Ninja, p.64
Ninja, page 64
A light went on atop the scarred metal desk, dim and buzzing, coldly fluorescent, emanating from an ancient khaki gooseneck lamp that had been functionally ugly when new and now was light-years away from that.
This fitful pale mauve illumination revealed a face no more unusual than an accountant’s or a professor’s. Black eyes above sloped Slavic cheekbones were penetratingly intelligent, to be sure, but his fine, tufted hair, the liver spots high on his domed forehead, and the rather weak chin all combined to paint a portrait of a bland, unremarkable man. Nothing could be further from the truth.
His slender-fingered hand came away from the phone; already his mind was racing. He did not like the sudden murder of the sensei; he knew well Kusunoki’s power and was astonished that the sensei had been overpowered at all. Still, he was trained to use any and all unforeseen circumstance to his benefit, and striking swiftly and surely during times of confusion was standard procedure.
Contrary to what his brethren back home espoused, he enjoyed working with these locals. While he would never invite one to marry his daughter—if he had one—he could admire their expertise, their dogged persistence, and, above all, their rabid fanaticism. This fascinated him; it was also his secret weapon against political assassination back home.
While his position, among all his brethren, was most secure—simply because he fed them a steady diet of fear and secrecy, two elements which never failed to catch their attention—still one found it good practice to keep shuffling the cards, keeping options open, finding the soft spots in one’s superiors’ private lives that would turn the key in the lock of one’s future. That was a lesson he had learned well and hard.
He turned away from the phone, activating the portable but very powerful 512K computer terminal, rechecking the myriad random elements he had thrown at the original program. Still it was holding up.
His grunt in the otherwise silent room told of his satisfaction. With an effort, he rose and lumbered to the door as thick and impenetrable as a bank vault. Dialing the combination, he let himself out.
Nicholas left the dazzling glitter of the enormous hotel behind him, a city within a city, and took the immaculate, silent subway into the Asakusa district. The blank-faced jostling throng who rode along with him with their fashionable clothes and French-style makeup were outwardly very different from the members of the war generation. Yet Nicholas could not forget what happened here—as it did throughout all of Tokyo—on March 9, 1945. The firebombing by American warplanes.
Here in the Asakusa district, people sought the sanctuary of the great and beloved Buddhist temple of Kannon, the goddess of Pity. Built in the seventeenth century, this was thought safe because it had survived all the great fires of Tokyo as well as the most infamous earthquake of 1923. But as hundreds crowded inside, the long, arching timbers, so lovingly wrought by artisans of the fabled past, caught fire. The gray slat roof which had been such a staunch landmark for hundreds of years collapsed inward, crushing the already burning throng. Outside, the ancient stately gingko trees of the surrounding gardens burst into crackling torches, pinwheels of sparks arcing into the howling crimson night, running along street gutters like voracious predators.
Asakusa, like the rest of the city, bore no scars from that time, Nicholas realized. The Japanese had been very careful about that. In this downtown area of Tokyo, more than in any other place in the city, perhaps, the ethos of Japan’s splendiferous Edo period still held sway.
Crowds clouded the gates of Kaminarimon, streaking its great two-story vermillion face with their darting shadows. A scarlet and ebon rice-paper lantern of gigantic proportions swung between the two red-faced wooden statues of the gods of wind and thunder, the bodyguards of Kannon, who, though she failed her people once in the incinerator of the war, was worshiped and loved still.
Dodging those Japanese on the run, Nicholas took the stone-paved Nakamise-dōri, passing sweet and souvenir shops piled high with wares.
On impulse he turned down a near side street, strolling slowly through the relative gloom. He stopped abruptly in front of a tiny storefront that spelled out “Yonoya” in kanji. Inside, glass shelves were lined with the slightly oily boxwood combs.
Nicholas remembered Yukio slowly, rhythmically stroking her hair with such a comb. How soft and long and shining were those tresses, thick and lustrous. Once he had asked her if all Orientals had such beautiful hair and she had laughed, embarrassed, pushing him from her.
“Only the ones who can afford these,” she said, still laughing. She showed him the exquisitely hand-carved implement. “Feel it,” she offered.
“Sticky,” he said immediately.
“But guaranteed never to tangle your hair, Nicholas,” she had said in her singsong voice. “This boxwood is brought all the way from Kyushu, the southern island. It is cut and steamed to remove any imperfections and then dried for more than a week above a boxwood-shaving fire. Then the lengths are tied together and bamboo hoops slipped over the bundles, and they are left to dry for thirty years to ensure that they are completely dry before being carved.
“In the shop in Asakusa where I buy these, their craftsmen have studied for twenty years. They sit for ten or twelve hours at a time, immobile except for their working hands, to shape these combs.” Nicholas had been fascinated then just as he was fascinated now. Even with such an everyday implement as a comb, he thought, we take exceptional care and artistry in its manufacture. Could a Westerner—any Westerner—ever fully understand the reasons why. Or would they think us mad to devote such time and intense effort to such a small and seemingly insignificant matter.
Again on impulse, he entered the shop and bought a comb for Justine. As he waited for the saleswoman to reoil the boxwood, carefully wrap it in three separate layers of high-grade rice paper, and then place it into its hand-sanded cedar box, his eyes traced the forms of the combs lying in artistic display. With each meticulously rounded corner, with each matched tooth end, he again saw Yukio in front of the mirror, her pale hand rising and falling like a tide through the river of her dark hair. He saw that ebon cascade highlighted against the snow-white kimono, its crimson edges moving like flowing blood.
He leaned forward and, hands on her delicate shoulders, turned her around, lifting her so that she rose. Soft rustle of silk like the bittersweet drift of heavenly cherry petals in mid-April when, it seemed, the ancient gods of Japan returned, filling the scented air with their ethereal presence.
The feel of her, the sight of her, the scent of her, all combined to transfix him, so that he experienced again his deep-seated fear of what she brought out in him: the intensity of sexual feeling. He was barely eighteen, it was 1963. He had had no experience with women, especially one as powerful as Yukio.
It was as if she held him in a tender spell, and now her palm came up to stroke his cheek and he shuddered at the fiery lick the caress engendered in him.
As was usual with them, she had to take the first few steps, sliding her fingertips back along her own body, pushing the rim of the kimono away from her shoulders. It parted with a rustle, revealing the inside slopes of her hard-nippled breasts. Nicholas’ breath caught in his throat and his belly contracted painfully.
With a slither the soft white kimono slid down her arms, the line of crimson along its verge flickering like flame. And now she was bare, the light striping her, throwing into deep shadow the erotic dells of her torso, hiding as it revealed.
Nicholas felt the terror filling him up as, like a sorceress, she moved, freeing his own sexuality, drawing out his own ribboning desire. He could deny her nothing at moments like this.
And yet there was a deeply buried sadness in her as she reached between his thighs, caught gentle hold of him, stroking.
“Is that all you can think of?” he said thickly.
“It’s all I have,” she said in a moan, guiding him.
Slowly refocusing, Nicholas’ gaze lit upon the empty space in the display case caused by the present he had bought Justine. Yukio was gone just as the boxwood comb was gone from the case.
The spotlights’ glare was harder in just that spot, magnifying the nothingness. He wondered what had ever become of Yukio’s magical boxwood comb. Had Saigō hurled it after her into the Straits of Shimonoseki? Had she been wearing it when he clubbed her, stunning her, then binding her for the long rowboat ride across those haunted waters? Or had some small child found the artifact among her abandoned belongings and was wearing it today?
Nicholas found that his eyes were full of tears. Despite his vow never to relive the moment when his evil cousin had told him of Yukio’s death, he had done it. His heart was breaking anew; he felt her loss as keenly this moment as he had a year ago. Perhaps this was one wound that time would never heal.
Blindly he received the exquisitely wrapped package, signed the American Express receipt. It was as if Yukio’s kami had appeared at his side, linking arms with him, and, standing by his side, was now looking down at the display of boxwood combs with him.
And for that moment it was as if death had been banished from the world of man, as if there was no dark barrier between life and death, the unknown becoming suddenly known and accepted. Did he walk with the dead, or had Yukio crossed over to live again at his side?
With a start, Nicholas found himself alone again in the shop. The saleswoman was looking at him oddly, not certain whether to smile or frown at the peculiar expression on his face.
Back on the Nakamise-dōri, he returned to the precincts of the Sensoji Temple, where rice crackers and tortoiseshell sticks were still sold just as they had been a hundred years before. He wanted to stay immersed in the past, unwilling as yet to let go of the last sweetly painful tendrils of his waking dream. At a streetside stall he paused to buy a confection made of egg and flour poured into a doll-shaped mold before bean jam was squeezed on and the whole was grilled with the deftly economical movements of the ancient vendor.
But, once holding the tiny cake in his hand, he found that he had no taste for food, especially sweets. The past was like the taste of ash in his mouth. He had thought that with Saigō’s death the detritus of his earlier life would dry up and blow away like the soft shed skin of a snake. But he saw now on his return to Japan that this was not so. It could not be. There was a certain continuity to life that was not to be denied. As Nicholas’ father, the Colonel, had often said: this is the only true lesson of history, and those who do not heed it, perish because of their ignorance.
Now, at the doorway to the Sensōji Temple, he gave the unwanted food to an old man with a back as thin and bent as a sapling’s trunk in a high wind. The old man, in a black snapbrim hat and Western dress, nodded his thanks but made no effort to smile.
As Nicholas went into the temple itself, echoes and the ripples of history seemed to reach out from the dim incense-filled interior with its high vaulting ceiling and cool stone floor, to remind him once again of all that he dare not forget.
When he reemerged into the spangled night of shitamachi, Tokyo’s downtown, the old man was still where Nicholas had left him, one hand curled around the thick copper rim of the huge vessel used to burn incense.
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Acknowledgments
BECAUSE, IN SOME INSTANCES, I met many of the real people in positions which, of necessity, are in this novel, I wish to state that none of the characters drawn here in any way resemble their real-life counterparts who, without exception, were extremely helpful to me.
I would like to thank:
Dr. Geetha Natarajan, Associate Medical Examiner, City of New York
Lieutenant Jim Doyle, Commander, Village Police, Westhampton Beach
and, especially:
Dr. Michael Baden, former Chief Medical Examiner, City of New York
Thanks to the numerous individuals who assisted me with translations, and to my father, who proofed the manuscript.
Special thanks to Ruth and Arthur for invaluable R&R in Shangri-La.
And to Mom, for her courage.
About the Author
Eric Van Lustbader is the author of numerous bestselling novels including the Nicholas Linnear series, First Daughter, Blood Trust, and the international bestsellers featuring Jason Bourne: The Bourne Legacy, The Bourne Betrayal, The Bourne Sanction, The Bourne Deception, The Bourne Objective, The Bourne Dominion, and The Bourne Retribution. For more information, visit www.EricVanLustbader.com. You can also follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“Natsu-gusa / Summer grass (Haiku)” from INTRODUCTION TO HAIKU by Harold Gould Henderson, copyright © 1958 by Harold G. Henderson. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1980 by Eric Van Lustbader
Cover design by Angela Goddard
978-1-4804-7086-6
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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