Sensei (11 page)

He looked at me with a deadpan expression. "Two is that if there's some connection between the victims some of your martial arts masters know the reason, and they're just not telling us. We wanna scope them out."

"Come on," I protested. ""Vfou really think these guys are holding out on you?"

Art sighed. "First rule of being a cop: everyone lies."

My brother nodded. "And the third reason," Micky jumped in, "is that nobody throws me my gun and tells me to run. Nobody." He grinned as he said it, but it wasn't a pleasant look.

I looked at Art with raised eyebrows. He was grinning too. It was nicer to look at.

"James Coburn," Art answered. "The Magnificent Seven."

I paused to digest the return to cinema. These guys could shift gears so quickly that it was hard to keep up with them. But I tried. "It didn't end well for his character as I remember," I reminded them.

"Shut up, Connor," my brother ordered.

The crowd ebbed and flowed around tables of food and waiters bearing trays. I stood near the performance area, trying not to let the party atmosphere distract me. It was almost show time.

Bobby's demonstration had been effectively hijacked by the sensei. Masters of their arts and of the etiquette that cloaked them, they had put together an impressive plan for the display. Armed and unarmed systems would be featured. Reflecting etiquette, the senior ranking master in the senior art form kendo, the way of the sword headed the list.

Asa Hiroaki Sensei was compact and dignified, possessed of a gravity created by the accretion of experience. Iron-gray hair was swept back from a wide brow. His eyes glittered black, peering at you over high cheekbones like a rifleman taking aim over a para pet. His lips were thin, as if pressed flat by the effort of forty years of training.

Even Yamashita respected him. Kendo is an art form inspired by the fencing techniques of the samurai. It includes free sparring using split bamboo foils known as shin ai and trainees wear elaborate armor for protection. Kendo is fast, elegant, and furious, but it's a highly stylized fury. Asa was a master of the art and combined dignity and elegance with lightening reflexes.

Kendo students are supposed to study sword kata, but most people have been seduced by the more sportive element of competition in free fighting. It's not unusual to see middle-level black belts, impressively ferocious in their sparring skills, fumble through a kata sequence. Yamashita thinks simulated fighting with armor is delusional; Asa thinks kendo kata are neglected. The two men practice very different arts but found common ground in the study of sword kata.

Asa and Yamashita were originally scheduled to open up the demo with the kendo kata. Kendo's free fighting is fast and subtle; the kata axe elegant and more appropriate for a formal gathering. But to everyone's surprise, Yamashita begged off and put me in his place. He'd damaged the ulnar nerve in his left arm he explained and wouldn't be able to wield the sword correctly. It was a valid excuse, I suppose. Even though the katana is normally wielded with two hands, only the right guides. The left does most of the real work. In a demonstration of this magnitude, it would be a serious handicap.

The only problem with the excuse was that I had never seen Yamashita with an injury as debilitating as that. And just this morning he had been going at it with some novices, all of whom would have sworn there was nothing wrong and with good reason.

The sensei were annoyed. They never come out and say it to your face, but deep down the Japanese feel that no Round Eye can really know the martial arts. Each sensei knew exceptions to the rule, but as a category non-Japanese are thought of as decidedly second string. Yamashita might have vouched for me, but for a public display of this importance, my role was a cause for concern for the other masters.

So here was another thing that worried me. Asa, all dressed up, was now being forced to work with what he considered an inferior product me. Only his respect for Yamashita and his need to maintain a dignified public appearance kept him from storming out of the room.

To make things more complicated, we were going to be using real swords. Most times, you use wooden weapons for these kata. At formal occasions, steel swords are used, but usually they are unsharpened replica swords known as iaito. They have the balance and look of a katana but they can't cut. Tonight's performance, however, would be with shin ken real swords.

So. A big crowd. The possible presence of a killer. My brother about to explode. A deeply annoyed performance partner. And live swords. The Burke luck was holding true to form.

Yamashita fussed around me, making sure the line of my garments was right. The paired swords, long and short, that we each would use rested in finely wrought wooden holders in a place of honor. Yamashita checked the sword fittings. The blades are held in by only a small bamboo pin, called a mekugi, that is inserted through the handle. If it breaks, the blades have an alarming habit of flying out when you do a cut. The rumor mill says a hapless spectator was impaled some years ago in Tokyo when a pin snapped and a blade went rocketing across the room. There were probably people who would pay to see Bobby Kay skewered that way, but Yamashita wanted this thing to go off tonight without a hitch.

Some people saw my teacher pick up the swords for inspection. When Yamashita knelt to remove them from the laquered wooden racks they rested on, a buzz started as people thought the demonstration was about to begin. Yamashita ignored it and went on with his work. Satisfied, he rose and crossed over to the other side of the area to speak briefly with Asa. I tried to stay calm and watched the crowd, looking for anything unusual. What does a killer look like, anyway? It was pretty much a swirl of party heads. You caught a sense of personalities in motion, brief glimpses. But any insight was lost in the crowd's motion, like a view into another room blocked by a closing door.

My sensei returned to me. "We begin in ten minutes Burke."

I noticed that a small envelope had been left by Asa's sword stand while I was distracted. Asa Sensei moved smoothly to the sword rack and picked up the note. He glanced at it and placed it inside his top. Then he picked up his swords. With a final tug on my ha kama I followed suit.

The demonstration finally began. I was relieved, because I couldn't deal with any more psychic clutter. There was a fanfare and some words of welcome. The mayor, who was up for reelection, had gotten wind of the press coverage, and he was there. It meant that there was some extra verbiage tossed around while Asa Sensei and I edged over to the side of the performance area and worked on our breathing. The crowd clustered around and I scanned the faces. I saw Art, who winked at me. Akkadian, looking pleased. There were lots of strangers. Some looked distracted. Some looked bored. Some looked rich and quite a few looked drunk. But no one looked like a murderer.

The words bubbled away eventually. There was applause and then silence. We were on.

The kata series Asa and I were to perform is highly choreographed and dense with significance. Each of the ten sets is a paired exercise in attack and response; each is an illustration of a vital lesson in the Way of the Sword. Entrance, initiative, attack, and even response are all known ahead of time. But the tension generated throughout the performance is considerable, You expend a great deal of energy looking confident in kata. There can be no hesitation in your actions, no flaw in your technique. Add to this the vagaries of dealing with a partner, and the kata performance becomes a nice test in how you balance the tension created by almost infinite minute variations in human activity with the need to maintain fidelity to the form and spirit of the kata.

When you are done with an exercise like this, perspiration trickles down the small of your back, under the stiff koshita that forms the back of the ha kama you wear. Your hands are slick with sweat from handling the sword. Mine were wet even before we started.

Just for kicks, Yamashita had arranged for a tameshigiri exercise to precede the kata. This is a test cutting that you perform to show the audience that the swords are real. Asa and I faced each other about twenty feet apart. Behind each of us and slightly to one side, three bamboo shoots, each as thick as a man's wrist, stood upright.

At Yamashita's command, we strode forward, closing the gap between us and crossing to the opposite side. I drew my sword and cut at the bamboo. You have to hit it just right with the sword. Although lethally sharp, you need to draw the blade in so you cut at the target a bit. If you don't, the katana will actually bounce off.

I got it right and sliced though the green stalks, one after the other. As I spun to face Asa, the bamboo stumps quivered and swayed slightly with the force of the attack. Then the kata began.

It only takes about six and a half minutes to perform the entire kendo kata set. But when you do it, time feels different. We slid toward each other, the balls of our feet rasping across the floor, the tips of our swords pointed high over our heads in the position known as jodan. Our hips drove us forward.

Asa exploded into an attack. In the first kata, the attacker tries to cleave you in two by cutting through the top of your head. I dodged the blow by stepping back just far enough for the cut to miss. When you're using wooden swords in this kata, it's a bit dicey because you can get clonked pretty good if you misjudge the distance. With live blades, it's infinitely more interesting.

Asa's intent was to cleave me in half down to the waist, and he followed through with his blow. It presented the critical opening needed. I dodged back, then slid forward and countered with a decisive cut to the head, my shout of attack coming a split second after his and punctuating the decisive moment in the exercise.

We concluded this kata. We met and our swords crossed. They say a good swordsman can make your sword "stick" to his at this juncture. Asa's blade and mine felt held together by a magnetic force. We broke and backed up to our initial starting points, eyeing each other warily, feet dragging along the ground as if we were wading through thick mud.

Each of the next nine exercises contained different techniques, but the same tension. After number seven, I switched to using the short sword, which reduced the margin for error even more. When I put the long sword down in the pause between the seventh and eighth series, the cloth wrapping on the handle was dark with perspiration.

When it was finally over and we bowed out, I had no real idea how the audience thought we had done. In many ways, the reality of the crowd had faded for me during the performance and it seemed as if the universe were filled only by the blades, their points and edges, and the threatening darkness of Asa's eyes. I had some vague memory of crowd noise washing over the sibilant whisper of my partner's blade as it whipped by my head a few times, but that was it. Asa, it seemed to me, had not been as precise as I would have expected, but it was only an impression of a microsecond's hesitation. Not something a casual viewer would have noticed.

The crowd applauded. We stepped out of the performance area, sat in the formal posture, and, bowing, thanked each other. I'm sure his error bothered him, but even when they're annoyed, the Japanese are usually polite. Asa got up and went to Yamashita. He bowed to my sensei and they spoke for a moment. Then Asa left. It was a surprise, but maybe he felt the need to get out of the area after what I'm sure he thought of as an embarrassing performance.

I turned to watch the next demonstration. I spotted Art and Micky, but they were looking at the faces focused on the performance area.

A noted karate master strode to the center of the crowd's attention. Thick and confident, he bowed to the makeshift dojo shrine and to the assembled masters. He stood silently for a moment, the breath coming and going with a tidal rhythm. His hands rose up in front of him higher than his head. The thumbs and forefingers of the open hands touched, making a triangle shape through which he looked for a moment. It was Kanku Dai, one of my favorite black belt routines. The name was suggested by the hand posture: Gazing at the Sky.

I felt a presence behind me. "Burke," Yamashita hissed in my ear, "something is amiss. Get your brother."

We gathered behind the audience, off in a corner. There were small clusters of people more interested in the free champagne than what was going on in the stage area. Back here, you could hear people talking and the occasional discreet laugh.

Micky and Art listened quietly, still watching the crowd, as the sensei explained.

"Something is wrong. Asa Sensei." He looked at me. '"You noticed?"

"He wasn't as focused as I thought he would be."

Yamashita nodded. "So. He took two tries at one of his cuts. There were moments where his awareness seemed clouded."

"He looked pretty scary to me," Art said.

Yamashita smiled tightly. "Yes. You would not know."

"Is that all," Micky asked with some exasperation. "The guy was off his game?"

"No, detective. That is not all." Yamashita's tone was not something they were used to hearing from people, and Micky and Art turned on him with the full power of their cop stare. My sensei didn't flinch. "As he left, Asa Sensei apologized to me for his faltering performance." He turned to face me. "He asked me to offer congratulations to you on the level of your skill, Professor."

"Yeah," Micky said, "I give it a nine and it's got a good dance beat. Can we get to the point?" My brother was still a bit cranky.