Enzan: The Far Mountain (6 page)

So here was a puzzle that needed solving. It meant I needed to take some time in my travels home to find out for certain if I was being followed. It was annoying, because I’m a pretty straight-line kind of person: when I go home, I simply go home. I like to think of it in terms of a Zen-like directness. My brother Mickey claims it’s because I am, at heart, an uptight nerd. But now I needed to make things complicated: start and stop, wander uncertainly, window shop. With a tail, you try to string them out a bit, make them unsure of what you’re up to. They get nervous when you change the distance between you and them. Slow down, and they do too. It makes them stand out in the New York crowd, chugging relentlessly along the cold sidewalks. Speed up and the tail has to break cover to hurry and catch up. Either way—busted.

The library was too thinly populated for a tail to risk coming in, so they must have lingered about at the entrance, waiting to pick me up. I hadn’t registered anything consciously on the way in to see Ann, but now I was sure. As I threaded my way down the avenue, I could sense the focus of someone following me.

If the tail knew me, they would expect me to head home for Brooklyn, to go from Washington Square to the Eighth Street subway station. It was, in fact, my plan. But now that plan had changed. So I chugged uptown, an erratic pedestrian bobbing along the thickening crowds of rush hour. West on Fourteenth Street. North on Seventh Avenue. I was a real pain and more than one impatient person bumped me slightly in their haste. I spent a good ten blocks going at a steady if somewhat sedate pace. No window shopping or pausing now: a man on a mission. It would set up an expectation on the part of whoever was tailing me. They’d grow more comfortable with my predictable behavior.

The chestnut roasters were out at the entrance to Penn Station. It was a smell I always associated with the city in winter. I dove through the doors and threaded my way through the crowd at top speed. The floor was slippery, but I kept it up, heading for the lower concourse and the Long Island Railroad. A bend in the hallway would have put me briefly out of sight of my pursuer. I went faster, using the staircase instead of the elevators, and then jagged left toward track 18. The green panels were flickering and announcing the Babylon Express. People were flowing to the track entrance, a thick river of commuters overheating in their coats as they rushed to make the train. I stood to one side and looked to my right. A figure came pounding down the stairs toward the concourse. He stood out because he wasn’t focused on a destination. Everyone else in that place was moving like a guided missile toward a target. But the man rushing down the stairs was looking all over the place, frantic to catch sight of me.

But I’d already seen what I needed to and I flowed along with the crowd, down to the train platform. I kept walking to the other end of the station, pushing my way up against the flow of homebound commuters. I left Penn on Eighth Avenue and walked across to Herald Square.

I caught the N back to Brooklyn.

If you ride the trains enough, the jolt and sway lulls you into a type of trance. The announcements come; the doors open and close. You hear the whine of the electric motor and the distant screech of the wheels as they take a curve in the tracks. People read, or nap, or stare off into the distance. Eye contact is frowned upon. It’s almost soothing. Or it would be if the molded plastic seats were actually sized for an adult human being.

I thought about the situation. People follow you because you are doing something they want to know about. Ito was going to get a report on what I was doing. It made no sense for him to have someone follow me. Someone might also wish to tail me simply because they didn’t trust me. But again, if Ito didn’t trust me, why contact me in the first place?

The final option: Someone was keeping tabs on me so they would know what I was doing before Ito did. This meant things were a little more complex than they seemed.

The subway rattled through Brooklyn. I got off at Fifty-Ninth Street just for a change of pace. The Chinese would get off at the Eighth Avenue stop. The sights and sounds of the neighborhood were familiar and my feeling of being followed was gone. I had lost my tail back in Penn Station. I thought about the man on the stairs at Penn, frantically scanning the crowd in the train station. I smiled.

Goro, you impetuous devil
.

Chapter 6

Burke
. The voice was clear. Insistent. The sound rang in my head, tolling with strange clarity. A summons unbidden, jerking my eyes open and making my heart pound.

Darkness. I lay for a moment in bed, wondering. The voice comes to me, but I am never sure whose it is. It could be Yamashita’s, or that of an old love. Perhaps it is a simple stirring of my conscience. But it comes in the tail end of the night, when the stars fade and the sleeping world begins to hum awake.

I rolled out of bed, the wood floor cold on my feet. I left the kitchen light off, working by feel as I set up the coffee. I like to be in the dark and sense the dawn slowly wash over me. The dining room is high ceilinged and I had emptied it of furniture a long time ago. There is a sword rack along the wall and two windows that open toward the sea. Across the tar-papered rooftops of Brooklyn and the cement arc of the Gowanus Expressway, the lights on the top of Verrazano Bridge were still bright.

The day begins with discipline. Then coffee. I sank to the floor and stretched, warming my way through old injuries, loosening up muscles and a frozen shoulder joint. There was an early training session at the dojo, and I needed to be ready.

When I was done stretching, I held the coffee mug to my face; the steam played across my skin. I wondered about the voice that had awoken me. I wondered at my involvement with the Miyazaki family. Was it simple foolishness? Was I rationalizing by alleging I was trying to protect Yamashita? Before she left me, my old girlfriend Sarah Klein said there was a part of me that craved violence, and, no matter how hard I protested, I unconsciously put myself in dangerous situations. To prove something. Why I felt the need to do this and to whom I was proving it were probably questions for a good shrink, Sarah felt.

I wonder sometimes whether she was right. I’d been laboring for years at my art and it had gradually displaced almost everything else in my life. I like to think it has been worth it: it’s brought me new skills and new insights about myself. But if it has made my vision clearer, what I see has not always been what I expected. And the discipline is relentless, the training never ending. I slog along, and on good days I am sure I can glimpse something wonderful in the distance. On bad days, I wonder about myself. I remember my brother Mickey’s dismissive comment: “You’re a grown man who spends his time dancing around in pajamas for Chrissake!”

I wondered whether I had drunk too much of the martial arts Kool-Aid. Who was I to think I could help someone like Chie Miyazaki? I’m a specialist in exotic etiquette and archaic weapons. The Miyazaki family seemed to me to have a number of needs, but I don’t think martial arts training was one of them.

But I had said I’d help them. In the end, it was as simple as that. Motivation is a murky thing. I’ve come to prefer the clarity of action. I finished my coffee. Outside my windows, the world shrugged off darkness. I decided I would too.

He came for me later that morning. “I am Alejandro. From Don Osorio.” Alejandro wore a grey overcoat and a silk scarf. His shoes were shined and his hair was recently cut. He was thin, and his ears stuck out, making him appear almost boyish. But he moved with an efficient self-confidence that hinted at a life of experience. You had to wonder about that, but I couldn’t dwell on it. I had asked for help and didn’t get to choose the form it would take.

I’m not a trained investigator, but I know the basics. You start at the beginning. You check the scene. You go over the backgrounds of suspects. Some of the information had already been provided to me. But not enough. I had, for instance, asked Ito whether I could see Chie’s apartment. But he had been dismissive. It was not necessary, he explained, since members of his staff had already done so and found little that was helpful. Or unexpected. No concrete clues about her whereabouts. Just the detritus of a messy life. Perhaps, I speculated, an extensive lingerie collection.

Maybe Ito’s refusal to let me see the apartment was part of the Miyazaki doing some damage control on public awareness of their wild child. But I didn’t get it. I had already been let in on their little secret. Life is filled with rocks, however, and I’ve learned some can be moved, while some are simply things to flow around. I was beginning to feel the Miyazaki were trying to steer me. I didn’t know why. But I’ve made wandering off in unexpected directions a life’s work. No reason to change now.
Flow
.

Alejandro and I drove from the dojo in Red Hook, across the bridge into Manhattan. “This man, Lim,” he began. “He’s got a number of places he stays, which is not surprising. It’s always wise to have several places to crash or hide out.” Alejandro sounded like someone speaking from personal experience. “But he keeps one place, an apartment, just for himself. He never takes his crew there. He never even brings his girlfriend there. I think this is really interesting.” Alejandro turned his head to look at me, his brown eyes liquid. “I had the opportunity to ask some of his associates about this. Many claimed not to know the apartment existed.”

“How did you find it, then?”

A hint of a smile. “I am a persistent questioner, Dr. Burke. It is why Don Osorio employs me.”

We eventually pulled up in front of an apartment building on the Lower East Side. My guide double-parked and we went to see the building superintendent.

The man opened the door, looking at us with a face that was grey from exhaustion. Alejandro had a brief, quiet conversation in Spanish. The man looked at me with suspicion, then nodded at Alejandro in resignation. He shrugged his way into a worn canvas work jacket and grabbed a huge ring of keys.

We walked up one flight and down a hall. There was the faint sound of a distant TV playing somewhere, but the hallway was empty and the place was quiet. The walls were freshly painted and the industrial carpet muffled our steps. The super sifted his key collection, selected one, and unlocked a door. He nodded once at Alejandro, ignored me, and shambled back downstairs.

“Here you are,” Alejandro said, and pushed the door open.

I nodded. “Yes. But where exactly is here?”

“Lim’s apartment,” he answered.

“How’d you get the super to let us in?”

He shrugged. “Don Osorio requested his cooperation.”

“Just like that?”

He smiled a full smile this time. Alejandro had very white and very even teeth. “
Sí.
” Suddenly he had a small automatic pistol in his hand. He motioned for me to wait, slipped into the apartment, then came out. “It’s empty. I’ll wait by the car. Take your time. But hurry up, if you know what I mean.”

The apartment was not what I expected. It was a one-bedroom place with modern furniture and understated decorations. I had a hard time reconciling it with the punk drug dealer who had been portrayed to me. In the photos I had seen, he had been smoking. But there was no odor of tobacco in the apartment.

A tiny foyer opened on to the living/dining room. There was a coffee table with some ski magazines. A side table was piled with copies of the
Times
and
Wall Street Journal
from a few weeks back. One wall was lined with books, most of them involved with politics, economics, and history. I saw Karl Marx, but Immanuel Wallerstein was there as well. So was Braudel. And the three volumes of the life of
Theodore Roosevelt
by Edmund Morris. Lim appeared to be an eclectic, if serious reader. And he was disturbingly neat for a lowlife. The place was clean: no crack pipes or ashtrays filled with roaches. There was a galley kitchen. No dishes in the sink. The fridge was stocked with real food. At the end of the hall leading off the foyer was the bathroom. To the right was the bedroom.

I was at a loss as to what to look for. My preference would have been a note lying around that was entitled “Places I will take Chie Miyazaki.” No go. I peeked around and rifled through the drawers. Nothing. There were men’s clothes hanging in the bedroom closet. There was a duffle bag on the floor. I opened it up: a clean martial arts uniform with the black piping of a taekwondo enthusiast.

So. He cleans. He reads. He doesn’t smoke at home. He works out. Lim’s public persona wasn’t fitting with his private one. And that was interesting.

A laptop computer sat on top of a desk in the bedroom, neatly placed in the center of the work surface. It was already open and when I hit the “Enter” key, the computer woke up. The screen showed four different camera shots of the apartment. In one of them, you could see my back as I peered into the screen.
Shit
. I was blown. I folded the computer screen down, and headed out of the bedroom. Right into the arms of an angry stranger.

I never heard the apartment door open. He was that good. Probably the only reason he didn’t try to kill me right off was that the narrow hallway we were standing in constricted his range of motion.

Not that he didn’t try to kill me, of course. He tried hard. A sudden attack at this level of lethality is often paralyzing: the force of the blows, the sudden shock as the body’s nerve endings shriek danger and the system is flooded with adrenalin. All these elements work to stun the mind and freeze the untrained into momentary stillness. Which is when you are finished off.

But Yamashita has changed me. In times like this, I don’t rely on the mind; it’s all body think instead. It’s the only way you have a chance of surviving. Thought is too slow. You need something faster because you’re back in the jungle now, in a place where it’s all heat and hate and the mad scramble for survival.

Jesus.

It wasn’t Lim. I didn’t recognize the man, but that fact was fleeting and irrelevant, an idea that flashed and was gone. I had bigger concerns. He came at me like a pile driver, a fist driving for the plexus to stop my breathing and a knife-hand blow chopping at my clavicle. It’s an easy bone to break, and it renders your arm effectively useless if the attack truly hits home. I got my hands up to take the first shock of the attack, and worked at deflecting the succession of strikes that followed. I pivoted, ramming my back against the wall and letting his momentum carry him through the attack zone. But he was good and didn’t overcommit. His head turned precisely and he drove an elbow strike at my face.
Move!
You’ve got to keep shifting with someone like this, altering the target profile and changing angles and distance.

I slammed my knee into the side of his thigh, but I was dodging left to get away from the elbow strike as I did it, and the blow wasn’t solid. I gave him a short left to the ribs, then tried to get my right fist into play. But the narrowness of the hall was constraining us both. We hammered and grunted around. We were wearing winter coats and they absorbed some of the force. It meant I had to work on attacking his head instead of the body, but that was like beating at a bowling ball. I slapped a palm into his ear and saw him wince in pain, but I don’t think I broke his eardrum. He pivoted around on me and I got my first good look at him: square face and slit eyed, black shaggy hair. One of Lim’s people. Young. Strong. Well trained.

I hate them like that.

He took a shuffling half step forward and then unleashed a wicked snap kick. I jerked back just out of range, but staggered a little.

He was on me then. I saw his eyes light up like some cyborg acquiring target lock. He thought he was closing in for the kill while I was off balance.

But it’s an old trick. I’ve seen Yamashita use it many times to suck in the unwary. He’d done it to me. More than once. And now I’m older and craftier. Meaner. I’ve learned my lessons. And I was about to teach this guy some of them.

I wasn’t as off-balance as I seemed. I just wanted to bring him close to me. I’d been lucky to have dodged his first few attacks, but I could tell this guy was a hitter. There’s a distinctive quality to the strikes of someone who’s really proficient: tight solidity, wild speed. This guy had it. In a few short seconds he’d pummeled me good. I knew something had to give soon. If I gave him the opportunity, he’d put my lights out.

As he closed the distance between us, I reached out for his coat lapels, and slid down and under his forward momentum. I got my foot up into his stomach and executed what I thought was a pretty good
tomoe-nage
, all things considered, landing on my back and propelling him over me and down the hall. If you use your arms just right, you can put a little English on the fall, accelerating the impact. So I did, and when he hit the floor, a few pictures rattled right off the wall.

But it wasn’t enough. The fall hadn’t stunned him. I scrambled upright but he had already gotten to his feet, shaking his thick head to clear it. In about a second, he was going to come at me again. I would have run, but he was between me and the door.

There was a blur of motion behind him. Over his shoulder, I saw Alejandro slip in and, with a short, precise motion, slam a lead-weighted cosh down on the attacker’s head. The guy’s eyes rolled up and he collapsed in a heap.

We stood for a moment, looking at the body. “I coulda taken him,” I protested. It would have sounded more convincing if my breath weren’t so raspy.

“
Claro
,” Alejandro said, and bent down to rifle through my attacker’s pockets. He came up with a small cell phone, a wallet, and a passport. He emptied the wallet of its money, shoved the bills into his pocket, and handed me the passport and phone.

The man on the floor moaned.

“At least he’s not dead,” I said.

Alejandro looked at me with a hurt look. “Of course he’s not dead. Give me some credit. I didn’t mean to kill him.”

“I think we should go,” I said. I looked around, waiting for my breath to slow and my brain to come back on line. It reminded me of something. “But wait. Let me get Lim’s computer.”

“Hurry up,” he said. “When this guy comes to, he’s going to be angry.”

I rubbed my arms: I could feel the bruises rising from where the man on the floor had slammed me. “Alejandro,” I said, “that would be way too much excitement for one day.”

The passport we had taken was blue with gilt lettering: the blocky rows of Hangul characters and the legend “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” There was some complicated seal on the front with a shining star radiating something. Maybe it was meant to symbolize the affection of the Young Leader bathing his subjects in fatherly warmth. Then again, maybe it was just a plutonium leak.