by John Donohue
“It’s not enough for scholars. Without field notes or journals from the time to back it up, it’s going to look like it means ‘permanently obscure.’” I couldn’t be positive, but out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Charlie’s lips twitch in a suppressed smile. Roy looked appalled. I had leaned forward in my chair as my temper got the better of me, so I sat back and waited.
Lori Westmann took a little sipping breath, swung her chair around so she could look out at window of her office, perhaps expecting her laser-like executive glare to pierce the curtains. She swung back to me, her face flat, but her eyes piercing.
“What else do you need to make the complete assessment?”
“I need access to whatever field notes or journals he kept at the time. I know your father kept a personal journal pretty faithfully…”
“He seems to have stopped that in recent years,” she told me.
I shook my head. “No, he never stopped,” I corrected her. “I’ve seen them.”
“What!” she demanded. The discovery seemed to shake her. At the time, I thought it was that she simply disliked being surprised. She was, after all, a woman who prided herself on being informed and in control. Not much happened in her little universe that she didn’t know about.
I described finding the journals, careful to point out that they shed light on Eliot Westmann, the way he thought, and his approach to life, but really had not contributed much toward my analysis of his contested works. Lori made careful notes about the journals and their location. She looked at Charlie for the first time that morning. “I’ll want those journals secured,” she ordered. He nodded in silent agreement.
She turned back to me. “Do you have a report for me?”
I was puzzled for a moment, and then I realized that she was expecting some sort of formal document. “You just got it,” I answered.
She was seething, but kept it pretty tightly under control. “I’d like a written summary of your activities to date and your observations on my desk by this evening.” The words were pronounced carefully and flew out like bullets from a gun. “Plus a concrete list of what other resources you’ll need to access and a timeline for completion. A short timeline.”
“I’ll need to see his journals from back then,” I countered. “The ones you say are in the archives…”
“His agent maintains them,” she snapped.
“Fine, I’ll go see him,” I said cheerily. It was fun needling her. Dangerous, but fun.
“He’s in New York City.” She glanced at Roy. He made some notes.
“Even better,” I said, my voice bright. Home. “The library at Columbia should give me the other resources I need.”
Lori gave Roy a string of orders. I was dismissed with a curt nod and Charlie and I sauntered back out into the daylight.
We strolled along the pathways, bordered in the deep emerald of well-manicured lawns.
“You are some piece of work,” he said with a slight smile.
I shrugged. “She hired me to do a job. I know my work. She ought to let me run with it.”
“She’s used to getting her way,” he noted. “Not many people don’t fold when she pushes hard at them.”
“And another thing,” I said, not even bothering to comment on Charlie’s observation, “she’s skewing the data I’ve got, trying to steer me to certain conclusions—she’s holding back sources that I need to make an objective assessment. As if I wouldn’t notice.”
“She’s paying you,” he said simply. “She figures she owns you.”
“She figured wrong,” I told him.
Charlie smiled again. “I think she realizes that now.”
As we walked up the path toward my suite, I looked at him. “How do you stand it? Working for her?”
He shrugged. “She needs me and she knows it. She tends to stay out of my way and I let her pretend she’s in charge. She’s unpleasant to be around, but the salary is good and every morning I can almost count on…”
“…getting in a full round of golf,” I finished for him.
He patted me on the shoulder. “You got it.”
I stopped and faced him. “I’m assuming I should probably start packing?”
“That would be a safe assumption. Old Roy will make sure you turn in your little book report tonight and probably have you on the first plane out of here.”
I nodded in acknowledgment and headed toward the door. It was slightly ajar.
“That’s funny,’ I said, “I would have sworn I locked it.”
Charlie pushed me gently aside. “These doors are self-closing,” he commented quietly. He reached down and took a small handgun from an ankle holster and pushed the door back into the room. A small piece of wood had been wedged in the bottom of the jam.
I looked at him questioningly, but he shook his head and did a quick sweep of the room. I looked around, but everything seemed fine. Charlie moved quietly into the other rooms, checking closets and corners. He called to me from the bedroom.
He was standing there, looking at the wall above the bed. Some characters had been spray painted there. And driven into the wood of the headboard was a small throwing star, the archaic weapon of the ninja. The points that weren’t embedded in the wood gleamed as if they had been recently sharpened. My laptop lay on the bed, the screen up as if it had just recently been used. When I had left for the meeting, the computer had been on the desk.
“Don’t touch anything,” he said, but it was unnecessary—I’d been at crime scenes before. I just stood there looking at things, picking up details, and trying to make sense out of it.
He nodded at the wall. “Can you make that out?”
“Sure,” I nodded. “It’s crude, but it’s legible.”
“And…” he prompted.
Two characters, one below the other. “Okuden,” I read.
“And?” he said again, with a trace of impatience.
“It refers to hidden teachings,” I told him. “In the martial arts world there are layers to what students get taught. The okuden are the special secrets of your teacher and not to be revealed to outsiders…”
Even as I said it, I began making the connections.
“I’ve seen these things before,” Charlie commented, pointing to the throwing star. “Kung fu, right?”
I smiled. “It’s a shuriken. A throwing star. Pretty common in various arts.”
“They all have the little design in the center?”
“No,” I sighed. Etched in the center of the star was a small diamond. A diamond, the kongo symbol that Eliot Westmann claimed was the mark of the followers of Inari-sama’s secret sect in Hokkaido.
“You still think Lori’s jerking your chain?” Charlie asked me quietly.
In fact, I didn’t know what to think. After the cops arrived and checked things out, I was left to puzzle over recent events. Roy moved me to another room, this one small and on the third floor of the main building, and also informed me that I was scheduled for a mid-day flight out of Arizona the next day. He appeared deeply concerned by the strange chain of events. I imagined that he wasn’t so much worried about what happened to me, since I was on his boss’s black list, as he was upset about the fact that someone had defaced hotel property in one of their more elegant suites.
I sat down in my little room for a while, staring at the walls. After a time, I moved out to the postage-stamp sized balcony. There was a white plastic chair and wobbly table, tangible evidence of how far I had fallen in Lori Westmann’s estimation. I gazed out over the resort property, the winding paths and rooftops, the lush deep green of grass and the bright blossoms of flowering plants. I lifted my eyes higher and into the rougher, less forgiving ground of the distant desert. We try so hard to make our worlds pleasant and tidy.
I sighed, turned around, and brought my laptop out to begin the chore of writing a report. But it wouldn’t boot up. I tried a few different things, but got the same result. Great. Now I’ll have to do it from memory.
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nbsp; I made a call to the business center and the folks there were more than happy to take a look at the computer. The word of my fall from grace had obviously not percolated down to the troops. I wandered down to the main reception center, taking care to make sure my door was securely locked. I was alert to the possible presence of danger. The most alarming thing I saw was an obese woman in a bright, expansively flowered bathing suit. She was alone in the deep blue of the pool, paddling slowly with the odd, languid grace that heavy people display in the water.
They ran a check on my computer. All the components were working.
“So what’s the deal?” I asked the tech.
“It’s been wiped,” he told me matter of factly. He was probably still in college, reed thin, with a spiky hairdo.
“Wiped?” I said.
“Sure,” he shrugged. “The hard drive’s been wiped out.”
“And the data?” I pressed him.
“Gone.” He saw my expression. “I can reformat the drive for you. It’ll take a while, but you’ll be able to use it again.”
“How’s something like this happen?”
“Pretty easy,” he explained. “All you need is a fairly good magnet. You wave it across the drive and it scrambles everything.”
I had wondered why the laptop was left on my bed. If the point of the break in was to warn me about discovering old secrets from Westmann’s work, then someone had to worry that there might be information on the computer I was using. I thought about the odd juxtaposition of things: a crude, scrawled warning in Japanese characters on the wall, the more sinister message of the shuriken’s point driven deep into a wood frame above the place where I lay, and now the destruction of my notes. As if to say that the revelation of secrets begun by Westmann so many years ago should finally be put to an end.
It was creepy. But something about it bothered me: The lore of Japanese assassins is replete with various types of exotic equipment: blowguns, blades, smoke bombs. Westmann’s books had described a sect of warrior monks armed with the typical set of Japanese weapons. As far as I could remember, I don’t think his ninja-like assassins were equipped with computer-destroying magnets.
I spent a few hours in the business center, hogging the use of one of their computers. I wrote down what I could, padding my text with information and sources I could pull from the Internet. The advanced education I had received while earning a Ph.D. has almost no useful application in the real world. But after years of graduate school, one thing I can do is write a book report.
I printed the report out and delivered it to the Dragon Lady. Then I took a ride out to Hasegawa’s dojo to say goodbye. Steve Hasegawa was puttering around the empty space, sweeping the mats in preparation for the evening’s class, and he seemed genuinely sad to learn that I wasn’t going to be around any more.
“It was good training with you, Burke,” he said and shook my hand. “The students will miss you.”
I shrugged the compliment off. “All good things come to an end,” I said.
Steve nodded sadly. “Sure.” He looked down at his feet, but I don’t think that was what he was seeing. I wondered for a moment whether he was thinking of his father, once a martial artist of accomplishment and now a prisoner in his own body. Then he looked up, back in the moment, and summoned up a smile. He tapped the side of his head with the heel of his palm in mock surprise. “But hey, I’m forgetting my reigi.”
Etiquette. It’s part and parcel of training. He rummaged around in his desk drawer and drew out a small folded piece of cloth wrapped in cellophane. It was a tenegui, a small cotton towel used in the martial arts for a variety of things. It’s customary when visiting other dojo for people to exchange them, since each school has tenegui made in different colors embodying different slogans representative of their unique character.
I accepted it with two hands in a gesture of respect. “I have nothing for you in return,” I admitted, “except my thanks.” The tenegui was yellow, with crimson calligraphy. The color scheme echoed the state flag of Arizona, but the sentiment written upon it was the same slogan that guided the students in the dojo of the Hasegawas.
Steve shrugged and smiled. “I know you like the motto,” he commented.
“Relentless as fire,” I recited.
He nodded. “Real old-time hard core, Burke.” But his tone led me to believe he had more to say.
“And?”
“You know what’s really relentless as fire, Burke?” I shook my head no. “Life,” he said simply, and turned back to cleaning the mats.
When I returned to the hotel, Charlie Fiorella was waiting for me. I barely got the car parked before he emerged from the shade of the front portico of the hotel reception area.
“Hi Charlie,” I said brightly enough, but then I registered his serious mood.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said grimly. He looked slightly disheveled, and I noticed a smudge or two on his sport coat.
What’s up?”
He didn’t answer me directly. “Where have you been for the last few hours?” he asked.
“Here, for the most part,” I said, puzzled.
“Witnesses?”
“Sure, I was in the business center.” I didn’t like the direction of his line of questions, but I liked Charlie and was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
He nodded at the car. “And now?”
“I took a drive out to the martial arts school I was training at to say good bye.”
“Can it be confirmed?”
I nodded in the affirmative. The brisk, focused series of questions was familiar: it was something I had seen my brother Micky do any number of times as he interrogated people who might or might not be suspects in a criminal investigation.
My responses seemed to reassure Charlie; his face relaxed somewhat, and he took me by the arm and guided me along the shaded walk so we’d be out of earshot of the staff.
“Look,” he said quietly. “After the meeting I went out to the old man’s place to get that journal you found. I had a couple of issues pending in the office, so I didn’t get out there until after lunch.”
“And?”
“When I got out there, the place had been torched. The main building was pretty much gutted. And the room you described had been ransacked.”
“No journal?” I guessed.
“No journal,” he replied. “No nothing. Every single scrap of paper in Westmann’s library is gone.”
I wasn’t sure that this was a major literary disaster. And I was pretty sure that Charlie didn’t care much about the loss of Westmann’s notes either. He wasn’t focusing so much on what was done; he was more concerned at the fact that it had taken place at all. It was a turf issue, a pride issue. But mostly, it was a cop thing. These guys work hard at keeping a messy world in some semblance of order. Their self-image is intertwined with the abilities they display on the job. Someone like Charlie could deal with any number of disasters and take them in stride. But this event was personal in an odd sort of way: an insult to his competence as head of security in the tiny efficient empire of Lori Westmann.
“Do you have any suspects?” I said.
He squinted at me. “We usually look to disgruntled employees.” I nodded. “People with an axe to grind.” He saw that I wasn’t getting it. “Someone,” he said with emphasis, “who might have recently been called to a meeting and argued with his employer and whose work was judged to be unsatisfactory.”
“Oh,” I replied, finally getting it. “Ah.”
Charlie started to laugh. “Burke, get a grip. I don’t seriously think you’re a suspect. And, fortunately,” he told me, “you’ve got an alibi.”
“True, but imagine that my tab at the poolside bar is not going to be honored anymore.”
“If you’re not packed yet,” he told me in confidence, “I’d make that a priority.”
The staff didn’t line up to bid me farewell. Charlie had hosed down Lori Westmann enough to ensure that I wasn�
��t arrested on suspicion of arson. I signed the bill with a sense of relief and prepared to escape. As I settled up, I asked them to retrieve the package I had deposited in the hotel safe a few days ago. It was fairly bulky, and when the clerk passed it over the high counter to me, some of the papers spilled out. The sheets swirled to the floor. I scrambled to pick them up and get them out of sight. Anyone who knew his handwriting would recognize the copy I had made of Eliot Westmann’s journal. I was focused on getting the pages back into the package and yet simultaneously trying to see whether anyone was taking an undue interest.
It wasn’t until I was almost out the door that I caught a glimpse of Xochi watching me with a still, shocking intensity.
I clambered into the limo that was taking me to the airport. If I had been driving, I would have hit the gas so hard that the wheels would have been smoking. As it was, the chauffeur moved us smoothly and sedately away from the hotel. I half expected Xochi to throw himself across the hood of the car. But he stayed in the shadows and the limo headed, unmolested, out into the hard light of the highway.
Home, James.
9 Kime
I tried not to think too much about the Westmanns for a while. And, truth be told, it wasn’t difficult. I had spent a great deal of my early life thinking too much and I was making up for lost time.
CRACK! I parried Yamashita’s cut at my wrist with my own wooden sword. The bokken is dense, white oak, and the vibration of the blow hummed deep in the bones of my arm. I could feel the sweat seeping out on my forehead. I moved warily to one side, watching my teacher. My partner. My opponent. Yamashita flowed over the surface of the wooden floor, his face a flat mask and his eyes dark and narrowed with merciless concentration. When I first began studying with him, the sheer psychic force of his presence when we crossed swords was enough to take my breath away. But I had learned to control my breath. It was just as well. Today, I was going to need it.
We were engaged in a demonstration kata for the students who sat, mute on the floor around us. Some would be entranced by the flow of action. The really good students would acknowledge the contained ferocity. Each knew the implications of the scripted moves and the toll they could take on the trainee. Symbols and rituals and hints of an exotic culture surround the traditional Japanese martial arts. It’s easy not to see them for what they really are. Despite the skill and grace, the elegance of the techniques and philosophies associated with them, these are systems that take as their subject the destruction of other human beings. Unlike more modern martial arts forms, these are not sports. They’re physical and sometimes beautiful, but never nice.