the glass doors.
Mai and I look at each other for a second before getting to our feet. We follow him like the disobedient children we are.
Samuel stops at the top of the landing and looks toward the koi pond, his head blocking my view of whatever he is seeing. From the left, Lam is sprinting toward the pond, shouting, his Glock held in a two-handed grip. He sounds pissed.
When I lean out to look around Samuel, I see the back of an elderly man sitting at the end of the cement bench where Samuel and I sat last evening. His posture is calm and relaxed. Incongruently, there is a groaning man lying on the ground next to him, kicking his bare feet and flailing his arms as if he were trying to swim on dry land. The old man is casually patting the back of the prone man’s head as if consoling him.
Lam stops behind the bench looking confused as to how to proceed. He says something to the old man. If he got an answer, I didn’t hear it.
Samuel moves quickly down the steps and over to his security man. Samuel says something to him and Lam lowers his weapon.
“What’s going on?” I whisper.
“I am not sure,” Mai says. “Lam asked Sifu if the man gave him trouble. I did not hear what he said.”
“That’s Shen Lang Rui?” I ask, though Mai just said it was. “Who’s the guy on the ground?”
Samuel speaks with the old man, who continues to pat the moaning man’s head. The downed guy is doing a great imitation of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps—sans pool.
“An intruder, I think,” Mai says. “I think Sifu caught him.
Slapslapslapslapslap
Tex streaks hand over hand between Mai and me, bounds down the four steps, and slaps his way over to the others.
Lam jerks the dazed young man to his feet, and is about to smack him, but Samuel steps between them. When Lam lets go, the intruder’s wobbly legs give out and he crumples back to the ground. The old man scoots off the bench, kneels on one knee, and touches the front of the man’s neck. He rubs it in small, gentle circles. In no time, the man shakes his head and gathers his bearings. Sifu stands and nods to Samuel.
“Shen Lang Rui healed him,” Mai whispers with admiration. “So he can stand.”
Before I can ask what she means, Samuel and Lam pull the man to his feet, his legs no longer appearing wobbly. Lam wants a piece of the guy so badly that he can barely restrain his twitchy self. I’m guessing that he doesn’t like his security breached. A touch on his shoulder from Samuel calms him a little.
Samuel leans in close to the intruder, their noses nearly touching. The young man listens, his face vibrating with fear, then he begins blabbering as if he has only seconds to get it out. Sifu has resumed sitting, his back to the action, once again watching the undulating movements of the koi.
I glance at Mai.
She smiles, shrugs. “All this must seem weird to you,” she says.
“It doesn’t to you?”
“The man is a thief, uh… what you call it… a burglar. Lam said that he came over the wall on the south side. There is a tree on the outside of it that Father is having removed because he thought that something like this could happen.”
“He isn’t one of Lai Van Tan’s people?”
“I think that Father is believing he is just a thief. He is nineteen, he said. Just a stupid boy. He is poor and was looking for something to take to sell.”
“Are you calling the police?”
Mai shakes her head. “I do not think Father will want that.”
“Why not?”
“Father will explain.”
“I don’t understand about Sifu. Did he catch the intruder?”
“I think so. I think he was holding the thief on the ground waiting for Lam to come. Sifu knew that Lam would see him on the monitors. He always teases Lam by coming in… un… undetected.”
I shake my head. “This is crazy. What was he doing to the kid’s neck?”
“The patting? It was to hold him down. Sorry, I do not know that nerve technique. It is advanced.”
This is all a bit much even if I weren’t still jet lagged.
Lam heads back to the monitor room, his gun tucked in his waistband, while Mai and I remain on the porch. Samuel is speaking quietly to the thief, but the hapless kid is trembling like a bumped bowl of Jell-O.
“Father is scaring him,” Mai says, “so that he tells other people never to come onto our property. Father says that the next time the old man won’t tease him with his kung fu, but he will send him to his ancestors.”
Samuel hands the sobbing would-be thief some paper money from his pocket, all the while the boy bows nonstop. Tex hands Samuel a rag from his pocket which Samuel secures over the boy’s eyes. A moment later, the two men escort him up the steps, past us, and through the glass door.
“Father gave him money to buy food, and now he takes him through the house and out the front gate. He did not want the boy to see the inside. Father is quite compassionate, no?”
“Has this happened before?”
“First time since we have been here. It is too easy with the tree.”
“Sam,” Samuel says coming back through the door and moving down the steps, as if the thing with the burglar was no more than a neighbor borrowing a cup of phở. “Sorry about the disruption to our breakfast. Let me introduce you.”
Sifu has remained seated on the cement bench, his back to us, elbows resting on his knees as he watches the koi. At least that’s what he appears to be doing. Judging by what Samuel and Mai have told me about him, he might be having a nice chat with the fish.
Samuel stops a respectful distance from the old man and murmurs softly. Sifu stands and turns about. I start to gasp, but manage to stop myself.
His eyes.
I read somewhere about a painting of Jesus in St. Catherine’s monastery in the middle of the Sinai Desert. The writer was startled by the painter’s depiction of Christ’s eyes, how they reflected two different expressions. The left eye conveyed Christ’s anger at sin and the right eye depicted his compassion and forgiveness. A monk told the writer to gaze at each eye for a while and reflect on what he felt from each one. The man did and was so moved that he left the monastery forever changed.
It would be strange enough that a Chinese man would have blue eyes or green ones, instead of the usual brown. But Sifu has one of each, one blue and one green. If the mixed colors weren’t peculiar enough, the way he looks at me is so… It’s as if he’s seeing into me, seeing into my… being. Like he already knows me, understands me. I want to break eye contact with him, but I can’t.
“Son, this is my sifu, Master Shen Lang Rui, founder of Temple
