by John Donohue
The American is absolutely perplexed.
The master repeats. “Start running. If I can catch you, I will beat you up.”
And off they go, the student tearing down the street, running for his life, while this ancient karate teacher chugs relentlessly after him.
I’m not even sure whether the old guy catches the student, but Yamashita thinks it is tremendously entertaining. Like most things he tells us, the story has a point: a good martial artist needs to stay in shape.
So I run.
I hate running, even after all this time. I use it as an exercise in concentration and breath control. I tend to make up little chants to keep time with the flopping of my sneakers. I know the scientifically engineered, dayglow, rollbar-equipped and heel-cup-enhanced productions I wear are more properly referred to as running shoes, but I grew up calling them sneakers and I like to keep the memory alive. When I was a kid, you rooted around for these things in bins that smelled like inner tubes and contained hundreds of mismatched pairs. They cost seven bucks then, which is why I have a minor stroke every time I buy new ones today.
Mostly, I use the rhythm of exercise as an aid to thinking. It helps focus me, like the repetitious chants used in Shinto ceremonies that are believed to get the attention of the spirits. And, of course, when I think, I’m no longer dwelling on how much I hate running.
All the research I had been doing made me think about Yamashita, the closest I had ever come to a true master. I had presented myself to him years ago, with formal written recommendations from highly respected teachers. I knelt on the wood floor in the formal position, bowed, and offered him the neatly brushed testimonials with both hands, which is a sign of respect. I waited.
I knew that there was something missing from the training I had received up to that point. It was a quiet but insistent urging. My teachers could see it in me, revealed in my technique: it’s hard to be focused when you’re craning your neck to see around a bend. Whatever I was looking for, they knew they couldn’t provide it. It must be a hard realization for any teacher to come to. So they passed me on to a higher level of intensity.
I knew a bit about Yamashita, even then. His prowess in swordsmanship, as a fighter with or without weapons, was grudgingly admitted by the more mainstream teachers. Stories about the rigor of his training were used to scare cocky black belts into a type of humility. So when I came before him that day, I looked at him carefully to see what part of my future was revealed in his form.
He was stocky and about average size for a Japanese man of his age. I’m not much bigger, but Yamashita radiated a type of power that you could feel. His hair was cut so short that from a distance he appeared totally bald. His eyes were hard and dark, and the expression on his face was one of total reserve. The fingers of his hands were thick and strong looking as they reached for the introductions I brought. Yamashita glanced once at me, read the letters, and grimaced.
“So,” he said. “Return tomorrow. We will see.”
You couldn’t tell whether he was pleased, annoyed, or optimistic. And in the early days of working with him, I despaired of ever finding out. But over the years, as I passed from one level to another, a subtle form of communication began to take place. I don’t know whether it was just that I got more used to the nuances in him, or whether his training was making me more perceptive, but there it was. And, as I persevered on the hard course he charted for me, there were times when I swear I could see a glint of approval or satisfaction in his eyes. And just that hint was enough to keep me going. He was my sensei, after all.
In the last few days, there had been a subtle increase in the intensity of training. Not that things weren’t normally pretty intense. But there was a pattern, a flow to the logic of what my teacher did. The years with him ingrain the pattern in you. And what we were doing lately seemed somehow out of synch. You could sense it in the nature of his comments to his students, in the stiff set of his back as he stalked the dojo floor. I wondered what Yamashita was up to.
Any sensei is a bit mercurial at times—they do it to keep you guessing. Part of the mystery of a really good martial arts teacher is the way in which you’re perpetually surprised by things, kept just slightly off balance. I had a karate teacher years ago, and every time I thought, OK this guy has shown me just about everything he ‘s got, he would waltz in and do something I had never seen before. Then he would look at me like he could read my mind.
Yamashita was a master of this type, but even more so. You could glean clues of the inner workings of the man from the comments he would make after training. The students sit, row after row of sweaty swordsmen in dark blue, slowing their breathing and listening to the master. When he was pleased, Yamashita would offer parables that reinforced an important lesson. At that point in the training session, you’re so used up that the mind is extremely open. As a result, the stories and advice are imprinted in your memory in a tremendously vivid way.
But there was none of that lately, just gruff admonitions to train harder. In response, each of us came back for more training even though its purpose was a mystery. I slogged on in the rhythm of the run, mulling the situation over. There was nothing to be done. My teacher would reveal his purpose in time. Or not. It was his choice. He was the master. I thought about something else.
I had finished up Bobby Kay’s project. It was not exactly a brain teaser. I e-mailed the file and mailed a disk and a hard copy to him just in case. Now I was waiting for the check. The school semester was ending. It was the beginning of the lean season for all part-time college teachers like me, and Bobby’s payment loomed large in my imagination. So I made up a little chant that kept my mind off the sheer boredom of running: Bobby Kay. You must pay.
I was on the hundredth repetition of my little mantra: Bob-by Kay. You Must Pay. It went well with the in and out of my breath. People were passing, going the other way, runners or people on mountain bikes, and I noticed after a while that I was getting some funny looks. Couldn’t have been the sneakers; they were as high tech as everyone else’s. I was also pretty sure that I hadn’t been actually chanting Bobby’s name out loud. Then I started to pick up the crunch of car tires slowly approaching me.
The unmarked cop car came grinding up behind me with its light flashing and gave me a quick bloop on the siren just for kicks. I was glad for the breather.
There were two of them, and they had that cop look about them: faces that told you everyone is guilty of something, everyone lies. The driver was sandy haired with a clipped, military-style mustache. The other guy had a shock of dark reddish brown hair with a two-inch white streak to one side of his widow’s peak. They were in shirts and ties, which told me they were detectives. You could eye their shoulder harnesses and hardware (gun belts being a pain in a car). I peeked in the back. Their sports jackets were neatly folded in the backseat, and the floors were cluttered with paper wrappers and empty coffee cups. I didn’t look too hard, though. Cops get nervous when you appear too focused.
The driver’s window geared down. I took one look and tried the time-honored civilian opener.
“What seems to be the problem, Officer?”
The driver eyed me silently, then looked at his partner. “How original.”
“You don’t get conversation like this just anywhere,” the guy with the white streak commented.
Mustache continued. “Burke.” It was a rhetorical question: they weren’t nosing pedestrians to either side of the path just for fun. They were looking for someone in particular. I nodded.
“We’re looking for some information. Could you come with us, please?”
I knew I hadn’t done anything. But there’s something about the Law. I got that feeling in my stomach. Like I had just gotten on an elevator that suddenly lurched down.
A black guy shot by on some in-line skates. “Hey man,” he called, “don’t let them roust you without ID. Could be anyone down here, know what I’m saying?” He had turned around to deliver this advice, skating back
ward. A few bicyclists swerved madly out of his way, and he spun forward and rolled on without giving us another look.
“I suppose I should ask for some ID.” I’m not proud about some things: I took the skater’s advice.
The driver made a show of patting himself absently and muttered, “Hmmm . . . badges . . . badges.”
His partner chimed in with a really bad Mexican accent. “Badges? Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges.” I tried to place it. Treasure of the Sierra Madre? I always get those bandits mixed up with the ones from The Magnificent Seven.
They both chortled. Cop humor. The driver with the mustache flashed a detective’s shield.
“You want me up front or in the back?” I asked. The sweat was beginning to pop out now that I had stopped running. I was hoping all the crud in the back of the car wouldn’t stick to me.
“You sit next to me, Bruce Lee,” the driver said.
His partner got out, eased the jackets over and settled into the backseat. It was an oddly fastidious motion. The jackets looked clean and pressed. They were the only tidy thing in the vehicle. I got in, bumping my knee on the radio console mounted on the dash, and we rolled slowly down the path until they could exit and we headed back onto the streets. No one said anything. The radio made soft gobbling noises. I asked if I could roll down my window. The driver eyed me and, deciding I wasn’t about to make a break for it, rolled it down with the power console on his left. I turned to look over my shoulder at the cop with the white streak.
“So Mick,” I asked, “how’s Mom?”
My brother, with the inevitability of salmon spawning and other inherited urges, was the latest product of the Brooklyn Irish diaspora who had flowed in childhood to Long Island and ebbed back home to the NYPD. He had been a rambunctious kid. He grew into a quiet adult who seemed to smother some deep, unanswerable anger and keep it under control only with a minute by minute exertion of willpower. He’s like a lot of cops I know: a basically good guy who has seen too many bad things and is baffled, frustrated, and personally affronted by them and who, at a moment’s notice, could go off like a rocket.
The family is mostly relieved he has found a constructive outlet for his energies. Micky is generous to his friends, an accomplished carpenter in his spare time, and a good husband and father. He also tends to wander off at family parties and stare vacantly into the distance while sucking on a Marlboro, seeing things the rest of us don’t. Or don’t want to.
It’s a measure of his self-control that he’s made detective. Since he essentially gets to wander the city with his partner, Art, tracking down criminals from the mobile trash bin they call a car, and doing it relatively free of supervision, Micky likes his job and is good at it.
Art Pedersen is a stockier version of Micky. He’s also a little less gloomy. Art gets to play Good Cop most of the time, although I imagine that when the two of them begin to really work on an interrogation, it’s probably hard for the perp to tell the difference between the Good Cop and the Bad Cop. Art is a movie buff, and after years of traveling together, the two of them have developed this annoying habit of recycling old lines of film dialogue into their conversation. They find it tremendously amusing. Many criminals, not as steeped in cinema, find it totally baffling.
Now I was treated to some of their patented charm. My older brother didn’t rise to the bait of my question. He just eyed me and said flatly, “What have you been up to, you moron?”
5. Message
“Nothing much, “ I replied. “The teaching, working out.”
We were driving on Fourth Avenue, heading north. This time of morning, it was a better bet than the Gowanus. Neither Art nor Micky said much. They had that smoldering cop silence about them, which was unusual. One of these guys was my brother, and Art had been his partner for eight years, so he was no stranger to me either. But I wasn’t getting any information from either of them. They drove and watched out the window as the tired-looking brick of Brooklyn slid by. Somewhere down these streets, our parents had roller-skated as children.
“You’re a little off the beaten path here, Mick,” I said.
“Yeah,” he admitted. Then he began to grope around for a Marlboro.
“Don’t you light up one of those things in my car,” Art warned him. He had quit about two years ago and was slowly, inexorably, forcing Micky into doing the same. “You light up in here, we’re gonna end up like a bunch of hams cured in a smokehouse.”
“Ah, gimme a break, Art.”
“Give ME a break. Idiot.”Art fumed.
“Asshole,” Micky mumbled. It was like listening to a crabby married couple. But I noticed that Micky didn’t light up.
They also didn’t say much about why we were heading over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan.
Eventually, however, the stop and go of city traffic seemed to shake something out of them.
“Still doing that martial arts stuff?” Art asked.
I grinned. “Oh, yeah. A deadly weapon.”
Micky snorted. “Some people never learn. Black belt, no black belt. No one can dodge a bullet.”
“The trick,” I said in my best Asian master voice, “is being where the bullet is not.”
Art looked at me like I was insane.
“What’s this I hear about you working for Bobby Kay?” Micky slipped the question in, but I sat up a little straighter.
“Yeah, “ I admitted. “How d’you find that out?”
Art slewed the car around a cab that shot across two lanes without warning to pluck up a fare, cursed under his breath, and asked, “You read the paper this morning, Connor?”
“No. Why?”
Micky was rooting around in the trash in the back and came up with a copy of the Daily News. He slapped it onto the seat back between us and said “Check it out, buddy boy.”
The headline read “Kung Fu Killer” with the sort of creative alliteration I usually associate with the Post. The crux of the article was a homicide. Early this morning, Mr. Robert Akkadian, noted entrepreneur, had gone to his Samurai House gallery for a scheduled early appointment with his personal trainer. The trainer, identified as Mitchell Reilly, a martial arts expert, had been found in Samurai House’s performance space, dead of an apparent broken neck. While NYPD was still investigating the cause of death, the News speculated it was caused by a “karate chop.” Theft does not appear to have been a motive for the killing and the investigation was ongoing.
“Oooh,” I said, “a karate chop. Hence the visit. Bobby Kay turn me in, fellas?”
I said it half-kidding, but the response I got was anything but.
“Look, Connor,” my brother said, “we just need to talk with you a bit on this.” Micky wasn’t exactly apologetic. If it bothered him at all to pick up his own brother for questioning, it didn’t show. Just doing his job. The questions were really almost automatic for him by this time.
“C’mon, Mick. You don’t seriously think I’m a suspect!” Micky held up a calming hand. Art, however, wasn’t going to let it go. Today, he was Bad Cop.
“Akkadian likes you for it.” There was silence. “Here’s what we’ve got, Connor,” Art continued. “The esteemed Mr. Akkadian, noted entrepreneur and tough guy wanna-be, gets a call from his janitorial staff early this A.M. to hightail it to his office. By the time he gets there, the uniforms are on the scene stretching yellow tape. Old Bob takes a good look around. Pokes about in his office. Then he goes over to the gallery. He takes one good look and that about does it.”
“You mean he said I did it?” I asked skeptically.
“Well,” Art continued, “first he had to stop barfing. Then he got cleaned up and started talking. And . . .”
“Presto,” Micky concluded, “your name pops up.”
I looked from one to the other and couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“Here’s where we are, Connor,” Art went on. “You doing a job for Bobby Kay. Reilly in the mix. The two of you have some sort of confrontation. Some sort
of mysterious martial arts stuff. Mitch tells Bobby about it. Day or so later, Mitch turns up dead. So . . . “
“So,” Micky picked up the thread, “we got Bobby Kay babbling about some karate-grudge death match. I personally think it’s a crock, but . . .”
“Motive.” Art held up his hand, index finger pointing up like a DA making a telling point to a jury.
“Then we got all this ‘death touch’ hype. You should read the Post’s version.” Micky was digging around back there looking for it but gave up after a few seconds.
“So now, Mr. Martial Arts Expert,” Art said, holding up finger number two, “we got the means.”
“You do anything last night, Connor? Out with friends? A date?”
“No.” I got a sinking feeling as Micky ran down the list of possibilities, trying to see whether I had an alibi. “I stayed in grading papers.”
“Phone calls?” I shook my head.
“And,” Art said with a flourish, raising finger three, “opportunity.”
We came to a halt in front of Samurai House. There was a police cruiser on the scene and a cop by the door.
“Hey, come on. You guys can’t be serious,” I protested.
Art let out a long, fuming sigh. He put a cardboard sign with an NYPD sticker on the dash and shut the car down.
“Nah,” Micky said. “We’ll have to run it down in terms of an alibi . . .”
“And you’ll have to make a statement . . . prints, that sort of thing,” Art added.
“But what we really want is some advice on this one,” Micky said as he climbed out of the backseat.
The three of us stood for a minute, looking at the front of Samurai House, the chrome and granite looking no worse for wear and the business of the city flowing past it as if nothing had happened there. But the cops were coming and going. Thirty minutes ago, I’d been running by the shore. Now I was in a very different world. Forensic guys in white coats were taking out little paper bags with stuff in them. Radios gabbled. My T-shirt had dried and my legs had that good, used feel they get from exertion. Though I stood there in my hi-tech sneakers, feeling fit, it didn’t do much for my confidence.