“Oh, come on, Burke,” he said in a low voice. “You ought to look at things a bit more critically, man. You act like this guy walks on water.” He snickered. “You should see yourself, following after Yamashita like some puppy dog, doing his bidding…”
“Stark, you don’t even know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“You think what you want, man. But I’m going to be Kita’s uchi deshi. You’re more like Yamashita’s…” Stark gave me a knowing, provocative smile as he searched for a description, “… house slave.”
I held my temper. And my tongue. But his words were hard to forget.
Later, my teacher came to my side. “The Rinpoche was correct,” he said. “I begin to see it now.” Yamashita gestured with his head toward Stark, working alone in a corner. He was endlessly repeating the basics of the action of
kiri
, cutting with the sword. I myself had once been in the same place in this room, forging a type of link to my master that was ironically made through practicing the art of severance.
“He struggles with something,” Yamashita said, “and searches…” His voice was somber and low. Then he looked at me and his tone brightened. “He has great potential, even so, Professor.”
I shrugged. “We’ll see.”
“He trains at another school downtown. He has asked me for permission to take you. I have agreed.”
“What if I don’t want to go with him?” My thoughts were elsewhere, trying piece together the possible links between three murders. Han’s interest in the Rinpoche. The Chinese. Working with Stark on personal development issues seemed tangential.
“Burke, we are obligated to the Rinpoche,” Yamashita said dismissively. “Besides, the experience will be a good one for you.”
Although I didn’t like it, I went.
Stark seemed eager to get me to his other dojo. That alone should have tipped me off. But I think I was too focused on other things. So intent that I didn’t notice the larger picture that was forming.
The school was tucked away in the lower level of a building near Washington Square. You walked down four dirty steps to a battered steel door. It was painted gray, and the lock was surrounded by scratches, as if small animals had been pawing at it. Stark grinned at me as he pushed it open, like a man sharing a secret.
The dojo was a long, rectangular space with a floor covered in battered mats. The pillars that supported the floors above had been wrapped in foam and duct tape. The ceiling was crisscrossed with pipes and jury-rigged fluorescent panels hung down on chains. You could smell wet cement, disinfectant, and sweat in the air.
I’ve been in places like this before. There’s a range of martial arts schools in the world: they go from the strip mall clubs where legions of suburban kids kick and scream the afternoons away to more traditional places where serious-faced adults in expensive uniforms stretch assiduously, pull their punches because they’ve got an important meeting tomorrow, and worry about being centered. This place was nothing like that. It was part cage and part classroom, a feral combination of dojo and biker bar.
Stark had been sampling the martial arts universe of the Big Apple. While nothing would probably compare with Kita, he confided, he was interested in the range of possibilities out there. “Ya gotta absorb what is useful, Burke,” he told me on the way down, his eyebrows arching with an attempt at sophistication.
“Gee, I wonder where I’ve heard that before?” I replied sarcastically. It had been one of the mottos of Bruce Lee.
“Don’t knock it,” he said, too self-involved to note my tone of voice. “Form is nice, but function is better.” I didn’t tell Stark, but my sensei agreed. Or rather, he didn’t see a distinction between the two. Yamashita had a real appreciation of the useful, but he didn’t let his students define that category. In the West, a student is an explorer, charged with discovering truths. In the East, the disciple is a receptacle to be filled by the master.
There was more to Stark’s interest in different fighting styles than just trite philosophy, however. I also suspected, for all his seeming docility in Yamashita’s presence, that Stark was finding the structure and discipline of my teacher’s method difficult to endure. In some ways I could understand the feeling.
But the Japanese prize fidelity. They frown on students who wander from style to style, searching for something. The old masters believe that what is missing in such searchers is something within themselves, not the system. But Stark seemed impervious to this sentiment. You could see in the set of his shoulders that he was excited about something. At the time, I thought it was just the effect of being liberated from Yamashita’s strictures, if only for the day.
When we entered that room, there were any number of fairly hard-looking cases warming up on the mats. Stark led me over to one and introduced him as the teacher.
He wore a black gi faded to gray and high-topped splittoed socks called
tabi
. A ragged black belt dangled from his waist. The breast of his gi was embroidered with something that looked like a ship’s wheel. But, colored in red and gold, it was actually a mandala, the sacred wheel of esoteric Buddhism. I noticed it had eight spokes. All the other students were dressed the same way. That’s when I knew I was in for trouble.
I had been lured to the lair of the
ninja
.
They claimed to study the ancient warrior arts of stealth—
ninjutsu
. The good schools practice an effective mix of unarmed and armed systems; the bad ones do a lot of cartwheels, roll around a great deal, and wax mystical. It’s not that ninjutsu doesn’t have a basis in real techniques. But practitioners of the more breathlessly acrobatic variants annoy me with the certainty that theirs is the only truly superior martial art. And there are harder versions of the art, as well. Darker systems. That’s where I suspected I had ended up. And I wasn’t surprised that Stark had led me there.
Their leader looked like a real hard case. His hands were square and you could see the calluses on the knuckles. He was broad-chested and solid-looking, with a big droopy mustache. Probably drove a Harley to ninja school.
They all eyed me suspiciously when Stark introduced me as Yamashita Sensei’s senior pupil. If they were dogs, the hair on their necks would have risen. They had heard of Yamashita, I was sure. And, like many of the more non-traditional martial arts groups, they were both self-conscious about their identity and eager to prove their superiority.
So they invited me to join them in their workout. This was not a gesture of magnanimity. What it really meant was that they were going to be eye-balling me the whole time, critiquing my moves. I changed into my training gear with Stark. He kept glancing my way like a man enjoying a private joke he was nonetheless reluctant to share. But we didn’t talk much.
I was a little out of place there—I had retained the dark blue uniform of my dojo, including the pleated hakama of the traditional arts. But I had decided to try to do this on my terms, not on theirs.
Every martial arts style is a little different—issues of stance and technique vary a great deal—but it’s all based on similar principles. As a result, I could keep up with them without too much awkwardness. They ran through various warm-ups, strikes, kicks, and rolls.
After a while, the leader called out, “Circle up!” The students formed a ring with him in the center. What followed next was an exercise in dealing with multiple attackers. One student would stand in the ring and be attacked by a succession of fighters. The point was to learn to flow with the action, to demonstrate a variety of technical responses, and to defend against the attacks. It was difficult in any situation, and more so here.
Because these guys played for keeps. You could see it in the sweaty faces of the succession of people in the center of the ring. Hear it in the smack and deep thud of meat and bone as hard blows were parried with a mix of focus and desperation. And occasionally, a really well-focused blow would knock someone flat onto the mat, where he would lay stunned for a minute.
I stood watching this for a while, silent and apart from the action. Finally, Mr. Mustache faced me. He smiled grimly. “You see what we’re up to here.”
I wasn’t sure whether this was a question. “Very impressive,” I replied. I pitched my voice low and calm. I could sense something here, an invisible emotional charge building like static electricity. A situation felt like it was developing and I wanted to defuse whatever the situation was.
The big guy eyed me critically. “How about a demo, man?” He gestured with a hard-looking hand to Stark. “This guy’s been shooting his mouth off about Yamashita and his stuff all week. Let’s see what you got.”
I looked a question at Stark. This was a guy who seemed skeptical about my sensei? Why the change of heart? The need to prove something about Yamashita to these guys? Stark shrugged at me, feigning innocence. “They seem pretty good, Burke.” He gestured around the room at the watching group. Then his eyes narrowed, and things got a little clearer to me. “You seem so sure about your style. Why not test it out?”
I looked silently at him. There was a hard set to his face, a coldness that I hadn’t seen before. It made me wonder for a fleeting second about how accurate the lama’s read on Stark was. But I refocused on the issue at hand.
A few things shot through my head. One was maybe that I should have seen this coming.
I’ll never live this down with Yamashita.
But then another idea followed immediately:
I’ll bet he knew. Yamashita. And he sent me anyway.
Which made me wonder. Was the point that my teacher wanted me to be put in a situation where I was supposed to
sense
coming danger? Was that it? Just another elaborate training exercise? Or did he send me here because he wanted to see how I would fare fighting these people? Or did he merely want me to keep tabs on Stark?
It was way too much to think about. And I had no desire to lock horns with these guys. It wasn’t an issue of being reluctant to test my skill against them. I’d been watching them for a while and was pretty sure I could hold my own, no matter what. It was just that I like to think I’m beyond that. There’s fighting and then there’s
fighting
. These guys trained hard; there was no doubt about it. But I know what it’s like to be rolling around on the floor with someone who is actually trying to kill you. You can feel the homicidal rage mixed in with the body heat and smell it in their breath. And I know what it feels like to stagger away from something like that, leaving the other guy in a still heap. It makes you think that everything else is so much play-acting and that you’d be wise to save your strength for the real thing.
So I sighed and explained to the ninja that I was just a visitor and probably wasn’t worth the effort on their part. I worked the humble angle about as hard as I could. But it wasn’t good enough. He looked around at his pals and said, “I told you they didn’t have balls…” He gestured at my hakama. “Must be why they wear dresses.” His audience snickered.
Oh boy
, I thought.
Here we go
. The hakama is a standard part of the practice uniform in many traditional arts. It really is a pleated and divided skirt, but we like to think it lends dignity and elegance to our practice. The ninja, however, seemed immune to the power of esthetics.
Maybe the arrogant smirk on the ninja’s face was what finally set me off. Maybe I’ve come to share the simmering anger that Micky had developed in the frustrating experience of investigating murders. Part of me wonders whether I was just trying to show Stark that I could cope with whatever he and his pals dished out. I could rationalize it as a useful lesson for him. But that wasn’t true. Part of me was deeply angry. At the situation. At my inability to understand Sakura’s last message. In any event, I let things get the better of me.
I glanced around at the class. Their faces were flat and hard, but with a slight gleam of anticipation showing here and there. “Well, look,” I said quietly, beckoning the teacher closer. Again, he smirked. I looked up into his face. It looked like his nose had been broken more than once. “If you’re really interested, I can probably show you some techniques.”
He smiled at me like a carnivore sighting the distant motion of prey.
We walked out onto the mat and I suggested we use weapons. The
bo
is six feet long and probably one of the most common types of wooden staff used in many arts. I was trying to be nice to ninja boy. At least for the moment.
He grabbed one from a corner and twirled it around in whistling arcs as he made for the center of the mat. I was handed a staff as well. The class closed in around us, a living ring of flesh, tense with anticipation. I stood there with the bo’s tip resting on the ground, a straight shaft going up through my right hand. The weapon was actually taller than I was.
The ninja adopted a ready posture, but I held up a hand. “We usually start with a seated bow,” I told him.
He shot a disparaging look to his companions, but knelt down, the bo placed flat beside him. I knelt on my left knee, my right foot still flat on the ground and the bo erect in my hand. It’s a type of battlefield salutation that lets you get up more quickly. We bowed tightly to each other, and, with a final smirk to his audience, he began to stand.
I’m not saying that what I did was fair. Fighting rarely is. Yamashita likes to tell us that what he teaches is
heiho
—strategy. It sounds elegant, but sometimes heiho is just brutally effective. That’s what counts.
I had let him kneel first so I could gauge the distance, of course. As my opponent came up from kneeling, he raised his right leg and placed the foot flat on the ground in front of him. It was what I needed.
Still kneeling, I pushed the bo in my right hand down from the vertical with all the speed and force I could muster. It whipped in an arc, bridging the gap between us, and cracked its tip across the fragile bones on the top of his foot. Maybe the tabi absorbed some of the blow, but you could hear him gasp as the strike went home.
I wasn’t letting it go at that, however. He looked a little too competent, and would probably fight through the pain.