Kage: The Shadow

by John Donohue

  His eyes got a little hard at that. He started to say something, then moved his mouth silently as if he were chewing on his words.

  “Look,” he finally said, “I started making some inquiries, but got pulled off it.”

  “Pulled off it? By whom?”

  He didn’t answer me directly. He didn’t have to. There was only one person at the hotel that could do that to him: the general manager, Lori Westmann. Charlie looked me in the eyes and said quietly, “Leave it Burke. They’re close.” He paused for emphasis. “Very close.”

  I wiggled my eyebrows suggestively.

  “Look,” Charlie said, “when the old man took the tumble, Lori had a lot on her plate: major restorations at the resort, some big contract negotiations. She needed someone out at the Kiva to be her eyes and ears… so she settled on Xochi. He’s out there practically every day anyway. He cleaned things up, got the old man’s papers organized. Nothing sinister.”

  But it was just another strange wrinkle in the story. I headed off to Eliot Westmann’s place and spent hours rummaging through his library. Something bothered me. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it was there in the back of my mind. I pressed on. There were files and files of manuscript notes that were dated, and so could be correlated to his publications. They were all Xerox copies, however. I wondered why, and also wondered where the originals were. I got some e-mail responses to my inquiries, most of which indicated that the people I had tried to contact were either no longer around, or really not interested in assisting me in my goofy little project. So I was essentially on my own, faced once again with an unpleasant task.

  I was really going to have to read Eliot Westmann’s collected works. I suppose that it’s an essential part of literary forensics, but from what I knew about his death, I suspected that the cops were right and that all of my work was going to be pointless. And besides, it didn’t interest me all that much.

  So I procrastinated. I poked around the library some more. Westmann was a prolific, even a compulsive writer. He hadn’t had much published, however, in the decade prior to his fatal tumble. The sterile little office didn’t give me much insight into what he was doing.

  I decided to poke around a bit more. The entire second floor of the main building had been Westmann’s living quarters. I wandered through them, feeling a bit self-conscious at invading a dead guy’s space. There was a living room, decorated Southwest style. It had tasteful pottery on shelves and a fine-looking Navaho rug hanging on the wall. The furniture was square, darkly stained mission-style stuff. The room also had a big leather sofa, a matching recliner, and a big screen TV. Aha! Finally, something that looked like a person actually lived in this place. It was still tremendously sterile, however.

  I slipped into his bedroom. More mission furniture. I poked around in the drawers of night tables and a small desk. They contained the usual junk you discover in small drawers: tissues, an old battery, a few paperclips, assorted plastic pens without their caps. I would have thought the meticulous Ms. Westmann would have had the house cleaned out by now.

  There was a walk-in closet. Westmann’s wardrobe was casual: denim and chinos. A canvas barn coat. A dusty daypack was dumped in a corner on top of a pair of well-worn hiking boots. There was a battered straw cowboy hat on a peg. The closet smelled faintly of old cologne, wood smoke, and tobacco. Finally, a place that didn’t appear to have been totally sanitized. The clothes on hangers and shelves were neatly arranged, but there was stuff in here that hadn’t been cleaned, as if someone had been reluctant to scrub away the last private vestiges of Westmann’s presence on the earth. Maybe she was more sentimental than I gave her credit.

  As I looked around the closet, I noticed that there was a nail high up on the inside of the door’s lip with a braided leather lanyard hanging from it. I took it down, the leather felt soft and worn. A single key hung from it, shiny with use.

  It took some skulking, but I eventually found the lock that the key opened. Actually, even with the skulking, I wouldn’t have found it, except that I tripped on a rock in front of the door, and to save my graceful self from bashing my head on the wall, I put my hand on the door and it gave just enough for me to notice the entrance. The key slipped into lock easily, and when I swung the door open, I knew I had found the mother lode.

  The room was small and seemed dark and cramped when compared to the library in the main house. A heavy old wooden table was piled high with papers. I closed the door and switched on the reading lamp that waited there. It threw an intimate, yellow light across the table, and made the shadows in the corners seem to swell and draw nearer. I sunk down into a cane-bottomed chair that creaked with old age. I looked around open-mouthed.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised, I suppose. Eliot Westmann was a bit of a recluse, someone who hid himself purposefully from others. Even in the security of his own retreat, old habits must have been hard to shake. Nestled here in this aromatic cell, protected by wood and stone, were the pieces of his life that he hid from view. Here were the pictures, newspaper clippings, and other scraps that marked his passage through life. A ceramic ashtray held a well-worn pipe, its bowl grown cold.

  A thick, crude shelf rested on rounded pegs driven into the wall. It held an oil lamp, its glass globe partially blackened with use, and a book of matches. Two good-sized rocks served as bookends, encompassing a series of leather-bound journals. I brought them down and carefully made a space on the battered old table.

  Westmann had a spidery, although legible hand. The volumes appeared to go back a few years. I surveyed the pages quickly, intending to go back in more detail later. Westmann’s journal was a combination of personal diary and a record of ongoing work. There were details of parties and people he met. His love life. There were a few snapshots shoved in among some particularly lurid pages. Young women in a hot tub smiled at the camera. The desert sky was dark behind them, with only a faint orange line across the horizon. The camera flash highlighted the contrast between the tan lines on their naked torsos and the pale skin of their breasts. There was another picture of Westmann in the water with them, his face flushed with alcohol and his eyes slightly crossed. He had an expression on his face that suggested that the lights were on but no one was home.

  “Ick,” I said out loud to no one in particular.

  Westmann’s party life wasn’t what I was interested in. I was looking for clues about how he thought and how he worked.

  Eventually, I grew adept at filtering out the more personal stuff and focusing on the entries dealing with writing. At first glance, there wasn’t much here that related to his old books. His recent journal notes suggested that he had developed a fascination with the indigenous peoples of the American Southwest, their relation to the land and their expressions of spirituality. The notes were a jumble of reflections on sand paintings, the Kachina, vision quests, and anything else he could grab at. There were copies of maps folded in the latest volumes.

  By evening, I’d come away with the impression of a man who had long put aside his early interests and was in the throes of a new intellectual passion. He didn’t seem worried about a visit from Asian assassins bent on revenging a decades-old betrayal of secret lore. He was interested in sweat lodges and mystic chants and figuring out a way to tap into the American fascination with the generically exotic.

  In other words, he was still a shyster. A talented guy with a keen eye and an ear well tuned to the pitch of popular culture, but a shyster nonetheless. This was not a revelation to me. There was little in the journals to pique my interest. Until the entries that began to mention the help Westmann received from a guide in the ways of the desert: Xochi.

  Was reading this stuff technically connected to what I was getting paid to do? No. I hadn’t finished my research, but I was coming to some conclusions. Westmann mostly seemed pretty sad to me: a person always trying to work the angles, in search of things not for the joy of discovery, but because the process led him to other things: notoriety, women, a go
od buzz. But that wasn’t what was holding my attention. I couldn’t let go of the question about the attack in the desert, or why Lori Westmann’s desert guide Xochi was taking an interest in me.

  Xochi. Did he hide the existence of Westmann’s retreat from Lori to protect her mental image of her father? Or was he playing some other angle? Perhaps there was a value to the journals that I didn’t understand.

  Looking back, maybe I shouldn’t have read the journals. But I had a sense that somewhere in these pages, there were answers for me. And besides, part of me really hated the type of shyster-scholar that Westmann had become. If I was going to research him, I wanted to uncover the truth and not whatever Lori Westmann was trying to peddle. Finally, I remembered Yamashita’s admonition: in the warrior’s life there are two things: intention and results.

  I spent some hours working the copy machine in the library, placed the original journals back where I had found them, then closed up and headed back to town. I had an order from Yamashita to obey.

  Hasegawa Sensei was probably in his early forties. He had a bristly salt and pepper mustache and short dark hair with some silver on the sides. His torso was thick and his handshake was powerful.

  “Hey, Dr. Burke,” he said. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Steve Hasegawa. We got a call that you might drop by.” Sansei, I thought: at least a third generation Japanese American.

  I smiled at him. He had good presence; the body relaxed yet fit looking, his face open and friendly. “My sensei doesn’t want me getting rusty while I’m out here for a while on a consulting job,” I explained. “He obviously thinks highly of your dojo. I was wondering whether you might be willing to let me train…”

  It was a decent looking training hall. The ceilings were high enough for weapons use. The space was big and empty and unadorned—always a positive sign in my experience. You go into a place and see a Bruce Lee poster or a velvet painting of the Buddha, it’s probably best to walk right out again. Hasegawa’s work space consisted of a battered metal desk. Behind him on the wall were framed certificates of rank, a posted practice schedule, and some black and white photos. A few showed a much older Asian man in action, a still center amidst the blurring motion of falling bodies. Another was of Steve Hasegawa conducting a class. Another photo captured him as a younger, cockier man wearing camouflage BDU’s with a Ranger tab on the shoulder and cradling a scoped sniper rifle.

  “Interesting,” I said.

  He waved a hand. “Ancient history. Let me show you around.”

  The room was dominated by the broad expanse of hard-looking mats. The walls were white with worn wainscoting, and fluorescent lights pulsed down without remorse. It was a serious training hall. The only concession to fashion was a small shrine along one wall with a scroll hanging there. The calligraphy was bold and fluid. It translated as “Relentless as Fire.” My kind of place.

  But it’s always dicey to show up and ask to be let in on practice. It’s not unusual in the martial arts world for complete strangers to wander in off the street, imply they’re advanced students, and ask to train for a while. They’ve got the gear in a battered bag and know the lingo, but they’re almost always a royal pain. Inevitably, they’re either not as trained as they think, which puts them at risk, or they’ve got something to prove, which puts others at risk

  Hasegawa’s smile didn’t fade when I made the request to train, although his eyes shifted a bit. “Well,” he said, “we’re always interested in new students, but I don’t know what benefit there would be in a short-term membership.”

  “Did my teacher speak with you?” I asked. “Sort of describe what I’m looking for?”

  “Uh, no,” he replied. “Actually the contact was through my father. It’s his school, but I’ve been sort of running it lately…” He trailed off as if there was explanation there but he was unwilling to supply it. Then Hasegawa moved over to a desk and pulled out a form. He looked up at me, still skeptical, but obviously thinking about whatever his father had told him. “Maybe you could fill this membership form out, give me some indication of your training background…”

  They gave me a rental gi to wear. It was soft with repeated washings and had the number “4” written on the collar in magic marker. The standard uniform you see in judo and other grappling arts, the gi was an off-white color. I had worn something very similar years ago when I first started studying the martial arts. In Yamashita’s dojo, we wear the deep indigo training tops of the traditional sword arts with a matching hakama. They’re links to an older, formal age in Japan. In some training halls, appearing in just a gi without a hakama over it is considered the equivalent of appearing in your underwear. But in other styles, like Hasegawa’s, hakama are only worn by people with black belt rank.

  They gave me a white belt to tie around my uniform. When the class was called to order, I made sure I sat at the end with the beginners. Everything in a traditional Japanese training hall is related to issues of rank: it conditions whom you bow to and how, the roles of people in paired exercises, and how you’re supposed to behave in general. Even the room is divided into spheres of higher and lower status. Higher ranks line up closest to the place of honor where the scroll hung. As sensei, Hasegawa would sit at that end. The line would stretch away from him, across the room, and as individual rank decreased, so your place in the line grew farther and farther away from the teacher.

  I sat near the door, with the kids. As the class sat down in the formal position for the ritual bow, the front door opened and an elderly woman pushed a man in a wheelchair into the room. All activity stopped. Steve Hasegawa leapt up from his position, kissed the woman, and gently took control of the wheelchair. He moved the old man onto the mats, placed him with care in the spot of honor, and then knelt down in front of him, facing the wheelchair-bound man with the rest of the class.

  His voice was strong as he called “Sensei ni… Rei!” and we bowed in silent unison toward the figure in the chair. He sat immobile, slightly slumped over, but his eyes glittered in acknowledgment of the salutation.

  This was probably the Hasegawa Sensei that Yamashita was thinking about when he sent me here. As I watched Steve care for the old man, placing him with care in a spot where he could watch the training, I realized that my first impressions were right: this would be a good place to learn things.

  It didn’t mean that it would be an easy place, however. The Hasegawa school was rooted in the traditions of judo and aikido. The advanced students worked with wooden swords and the short staff known as a jo. They handed me one of the staffs, which were made from white oak.

  We moved through some basics, practicing movement and strikes in isolation. Then we progressed to paired techniques. The old man watched me, his body almost totally motionless, but his head and eyes moving slightly to track me, to measure me, to weigh my skill. His son was doing the same, moving around the room, correcting and encouraging, but always coming back to evaluate me.

  At one point we took a rest and at some signal I couldn’t decipher, the old man called his son over. Steve bent over the chair and his father whispered something to him. The younger man nodded and straightened up.

  “Kata,” he called. Kata are the formal practice routines of the old arts, choreographed actions developed from traditions where the slightest error with a weapon could maim your opponent. Some martial artists disdain kata. When done right, true kata practice can make the sweat stream off you and your hair stand on end.

  In the paired exercises focusing on jo, the attacker uses a wooden sword and the defender wields a jo. There are twelve kata for jo, and they grow subtly more complex as you progress through them. As a junior ranked person in this school, I got to defend with the jo. I was looking about for a partner, when Steve Hasegawa slipped into place in front of me carrying a wooden sword. He grinned slightly as we bowed.

  But when we came together, he was all business—focused, smooth, and lethal. We started with the kata called tsukizue. Hasegawa was holding back a bit, ge
tting a feel for my skill level. As we advanced through each form, his movements grew crisper, harder, and faster. His eyes tightened in concentration as my response kept pace with the increasing intensity of his actions.

  By the time we had finished the final kata called Ranai, we were both sweaty. We brought our weapons down and bowed formally to each other. The smile was back on his face. I glanced around me and noticed that the rest of the class had sat down to watch. Thinking back, I remember the fleeting impression that most other activity had stopped some time ago.

  “Thank you, Sensei,” I said. “That was the sort of thing I needed.”

  “My pleasure, Dr. Burke,” he said, and sounded like he meant it. He called the class to order and we began to line up for the formal bow that would end the session. I started to move down to the end of the line, but Hasegawa laid a gentle hand upon my arm.

  “Oh, no.” He gestured beside him in the special spot reserved for teachers. “You sit beside me here.”

  When the students were seated, Hasegawa Sensei addressed them. “I hope you were watching carefully this evening,” he began. “It’s not often we get to see this sort of thing. Dr. Burke will be with us for a short time. I hope that you use that time to learn what you can from him.”

  He called the group to attention, we bowed to the old man in the wheelchair, then to each other. As the class broke up, Hasegawa called to one of his senior students. “Keith, please see whether we can rustle up a hakama to loan to Dr. Burke.” I glanced over at the old man in the wheelchair. His eyes closed slowly and he painfully, ever so slightly, inclined himself in my direction.

  As the week passed, I settled into a rhythm, sifting through the papers at Westmann’s estate, working more eagerly with his journals, and training with the Hasegawas in the evening. It helped me feel a bit less adrift, more myself as I pursued what I was coming to believe was a fruitless search for clues to a non-existent crime related to Westmann’s death.