Deshi. John Donohue
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teacher saw them and stood up quickly. He made a gesture at the cops as if trying to shoo them away. They paused. Then the two swordsmen came out from behind the table.
Yamashita and Asa sat down in the formal position and gestured for me to do the same. Then, Asa formally promoted me to the fourth dan—black belt rank—in kendo. I received the certificate he proffered, taking it in both hands as a sign of respect. Asa bowed to me and to my teacher, then rose and left without another word. Yamashita looked at me and then glanced at the cops, who were heading our way.
I held the certificate in my lap, silent. My hands trembled slightly. You might think it was muscle fatigue; in reality, it takes a while to bleed off the psychic energy of a match like that.
Yamashita nodded slightly to me. “So. An interesting performance. But it was not decisive. Perhaps if we had let it go on… one of you certainly would have won.”
“It would have been me,” I said. My voice was flat, but I gave him a look that said there wasn’t any argument.
“So?” he said, and broke into a smile. “I would expect no less. And now you see the point of the exercise.” He bowed in dismissal and left me in a smooth, silent glide.
I could hear bits of the quiet conversation the two cops were having as they approached me. “I’m telling you,” the bigger one was saying, “there’s a stylistic link here. These costumes make these guys look like Darth Vader.”
His partner didn’t reply. He had a white streak in his hair and a disgusted look on his face. They hovered about me and I got up to meet them.
“Well?” I asked them expectantly. My tone wasn’t the friendliest. This guy with the streak in his hair had bugged me way before he had started to go gray. He was my older brother Micky.
He smirked at me. “You look like shit,” my brother the cop said. “But I think we need you.”
I held a hand up to my ear. “What was that?”
“Stop dickin’ around,” Micky said.
I gestured with my hand at my ear again. “Huh?”
“We need you,” he said, biting the words off one by one.
His partner, Art, was a bigger man. He smiled at me. He also enjoyed needling Micky. It was part of a very complex relationship.
“I’ll bet it hurt you to say that,” I commented to my brother, and winked at Art.
“Oh, yeah,” Art said happily, nodding. Micky was silent.
I gathered up my gear and changed. My muscles felt loose and disconnected. People talk about a “runner’s high” after exercise. But in the martial arts world of Yamashita Sensei, you often just emerged stunned, bruised, and trembling. I’ve been at this for a while, however. Aside from the distant ache of new bruises I just felt slightly relaxed.
But I wasn’t going to stay that way. When I came outside, the two policemen were waiting for me. We were heading for a place where the violence was less contained and all the bloodshed was real.
They argued about who would drive. “You sure you’re up to it?” my brother Micky asked.
His partner, Art, is pretty good-natured, but questions like this bother him. “Hey, get off my case,” he snapped. “What, you think I’m not up to it?”
Micky held up his hands in mock surrender. “Just asking. You don’t want to tax things.” He went to the passenger door. Art moved past him, grumbling, and got behind the wheel.
I sat in silence in the back and let the flow of the trip calm them down. This crabby exchange was typical and the tense atmosphere didn’t last long. Eventually, Art started to talk again. “So we say to ourselves,” he began saying to me as we drove crosstown toward the East River, “why not share the wealth?”
“Hey, asshole,” my brother Micky said, “you want to drive so badly, how about using two hands?” Now he was cranky.
Art was driving with his right hand and waving the other one around. It made me worry. Not too long ago, someone had sliced his right hand off with a sword. They had bagged it in ice and stuck it on the gurney when they wheeled Art away. No one paid much attention. The guy with the sword had done other damage and everyone expected Art to die.
He hung on. Micky and I tracked the swordsman down. Eventually, it came to a head on a steamy night in midtown Manhattan. I don’t like to think about it too much. The only good thing was that, at the end of it all, I didn’t die.
Neither did Art.
He spent quite a bit of time in ICU, hooked up to machines. I wonder if the doctors felt left out from the start and reattached the hand immediately just to have something to do. It turned out to be a good thing. Art got better and Micky would have refused to work with a partner that looked like Captain Hook.
Now we were rocking along the FDR drive with a cop’s casual disregard for speed limits. He swerved around other motorists in long swooping moves that would have induced motion sickness in the less stalwart.
I was sitting in the back of their car. The shocks were mushy. The back was awash in clipboards and old newspapers. A paper coffee cup rolled wetly around on the floor. I inched the window down a bit and sipped at the air in quiet desperation.
“I gotta say, Connor,” Micky commented, watching the scenery whiz by, “I thought, ‘no way’ when this call came through. I mean, come on.”
“Strange,” Art said in a thick, choked up weird voice.
“Let me get this straight,” I said, and tried to focus on something other than Art’s atrocious driving. “The Brooklyn cops called you in on a homicide because some bright light had read about what happened to us last time?”
“Famous, we are,” Art said in that same voice.
“Yeah, well,” my brother responded. “We got some Japanese guy. Apparent homicide victim. The only clue? Some calligraphy.”
“Come on!” I protested.
“Mystery, there is. And danger,” Art intoned.
“Art, I swear to God if you don’t cut that Master Yoda shit out right now I’m gonna go insane!” my brother yelled.
Art just chortled and swung around a slow-moving vehicle. “Yeah,” he said in his normal voice, “so we thought we’d bring you with us to take a look.”
“Great,” I said.
“You bet.” Art smiled as he glanced up at me in the rearview mirror. We coasted onto the ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge. “Only one change in plans,” he said, looking at my brother.
“Oh, yeah?” Micky asked skeptically.
“Yeah. If there’s a guy with a sword, you go after him this time.” Then Art put both hands on the wheel, as if suddenly remembering something disturbing. Micky looked at the side window, his face a mask.
There was a variety of uniformed types milling about the house when we arrived. Cops have a herding instinct. Most of the workday is indescribably boring. So when something big happens, they’re drawn to it. From all over. There were marked and unmarked cars sitting at various angles along the street. The nicely tended trees tended to break things up, but you could hear the chatter from a number of radios, like the sound of nasty insects. There were a few plainclothes guys smoking on the sidewalk and a few patrolmen in the traditional blue uniforms of the NYPD milling about. They all seemed to have large, square automatics riding on their gunbelts.
I looked at Art and Micky. They wear rumpled sportcoats and pants whose manufacturers claim never need ironing. This is not true. I, for one, had left my shinai in the trunk of the car and, bereft of a belt loaded with cop hardware, I felt conspicuously