Kage: The Shadow

by John Donohue

  “Burke,” he whispered. I looked over at him as he gestured at me. “The windows. Get away from them.”

  The sun was setting, but there was still daylight outside. The lights weren’t on in the apartment, so I doubted I was being silhouetted. I thought Daley was being a bit paranoid.

  “What, you afraid of snipers?”I said, half joking.

  He wasn’t smiling. “A surveillance team with a parabolic mike can pick up the vibrations of your phone conversation through the glass. Get away.” I humored him and left the broad window at the front of the apartment.

  Micky heard the conversation. “Is Daley there?” he demanded. “Put him on.” I handed the phone over and Daley wandered into the galley kitchen. I had been in there earlier and it was like the rest of the place: the occasional signs of life only served to heighten the sense of emptiness. The kitchen featured cheap cabinets, a metal sink with a curled yellow sponge, and a case of Bud Light in the refrigerator along with the seemingly inevitable bag of apples. The fake butcher block counter was the resting site for the gnawed remains of half a loaf of stale Italian bread, now the shape and hardness of the head of a medieval war hammer.

  Daley’s voice reached me as a murmur. I stopped trying to listen and sat down, facing the wall. Sinking into the meditation posture of seiza is a movement I have repeated so often in my life that it brings its own sense of comfort, a muscle reminder of who I am and what I do. I needed that centering now.

  I began the cadenced series of breaths that would slow the body and calm the mind. My thoughts were jumbled, a racing, disconnected montage of images and ideas. My emotional state wasn’t much better. I knew what I had to do. I had an idea of how I would do it. But any fight is a thing of angles, probable moves, and possible permutations. If you dwell too much on the endless ways in which an attack can occur, your focus is shattered. You spend more time dreading what might happen than you do being watchful enough to see what is happening.

  Breathe. There were so many ways this could go wrong.

  Let the thoughts bubble off. I wasn’t sure I could go through with it. And if I did, would Sarah ever speak to me again?

  Breathe. I was so exhausted.

  I sat, eyelids barely closed, and the warrior’s meditative discipline began to take hold. I was sinking and rising, a stone centered on itself, both intensely aware of everything and completely out of the moment. And in that space, I heard Yamashita’s voice. Not a memory of him, but his actual voice in striking clarity.

  “A battle is won by many things, Burke. Weapons and skill. Terrain. Planning. But most important of all is spirit. Do not give in to doubt or fear. You think you are tired. You are not. Your mind is troubled and uses your body as an ally. Ignore it. Hakka yoi, Burke.”

  My pulse jumped. Hakka yoi, the samurai’s stern admonition to endure. I opened my eyes, seeing nothing but the blank wall in front of me. At that moment I didn’t know what I was more afraid of: what I would have to do or the possibility that I’d be able to do it.

  20 Shinken

  I stood, the warm rays of the sun at my back. The dust swirled in front of the old adobe house. Near the souped-up Hummers that El Carnicero and the other members of TM-7 had driven to the rendezvous, silent men in dark clothes and sunglasses were methodically forcing gang members to their knees and shooting them through the back of the head.

  I was frozen, hands up, while a man with a gun watched me intently. Thought was gone; sensation ruled. There was the sight of the reddish wash of light from the setting sun, the glinting metal surfaces of vehicles and weapons. Shadows were growing long. I heard weapons popping and the squealing and the scuffling sound of bodies as they spasmed on the ground. I could smell my own sweat, the resinous scent of creosote bushes, cordite. And the sharp, coppery smell of blood.

  I knew then that my plan had gone about as wrong as it could go.

  After he finished his hushed phone conversation with my brother, Daley tersely said he needed to go out for a while. It suited me fine. He dragged a heavy duffle out of an otherwise empty closet, kneeled on the floor, and began to remove a trove of weapons from the bag. He laid them side by side in front of him, with a methodical care that reminded me of Yamashita tending to his swords.

  “See if anything here looks familiar,” Daley told me. “Whether you might be able to handle it. You’ve used these sorts of things before?” I nodded, but he didn’t seem encouraged. Daley stood up and looked at me with his washed-out eyes. “They’re unloaded. Keep ‘em that way until I get back with the flash-bangs.”

  I sat slumped on the floor with my back against the wall, watching him. I didn’t move toward the weapons. When he left, I made a phone call of my own.

  Steve Hasegawa met me on the fringe of the garden apartment property where Daley kept his lair. There was a meandering pathway ringing the complex, studded with decorative cactus and large rocks. It was supposed to strike you as aesthetic, but I suspected that there were less elevated motives at work. I had seen the shoddy nature of the apartment buildings close up. The rocks were there because the contractor had simply not wanted to bother with the expense of removing them. We walked for a time in the night. Steve listened to my story without comment, but hesitated when I asked for help.

  “I saw the pictures on the wall,” I urged. “You used to be a pro.” The framed picture on the dojo wall had showed a leaner, younger Steve Hasegawa, cradling a sniper rifle and wearing the tabs of an Army Ranger.

  He smiled sadly. “Long time gone, Burke.”

  “The skills don’t go away,” I said.

  He looked at me with a type of bemused tolerance. “No, but the attitude does. All that ‘hoorah’ stuff and the feeling that you’re invincible. And maybe the skills don’t go away, but they do get rusty.” His voice trailed off to get lost in some interior reverie.

  “But you could do it,” I prodded. I had described the layout of the meeting place and what I had in mind. He nodded reluctantly, sighing. “Probably. The distance isn’t that great.” A faint smile appeared. “I’m rusty, but I’m not that rusty.”

  “I’m out of options, Steve.”

  “I know,” he said. He looked off into the west where the sun had dropped down out of sight behind the mountains. The distant hills were outlined with a bright line of gold. Above us, stars were coming out.

  “It’s a pretty night,” he began. He stopped walking and looked at me. “You know that my father died?”

  I remembered the old man in the wheelchair entering the dojo and the tender solicitude that Steve had shown him. There was pain in his voice.

  “No,” I stammered. “I’m sorry…”

  He waved my sympathy away. “It was no way for him to end his life. Strapped in that chair, a prisoner in his own body. In the end, it was a blessing.” He walked along the path and I followed.

  “You should have seen him in his prime, Burke.” The pain in his voice had given way to a sad, gentle pride. “Nobody on the mats could touch him. Nobody, not even your Yamashita.” I wasn’t going to dispute the claim. We’d be like two overgrown kids arguing about whose father could beat up whom. Steve’s memory wasn’t about the facts, but about the power of love and the way his father’s presence was woven into his life, filling it almost to bursting.

  “It was no way for him to go,” he repeated. He stopped and looked at me. “We train all our lives, Burke, always trying to get a little better. And for what? Most of us are never going to use these skills in a fight.”

  “I know,” I said. “We strive for perfection,” I said, quoting an old article I had written once, “but to what end? We train to be brave, but in what service?”

  “Fancy stuff,” he grunted.

  I shrugged sheepishly. “I have a Ph.D. Sometimes it gets out of control.”

  “Sure—and what you said was true enough. And, in the end, life will wear us all down.”

  “Relentless as fire,” I agreed, remembering his parting comment the last time I had seen h
im. My stomach muscles were clenched with tension. I knew the effect my own decision to act had on me; I could imagine Steve Hasegawa’s state of mind.

  “I know what I’m asking you to do isn’t legal,” I began.

  “Yeah,” he grunted, letting out a breath. Then he was silent.

  “It’s got to be done,” I prodded.

  He squinted at me. “Not legal, just right?” I nodded.

  “Man, Burke,” he sighed, “who are we to judge?”

  I shrugged. “Two bugeisha. Who better?”

  Steve Hasegawa nodded thoughtfully, staring at the dirt. Nothing happened for what seemed like a long time. Then he looked up to the fading line of hills and finally craned his neck to take in the stars.

  “Mono no aware,” he told me. “You know the idea?”

  “Sure,” I said. The sad, powerful beauty of transience. The Japanese insistence that the most beautiful things are, by nature, fleeting.

  “I used to think all that old samurai stuff about bushido and the glory of death was nuts,” he confided. “These days… I dunno. I wouldn’t want to go like my father.” We walked for a time and then he halted, turning to face me. “So maybe— maybe for once we can be the fire, Burke.” His rueful smile flashed faintly in the growing dark. “I’m in.”

  The next day, they came right on time. I had dragged some dilapidated chairs from the house and set them out in the clearing facing each other along an east/west axis. I placed an empty fifty gallon drum between them and put Westmann’s manuscript on top. It was, after all, why they were coming. I sat with my back to the western slope where Steve Hasegawa waited with a long rifle, a laser-sighted Bushmaster Predator. The setting sun would be in their eyes. They would, of course, probably all be wearing sunglasses, but I hoped the placement would give me some small edge. I had a wireless earphone on and Steve’s voice was clear and calm through it: “They’re coming.”

  I stood up. Daley was right: the Butcher, El Carnicero, wasn’t coming alone. The two big Hummers jounced along the road, the wide tires throwing rocks and kicking up the dust. The adobe building was to my left. Daley had placed himself deep in the interior shadows near a window, cradling a snub Heckler and Koch MP5. He took one look at the approaching vehicles and faded away into the building. Part of me wanted to listen for the telltale bang of the back door as he hightailed it into the gulley and away, but I forced myself to face what was coming.

  A real fight, a fight to the death, is called shinken shobu. There are no rules, just stratagems. You study your opponent, scanning for danger, probing for weaknesses. You know your own faults well enough. Or you should if you pick up a shinken, a live sword.

  The man who was coming was ruthless. I had thwarted him and he would be angry. He wasn’t mentally stable to begin with; being called the Butcher was a tribute to a savage anger and the inability to control it. I could use that.

  What did he know of me? Little enough. I was some sort of scholar who’d stumbled on a manuscript that was valuable for reasons I didn’t realize at first. I was also some sort of martial artist, but he was a man who lived in a bloody world. I could imagine his dismissive idea of martial artists—delusional people in exotic pajamas pretending to be warriors. He knew that I had somehow survived the killers he had sent to Brooklyn, but probably believed that it was an accident, a fluke. Now I was on his turf and he would be eager to end this and prove his worth to his gang.

  He would think I was naïve. That I would want to make a deal for my life. He’d let me try. He’d play with me for a time. But then he’d take the manuscript and, no matter what deal I’d offer, he’d kill me.

  Or he’d try.

  There were ten of them, arms and necks dark with the winding stain of tattoos. A few cradled shotguns; many had large, nickel-plated pistols stuck conspicuously in the waistbands of baggy pants. El Carnicero approached me empty-handed. He had thick black hair that was slicked back from a high, narrow forehead. His eyes were hidden behind wraparound sunglasses. His face was lean, and when he smiled you could see the play of muscle and tendon along his jaw line.

  “Dr. Burke,” he said, with a sarcastic emphasis on the title. He glanced toward the building on his right and made a quick gesture with his head. Two of his men peeled off and checked it. They came out and reported.

  “No hay nadie, jefe,” one said.

  I felt a brief surge of betrayal and remembered Daley’s own description of himself: an entrepreneur. The fact that he was gone spoke volumes about his assessment of the situation: there was no profit to be made here.

  “You came alone, as promised,” el Carnicero said, incredulous. His speech had only the slightest trace of an accent. “Man, you are always a surprise…” He leaned back and said loudly. “He came alone!” His men laughed. The snakes writhed just under skin as he smiled once more. He looked at me, raising his chin up to one side as if critically appraising an object. “Hey, you’re not quite what I expected.”

  The story of my life. But Yamashita has taught me that there are advantages to being more than you seem. To keeping your true nature in the shadows.

  “That’s what Los Gemenos thought,” I said.

  His chin came down and he faced me directly. The setting sun flashed on the surface of his sunglasses. He raised his arms to indicate the men standing behind them. They formed a rough arc, their backs to the vehicles. “Mira. I’m not stupid, bro. I’ve got backup.”

  “I told you to come alone.” I tried to sound angry.

  “Oh, si… but I have been doing this too long, man. And rules are meant for games.” He turned slightly to his men. “And we’re not playing fucking games, eh?” A few of the gang members laughed scornfully at me.

  He sat down with a sigh of contentment in one of the chairs. “Hey, think of it as a sign of respect, Dr. Burke. Maybe I think enough of you to believe that you might be dangerous.”

  I sat down as well. The chairs were far enough from the metal drum that we could see each other. I had measured the distances carefully. It’s what all good swordsmen do. The ability to gauge distance and use it to your advantage is a critical skill. Living or dying can be measured in a matter of inches. El Carnicero had a reputation as someone who liked to use a knife. I wanted him far enough away from me to make a deadly lunge difficult.

  The dark sunglasses hid his eyes from me, but I could imagine the small darting movements they would make as he assessed the situation.

  He leaned forward and placed a hand on the manuscript in its package. Or he could have been shifting his body a few inches closer in preparation for an attack. I felt the air crackle with nuance and dangerous possibility.

  “So,” he said, “this is the book with Westmann’s notes? The lists of the trails?”

  “Yes.”

  He opened the package and leafed through the pages, his lips pressed together as if doing something distasteful. “Claro,” he said, “but let’s be sure, get another set of eyes on this…” He leaned back and turned toward the Hummers.

  “Xochi!”

  A door opened and Xochi slid out of the vehicle. He looked much as he had that day I met him on the trail: dressed in hiking clothes, his long, dark hair in a loose ponytail, his eyes hid by high-tech sunglasses. But his gait as he approached El Carnicero was hesitant, stiff. Xochi seemed fearful of being near the man. But he came.

  Xochi inspected the package, moving carefully through the pages and examining in depth the section with the trail. He avoided looking at me. When he was done, he glanced furtively at me, then nodded to his master and murmured something.

  “Todas las paginas?”

  “Si,” Xochi answered, “todas.” He backed away from the two of us like someone desperate to escape a booby trap, but fearful that his haste might detonate it.

  “This book is mine,” El Carnicero said, sitting back comfortably in his chair.

  “I am willing to return it to you,” I said.

  Again, the unsettling smile. “Hey, nice. But you kno
w, in my world, you don’t get things like this without a price tag.”

  “Consider it a gift,” I said.

  It intrigued him. He sat up and leaned forward. “Un regalo… this I understand.” He wagged a finger at me. “You are a clever one, Dr. Burke. In my culture, gifts entail obligations, no?”

  I nodded my agreement.

  The smile flattened out. The jaw line quivered. “And what would be the obligation that comes with this gift?”

  I felt the impulse to mimic his settling back into a relaxed posture in the chair, to appear confident as we dickered. I didn’t do it. The position would put me off balance and vulnerable to attack. This is the draining aspect of the high-tension period before a fight is joined; the thousand and one shifts of position and balance and attention, the cascade of sensations that need to be sorted and evaluated for threat.

  “Simple,” I said. “Leave me alone. Leave those I love alone.”

  “Simple?” he countered, “I don’t think so…”

  “I don’t care about what you’re up to,” I broke in. “I live a world away. Take the package. Walk away. I’ll do the same.”

  He laughed then. “Oh, Dr. Burke, man, you don’t have the fucking slightest idea about my world, do you?” He gestured and one of his men started to come forward, drawing a pistol.

  I held up my hand in the signal Steve and I had agreed on; the green dot of a laser sight flicked on the book in front of us, then onto El Carnicero’s chest, then onto the torso of the man with the pistol.

  “I understand your world better than you think,” I told him.

  I wished I could see his eyes, notice whether they widened with fear or tightened with anger. But I couldn’t. Was there a slight hunching of the shoulder muscles? El Carnicero stood and I did the same. I could almost sense him tensing for an attack, noting the placement of obstacles, the length of my arms, and just where he would stick the knife.