if I was being followed. It was annoying, because I’m a pretty straight-line kind of person: when I go home, I simply go home. I like to think of it in terms of a Zen-like directness. My brother Mickey claims it’s because I am, at heart, an uptight nerd. But now I needed to make things complicated: start and stop, wander uncertainly, window shop. With a tail, you try to string them out a bit, make them unsure of what you’re up to. They get nervous when you change the distance between you and them. Slow down, and they do too. It makes them stand out in the New York crowd, chugging relentlessly along the cold sidewalks. Speed up and the tail has to break cover to hurry and catch up. Either way—busted.
The library was too thinly populated for a tail to risk coming in, so they must have lingered about at the entrance, waiting to pick me up. I hadn’t registered anything consciously on the way in to see Ann, but now I was sure. As I threaded my way down the avenue, I could sense the focus of someone following me.
If the tail knew me, they would expect me to head home for Brooklyn, to go from Washington Square to the Eighth Street subway station. It was, in fact, my plan. But now that plan had changed. So I chugged uptown, an erratic pedestrian bobbing along the thickening crowds of rush hour. West on Fourteenth Street. North on Seventh Avenue. I was a real pain and more than one impatient person bumped me slightly in their haste. I spent a good ten blocks going at a steady if somewhat sedate pace. No window shopping or pausing now: a man on a mission. It would set up an expectation on the part of whoever was tailing me. They’d grow more comfortable with my predictable behavior.
The chestnut roasters were out at the entrance to Penn Station. It was a smell I always associated with the city in winter. I dove through the doors and threaded my way through the crowd at top speed. The floor was slippery, but I kept it up, heading for the lower concourse and the Long Island Railroad. A bend in the hallway would have put me briefly out of sight of my pursuer. I went faster, using the staircase instead of the elevators, and then jagged left toward track 18. The green panels were flickering and announcing the Babylon Express. People were flowing to the track entrance, a thick river of commuters overheating in their coats as they rushed to make the train. I stood to one side and looked to my right. A figure came pounding down the stairs toward the concourse. He stood out because he wasn’t focused on a destination. Everyone else in that place was moving like a guided missile toward a target. But the man rushing down the stairs was looking all over the place, frantic to catch sight of me.
But I’d already seen what I needed to and I flowed along with the crowd, down to the train platform. I kept walking to the other end of the station, pushing my way up against the flow of homebound commuters. I left Penn on Eighth Avenue and walked across to Herald Square.
I caught the N back to Brooklyn.
If you ride the trains enough, the jolt and sway lulls you into a type of trance. The announcements come; the doors open and close. You hear the whine of the electric motor and the distant screech of the wheels as they take a curve in the tracks. People read, or nap, or stare off into the distance. Eye contact is frowned upon. It’s almost soothing. Or it would be if the molded plastic seats were actually sized for an adult human being.
I thought about the situation. People follow you because you are doing something they want to know about. Ito was going to get a report on what I was doing. It made no sense for him to have someone follow me. Someone might also wish to tail me simply because they didn’t trust me. But again, if Ito didn’t trust me, why contact me in the first place?
The final option: Someone was keeping tabs on me so they would know what I was doing before Ito did. This meant things were a little more complex than they seemed.
The subway rattled through Brooklyn. I got off at Fifty-Ninth Street just for a change of pace. The Chinese would get off at the Eighth Avenue stop. The sights and sounds of the neighborhood were familiar and my feeling of being followed was gone. I had lost my tail back in Penn Station. I thought about the man on the stairs at Penn, frantically scanning the crowd in the train station. I smiled.
Goro, you impetuous devil.
Chapter 6
Burke. The voice was clear. Insistent. The sound rang in my head, tolling with strange clarity. A summons unbidden, jerking my eyes open and making my heart pound.
Darkness. I lay for a moment in bed, wondering. The voice comes to me, but I am never sure whose it is. It could be Yamashita’s, or that of an old love. Perhaps it is a simple stirring of my conscience. But it comes in the tail end of the night, when the stars fade and the sleeping world begins to hum awake.
I rolled out of bed, the wood floor cold on my feet. I left the kitchen light off, working by feel as I set up the coffee. I like to be in the dark and sense the dawn slowly wash over me. The dining room is high ceilinged and I had emptied it of furniture a long time ago. There is a sword rack along the wall and two windows that open toward the sea. Across the tar-papered rooftops of Brooklyn and the cement arc of the Gowanus Expressway, the lights on the top of Verrazano Bridge were still bright.
The day begins with discipline. Then coffee. I sank to the floor and stretched, warming my way through old injuries, loosening up muscles and a frozen shoulder joint. There was an early training session at the dojo, and I needed to be ready.
When I was done stretching, I held the coffee mug to my face; the steam played across my skin. I wondered about the voice that had awoken me. I wondered at my involvement with the Miyazaki family. Was it simple foolishness? Was I rationalizing by alleging I was trying to protect Yamashita? Before she left me, my old girlfriend Sarah Klein said there was a part of me that craved violence, and, no matter how hard I protested, I unconsciously put myself in dangerous situations. To prove something. Why I felt the need to do this and to whom I was proving it were probably questions for a good shrink, Sarah felt.
I wonder sometimes whether she was right. I’d been laboring for years at my art and it had gradually displaced almost everything else in my life. I like to think it has been worth it: it’s brought me new skills and new insights about myself. But if it has made my vision clearer, what I see has not always been what I expected. And the discipline is relentless, the training never ending. I slog along, and on good days I am sure I can glimpse something wonderful in the distance. On bad days, I wonder about myself. I remember my brother Mickey’s dismissive comment: “You’re a grown man who spends his time dancing around in pajamas for Chrissake!”
I wondered whether I had drunk too much of the martial arts Kool-Aid. Who was I to think I could help someone like Chie Miyazaki? I’m a specialist in exotic etiquette and archaic weapons. The Miyazaki family seemed to me to have a number of needs, but I don’t think martial arts training was one of them.
But I had said I’d help them. In the end, it was as simple as that. Motivation is a murky thing. I’ve come to prefer the clarity of action. I finished my coffee. Outside my windows, the world shrugged off darkness. I decided I would too.
He came for me later that morning. “I am Alejandro. From Don Osorio.” Alejandro wore a grey overcoat and a silk scarf. His shoes were shined and his hair was recently cut. He was thin, and his ears stuck out, making him appear almost boyish. But he moved with an efficient self-confidence that hinted at a life of experience. You had to wonder about that, but I couldn’t dwell on it. I had asked for help and didn’t get to choose the form it would take.
I’m not a trained investigator, but I know the basics. You start at the beginning. You check the scene. You go over the backgrounds of suspects. Some of the information had already been provided to me. But not enough. I had, for instance, asked Ito whether I could see Chie’s apartment. But he had been dismissive. It was not necessary, he explained, since members of his staff had already done so and found little that was helpful. Or unexpected. No concrete clues about her whereabouts.
