Linnear 03 - White Ninja (11 page)

Branding had never made love to music; Mary had needed undisturbed quiet in order to relax sufficiently for sex. He found the music at once exhilarating and disturbing, almost as if he were making love. to two women at once - or, more accurately, as if they were making love to him, one with her mouth and her sex, the other with her voice.

Then, sweat-sheened, Shisei sank all the way down on him, and he forgot about everything else.

Afterwards, he said with an ironic smile, 'I wonder what would have happened if you'd found a David Bowie album instead of this one by Grace Jones.' He was exhausted; she was amazingly dexterous, extraordinarily powerful. He felt as if he had just spent two hours working out at the gym. It was, he thought, a delicious land of exhaustion.

'I masturbate to David Bowie,' Shisei said. 'Do you masturbate, Cook?'

'That's an odd question.' He was astonished by her power to shock him.

'Do you think so?' she said. 'Why? It is merely a parameter of what makes you you - one of many.'

He sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, determined to break the mood. He was uncomfortable when she spoke like this, with the cutting directness of a child. But she was not a child. 'Here in America,' he said, 'it is not something easily spoken of.'

'Not even among man and wife?'

'We are not man and wife, Shisei. We are strangers.' And then, because her penetrating gaze compelled him, he added, 'Sometimes not even among man and wife.'

'That is senseless,' she said. 'It is natural, like the naked body. Like sex. And yet Americans are ashamed.'

'From what I understand, there are many subjects not openly talked about in Japan.'

'Shall we speak about all of them now?'

Branding did not believe her. 'What about kataT

Shisei moved on the bed, taking between her calves the printed top sheet, flicking it on to the stained wood floor. 'I. have been taught that if something is beneath the ice, if you sense it but cannot see it, it is still there, moving, disturbing the currents.' She opened her thighs, redirecting Branding's gaze. She arched her back. 'Come here, Cook. I do not think that I have finished with you - nor you with me.'

When Justine had stormed out of Nicholas's workout room, she went into the kitchen. It had been close to dinnertime, but she had realized that she could not remember what it was she was going to prepare. Besides, she had not been hungry, and as for Nicholas, she had thought, if he's hungry, let bun get his own dinner.

Having come to that conclusion, she found that she was no longer comfortable anywhere in the house. She

went outside, down the engawa steps, past the huge cryptomeria. In the last of the light, she wandered the grounds, until she found herself at the stone basin where, more than three years before, Nicholas had taken her on their way to this house.

I'm thirsty, she had said then, and she was thirsty now. She stopped, took up the handmade bamboo ladle, drank from it. She stared down into the bottom of the basin, made out the Japanese character for michi. A path; also a journey.

Was her destiny here, in Japan? Was that the only direction in which her path lay, the sole destination of her life's journey? Could such a thing be possible? She had always thought that life's journey had many paths, a multitude of destinations. Well, then? But she tried to imagine her life without Nicholas, and all she felt was a terrible loneliness that she knew she could not bear. Living somewhere apart from him would be torture, she knew, because her mind and her heart would always be wherever he was. She did not want to live the rest of her life as an emotional cripple.

But, on the other hand, she knew she could not continue the relationship as it was. She had relied on Nicholas. He was her anchor, her safe haven, especially here in Japan where she knew no one and, moreover, was increasingly coming to feel that she was unwanted. In the beginning, everyone was friendly - no, she corrected herself, polite was the right word. Every person Nicholas or Nangi introduced her to was so damn polite Justine couldn't stand it. No one could consistently be that polite, she suspected, and really mean it. And yet, Nicholas had repeatedly told her that the virtue of sincerity was extremely important to the Japanese.

What, then, was she missing? Was she crazy in her belief that she would never be allowed into the inner social circles of even Nicholas's closest Japanese acquaintances? She did not think so.

Again, she felt as if she were missing something vital, some kind of Rosetta stone which, once deciphered, would explain the inexplicable Japanese to her.

And now, Justine understood that she needed Nicholas's help more than ever. She could not allow him to push her away. She had to persevere. She knew in her heart that whatever difficulties both of them might encounter, they could survive them only if they stuck together, and did not tolerate this eerie estrangement in their relationship.

Justine allowed herself one brief moment to feel the fear that her estrangement from Nicholas engendered in her. Then, she did her best to clamp it off. She listened, instead, to the sounds of summer all around her.

In a moment, she had drunk her fill. She replaced the ladle on the stone basin, and immediately the carved michi disappeared. Justine turned, and went through the twilight, taking a different route back to the house.

Inside, she heard Nicholas in the workout room. She could hear his deep exhalations as he hit the padded pole over and over again with knuckles as hard as steel.

She exhaled deeply, as if she had been holding her breath for a long time, felt how much tension she had been holding in her upper body. For months, she had ached with worry for Nicholas. She passed by the workout room now and thought, Everything will soon be all right. He's starting to get back to his old self.

Nothing could have been further from the truth, however. Nicholas knew it the moment he threw the first of the aikido atemi. It was clumsy, out of skew, the result

-not only of being rusty, but of something more pervasive, something sinister.

The unthinkable had occurred. Nicholas had suspected it months ago. Now he was sure.

In the first few weeks after the operation, there had been a great deal of pain. Out of reflex, Nicholas had

sought to dissipate it through his martial arts training. There was a way to open, internally, the endorphin channels in order to damp down on the brief, immediate pain one experiences in hand-to-hand combat. For more lasting pain, such as he had, there was another way.

Getsumei no michi. The Moonlit Path. Akutagawa--san, one of Nicholas's sensei, had said, In Getsumei no michi you will experience two immediate insights. One, all sensation will gain in weight and significance. You will, in effect, simultaneously see the skin and what is beneath it. Two, there will be an awareness of light even when there is none.

What Akutagawa-san had meant, Nicholas had learned, was that Getsumei no michi allowed him to combine intuition with insight. He could hear lies spun in the air; he could make his way through the most labyrinthine enclosure blindfolded. Getsumei no michi was a return to man in his most elemental state, long before the layers of civilization accreted, stifling his primitive power.

But Getsumei no michi was much more. It was, in effect, a haven, the source of Nicholas's inner strength and resolve. In Getsumei no michi all things were made clear to bun. Without it, he was far worse than deaf, dumb and blind. He was defenceless.

When, in pain in the hospital, he had sought surcease in Getsumei no michi, he had found none/ His connection with that mystical state was not only severed, but his knowledge of the state itself was gone altogether. It was not a question simply of memory. Nicholas could remember what Getsumei no michi was, could even conjure up what it had felt like to be there, and that proved the most painful realization of all. A person born blind looks upon life differently than one who has had his sight taken from him. Cruelly, Nicholas was aware of what he was missing, and the knowledge ate at him like acid.

Still, because he had been so weak after the operation,

he could not know for certain if the damage were irreparable until he returned home and began his twice daily workouts. Physical proof was required that he had been reduced to the status of mere mortal. Which accounted for his moods, his anxiety and his sleepless nights. Quite simply, he was terrified to confront the truth. As long as there was a shred of hope that he was wrong, and in time Getsumei no michi would be returned to him, there was something to hold on to. But after the first atemi was struck, when he would know absolutely whether or not he had been abandoned, he knew that there would no longer be room for hope, only reality.

Now it had happened; his worst nightmare come true. He was like a man naked beneath a blinding sun with no protection, nowhere to run.

He had never been aware of how he relied on his. godlike state until it had been stripped from him. How dull and uninteresting, real life seemed with its reliance on the five under-developed senses.

Who knew how long Nicholas would have continued to sit on his engawa contemplating light and shadow, refusing to come to terms with his fate, had not Lew Croaker's letter arrived, had he not asked Justine to read it, had she not been curious about Croaker's new hand.

That had cut it. In the face of what his friend had gone through - and was still dealing with - Nicholas felt abject and foolish for putting off what he knew was inevitable.

He had gone into his workout room and, staring 'hard at the padded pole, had begun his preliminary breathing exercises, had, without thinking, assumed the ready position, and had struck out. ' The first atemi, the basic percussive blow of aikido, was struck. And it was as if he were a rank beginner. The form remained, ingrained in his musculature, but there was nothing behind it: no conviction, no mind-set,

no purity of purpose. Instead, Nicholas's mind was a chaos of conflicting thoughts and images deflecting and reflecting off one another in wild concatenation.

Nicholas, mechanically striking the padded pole over and over, was in shock. He could not quite believe it was happening. Getsumei no michi gone. His mind no longer part of the benevolent Void, emptied in order to absorb fully each clear thought, but rather a babble of mutually antagonistic currents, each seeking its own independent end.

And that was how Justine found him, collapsed on to the tatami mats, his chin lolling on his sweat-streaked chest.

He heard her enter, heard her little gasp of horror and, lifting his head, he saw the look of pity in her eyes, and could not bear it.

'Get out!' he shouted. And, because he had unconsciously used kiai, the samurai's war shout, Justine felt as if she had been physically assaulted. She recoiled, reeling in bewilderment. 'Get the hell away from me!'

When Tomi Yazawa shut the door to Commander Omukae's office behind her, she was trembling. She stood still for one long moment, composing herself. The realization that she had revealed to a man she did not know well, more than she had revealed to anyone else in the world, shocked her. More, it shamed her. No matter that Senjin Omukae had given her permission to speak; she should have kept her mouth shut. Why, then, had she spoken? And why had she spoken the truth instead of a well-crafted, face-saving lie?

Tomi did not know, but she suspected that her weakness of resolve had had something to do with Commander Omukae's beautiful face. She shuddered as she recalled the moment when he had stood up, moving into her line of sight. She knew then that he had trapped her as surely

as if he were a hunter with a snare. She had had no recourse but to look directly into his face for the whole of the interview.

The experience had been terrifying. She had felt somehow naked - obscenely, glowingly naked - beneath his penetrating gaze. And although she had fully meant to create some kind of fabrication to answer his questions, she found as she was about to speak that she could not. It was as if Commander Omukae possessed an invisible hand that had entered her mind, drawing out from her against her will that which he wanted to know.

And yet... Tomi was racked with guilt. Commander Omukae was her champion in the police department, which certainly did not appreciate a female moving through the ranks of its detectives. Were she a man, Tomi knew, she would already have made the rank of lieutenant, would already have been leading her own squad. This was part of what Commander Omukae had meant when he had said, We are, each in our own ways, outcasts.

The fact that she was on important assignments at all was due entirely to Commander Omukae. He, of all the officers of superior rank that she had encountered, treated her as an intelligent human being. He had even praised her work once or twice, the last time not more than a month ago when her diligent surveillance had at last paid off, and they had taken down a major importer of MAC-10 submachine pistols for the Red Army.

Before that, there had been the female terrorist who was about to board a Korean Air flight at Narita Airport armed with plastic explosive. Tomi had taken her into custody in the ladies' room at the very last minute. The knife wound Tomi had received during that fracas had been superficial, nevertheless Commander Omukae had put her in for a valorous commendation. No matter that his recommendation had been turned down, Tomi

thought, as she walked thoughtfully back to her desk.