Deshi (16 page)
But there was no clash. He simply reached out and touched the arrow’s shaft. Sarah lowered the bow, a rueful expression on her face.
“The weapon, so fearful in one situation, is not useful in another,” He smiled at her and bowed. She bowed back.
He approached the group, thick and dense with power, his dark eyes focused intently upon us.
“We all study with different masters. And respect them. As it should be. But we all need to remain open to new things. New ways. You all have the physical capacity to be good students,” my teacher continued. “But there is something more needed…”
Sensei was speaking to the group, but he looked toward the spot where I stood and watched me closely for a moment. “There is a need for
nyunanshin
here. Do you know the phrase?” He glanced around the room.
Heads shook: no.
Yamashita looked at me. “Professor?”
“Soft-heartedness,” I said, sighing inwardly. “A receptivity of the mind and spirit to instruction.”
“Precisely,” Yamashita breathed. “To be a student is not just a matter of being capable of learning. It is being willing to do so. And acting on the lesson, no matter how difficult.”
“
Hai
,” I said.
That night when I got home, there was a message waiting for me from my brother.
“What’s up? You get a lead on the big guy and his getaway car?” I asked over the phone. In the background, I could hear one of Micky’s kids howling. It was late and the usual struggle to wrestle them into bed was taking place.
“I’m workin’ on that,” he grumbled. “Whatta you got going tomorrow?” my brother asked.
“Well… work,” I said. My time off was up.
“Call in sick, it’s Friday anyway. We’re on to something.”
A screaming child wailed like a banshee on Micky’s end of the phone. The screaming receded and I could hear his wife Deirdre following in hot pursuit.
“We checked out the records from Sakura’s office,” Micky explained in the lull. “Following up to see whether we could get anything that might fit in with the theory about the connections between the calligraphy job and the murder.”
“Aha!” I said. “You still think it’s lame?”
“Time will tell,” he said, not admitting anything. “But we tried to run down Sakura’s most recent contacts and see whether there was anything interesting about them…”
“And,” I prompted.
“There were some calls from a journalism student from NYU. Korean kid from Queens named Kim. He seemed a little out of the ordinary from Sakura’s usual clientele. We ran it down, even though it took a while.” He sniffed.
“Students are slippery,” I commented.
“Well this guy thought of himself as some hot-shot investigative reporter. He was off on some secret project according to his friends. Doing research. Ya know, generally pestering the life out of people.”
“What did he want with Sakura?”
“Once we got his name and stuff, the secretaries remembered a little better. He wanted Sakura to look at some stuff for him. The time frame fits.”
“Interesting,” I said. “Did the kid tell you what he wanted Sakura to look at. And why?”
“Sort of hard to tell,” Micky said. “The kid’s not saying much.”
“Why not?”
“He’s in the morgue.”
There are cultures in the world that believe that the eyes can project an invisible power. It’s more than just the windows to the soul idea. Eyes are portals of a type: they let things in, but can also allow other things to leak out. Cops are sensitized to facial expressions, the shift of the eyes and the minute play of muscles along the jaw. They watch you while you talk. You control what you say, but sometimes other energies leak out in other ways, and send messages into the silent space between words.
The eyes I saw in the picture Micky showed me were hidden behind a flat surface that gleamed dully in the light from the camera’s flash. Two hard pools of darkness that had pressed themselves into the victim’s flesh. You got the urge to pull the stuff off the man’s head, even just looking at it in a photograph. But at the same time you were afraid to see what was underneath.
That little adventure would be left for the coroner.
I met Micky and Art that next morning. The day started with the usual sights and sounds. I took the subway to Jamaica to meet them, since the NYU student had been found in Queens. Walking through the Long Island Railroad station was surreal: the usual background of my morning commute from Brooklyn to the university on Long Island, but now with a very different destination. I heard the familiar garbled announcements from platform loudspeakers and watched commuters slip through closing train doors to the trilling of warning bells. I could smell the usual scent of dirt and metal filings in the air, the ozone of electricity and the deep, dark smell of grease.
We walked out into the rail yard. It’s an expanse of open land, cut by train rails and dotted with small, oddly placed shacks, squat brick structures with grimy windows, and industrial detritus. Piles of rusting iron rails sit among weeds. There are old train cars shunted off into dead ends. Pieces of wood and wire are scattered along with the track cinders. At one point, a dilapidated kitchen chair, its vinyl seat cracked and oozing foam padding, sat by a siding, a shiny Coke can set down beside it.
We were headed for an old warehouse on the north side of the train yard. It was a sagging building with broken windows showing like broken teeth. The crime scene had long been vacant, but Micky and Art insisted on seeing it. My brother would scoff at the idea that a location gives off vibrations of any type. And I’m usually in agreement. I think he and Art go to places like this to make the crime more real for them. They don’t want the victim to be just a statistic, or a report, or even a photograph. They need to see the place where it actually happened. Because sometimes the things they investigate are hard to believe.
We walked the perimeter of the building first, not saying much. Art and Micky talked quietly about what they knew from the investigation. It freed me up to just look and drink in the surroundings. These places smell like rust and dirty water. It’s now an odor I associate with other things.
When they got started on Kim, the screams must have bounced around the empty space like trapped birds, desperate to escape into the sky. We finally ducked under the crime scene tape and paced the empty space, silently taking the surroundings in and matching them to what the photographs had shown us.
Someone had strapped him down on an old wooden work-table in the center of the room. When things really got going, Kim had tugged and sawed at the bindings with the panicked desperation of an animal. In the pictures, you could see where the cords bit into his ankles and wrists as he rocked and convulsed in the aftershock of what was happening to him.
There was the dark residue of old blood all over the place—from a knife. Or at least that’s what Micky thought after reading the coroner’s report. Someone had sliced and hacked at Kim, and it must have gone on for some time. He had wood fragments under his nails that had been gouged up by his struggles.
He had numerous small wounds all over him. You can plot the sequence of events like this by the flow of blood, which oozes and spurts out to the rhythm of the crime. I wasn’t there when the cops had found him, which was just as well. The smell clings to you and it takes a long time to dissipate. And even longer to forget.
Whoever did it saved the eyes for the end. It made you shudder when you thought too much about it. They dropped hot solder into Kim’s eyes, one drop at a time. It hissed and bit into his flesh, pattering around the orbit of bone, blistering the eyelids while he must have rocked and screamed and tried to escape. And slowly, they sealed Kim’s eyes off forever.
When you looked at the pictures, it was bad. You knew it was bad. That it had taken a long time for Kim to die. And that somebody had enjoyed the process.
“My God,” I had breathed as I looked at the crime scene shots.
“God’s got nothin’ to do with this, buddy boy,” my brother said.
“Whoever did this,” Art said, “is one sick fuck.”
“Does this have anything to do with Sakura?” I asked.
Art sighed. “Stuff like this has got its own weird logic. Could be directly connected…”
“Could be coincidence,” my brother said. But he didn’t sound like he believed it.
“He was tortured,” I said. Micky nodded.
“And not just for the hell of it,” Art added. I looked a question at him.
“They didn’t cut his tongue out, Connor,” he explained.
“They?”
He waved his hand. “Figure of speech. He. She. They.”
“It,” Micky said.
“Whoever did this wanted Kim to be able to talk,” Art said. “He was tortured for information.”
I looked around the warehouse. Dingy and empty now, the yellow crime scene tape an incongruous slash of color in the gray landscape. “I don’t think I can imagine anything worse,” I said. The smell in the air here was bitter and made me feel sick.
“I can,” Micky told me. I squinted at him, waiting. “It would be worse to have someone working on you for something and not really knowing the information they were torturing you for.”
We all looked at each other silently.
“Let’s get out of here,” Art said.
Kim’s torture and murder was not exactly a well-kept secret. The crime was more than a week old and the word on the street was that the killing was done by a group called the Street Ghosts. Micky and Art hooked up with a female officer named Roth, who worked the Queens North bureau for the NYPD and tried to keep up with groups like the Ghosts. She collected whatever intelligence the PD came up with from the patrol units, the occasional tidbits from the Organized Crime Investigation Division, sorted through rap sheets and aliases, and listed the depressing statistics. She wasn’t a street cop. She experienced things at one remove. But it was probably just as well. Art said later that learning about the gangs was a lot like the experience of pulling up a flat rock and being appalled by the squirming variety of life that coiled just below the surface.
Roth was thick-waisted from desk life, with a short, frosted, no-nonsense hairdo and enough time on the force to know how to cut to the chase. Her desk was covered with files, neatly stacked and sorted in some arrangement only she could make sense of. She had an aging PC in one corner with yellow sticky notes stuck all around the perimeter of the screen. Her file cabinets were heavy with paper as well, and the drawers sagged when she hauled them open to look for things.
“Street Ghosts. Sure.” She had continued filling out a form as she talked to my brother. “Whattaya wanna know?”
Art and Micky laid it out for her. The Sakura murder. The NYU kid. An informant’s suggestion of the gang as the perpetrators. Roth didn’t even blink.
“I read about that Kim thing. Could be one of the gangs. They’ll kill anyone. Anytime. For any reason.”
“Pretty good motto,” Micky said to Art.
“Short, yet oh so descriptive,” his partner answered.
Roth eyed them both suspiciously. She got up and yanked a file drawer open with a grunt. She removed a thick file and a black ring binder and they thudded onto the desk.
“But I haven’t picked up anything that would connect to this Sakura thing locally.” She opened the binder and consulted notes. “No rumble on the street so far. All you got right now is this clue from the victim Sakura?”
Micky and Art nodded.
Roth made a face like she had just eaten something that didn’t taste good. “Kinda thin,” she commented. “And the Ghosts… we haven’t heard much from them lately. Besides, they were usually a bit messier when they hit someone.”
“How so?” Micky prompted.
Roth looked up from her desk. “These guys are kids, mostly.” She snorted at the thought. “Scary to say, but there ya are. So when they do a hit, there’s usually a bit more excitement. Lots of hacking and chopping. Excess bullets. Usually, they’ll kill someone for a reason, but, for them, there’s also a bit of thrill in it.”
Micky shrugged. “No surprise. Even most pros, deep down, are gettin’ off on killing.”
Roth nodded, and when she did it accentuated her growing double chin. “The Street Ghosts tend to use blades in their hits. They get in the occasional shoot-out with other gangs, but when they really want to make a point, they use these short Chinese swords.” She paused and checked a note in another loose-leaf binder she had lugged out from beneath the desk. “Yeah,” she nodded. “Butterfly knives, they’re called.”
“No knives with Sakura,” Art said. “But this kid from NYU was a mess…”
“A few years ago I would have liked them for it,” Roth said. Her eyes were brown. She looked from one man to the other, and then shrugged.” The guy who led them was named Han. Local kid from the Korean-American community. A freak. In and out of juvenile detention for years. Sexual assault. Aggravated assault. Assault with a deadly weapon. Extortion. A few murders we were real suspicious about, but nothing we could pin on him.”
The two detectives were unmoved. Most rap sheets they saw were long, sad lists of minor convictions and, in between the lines, big suspicions.
“He’s about the size of a refrigerator,” Roth commented, rooting around in a drawer and pulling out a binder of mug shots. “He was into all that kung fu stuff… ah, here he is.” She turned the book around so we could see it. Han’s narrow eyes glared out from the picture, the rest of his square face a rigid mask. The height markers on the wall behind him showed us he was about 6’3”. I didn’t need the help. I had seen him staring down at me as I lay in a rainy alley.
Micky saw the expression on my face. “Wha’?”
“It’s the guy who jumped me near the Dharma Center,” I said.
“You sure, Connor?” my brother asked.
“Oh yeah. That’s him.”
“Big guy,” Art said softly.
“Angry Asian male,” I added.
“What’s he doin’ off his turf?” Micky asked.
“Why’s he following Tibetan monks around the city?” I added.
Roth looked confused. “He was sent upstate for a while,” she continued. “Did some time and then disappeared onto the street. Haven’t been able to pin anything on him for quite a while.” She looked at my face. “He do that to you?” I nodded. “Word is, he’s moved onto to bigger and better things. Hired muscle of some sort.”
