Deshi (23 page)
“And,” he concluded, “because you fear so strongly, you hate the one who is pushing you to confront that fear.”
Some of the anger was still there. I felt it stir, an ember being blown upon. The lama held up a calming hand. “Peace, Burke. Now you must learn something of the human capacity for the unexpected,” he said.
“I don’t understand, Rinpoche,”
“Hush. Chant with me.” And, in that dark room, we sat in the candlelight, the murmur of words and the cadence of breathing slowly bringing us to that place where you both sink and rise at the same time.
My eyelids flickered. I felt suddenly nauseous and stirred uncomfortably. “I feel sick,” I murmured.
Changpa smiled slightly. “You are not sick. Your conscious mind struggles against release. The power deep within you struggles for release. And your conscious self struggles to imprison it.” He held up his hand in that familiar mudra, the open hand gesture that said
have no fear
. I concentrated on my breathing once more.
Your eyes start to close slightly. Shadows begin to swell and shift. The sound of chanting filled the room; the image of the lama before me grew faded, less distinct. And slowly, subtly, in a way that made the final apparition appear almost expected, Changpa’s raised hand began to glow. It was as if heat and light was leaking through the folds and seams of his palm: warm red and yellow energy seeping out into the still air between us.
He rose then, still chanting, and touched his glowing palm to my forehead. The location of the third eye. Then, he gradually touched the other chakra, the power centers of the body. The throat, the solar plexus, the spot below the navel that Japanese call the
saika tanden
. The base of the spine. I felt a warmth envelop me as I sat motionless under his touch. It struggled against another fire that still smoldered, deep within me.
In time, the sensation faded. I rose, curiously tired and lightheaded. Changpa held out his hands in benediction, offering a peace I could not yet accept. “Surrender is not defeat, Burke,” he called out to me as I left. His voice had quiet resonance that stayed with me as I left the building.
“We gotta stop meeting like this,” another voice said as I came down the steps from the Dharma Center onto the street. Micky and Art were standing there.
“A force larger than any of us, there is,” Art said in his Master Yoda voice. Micky and I both glared at him, but my brother’s partner seemed unperturbed.
“You guys following me around?” I said.
My brother gestured at me to come closer to him. “So we’re running down things on this torture victim…”
“Kim,” Art supplied.
“Somebody wants something from him. Is it whatever he sent to Sakura? Could be, but we gotta make sure.” Micky squinted at me as he ran through their reasoning, like he was thinking about what to reveal and what to withhold.
“We checked out his apartment,” Art said, consulting his notebook.
“Grad student housing at NYU,” he sniffed. “Turns out someone had been there ahead of us.”
“The place had been tossed,” Micky added. “We spoke to the security people… Kim hadn’t been seen on campus for a few weeks.”
“So he’d been hiding out?” I asked.
My brother nodded. “Possibly. According to his professors he was working on some independent project.”
“Did you look for fingerprints at the apartment… anything that might link up with the Sakura murder,” I started.
Micky waved me off. “You been watching too much TV, Connor. Forensics is useful for firming up links, but it’s hard to generate theories from it. Too many variables.”
“Besides,” Art told me, “unless the prints are in the local files, we end up sending stuff to the FBI for a check, and they seem a little preoccupied lately…”
“Ever since the Twin Towers came down,” Micky told me, “the routine stuff has been moving slowly.”
“The Feds have bigger fish to fry, these days, Connor. All sorts of suspicious folks around…”
“Cabbies from Bangladesh,” Micky offered.
“Yemeni tobacconists,” Art added wistfully. “Basically, ninety percent of the managers of convenience stores in the five boroughs…”
“OK, I got it,” I told them.
“We knocked on some doors instead,” Art told me. “It’s what we do. Talk to people. Not fancy, but it sometimes gets results.”
“And?”
“And eventually we ran into a buddy of Kim’s. Told us that he’d stopped by briefly a while ago…” Art looked at Micky, who finished the sentence.
“He seemed agitated and asked his pal to hold onto some stuff for him.”
“Such as?” I pressed.
“Computer files,” Art said. “Kim hinted that they were part of some big investigative report he was working on…”
“These journalism students at NYU take themselves very seriously,” Micky confided.
I nodded. “Woodward and Bernstein?”
Micky closed one eye and looked up into the sky. “After talking to his pal, I’m thinking more… what Art? Geraldo?”
“Definitely,” his partner replied.
“What’s in the files?” I said, worrying about where they could go with this.
“Hard to say, Connor. The files are password protected,” Micky said. “What a pain. We got a guy back downtown who can deal with it…”
“Take a day or so, though,” Art said thoughtfully.
“There may be another copy if Kim used the university’s network to store files,” I suggested. “He might not have encrypted it there because the school has its own security protections.”
Micky looked thoughtful. “Whaddaya think, Art?”
His partner grimaced. “We’ll need a different warrant. That, too, will take some time.”
“Shit,” my brother commented. “OK, we’ll get that running. Thanks for the suggestion, buddy boy.” Micky smiled at me. “But in the meantime, we’re following up on some other loose ends.”
I looked at him expectantly.
“Kim seemed like a pretty digital kind of guy, but even he wrote stuff down. Addresses, things like that. Sakura’s was there. And so,” he said nodding up the stairs toward the Dharma Center, “was this place.”
“What’s the link?”
My brother shrugged. “Beats me. That’s why we’re here.”
“We knock on doors,” Art confided to me. “Ask questions.”
“But do you get answers?” I said to them. I had stumbled out of Changpa’s meditation hall confused and disoriented. The sensation of calm warmth had started to fade as soon as I had left the lama’s presence. I stepped into the clutter of a New York night, back into a world that hummed with disjointed activity. Pedestrians wandered by. The deep bass thudding of overpowered car stereos pulsed in the distance. Horns honked. Lights flashed on and off. And two cops followed the tangled ball of hint and possibility in any number of different directions. I felt numbed by it all.
I left them to their investigation and wandered off down the streets of Manhattan. Cars shot by in the darkness. Occasionally, faces would be revealed in the dark interiors, flashing by streetlights and flickering like the faint promise of meaning in a world built of questions.
I threaded the gauntlet of various disgusted cop faces: front desk sergeant, tired-looking patrolmen, and plainclothes guys in rumpled suits as I made my way to Micky’s desk. Their faces matched my mood. In its march to modernity the NYPD had been modifying the typical bullpen room, open and dotted with desks, to a brightly lit space with tasteful beige fabric partitions. But when you eavesdropped on conversations or looked at the paperwork, the esthetic effect faded somewhat.
My brother’s cubicle was unoccupied. You couldn’t say empty, since it was crammed full of paper. Dog-eared sheets spilled across his desk. Cardboard file boxes sagged in a corner. An old IBM Selectric typewriter stood on a small green metal table with wheels. A form of some sort was loaded in it, with spaces blotted by white-out. A Burke had been at work here.
A passing detective spotted me, checked my pass, and led me to a conference room, where Micky and Art sat sifting through documents with the excruciating patience of hung-over forty-niners. My brother looked up when I opened the door.
“Unh,” he said, and gestured me to a seat.
His partner was a little more talkative. “The computer guys have accessed some of Kim’s files,” he told me. “We’ve been going through the printouts most of the morning.”
“What do you have?” I said.
“More shit than we know what to do with,” Micky grumbled. He gestured at the papers. “Some of this is school stuff—term papers, notes. Other stuff was digital copies of photos.”
“Stuff in Chinese,” Art told me significantly.
“Calligraphy?” I asked. Maybe there was something here related to what Sakura had been sent. Whatever that was.
“Nah,” Micky started, then corrected himself. “You tell me. Looks printed to me.”
And it was. They were, in fact, official letters and documents of some sort. I didn’t recognize the insignia on the letterhead, but the characters were easy enough to decipher:
Zhong-guo Ren-min
, the People’s Republic of China.
“So, what are you thinking?” I pressed. “That Kim took pictures of these documents for some reason? Part of whatever he was investigating?” I was disoriented. I hadn’t shaken off the impact of my session with Changpa, as well as an irrational sense of impending danger. I had come to the precinct hoping to follow up on the links between Kim and the Dharma Center. What I got was more confusion.
“We figured out Kim’s link with the Tibetan guy,” Art said. “At least that’s something.” I looked up. “Yeah,” he continued. “Kim was using the library at the Dharma Center to do research on Tibetan lamas.”
I nodded, remembering the photos on the wall that the Rinpoche had shown me.
“As far as I can see,” Micky said, “Kim was putting together a report on the fate of these guys…”
I was skeptical. “This is cutting edge journalism? The Chinese have been jailing these guys for years.”
“Richard Gere seems to think it’s important,” Art offered.
Micky shrugged. “I didn’t say I’d figured everything out. It’s where we are right now…”
“Maybe you can take a look as well, Connor,” Art prodded.
I hesitated. “This not really my area, you know. The shodo stuff is even a stretch…”
Art waved my protest away. “Come on. Asia is your thing…”
“Dig in, buddy boy,” Micky said with grim determination. He pushed a pile of papers my way.
I sat back and got to work. After a while, I rubbed my eyes and told them, “Look, if I’m going to make heads or tails out of Kim’s notes, I need some reference materials. The Tibetan stuff is confusing. Let me take copies over to the Dharma Center. They’ve probably got the best local collection in the area. And I can pick their brains if I get stuck.”
They eyed each other. “Whaddaya think?” Micky asked Art.
His partner shrugged. “Why not? It’s gotta be an improvement over where we are now…”
“Which is nowhere,” my brother concluded.
They hovered for a while like mad wizards over a Xerox machine, then bundled up the copies and slipped them into a brown manila folder. They walked me to the door so I wouldn’t get stopped.
“Technically,” Art murmured, “we’re not supposed to do this.”
“That’s half the fun,” my brother told him.
I spent the day sorting through Kim’s stuff and cross-referencing facts, looking for a pattern. A clue. By nightfall what I ended up with was a sad list of a bunch of Tibetan Buddhists who had been noted teachers and scholars. They still could be, for all anyone knew, but their fate seemed to be a mystery: after a long period of successfully avoiding notoriety, they had somehow run afoul of the Chinese authorities. I imagined the high, cold air of Tibet. Chinese prisons there would not be pleasant places.
I asked to see the Rinpoche, but was informed that he was traveling. I remembered that Yamashita had said they were going to visit Kita. It made me uneasy, but I figured the emotion was the result of a combination of residual anger, confusion, and frustration. My usual internal state. Then the skinny guy with the ponytail drifted in and told me there was someone on the telephone asking for me.
“They got it,” Art told me, and you could hear the excitement even over the phone.
“Huh?” I had been reading all day and my brain was still engaged in the world of books.
“Sakura’s scroll,” he said. “You were right. Hoddington stashed it with his former students. The archery people.” I knew that they had made a call to Georgia after Sarah had made the connection between Hoddington and his student, but it had been lost in everything else that had happened. Now, I felt a jolt of excitement.
“What’s it say?” I asked.
“Damned if I know,” Art admitted. “They sent a digital copy. It’s calligraphy. Japanese, I guess. You need to translate it for us. Now.” There was a scuffling noise and my brother came on the line.
“You stay put. We’re on our way.”
I was too anxious to continue reading. I wandered around the room and then went downstairs to watch the archers. Stark was there, hovering around with Andy, that same guy I had met at the museum. Stark’s face clouded when he saw me, which wasn’t surprising. I wondered whether Yamashita had said anything to him. Whether he was still training at the dojo. I ignored him, gave the teacher a bow, and watched.
The kyudo sensei was working with the archers—not on technique, but on the spiritual projection needed to use a weapon, any weapon, well. Sarah Klein was still away, but I could imagine what she would look like here, listening solemnly to everything he said, her eyes big with attention. I liked that about her. The sense of focus. Of paying attention to life’s lessons. She seemed like someone who was alive to life’s possibilities. And mature enough to appreciate them.
After a while, I went upstairs to wait. Soon the archers would bow out and it wouldn’t be long before Micky and Art got there. I walked around the reception area, looking at the Tibetan art and killing time.
I checked my watch, went into the reading room and scooped up my file folder, then started down the five granite steps of the Dharma Center entrance. I figured I’d meet them on the street. As I came out into the night, I felt the change in air pressure and heard the faint rhythm of street sounds in Midtown. I looked down the block expectantly. It was dark, and the streetlights bled the color out of the world, while shadows clung at random spots in doorways and between cars.
