Giri

by Marc Olden

  The dojo, the Manhattan Karate Club, had five instructors, four Americans and one Japanese. Two of the Americans, Nick and Grace Harper, a husband and wife approaching sixty, owned the club. Both had struggled in the martial arts for years, teaching, demonstrating, losing money. In good years, they just managed to get by. Since the late seventies, the dojo had shown a profit, repaying twenty-five years of the Harpers’ sacrifices and belief.

  Other instructors were Luke, a thirty-year-old black schoolteacher, and eighteen-year-old Tommy, a Japanese black belt who had been practicing since he was nine. Decker was the best fighter, the best teacher. He accepted no fees for teaching; he did it because he liked Nick and Grace and because they left him alone. Their dojo, near Lincoln Center and just two blocks from Decker’s apartment, was on the second floor of a building that had once been a small hat factory.

  Tonight the class sparred slowly, getting the feel of fighting in combinations. Decker, Luke and Tommy circulated among the students, correcting, encouraging, maintaining a tight control over everyone. Fighting could easily get out of hand, especially when tempers flared. And the greatest danger came from beginners, who didn’t know how much damage they could do.

  As usual, there were visitors. Some came to watch with an eye toward joining. Others waited for wives, husbands, friends. They sat on benches near the exit, whispering or not talking at all.

  Decker rarely paid attention to visitors, especially when he was teaching. But tonight he saw the spectators turn their attention to a woman who stood in the doorway. Decker stopped moving around the floor long enough to let his eyes follow theirs. The woman was Japanese, small, elegant, striking. She wore a Black Diamond mink coat, a fur hat to match. Boots that probably cost a month of Decker’s salary. Reluctantly he turned from her and back to his class. There were more than fifty students on the floor, fifty sets of egos that needed stroking.

  Decker squatted beside a nine-year-old girl and showed her how to form a proper karate fist. Fingertips tight into the base of the fingers, thumb pressed down on top of the first two fingers. Squeeze hard.

  Still squatting, he looked again toward the door. For a second he imagined that the Japanese woman was staring at him. Hard to tell with those oversized dark glasses hiding much of her face. Decker rose, watched the nine-year-old throw a few punches and look to him for approval. Grinning, he rubbed her head and nodded. And then he was walking among his students again, stopping to correct a man’s stance but positioning himself so that he could see the door. Interesting. The woman had been looking at him.

  She removed her glasses for a clearer look at him and was now putting them back on when Decker stared at her. The half smile on her face intrigued him. But he told himself, let it go. Didn’t look good for an instructor to abandon a class to hit on a visitor, no matter how beautiful she was. But there was something about her that drew him closer. He wanted to talk to her.

  Then she tilted her head to the left, her gaze behind the dark glasses aimed squarely at Decker. Now he couldn’t look away if he wanted to. Because something in that one motion, in the way she moved her head reminded him of …

  But it couldn’t be. He shook his head to clear his mind. Definitely could not be. But the more he said that to himself the stronger the idea grew …

  Without thinking he tapped Luke on the shoulder and said, ‘Take over.”

  Luke glanced at the doorway. There was appreciation in his voice. “Oh yeah, I can dig it.”

  Decker walked past him to the Japanese woman, who smiled openly at him. No mistake about it now. Visitors on the wooden benches eyed both players, the mysterious lady and the karateka.

  Decker’s reason weakened. Which part of him, he wondered, was responsible for what he now saw? His eyes? His mind, which refused to let go of the past? Or was it his heart, which could not stop loving a dead woman?

  He stepped forward to embrace the illusion.

  And his world changed forever.

  “Michi?”

  “Manny.” Her voice was a whisper. But the sound of it was a scalding jolt to his sanity.

  She held out her arms to him, but Decker could only stand and weep.

  It was Michi. And she was alive.

  Two

  Kai-Ken

  In feudal Japan, a knife used by women for self-defense

  6

  TWO HOURS AFTER LEAVING the dojo, Decker and Michi knelt in front of a tokonoma, an alcove in the sunken living room of her apartment on East End Avenue. Both wore black silk kimonos with mons, the Chihara family crest, on the back of each sleeve. The crest, in gold, silver and white, featured a medieval bowman aiming his last arrow at an eagle soaring high against the sun. It symbolized the Chiharas’ descent from the Minamoto clan, feudal Japan’s most skilled archers.

  A scroll, hand-painted in gold, blue, green and white, hung from the alcove’s bare wall. It, too, showed a bowman, this one sitting alone in meditation beside a tree-shaded stream. He was Yoshiiye of the Minamoto clan, the first prominent archer to appear in Japan’s history books. His ability with the bow, and as a battle strategist, had won him the title Hachiman Taro, eldest son of the god of war.

  On the narrow floor of the alcove were two bronze vases; in each was a display of ikebana, the Japanese flower arrangement created from the barest minimum of material. With only a handful of small yellow roses and evergreens, Michi had created a shoka design, the heaven-man-earth presentation first brought to sixth-century Japan by Buddhist priests from China. Decker noticed that in each vase she had deliberately torn a single petal on one rose.

  Furyu.

  A reminder of the imperfection in perfection. A reminder that nature, like all else, was transitory, and often painful.

  In the dojo they had said little to each other. Ma, the Japanese called it. The ability to enjoy the company of friends and loved ones in silence. The talent for mastering the pauses and periods of quiet that occur in conversation when one dares not risk saying what he truly feels. At times ma is mere politeness. Or a protection, a layer of outer calm and self-control. It can be called timing, a mastery of unspoken rhythms.

  In the taxi, Michi did say, “I love you, Manny. I have never stopped loving you. I, we, will say the rest in time.”

  And Decker, because he could not measure his happiness, because he set no conditions on her returning to his life, could ask for nothing more. Quickly—it surprised him just how quickly—he fell into her rhythm. But he did say that he had never stopped loving her.

  “My mother and sister died in Saigon,” said Michi, “but not my father. He fell into the hands of the North Vietnamese. For years I tried to free him. I had no choice.”

  Decker knew the rest. Giri. The Chihara family was imprisoned by the tradition of a rigid and demanding bloodline, one supported by a society that was just as inflexible. The Chihara bloodline, traceable back one thousand years, was that of samurai who had served emperors and shoguns, princes and clan leaders. Eventually, the samurai themselves had emerged as an elite.

  The Chiharas had always been privileged members of Japan’s ruling military. During World War II Michi’s father, George Chihara, had been the ultimate samurai, a member of the Jinrai Butai, or Divine Thunderbolt Corps, the nickname given to the Tokko-tai, Special Attack Forces. Kamikaze pilots.

  Bad weather had forced the cancellation of George Chihara’s death flight in a small rocket plane, whose nose was armed with 2,800 pounds of explosives and whose target was to have been an American destroyer transport off Okinawa. Kamikazes were considered by many Japanese to be samurai of the skies. Decker had found Chihara threatening, someone who, though bound by samurai traditions of loyalty and honor, had still become enslaved by greed.

  Saigon, 1974. It was Decker’s first sight of George Chihara and he never forgot it. Squat and powerfully built, with a large head of toadlike ugliness, Chihara was about to kill. Not once, but many times.

  Unknown to Chihara, his daughter and Decker watched from a window
in his villa as he barked a command, and dozens of maimed, starving and vicious dogs collected from Saigon’s streets were driven by cursing servants, with clubs and kicks, into a large pen surrounded by thick wooden fences six feet high.

  Decker, Michi clinging to his arm, looked to the right. Chihara, hard eyed and unsmiling, stood on a platform overlooking the enclosure of howling, snarling animals. In one hand was a six-foot-long Japanese bow; a quiver of arrows was slung on his back. He was dressed in a bloodred kimono trimmed in gold, the family crest on the back and sleeves. He also wore a hachimaki, a wide headband containing the characters for Jinrai Butai and the red circle that symbolized the rising sun. The wearing of a hachimaki was part of the preparation for a great physical and spiritual effort, for combat.

  Reaching over his shoulder Chihara took an arrow from the quiver, notched it to the bow and in the tradition of Oriental archers, held the bow and arrow overhead before bringing it down and sighting on a target. Bowstring and feathered end of the arrow were squeezed between index finger and bent thumb, allowing for a smooth release.

  Chihara shot his first arrow. And hit a tawny-colored mongrel in the neck, lifting the animal from its feet and into the air. The dog fell to earth and disappeared in the milling pack. A second arrow passed through the bony, sore-encrusted body of one dog and lodged itself in the jaw of another. Another shaft pinned a small dog to the inside of the wooden pen. And now panic spread among them and they fought each other to escape, vainly leaping high against the wall.

  Chihara the archer, the descendant of samurai, continued to slay them.

  Michi looked away. “Once a month he does this. For hundreds of years archers practiced their skills this way.”

  Walk easy around this son of a bitch, thought Decker. Walk real fucking easy.

  For a thousand years the Chihara family had been taught to choose giri over ninjo, human feelings, to preserve the group and the institution over the individual. Giri was duty, loyalty, social responsibility. Ninjo was chaos and disorder, tragedy and unrest. For Michi to fall in love with Decker had taken great courage and he loved her all the more for it. Still, she could never completely extricate herself from the burden of those thousand years and he knew that. But in the nightmare of Vietnam, love was all he had. And he would not give it up.

  Love had brought them together. In Saigon, they had met on Tanabata, the Japanese festival honoring two lovers—a pair of stars called Vega and Altair, who legend said were to meet once a year in July, providing it did not rain. Offering food to the heavenly lovers, crowds gathered to watch the sky and pray for good weather. They wrote poems on strips of colored paper and hung them on bamboo cuttings planted in gardens. When he met Michi on a Saigon street, amid festival crowds, twenty-four-year-old Decker, having neither garden nor bamboo cuttings, had been carrying his poem in his pocket. The twenty-two-year-old Japanese girl had been shocked to find an American aware of the custom, let alone sensitive enough to believe in it.

  “The worse it gets over here,” said Decker, “the more I find myself hoping. Just writing the poem made me feel better. Don’t know what I’m going to do with it, though.”

  Michi, eyes on his face, held out her hand. Sakaye, her older sister, who had accompanied her to the festival, watched, brown eyes darting from the slim, beautiful Michi to the young American. She saw him give Michi his poem, saw their hands touch and linger there before withdrawing. Thinking of their father, Sakaye knew that what she had just witnessed presented as much danger as the NVA, the North Vietnamese army, now advancing closer to Saigon each day.

  Even before meeting her, Decker knew of Michi’s father, one of Southeast Asia’s most prosperous Japanese businessmen. George Chihara owned two airlines, real estate in South Vietnam, Laos and Macao, a construction company, and he manufactured children’s toys. And because the CIA occupied three floors of the six-story American embassy in Saigon, Decker knew that Chihara was a CIA front man, who used that connection to deal in narcotics and smuggle gold and diamonds.

  Chihara’s other questionable connection was with the American Mafia, the Molise family in New York. In Saigon, the Thing, as the mob called itself, had gotten rich in U.S. military construction, and in gold and narcotics. Nor had the Thing failed to get its share of the millions connected with American base clubs scattered throughout South Vietnam. Chihara’s appeal to American organized crime had been his expensive arrangements with corrupt Vietnamese politicians and certain American generals.

  Chihara had been the leading kuromaku among Saigon’s Japanese. Named for a black curtain used in the Kabuki theater, a kuromaku was a power broker in the dark world of Japanese business. With his steely gaze and questionable ethics, Chihara had been called “the Snake” for the speed with which he went after business rivals. The CIA needed Chihara. And because he knew too much, it also feared him.

  In her huge Manhattan duplex overlooking the East River, Michi and Decker stripped, then washed before soaking in a large bath, whose walls were murals of snowcapped mountains, cloudless blue skies and ancient temples. The colors were beige and gray, black and gold, with sections of floors alternately covered in tatami and shag rugs. There was taped musics—koto, the thirteen-string Japanese harp, and wooden flutes and the samisen, a Japanese balalaika with a parchment-covered sound box.

  In the sunken living room, a skylight looked down on a fireplace, and telephone tie lines to Tokyo, cable television and a telex were hidden behind a black and red lacquered screen. The money for all of this came from diamonds. Michi headed the New York office of Pantheon Diamonds of Tokyo and was one of her country’s highest-paid executives.

  Decker told her of his work and of being a field associate, something he had kept from his family.

  Michi said, “It sounds dangerous. No one likes being betrayed.”

  “I’m careful.”

  “And you are pleased to live with the tension of being a field associate.”

  “Like always, you read me loud and clear. Having anyone else know that much about me would be uncomfortable. You, I can accept it from.”

  “Because I accept you as you are. Always.”

  “In Saigon, I made you a promise. I said that I would come to you, to take you with me on one of the last flights out I did come, Michi. Believe me, I did.”

  “I know. I was told that you had kept your promise,”

  Decker closed his eyes. “Too late. Too goddamn late. The house was destroyed. Viet Cong rockets. Killed your family. Killed you, I thought.”

  “A friend, Kiye, you met her once, she was in the house that day and it was her corpse that was mistaken for mine. You said Major Sparrowhawk told you I was dead.”

  “Him. And Dorian Raymond and Robbie Ambrose. They said they saw the house get wasted. CIA confirmed their story. Christ for a long time I hated Sparrowhawk. Hated Dorian, hated Robbie.”

  Michi looked at him for long seconds before asking, “Why?”

  “Thought maybe they could have saved you. Never got along with them anyway. Bumped heads with those bastards a couple of times.”

  In Saigon, Decker and another Marine had escorted a CIA agent to a payoff with Vietnamese agents working with Sparrowhawk, who, as a soldier of fortune, had hired himself out to the CIA for good money. At the payoff site, something had gone wrong; two people had been killed. Badly wounded, the CIA agent had given the payoff money, $50,000, to Decker. Sparrowhawk, however, had insisted that it be turned over to him, to dispose of as he saw fit. Decker refused. It had ended up with Decker aiming an M-16 at Sparrowhawk’s gut ordering him to call off Robbie and Dorian.

  And just before the fall of Saigon, the wife of an ambassador’s aide and the Marine who was her driver had been kidnapped by several ARVN; the South Vietnamese army officers planned to hold them in exchange for a flight out of the country. Decker had learned where the Americans were being held captive and rescued them, killing three ARVN. The dead officers had been associates of Sparrowhawk’s, who was enraged at
what he called their needless slaughter.

  Decker knew damn well that the Englishman had come up with this scheme to ensure the officers’ escape from the advancing Communists and get them a seat on a plane. But there was no proof of Sparrowhawk’s involvement; in any case, the CIA ordered the affair closed. No one at the embassy, especially the CIA, wanted to believe that Sparrowhawk was less than untainted, at least as long as he worked for them. And no one wanted to give the South Vietnamese, already panicky and demoralized, any more ideas about saving their skins at American expense.

  “That last day,” said Decker, “I tried everything I knew of to get to you. But damn, things just kept going wrong. I was ordered to pick up several officers and get them to the embassy and on to a helicopter. I had to chase around after American civilians. Never been so goddamn busy in my life. If I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn somebody fixed things to keep us apart.”

  He did not see Michi blink. When he did turn to her she was staring down at the water in the tub. She was even more beautiful than he remembered, with ivory skin and eyes as bright as dark jewels. Her hair was shorter, but she was as slim, as alluring as she had been in his dreams. There were moments with her tonight when he was almost certain they had never been apart.

  Leaving the bath, they dried themselves and put on kimonos. After kneeling quietly in front of the tokonoma, they rose and went into the kitchen, where Michi made tea and Decker told her that he was investigating Sparrowhawk and Dorian Raymond. Oddly enough, he sensed that she was not surprised; but he decided that she was merely showing self-control. When she said she had been in New York since September, he asked her why she had not contacted him sooner.

  She poured tea for them. “I must ask this of you, Manny, that we have between us keiyaku. Please?”

  Decker nodded. Keiyaku was a contract, an understanding, with room for modification of that agreement as circumstances dictated.