Kage (28 page)

ing. “The cops say you can come home,” I added.

She took a ragged breath. “Burke… I’m not sure I can.”

“Sarah…”

“I keep seeing you, covered in blood… What I did… The

bodies.”

“I know,” I told her. It’s a hard thing to experience. The

sensations are bad enough: the sight of blood splashed on walls

and pooling in rubbery spots on the floor. The metallic scent

of it. The animal grunts, the seeping of air. The fluid rip of a

blade or the crash of a gun. And the stunned silence that gets

slowly overwhelmed by the growing wail of a siren. But it’s the

realization such sensations bring that’s worse: that we’re vulner-

able, violent, and mortal despite all our striving.

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Kage

I wished that I had been with Sarah instead of just a voice

over the wire, but her sister had told me how fragile she was and

that she didn’t want any visitors. I thought that just holding her

might have been enough to help keep the demons at bay.

There was silence on the line for a time. The she spoke.

“How do you stand it, Burke?” she asked in something close

to desperation.

“Yamashita says… .” I began, but she ripped into me with

ferocity.

“I don’t care about Yamashita! How do
you
stand it? How

do you live with it? How do you live with yourself?”

I wasn’t sure I had an answer to that. Or even if I did that

it could be explained. I took a breath. “You put it in a box,” I

said. “You push it away… The situation is not who you are.”

It sounded lame, even as I said it. The truth is that some things

don’t bear too much scrutiny. I try not to think about them too

much. You fight the fight and, if you come out the other end,

you don’t look back. Some wel s are too dark and too deep to

peer into. If you do, the dense force of the depths wil pul you in.

Yamashita had worked with me for years, teaching me to

walk across a landscape studded with pits, aware of the danger,

yet focused instead on a distant light. It took patience and dis-

cipline and the light was often a thin beam, bright enough, but

with little warmth to it. It was an odd, cold type of hope and

not what Sarah was looking for.

“What if the situation
is
who you are, Burke?’ she pressed.

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is… Look at your life. What you do. And the

things that keep happening…”

“I don’t create those situations,” I objected. I felt my ears

flush.

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John Donohue

“No?” she demanded. “What if, deep down, you do? What

if you set yourself up for them? What if you
need
them?”

“Sarah…” We were heading toward the pit. It’s not that her

ideas didn’t merit some thought. But you fight one fight at a

time.

“Look,” she said, “I’m sorry. I’m upset. But I need some

time.”

“Sure,” I answered quickly. I think even then that I could

sense what was coming and was trying to head it off. “We could

take some time and go somewhere.”

Again the ragged breath over the phone. “Connor,” she said

quietly. “I need some time… on my own… to think things

through.”

The rest of the conversation was a blur. When we were done,

she said goodbye and the link between us clicked apart. I sat

in the quiet of approaching night, still and cold and confused.

At dawn, the lights from the Verrazano Bridge still twinkled

in the distance. I stared out at the approach of day, wondering

where to begin. I had already stretched and worked through

the basic sword forms that I had learned years ago, old les-

sons forever new. I tried to lose myself in the action, but last

night’s conversation with Sarah kept running through my head.

Eventually, I set the sword aside and let my thoughts cascade

through me.

I didn’t know whether Sarah’s questions bothered me

because of what they said about her or because of what they

suggested about me. Either way, I felt oddly defensive. She had

come late to the martial arts, but Yamashita saw something in

her. Perhaps it was that she had an instinctual knowledge of

where to stick the blade.

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Kage

I sighed and rose from the cold floor. I would need to think

about the things Sarah had said. Part of me knew that. But I

also knew that I had other things to do as well. Perhaps they

weren’t as significant as Sarah’s questions, but they were much

more urgent. I set my face, blank and expressionless, as the

milky dawn sky brightened over Staten Island, and got dressed.

Martín’s whereabouts were unknown to the NYPD, but

the word on the street was that he was gone from New York.

Osorio left the same message. I thought that Martín would

be back without a doubt. The types of people who hired him

react poorly to disappointment. In addition, he had an image

to consider as well as a lover to avenge. I figured I had some

breathing space, but eventually I was going to see his toad face

again. I hoped it would be on my terms.

I knew about Martín—McHale had been nice enough to

let Micky spend some time with the file he had generated. So I

set him aside for a time. He was just a link in the chain. What

I had to figure out was why TM-7 was on my case and what I

could do about it.

I teach sporadically as an adjunct instructor at NYU. My

schedule is always changing, and after a while the IT people got

tired of turning my computer access on and off, so when the

head of the history department vouched for me, they left me

connected and I could log on to the university system when-

ever I wanted.

I sat at a cluster of terminals in the university library and did

some basic Web searches on the gang known as
Todos Muertos
,

TM-7. It was a grim story. Civil war in Central America sent

millions of refugees into the US during the 80’s. The barrios

they ended up in were crowded and violent. Crack cocaine and

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John Donohue

gangs shaped existence there, a nasty Darwinian world where

you learned quickly or died. In LA, TM-7 was the mutant

product of this hothouse—a nasty, ruthless thing that mirrored

the environment.

Over the years, gang members had been deported back

across the border and recruited new members among the des-

titute and desperate in Mexico and Central America. In time,

these new recruits made their way north and the circle contin-

ued. The beast was thriving.

And it was no longer just a local issue. Today TM-7 is

reported in at least five countries and some thirty states north

of the border. Membership is always difficult to determine, but

some sources put it as high as one hundred thousand, with

instability and desperation adding to the rolls on a regular

basis. More good news. I may have inadvertently trimmed the

gang population down somewhat, but there was no shortage of

replacements.

I read on: highly violent, heavily tattooed. Drugs. Murder.

And it got better: as they grew more successful, TM-7 was also

becoming a more sophisticated organization. The gang had

hired paramilitary experts from Mexico to assist them, rogue

members of another border organization known as the Alphas.

They were reputed to have come from an elite federal battal-

ion known as the Special Mobile Force Group. They brought

increased firepower, sophistication, and ruthlessness to the mix

in the dry lands of the Southwest between Mexico and the US.

The members of TM-7’s cells had adapted and expanded

their range of activity. They were now heavily involved in

working the border, moving dope and guns and anything else

that pays. The Feds even worried that they may have ties with

Al Qaeda.

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Kage

And McHale said that they were after me.

And I knew why. Sort of. My explanation was fuzzy, but it

provided the only link. How could I have possibly run afoul of

TM-7? The only thing I could think of was my trip to Tucson.

What had I done? I annoyed some mystery writers, but all their

mayhem was confined to paper. I ticked off Lori Westmann,

but it had all worked out to her benefit in the end. Little people

like me got used and discarded on a regular basis in her world.

I doubt she even gave me a second thought.

I did have a fight in the desert with a bunch of guys who

seemed to be waiting for something. But thinking back, they

didn’t appear to fit the TM-7 mold. They were working men,

not gang-bangers. They may have been smugglers, but they

were small time.

What had been important enough to send someone after

me in Brooklyn? What did I have that could be of any possible

interest? I sat back and closed my eyes. I could hear the clicking

of other people tapping on keyboards to either side of me, the

shuffle of footsteps and distant conversations. My hands rested,

palm up, in my lap. I slowed my breathing and waited for the

sensation of simultaneously sinking and rising to take hold.

Images flickered across my mind: Sarah’s face floating above

me as she tried to staunch the bleeding, Yamashita standing in

the
dojo
, a rock worn and pitted by time. My brother’s smirk.

And the appalled, fearful expression of the desert guide

Xochi as he saw the copies of Eliot Westmann’s most recent

journal spill out of my bags as I headed for the airport.

“You gonna use that terminal?” a voice asked. I opened

my eyes, momentarily startled. He was just a college kid: lean

and bearded with the intense eyes and shapeless suit jacket of a

graduate student. I never even heard him approach.

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John Donohue

Nice work, Burke. An army of psychopaths is after you and

you’re napping in a public place.

The kid had a copy of Spengler’s
Decline of the West
under

his arm.
Oh boy. Danger is all around.

“No,” I told him. “Knock yourself out. I’m done.”

When I had returned from Tucson and before the attack

at the house had knocked me off balance, I wondered about

Xochi’s concern about the copy of the Westmann manuscript.

Lori Westmann’s agent hadn’t even mentioned it when I had

visited, so it couldn’t have meant something to her. I wondered

again whether Xochi had kept its existence secret. Something

about it must have caught his attention.

He was a desert guide and advocate for traditional South-

west culture. It was clear to me that Elliot Westmann had been

milking Xochi for all kinds of information. The author’s notes

gave a pretty clear sense of the old faker collecting odds and

ends of cultural minutiae that could be used to dress up a new

book. Westmann was working on some kind of Eco-Indian-

New Age scheme. It was structurally similar to what he had

done with his earlier
Tales of a Warrior Mystic
, but designed to

be sold in a different era to a different clientele. There’s a sucker

born every generation.

It was, I thought, pretty transparent. When I had origi-

nally scanned Westmann’s notes, I made a rough allocation of

elements to different categories—local color, religion, ritual,

ecology. But there were also chunks of material that combined

hiking narrative with odd little numerical references in the

margins—Paired strings of five digits. Westmann did not strike

me as a numbers guy, so they stuck out in my mind.

But then
Los Gemenos
came calling and there were other

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Kage

things to worry about. Yet now I wondered again about the

numbers and what they could tell me.

The university has a nice map room, with expansive blocks

of document cases in natural wood. Clusters of soft chairs were

spread here and there, with the occasional napping students

sprawled in them, but it was mostly deserted. No skulking hit

men, students of German intellectualism or other dangerous

types. A young, gum chewing reference librarian showed me

how to access the relevant data files at yet another bank of com-

puter terminals.

I yearned for the musty card catalogues of my youth. But it

was not to be. The room was cool and angular and high tech.

The only real maps immediately apparent were behind Plexi-

glas and mounted on the wall like archaeological exhibits from

a bygone age. The librarian, however, fit right in with the con-

temporary decor. She had short spiky hair that was dyed black.

A small jewel of some sort was set in her nose. Her skirt was

short and her long, thin legs were encased in nubby tights. The

only makeup she wore was an odd maroon lip gloss. It created

an unfortunate contrast with the purple of the laminated ID

card she wore on a lanyard around her neck.

“How do you feel about the ideas of Oswald Spengler?” I

asked on a hunch. She looked at me dismissively. “This,” she