The Cold Smell of Sacred Stone

by George C. Chesbro

  “Do you really think you could do that, Kendry?” Henry Kitten asked in a low, even voice. “Do you think you could do it even with the use of both your arms?”

  “With the friend that you mentioned and his gun over there, Kitten, I’m not obliged to give you lessons. As I said, I take you to be a man of honor and great pride. Will you promise that I won’t see or hear of you again if Mongo and I let you walk out of here?”

  “It’s certainly a tempting offer,” Henry Kitten said, and shrugged his shoulders again.

  That was one ninja shrug too many, and I pulled the trigger on the Beretta. As the gun roared, his left arm—which had shot out from the top of his head with the speed of a striking snake—jerked back. He spun around and grabbed for his left shoulder at the same time as what felt like a white hot branding iron sliced across my forehead, just above my eyes. I pulled the trigger three times in rapid succession, firing blindly now as a thick, warm curtain of blood flowed into my eyes. I heard glass shatter.

  Stunned, I fell over on my side and frantically swiped at my blood-filled eyes with my free hand as I heard the thud-thud-thud of bodies colliding and blows landing. I felt nauseated and light-headed, and knew that I was close to fainting.

  My left hand found a paint rag. I used it to wipe away the blood from my eyes, then pressed it tightly against the shuriken-split flesh of my forehead. I struggled to my feet, swaying, then leaned back against the wall and squinted at the blurred tableau in a pool of moonlight almost perfectly bisected by the powerful beam of the flashlight.

  What I saw was two ninjas doing battle, dancing on the balls of their feet as they spun and charged, firing side and high kicks at one another’s body. I noted with some satisfaction that I’d managed to even the odds a little, since Henry Kitten’s left arm flopped uselessly at his side, and blood seeped from the bullet hole I’d put in his shoulder. Like Veil, the assassin was now forced to rely primarily on kicks, while taking care to protect his injury.

  Incredibly, at least to me, Veil had chosen to toss aside his deadly nunchaku sticks, along with the two knives he’d had in his waistband; it seemed he intended to give Henry Kitten a few lessons after all.

  Veil was nothing if not creative in his practice of the martial arts. He had mastered the kata of a dozen different systems, but used no system exclusively; indeed, he had devised what he laughingly called a no-system, which was all his own and which he considered superior to any of the many systems that were traditionally taught. Strict and sterile adherence to any one school’s kata could be a deadly trap, he had warned me on more than one occasion, inasmuch as it could telegraph your next moves to a knowledgeable opponent and provide him with a killing suki, or opportunity. Consequently, much of my training with Veil had consisted of my trying to unlearn the formal system of karate kata I had dutifully mastered in order to earn my black belt. Therefore, it was with some surprise that I watched Veil initially set up and move in a taijutsu mode, kata emphasizing distorted body angles, as if to protect his injured arm. Even Kitten, his triangular face briefly illuminated by a shaft of moonlight, seemed startled by what he must have assumed was his good fortune; and then the white ninja proceeded to execute a series of koppojutsu moves designed to penetrate Veil’s defensive maneuvers, to smash bone. His mistake. At the last moment, a microsecond, Veil spun out and away from a side kick, wheeled back in, and delivered an elbow strike to Kitten’s jaw that shattered teeth as it whipped the assassin’s head back.

  First round, first blood, to Veil. Not too trashy, I thought. In the future, which was looking brighter all the time, I vowed to pay even closer attention to the things my teacher had to say.

  But Kitten had his own ideas about the future. Seemingly oblivious to shock and what had to be considerable pain, he leaped high in the air, twisted, fired a high kick that would have broken Veil’s neck if it had landed. Veil leaned back, letting the foot fly past his head, then drove his left fist into the inside of Kitten’s heavily muscled thigh, just above the knee. Kitten grunted with pain and surprise. He landed on his other leg—awkwardly—and just managed to duck under one of Veil’s kicks that would have crushed his temple.

  I raised my gun with a badly trembling hand, trying to track Kitten, but did not pull the trigger. Both men were constantly spinning and circling, darting in and out of the smoky light, and I would have had a hard time telling which was which even if my vision hadn’t been constantly slipping in and out of focus. Also, blood had soaked through the rag I held over my forehead and was once again seeping into my eyes. I wiped away blood with the back of my gun hand, then sidled along the wall, angling closer to the two figures, looking for one clean shot. Limping slightly, Henry Kitten stepped back and began slowly to circle Veil, who had stopped moving and was now standing calmly in the center of the patch of moonlight, the flashlight beam highlighting his head and shoulders. Suddenly Kitten attacked with what was to me blinding speed, faking a side kick with his left leg, then spinning counterclockwise and launching a flying high kick at Veil’s damaged right arm. Veil spun the other way, inside the kick, and drove the point of his left elbow deep into Kitten’s momentarily unprotected groin. Kitten cried out and doubled over while he was still in the air. He landed on his side, immediately sensed the danger and managed to scramble to his feet, although he was still clutching at his groin, inhaling and exhaling with great whooping sounds. He tried to back away, but he wasn’t fast enough. Veil’s fist shot out and landed squarely on the other man’s bullet-damaged shoulder. Kitten screamed, took one hand from his groin to clutch at his shoulder. For a moment I thought he would go down, but he managed to keep his balance while he spun around and began to stagger toward one side of the loft. Veil facilitated Henry Kitten’s attempt at walking by stepping up behind the man and grabbing his belt, lifting him up on his toes. In what seemed to me an astonishingly brief time, Veil had achieved zanshin—total physical and mental domination of his opponent. He steered the other man around and marched him toward the end of the loft. When they were a few feet from the bank of windows, Veil flexed his knees, and with a mighty pull and shove hurled Kitten through the air. The ninja assassin disappeared into the night in an explosion of glass. Henry Kitten didn’t scream; amid the tinkling of glass came the sound of his body landing in the mounds of jagged junk and mushy, rotting garbage in the narrow alleyway four stories below. When Veil turned away from the window and came toward me, he didn’t even seem to be breathing hard.

  “Not bad for a painter,” I managed to say before the gun slipped from my fingers and I slumped unconscious to the floor.

  2.

  I awoke to find myself lying on Veil’s bed, with Veil bending over me applying the finishing touches to taping a thick bandage in place on my forehead. The smell of turpentine was strong in my nostrils, and I suspected it was coming off me. The lights were back on, and I could hear the thrumming of the two giant exhaust fans in the work area as they carried away the last traces of the acrid smoke from the fire I had started. A teakettle was whistling in the kitchen behind the thin partition beside the bed. I started to sit up, but Veil put his hand on my chest and gently but firmly pushed me back down on the bed.

  “Easy, Mongo. You’ve lost a lot of blood. Start moving around too quickly, and you’ll pass out again.”

  “How long have I been out?”

  “A little more than an hour; you had a nice nap, but considering the shock to your system and the blood you’ve lost, it probably wasn’t long enough. The lights came back on about ten minutes after you fainted. I cleaned you up a little, and managed to stitch the wound.”

  “Jesus. With one hand, no less.”

  Veil shrugged, then wiggled the fingers of his right hand. “The arm may be in a cast, but I can still use the hand. Suturing is a little skill I picked up out of necessity during the war, when I had to tend to my own knitting, so to speak. I think I managed to clean out the wound pretty good with peroxide, and the sutures will keep it closed until we can get
you to a plastic surgeon to have it done properly.”

  “I’m sure the sewing job you did is as good as I’m going to get anywhere.”

  “Wrong. You could end up with a nasty scar, and I can’t be sure there won’t be an infection. I poured a bottle of peroxide in there, but the rag you used to stanch the bleeding was covered with green paint; you looked like a Christmas decoration. As soon as I get some herbal tea down you, I’m going to drive you to a hospital emergency room.”

  “The wound bled a lot, right?”

  “Indeed.”

  “And the stitches you put in will hold until it heals?”

  “As long as you don’t do a lot of walking on your hands or opening doors with your head, they should.”

  “Good. I’ll pass on the trip to a hospital. I’m too old to worry about my looks, and a scar on my face is probably just what I need to put a good scare into my enemies.”

  “Mongo—”

  “I don’t want to have to answer a lot of questions, Veil,” I said seriously, “and that’s what will happen if I go to a hospital emergency room. I can’t very well claim I cut myself shaving. I can always claim I was slashed by a mugger, but then somebody’s going to want to get the police involved. Considering our somewhat complicated situation, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “You could have a point.” Veil paused, grinned. “All those cute little co-eds who already think you’re so sexy will really go crazy with lust if you show up in class with a huge scar on your forehead. Then again, you may be asked to head up the school’s German dueling society.”

  “I’m not teaching any longer,” I said, trying and failing to keep the bitterness I felt out of my voice.

  Veil raised his eyebrows slightly. “No?”

  “You don’t know about it, but the university lined up with everyone else who tried to squash Garth and me while we were looking for you. Madison’s people got to both the police and the school. The NYPD suspended Garth, without pay, for supposedly aiding and abetting a criminal—me; Christ, they assigned him to tag along with me and then busted his ass for doing precisely that. The university took all my classes away from me and started making noises about taking away my tenure on the grounds of moral turpitude. Then they offered me a raise and the chairmanship of the department after it was all over. I told them to shove it, and I submitted my letter of resignation yesterday. I wanted nothing more to do with those people.”

  Veil studied me for a few moments, then slowly nodded his head, perhaps sensing that my aborted teaching career wasn’t something I felt like talking about. “I’m going to make you some of my super-duper herbal tea,” he said at last. “It will perk you right up.”

  “I’d rather have Scotch.”

  “Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me at all,” Veil said, walking away toward the entrance to the kitchen. “First, the tea.”

  “I feel like a Goddamn old lady,” I called out, slowly sitting up on the edge of the bed, then bracing myself with my hands and closing my eyes when the room started to tilt.

  “Why?” Veil called from the other side of the partition.

  “I don’t usually pass out so easily.”

  “Hey, my friend, when somebody bounces a shuriken off your forehead and you lose as much blood as you did, the only reasonable thing to do is pass out. Ask anybody. You’re lucky you have a thick skull. Incidentally, I’m sorry I wasn’t able to stop him from doing that. I should have kept a closer eye on him.”

  “You’re sorry you weren’t able to stop him?! I was the one with the gun, remember? By the way, that was some number you did on him. But why the hell didn’t you just bop him on the head with your nunchaku, or stick a knife between his ribs?”

  “You’d already put a bullet in his shoulder,” Veil replied dryly. “It didn’t seem quite sporting for me to use weapons.”

  “Sporting?!”

  Veil came back into the bedroom carrying a huge ceramic mug filled to the brim with a steaming, perfectly foul-smelling liquid. “Well, you’d been telling me what a bad-ass this guy was, and he obviously thought he was a bad-ass, along with his various employers. I was curious as to how he’d fight; I thought I might learn something.”

  At first I thought he had to be joking, but when I looked into his face I could see that he was serious. I shook my head in amazement. “Jesus Christ. I knew you were damn good, and I never doubted that you could beat Kitten, but I never imagined that anyone could have done it so easily. I think I’ll start calling you sir.”

  “Drink this,” Veil said, handing me the mug. “Watch it; it’s hot.”

  I sipped at the disgusting brown liquid, almost gagged. “What the hell is this stuff?!”

  “I told you; super-duper herbal tea. Mother Kendry’s magic healing potion.”

  “It tastes like you washed your socks and jock in it after our last workout.”

  “Drink it; all of it. It will make you feel better.”

  He was right about that. With Veil occasionally prodding me by raising my elbow, I drained off the mug. The throbbing in my forehead eased dramatically, the room no longer threatened to turn upside down on me, and I felt decidedly stronger, less groggy.

  “So,” I said as I set the empty mug down on the bed’s side table, “now we have to figure out what to do with our departed assassin.”

  Veil nodded as he sat down next to me on the bed and absently adjusted his sling, which he had changed. “If we call the police, they’re going to be all over the two of us; Kitten just doesn’t look like your average burglar, especially in this neighborhood.”

  “You got that right. If they identify him—or if they can’t identify him, which seems more likely—the cops are going to be leaning very heavily on us for explanations, which we can’t give. Shannon’s done his part, and we’re all home free at the moment; but it’s all over if anyone manages to make a link between that dead assassin and Orville Madison. If the cops check with Interpol, they’ll find out that Garth filed a request for information on a guy that turned out to be Henry Kitten. A lot of worms will come crawling out of a lot of cans.”

  “Worms,” Veil said, and smiled thinly. “You feel up to helping me with a little spring planting? I’ll reward you with a Scotch from your special reserve I keep under the kitchen counter.”

  We gained access to the alley, which was blocked off from the street at both ends by rusting chain-link fences, through a triple-bolted steel door in the basement of the gutted building. Clambering through a treacherous jungle of rubber tires, twisted shards of rusting metal, various unrecognizable objects, garbage, and a host of scurrying, dog-sized rats, we finally made our way to the mound of junk on which the broken body of Henry Kitten lay askew, leaking blood from all its orifices. Along the way I’d picked up half of a broken steel pole, with one jagged, splayed end. Veil kicked aside some soggy cardboard, and I began digging with my makeshift shovel in the soft, rotting earth which had been exposed.

  “Easy does it, Mongo,” Veil said as he leaned back against a tangled pile of lumber and steel. If he was the least bit concerned about having a corpse buried beneath the windows of a loft where he lived and worked, he certainly didn’t show it. He’d assured me that it would be at least a hundred years before anyone found the remains of Henry Kitten, and—considering the neighborhood—nobody in the next century would give them a second thought. Our conversation-spiced spring planting expedition might have seemed a tad macabre to me if I hadn’t been so happy to be rid of Henry Kitten. “You don’t want to start that wound bleeding.”

  “Listen, pal, with that tea you gave me I feel like I could staff an entire gravediggers’ union by myself. What the hell is in that stuff? Cocaine?”

  “Just herbs. It’s a recipe I picked up in Laos, from the Hmong. Very good for whatever ails you. I’ll give you the recipe, if you’d like.”

  “No, thanks. I’m not sure I could handle it.”

  Veil selected a jagged wood stick from the pile he was leaning again
st, gripped it tightly in his left hand and began helping me dig. “How’s Garth?” he asked quietly.

  I paused in my digging, leaned on my pole, sighed, and shook my head. “No change from the way you saw him three days ago at Langley. He’s just … gone away. His eyes are open, but there’s no life in them; they look like dull marbles. He blinks, breathes, pisses down a tube into a bag, shits through another tube into another bag, gets fed through tubes in his nose, and doesn’t object to being massaged and rolled into another position four times in every twenty-four hours.”

  “EEG?”

  “Damn near normal, which is what’s so frustrating. Maybe I could accept the fact that my brother’s become a zombie if there were some sign of brain damage, but there isn’t. All of his organs seem to be functioning quite normally, considering the fact that he’s totally sedentary, but there’s nothing going on with him. He reminds me of the way I found your loft that night; all the lights are on, but there’s nobody home.”

  “Are you satisfied with his care?”

  “Lippitt says it’s the best, and I have no reason not to believe him. You know, the clinic is at Rockland Psychiatric Center, but it’s a secret Defense Intelligence Agency facility, staffed by their people and under their control. I don’t know enough about what’s required in Garth’s case to be in a position to evaluate the care, but all of the equipment looks like state-of-the-art, there are plenty of nurses who really seem to care running about most of the time, the food is good, and the rooms comfortable. There’s a shrink for every three patients. The place is run by a shrink named Charles Slycke, who doesn’t seem to care for me very much.”

  “What’s his problem?”

  “Beats me. I only met him this afternoon, before I headed down here, but I sensed a lot of hostility. Actually, I don’t give a shit what he thinks of me just as long as he sees that Garth gets the best care.”

  “I’m sorry, Mongo.”

  “Yeah; me too. It’s a bitch.”