In the airport coffee shop, Shaun Bell moved the cup to the edge of the table so that he wouldn't have to endure the inferior smell of the tea. He recalled the smell of grass and honeysuckle on late summer nights in California, the sky deepening to burnished indigo while he stepped and pivoted, adjusted his stance and grip, breathed and sweated until his eyes no longer searched the fence line for slow moving headlights, his ears focused only on his exhalations and the dull roar of hard wood cleaving the still air while the first cold, distant stars came out to watch him.
He could see Sensei now, moving down the concourse, gliding between the crows.
If only.
It was a phrase that haunted his mind lately, like a mantra. If only the old man hadn’t killed a dog that night when he killed the woman.
* * *
Desmond slept in Lucas’s bed. It was too small for him, and he had to curl up in a fetal position to do it, but he was too exhausted to care. It would have been harder to fall asleep in his own bed with Sandy’s ghost beside him, judging him for losing their son. In Lucas’s room he was able to succumb to sleep while still taking responsibility for the failure. He knew he could do nothing to rectify the situation in the middle of the night, knew that whatever he could do in the morning would only be hindered by exhaustion, so he’d surrendered into merciful ignorance of the conditions at the stormy surface of his life the way a diver escapes the turbulence of a rough sea by descending.
Twice before sleep claimed him for the night, he startled back to wakefulness with the jolt that comes from the body reacting to the hard tug of sleep—that alarmed bracing against the sensation of falling. And each time he surfaced, clutching the Spider-Man sheets, he imagined he could hear the bloodthirsty blade whispering to him from within the wall, begging him for the freedom to do the thing it had been forged for, to bleed all of the antagonists—some in shadow, some in plain sight—who were trying to take Lucas away from him.
The morning brought rain. Out of habit he rose early, showered, made coffee, and went to his desk in the living room. He stood in front of the laptop and stared at the lid until he realized he was holding his breath. Last night had been the first night with the new locks installed, but he’d still felt compelled to check them, and now he half expected to find a new haiku on the screen.
His brain was waking up at the same time as the computer, and he felt a curdling in the pit of his stomach as he remembered something that had evaded him while showering and putting on the coffee pot. In the predawn, his first pain-radiant thoughts of the day had been a replay of the encounter with Phil—what he had said to his father-in-law and what he should have said…but he had been holding one detail of the previous night just out of view, protecting himself from the possibilities it suggested: the paper butterfly.
The computer was awake now and displayed the white Word document, the cursor blinking at the end of the lousy couple of lines he had produced at the park. He sighed and closed the lid. He got up and went to the couch where the origami insect patiently waited for him.
Desmond picked it up and turned it over in his hands. He had seen origami butterflies before, but they weren’t as common as cranes, and origami animals in general weren’t exactly common enough to be produced like paper airplanes by American boys hanging out in a tree house. Common enough for coincidence? He couldn't afford to believe that. And this one was flawless. He looked at the clock: 6:19. It was still too early to call Laurie. Why? Respect for her Sunday morning sleep? He couldn't afford to put manners ahead of Lucas’s safety. He picked up the phone. At least he wouldn't wake her husband. She had said he would be away on his business trip until Monday.
She answered on the fourth ring, her voice coated with sleep. Desmond apologized but didn’t ask if he’d woken her. Of course he had. “Is Lucas okay?” she asked. She knew he wouldn’t be calling unless something had happened; a food allergy, or an injury she hadn’t noticed. How was he supposed to frame the question? I was just wondering if Sandy’s killer might have dropped by yesterday to deliver some party favors for the boys. You didn’t happen to see a guy in a Japanese demon mask haunting your yard, did you?
“This is going to sound like it could have waited, but trust me, it’s important. I found an origami butterfly in Lucas’s bag. Do you know where he got it?”
“Um….” Desmond could picture her lying in bed, an arm draped over her forehead, staring up at the ceiling and forcing her brain to work. “Yeah. The boys said they found it in the tree house. I figured the girl next door might have made it when she was sitting Carl for me last week. She’s pretty creative…why?”
He didn’t answer. Morning light had filtered into the room through the clouds and curtains, and even in diluted gray form, it overpowered the lamplight by which he had first examined the butterfly the previous night. Now he could see dark spots on the paper, the shadows of ink within its folds. “It might be nothing,” he said, not believing the words, “but it has something in common with what happened to Sandy, so I hope you’ll forgive me for being freaked out.” He unfolded the paper. “Could you ask the girl if she made it? Call her and call me back?”
When the paper was no longer a butterfly, but a many-creased and softly angled paper square, he let go of it and watched it drift to the surface of his desk. It sliced through the air sideways and gently came to rest on the wood laminate. A bold, fluid kanji pictogram blazed up at him in black ink. He wasn’t hearing Laurie’s answer to his question, something about when the sun was up. He snapped back when she asked him if he was okay.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think I am.” He pressed END.
He flipped the laptop open and ran a search for “kanji butterfly.” It was all he had to go on. Most of the results were for tattoo studio websites where illustrations of butterflies combined with calligraphy jumped out at him from freckled swatches of pale skin, inflamed red around the freshly inked lines. He clicked back and tried a more traditional calligraphy site where he was able to find the kanji character for “butterfly,” but it didn’t match the ink on the paper in front of him. Another site allowed you to order a custom calligraphy scroll, but you had to type in the English word or phrase that you wanted translated. Desmond needed to go the other way—from kanji to English. Typing in random words to find a match would take all day. He needed human help. And for that, he would have to wait. It wasn’t even 7 AM.
He poured more coffee, paced the apartment, and looked at the street through the blinds. He felt helpless. Fear droned through the silent apartment, threatening to reach a panic pitch at any moment. He tried to focus. Salerno had said that the guest instructor, the sword teacher, was Japanese. Maybe a phone call to the man, followed by an email attachment, would be enough to get a translation. He smoothed out the paper square and placed it in the circle of light from the desk lamp. Then he snapped a few photos of it with his smartphone until he got one that wasn’t too blurry. The phone rang in his hand and startled him while he was looking at the pictures.
It was Laurie calling him back to tell him that the girl next door didn’t know anything about origami. It was exactly what he’d been expecting to hear, and yet his dread deepened at the confirmation. “Desmond, what’s this all about?” she asked, with a new kind of concern in her voice. “Frankly, you’re scaring me. You seem stressed and…paranoid.”
“I can’t talk about it yet. Not until I understand it better myself,” he said.
“Is someone stalking you? Because of your books, or because of….”
What happened to Sandy.
“The police don’t seem to think so,” Desmond said.
“But you do.”
“I can’t talk about it.”
Silence from her but not consent. She didn’t want to let him off the hook. Not if she thought she might be able to help.
“You’re a good friend, Laurie. I’ll keep you in the loop.”
“Let us know if you need anything. Really, anything.”
“I
will. I might need a character reference to keep custody of Lucas.”
“What?”
“That’s why I can’t get into my suspicions with you. I’m trying to find my way through a maze, and if a judge or lawyer ever asked you point blank whether or not you’ve heard me talking about certain far-fetched ideas…it could hurt my chances of keeping him.”
“What happened, Des?”
“I’ll talk to you soon. I promise.” He hung up.
The kanji character shone from the screen in his hand in high contrast black and white.
Desmond went to the coat rack by the door, took his wallet from his jacket pocket, and plucked Salerno’s business card from the fold. The sword instructor’s name and phone number were scrawled on the back, barely legible. He checked the time: still too early to call a stranger or a lawyer. What to do to kill time? Writing was out of the question. He wouldn’t be able to focus. Looking at the laptop he doubted that he would ever be able to focus again. How could he type on those keys knowing that Sandy’s killer had touched them? His space had been violated. Everything had been violated—his home, his work, his relationship with his son. But for Desmond, writing was thinking. Even when there was no escaping into fiction, there was the hope that forming questions and potential answers in writing would calm him and show him a way forward. He used to talk to Sandy to puzzle out problems, and while he wasn’t going to start talking to himself, he sort of could, if he wrote. But the laptop sat on the desk in the corner looking like a bear trap.
He climbed the stairs, entered his bedroom, and opened the top drawer of his dresser. He felt around in the back of the drawer under his socks until his fingers found a polished wooden box. He withdrew it: a mahogany case with rounded corners and invisible hinges, longer than it was wide. He slid a switch on the side, and the case opened with a weird slowness that reminded him of hydraulic levers. Inside, a jet-black fountain pen with sterling silver accents was nestled tightly into a bed of silk.
Sandy had given him the pen as a gift when his first novel sold. He had signed the contract with it, and it had always been more of a symbolic item to him than an actual tool, something to display on his desk back when he had a real desk instead of a table in the corner of the apartment—a token reminder of his calling. It had also reminded him of who he was writing for: a woman who loved and understood him.
Actually writing with the thing had always seemed pretentious to him, and a little intimidating, as if every word scratched out under its sharp quill tip had to be worthy of graving in stone, every milligram of its rarefied ink weighted against the literature of the ages. And Desmond knew in his heart that he was more of an entertainer than an artist. Sure, there were timeless mythic themes in his work, and he treated those threads seriously; but he also knew that he had inherited more from Tolkien than Tolstoy. The yarn he was currently spinning even featured a knight avenging a slain queen, and you didn’t have to be Freud…. Therapeutic? Yes, definitely. Maybe even cathartic, but the act of writing about heroes didn’t have to be heroic. The laptop had always been fine.
He took the pen from the case and studied it, placed it between his thumb and forefinger and gave the grip a try, scribbling on air. It was comfortable. He fetched a blank legal pad from the top shelf of his closet, carried his new tools downstairs, settled at the kitchen table, and documented everything he could remember since the day at the Castle Playground. At first the sentences formed in slow, halting bursts. He drank cold coffee, kept the pen on the page, and found a rhythm. Ink flowed.
Two hours later, he tossed the pen down on the pad as if it were hot. His hand ached.
The kitchen clock told him that he had burned the inappropriate hours, so he picked up the business card and typed the number into his phone. The voice that answered sounded relaxed, but not sleepy.
“Mr. Masahiro?” Desmond asked.
“This is he.”
“My name is Desmond Carmichael. Peter Salerno gave me your number. He said you might be able to answer some questions about samurai swords and Japanese culture.”
“Ah, yes. Peter mentioned that you might call. My condolences for your loss, Mr. Carmichael.”
“Thank you.” Desmond cleared his throat.
“Perhaps we could meet in person some time to discuss your questions.”
“That would be great, but as a single parent, finding time can be a little tricky. I wondered if I might ask you a few questions over the phone. Have I reached you at an okay time?”
“Now is fine.”
“Okay. Um…. I actually have a kanji character that I need translated. Do you read kanji?”
“Yes.”
“Could I possibly email you an image file?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you. I do have another question first, if I may…. I know this is morbid, but you’ll understand why I would ask…. How difficult is it to decapitate a person with a sword? Would it require much skill and strength?”
The silence on the line stretched out long enough for Desmond to wonder if the man had hung up on him, but the air sounded too alive for that. Eventually, Masahiro said, “Not much muscle strength, no. The sword does the cutting, not the swordsman. However, it does require skill for the swordsman to let the blade do its job without getting in the way.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’m speaking in general about cutting. Of course I can’t speak from experience about cutting people. In the dojo, we use bamboo to simulate bone, and grass mats soaked in water to emulate the density of flesh.”
“I see.”
“The curve of the samurai sword makes it perfect for slicing, but the angle of the blade in motion must be straight. This requires a proper grip. If the grip is too tight, too stiff, it is a hindrance. Beginners have trouble relaxing and guiding the blade along a straight path without forcing it.”
“Would someone who was relaxed by alcohol have an easier time swinging the right way?”
“No, even relaxed, it would take exceptional luck for an untrained person to cut clean through a human neck.”
“Why is that?”
“Are you sure you want to discuss this in such…detail, Mr. Carmichael?”
“Please. Go on.”
“All right, then. It would be easier to show you these things in person, but I will try to explain. There is a section of the blade, about nine inches long, where the curvature and tensile strength are greatest. If the target is struck too close to the tip of the blade, the sword will become wedged and stuck, or the tip may shatter against the spinal vertebrae. If the target is struck too low on the blade, too close to the hilt, there will be insufficient momentum to slice through, and again, the blade may become wedged in muscle. And if the hilt is not properly aligned at the moment of impact, if it is extended beyond the center of the target, the swing will be like that of a baseball bat, overextended, no good for slicing through."
“That’s a lot more complicated than I realized.”
“That is why it is an art. My students spend years refining the details of their form while cutting nothing more substantial than air.”
Desmond’s voice had grown thin. He cleared his throat and asked, “Could an untrained, lucky person sever a neck most of the way, but fail to cut the head entirely off?” He felt bile rising in the back of his throat and perspiration beading up along his hairline.
“Such a cut would be the mark of true samurai skill.”
“Why?”
“It is the traditional method of finishing someone who is performing seppuku. You are familiar with the ritual suicide of a samurai?”
“Yes.”
“When the suicide assistant sees the practitioner tug the dagger in his gut upward toward the sternum, it signals that the act is complete, and the assistant steps forward to decapitate, but not fully. A thin strip of flesh is left to prevent the disgrace of the head bouncing on the ground or rolling away.”
Desmond thought he might vomit. He pressed his
knuckle to his lips and squeezed the cell phone; his breath flared through the speaker in a cloud of white noise.
“Are you okay, Desmond?”
“Yeah.” The word came out faint and toneless, the husk of a word.
“I’m sorry. These details must be deeply distressing for you to contemplate. I can get carried away talking shop, forgetting that you are not a student.”
Desmond sighed. “Okay…thank you. I’ll send you that character?”
“Of course. Do you have a pen handy? I’ll give you my email address.”
Desmond picked up the fountain pen, jotted the address down. Then he pressed END, dropped the phone, ran to the bathroom, and heaved up his breakfast.
After splashing water on his face and rinsing his mouth from the tap, he returned to the kitchen and, with clumsy, trembling fingers, emailed the photo from his phone. As soon as he heard the “sent” sound, he put the phone down on the table and went out onto the front steps to breathe in the salty air. He wished like hell he hadn’t quit smoking when Sandy was pregnant with Lucas, wished he still had one last stale cigarette in the apartment that he could smoke the fuck out of right now. Just one.
When he went back inside, there was a reply from Masahiro on the little phone screen. Holding his breath, he tapped it. The reply was two words long.
Translation: Fly
The word fly written inside a folded paper butterfly? What was that? A command? A warning? He knew in the bottom of his sour stomach that it was. It was a message for Lucas, a message that a four-year-old child could never decode on his own. Fly away, little butterfly. The dragon is coming.
Chapter 11
Phil Parsons stared at the computer monitor and watched his sleeping grandson. Lucas was tangled in the sheets, having rotated sideways in the night, like a clock hand anxious for dawn. Maybe it had been a restless sleep, but the boy looked peaceful now, and Phil wasn’t looking forward to shattering that peace by waking him or telling him things he didn’t want to hear.
Steel Breeze Page 11
