The Nicholas Linnear Novels (65 page)

She was still far too full of energy to lie down so she walked. The beach was wide, surprisingly free of debris, with sand of a very pale color.

The surf was up, curling high in a translucent green arc crowned by white spume before tumbling forward onto the sand in a dazzle of silver spray.

It was far from crowded this early in the morning, though the beaches this far out were never jammed the way places like Jones Beach always seemed to be.

It was quiet, peaceful with the repetitive sounds of the sea and the gulls calling as they wheeled into the sun.

The character of the beach changed so subtly that for a long time she was not even aware of any difference, but presently it seemed to her as if it had become somewhat more familiar. For instance, she knew that she was coming up on a narrow spit of land before she turned the curve of the beach and saw it lying before her. As this began to happen more frequently she began to wonder where in fact she was.

Then, as she happened to look up from the beach to the houses she was passing on her right, she saw the familiar spires. She felt a brief twist in her stomach as if she were plunging downward in a high-speed elevator, wondering how she could have been so stupid. Flying Point was just east of Southampton and Gin Lane.

There it stood in all its looming splendor. The family house.

As she stared, she saw the wooden gate swing open and a figure come down the slatted redwood stairs onto the dunes.

My God, she thought. It’s Gelda!

Her first instinct was to turn around and simply walk away but she was rooted to the spot, thinking: What the hell is she doing at the house?

On the sand, Gelda had poised and now she took off her sunglasses.

She’s seen me, Justine thought, panic-stricken. I can’t walk away now.

Gelda came toward Justine. They stood facing each other on the near-deserted beach at a distance where a pair of duellists might stand preparatory to firing at each other.

“Justine!”

“Well.”

“What a surprise.” Her eyes had gone dull, as if an iron gate had come crashing down behind them. They talked as stiffly as if they were two strangers awkwardly thrown together at a party neither of them had wanted to attend.

“Are you here with… anyone?”

The wind whipped about them, making streamers of their hair as if they were pennants on a field of battle.

“No, I’m waiting for someone.”

“I am too.”

“Well.”

“Yes.” She did not want to admit to herself how much Gelda had changed. How beautiful she was now. How gracefully she moved. And behind that, a kind of confidence that—well, she had always had enough confidence for them both. It was Gelda who always had the boyfriends, who was always asked to parties and to football games. It was Gelda who could ice-skate so exquisitely—her movements on the ice totally belying her weight—her dates soon clung to the side railings, watching her with unabashed awe.

Justine was always too young for this or for that; too skinny for the boys to notice her; too clumsy for sports. She drew instead and became more isolated, her envy feeding upon itself like a ravenous cannibal.

“Is Father here?”

Gelda shook her head. “No, he’s in the city.” She hesitated a moment, debating with herself. “He’s in some kind of trouble.”

“That’s nothing new.”

“No, but I thought you would be concerned—at the very least. You always were with Mother.”

And there it was, staring at them both in the face like an ugly red sore.

“I can’t help the way Mother felt,” Justine said defensively. Anger began to fill her up, and if she had ever entertained the thought of telling her sister about Nicholas it fled now.

“And I can’t help being the way I am.”

“That was always your excuse for doing just what you wanted.”

They stared at each other silently. Justine was appalled yet unable to initiate any action. My God, she thought despairingly, we’re kids again. We can’t think like adults when we’re around each other, just intent on hurting each other all over again.

Gelda squinted into the sun. “D’you want to come inside for a while?”

“No, I—”

“Oh, come on, Justine. You can unbend
that
much, I imagine.”

“You have felt it, also.”

“Yes. During the night. This morning. I don’t know when.”

“It is important that you are here.”

“There was nowhere else to go,” Nicholas said.

Fukashigi smiled thinly.

There were no classes today and the
dōjō
seemed enormous in its emptiness. Sadly, it reminded Nicholas of the last time he had seen Kansatsu in the
ryu
outside Tokyo. And it occurred to him that much of his life since then had been spent simply floating, the days and nights gently rocking him as they blended together, lulling him to sleep on the tide of their passage.

What had he really accomplished in America? What could he have done with that time had he stayed in Japan? So much time. And if he had never begun his studies in bujutsu? What then? What would he be now? Some high government functionary, no doubt, with a high salary and a perfect garden. Two weeks each year in Kyoto or somewhere on the seashore, even Hong Kong, perhaps, in a season when it was not overrun by Western tourists. A loyal wife and a family. Children to drool on him and laugh with.

The void, he realized, is only noticeable when it is no longer there. Justine. Justine. Justine. His reward for at last swatting down the past. He very much wished to see again the graves of his parents, to kneel before their
sotoba
, to light the incense sticks, to say the litany of prayer over them.

“You have brought it?” Fukashigi said.

“Yes, I knew I must one day, though I don’t know why.”

“Come.”

Fukashigi led him through the abandoned
dōjō
, striped with shadow and pale sunlight bleeding through the ragged rents in the flying lengths of oblique cloud that marbled the summer sky.

At the threshold to the back rooms, Nicholas shed his shoes, Fukashigi his
geta
, and the old man took him to the very rear of the building, to a room with a raised floor of tatamis. He pushed aside the
shōji
and they entered.

Sitting cross-legged, Fukashigi waved his hand gracefully. “Please place it between us.”

Nicholas put the parcel he had been carrying down onto the tatami and unwrapped it. There was the dragon and tiger box that So-Peng had given to his parents.

“Open it.” Fukashigi’s voice held a certain reverence.

Nicholas obeyed, lifting the heavy lid to display the nine cut emeralds.

All of Fukashigi’s breath seemed to go out of him as he gazed at those nine bits of mineral which seemed to glow and spark in the low light.

“I never thought,” the old man said softly, “that I would see such a sight.” He sighed. “And they are all here. All nine of them.”

He looked up. The square room was immaculate, spacious, harmonious, calming.

“Time changes many things. When you came to me so many years ago in Kyoto it was, I think, only the letter from my friend Kansatsu that stopped me from dismissing you out of hand. Oh, so you did not know that. Well, it is true. And, to be completely truthful, even after I had read the letter, I thought that I might be making a grievous mistake. After all,
Aka i ninjutsu
, history informs us, is no acquired trait but a serious calling—quite as serious, quite as mysterious as the calling to serve Amida Buddha—to which one is born and bred.

“I can tell you that I had grave doubts concerning your entrance into
Aka i ninjutsu
, despite what Kansatsu wrote. He is no ninja, I thought, therefore he cannot know. But a breach of our security had already been created and, of course, you came to me appearing a Westerner. I knew only that Kansatsu had not lost his mind.

“Of course, to have sent you away would have been, I know now, a mistake.” His fingertips caressed the box before him. He smiled. “You see, I am not, as I understand was so often said of me in those days, omniscient.”

“It is still said.”

The old man inclined his head slightly. “So? It is, as you can see, an untruth. It was through Kansatsu’s intuitiveness that you became the first student of mixed blood at the Tenshin Shoden Katori
ryu.
The only one such. A signal honor; an unorthodox decision on my part. Still, I do not regret it. The
ryu
has had no finer student in all the years that it was mine.”

Now it was Nicholas’ turn to incline his head.

“But you came to us for a reason, did you not? And now the time has come. It has begun.”

“I regret to say,
sensei
, that it began some time ago.” And he told the old man about the murders.

Fukashigi sat quite still and there was silence for a time after Nicholas had finished. His head swiveled and his cool gaze swept over Nicholas’ face. “When you joined us you took certain vows, just as you did at every step of your training. You must have known what was commencing the moment you discovered the
shaken
fragment. Yet you took no action. Now, perhaps because of that, many people—three of them your friends—are dead.” His cold eyes seemed as luminous as beacons on a foggy day. “Are you dead, too, Nicholas?”

Nicholas watched the backs of his hands, stung by the old man’s words. “Perhaps I never should have come to the West. I think I was merely trying to outrun my karma.”

“You know better than that. Wherever you go, it will be the same for you.”

“It sounds like a curse.”

“If one chooses to see one’s life in those terms, then it is. But I am surprised that you should think in such a curiously Western mode.”

“Perhaps America has changed me as it did Vincent.”

“Of course only you can know the truth of that—”

“I don’t know anymore.”

“I suspect that is only because you do not fully comprehend it yet.”

“I am bound up inexplicably with Saigō—and with Yukio—yet—”

“Acceptance of karma should not be confused with fatalism. We are all, to a great extent, masters of our own fate. But also we must learn to bow before the inevitable: this is the true meaning of acceptance and it is only this which brings the harmony without which life is not really worth living.”

“I understand all that,” Nicholas said. “It is the specifics that still elude me.”

Fukashigi nodded his head and, reaching inside his robe, he withdrew a series of rice paper sheets which had been folded very carefully. They had about them the look of age. Fukashigi handed them across to Nicholas.

“This letter is from Kansatsu. I am following his express instructions in giving this to you now.”

It was a plain black Ford sedan.

Doc Deerforth tried to make out who was in it but the late morning sunlight spun like a nova across the windshield, completely opaquing it.

He watched the sedan long enough to make certain that it was following Justine’s brick-red roadster and, still mindful of and not a little curious about Nicholas’ warning, he spun the wheel of his car and set off after them both.

He had had a call out along the west end of Dune Road earlier that morning and had come east to look in on Justine. He had still been some distance away when he had seen her take the roadster east. That was when he had picked up the black Ford.

He stayed well back and turned in after seeing the brick-red roadster stop at Flying Point. But, curiously, no one emerged from the black Ford. He waited impatiently for what seemed a long time. He got out of his car, on the point of following her down the beach, when the black Ford started up. Slowly it began to pace her along the beach road.

Doc Deerforth went hurriedly back to his car and got in.

He was sweating profusely by the time he came around the last turn and saw the sedan parked some way from the beginning of Gin Lane.

He was grateful he had not lost it. The traffic was light and he had had to hang back farther than he would have wanted. More than once the Ford had disappeared for long moments around a serpentine turning.

Now he knew where they were both headed. He recognized Raphael Tomkin’s house immediately.

The soles of his shoes crunched on gravel as he got out of the car. He snapped down the sunglass attachment to his glasses against the fierce glare.

Now he could see into the black Ford. It was empty.

It was quite still here. There was a lone cardinal in a tall pine but it would not sing. He could no longer hear the boom and hiss of the surf and the lack of that sound was like white noise clattering like thrown stones through his brain.

He began to walk toward the Ford. All sound seemed heightened in the hush. Not even a breeze stirred the high treetops. It was very hot.

The black Ford was nearer now, hulking like some sinister castle in the desert. Who would follow Justine? And why?
Look after her
, Nicholas had said. Startled, Doc Deerforth realized he thought of the two of them as if they were his own kids. Just an old man’s foolishness, he admonished himself. I miss my two girls, is all.

His shirt was soaked, sticking to his skin like loose folds of ancient flesh. Just as it did, he reflected, in the jungle so long ago. And abruptly, he staggered, experiencing a fierce stab of vertigo. It’s the malaria, he thought, steadying himself against a resinous tree trunk. My own form of malaria. Because it’s the summer. In the fall, it will pass.

He ran one hand along the burning flank of the Ford and, bending a bit, peering into the interior. There was nothing to see.

He was still stooped over like that, an old, balding man, sweating in the heat of the afternoon, when the shadow stretched itself across the side of the black sedan.

For a long moment, Doc Deerforth stared at it. It recalled to him a moment in a ballet he had seen a long time ago in the city: the entrance of the Dark Angel. On either side of him, his daughters—they were still young then—had cried at the vision. Black wings clouded the sun and he was abruptly cold.

He began to turn, heard the weird whirring sound at that same instant. A blur on the periphery of his vision and instinctively he raised his arm in front of his face.