Deshi (35 page)
I could hear the little things that had seemed to fall away during the fight: the rasp of my panting breath, the plop of individual raindrops hitting the pond. In the killing ground between the ditch and the woods, someone gave out a faint, wavering moan.
The lama reached us. “So much suffering,” he said quietly. He seemed stunned.
Yamashita came close and gestured with the bloody blade. “There is another in the trees.” His voice was cold and matter-of-fact.
I closed my eyes for a second. I could smell the faint scent of Sarah’s hair. But the scene had a power all its own and I opened my eyes again. Micky sat in the mud and looked at the sky, squinting with my father’s expression, looking for a sign of clearing.
Art sunk down heavily, legs dangling into the culvert. He still held his pistol, the slide locked back on an open chamber. He put it down into his lap and looked at his hands. “Michael,” he said quietly, emphasizing each word, “I am getting way too old for this.”
For a moment, I thought I heard the sound of help coming—footfalls on rock and the crackle of radios. But then the heavens opened up again, soaking us with water and noise. In that dark space it was hard to tell who was colder, the living or the dead.
It rained for the next few weeks as if heaven was trying to soak the blood from that clearing. The rainy days, where you wandered around with hunched shoulders and wished you had stayed in bed, were a pretty good match to our moods—we were all hunkered down and hoping that things would blow over.
The Massachusetts State Police weren’t too pleased with us. The woods were a mess and the fact that some New York cops had jumped jurisdictions and made a bloody ending to a homicide investigation didn’t seem to mollify them one bit. Probably just jealous. Micky told me that there was a great deal of yelling and screaming over phone lines. Letters of reprimand were written on official letterhead. Even more alarming, higher-ups were involved, hammering out new rules for “modalities for inter-state law enforcement cooperation.” Whatever that was.
And the Feds were even more furious. They murmured darkly about national security. The Patriot Act. They were dying to tell us what we had done. But they couldn’t, and that made them even madder. It didn’t stop Micky and Art from getting hosed down pretty good by some suit from headquarters. The word on the street was that we had screwed something up. Imagine.
Wallace was finished as a cop: the high velocity rounds had wrecked his tibia. His wife was angry beyond words when we met her at the hospital. She was a thin, diminutive blonde woman who eyed us as if we were roaches when we came into the hospital room. She didn’t say a word, all hard looks and lips pressed together into a tight line from the effort of self-control. I think she wanted to bite us.
But Wallace seemed philosophical at the prospect of retiring on long-term disability. “Hey,” he shrugged, sipping at some apple juice through a straw, “more time for fishing.” The color was back in his skin, which was nice to see. When they had trundled him off the mountain, he was the color of putty.
I’d been alarmed when Wu had not been among the bodies on the mountain. My brother shrugged. “A Chinese guy in a tracksuit is not gonna last long out here, Connor. They’ll pick him up soon.” And they did, the Feds whisking him away without a word. But it didn’t cheer me up. Once we got over the relief of coming out alive, not one of us felt particularly happy.
I had looked at the Rinpoche in the immediate aftermath of the fight, and he seemed overwhelmed with sadness. Each still form in the woods seemed to affect him the same way, his grief as great for the Mongol as it was for Stark. I don’t know whether that was a measure of his greatness or just the fact that he was fundamentally different from the rest of us. When someone tries to impale me with a spear, my supply of compassion tends to run out quickly.
Together, he and I watched the coroner’s people put someone into a black rubber bag. Changpa touched the gurney lightly as it began to move, the attendants bouncing it over the rough stones with the callousness of routine. He looked at me.
“I’m sorry,” I told him quietly. “I failed you.” I wasn’t thinking about the mystery of who was watching the Dharma Center, or whether the Chinese were involved. I was thinking about Stark. The lama’s look told me that he knew that.
He smiled, but it wasn’t an expression that gave me comfort. Changpa gazed off over my shoulder. The trees were dark with rain and the mountain vista was obscured with a rising mist. What did he glimpse on those far mountains?
“I once spoke to you about the ability to see… about pre-science,” he said quietly.
“The dark valley,” I nodded.
Again the grim smile. “Some people think it is a gift. And perhaps it is so…” He took a ragged breath. “But not in the way they think. To see only partially is to be reminded that the thinking mind is still clouded with illusion. I let myself be deluded into thinking I could steer Stark onto a different path.” He sighed and the wind echoed him.
We were silent for a while. Micky and Art, wrapped in space blankets, were talking quietly with the cops who were taping off the scene, marking the placement of spent shells and broken spears. The medical people had bundled Sarah away. Occasionally, one of them tried to dab at my cuts, but I fended them off for a while. Yamashita stood silently, waiting his turn to take the detectives into the woods to mark the place where he had left a body in his wake. He had cleaned his hands off, but a streak of gore had spurted across his temple, a dark mark of someone’s passing.
“Maybe you did steer him,” I finally told Changpa. His eyes focused back on me, away from the soft hint of ridge lines in the distance. He was puzzled, clearly waiting for an explanation.
“Maybe, in some way, you did help Stark. Each person chooses a path for himself,” I explained. “Maybe, when it came down to it, Stark chose to do the right thing. He didn’t let Yamashita walk into a trap. He didn’t go along with Kita’s scheme…”
The lama nodded slowly. I’m sure it wasn’t a new thought to him. But it was hard to feel comforted in the clearing that day. The air was thick and pungent with moisture and the smell of blood. He turned from me and began to walk down the mountain, his mala beads clicking, the tiny percussive sounds of a man trying to hammer a good lesson out of the callous school of experience.
The weather cleared in time for the Burke family. Every year, the whole clan gets together for what’s known as the Memorial Golf Outing. My dad died late in June and rather than mope around on the anniversary, we’ve created this Outing. Why golf was selected is anyone’s guess: my father had spent a year in Korea with the First Marine Division and that had cured him of the desire for any outdoor activities whatsoever. But there’s a small public course in Robert Moses State Park off the South Shore of Long Island. The beaches stretch for miles, part of the barrier that creates the Great South Bay. You can barbecue there and spend the day on the sand if your Bourgeois Sport Skills are not what they should be. No one takes the game seriously, but there’s a chintzy trophy awarded and we spend some nice time together.
After the ritual toast to Dad at the end of the game, the solemnity of the mood was overwhelmed by picnic logistics. Folding chairs pinched fingers; blankets were spread; immense coolers, awash in melting ice, food, and drink were lugged into place.
My sisters had packed the usual buffet specialties: casseroles heavily dependent on mayonnaise or unlikely recipes culled from the side panels of cracker boxes. What was a “mock” apple pie, anyway? I had learned long ago not to inquire too deeply. My brothers-in-law sipped surreptitiously at beers. After the sham golf game the ever-expanding tribe of Burke kids were turned loose on the wide expanse of fine white beach. Later on, someone would fall from a swing set in the nearby play-ground and run, screams muffled by a mouthful of bloody sand, back to the adults. But for now, we sat under umbrellas or stood in the early summer warmth, squinting at the ocean, content.
“Well, you played your usual crappy game,” Micky said to me. We were standing by the cooler, a little bit away from everyone.
“I use you as my role model,” I told him. He handed me a can of beer, decently hidden from the Park Police by an insulating tube that wraps around the can to keep it cool. Sometimes technology is our friend.
Micky sipped the foam out of his newly opened beer. “Yeah, well. I don’t know about you, but I’m still a bit sore.”
I flexed my fingers almost unconsciously, testing for the stiffness that had just begun to dissipate. The joints made little cracking sounds. “How’re things going with the girl?” my brother asked.
I shrugged. Sarah and I had sat in the conference center in the Yamaji, almost forgotten in the bustle and confusion of a crime scene investigation. Rain dripped down the windows—fat drops striking the glass in gusts, like the surf beating against the shore.
She was draped in a blanket and her hair was wet and plastered against her head. She shivered. “I’m sorry, Burke,” she said to me.
“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” I said. “You got through to Micky, which ended up saving all our necks. And I talked to the Rinpoche. He tells me that when that guy Wu came to get him, you clocked him pretty good.”
She smiled very slightly, waving the things I said away. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry I missed with the arrows.” But her eyes filled with tears at the memory of things. Her voice thick-ened. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier about Travis…”
I reached out on impulse to touch her face. My hand was streaked with dirt and dried blood. She saw it and shied away from my touch. I wiped my hand self-consciously and set it down gently on her hand instead.
“It’s OK,” I said. She gave me a small, sad smile.
I looked at Micky now. “We’re working on it,” I said.
“And?” he pressed.
I shrugged. “It’s hard, ya know. Sometimes when I’m around, all she can remember is the blood and stuff…”
Micky grunted. “Ya gotta make her see
you
, Connor.”
“Easier said than done.”
He snorted. “Is she worth it?”
I got an image of her, small and strong and determined, shooting arrows like arcs of lightning across that clearing. “Oh, yeah,” I said.
“So what’s that thing that Yamashita’s always telling you? Ya know, keep at it?”
“Gambatte
,
”
I told him.
Micky nodded. “OK. So,
gambatte
.”
The adults had settled in a semicircle, talking to each other while keeping an eye on the kids. Micky and I joined them. “I still don’t know why on earth you two went up that mountain in the first place,” my mom said to us. When Dad died she got very thin. She’s better now, but increasingly birdlike in her fragility. She sat, swathed in a windbreaker, looking smaller than I remembered. But she was still feisty.
Micky didn’t talk much with Mom about what he did: for a woman who had experienced so much of life she was still remarkably naive. “Well,” he told her judiciously, “it’s like I said to the Internal Affairs guys—it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Micky’s wife, Deirdre, made a “humph” noise and got up to tend the kids. Somebody was going to get brained with a seesaw at any moment. I could feel it, and so could Dee.
I nodded in support of Micky. “Ya had to be there, Mom.” She, too, made a dissatisfied noise way back in her throat.
Micky watched the playground as his wife pushed their son, Tom, higher and higher on the swings. At the apex of the swing, Tom escaped gravity for a moment and shrieked with delight before the breathless fall backwards. When you’re a kid, danger is the brief electric swoop of a swing, kept under control with a tether.
From what he could piece together—Charlie Wilcox had slammed the phone down when called and that was the nicest response Micky had gotten—my brother knew that there wasn’t going to be any legal action against Wu. He was still at the consulate.
“Diplomatic immunity, buddy boy,” he told me.
“But you’d think the Chinese would pull him once they found out about this stuff…”
“Who’s to say they’re gonna find out?” He looked at me archly.
“I don’t get it, Mick.”
“Ya don’t, huh?” My brother dug a hole in the fine sand with his toe. There are deep purple grains mixed in with the white on Long Island’s beaches, the minute fragments of clam shells that the Indians used to turn into wampum centuries ago. Micky concentrated on the hole, not looking up as he explained.
“The best spies are the ones you’ve already identified,” he told me. “And the ones you own…”
“But the guy’s a killer,” I protested.
Micky shrugged. “Far as I can figure it, the Feds had their eye on Wu for a while. They knew he was dirty in Tibet. Probably still was. And they wanted to turn him. But the evidence was not all that great and Wu’s a pretty slick character. So they figured that they’ve got to somehow… encourage him to do something.”
“Isn’t that entrapment?”
Micky filled the hole in and began another. “Intelligence has sort of different rules. Besides, they weren’t going to take him to court, they were going to blackmail him. Make him into a double agent.”
“So they got him to kill someone!” It sounded far-fetched to me.
Micky laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “I think this got away from them, Connor. They arranged for Kim to get access to the documents and start investigating. When Kita got wind of it, he freaked. Never mind the inka, he knew that the documents he’d saved would implicate Wu in art smuggling. So Kita had to contact Wu and ask for help in getting things back.”
“But it didn’t go as they planned, did it?” I said.
Micky shook his head. “Didn’t go as planned for anyone. Wu probably told Kita to deal with it, so he could keep things at arm’s length. But Kim gave Kita the slip and farmed stuff out to Sakura. He encrypted his files and stashed them. So Wu had to get involved, but he used hired muscle…”
“Just to stay out of it,” I said.
“Sure. And the FBI was so busy watching Wu, they didn’t bother to keep tabs on that psycho Han, which is when things really started to spin out of control for all concerned. Han followed the links from Sakura to Hoddington to Kim, but he couldn’t find the documents.”
