by John Donohue
“And when people like her hire you,” Art told me significantly, “what they’re really thinking is that they’ve bought you.”
“You mean that she expected me to cook my findings to support her murder theory?”
“Uh, gee, ya think?” Micky said sarcastically.
“Put it all together, Connor,” Art said. “This lady thinks her father was murdered. Does she pester the cops? No. She asks some Asian specialist to write a report that would substantiate her wacky Asian assassin theory.”
“She never asked me to do that,” I started.
“Not in so many words,” Art agreed. “But again. People like this have expectations. They pay. You play.”
“What happened when your research started to poke holes in things?” Micky asked.
“She was pretty steamed,” I said.
“And she got rid of you pretty quickly, too,” Art reminded me.
“So what was the point?” I pressed.
Micky signaled the waitress for another round. Art mutely held up the empty peanut basket for her to see that he needed a refill there as well.
“I wondered that, too,” my brother said. “But the visit with the agent pretty much clears everything up.”
“How so?”
Art reached out and touched my arm. “It wasn’t about her father, Connor. It was about his books…” They both looked at me expectantly, waiting for the light to go on over my head.
I saw it then. I was a minor player in Lori Westmann’s gambit to revitalize interest in her father’s writing. If she could create some controversy, the chances were greater that she could sell the idea of reissuing his works. For Lori Westmann, her father was a literary property, not a person. My research was supposed to contribute toward the PR machine.
“So when it didn’t work out with my research, she decided to cut her losses?” I commented. “Pursue other avenues?”
“In today’s fast-moving world, the successful manager is nothing if not flexible,” Art intoned.
“And I guess it worked out for her, based on what the agent said to you,” Micky said.
I shrugged in acceptance. “Man. People are such a disappointment.”
“Tremendously predictable and yet always a surprise,” Micky told me in a tone that hinted at vast experience.
We sat and drank for a while, talking about nothing in particular. Art cracked his way through the basket of peanuts and was finally reduced to poking through the broken shells for any fugitive nuts that might have been overlooked.
“OK,” I finally said, “but there’s still something that bugs me…”
“I knew this was coming,” my brother said.
I ignored him. “From what I could see from Eliot Westmann’s most recent journals, he was fascinated with Native American mysticism. The lure of the desert and all that stuff. He was working with that guy Xochi.”
“The guy who called the banditos off you?” Art commented.
“Yeah. The journal is filled with descriptions of ancient settlements and obscure desert trails that crisscross the border down there. I wonder whether he hadn’t stumbled onto something…”
“We see lots of stuff from the Homeland Security guys,” Micky said. “There’s a lot of activity going on down there. Knowledge of multiple smuggling routes that are not heavily used would be valuable to any number of people. Maybe that guy Xochi was up to something. Maybe he just bailed you out of a bad situation because he knew you were working for Lori Westmann and didn’t want the attention your demise would attract.”
“Sometimes things are not what they appear,” Art explained. “But sometimes they are. You may have just wandered into something. An accident. Like a tourist inadvertently walking into the wrong part of town.”
“Stuff happens,” Micky shrugged. “It had an exotic locale…”
“Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” Art interjected.
“… and so it sticks in your mind. But just be happy you got out in one piece, and now you’re back here where you belong.”
I knew what they were trying to tell me, but something nagged at me about the whole situation. It was like the feeling you get just before a fight is joined—you’re not positive about what will happen, but sense the invisible jangling of energy that telegraphs danger.
“Si, senor,” Art said in his best Mexican accent. “Better for you here, where you are safe, I theenk.”
He meant well, but was more wrong than any of us could have known.
10 Targets
I live in Brooklyn. Immigrants from Europe spawned here after making the scary trip across the gray expanse of the Atlantic. Later waves of newcomers journeyed across different seas, mixing with the Irish, Scandinavians, Italians, and Jews. Today, there are places in Brooklyn where you can still get canned reindeer meat and markets where shopkeepers speak only in Mandarin.
It’s no real surprise that Yamashita ended up here. His dojo is in Red Hook, inside an old warehouse. The building is made of worn orange-red brick baked before the turn of the century, and it sits on an ugly street in a neighborhood that was grumpily becoming gentrified. Just finding it is an adventure. In the old days, getting home safe was not a given. In retrospect, I think my sensei originally chose the location on purpose—it tended to winnow out the faint of heart.
I live in Brooklyn partly to be near the dojo. But there are other reasons as well. The Burkes have deep roots in the borough. Rheumy-eyed women, bent with age, still wander these streets and remember my father when he was a child. The Irish American diaspora didn’t end with a flight from the city to the suburbs; some of us have found our way back.
The house I live in on 61st street is part of the transitional zone between Sunset Park and the more upscale section known as Fort Hamilton. Many of the families in my neighborhood go back for three generations and the area still has the feeling of a community. The block is made up of narrow, attached houses, their brick faces seasoned with time and peppered with urban grit. They are all essentially the same and only the front porches offer any variety or clue to the owners’ personalities. Some porches have been enclosed, as if to shut out the streets. Others embrace it and sport bizarrely green outdoor carpeting and lawn chairs. A few flower boxes are in evidence here and there, and in season bright geraniums and pansies sprout and seek the yellow light of a Brooklyn summer.
Inside, each building has a classic railroad flat configuration. You enter through an outer and inner door into a small foyer. Three short stairs to your left lead to a landing, then turn right and climb up to the second floor. A hall directly in front of you stretches to the rear—a long, dim tube that ends at the kitchen. In years past, my landlady, Mrs. O’Toole, would invariably be there. You’d walk in and smell the odd perfume of her home: old plaster, the faint hint of steam, the smell of onions and meat cooking. The kitchen was a bright, distant rectangle, the room where she held sway, murmuring to herself like a harmless witch and tending a stove that seemed to be perpetually in use.
A pocket door to your right opens on the living room, with a broad window facing the street. This half of the house parallels the hallway and is divided by heavy mahogany pocket doors into two small bedrooms and the larger dining room at the rear, next to the kitchen.
It’s all mine now. Mrs. O’Toole had outlived all her relatives and, when she died, she left me the place because, as the note in the will said, “he’s an odd sort of fellow and his family must worry he’ll never amount to anything.” I was grateful for the gift. Kindness is rare enough, no matter the motive.
Sarah had her own place in Manhattan, but after our time apart we were eager to be together. She stayed the night and we decided to spend the next day just knocking around. At dawn, I slipped out of bed, leaving her nestled in the sheets. I padded quietly to the room at the rear of the second story of the house that I had turned into a makeshift dojo. I gazed groggily out the window, across the elevated section of the expressway in the distance, toward Staten Island. The sky
was still dark over there, and the lights on the top of the Verrazano Bridge twinkled.
I sank to the floor and stretched, my body slowly warming but my mind still sluggish with the last vestiges of sleep. Eventually, I picked up a bokken and went through some basic routines. Later in the session, I’d use the katana that waited in lethal repose on the rack on a small table nearby. But I have a basic rule of thumb: never use a live blade when you’re still half asleep.
I’ve come to like the dawn, its quiet and the hushed sense of possibility. Part of that potential is increasingly revealed for me in the act of training. It’s become a constant companion in my life. I used to think that following the martial path was a journey that had specific destinations in view: achieving a black belt, gaining admission to a prestigious school like Yamashita’s, or perhaps mastering a weapon and its techniques. But I was confusing the road markers for the journey. Now, I have come to realize that an essential element of what I do is not lineal, but cyclical. You strive and endure and train, and, at the end of it, the curtain parts. You see more clearly into new territory and understand what will be asked of you anew: effort, endurance. And more training.
I sensed something behind me in the quiet of the room. It was Sarah, wrapped in a robe, watching me silently with an expression that seemed somehow sad. I put down my sword and went to her, but she moved away.
“Finish,” she said, shaking her head. Then she shuffled away.
Later, after lingering over coffee and the morning newspaper, we went out, heading toward 8th Avenue and the supermarket. Sarah still seemed subdued, but outside the day was coming alive. At any given moment, there’s a lot of movement on my street. Buicks rock through the neighborhood, their speakers pulsing like the heartbeat of an animal. Kids shout. The gates in the wrought-iron fences that front each home creak and clang as people emerge for the day. I was happy to be back home—happy to be with Sarah. All those things together are probably why I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.
“Did you ever wonder what’s the point of all that training, Burke?” She asked as we wandered through the store. Sarah looked at me pointedly. I shrugged and put some cans of tomato paste into the cart.
“I dunno. What do you mean?” I said. She didn’t answer right away, just wheeled the cart slowly down the aisle. Sarah reached stiffly for a box of lasagna noodles. I followed, wondering what was behind her question. I thought about the look on her face this morning.
She continued, “Well, here you are working so hard at something. All these years… And it’s sort of, I don’t know…”
“Abstract?” I offered. “Archaic? That’s probably half the attraction for me.” I smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back.
“No.” She shook her head emphatically. “Maybe in some places you could say that. But not in Yamashita’s dojo. It’s much too serious.” We wandered over to the cheese section. She picked up a packet of mozzarella and looked at it, but I don’t think that was what she was seeing.
“Well,” I countered. “You know something about this from your own experience—The coordination of mind and body—The Way—All that stuff.”
“The Way…” she said reflectively. “The Way to—what?”
It was a good question and a hard one to answer in some ways. You hope that the training gives you a better insight into yourself, that the archaic discipline of the martial art makes you more able to deal with the world in the here and now. But the reality is that martial artists are like everyone else: some are good people; some are idiots. The process is supposed to make you a better person through the alchemy of training, but in many dojo there are individuals who have walked the path for years and are still idiots. They’re just highly-skilled idiots.
“For me,” I finally told her, “it’s complicated. I enjoy the physical action and the way I can lose myself in it.” I shrugged again. “And there’s Yamashita…”
She tossed the cheese in the basket and I pushed it down the aisle. One of the wheels turned sideways and the cart shuddered a bit before I got it lined up just right.
Sarah sighed. “I know. But sometimes, Burke, I see you in the dojo and the look in your eyes—I’ve seen it before. There are times when you are—not there. I was afraid that you wouldn’t come back in time to stop yourself from hurting a student.”
I almost replied that that was a good thing, but I wisely held my tongue.
“I don’t know,” she concluded as we paid the cashier. “I wonder whether training like that doesn’t bring something bad out in a person.”
“Oh, come on, Sarah,” I protested.
“Come on, yourself. Think about it. I mean, I respect Yamashita and his training. It’s a big part of your life. It’s a good part of your life…”
“There’s a ‘but’ coming,” I said warily.
She cocked her head and looked at me. Her gaze was remote and objective. “There’s a terrible sadness in him, Burke. I mean, a master of his caliber, out in the US, buried in Red Hook?”
I shrugged. “He’s got his reasons, I suppose.” Privately I wondered whether someday he’d ever share them with me.
“You’re travelling blind, Burke.” She reached out to touch me, her eyes glistening with emotion. “He’s swallowing you up.”
I felt a jet of anger. Was she jealous? A faint voice way in the back of my head wondered whether she was intuiting something that I couldn’t see. But I ignored it and shrugged off her touch.
“You used to have your university job—awful as it was—it kept you aware of the rest of the world. Now your whole life is Yamashita. And violence.” She swallowed. “I worry about you and I worry about me.”
I didn’t know what to say. In retrospect, perhaps she was more sensitive to a whole range of forces that flitted around us, waiting to pounce. We wandered back to the house in silence.
The lookout probably picked us up when we went to the store. They certainly had enough time to set up. Once again, I was too focused on internal things and not alert to the growing threat around me.
It’s not an excuse mind you, just an explanation.
Sarah, still deeply annoyed, pushed into the house clutching her grocery bags, and moved away from me down the hall toward the kitchen. I fumbled with my own bags at the door, watching her recede from me.
Somehow I must have registered the sounds behind me—the clank of the gate, the scuffle of footsteps—but I reacted too late. They pushed in behind me with the force and efficiency of long practice, sweeping me into the foyer. I spun around to face them.
There were three men, all Hispanic looking. They formed an arc in front of me. Two shooters stood expectantly, pistols hanging at their sides. They were thick and experienced looking, calm presences on either side of a man wearing a black raincoat and knit cap. He was younger, leaner, and appeared unarmed. I could see the dark vinelike curl of a tattoo climbing his neck and thought he also had tattoos on his temples that looked like a devil’s horns, but the cap partially obscured the ink.
We could all hear Sarah in the rear of the house. The man in black looked to the shooter on my left. “La mujer,” he said softly, and the man began to move past me toward the kitchen.
I started for him and shouted out a warning to Sarah. The man in black came at me, a knife appearing in his hand like a sorcerer’s trick. It wasn’t some cheap brittle street blade. This was a combat weapon, double-edged with the flat sheen of quality steel.
The ones with knives always come at you first—it’s why they choose knives in the first place. They like the action, the intimacy of attack. Above all, they like the smooth purr and wet sensation of cutting.
The guy heading for Sarah eluded me. I had to let him go. In that enclosed space of the hallway, my world had narrowed down to the two other men as they launched their attack. I knew in an elemental way that this wasn’t about robbery. It wasn’t a typical break in or a mugging. They were here to kill us.
You can scoff, but there’s a tangible diffe
rence between types of violence. And I’ve learned to sense it. The air around me was thick with intent, as if violence gave off a mist that you could almost see in the air and taste on your lips. Time seemed to both compress and stretch out.
You can’t wait on a knife attack. You can’t dodge it—a good knife man will keep flicking at you like a viper until you make a mistake and he slices you open or punches into you with his blade. If Yamashita has beaten one thing into my head it was to move toward the attacking blade, not away from it. So my response was instinctual. I rushed inside the strike and clamped my left hand around his wrist. At the same time I slammed at his chin, upward and to one side, using a palm heel strike. If you can make the head move, you can unbalance people. His head moved all right, but he had strong neck muscles and the effect didn’t have the stunning sort of snap I was looking for. I left my hand there and gripped his jaw, yanking us around in a tight arc. I could feel the intimate play of bone and muscle in his jaw as I squeezed his chin like a vise.
But also I had to worry about the other guy. The one with the gun. I didn’t think he’d risk a shot—in the tight confines of the foyer, there was as much likelihood that he’d hit his friend as he would me. But he’d probably have a few other tricks up his sleeve.
We crashed up against the wall. The gunman was trying to pistol whip me from behind, but I was moving too much for him to be able to strike the spot behind the ear that he was trying for. He rained down blows on my skull anyway, and I could feel the hot burning sensation as my scalp ripped open. In the kitchen, I could hear thuds and muffled cries as well. I knew I had to move fast. A fight is a race to see who can inflict the most pain in the shortest period of time. The longer you take, the less effective you are, the more exhausted you become, and the greater the likelihood that you’ll make a mistake.
There was no margin for error here. I gripped the knife fighter’s throat and repeatedly slammed his arm against the corner of the entranceway leading into the living room. I kneed him with fast, vicious moves; groin, thigh—anything I could hit. The man behind me hit me in the kidneys and my knees almost buckled. I gasped, but kept at it. I felt the bones in the knife fighter’s arm crackle. Then the blade fell from his hand and he rolled away from me into the living room.
