The Nicholas Linnear Novels (169 page)

“‘Anyway, enough about me,’” Justine continued reading. “‘What’s with you two? I trust you’ve gotten over your rough time.’” Justine stopped, unable for a moment to continue. She became aware that Nicholas was looking at her, and she made herself smile as naturally as she could.

She cleared her throat, dropped her gaze to the letter. “‘I can’t believe it’s been months since I last wrote. Can’t believe that we haven’t seen each other in years. Any chance you can take time out for a vacation? I know a great boat you can stay on, and Alix would love to see you. How about it? Best, Lew.’

“You know,” she said tentatively, “this sounds like a great idea.”

“What?”

“Taking Lew up on his offer. I think it would be terrific to get back to the States for a little while.” She had said nothing to him about her own increasing desire to return to America. “We could fish, swim, relax. Just laugh and have fun. And we’d be with good friends.” She poked at the letter with her finger. “I don’t know about you, but I’d like to see for myself why Alix is calling him Captain Sumo.”

It had been meant as a bit of levity, something to break his morbid mood, but she knew as soon as she said it that it was a mistake to refer to Croaker’s new hand. Nicholas flinched as if she had struck him, and he got up and went into the house.

For a moment Justine sat staring straight ahead at the shadows of the huge cryptomeria that had for so long entranced Nicholas. Then, very carefully, she folded Croaker’s letter and slid it back into its envelope.

Inside the house Nicholas stood in front of the open
fusuma,
the sliding doors leading to his workout room. He was a formidable, almost intimidating figure: wide, powerful shoulders above the narrow hips of a dancer and the long sinewy-muscled legs of the serious athlete. His face was rugged, angular, handsome and magnetic without being in any way classically beautiful. His eyes were long and upswept, testament to his Oriental blood. His cheekbones were high, his chin solid and as Western as his English father’s had been. His thick black hair now had traces of silver through it which Justine loved. He had about him both a sense of quiet and of danger.

He almost passed by the doorway, then Lew Croaker’s words came back to him. One-handed Lew.
Stop it!
he told himself irritably. You have more than enough on your mind without playing guilt games with yourself. In the back of his mind was the thought that this form of guilt was peculiarly Western, and he despised that in himself. He wondered whether his father, the Colonel, had ever felt this Western.

In a way, Justine was right. What had happened to Croaker was his karma. But she was also wrong. Because Nicholas knew that somehow he and Lew Croaker had been born under the same sign. Their karma were inextricably entwined. Like Siamese twins, what happened to the one seemed to affect the other. He did not think it a coincidence that Croaker’s letter should arrive at just this moment.

Reluctantly, Nicholas went into the workout room and put on his black cotton
gi.
It seemed a lifetime since he had had it on, and it felt oddly uncomfortable. As if that were some kind of omen, he shivered. What was the matter with him? Nothing felt right.

The workout room smelled of straw and slightly of stale sweat. Nicholas saw the padded pole, the hanging rings, the wooden floor-to-ceiling trellis he had made himself, bolted to one wall, and the rough-hewn crisscrossing wooden beams above his head through which he used to climb, swing, and hang by his crossed ankles.

He closed his eyes, trying to conjure up the numerous times he had been in here, practicing the complicated exercises associated with his martial arts specialties, aikido and ninjutsu. He could quite clearly remember being in here, working up a sweat, but he could not,
could not for the life of him,
recall what it was he had practiced. Christ, he thought, abruptly exhausted, it’s not possible. This cannot be happening. But it was, and a curious dread crept through him, a thief stealing his resolve.

His knees grew weak and he had to sit down. Slumped against the padded pole, Nicholas remembered the last battle as one does a spectacular but long-gone lover, with an awe tinged by the suspicion that memory had distorted its import, magnifying its significance.

He remembered the pain that Koten—the Japanese sumo, the Soviet agent who had cut off Lew Croaker’s hand—had inflicted on him using the
dai-katana,
the Japanese longsword his father had given him on his thirteenth birthday.

Nicholas feinted right, then came in beneath Koten’s guard. But the sumo let go of the
dai-katana
with his left hand, slamming the forearm into Nicholas’s chest. Nicholas hit the floor hard.

Koten laughed.“I didn’t hear you scream that time, barbarian, but you will soon.” The
dai-katana
swooped down, its finely honed tip splintering the polished wooden boards at Nicholas’s feet.

Koten laughed again as Nicholas came at him, a human mountain attacked by an insect who possibly could sting, but nothing more.

He countered Nicholas’s
oshi,
using the hilt of the sword, instead of, as Nicholas had expected, returning
oshi
for
oshi.
He felt the crushing blow on the point of his shoulder, felt the resulting grinding of bone and the audible pop of dislocation. Pain ran like fire down his arm, rendering his right side totally useless.

“This is what Musashi called Injuring the Corners, barbarian,” Koten gloated. “I’ll beat you down in small strokes. I’ll make you scream yet.”

He ran at Nicholas, feinting with the long sword, employing
oshi
now to throw Nicholas hard onto the floor. He knelt over him on one knee. The blade sizzled downward, cutting a vicious arc through the air.

Desperately, Nicholas twisted, raising his left arm so that it broke inside Koten’s upraised arm, deflecting the blow out and away from him. But because of the injury to his shoulder, he was unable to complete the
suwari waza
move.

Instead he was obliged prematurely to release Koten’s arm to deliver an
atemi,
a percussive strike, with his left elbow. He heard the answering crack as ribs caved in beneath the blow.

Koten cried out, twisting his body up and away, at the same time slashing back toward Nicholas’s body with the sword.

The steel blade was Nicholas’s first priority. He made contact with Koten’s forearm, gliding his left hand along the flesh. At the bottom of the wrist he broke inward, twisting. The bone snapped.

Now they were even, in a way; Koten was obliged to drop the two-handed grip on the sword, his right arm hanging loose and ungainly at his side.

But his second attack could not be stopped, and he used a shoulder throw to Nicholas’s right side. This time Nicholas cried out. He rolled away, scrambling, directly into a powerful
tsuki
that forced all the air from his lungs. His head went down and he began to wheeze reflexively as his lungs tried desperately to regain the oxygen denied them.

A second vicious
tsuki
to his sternum rocked him backward. In an instant Koten’s massive bulk was over him, his weight pressing on Nicholas’s chest, further denying him air. Bile rose into Nicholas’s throat. This was the enormous danger in
sumai—
the form of battle sumo of which Koten was a master. Its territory was in bringing the superior weight to bear in an area close to the ground, increasing the strength of the
sumai
warrior exponentially.

Koten brought the bright blade point against Nicholas’s black cotton
gi.
Koten leaned forward, bringing pressure down onto Nicholas’s chest. Beginning the first cut, skin rupturing, peeling back like the rind of a fruit. Blood welling, dark and hot.

Nicholas’s mind was screaming for surcease. Reaching back for the “no mind” of the Void, he allowed the organism to work on its own. His left arm shot straight up, the fingers together and as rigid as any sword blade ever forged. Into the soft spot of flesh joining Koten’s chin and throat.

Nicholas struck as he had been taught
kenjutsu, as
he would have done a sword strike: with all his muscle, mind, and spirit. He thought not of Koten’s flesh but rather of what lay beyond it.

The
kite
struck through flesh and cartilage. The sumo was dead before sensation could reach the brain and register.

Afterward, exhausted in spirit, sick at heart at what the violence in his life had engendered, Nicholas had taken the
dai-katana
and thrown it into a lake not far from where he now lived. It had vanished immediately, taking with it the last vestiges of a life he was determined to leave behind.

Now Nicholas ripped apart the black cotton of his
gi,
feeling with his fingertips the raised horizontal scars on his chest, proof of the wounds he had received from Koten. For without that assurance, surely he would have thought this memory nothing more than a dream.

Abruptly, he heard a sound in the room, and his head snapped up just as if he were expecting an attack from an enemy.

He saw Justine walking barefoot across the tatami mats toward him. He said nothing as she crouched beside him. Her eyes searched his dark face, but she did not touch him.

“If you are in such pain,” she said softly, “the least you can do is let me help you.”

He was silent for a time. “There’s nothing you can do,” he said finally.

“You mean there’s nothing you’ll
let
me do.”

His head was down, his face in the shadows he created.

“You’re being foolish, Nicholas.”

“Since you’re so sure of yourself, so be it, then.”

Justine sat back on her heels, contemplating him. “You helped me when I was in pain. Why won’t you let me—”

“It’s not the same.”

“Isn’t it?” She shrugged. “Well, maybe not.” She touched him now, her fingertips on his forearm for just an instant. “You know, Nick, for a long time after…the death, I had no interest in sex. Well, that must have been fairly obvious.”

“Neither of us were prepared to go on that way then,” he said.

She waited for a moment, to let him know that he must allow her to finish. He knew from experience how difficult it was for her to speak her mind, or her heart, in personal matters. She said, “My abhorrence of sex—well, not sex so much as the ultimate fruit of sex, that it had brought us such pain instead of joy—lasted longer than it should have, longer than was normal.”

She caught the look in his eye and said, “Yes, Nick, I knew what I was doing—what I was doing to the two of us. But, you see, I couldn’t stop. In retrospect, I think it might have been a perverse kind of penance, a feeling that crept over me, a malaise. I was certain that after what happened, you would no longer find me attractive. No—” She put her hand over his mouth. “There’s no need for you to tell me otherwise.” She smiled. “It’s all right. Really it is. Whatever I did, I did to myself. You were not a cause; you were only affected. I’m sorry about that.” She settled nearer to him. “I wish…in a way, I wish we could go back in time, so I could deal with my own pain more effectively, and not allow it to spill over. I—”

“You had every reason to feel as much pain as you did,” Nicholas said.

She looked at him oddly. “What about
your
pain, Nick? She was your baby, too.” She said it quietly, and had not meant to inject an accusatory note into her voice.

“I don’t want to talk about it. Whatever I feel about her is private.”

Justine was taken aback. “From me? I’m your wife, Nick!” She was dimly aware that her voice was rising, but she could not seem to stop herself. “We made our daughter together. She was
ours.
”

“It does no good to belabor the obvious.”

Justine’s anger abruptly burst through. “Oh, stop it! It’s so unreal, the way you are able to suppress everything. Love, hate, resentment, anger. What did you really think about me when you saw me wallowing in my self-pity day after day? Surely, from time to time, you must have been angry, hurt at my closing you out. And speaking of that time, I don’t even know what you felt after the baby died. You never cried—at least not in my presence; you never talked about it, even when I got up enough courage to bring up the subject. Did you bury it so deeply inside you that you now feel nothing at the passing of that tiny spirit?”

“I see,” Nicholas said, “that you’ve returned to your habit of playing judge and jury in condemning me.”

“No, damnit! I’m giving you a chance to explain yourself.”

“You see?” he said more easily than he felt. “I am, in your eyes, already guilty, because in order to calm you down I now have to explain my actions.”

“I’m perfectly calm!” Justine shouted.

“Your face is red,” Nicholas pointed out.

“Go fuck yourself!” She jumped up. She began to walk out of the room, then turned back to him. “You engineered this fight. I want you to remember that!”

Their gazes met, and Nicholas knew she was right. Why couldn’t he bring himself to tell her how he felt then—when their daughter had died—or now?

And suddenly he knew, and the knowledge, like a stone lodged in his throat, made him break out into a sweat. It was because he was afraid. He was afraid of the fear that was like a living thing growing inside him.

Senjin Omukae picked up the phone and sent for Sergeant Tomi Yazawa. While he waited he lit a cigarette and, inhaling deeply, blew smoke at the ceiling. He stared out the small window of his cubicle at the ancient Imperial castle where the Tokugawa shoguns had commenced the longest and surely the most paranoid suzerainty in Japan’s history, approximately 250 years.

On the other hand, the Tokugawas had been canny rulers. Aware that they must ruthlessly destroy any hint of rebellion against their rule as near to its infancy as they could manage, they conspired to import from China a form of Confucianism suitable to their needs. This branch of religion stressed duty and loyalty above all other traits. Initially, in its purest Chinese form, this meant loyalty to one’s father and mother, but the Tokugawas, like most Japanese, could not resist tinkering with the original product. The result was that duty and loyalty came to include one’s shogun—namely, the Tokugawas themselves.