a mistake. She was now a dark wraith nursing a grudge.
I noticed there was a strand of fake evergreen garland arranged along the desk’s edge and a small plastic candy cane scotch-taped to it in the very middle of the strand. I gestured at it. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”
Her eyes betrayed a number of emotions, none of them positive. I didn’t remember what color they had been the last time I saw her, but now they were a striking blue. Probably contacts selected to match the highlights in her hair. This was the only hint of color in her gypsy-punk outfit. The little Christmas display seemed out of character for her, but perhaps there were hidden depths to Ann. The decorations were minimalist, but carefully placed. I shouldn’t have been surprised at the symmetry of the desk ornament: she was, at heart, a librarian.
She eyed me skeptically, thinking of some response. “Christmas,” she finally said, “is a crock.”
Ann seemed definitive on that point, and I wasn’t interested in debating it, so I explained to her that I needed some research done on the Miyazaki family. I gave her the general outline of the issues.
“Seems like a hairball,” she said. “I mean, why get in the middle of a family thing?”
“The girl sounds screwed up.”
Ann rolled her eyes. “Uh, yeah.”
“The family’s got some connection with Yamashita, my sensei. There’s a debt of some kind owed.”
“Like what?”
I shrugged. “They were vague.”
Ann made a frown and touched the jeweled stud in her nose with the tip of a finger. Her nails were painted navy blue. She thought for a minute. “Why not ask your sensei about it?”
There was the real problem, I explained: if the story of the debt were true and I told Yamashita, he’d insist on helping. And he wasn’t up to that. A lifetime of injuries sustained in and out of the dojo had taken their toll. He was too proud to admit it. And I cared for him too much to have him confronted with that fact.
“You’re doing this just to satisfy a debt of honor?” Ann said, and her tone rang with the conviction that I was a fool and the concept of honor itself was obsolete.
“I’m doing it to protect Yamashita …”
“I hear an ‘and’ coming,” she told me.
“I dunno,” I said. “They seem so screwed up. The family. Maybe I can do something and help them out.”
“Uh huh.” Ann did not sound convinced. “Help out. The last little thing you went off on? In Arizona?”
“Yes?”
She crossed her arms and hugged herself. “It work out OK?”
I frowned. “I’m not really allowed to say.” I suppose it had worked out: I was still standing. It’s not much of a standard to judge things by, but at least it’s concrete.
“Huh,” she said, more a rush of air than a vocal expression. It might have been my imagination, but I could swear her nose stud whistled slightly.
“Come on, Ann.”
“Why should I help?”
I looked around the sleepy room, my eyes wide. “Yeah. Easy to see why you wouldn’t want a break from all the excitement.”
“Funny.” She was still skeptical.
“Look,” I said and touched her lightly on the arm. “I don’t have many people I can depend on.” I let the statement hang in the air. Gave her my earnest look. Eventually, she gave me a small, grudging smile.
“OK,” she said.
“Wait,” I said, “there’s more!” I used my TV pitchman voice and her reluctant smile got a little bigger.
I explained that I had an expense account courtesy of a mystery client, and this time, I could afford to pay her for her assistance. At that, the neon blue of her eyes seemed to glow with greater wattage.
“Still don’t believe in Santa, little girl?” I teased.
Ann looked down at the information I had written out for her.
“Ho ho ho,” she said.
It was growing dark outside, the air bluing into dusk. Artificial lights grew brighter, and yet details were hard to see. But I felt it. Not a tingle or a chill. Perhaps feeling isn’t even the right word.
There had been something that registered on a subconscious level. It may have been the flash of a face in a crowd, something familiar, or something out of place. Eyes that should have washed over me but instead were looking intently. I don’t know what it was. But I had learned to pay attention to these feelings.
In the days when I still thought I would eventually be some sort of college professor, Yamashita had frequently chided me for living too much in my head. He would sit in front of me after training, an implacable god in swordsman blue, critiquing my latest string of errors.
“Think less,” he often told me. “Be more.”
I sighed. I sighed often back then, especially when Yamashita went into his Master Yoda mode. It was particularly annoying because my teacher was always right.
If I’ve learned anything from him, it’s that conscious thought is not the only way of knowing that is open to us. The mind can sometimes be an obstacle to seeing things clearly. In swordsmanship, we say too much thought makes you “stick”: it slows down reaction time and interferes with accurate perception. A brain in overdrive can drown out the signals your other senses are trying to send to you.
And as he has aged, Yamashita has become acutely focused on developing in me the intuitive awareness of haragei. I work at the arcane exercises he has set for me, but I frequently despair of the effort. Still sometimes, in the slash and stomp of the dojo, time seems to slow down and I see the opponent before me with new eyes. It is as if the light has changed, and I am possessed of a strange acuity and ease of motion. There is no longer any sense of effort, no real awareness of self. Just the flow of breath and the arc of the sword’s blade. At moments like that, I can’t even feel the sensation of gripping the weapon. There are no hands, no arms, no Burke. Just the flow of the sword.
Then, of course, the sensation is gone and I’m left breathless with disappointment. And from across the dojo, my sensei’s eyes bore into me, alive with knowing, aware of what I just experienced. This is what we seek, Burke.
Haragei: there was someone following me.
And that was a puzzle. If the initial efforts by the Japanese to find Chie Miyazaki had jangled Lim’s nerves, he’d have people watching. It’s possible someone tailed Ito and Goro to our rendezvous, but my experience was that the people from the Kunaicho were more competent than that. Ito hadn’t picked anything up at the bar. And even if someone had tailed him there, it was highly unlikely there was more than one person and that the tail would abandon him in favor of me.
So here was a puzzle that needed solving. It meant I needed
