Linnear 01 - The Ninja (42 page)

‘He laughed shortly. “If I could, do you think I’d be here now?”

“What about a hospital?”

“Won’t take you in unless you bring your own food,” he said. His eyes were clear. I could see his ribs underneath his uniform blouse. I thought: What am I doing? He is the enemy. “We’re all dying of malnutrition. We can’t get into the hospital and our unit’s booted us out because we can’t fight any more. It’s not a soldier’s end. There’s no honour in any of this.” He stared at me and, for a moment, there seemed to be no difference between us.

‘Then my captor had hold of me and, barking harshly, he pushed me towards another part of the camp. Here, too, soldiers littered the ground. It seemed pathetic.

‘He carried with him a small black satchel which I hadn’t noticed before. It was over this that they seemed to be arguing. There were perhaps four of them. They might have been brothers. Now I regretted not asking my unexpected friend who these men were. It was clear that they weren’t regular army. To one side, I saw what was obviously a cooking fire. There was a black iron pot. By its side was a small pile of what the Japanese called famote, the diminutive Philippine potatoes that taste rather like a conventional sweet potato. There were also some withered tubers. These were obviously their rations: all the food they possessed.

‘The man who had brought me produced a series of cans he had obviously stolen from our camp. How he had spirited this food away I could not imagine, but there it was.

“They began to argue all over again - I suppose about who would get how much. My captor hustled me away, shoved me down towards a group of supine men. It was clear that he wanted me to work on them. Now I understood why I had been spared. He knew very well what I was. I began to wonder what else he knew about me.

‘I turned to the soldiers. In truth there wasn’t much I could do for them. I was without my instruments and my medicines. But they would not have been much help. My friend had been quite correct in his analysis of the situation. The Japanese were dying of malnutrition.

‘At length I got up, went over to the man who had brought me.

‘ “I’m sorry,” I said, “but there’s nothing I can do.”

‘He hit me without warning. I didn’t even see where the blow came from. One moment I was standing and talking to him, the next I was on my ass in the mud.

‘ “They need food,” I said inanely.

‘He reached down and hauled me up. There seemed to be no expression in his eyes. He hit me again, this time harder, with the edge of his hand. It felt like I had been struck by a cement mixer. I went down and stayed down.

‘It was dark when I awoke. I had a splitting headache and my right shoulder didn’t seem to work. It was odd. I could wiggle my fingers, even make a loose fist, but I couldn’t raise my arm even an inch.

‘I was in a tent, lying on something hard. Now I could tell

it wasn’t the ground. I had my jacket and fatigue shirt on but no pants. I was naked from the waist down. I tried to move but couldn’t. My entire body seemed to pulse with pain. There were flashes behind my eyes and I wondered what he had done to my nerves.

‘Shortly after, he came in. I didn’t hear him but felt some stirring of the humid air. His face loomed over me. He had removed the lampblack from his face but not the black clothing. This apparently was his uniform.

‘“What is your troop strength?” he asked.

‘I understood. Having proved useless in my healing capacity, I was now a fully-fledged prisoner of war. I knew what that meant.

‘I told him my name.

‘ “How much firepower have you?”

‘I told him my name.

‘“With which units will you rendezvous?”

‘I told him my name.

“What is the American time-table for link-up?”

‘This time I varied it. I gave him my rank and serial number.

‘ “When do the Americans plan to launch their invasion of Luzon?”

‘ “Luzon has already been invaded,” I said. “By the Japanese.”

‘Then he began to work on me. He used nothing but the ends of four fingers: his two thumbs and forefingers. No blades, no heat, no drugs, no wire, no water. None of the traditional interrogator’s tools. He had no need for anything so crude.

‘He worked on me for the whole of the night - more than ten hours. Oh, not constantly, of course; I never could have taken that. And at the end of that time there was not a mark on my body.

‘He was, truly, a magician. He worked on the nerves. Not just the major nerve centres as might be expected, but the nerve chains themselves. Just his fingers squeezing.

‘Everything else ceased to exist. He saw to that. It became, after a while, a kind of sensory deprivation situation: I felt nothing but pain. Even the two or three times I urinated, I couldn’t feel it, only smelled it for a time. Then that, too, was obliterated.

‘He used pain the way a clever woman can use pleasure. You know the way a woman leads you up the pleasure curve, slowly, lovingly, gently, until you’re throbbing for release. She’ll bring-you to the brink, hold you there for exquisite moments, then stop until the excitement subsides and she starts all over again. Finally, when you come, the sensation is better than it’s ever been before. This man used the same principle. You know terrible pain can become its own anaesthetic - just like when you fuck too much, you go numb for a while. So, too, with pain. Even your nerves have a limit, and after a while they just shut down and you feel nothing. That can be your only advantage in intensive interrogation.

‘By his very technique, this man avoided that. Again and again, he would bring me slowly up the pain curve, keep me hovering on the brink for long moments - but he never let me topple over into the numbness of the other side. He knew precisely how long I could take it and brought me down each time.

‘All the while the questions were repeated over and over. Not shouted, the tone calm and even friendly, he spoke in an intimate voice as if we were close friends meeting in a bar, talking about old times.

‘It was odd, this combination. We became, after a while, as intimate as lovers. I wanted to trust him, to tell him all my secrets, to break down the last barriers between us. The pain, too, changed over time. It became - how shall I put it? - less painful? Yes, that’s it. Less painful. I still can’t understand how it was done. Of course, I knew even then that he was working on my mind as well as on my body. But somehow that didn’t help any. I seemed powerless to stop what was happening. I felt things slipping away from, me, as if I were losing my balance on slippery ice. Then even the ice was gone and I felt myself settling down into a kind of muddy slime, sinking lower and lower. There seemed to be no bottom.

‘All this time the pain was ebbing and, as it did, I felt myself wanting to trust him more. He was my friend and I became guilty at holding out my secrets. How selfish I was I How unworthy of his friendship.

‘It was not numbness which overtook me now - I told you he would not allow that. It was another sensation. Pleasure. It crept up on me while I was concentrating on not answering his repeated questions. This was taking more and more energy and once or twice I had to bite my tongue in order to stop myself from telling him everything he wanted to know.

‘I felt, at that moment, my self slipping away from me, revealing, underneath, another person I knew not at all. It seemed to me, then, that this man knew more about me than I did and this terrified me.

‘Now I found myself wanting to tell him more than ever. Once I did, I was convinced he would hold and comfort me. The pleasure grew. I began to rejoice in the pain, to want it, for it was my link with him and I began to feel that I would be lost without it, that once it ceased I would have nothing and, therefore, be reduced to nothing. Time ceased to have any meaning. There was no past, no future, just an endless now with its bright connection. My mouth was hot with my own blood as I fought to hold back telling him everything.

‘Abruptly, it was gone. The pleasure-pain. Everything. I was lost. Alone in the tent, I began to cry, great dry racking sobs -my body had been so depleted of moisture during the night that even tears would not come. I was terrified of being alone, like a child cruelly left by its mother. I had been reduced to a kind of psychological infancy in which I now depended on my inquisitor as a baby does on its mother. I had been left alone so that it would be hammered home. I knew then that the moment he returned and started on me again, I would talk and talk and talk. Nothing would stop me.

‘I became abruptly aware of a sound in the tent. It came from behind my head. I thought he had returned and I wept for joy. There came some scraping sounds. I tried to twist my head but I could see nothing except the heavily fluttering tent top.

‘Get up!’ It was a harsh whisper in my ear.

‘ “What?” It sounded moronic. A combination of the dehydration and my swollen tongue made me sound like a cross between a heavy drunk and a lobotomy case.

‘ “Get up! Get up! Get up!” the voice hissed.

‘I felt hands under my back, forcing me to sit up. It seemed a novel experience. For a moment I stared stupidly down at my body, perhaps expecting to find the flesh shredded into ribbons or blackened bamboo shoots under my nails. There was no mark on me. I shuddered as I forced myself to remember the pain.

‘“This way!” the voice said, urgently. “Come on! Move yourself! There’s no time to sit around!”

‘Gingerly, I swung off the wooden trestle table and turned. It was my friend, the crippled Japanese. His face was drawn with worry. His extended arm held open a flap of the tent on the far side. Through it I could see the bright green of the jungle. The daylight hurt my eyes and for a moment I felt a sense of intense vertigo.

‘I stumbled across the room and he had to reach out to stop me from falling over. “I’ll never make it,” I said.

‘ “Yes,” he whispered, “you will. They won’t follow you in the daytime.” He gave me some water then looked away from me as I gulped it greedily down. “We’ve all had enough of this,” he said softly. “It’s so useless, so pitiable.” He moved on his crutches. “Come on. There’s no time to lose. We can’t let them find you like this, can we?”

‘I went to the open tent flap. My chest seemed to be pounding so hard that I thought I might drop dead of a heart attack before I had taken ten paces.

‘ “I don’t know how to thank you,” I said as I passed him.

‘ “Don’t,” he said. “We’re from totally different worlds. We could never understand each other.”

‘“Oh no?” I stuck out my hand. He touched it for a moment, then released it quickly as if he was embarrassed again. “One last thing,” I said. “Who are they?” He knew who I meant.

‘ “You don’t want to know.” He began to turn away. The tent flap was coming down like the curtain between our two worlds.

‘“Yes I do. Very much.”

‘His back was already to me. “Ninja” I heard his voice float back to me as if from a great distance.

‘I wished him luck,’ Doc Deerforth concluded, ‘but I don’t think he heard. I turned and ran into the jungle, away from the camp, away from the ninja.’

He sat staring down into the remains of his eggs as if they were a doorway into the past. The skin of his high forehead, where the white hair had receded over the years, was shiny with sweat. For the first time in which seemed like hours, Nicholas heard the stertorous ticking of the clock on the wall.

After a while, Doc Deerforth lifted his head. His eyes seemed weary as they looked into Nicholas’s. ‘I’ve never told anyone what happened,’ he said softly. ‘Not the men in my unit; not my C.O.; not even my wife. I told you, Nicholas, because I was certain you’d understand.’ His gaze was steady now, the eyes seeming to bore holes right through Nicholas’s skull, X-raying his brain.

‘You know, then.’

Doc Deerforth didn’t need to nod; his eyes told Nicholas what he wanted to know.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Do?’ Doc Deerforth seemed genuinely surprised. ‘Why, nothing. What should I do?’

‘I know how you feel,’ Nicholas said, ‘about them.’

‘About dial one,’ Doc Deerforth corrected him.

‘They’re like that, most of them.’

‘Are they?’

‘It’s the way they’re trained. Their training is even more rigorous than a samurai’s because its tradition is bound in such secrecy.’

‘Tradition. Odd, isn’t it, that such stringent traditionalists should be the perpetrators of such violent anarchy.’

‘I never thought of it dial way but, yes, you’re quite right.’

‘I want you to get this one, Nicholas.’ Doc Deerforth pushed his cold plate away from him. ‘I know you’re the only one who can. The police don’t know -‘

‘No, they don’t.’

‘- anything at all about this. It’s very fortunate that you’ve become involved. Have you thought about dial?”

The day was bright, not a cloud in the sky. The dazzle of the car’s chrome was so intense that he put on his sunglasses.

Nicholas left the town behind as he drove back out to Dune Road. He slid into the driveway at the side of his house, picked up the Times lying outside his door. He glanced uninterestedly at the headlines, went down the steps onto the beach.

He came up on Justine’s house from the right, so he could not tell if her car was there. Both the screen door and the outer door were closed but the Times had been taken in. He went up the sandy steps.

‘She’s not in.’

Nicholas turned. Croaker was just coming round from the left side of the house. He was dressed in a rumpled brown suit. His tie was pulled half off. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for two or three nights.

‘Car’s gone.’

‘What are you doing here, Croaker?’

‘Let’s take a walk.’

He led Nicholas down to the beach.

‘You’re not exactly dressed for it,’ Nicholas observed.

‘That’s all right. I like sand in my shoes. Reminds me of when I was a kid. We used to stay in the city during the summer. Never had any money to go anywhere. We used the hydrants. Turned them on and cooled off.’ The water crashed and creamed past them on the right. Far down the beach, blankets were being set up. A portable radio blatted out disco, all booming bass and tattoo percussion. ‘There were seven of us. I don’t know how my old man made ends meet. But you know, once a month during the summer, as regular as clockwork, he’d call me over just before he went to work. “Lewis,” he’d say, “c’mere. I have something for you.” He’d give me enough money for a car fare out to Coney Island and an ice cream. He knew I loved the beach. “Promise me one thing,” he’d say every time. “Take a towel. I” don’t want your mother to worry. Okay”?’