Linnear 01 - The Ninja (9 page)

On the top of the steps, Billy took a deep breath and cursed the summer influx. We’re all gonna die of carbon monoxide poisoning one of these days, he thought.

Not four paces away, his Lilco truck stood waiting for him, but this evening he was reluctant to leave the cheery warmth of the bar. Music blatted at his back from the juke inside. Tony Bennett singing ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco”.

You could take San Francisco, Billy thought, take the whole of the West Coast and shove it up your ass. He’d been out there in the Army and had come to hate it. I didn’t leave anything there but a good case of the clap. He laughed. But, damn, I’m sure sorry I took this late job. Time and a half was all well and good but some days - well, some days it just wasn’t worth it. He had a feeling that this was one of those days.

Sighing deeply, he went down the stairs but not before giving the finger to Tony Bennett and his shit-ass city.

His mood changed, however, as he banged down one of the dark side roads and he began to whistle tunelessly. He didn’t think this job was going to take too long.

And, of course, by that time he was thinking of Helene and the stuff he had bought her from the Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue. Agh, he thought, maybe it came in the mail today. It was about due.

He was picturing Helene’s long-legged frame in the clothes -he laughed: if you could call them that - as he came around the last bend to the beachfront property and saw the black-clad figure step right into the beam of his left-side headlight.

‘What the fuck!’ He stepped on the brakes and swerved over to the right shoulder. Leaning out of the window, he called, ‘You stupid bastard! I mighta killed you. What’s the matter with -‘

The door on his side crashed open and it felt as if a tornado hurled him out of the cab. ‘Hey!’ He rolled across the cool tarmac. ‘Hey, buddy!’

He got to his feet in a boxer’s semi-crouch, his fists up in front of his chest.

‘Not to fool around, you sonovabitch.’

His eyes opened wide as he saw the flash of the long blade in the wash of the headlights. Christ, he thought, a sword. A sword? Jesus, I must be drunk.

A moth batted in the headlight, dazzled, and the cicadas sizzled. Close at hand, the surf hissed and shushed like a nanny calming a crying baby.

He threw a punch. It never connected.

The air in front of him seemed to split apart and vibrated like a bead curtain.

He felt two sensations almost simultaneously. They were the sharpest, most exquisitely painful feelings he had ever experienced.

Once, just outside the base, he had had a scuffle with an M.P. and the bastard had managed to slash him with a knife, wounding him in the side, before he had had a chance to bury his fist in the M.P.‘s face. It was the guardhouse for him for that, but he had never felt so satisfied in his life.

But that pain, that burning was nothing to what Billy Shawtuck felt now. The blur of the blade pierced the night and then pierced Billy. From the top of his right shoulder down across his abdomen to the left side of his pelvis. His guts began to spill out and his nostrils were suffused with a nauseating stench.

‘Jesus Chri -‘

Then the round wooden pole crashed, whistling like a boy at play, onto his shoulder. He heard the sharp crack as the bones broke but, astoundingly, there was absolutely no pain. Only the feeling that he had been driven straight through the tarmac of the road.

Tears came to Billy’s eyes for the first time in years. Momma, he thought, Momma, I’m comin’ home.

‘I think I know what it is,’ she said.

Night had come and a strong wind, springing up from the landward side of the house, rattled the trees outside. Far off a boat hooted once and was still. They lay close together on the bed, enjoying the nearness of their flesh, nothing sexual in it; just two beings, together.

‘You won’t laugh,’ she said, turning her face towards his. ‘Promise me you won’t laugh.’

‘I promise.’

‘If I’m hurt - physically - it prepared me, sort of.’

‘For what?’

‘For the other kind of hurt. The breaking up; the leaving.’

‘That seems to me an awfully pessimistic view of life.’

‘Yes, it does.’

‘He put his arm around her and she put one foot between his, rubbing his shins.

After a time, he said, ‘What is it you want?’

‘To be happy,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’ There is nothing else in the world, she thought, but our linked bodies, our twined souls, and she thought that she had never been as close to anyone as she felt at that moment to Nicholas. Trust had to begin somewhere. Perhaps this was the place for her to start.

She jumped at the sound of an enormous crash that seemed to come from near the front of the house, the kitchen. She cried out as if a cold hand had clutched at her vitals, saw Nicholas sit up, swing his legs over the side of the bed.

He stood up, and as he began to move towards the bedroom door he seemed totally transformed to her. Standing there stark naked, he nevertheless seemed fully clothed, as if his rippling muscles and gleaming sweat-streaked skin were some mysterious raiment cloaking him.

He moved silently towards the lemon light streaming down the hallway. He led with his left foot, his body sideways as if he were a fencer, knees slightly bent, feet not leaving the floor. Down the hallway. He had said not a word to her.

Gathering her wits, she went after him.

His hands were up before him, she saw, their edges reminded her oddly of blades, the fingers as stiff as steel as he moved steadily into the kitchen.

Past the table, she saw that the window over the sink had been shattered inwards and shards of glass gleamed in the light. She dared not move farther on bare feet. The curtains flapped in the wind rushing in through the rent, whipping against the enameled walls.

She watched Nicholas move forwards, stop as still as a statue as he peered down at something on the floor on the far side of the table near the window. He stayed in that position for such a long time that she went cautiously across the littered floor to stand behind him. She gasped and turned away. But something drew her eyes inexorably back and she looked again.

On the floor was a black furry mass, large and unmoving. Blood seeped along the floor in several places from under the body, glistening where it shone upon the ruined glass. A strange, astringent smell assaulted her nostrils and she gagged. Her eyes began to blur.

‘What -‘ She gagged again, swallowed hard. ‘What is that thing?’

‘I’m not sure,’ he said slowly. ‘It’s too big for a bat, at least in this part of the country, and it’s not a flying squirrel.’

The phone began to ring and Justine jumped. Her hands gripped her arms. ‘I’ve got goose-flesh,’ she said. Nicholas remained where he was, staring down at the black thing that had crashed through the window. ‘Blinded by the light,’ he said.

Justine went to the far wall and picked up the phone but he seemed oblivious as she spoke for several moments. She had to come back and touch him on the arm. ‘Vincent wants to speak to you,’ she said.

He looked at her then, tearing his eyes away. ‘All right.’ His voice seemed thick, his droughts far away. ‘Don’t go near it,’

he warned as he went to the phone. ‘What is it?’ he said abruptly.

‘I tried you at your place,’ Vincent said. ‘When there was no answer, I took a chance.’ Nicholas said nothing. ‘Look, I know what time it is.’ His voice rattled against Nicholas’s ear, an odd note settled in it. ‘It’s happened again. Florum just brought in another body. They’re photographing it now.’ The wind howling in through the broken window seemed chill to Nicholas. He waited, sweat breaking out on his body. He looked at the mess on the floor: the black-furred corpse, the red blood, seeping still as if seeking something or someone. ‘Nick, the body has been cut obliquely from shoulder-blade to hip joint as neatly as - It was one cut. Do you understand?’

Tokyo Suburbs

Singapore, Summer 1945

Tokyo Suburbs, Winter 1951

There was a Shinto temple amid the lushest forest Nicholas had ever seen, a mere three hundred metres from the extreme eastern edge of his father’s land. Then it was another hundred and fifty or so to the house, a large, delicate, precisely orchestrated structure of traditional Japanese design. The front was L-shaped, preceded, as one came upon it, by an exquisite formal garden which, needless to say, required tireless attention and as much love as a small child.

The irony of the location would come later when, on the far side of the long rolling knoll to the west, they would construct an ultramodern eight-lane superhighway to aid the bustling traffic to and from the heart of Tokyo.

The last traces of Japan’s military might had been ground to metal powder, its imperial daimyo tried and serving time as war criminals. The Emperor remained but everywhere uniformed Americans basked in what they often laughingly referred to as ‘the atomic sunshine*.

Yet Nicholas’s history lessons were to begin in another country.

On February 15, 1942, his father told him when he was ten, the British garrison had surrendered Singapore to the attacking Japanese. They held the city for three and a half years until September 1945, when the British reoccupied it. There his father had met his mother, a kind of refugee in the war-torn city. She had been married to a Japanese garrison commander and seeing him blown to bits during the last days of that humid trembling summer perhaps unhinged her for a time.

The first of the British forces were already infiltrating the outskirts of the city and the commander had moved his garrison east to outflank them but, overextending his position, had found himself outflanked. Caught in a murderous crossfire, he had cut down six English soldiers with his katana before the rest had sense enough to step back and loft the volley of grenades. There was nothing left of him, not even bones.

Years later, in an old battered shop selling ukiyo-e prints in a tiny Tokyo side street, Nicholas had come across a certain print entitled The End of the Samurai. It depicted a dismayed warrior’s death, his great katana flung from his hands by a blast of gunpowder. In that print Nicholas saw, perhaps, the redemption of his mother’s first husband, recognizing the historical imperative of that enemy.

His mother had always been a totally apolitical woman. She had married out of love, hardly out of convenience. But with the eventual defeat of the Japanese in Singapore, with the death of her husband, she found that her entire world had exploded into a wilderness that frightened her. This she found utterly consternating. Life, she firmly believed, was for the living. One mourned one’s losses and moved onwards. Karma. She believed in that above all else. Not a predestiny - she was no fatalist as many Westerners might mistakenly dub her. She knew rather, merely how to bow before the inevitabilities of life. As the death of her husband.

But this was a time of momentous changes and, like a beautiful flower caught up in an inexplicable maelstrom, she felt adrift in the riot of chattering gunfire and mortar explosions.

She met Nicholas’s father, ironically enough, in the very office where her dead husband had carried on the command of his defeated garrison. She had wandered in there as if it were some Buddhist temple, sacrosanct from the flames of war that rose all about her. Perhaps she had come there because it was one of the only places left in Singapore now that was at all familiar to her. Oddly enough, the thought of fleeing the city never entered her mind. Rather, she wandered the lethal city with little regard to her personal safety.

So much of the city had changed that she was confused, no longer certain where the business district was or where her old apartment had once stood. Piles of rubble were everywhere and the streets were flooded with a tide of children, surging and calling, as if in the aftermath of war’s bleak nightmare they had been released from some hideous bondage. It recalled to her the happiness she had felt at New Year’s festivals when she had been a girl - liberated for a time from the cares and restrictions of the world. And this, too, confounded her.

Thus for many days she had walked the steaming streets, whirling into dark doorways instinctively as she heard the heavy tramping of the approaching soldiers - she was beyond differentiating one side from another. Miraculously, she avoided serious misadventure.

Karma, she would say later. She survived at the sufferance and the pity of those Chinese folk who spied her and fed her almost as if she were a baby, spooning the thin rice soup between her slack lips, wiping her, chin every so often, for she could not perform even this simple act herself. She relieved herself in the gutters and forgot what it was like to take a bath. Those times when she came across running water, as in the fountains still intact which she stumbled across by chance, she thrust her fingers into the spray, staring at it as if it were something she had never seen before. When it rained, she stood still and stared upwards at the billowing clouds, seeking, perhaps, a glimpse of God.

The morning she staggered into the garrison office, Nicholas’s father was in the middle of an administrative crisis. Not only were his troops obliged to mop up the last outlying pockets of Japanese opposition but now orders had come down urging him to see to it that his men policed the metropolitan area in an attempt to quell the increasingly violent outbreaks between the Chinese and the Malays who lived constantly in an uneasy half-peace. That left perhaps an hour and a half each day for his men to sleep; it was clearly a situation he could not tolerate and he was in the process of seeking some conciliatory alternative to actively disobeying a direct order. He had, in fact, been sitting in this same wooden slatted chair - the one that had, for the last three years, been the sole property of the dead Japanese garrison commander - since the morning of the previous day.

Except for several hurried trips to the washroom to relieve himself, Colonel Denis Linnear had been right where he was when the dazed woman wandered into his sanctum sanctorum. How she had managed to slip past the three sets of guards he was never able to ascertain to his satisfaction. Yet that particular point only manifested itself to him much later. At the time, he was concerned only with her appearance and, as he jumped up from behind his littered desk, his aides seemed more startled by his movements than by the fact that there was an unannounced woman in the room.