Linnear 03 - White Ninja (20 page)

Senjin could see that Dr Muku was sceptical. That was hardly surprising. When it came to the human mind, Dr Muku was locked within the severely limited framework of modern analytical thought. He was, to Senjin's way of thinking, a pathetic cripple, unable to comprehend anything save what he had been taught at school.

'The thing about Kshira,' Senjin said, suddenly leaning forward, 'is that it is infinitely malleable.' He took a puff on his cigarette and it began to sizzle, bursting with an odd blue-white incendiary glow.

Senjin's left hand covered Dr Muku's face before the psychiatrist had a chance to react. Senjin's thumb lifted Dr Muku's glasses off the bridge of his nose. The metal

slid in the sweat-sheen breaking out on the psychiatrist's forehead.

Then Senjin jabbed the glowing end of his cigarette directly into Dr Muku's left eye. His left hand, fingers spread like a spider across the doctor's face, held Dr Muku implacably in place.

Dr Muku's arms flailed at Senjin as the phosphorus-impregnated cigarette burned ever more deeply into his eye socket. He began to wail, an eerie, stifled sound that was more a vibration emanating from his throat.

Watching him as if he were an electronic image on a TV screen, Senjin smiled. 'The "subject",' he said in Dr Muku's ear, 'has not killed only women. Young women, beautiful women.' He was throwing the psychiatrist's words back at him. 'You were wrong, Doctor. About me. About everything.'

There was a smell in the room, emanating from Dr Muku, and Senjin's tongue appeared between his parted lips, curling slightly, questing for more of the scent. It was the stench of death.

Senjin shifted his gaze, staring into Dr Muku's wildly rolling right eye. Tears were streaming from it and, with one finger, Senjin wiped them away. The pupil was dilated, as if the psychiatrist were an addict: Senjin wished that Dr Muku could tell him what the pain, the fear were like. Surely his analytical brain could make sense of the chaos, could separate the rage of sensation into easily recognizable components.

'Muku-san, what is it?' Senjin asked. 'What is happening to you?'

There was an entire world in that one teary eye, defined by agony, detailed with the increments of knowledge at the approach of death.

Then the eye fixed on something even Senjin could not see.

Dr Muku, burning still from the phosphorus embedded

in his skull, lay slumped against the back of his chair. He looked quite relaxed now, Senjin thought.

Senjin reached past the body, jerked open the drawer of the wooden side table. He grunted, extracting the mini-tape recorder. The reels were slowly churning, faithfully recording every word, every sound uttered in the room. Senjin had suspected that the doctor had begun taping their sessions as soon as Senjin had given him enough clues for him to form his opinion that Senjin and the 'subject' were one and the same.

Senjin depressed the 'Stop' button, pocketed the device. Then he looked at Dr Muku. 'You'll never know how wrong you really were,' he said.

With slitted eyes he looked into the blinding sun of his memory, remembering each aftermath of the Kabu-ki play, Musume Dojoji. How he would treat his dates to an expansive dinner, encourage them to dissect the psychological motivations of the two major characters. And how, sated on these odd appetizers, he would then proceed to the main course, the slow, aching, erotic discipline of murder.

Senjin pulled the curtains on that lambent sunlight, bent, heaved the corpse on to his shoulder. In a way, he thought, it was a pity that Dr Muku could no longer answer him. But, then again, Dr Muku still had another, more important, service to perform.

Clearly, Dr Hanami did not believe him. Nicholas had finished his account starting with his vague feelings of unease in the hospital after the operation, his trying and failing to stem the post-operative pain, to the events of the last twenty-four hours, which proved conclusively that he had lost the use of Getsumei no michi and every other aspect of the martial arts he had painstakingly learned over the years. Dr Hanami had sat back, steepled his fingers, and

said with absolute finality, 'But my dear Mr Linnear, what you are suggesting is patently impossible. You may well think that you have, as you say, lost these admittedly remarkable abilities, but let me assure you that you have not.'

He extracted a set of X-rays from Nicholas's file, turned and snapped them into place against a pair of light boxes mounted on the wall behind his desk. He switched the boxes on. 'See here' - he pointed to a shadow - 'is where the tumour lay, along the second temporal convolution, just above the hippocampal fissure. You can see its outline here.' He switched his attention to the second X-ray. 'Now here we are after the operation. As you can see, there is a perfect fitting of the folds. The surrounding area was left absolutely undisturbed. Of this there can be no question, Mr Linnear. None at all.'

'Then what happened to me, Doctor?'

Dr Hanami considered this for some time. Very deliberately, he switched off the light boxes, pulled the X-ray film down, slid them back into the folder. Then he closed the file, clasped his hands over the top. 'It's difficult in these cases to be certain, but it seems to me that we could begin by asking not what happened to you, but rather, what is happening to you.' Dr Hanami smiled encouragingly. 'After a major operation of this nature it is not at all abnormal for the patient to believe that some part of him has been excised along with the non-beneficial tissue.' He drew a small pad towards him, scribbled a name and a phone number. He ripped off the sheet, gave it to Nicholas.

'What is this?'

'Dr Muku is pre-eminent in the field of psychotherapy, Mr Linnear. His office is right across the - '

'That's what you think I need?' Nicholas said, incredulous. 'A psychiatrist?'

'Given your present emotional state, I think it would be highly bene - '

'You haven't got it yet, have you, Doctor?' Nicholas was livid. 'Someone - maybe it was you - did something to me while I was on the operating table. For Christ's sake, tell me what happened!'

'Linnear-san, you must calm yourself,' Dr Hanami said, resorting once again to age-old rituals in order to quell the modern demons that seemed to have invaded his office. 'These outbursts will do no one any good, least of all yourself. When you have returned to a state of serenity, you will be able to see everything in its proper light.'

'You're not going to tell me, are you?'

'Linnear-san, I assure you there is nothing more I can tell you.' He glanced again at Nicholas's file, as if to give added weight to his words. 'Your operation was successful in every way. As for your claim, I can find no medical reason to - '

Dr Hanami stopped. He looked up, realizing that his patient was already gone.

Nicholas had lost faith. He saw in a flash of terrible clarity that all his training had been in vain. He saw that without Getsumei no michi he was nothing. His spirit, diminished because he had been denied his ultimate place of refuge, of intimacy with the world around him, of strength, was withering. Cut off from the kind of communion with the universe that had sustained him through his most painful ordeals, which had nourished him during his brief stab as a family man and a businessman, he felt like the lone survivor of a shipwreck, cast upon a hostile and alien shore.

He thought of his mother, Cheong, and knew there was only one thing for him to do now. His mind flew back in time,to the dreadful autumn of 1963, when he had fallen hopelessly in love with Yukio and had, thus, incurred the wrath of his cousin, Saigo.

Nicholas, Cheong had said to him, your grandfather, So-Peng, was a very wise man. It was he who said one is never truly alone in Asia. Cheong had drawn out a box made of copper. Nicholas had seen it once before when his father had shown it to him, a legacy of his grandfather, So-Peng. On its enamelled and elaborately lacquered top was a fiery, scaled dragon entwined with a rampant tiger.

Carefully, almost reverently, Cheong had opened the box. Inside were four rows of glittering emeralds, fifteen in all.

You are free to use six of these emeralds, she had said. To convert them into money if your need is sufficient. Originally there were sixteen. One was used to buy this house. She had taken a deep breath. There must never be less than nine emeralds in here. Ever. No matter the reason, you must not use more than six.

As you know, Nicholas, my father, So-Peng, gave your father and me this box when we left Singapore. It is a mystical box. It has certain powers. She had paused, as if waiting.
see you're not smiling. Good. I believe in the power of this box, the nine emeralds, as did So-Peng. He was a great and wise man in all things, Nicholas. He was no fool. He knew well that there exist on the Asian continent many things which defy analysis; which, perhaps; have no place in the modern world. They relate to another set of laws; they are timeless. She had smiled gently. So I believe. If you believe then the power will be there for you when some day you need it.<
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Nicholas believed in the legacy of his grandfather, the power of the fifteen emeralds in the mystic box. He had put away the treasure, secreting it within his house when he and Justine had returned to Japan. For while he had no intention of ever using the emeralds, he wanted them near him, could feel their pulse in his heart as one feels sunlight warming one's flesh.

Cast adrift, Nicholas knew that he had to get home

as quickly as he could. Now he understood that the time had come to put the magic of the emeralds to work.

He had lost faith. Now he understood, and the terror flooded fully through him. It was not merely that he had lost his ability to find Getsumei no michi, not merely that he had lost his memory of his ninjutsu training. He had lost faith in everything he had believed in.

There could be only one explanation for that: Shiro Ninja.

It was clear that if he were indeed Shiro Ninja, Dr Hanami had not been responsible for his loss of memory; it was not a medical problem at all. He almost turned around then, so he could apologize to Dr Hanami, but he was too wrapped up in his own fear.

Somewhere in Tokyo he had an enemy, one of such power that it beggared the imagination. Who could it be? Why had he been rendered powerless through Shiro Ninja?

Nicholas, shivering, imagined himself amid the vapour of his recent nightmares, and shuddered. He imagined that the emeralds' magic could save him from drowning in that colourless vapour. Falling and drowning. Part of him, perhaps, even suspected that his grandfather, So-Peng, had known this day would come and had prepared him for it by ensuring that he would receive the box, just as once the Colonel and Cheong had received it.

So-Peng. Cheong had told him so much about her father, yet increasingly now, when Nicholas thought of him, he realized how little he knew of the man and his life. Much less than he did about the Colonel's English parents - his father, a middle-class London banker, levelheaded, honest, content; his mother, a wealthy Jewess who, despite her money, was never accepted in English society, dark-haired, green-eyed, tempestuous, curious and very smart. She had had two sons, one of whom, William, had died of smallpox. Three years later, in the

winter of 1915, she had given birth to Denis, Nicholas's father.

Nicholas was so wrapped up in his thoughts of the past that he failed to see the young woman heading into Dr Hanami's office as he left it. They hit head-on, even though she tried to step hurriedly back. Startled, Nicholas automatically apologized, began to move towards the lifts.

'Linnear-san!'

He turned, found the woman following him. 'You are Nicholas Linnear.'

There seemed to be no interrogative in her inflection, but he said yes, just the same.

'Hello. I'm Tomi Yazawa. Detective Sergeant with the Homicide division of the Tokyo Police.' She flashed him her credentials, which he studied with the kind of amused curiosity he normally reserved for outlandish headlines in tabloids.

'Good morning, Miss Yazawa,' he said. 'How is it you know who I am?'

'I'm looking for you, Mr Linnear.'

'Indeed. Well, perhaps some other time. This really isn't the best - '

The lift doors opened and Nicholas got in. Tomi followed.

'Ah, persistence,' Nicholas said. His mind was far. away from Tomi Yazawa and what she might want of him. Whatever it was, he decided, it could wait for a more propitious moment.

'Persistence is a required course at the academy,' Tomi said.

If Nicholas recognized this as a joke, he gave no sign of it. All he wanted to do was get down, and out of there.

'I appreciate that this may not be the best time for you,' Tomi said, 'but I must talk with you immediately.'

Nicholas discovered that he was gripping a piece of

paper in his left hand. He uncrumpled it, saw there in Dr Hanami's hurried scrawl the name and phone number of Dr Muku, the psychiatrist. He wondered briefly why the surgeon had not included an address. Then he saw the suite number and realized that Dr Muku must have his offices in this same mega-building. Cosy, he thought. How many patients did the two cross-pollinate? He imagined the two doctors as tennis players, sending their patients back and forth across the net, picking up finders' fees with every swing. With an angry growl, he mashed the paper into a ball, flung it against the brushed bronze of the lift wall.