common. One is that we both live in worlds that are seemingly awash in paper. When Art brought me into a conference room, Micky began taking some files out and arranging them on the tabletop. “I followed up on the name and address where Sakura sent the package. So did someone else.”

He took out the pictures.

I’ve looked at crime scene photos before, but it’s never pleasant. There was the body of an older man on the floor, the blood thick and black under him. Papers were strewn all around: on the table he lay near, across the floor. One had blown against the victim’s face. The blood had made it stick there.

Micky picked up a sheet and read from it. “Cameron Hoddington, Cappy to his friends. Age seventy-six. Professor of Asian Culture at the University of Georgia. Heard of him?”

“C. G. Hoddington, sure,” I said. “I probably read some of his stuff in grad school.” I had a vague memory of old articles in
Monumenta Nipponica
. “I thought he was dead.”

Micky grimaced. “He is now. He was on leave writing a book. He owned a vacation cabin up in the hills for years. That’s where they found him.”

“They?”

“We tried his office,” Art explained. “Left a message. Finally spoke to a departmental secretary. She told us where he was, but that he didn’t answer his phone. So I put a call in to the local cops.”

I gestured at the pictures. “What’s the deal? Robbery?”

He shook his head grimly. “No. Nothing of value up there to take. Except the car, and they left that.”

I gingerly moved the photos around to see them better. “What’s with the papers?”

Micky shrugged. “The door to the cabin was left open. Some of it’s just from the wind. But I’d guess that someone was also looking for something.”

I looked at the pictures again. “Knife wound?”

The two detectives looked at each other. Art wiggled his eyebrows. “Good guess, but no. It looks like he was garroted. Some kind of wire. The weapon hasn’t been found yet.”

“Anything else?”

“No. No prints that are useable. Pretty remote place. No one noticed anything. Killer could have driven in and out without being spotted. The state police are still following up.”

“So how does this help us?” I asked.

Art shrugged. “The deceased was an expert on old Japanese scrolls of some sort. I don’t really get it. Certificates. Things like that.”

“Sure,” I told him. “I’ve seen plenty. They call them
inka
in the martial arts.” I looked closer at the crime scene shots. You could see that many of the papers had Japanese characters on them.

“Right,” Micky said. “So we put two and two together. Sakura doing some sort of work on a scroll. The angry guy looking for it. The FedEx.” He gestured at Hoddington’s body, glued to the floor by his own dried blood. “Somebody’s looking for something. And they want it badly enough to kill for it.”

“What did the Georgia cops turn up at the murder scene?” This isn’t my first time with these sorts of things. I at least knew enough to ask some questions.

Micky made a face. “They got a list of documents and stuff that nobody can read—they’re all in Chinese or Japanese or something. Right up your alley, buddy boy.”

“Can you get them sent up here?”

His look of displeasure deepened. “I’ve got a request for copies in, but between you and me, I don’t think they’re real inclined to move quick.”

“Still sore at the Yankees,” I said.

“Yeah, they told us that they’re a bit shorthanded for clerks right now and that standing in front of a Xerox machine was not high on their list of law enforcement priorities.”