by John Donohue
“Maybe,” I said grugingly. I was still trying to digest the swirl of action that hadn’t seemed to let up since Asa and I crossed swords for the kata demonstration. It felt like it happened a month ago.
The expressway was a bland, brightly lit stretch of elevated concrete. You got occasional glimpses of the upper stories of brick row houses that piled up in clusters right in the shadow of the roadway. Church spires stuck up out of the sea of tar roofs—Brooklyn is the borough of churches. Billboards advertised for car dealerships. Up ahead, the sky looked dark, but the stars were washed out from the ambient light. Soon the road would arc left to lead to the bridge to Staten Island. The traffic had eased up here and everyone was more or less in their own lanes. It reduced the tension and the two men were more willing to talk.
“Ronin has got to know someone’s looking for him,” Art commented.
“And our basic assumption is that there’s something he’s after we don’t know about. So he may be crazy,” Micky said.
“But he’s not dumb,” Art finished.
“So, after all the publicity in the papers, he’s got to find another spot to get at his victim. Now that ya think about it, maybe the whole Samurai House reception looked to him like a great way to get us lookin’ in the wrong place.”
“Sure,” Art nodded sagely. “And while we’re all tied up there, he sets up another location.”
“But he’s got to have a way to lure someone to the meet. I wonder what he’s got?” My brother had been giving this some thought.
“Gotta be some powerful mojo,” Art commented. “He’s already used it on two others.”
I grunted in affirmation. Part of me was wondering whether my brother hadn’t been right all along: the sensei knew something they weren’t telling. I had the sickening feeling that maybe my sensei knew something. But at that moment, I was trying to figure out some way of getting out of the ceremonial outfit I was still wearing. I had anticipated changing into a suit after the performance. But not in a car.
The hakama and other clothes are not easily disposed of. I finally gave up and just pulled on the shoes I had in the bottom of the bag. The zori would be useless if we had to go anywhere on foot.
As I looked up, the Camry exited onto Fourth Avenue and we kept pace.
“Mr. Man, Mr. Man,” Micky murmured under his breath, “where are you heading?”
He was heading south. But we couldn’t figure out where. Down Fourth Avenue, Asa took a left. It led along a strip of park that served as a buffer between the neighborhoods of Sunset Park and Bay Ridge. It was lined with trees whose bark was mottled like camouflage. The chain-link fencing around the playground was ten feet high and iron swing sets and monkey bars made odd shapes in the darkness. A squat brick Parks Department building hulked in the middle of the grass strip. Passing headlights picked out the fluid wash of graffiti.
A left again, and we were heading north onto Sixth Avenue. We passed under the expressway, and the Camry’s brake lights flashed as Asa turned right onto Sixty-Second Street.
At this spot in Brooklyn, the subway comes up for air. The R and N lines run out here from Manhattan. The R continues south to the tip of Brooklyn, which is capped by Fort Hamilton. At Fifty-Ninth Street, the N line turns east and emerges from its tunnel into a trench that rises slowly until the subway becomes elevated and you get to Coney Island. A growing Chinese population was moving into the area around the point where the trains come out of the tunnels. New immigrants got simple directions to the first stop the N makes after it bursts from darkness: get off at Blue Sky. For the local Chinese, the Eighth Avenue stop on the N is known as the Blue Sky station.
Asa slowly rolled down Sixty-Second Street, which goes one way, east, and parallels the N train’s trench. Small factories and warehouses dotted the street, shuttered tight and washed in the odd light of sodium lamps. There were narrow garages here as well, former stables from the 1920s that had been converted for cars. The block ended ahead, where it met Seventh Avenue.
The subway lines themselves were dug out here early in the last century. The token booths and entrances get an occasional facelift, but if you walk far enough down any subway platform in New York, you come face to face with the thick riveted girders and arched struts that generations of New Yorkers have stood near, glancing impatiently down the track for the light of an oncoming train. On the block where we were trailing Asa, the old stables were a reminder that, short sixty or seventy years ago, horses were still lugging ice through Brooklyn’s streets.
“What’s the deal here, Connor?” We weren’t too far from where I lived and Micky was relying on me for some information.
“Seventh Avenue’s coming up,” I said. “The street dead-ends. Not much there. A few shops around the corner. More people closer to Eighth Avenue.”
Asa pulled over and we nosed into the curb, farther back on the block. Micky dowsed the headlights and we watched.
The Camry’s lights went out. Asa got out of the car. He took a quick glance around, sweeping the shadows. His eyes were dark slashes in the sodium wash of the streetlight. I felt myself shrink back into the seat almost involuntarily. With anyone else, it would have been foolish. But I knew this man and what he was capable of. I felt as if he had sensed our presence. But it didn’t seem to bother him. He popped the trunk and removed something long and narrow from the car, and began walking toward the corner.
Micky gestured. “What?” he asked me quietly.
I let out a tense breath. “It’s a sword bag.”
“OK,” Micky’s voice was sharp with excitement. “It’s happening. What’s there?” he pointed as Asa turned right at the corner.
“Nothing,” I said. “The overpass is blocked off for construction.”
“C’mon, ladies,” Art urged, “time’s wastin’. Something’s there.”
“Nothing,” I insisted. Then it came to me. “Wait.” I sat forward to peer through the windshield into the murk. “There’s an old entrance to the Eighth Avenue subway stop.”
“In use?” Micky had already started to roll the car forward.
“No. It’s closed down.”
They looked quickly at each other. “Perfect,” Art said. He reached under his coat and checked his pistol. Micky handed him a two-way radio and Art squelched it for a test. “There’s an exit further ahead on Eighth?” he confirmed.
“Next block.” Things were beginning to speed up and the conversation, the movements, everything had the feeling of getting tight.
“OK.” Art was doing three things at once. Checking his gun. Handling the radio. Undoing the seat belt. His brain had to be racing. “I go in here. You block the other exit?” He looked at Micky for confirmation.
Micky nodded in agreement and we rolled ahead to the corner where Asa had turned right. Art launched himself out the door. Asa was nowhere to be seen. On the east side of Seventh Avenue, the closed subway entrance was dark. An old sign, dirty with time and neglect, hinted faintly at the old platform’s presence. One of those old metal turnstiles marked the entrance. It was essentially a cylindrical cage that was about seven feet high. Part of it rotated to permit access. In the dark it looked like a torture machine from a medieval castle. At one point, it had been chained shut. Art shined a flashlight on the entry. He held it like a club, with the shorter, light end projecting from the bottom of his fist. The chain hung, swaying slightly. The light picked up the fresh cut where the links had been severed. Art gave us a last look, nodded, and followed Asa into the shadows that led down to the trench.
“Shit, Art,” Micky said to the night where his partner had been, “shoot first, will ya?”
Micky started to wheel the car into a left turn to get to Sixty-First Street and head to the other end of the station, but never made it. The sequence that followed is jumbled in my mind, even now.
Art’s voice crackled over the two-way radio. “Mick,” he hissed cautiously. Then louder, more urgently, “MICK!”
My brother jerked t
he car to a stop and sprung out, the door hanging open. My window was closed but the sound of the gunshot was clear as it punched its way up from down on the old platform. It cut through everything and snapped my head in its direction.
My brother sprinted around the front of the car and headed for the subway turnstile at a run. His gun was out and he was calling into his radio: “Art? Art?” As if contact would put things right again. But he was wrong.
I sat for a moment, watching things unfold with a bewildering rapidity. I popped open the car door, unsure of what to do next. The engine was still running and the keys glinted in the darkness, dancing with vibration. The radio mounted on the dash chattered. I got out of the car and headed toward my brother. Micky hit the entranceway and, from down in the trench, a muffled string of concussions thudded into the night.
Things were bad. They were about to get worse.
The turnstile entrance was dark and the metal moaned as I moved through it. The brief corridor smelled of damp concrete and urine, and I hurried onto the stairs leading down to the old station.
A hundred yards to my left toward Eighth Avenue the platform was brightly lit. But here, it was dim. I took the stairs as fast as I could, but it was awkward in the Japanese clothes. The steps were slick with dead leaves and old newspapers and the thick wet stuff that subway floors secrete like mucus.
I don’t know what I expected. Movement, I suppose. Some kind of action. But it was still down there, and it scared me. There was just enough light to ruin whatever night vision I had, but I could sense faint forms huddled at the bottom of the landing.
I could also smell the residual scent of gunfire in the air. And the damp. And something else that I couldn’t identify yet. You could hear the faint hum of the traffic in the distance, the pulse that never really stops in Brooklyn. The high whine of tires on the expressway floated above. Then I picked up the odd zzzing noise carrying through the metal rails on the subway tracks that told you a train was approaching. But there was something else as well, another noise I couldn’t immediately identify.
As I got closer, cutting through the background noise, small, liquid gasps floated up into the night air from below me on the landing.
A Manhattan-bound train pulled in at the Eighth Avenue stop, three hundred feet to the east. Its light washed the scene. Asa crouched in a corner, gripping the handle of his sword like a talisman. His face was an angry mask, rigid with the intensity of emotion. He tried to say something as I slid down the stairs, but the noise of the approaching train swallowed it.
The light intensified as the subway train got closer. The roar of its approach grew in volume as I reached the last step. The train shot by, a fierce explosion of light and speed and noise. Then I knew what I smelled.
In the strobe like flutter of the light from the train cars, Micky knelt in a black pool of blood that washed across the platform. In his arms, Art lay stretched out. It was dark, but I could see the stump of a wrist where blood pulsed out onto the concrete. His shirt was dark and slick from the gash across his torso. He was sliding deep down into shock and gazing up frantically as if trying to pierce the night sky for a last glimpse of the world. His face was straining in the effort, a response to some inner prompting we could only guess at. Art gulped spasmodically at the air, his lips working in frantic haste.
The noise of the train passed and I could hear Micky screaming at me “Put some pressure on it, Godammit!” and jerking his chin at the gushing arm. Then into his radio: “Officer down! Officer down!” In the rapid pattern of dark and light thrown by the train, he looked wild, caught up in a mix of rage and frustration and despair.
Ronin was nowhere to be seen. In the distance, a siren whooped, its frantic call a faint offer of hope.
I knelt across from my brother and pressed down hard on Art’s arm as if sheer diligence could set things right. “Hang on, buddy,” Micky was telling him. “Hang on.” Micky was rocking back and forth, cradling Art’s head in one hand, working the radio with the other. The force in his utterance was like something palpable: a rope to bind Art to us, a light in the dim, wet valley we huddled in. A prayer against the night.
The sirens got closer. I could hear shouts. People were moving cautiously down toward us from the lighted platform.
Art seemed to seize up; his back arched and he made a glottal, choking sound. Micky dropped the radio and held him tight. Art’s face calmed a bit as if reassured. It was hard to tell at that point if he was even aware of us. I felt like something essential had just been wrenched from me, deep down in my guts. I looked about in that dark place, searching for help. It seemed to take a long time to come. I turned back to face my brother.
Even in the washed out light of that place, the tears in Micky’s eyes glittered like the last sparks of a dying star.
12. Night Noise
When Art married Marie, he converted to Catholicism, so amid the tubes and beeping machines of the lCU, there were the whispered implications of the Last Rites. The priest was youngish, with that well-fed and sincere look priests get before the hard life they choose drives them to furtive sins and quiet resignation. For now, he sat uncomfortably with us in the waiting room, pink-faced and round, ready to speak, eager to comfort. But he took a look at Micky and the other cops who had come to be with the family. They were hard-faced men. The priest wisely squashed his impulse to tell us all the Good News. No one was in the mood for it.
Marie sniffed once or twice but held it together. Dee sat with her. Art’s daughter, red-eyed and washed out, stared at a world that had been blown apart and revealed as the uncertain place it really was. It was a hard thing to learn. At any age.
They couldn’t say whether Art would make it. We waited around the hospital, not saying much. It was a busy place, and each group keeping vigil thought they were somehow special, but we were all the same. For every red-eyed cluster, the universe had contracted into a tight knot of people hesitant to come to grips with the grim possibilities before them. It had been a long night, but it seemed like there were better things to do than just wait. The cops arranged shifts: some stayed; some went back out on the streets. After a while, I emerged into the bright sunlight, blinking with the suddenness of the glare and the harsh, relentless way of the world.
The ride home was a leaden progression through different mental landscapes. The growing summer heat beat in through the windshield, fighting with the air conditioner for dominance. It added to the general feeling of impending disaster. For distraction, I watched the scenery rush by, but it didn’t work. My eyes were open, but I was really just seeing the aftermath of that night.
There is nothing so frantic as the scene where a policeman has been taken down. A transit cop at the Eighth Avenue station had heard the shots and called for backup—the radios Micky and Art were using were encrypted stakeout sets that couldn’t reach the police communication network. A cruiser from the local precinct was the first on the scene, both cops nervously waving guns and lights around until they were sure who all the players were. By that time, Asa had joined us by Art’s side, which was a good thing; if he’d still been crouched in the corner with a sword, the cops would have drilled him for sure.
The ambulance got there at about the same time. Two beefy guys in tightly tailored uniform shirts snapped on latex gloves and got to work. They surveyed the scene and knelt down across from Micky.
“Shit,”one breathed. He was looking at the mess of Art’s chest and his stump, trying to figure out what to do first. You could see the judgment register in his eyes like a shutter flickering, but his hands never stopped moving. “Shock suit,” he told his partner.
Micky’s voice was flat and far away. “He’s already bled out.”
The EMT nodded in acknowledgment. “Maybe. Maybe not. We gotta try, man,” he said gently. “Hey,” he shouted to one of the cops, “put that piece away and find the hand. Then bag it in ice.” The cops holstered their guns sheepishly and did what he said. “Make yoself useful fo’ a cha
nge,” the EMT mumbled under his breath.
Then he began with the arsenal at his disposal. Tubes. Shock suit. Blood expanders. They trundled Art out of that trench and away with grim, firm moves, a ritual of succor performed in equal parts for victim and witnesses. The ambulance whooped away into the night.
Then Asa and I got hustled off the platform and back up to street level. The area was thick with cars. Red bubble lights were strobing around the site. Radios crackled and sputtered and cops rushed back and forth, frantic to impose some sense and order on the jumble of witnesses and blood and darkness.
We went to the Sixty-Eighth Precinct. No one there was happy to see us. A cop walked us into the main foyer, they buzzed us through a door, and the patrolman silently put Asa’s sword on a desk. It was wrapped in brown paper and tagged. Then Asa and I were split up and the desk sergeant told someone to put us in interrogation rooms. They let me change into regular clothes. There were dark smudges on the hakama. I’d been kneeling in blood and was glad to get the smell of it away from me. I’d seen enough of the stuff.
Micky arrived in a separate car. He was covered in dried blood too, and the desk staff fussed about him, repeating all the blood-borne pathogen stuff that the age of AIDS has made a daily reality for cops. I heard his voice in the hall asking where Asa was. The door to my room opened and he stuck his head in. His face was closed and hard. His only comment to me was “What a cluster fuck,” Then he was gone. He must have ID’d us to the people at the precinct; things got a little less tense. But a cop was down, and the fluorescent lights did little to dispel the dinginess of the station or the somber tone of the interrogation.
Asa was still gray faced and silent when they led him away. After I had my statement taken, a series of different detectives came in and asked me the same series of questions all over again. They had a real knack for making you feel like you were lying, even when you were telling the truth. You know why they do it, of course, but it doesn’t make things any easier.