by Ruby Spinell
Taekwondo was offered that year at Two-Forty Centre St. behind the five statues representing the five boroughs in three, large, unused rooms. The predominantly Irish New York cop gave it barely a passing nod. He enrolled. One evening, after studying three years, he arrived early and caught a group working out in Goju.
The footwork, lightning fast, reminded him of the man on the street. He switched and earned his black belt in Goju Karate.
One evening when I was twelve he told me he’d watched a Kung Fu master from mainland China perform in a dojo in downtown Yonkers. He described the man’s movements as flowing spirals, without straight thrust, without rigid line. He drew the yin yang symbol whirling within its circle. Then he asked me and my sister to double up on a bedroom. Every family should have an empty room for practice. I don’t remember minding too much, though my sister borrowed and never returned my clothes and this sudden proximity gave her increased opportunity, because he spent so much time teaching us. In junior high we knew how to stop the action we did not yet know how to start.
When I learned all one hundred and twenty-eight movements of Tai Chi Chuan, he gave me these words of Ch’en Ch’ang Hsing: “In Tai Chi Chuan you will find semblance of an eagle flying, fish in the deep sea, full of life and vitality … mysterious is the essence of Tai Chi Chuan … it is a game fit for the immortals.”
At ‘woman-works-shuttles’ Eli noted the slowed-up tempo, a dust ball lay unmoving on the wood less than a foot away. Laurence Van de Post says the truer the movement, and the greater its content, the greater the swing of the universal pendulum.
A man of fifty-five becomes more diffuse. Hischazkus changes, from the younger man’s stubborn, self-propelling ego-core to something immeasurably finer. True hischazkus, a strengthening, a divine spark, would see him through.
His body, slowed, off-balance, was not the problem mind made of it. Reveling in the art of change, it used the art of movement to visit the mountains. His body knew where the spirits lived exhaling Chi. He hadn’t need of a particularly large apartment, just one capacious enough to provide him with an empty room with a good level wood floor. He’d known the moment he came through the door: the light pouring through the turret windows, the oak flooring in the long room to the left of the kitchen, the bright room off to the right.
Eli closed the door behind him as he stepped into the warmth of the tower room. He walked over and put coffee on the small gas range to perc. A square table with two chairs fit neatly in the window bay. At the opposite end a heavy, sagging armchair, squat beside a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, held the rumpled pages of Sunday’s Times. He built the bookcase, two of them, (one in the bedroom just like this one), after convincing Mrs. Poole they would be welcome improvements to her property. He had never liked bureaus, the one in the bedroom told at a glance when it was wash day. Taking up one whole wall, it held the stereo and a couple of lamps. A double bed and an old comfortable lazy-boy were the only items of furniture.
Drinking the coffee very hot and very black he knew that someone had seen the delivery at Annunciation Monastery a week ago.
He let the knowledge sit there as if unobserved. And while he ignored it with his brain he felt the Chi drift in like fog. He did not visualize the monastery. He did not recall the cookie cutter houses with their distinctive trim, nor the surrounding streets. He drifted with the fog.
“I’m not saying mandarin manners will solve the case …” He was interrupted. “I agree … much more, yes … yes … But Janah is.” He flicked his forefinger along the spine of his cigar sending a directly aimed snowfall on the right boob. He’d been working on burying the two symmetrical pink mounds on the cutesy ashtray while listening to the captain grumble about the heat he was under from the mayor, the archdiocese, the commissioner, the Asian delegation, the press. The surface of one tit disappeared. Three large flakes with no place to lie slid down the volcano.
“He’s got Fay and Bathesday. Of course. Of course! He works best though …” He was interrupted again. This time he listened to a tirade on prima donnas. When it petered out he ventured, “Captain, remember Cadilluci? Joe Razetton? The Dewey multiple murders? Lone bird ain’t bad.” He looked up.
Lone bird looked like thoughtful stork standing in open door wearing a charcoal grey suit and white turtleneck, a dark grey overcoat hung on his left arm. Motioning Eli in, his hand scattered the ash like fairy godmothers shake stardust.
No Asian deaths from hemorrhage due to mutilation on the East coast.” The lieutenant delivered this announcement to his senior detective while lowering the phone to its cradle. “And that,” bowing to the phone, “as you’ve probably guessed was the captain. He wanted to make sure we have enough help on this.” Eli was silent. The ‘we’ sounded conspiratorial. “He’ll raise the damned and the dead and deliver them here … if we want help.” A searching look met Eli. “He wanted assurances.” Eli nodded, an unspoken agreement between them and went out to look for John Fay and Walt Bathesday. Dapper, the lieutenant thought, breaks all stereotypes. He watched the tall, thin man with the curly greying temples navigate the desks on the open floor.
Eli found John Fay perched atop his desk in a modified lotus. His whole appearance said he regarded the trip from Haight Ashbury in the late sixties to New York detective in the late eighties as humorous, at the very least. Walt Bathesday, the balding ex desk sergeant, ex Vietnam veteran, lay back in his chair, his feet on the blotter. Working with Eli Janah, one learned to wait. He had a circuitous way of thinking that the sergeant had encountered on Nam, odd to find in a Jewish-American, odd to find, and yet vaguely electrifying. He got more excitement working on a case with Janah than he’d ever got climbing into bed with a woman. He got along OK with Fay; he was a regular guy, sometimes a bit lazy. These young guys don’t know what hard work is, Bath thought. Janah though, he was something else.
Eli dropped into the empty chair. “Lieutenant says we have help if we need it.”
“Help? Who needs help? John and me, we finished the neighborhood canvass. Some interesting characters around those monastery walls.” He chewed the inside of his cheek thoughtfully. Eli liked these two; this would be the sixth or would it be the seventh case they’d worked on together?
Bath missed very little, and Fay, because he looked as much like a detective as a kid from junior high, was privy to confidences that the other two could never elicit. Neither minded long hours, Bath, a confirmed bachelor and Fay, a recurrent on again off again with a tall, studious girl in the steno pool. Unlikely pair. Yet they had been ‘getting together again’ now for five years. He didn’t hear about the separations, but he knew immediately from Fay’s hangdog appearance when they occurred. They would understand now.
“I’m going to run a modified, door to door, myself,” Eli shrugged. “Funny hunch.” They nodded.
“The semi out of central sorting was an hour forty minutes late in arriving … carriers piled up three deep … I was late … REAL late!
“When I got here the place was runny with flashing red lights, gawkers lined the street.” The man in postal uniform gestured with his chin. “Three cops made sure I was legit. Who else would be driving a stub with postal stickers?” He shook his head. “They wouldn’t let me near the turn. Told me to deliver the mail to the side door. What a mess. Can you believe all this?”
Eli glanced over the man’s shoulder. When the red, white and blue truck arrived, he had been standing before the massive, silent sightlessness of the Monastery of the Annunciation, absorbed.
A mountain would be surrounded by Chi of great gentleness and strength. This complex of buildings was encircled by a void against which an invisible current of bile worked. The dragon’s veins—as the Chinese called them—were riled, the invisible currents that flow between the hills and follow the water courses and valleys were not easeful.
As he was considering this, the little man suddenly leapt out of the postal vehicle, challenging. What was he doing here? Was he visiting? Had he busi
ness? By way of apology, after Eli silently showed his badge, the man explained that everyone in the neighborhood looked after the sisters.
The neighborhood was extremely quiet, yet according to Bath and Fay, it was not a true bedroom community, with the majority traveling off to the city for work every day. A number of students rented houses. They were occasionally the joy of a lonely widower and quite often the bane of those who were not enamored of loud stereo systems played at late hours. Quite a few retired people owned homes. For three months they became snow birds in Florida or Texas, but otherwise they liked the north.
Rows and rows of maple shade trees, now leafless, lined the road to the monastery, which looked like a beacon of peace at the end. Until you came up to it. Eli wondered if everyone felt this heaviness. Making switch-backs up and down the streets from his parked car, he encountered one man who walked a dog and didn’t look at him until he passed, three toddlers in their yard, howling with glee while they threw the sand from their sandbox out onto the pavement, a young woman hanging up her wash in a red checkered man’s lumber jacket and nothing else, and the Remco Oil Company man making a delivery.
Each street had seemed tranquil until it neared the hub, the monastery. He was considering the ramifications of this when the idiot mailman had arrived. While Eli was wishing he would go away, the mailman suddenly said he had deliveries and left.
The man probably took off abruptly because Eliaphus Daniel Janah turned to stone. Some would find this disconcerting. As honest as he was about his own failings, he didn’t fully realize his own enigmatic quality. When the mana was upon him—he would say the Chi—he had no patience with ordinary mortals. His innate good manners, while dictating external behavior, did nothing to disguise the inner change; the power flowing through him turned his soul like a wheel in the direction it wished to go.
Now, standing beside the neat black and white sign reading Congregation of Prompt Succor, his eyes roamed over the streets. From the rise, the heads of four streets were visible, seventh and eighth on his left, first and second on his right. The remainder, unseen from this vantage point, radiated out behind the monastery outbuildings and the large black fenced enclosure.
A walkway backed each row of houses, an alley, running past various kinds of picket, chain link, and post fencing around small patios and gardens. He headed for the alley between eighth and first.
The bamboo was the color of ripe timothy. Poles eight feet tall, round as a grown woman’s wrist, bound together at the knuckle with figure-eights of balled twine, enclosed two adjoining yards. A gate, also of bamboo but two feet shorter, was recessed. In this tiny alcove a sword of peachwood hung below a small cinnabar bell.
The four-foot sword gleamed. It was stained a rich burnt sienna, and light reflected off the curved tip and the carved figure of the man riding the water buffalo. Childlike, Eli stood simply before Taoist magic, feeling the joy of discovery. How apt, Lao Tzu was leaving for the West, long life awaited. Lost in thought, he waited for five minutes there under the curved bamboo lintel from which the bell hung, before the dry sound of wind through hollow tubes drifted down on his head and the gate opened inward.
He caught his breath in pleasure and looked at the figure standing before him. Barely five feet tall, an old woman in a long, yellow quilted coat smiled and said, “Inspector, welcome! Welcome to my humble home!” Her voice was a whisper of leaves across a flagstone path, the long, thin, proffered hand as light as a dried yucca pod. “I’ve been watching.” She gestured him across the threshold. “My name is SouLin.”
The pleasant, dry chuckle came from a wind rattle made of eight hollow bamboo pipes suspended from the lowest limb of a black birch. A path wound over a hint of bridge. Beside a glassy pond she said, “We take the fish inside.” He bent to hear, “they look forward to it.”
A miniature pine forest broke at a tumble of boulders and rough hewn stone. An avalanche. Dwarfed, spike grasses collared a stand of ten-foot bamboo trees. Very young, very labile, they circled and bowed. So many spots pleasing and restful to the eye made the garden seem like a park. He could have sworn it took them hours to walk through it to the house.
The floor of the large room overlooking the garden was covered with a thick woven mat. Low couches sprawled around a sunken hearth, pillows scattered at their sides. A latticework screen from the eight-foot ceiling to the floor made a divider for a quarter of the room; a long table of black ebony could be seen behind it.
Bold, black calligraphy had been brushed onto a wide sheet of rice paper which in turn was attached to a linen banner, hung on a screen. He stopped before the calligraphy.
“Do you read, Inspector?”
“Madam,” he smiled at her and bowed, “I have not attained the status of inspector. It is Detective Janah. As for the calligraphy, the work attributed to the Spirits of Purity and Mystery has always interested me.”
Her head came out of her coat then, like a turtle heading for the sea, and she did not look so old. “A woman finding someone or something to surprise her at ninety-two is indeed lucky, don’t you think Detective Janah? Would you care to read for me?” She motioned to the black figures.
Eli smiled again. “The author has remained unknown. These magic taboo characters are from the book called The Secret Methods of Eminent Spirits of Purity and Mystery. They raise the thunder and call it down upon those guilty of secret evil. It is done in a very find hand. I would say the one who brushed this communed with spirits, as only an inspired calligrapher could paint that asymmetrical, unorthodox form essential to the occult talisman.”
A little sigh of pleasure escaped her lips. “Won’t you sit down? Tea is ready. I will pour.”
Except for a comment on the unique flavor—it reminded him of fresh bergamot—Eli drank three cups in silence, watching a leaf twirl on the bamboo in the garden.
SouLin turned to business first. “My family is very indebted to the Sisters of Prompt Succor, detective. We would not be here, but for their involvement in the world of mortal form.” Her face lit, and many fined lines came together in a smile, “I would be one more dead Cambodian.
“Because of them I watch my great-grandson try to kill himself on that wreck of a motorcycle he bought with a month’s allowance and my great-granddaughter worry about being dateless because she gets such good marks in math. America has been good to us.”
“You speak good English.”
In a light, dry tone she spoke about the French school of her girlhood. He tried to picture her on the march from Battambang she had described previously to Bath and Fay. Her mother, father, two grown sons, and a baby girl did not make it. Four grandchildren, two wilderness-conscious cousins, an aunt and she, kept barely ahead of the Khmer Rouge. Reaching Thailand, by the Bay of Sam near Rayong, they hid without food for three days until they could connect with the boatman hired to ferry them out into the Gulf and the waiting World War I troop ship.
“But you did not come to hear me talk of time long gone.” She looked intently at him. “You are searching for someone.” Then, after a pause, “it has been done before, you know, death by way of hemorrhage.”
“At the moment, Madam, I am not convinced we are dealing with death.”
A long silence followed, during which she frankly appraised the tall, composed, well-dressed man before her. Eli was thinking, she is not a person whose hand will be forced, Janah. No matter how vigorously you stir this pot there will be no uncontrolled splashing. She does not have to account to anyone for herself. You can sit here all day drinking this delicious tea and only get a full bladder.
She came to a decision. “Detective, my children are very solicitous for my well being. They feel I can no longer climb the stairs as easily and so they have given me a lovely room on the other side of that wall looking out on the garden. One of my great-granddaughters has the little attic room that I had on the third floor when I first came to America. I would not for the world let them think I am unappreciative of their thoughtfulne
ss. But when they are away to work and class and I am alone in the house, who is to know? I climb more slowly than before,” she nodded vigorously, “but just as well. I climb to my little room and sit there watching the light change as the sun drops from its noon position. Would you care to see the view from my little room?”
Eli, grinning, looked in her eyes, liking her. By the powers above he was being given a koan by some old Zen master. Ridiculous. Off balance. Irregular and perfect. He followed her to the front of the house, then on up the stairs.
In the tiny third-floor room evidently inhabited by a teenager, SouLin crossed to the rocker by the window. Two steps carried him to her side.
“You agree the view is quite lovely?” The angled window, looking out over and past the adjoining houses, opened on a vista of slope leading to the monastery chapel. Snow hung around the grass, whereas it had melted around the sign and on the roads and paths. As he stood there, a car drove up and parked in one of the five spaces. A middle-aged woman in a blue coat and hat got out, walked to the front entrance door across the creaky board, and rang the buzzer. In thirty seconds she opened the door and went inside. He turned and looked at SouLin.
“On Tuesday, Detective Janah, between twelve noon and two p.m., I observed three individuals ring that buzzer. A young boy, probably Del Martin from the adjoining parish with their host order. His father likes the bagels the bakery on Main makes fresh every day. He often combines the errands. He was very bundled up, but I think it was he. Mrs. Henry, who often cleans the extern quarters and the chapel for the sisters. And Father Elias from St. Hilary’s. There was no one else.”
She evidently heard his unvoiced question. “Sometimes I nod in the sun, but it was cold and grey that day. Almost certainly, I did not sleep.”
Chapter Five
St. Hilary’s was a monolith dating from the Church’s love affair with undefined grey granite, large blocks of it. Eli’s timing was lousy, and as he turned off Lawrence onto Rigby a round matron wearing a flaming orange vest atop her coat leapt out brandishing a big red stop sign. He pressed down instantly on the brakes; even so the sign came perilously close to being squashed against the snout where it swayed like a drunken effigy.