A Single Eye (16 page)

I needed to get them out of here, before the killer lost control. But there was no way. The van was gone; it wouldn't be back for two weeks. There was no phone. We were stuck, all of us here together. And Leo? Leo was sleeping the deep uneasy sleep of the sick. When he woke, we'd talk. In the meantime, the sesshin schedule went on.

In quarter of an hour the clappers would sound for work meeting, where work period jobs would be assigned. These jobs and the attitude students brought to doing them was the crossover between seated-silent-still meditation and the hassle of regular life. Some teachers called work period the most important time in sesshin. No one was exempt from the meeting, not even the roshi's assistant, who needed to find wood and figure out how to build a fire in the roshi's freezing cabin. I hadn't built a fire—ever. Growing up there had always been brothers jostling each other with wood and techniques, until the chimney collapsed in the Loma Prieta earthquake and Dad replaced the fireplace with a television nook. Now I could hardly ask anyone to help, not and have them see what awful condition Leo was in.

I ran for the shed. The macadam path was slippery; my inadequate running shoes hydroplaned and just keeping my balance required all my attention. At the shed door I skidded, caught the knob to stop myself and swung inside. Gray stripes of light slipped between the wall boards. A woodpile half filled the space—plenty to keep Leo warm till Christmas. There were a few bucketsful of twigs that would pass for kindling, but no lighter fluid. No lighter. Only matches. Matches might work for a Boy Scout, but not for a fire-novice. I checked the cans on the top shelf, and the middle, and behind them. I never did find lighter fluid; what I came across on the bottom shelf in the dark corner hidden behind a can of shellac was weed poison. Weed poison containing cyanide. I snatched the bottle, and reached for the door. I could empty it in the woods; I could brave the woods that long.

But wait! How many other garden or household poisons were here? This shed could be a bastion for skull and crossbones. Dealing with the poisoner was like guarding against terrorists; the ingredients of death were everywhere. No way to protect against them. All I could do was watch over Leo and flush out the person—his
student
—who was trying to kill him.

Knowledge of Roshi's cocoa habit and that poison would be waiting in this shed, both pointed to a long-time student, someone who had nurtured his grievance in this isolated place. Of course, anyone could have carried the poison in with him. But that still indicated an old-timer. New students don't pack cyanide along with their long johns just in case something might irritate them.

“Crazy,” I heard myself saying. And then I remembered the last time I'd said that, to Leo himself. It was crazy, but the intensity of silence and isolation in a place like this can cut both ways. Zen isn't magic, particularly for someone who doesn't want it to be.

Behind me, hinges whined, wood scraped against wood. The door snapped open. I grabbed for the spade, and just caught myself before hoisting it weapon-style. My face flushed, and I was lucky the darkness of the place protected me. Gabe Luzotta was inside the door before he saw me. He started. His body outlines said “caught,” but it was too dark for me to be positive. I wasn't sure till I heard the emphasis in his question.

“What are
you
doing here?”

“And you?”

“Never mind.” Gabe Luzotta shrugged. “I know what you're going to say, you're the roshi's assistant.”

“And you?” I repeated.

“And I'm not.”

Another time I would have laughed, a time I wasn't in a shed with poison and a stranger.

“Okay, okay, Assistant. I'm hiding out. Look, I asked Rob to let me start sesshin tomorrow. ‘No exceptions,' says His Assholeness. You'd think he was getting a cut of the gate here. ‘Everyone else got here on time,' he whines. Shit!”

Gabe threw up his hands. His utter outrage drew me to him. The enemy of my enemy and all. Besides, Gabe Luzotta was exactly the kind of wink-and-break-rule guy I liked. It had taken me years to leash in my penchant for the scoff-rule set, at least when I was doing gags with them.

“So,” Gabe went on, “when the mid-morning sittings started, I climbed on my cushion and I sat. The first period I nodded and jerked awake, nodded, jerked awake, and kept doing it till my head banged into the wall. The second period I sat as close to the wall as I could and just let my head rest.”

“So you slept right through the last two periods of zazen?”

“No.”

“Did Rob wake you?”

“No, my snoring did. I'm not gonna win Mr. Popularity with the guy next to me in there. If he hadn't kept poking me I'd have entertained you all.”

But none of that explained why he had made a bee-line to the place the poison was stored.

“What
are
you doing in here?”

“Looking for a place to sleep.”

“In the
woodshed
? Please! Why don't you sleep in your dorm like everyone else?”

“Because it's almost work period, and His Assholeness said since I showed up late I was the one who could help him with something or other, I don't know what. I wasn't listening by then because I was so ticked. And besides, I knew I wasn't going to be doing it, so why listen to the details, right?”

That was three steps below an excuse; it couldn't be anything but the truth. I had sat through those beginning periods of zazen in sesshins and snapped from dream to waking to dream and back so often in one forty-minute period it was like turning pages. I had ended those periods with the odd disoriented feeling that neither state was real.

I don't know if it was my memory or Gabe's conspiratorial shrug or Rob's infuriating demands that made me do what I did about this special work project for Gabe.

I said, “We're adults. We don't do punishments here. That's stupid. Go to bed. Sleep through afternoon zazen. Set your alarm so you're up in time for dinner and do the evening sittings. There's no sense in your being dead on the cushion for days.”

“Shall I tell that to Rob?”

“Tell him the roshi's assistant told you it was okay.”

He gave my shoulder a little punch, and I only flinched a smidge.

“I owe you, Assistant.”

Then he winked! Or it looked like a wink in the half-dark. I was so furious with myself I said, “Well, Gabe, you can pay up—”

“Yeah, I should've paid up by bringing you your letter here instead of leaving it on your bed.”

“Letter?”

We didn't get mail here. The mail carrier didn't trot nine miles into the woods to drop in our box.

“I picked the mail up on my way from town. Figured it might soften the blow from being late. Now, maybe if I'd had a nice package for Rob—”

“You didn't happen to notice the return address on my letter, did you?”

Who could be writing me here? No one knew I was here, no one but my family and Yamana-roshi. Yamana couldn't have gotten a letter here unless he overnighted it, unless it was vital. About Leo? Or Aeneas? Leo and Aeneas? How bad would it have to be to overnight a letter?

He hesitated. “I glanced, but I was in a rush. Jog my memory.”

“New York?”

He seemed to be pulling the tail of the memory out of his head.

“Omigod, San Francisco?” Mom? Something happened to Duffy?

“What's in San Francisco?”

“My family.”

“Your parents?”

“Yeah.”

He looked down. “No. It wasn't from San Francisco.”

“You're sure?”

Gabe's hand was on the door. But now he turned back to assess me.

“Yeah, I'm sure.”

I hesitated and in that moment I saw his expression shift from the upward furrowing of strategizing to the downwardly scrunched brow of one drawing back with regret. I wondered what was behind that, but I was so relieved there was no letter telling me Duffy had run into the street or choked on an anchovy—his favorite—I couldn't do anything but sigh in gratitude. It was only when Gabe shifted to leave that I grabbed the chance he offered here.

“Tell me about Aeneas's disappearance. What happened that day?”

His whole face relaxed, and he gave a conspiratorial nod and leaned back against the shelf behind him.

“Got you already, has it? Did you read up on it in blog archives before you came? Or did you hear word of mouth?”

He wasn't even embarrassed. He assumed I was on the make, like him!

“Word of mouth,” I said, choosing the safer lie. “But my facts are sketchy. I mean, I have no time line.”

“Oh, well, that's easy,” he said, glancing around for a ledge on which to rest his arm. The musty shed didn't offer a mantel-like support, and he ended up resting his left arm, somewhat gingerly, on the shelf above the cyanide. Rain rapped louder on the roof and the reminder that we were protected from the wet gave the small damp space a cozier feel than it deserved. “All I can tell you about is the day of the opening, the day Aeneas disappeared. I only got here that morning, so I'm not reliable on anything before. By the time I got here the Japanese roshis had been here overnight. They were old, frail guys. Used to being cared for in their own temples, used to sleeping in beautiful rooms, with walls and floors.”

“Not tents, you mean?” Work period was going to start any minute. I didn't have all day.

“They don't go camping in Japan. In Japan they don't have dirt.”

In spite of everything, I laughed. Poor old guys.

“So everyone's rushing around trying to make them comfortable, and there's no way they're going to be comfortable. Plus they don't speak English, so no one knows what they're not comfortable about. Are they thirsty? Do they want food? The chairs are too tall, and too wobbly. If they
had
been comfortable they sure wouldn't have been after a couple hours of that.”

“But—?”

Gabe nodded approvingly.

“But one of them went into the zendo to check on something and discovered the Buddha missing.” “And—”

Gabe was enjoying this, making me ask.

“All hell broke loose. In an understated Zen kind of way. I mean your first thought at a Zen monastery opening is not that someone's going to pocket the Buddha. I think Leo just assumed the cleaning crew had moved it. Barry was elbow deep in food for the reception after the ceremony, so he wouldn't have noticed unless the Buddha was in the stew. It was Rob—well, you could guess that, right?—who went ballistic searching tents, just about turning out suitcases.”

He leaned toward me, a hunger in his eyes. I couldn't figure whether that hunger was for an audience for his opinions, or a source of something he'd missed.

Outside something cracked. The clappers. The first call for work meeting. I made a ‘come' motion with my fingers.

“Okay, okay. Here's what happened. They didn't find the Buddha. They had to do the whole ceremony without it.”

“Surely they had another Buddha, or something they'd have had on the altar before. A Zen center running low on Buddhas is like the Forty-niners running out of footballs.”

“Whatever. But Roshi didn't replace it. The empty space loomed over the ceremony. People could barely watch the priests. Honest to God, it was the weirdest Zen ceremony I've ever seen.”

And it must have been one of the most embarrassing, for Leo. Poor Leo. Why had he let himself be so humiliated in front of the foreign dignitaries?

“But, Gabe, the Buddha's on the altar now.”

He shrugged. “My information is that it turned up later. How much later or why I don't know.”

Squinting in the dim light, he peered around until his gaze landed on a suede gardening glove. He snatched it up and began pulling at one finger, as if milking off his nervous energy. I was betting Gabe Luzotta was never still. He probably even tossed and jabbered in his sleep. But this time he wasn't just futzing for futzing's sake; he was avoiding me.

“You do know, Gabe.”

“Not hardly. If I—”

“You know, and you'll tell me. You're looking at this as a potential story, right? Old scandal in Zen monastery lingers for half a dozen years. It has the makings of a
New Yorker
piece, particularly if Aeneas is dead. You think he's dead, right?”

He pulled the gardening glove taut.

“I'm going to lay things out, Gabe. I'm not a writer. I don't care about the story. It's all yours. But I need to know what happened and what
is
happening at this sesshin. You will tell me.”

“Or?”

“Or I'll have a word with Rob and he'll have you out at the coast road by sunset, no matter what it takes. You know he'd love to have reason to be rid of you.”

On movie sets, I'd faced down professional tough guys. Some blustered, some caved, some saved face, but some swallowed hard and considered the long run. I couldn't swear to it, but I think Gabe swallowed before he let out a huge laugh. Then he punched my shoulder.