Ransom

by Jay McInerney

  Ransom had vaguely expected something like this, although he hadn’t thought DeVito would spell it out in advance. “I don’t have a sword,” Ransom said.

  “I can provide one.”

  He could refuse; it was up to him, not DeVito. Marilyn should turn up by tomorrow, somehow, and he wouldn’t have to fight. They could both leave Kyoto. As the alternatives to fighting DeVito with swords flashed plausibly across his mind he found himself unconvinced, or perhaps just uninterested. He tried to imagine himself on a plane to the States. “All right,” he said.

  “Sunrise tomorrow. The top of Mt. Hiei, in front of the main temple.”

  Showdown at sunrise. Ransom wondered which movie DeVito was living out. All of them, maybe. But this, Ransom thought, was his own movie now.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ll meet you on the west bank of the river. The wide stretch halfway between the Kitaoji and Imadegawa bridges.”

  Ransom waited for a response.

  “Are you backing out on me?” DeVito said finally.

  “I’m just telling you where I’ll be.”

  “You’ll be at the temple, Ransom.”

  “I’ll be at the river at sunrise,” Ransom said and hung up.

  Ransom returned to the bar, the buzz of conversation and laughter rising and fading rhythmically, even as he was in the midst of it. He saw Kano sitting alone at the bar and walked over. Kano put out his palm, and Ransom gave him five.

  “What’s happening?” Kano said.

  “Nothing much.”

  “You feeling okay? You look weird, man.”

  “I’m fine, really,” Ransom answered. “I hear you’re going to Chicago.”

  Kano took a seat and nodded gravely. “Maybe.”

  “Not definite?”

  Kano shrugged. “I don’t know if I want to go.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “It’s difficult to explain. You want a drink?”

  “Sure,” Ransom said. “Whatever you’re having.”

  Kano ordered two bourbons. As Ransom waited for him to speak, he wondered how he should feel, wondered why he felt fine. He felt free to devote his attention to Kano or to anything that he liked.

  He and Kano lifted glasses in unison, tapping them lightly. Kano drank and lowered his glass, his face registering the attempt to gather his thoughts. “For ten years I play blues. I listen to records, I make an image in my head. The place where the music comes from, for me maybe it’s like the place that black folks sing about, the place they can’t go back to. It’s a place in my head. I don’t know if I want to go there.” Kano shook a cigarette from his pack and lit it up. “You think I’m crazy?”

  “You may be very smart.”

  “Everyone thinks I’m crazy, man.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Ransom said.

  “You know what I mean?” Kano asked hopefully.

  “I think so.”

  When Kano returned to the stage, Ransom thought about the morning. In a few hours he would meet DeVito, something he had decided to do not for DeVito’s reasons but for reasons of his own. He was very much awake, but he would go home to lie down for a few hours, getting up in time to wash and dress and walk down to the river. He left his unfinished drink on the bar and waved to Kano on his way out.

  30

  North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan, March 1975

  The sun had just dropped behind the mountains into Afghanistan. Ransom had no idea how long the Pathan had been gone. The bazaar was closing down. Ransom was sitting at a table in front of a tea shop. The old man who had served him came out of the shop to look at him, then went slowly back inside.

  Someone was addressing him. At first Ransom didn’t hear what was being said. The man who was speaking had bushy hair tied back in a ponytail and wore a gold ring through his left nostril. He was waving his hand in front of Ransom’s face.

  “Hey, man. Do you read me? Anybody home in there?” He unstrapped his backpack and took a seat across from Ransom. He put his finger to his ear and said “Bang!” then patted his shirtpockets. “Got a smoke?”

  Ransom shook his head.

  “Got a voice? Speak to me, man. I’m going crazy. Five fucking hours at the border. They tear my pack down. They strip me. Check my asshole. Under my toenails. Behind my ears. But I’m clean. Jesus, I’d kill for a toke right now. Swallowed my last half gram on the bus. Once that hit I thought the Khyber Pass was going to swallow me. What a place. Journey into Hades. So tell me. What’s the scene here? These dudes toting guns, they got a war going on or what?”

  Ransom saw the Pathan approaching. He stopped a few yards short of the tea shop, took a pistol from his holster and pointed it at Ransom, whose companion stopped talking. He followed Ransom’s gaze and when he saw the Pathan he dropped to the ground and rolled under the table.

  The Pathan said, “We had an agreement.” His voice was strange.

  Ransom nodded.

  “Perhaps you think to make a joke.”

  Ransom opened his mouth to speak, but he could not catch his breath. The pistol followed the back-and-forth motion of his head.

  “My offer was more than generous,” the Pathan said.

  “Where is Annette?” Ransom said, although he was not sure if his voice could be heard.

  “Where? Do not worry about where. She is just where you left her.” The Pathan stepped forward and examined Ransom’s face. “You do not know, then?” He shook his head in apparent disgust. Then he spit on the ground between them. Stepping forward, he went through Ransom’s pockets with one hand. He found the envelope and put it in the sleeve of his shirt. Then he left.

  The man with the ponytail crawled out from under the table. Ransom looked at the ring through his nose. He wondered if it had hurt when the ring was put in.

  “Jesus Christ,” the man said. “That was close, man. Somebody could’ve got killed.”

  It was almost dark. Ransom looked up at the huge gray sky. He could see the first faint stars. He could feel the planet turning and moving through space. He could feel the tug of gravity in his arms and legs, and he could hear the roar of darkness sweeping toward him like a fist.

  31

  The alarm was unnecessary; DeVito was awake when it went off at a quarter to four. Sunrise was 5:09. Last night, after talking to Ransom, he had laid out the weapons and a kimono and then lay down, allowing himself to float just beneath the surface of consciousness, half dreaming of battle.

  DeVito filled a basin with cold water and washed his entire body. Then he prepared a bowl, shaved his face and his forehead up to the point where the hair of the topknot started, and the top of his head on both sides of the inch-wide stripe beneath the topknot. When he was finished he brushed out his hair and tied the topknot in place. He put on a pair of sweats and jogged once around the temple compound to get his blood moving. The air was dense and saturated. The rainy season would set in any day. Back in the house he filled a blender with a pint of orange juice, a pint of milk, three bananas and three eggs.

  He took up his katana in its polished lacquer scabbard, the weapon made by the great swordsmith Yasukuni of the Soshu Branch of the Sagami School. From sitting position, holding the scabbard in his right hand, he drew the sword in a single continuous motion. Last night he had polished it. Along the graceful curve of the temper line, the cutting edge showed the wavy pattern of its layers; the ancient swordsmith pounded the steel into sword shape, folded it in half and hammered it out again, doubling each time the layers of steel: four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four . . . the method of the Sagami swordsmiths calling for fifteen folds, which gave the finished blade more than thirty-two thousand layers, each a molecule or two thick. DeVito had worked it out, many times, on a calculator, amazed in the face of this simple mathematical progression.

  He could have handed Ransom the sword he had picked up in Okinawa, the prewar, mass-produced item turned out for flunky officers of the Imperial Army to carry into the
jungles of the South Pacific. But he wanted a fight, not a fix. He had stolen another sword from the temple’s cache, a seventeenth-century weapon nearly as good as his own. For their purposes, the technology was about equal. Although DeVito was confident of the outcome, he’d been briefly rattled when Ransom switched the location and hung up the phone. He had felt his authority diminished. But it didn’t make a damn bit of difference, he told himself, where Ransom wanted to buy the farm. In two weeks DeVito could finally join the kendo dojo, but this way he could give himself the most important lesson first.

  At four-fifteen he changed from his sweats into the kimono, put both swords in a big fishing-rod case and set out.

  When he reached the Kitaoji Bridge, light was beginning to show over the ridge of the eastern mountains. He left his motorcycle in a bicycle-park area and walked down along the deserted riverbank, the rod case slung over his shoulder by the strap. When he was halfway between the two bridges he sat down on the ground to wait. As the sky grew brighter he began to be certain that Ransom wouldn’t show.

  DeVito did not hear Ransom until he was standing directly behind him.

  “Either you’re a very trusting soul,” Ransom said, “or very unobservant.”

  DeVito leapt to his feet. Ransom was in his white karate gi. “Are you ready to fight?”

  Ransom didn’t answer. He turned and looked over his shoulder at the eastern mountains. DeVito looked too, thinking that it was stupid of Ransom to expose himself; as they watched, a yellow glow seemed to spread among the thick clouds spilling over the ridge.

  “Do you have a weapon for me?” Ransom said, turning back to face DeVito.

  DeVito unslung the rod case and unscrewed the cap, removing the two katana. Cautiously, watching for sudden moves, he extended one sword. Ransom took it, examined the hilt and scabbard, and then unlaced the ties that fastened the guard to the scabbard. DeVito stepped back as he partially unsheathed the blade.

  “It’s a good sword,” DeVito said.

  Ransom looked again to the east. “I don’t think we’re going to see the sun today, but I believe it’s dawn.”

  “I’m ready when you are.” DeVito took another step back, and slid the scabbard of the Sagami sword into the obi fastening his kimono.

  Ransom unfastened his obi and retied it, then drew his sword and threw the scabbard into the river. DeVito set the balls of his feet in the sand and drew his sword in a smooth arc which Ransom leaped back to avoid. DeVito held his sword aloft, two-handed, above his right shoulder; Ransom raised his to a similar position. He parried DeVito’s first cut and slashed low. The two blades rang like chimes, each with its distinct tone, as DeVito blocked and threw aside Ransom’s blade. Ransom was open for a moment but he managed to raise his blade in time to stop DeVito’s just short of his neck. They stood face to face, so close that DeVito could see the pores on Ransom’s nose, and for a moment the assurance of Ransom’s gaze robbed DeVito of his own.

  Ransom pushed off from DeVito’s blade. He thrust low. DeVito slashed, deflecting Ransom’s blade into the sand at his feet. Ransom raised his sword just in time to parry the following slash. He threw DeVito’s blade back and came in from the side, cutting the sleeve of DeVito’s kimono and slicing the flesh over his ribcage. DeVito gasped—the wound seeming to burn deeper into him even after he had slipped away from the blade, burning with all the heat that had gone into the forging of the steel. Ransom paused, his sword in the air showing blood.

  DeVito inhaled deeply and tried to suck all the pain into his lungs. He let out a yell and attacked. As Ransom’s blade met his own, DeVito kicked him in the gut, and when he doubled over DeVito drew his arms back and struck with what the sixteenth-century master Miyamoto Musashi called the Flowing Water Cut. The blade entered diagonally between neck and shoulder, severing Ransom’s spine.

  Standing over the body, DeVito watched the blood spilling from the open neck onto the white sand of the flood plain. So this is what it’s like, he thought, as the rain began to fall and the rainy season commenced.

  A Note on the Author

  JAY McINERNEY writes a wine column for the Wall Street Journal and is a regular contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times Book Review and Corriere della Sera. He has written seven novels, including Bright Lights, Big City, cited by Time as one of the nine generation-defining novels of the twentieth century, two short story collections and three non-fiction books on wine, one of which was the acclaimed A Hedonist in the Cellar. In 2006, he received the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award from the James Beard Foundation. He lives in Manhattan and Bridgehampton, New York.

  By the Same Author

  FICTION

  The Last Bachelor

  How It Ended

  The Good Life

  Model Behaviour

  The Last of the Savages

  Brightness Falls

  Story of My Life

  Bright Lights, Big City

  NONFICTION

  The Juice

  A Hedonist in the Cellar

  Bacchus and Me

  Also by Jay McInerney

  Bright Lights, Big City

  ‘A rambunctious, deadly funny novel that goes for the right mark – the human heart’ Raymond Carver

  You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might become clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not… So begins our nameless hero’s trawl through the brightly lit streets of Manhattan, sampling all this wonderland has to offer yet suspecting that tomorrow’s hangover may be caused by more than simple excess. Bright Lights, Big City is an acclaimed classic which marked Jay McInerney as one of the major writers of our time.

  ‘The seminal novel of the 1980s’ New York Times

  ‘Distinctive and sophisticated … extremely funny’ Sunday Times

  ‘McInerney earns his place in literary history with Bright Lights, Big City, the comic morality tale of a spoilt young man making a mess of his life in Manhattan … a landmark evocation of the wasteful decade it lampoons’ Guardian

  ‘A super-smart, touching novel … captures the loneliness and libertine isolation of New York life’ The Times

  Story of My Life

  ‘Line for line, it’s one of the funniest novels I have ever read’ John Sutherland, London Review of Books

  It’s party time. Alison lives for the moment in a carnival of gossip and midnight sessions of Truth or Dare, and her cocaine-bashing friends crave satiation. Young and beautiful, sex-crazed and alcohol-fuelled, Alison juggles rent money with abortion fees, lingering lovers with current conquests and is the despair of her gynaecologist. Story of her life right? But in a world of no consequences, Alison is heading for a meltdown.

  ‘McInerney has proven himself not only a brilliant stylist but a master of characterisation, with a keen eye for the incongruities of urban life’ New York Times Book Review

  Brightness Falls

  ‘A funny, self-mocking, sometimes brilliant portrait of Manhattan’s young literary and Wall Street crowd, our latest Lost Generation’ Time

  Corrine Calloway is a young stockbroker on Wall Street, her husband Russell an underpaid but ambitious publishing editor. The happily married couple head into New York’s 1980s gold rush where prospects and money seem to be flying everywhere, and all vie for riches, fame and the love of beautiful people. But the Calloways soon find out that what goes up must come crashing down, both on Wall Street and at home.

  ‘McInerney has a gift for the simultaneous perception of the glamour and tawdriness of city life and the novel pulsates with his trademark sense of excitement about living in New York’ Evening Standard

  The Last of the Savages

  ‘Gives Scott Fitzgerald’s fictional world a modern make-over’ Sunday Times

  When Patrick Keane arrives at an exclusive New England prep school in the Sixties he meets his roommate, the radical
Will Savage. The last in the line of a privileged white family from the Mississippi Delta, Will disavows his father’s expectations and embraces the searing anthems of black soul music. From wildly different backgrounds, Patrick and Will form an unlikely friendship that is to span three decades, from the turbulent Sixties to the Nineties. The Last of the Savages is a dazzling exploration of interracial love, music, family and enduring friendship.

  ‘A moving portrait of friendship … Funny and touching’ Tatler

  Model Behaviour

  ‘A fast-paced, funny tale of true love gone wrong, full of McInerney’s wit and style’ Cosmopolitan

  Connor’s girlfriend is off to California, allegedly on a fashion shoot, but something tells him she might never come back. His friend Jeremy has a dog being held to ransom for reasons too Machiavellian to blurb. Connor’s sister Brook, genius and anorexic, is busy anguishing over Rwanda and Bosnia. His editor at Ciao Bella is only concerned about the celebrity of the month. Thanks goodness for Pallas, a knock-out table dancer with a heart of gold.

  ‘Model Behaviour does for the 90s what Bright Lights, Big City did for the 80s … New York, New York: so good he nailed it twice’ Independent on Sunday

  The Good Life

  ‘Tender and moving … of all the 9/11 books this is possibly the only one that will pass the test of time’ Arena

  Ten years on, Russell is still a literary editor; Corrine watches anxiously over their children at home. Across town, Luke is struggling to reconnect with his wife and their angst-ridden daughter. These two families are teetering on the brink of change when 9/11 happens. The Good Life explores that territory between hope and despair, love and loss, regret and fulfilment. This is McInerney doing what he does best, presenting us with New York in all its moral complexity.