Sensei

by John Donohue

  The two men were prominent and skilled martial artists. They were both Japanese. But other than that, I got no sense of how they were connected. And Reilly’s connection was still unknown.

  Which brought me to a dead end. So I considered Ronin. Micky looked at the basics. I followed that line of thinking from my own perspective. I thought that someone like Ronin needed not only a place to live, but also a place to train. You don’t acquire those types of skills like you buy a suit of clothes. It’s a high- maintenance commodity, which is why so many people begin studying the arts and so few persevere long enough to learn any- thing. In a consumer society, where everything is fast and easy, learning the martial arts is not. To make matters worse, martial skill requires practice. Constant practice and constant conditioning. And then more practice.

  I explained to Micky and Art that training would probably eat up a big part of Ronin’s day and be expensive. It narrowed things down somewhat: we had a much better chance of trying to find him by locating likely places where he could train.

  At this skill level, some of your training takes place alone: you run, stretch, lift weights, whatever. But if you’re serious about dealing with people, then you eventually have to confront a live adversary. You need bodies to work with, muscle and bone to leverage around.

  For Ronin, however, the kind of place he would need would be special. It would need to be tough. And mean. This type of place the City had in abundance. But he seemed to gravitate to the Japanese arts. I’d look for him in a dojo but not some store-front school that was part day care and part yuppie commando fantasy center. The people in it would also have to be very skilled, which cut down the potential number of likely places considerably. I also thought, given the type of things that he would be training in, that there would have to be a high tolerance for injury. When this man practiced, there would be a good likelihood of collateral damage. It narrowed the list down even more.

  I had some ideas, but this was a bit out of my league. It forced me to do the one thing that I wanted to avoid. I needed to talk with Yamashita.

  I used the excuse that I needed to know about likely places to look for Ronin. The Japanese sensei like to pretend they ignore everyone except their equals. Believing they have no equals gives them license to appear totally disinterested in the great wash of humanity’s inferior attempts at the fighting arts. Don’t be fooled. The sensei watch everything from WWW wrestling to street fights. Their eyes don’t blink as they bore into their subjects. They see and remember. And endure.

  Yamashita didn’t give me much. I spoke to him during a pause in a training session, so maybe he was focused on something else, but his whole manner seemed odd. I sidled in through the door and bowed, removing my shoes. I waited for the lesson to close and approached him.

  Generally speaking, my teacher strides the practice floor in isolation. Even when not teaching, people watch him covertly. The way he moves, even the way he breathes can show you something. It was unusual that he should be approached and even more unusual that I did so in street clothes. But I bowed again, apologized for the intrusion, explained myself quietly to him and hoped he would have a suggestion that could help.

  He didn’t look at me when he answered the question. And he seemed pretty vague for the most part. Not particularly helpful. I’ve given up trying to anticipate his moods and chalked it up to some sort of Zen state, figuring that in his brain he was seated in an empty space, staring through nothing. But I was mildly surprised by the fact that, after I pushed him for a little more information, he began to appear almost visibly agitated by the whole thing. This was unusual in a man devoted to the idea that emotions be kept hidden from the world. It wasn’t that Yamashita didn’t have emotions. It was just that permitting others to see them gave potential opponents an advantage. As a result, his usual flat affect wasn’t repression; it was heiho.

  I mentioned Ikagi’s name and saw no reaction in those dark eyes. He had heard something about the man’s death, he admitted. It was only natural. But he was unaware of any connection between that incident and Kubata’s murder. When I explained the theory Micky was working on, he dismissed it with a short chop of the hand.

  “This country is a violent place, Professor. All those cowboy movies, no? Kubata Sensei’s murder . . . I hope your brother does not waste his time chasing illusions. There is no mystery here. Only tragedy.”

  But I insisted that Reilly’s death proved that Ronin was now in New York. And that he was a martial artist. If so, I wanted to help find him. And that’s why Yamashita’s insight would be helpful. In the end, I got little concrete information from him, despite my wheedling. Only a warning.

  “This man you seek, Burke . . .” he stared off blankly at the wall for a moment, then finally turned those hard eyes on me and started again. “Human beings are conduits of power. Training focuses that power. Directs it. People like the one you seek . . . they are like . . . “ again the pause, “they are like electrical cable. Yes? Cable with cracked insulation. They leak anger. It is powerful. And dangerous. But it is the result of a flaw, not of real strength.”

  He held up his hand in the tegatana, arm extended in a loose arc designed to maximize the flow of energy, of ki. “They leak power, Burke, because of flaws in themselves. In their training. It appears impressive. Some people are seduced by it. But it is wrong. It is not the true Way.”

  And then he said, in the contradictory manner I have come to almost expect from him, “Such training is deeply flawed. But these people are very dangerous. I wish you would avoid them.”

  “I’m not looking for a fight, sensei. We’re just trying to track this killer down.”

  Yamashita shifted slightly on his feet and appeared to get more rooted to the ground. As if that were possible. “It does not matter what you wish. You place yourself in danger.”

  I was curious. “Are you saying, Sensei, that I would not be able to fight someone like this?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Don’t be an idiot, Burke. It is a child’s question, who would win, who would lose! This man—whoever he is—is a killer.” When he gets mad, my teacher grows quieter, more focused, more eloquent. “Evil has its own energy, Burke. Getting too close to it allows it to pull at your spirit. It is most unwise.”

  And he wouldn’t say anything more than that.

  Micky and Art planned to visit places where the types of body men they were familiar with would train. I could imagine it. They would slog through a number of dingy gyms, a universe filled with mats stained with skin grease and sweat and decades-old heavy bags patched with duct tape like victims of bad triage. You went downstairs or into an alley through a door and into a space where the bricks had been painted with diluted whitewash some- time during the Eisenhower administration. The clank of free weights hitting the ground would compete with the staccato rhythm of speed bags and the deeper thuds of bodies hitting the mat in a roped in area farther back in the cavernous space.

  The men training there would be mostly young and thickly built in the functional way you get when you leverage people’s bodies around for a living. There was no Spandex worn here. There was lots of tape on hands and feet. Some of the denizens would take one look at Micky and Art and duck away, feigning a renewed interest in training. My brother would probably shoot his partner a look as well. Everyone recognized everyone else.

  In those places the aural signature communicated effort and frustration, the quest for dominance. And anger. The air would be thick with the psychic radiation, spiky with sudden thuds and clanks, the visual field rendered gritty by bad light and human effort.

  Micky and Art would ask whether anyone new had been training. They would be greeted with blank looks or faked attempts at thinking. They would go through the motions, leaving their cards and asking if anyone remembered anything or saw anything to give them a call.

  They left the more exotic locations to me, figuring I’d have better luck. I knew some guys in some of the tougher dojo in New York. They weren�
��t exactly friends, but you got to know people over the years, if only because when you bang on someone and they bang back, you tend to remember them.

  I’d first come across Billy Watson when I was in college. He was a former wrestler who’d taken a shine to judo and was working out on the mats that got shared with the other martial arts clubs. He’d ended up hooked on judo and eventually began studying Yoshinkan aikido as well. It’s an art form that adds joint locks to the throws and balance shifts of judo. Aikido in general is a beautiful and, in highly trained hands, somewhat effective art. Yoshinkan is a bit on the hard side, however. It uses more power than some other styles.

  It suited Billy. There’s a ritual pledge they use in Shotokan karate at the end of class. Among other things, trainees swear to “refrain from violent behavior.” A more accurate translation of the Japanese is “to guard against impetuous courage.” The Japanese sensei like to keep their students on a tight leash: they don’t mind fighting; they just want to be able to control when and where it happens. Billy had enough impetuous courage to keep a room full of teachers worried. From what I knew of him and the type of people who gravitated to his Yoshinkan dojo, I thought he might be able to point me in a couple of good directions.

  Like many other New York City dojo, Billy’s had to offer classes practically around the clock to survive. There was an early morning workout for stressed Wall Street types (who got to the office still shaking out their wrists and trying to get the nerve endings to stop buzzing). There were typical evening classes and even an early lunchtime session on Sunday, which was where I found Billy putting his pupils through their paces.

  He was an average-size guy, but hard. Anyone who ever tangled with Billy learned that he was packed with muscle. He had a big, square head with bristly short, dark hair. It let you see the ropes of muscles that bound his head to the rest of him. There were nicks in his skull, white scars from old fights where the hair would never grow back. Billy took his training seriously. His eyes were a cool blue and he had that focused stare you see with really intense competitors. It was designed to frighten you. I knew. We had met more than a few times on the mats in my early days. His face was lean, and you could see that the straight ridge of his nose had been ruined when it was broken. I don’t know whether he was still mad at me for doing it. I figured we were even: I can’t sleep on my right side because of something he did to my shoulder.

  The dojo was a pretty good size, carved out of an old downtown warehouse. The walls and pipes had been painted over and over again in that white color they use in the City to make you believe that things are new and clean. It mostly looks dingy and tired.

  But the mats in Billy’s dojo were in good shape. They were worn but repaired precisely. He had about twenty men, all at black belt level, working on some take down techniques. In Yoshinkan dojo, they tend to just wear judo gi and not the fancier pleated hakama. It sends a certain message about the tough, no frills approach this style takes to fighting.

  Billy was working with the class on what looked to me like tenshi-nage. It’s a standard throw in the art: you deflect a lunging thrust and throw the attacker to his front corner by unbalancing him and moving in. Billy caught my entrance out of the corner of his eye. His eyes swept my way, but he made no sign of recognition.

  Tenshi-nage in most styles is pretty elegant. Some schools make it almost too stylized: trainees virtually launch themselves into the fall for their practice partners. Not here. Billy was obviously working on some variations that seemed predicated on the idea that your attacker would not go down. It was a good exercise: what happens when you give it your best shot and the guy will still not fold? It happens eventually to all of us.

  There are a number of solutions to the problem. Billy demonstrated a few pretty convincingly: his opponents got propelled not only down but into the mat. Then the class got to try. He watched as they paired off and tried out his variations on each other.

  I watched with him. And listened.

  The aural signature here was a serious one, punctuated by the rhythmic slam of bodies hitting the mat. You could hear the deeper thud of body collision, the hiss of breath, the occasional grunt. I also picked up the higher pitched sound of slapping.

  Billy sidled up to me. “Burke. You come for a workout?” It wasn’t a friendly comment. Billy and guys like him work hard at things, which is fine. But they also tend to believe that their way is the only way. I shook his hand—if we had been dogs, the hair on our necks would have been standing up.

  “No. Just looking for some help with something.” The slapping sound continued and drew my attention. Billy saw my glance and gestured with his chin.

  “Check this guy out. The real deal.”

  The man wore a spotless white gi that looked soft with repeated washings. He was intent on working his partner relentlessly, moving in repeatedly to practice the move that Billy had shown them. The slapping noise was coming as he brought his cupped hand sharply into the jaw of his partner as a prelude to the throw. Smack! And in the brief moment of pain, the man would swirl into position and hinge down for the throw. His victim would be driven to the mat and then rise, red faced from the blow, to take more.

  Billy’s face didn’t look a bit troubled as he watched. He didn’t say anything. It was a tough place.

  I told him about my problem. He looked at his class for a minute as if inspecting a lineup of suspects. “My people are rough, Burke, but I don’t see any of them as a killer.”

  “Sure, Billy. But if anyone new comes by, anyone out of the ordinary, you let me know.”

  He gave me that hard look. “Hey, you know? I run a business here. People come in to train. I got transients coming by all the time. What’s it gonna do for me if I start getting them involved with the cops? It’ll kill me.”

  “Funny you should say that. The guy I’m looking for kills people.”

  He shook his head. It swiveled very precisely back and forth, yanked by muscle. “I teach people to fight. I don’t get involved with their lives off the mat.”

  I could see he was annoyed. Billy always had a short fuse. I changed the subject and nodded in his student’s direction. “He’s going at it a bit hard, isn’t he? Is he always this intense?” Part of me was thinking like a cop. Could this guy fit the profile of the man we were looking for?

  Billy crossed his arms across his chest and watched the class. “Pretty much.” Then he looked at me. “Don’t get any ideas. He’s been with me for a few years.” I felt let down. I guess I wasn’t going to crack the case. Billy watched as the man’s partner took a particularly hard fall. I winced, but Billy was stoic. “Ya gotta keep him away from the beginners. They tend to break. He gives my advanced people a run for their money, though. Hang on a sec.”

  He glided over to the mat edge and called the group to order. It’s always amazing to watch someone move like that: hard and crude though he was, he practically floated. He told everyone to take a short break and brought the man over to be introduced.

  The Real Deal was cautiously polite in a way that’s typical of a great many martial artists. They save most of their intensity for training. Some people feel we’re repressed and only express ourselves in the dojo. They don’t understand. We’re just resting between fights. “Sensei Watson tells us stories about your dojo “ he said. “And your teacher. It would be something to meet him.”

  “Yeah,” Billy said, “get in line. But don’t get your hopes up. I’ve been trying to get in there for years.” The topic seemed to revive his bad mood. “What he sees in you is anyone’s guess, Burke.”

  I just shrugged. I sometimes wondered the same thing. But I knew that Billy wouldn’t be getting to see my teacher soon. Yamashita had spoken to me about Billy in the past. Sensei wanted him to get a bit more experience. The impetuous courage thing.

  Billy smirked at me. “OK, since you’re here, how about a quick lesson for the class? Show us some of those exotic techniques you get to work on.” Both men looked at me exp
ectantly. If they weren’t going to get to see Yamashita anytime soon, maybe some pointers from one of his students would do. But that wasn’t the only reason. Way back in the eyes of the two men, I could see the predatory gleam of competitors. They wanted to see me work.

  Billy ushered the class back into order and introduced me. I slipped my shoes off and bowed onto the mat.

  I gestured for a partner. A student stepped forward. One-half of his face was still red from the slapping he had gotten. You had to give the guy credit for guts.

  I looked around the group. “All technique should be guided by efficiency,” I began. “Any of you who’ve studied judo know the principle of maximum efficiency for a minimum of effort.”Some heads nodded around the circle that had formed around me. “In a situation like the one your sensei has given you—you try a technique and it doesn’t quite work—the temptation is very strong to compensate by overpowering the opponent.” I said to my partner, gesturing at him, “So. Half-speed, please.”

  He came at me with a lunge punch. It was a good, serious strike. “Someone centered,” I continued as I moved, “someone strong and trained, like this guy here,” I grinned, “is hard to fight off.” I let him barrel into me. I let his force push me back and down. I rolled backward and up onto my feet. “Too little force, or too slow a reaction time, will ruin your technique.”