Читать книгу Enzan - John Donohue - Страница 13

Chapter 6

Burke. The voice was clear. Insistent. The sound rang in my head, tolling with strange clarity. A summons unbidden, jerking my eyes open and making my heart pound.

Darkness. I lay for a moment in bed, wondering. The voice comes to me, but I am never sure whose it is. It could be Yamashita’s, or that of an old love. Perhaps it is a simple stirring of my conscience. But it comes in the tail end of the night, when the stars fade and the sleeping world begins to hum awake.

I rolled out of bed, the wood floor cold on my feet. I left the kitchen light off, working by feel as I set up the coffee. I like to be in the dark and sense the dawn slowly wash over me. The dining room is high ceilinged and I had emptied it of furniture a long time ago. There is a sword rack along the wall and two windows that open toward the sea. Across the tar-papered rooftops of Brooklyn and the cement arc of the Gowanus Expressway, the lights on the top of Verrazano Bridge were still bright.

The day begins with discipline. Then coffee. I sank to the floor and stretched, warming my way through old injuries, loosening up muscles and a frozen shoulder joint. There was an early training session at the dojo, and I needed to be ready.

When I was done stretching, I held the coffee mug to my face; the steam played across my skin. I wondered about the voice that had awoken me. I wondered at my involvement with the Miyazaki family. Was it simple foolishness? Was I rationalizing by alleging I was trying to protect Yamashita? Before she left me, my old girlfriend Sarah Klein said there was a part of me that craved violence, and, no matter how hard I protested, I unconsciously put myself in dangerous situations. To prove something. Why I felt the need to do this and to whom I was proving it were probably questions for a good shrink, Sarah felt.

I wonder sometimes whether she was right. I’d been laboring for years at my art and it had gradually displaced almost everything else in my life. I like to think it has been worth it: it’s brought me new skills and new insights about myself. But if it has made my vision clearer, what I see has not always been what I expected. And the discipline is relentless, the training never ending. I slog along, and on good days I am sure I can glimpse something wonderful in the distance. On bad days, I wonder about myself. I remember my brother Mickey’s dismissive comment: “You’re a grown man who spends his time dancing around in pajamas for Chrissake!”

I wondered whether I had drunk too much of the martial arts Kool-Aid. Who was I to think I could help someone like Chie Miyazaki? I’m a specialist in exotic etiquette and archaic weapons. The Miyazaki family seemed to me to have a number of needs, but I don’t think martial arts training was one of them.

But I had said I’d help them. In the end, it was as simple as that. Motivation is a murky thing. I’ve come to prefer the clarity of action. I finished my coffee. Outside my windows, the world shrugged off darkness. I decided I would too.

He came for me later that morning. “I am Alejandro. From Don Osorio.” Alejandro wore a grey overcoat and a silk scarf. His shoes were shined and his hair was recently cut. He was thin, and his ears stuck out, making him appear almost boyish. But he moved with an efficient self-confidence that hinted at a life of experience. You had to wonder about that, but I couldn’t dwell on it. I had asked for help and didn’t get to choose the form it would take.

I’m not a trained investigator, but I know the basics. You start at the beginning. You check the scene. You go over the backgrounds of suspects. Some of the information had already been provided to me. But not enough. I had, for instance, asked Ito whether I could see Chie’s apartment. But he had been dismissive. It was not necessary, he explained, since members of his staff had already done so and found little that was helpful. Or unexpected. No concrete clues about her whereabouts. Just the detritus of a messy life. Perhaps, I speculated, an extensive lingerie collection.

Maybe Ito’s refusal to let me see the apartment was part of the Miyazaki doing some damage control on public awareness of their wild child. But I didn’t get it. I had already been let in on their little secret. Life is filled with rocks, however, and I’ve learned some can be moved, while some are simply things to flow around. I was beginning to feel the Miyazaki were trying to steer me. I didn’t know why. But I’ve made wandering off in unexpected directions a life’s work. No reason to change now. Flow.

Alejandro and I drove from the dojo in Red Hook, across the bridge into Manhattan. “This man, Lim,” he began. “He’s got a number of places he stays, which is not surprising. It’s always wise to have several places to crash or hide out.” Alejandro sounded like someone speaking from personal experience. “But he keeps one place, an apartment, just for himself. He never takes his crew there. He never even brings his girlfriend there. I think this is really interesting.” Alejandro turned his head to look at me, his brown eyes liquid. “I had the opportunity to ask some of his associates about this. Many claimed not to know the apartment existed.”

“How did you find it, then?”

A hint of a smile. “I am a persistent questioner, Dr. Burke. It is why Don Osorio employs me.”

We eventually pulled up in front of an apartment building on the Lower East Side. My guide double-parked and we went to see the building superintendent.

The man opened the door, looking at us with a face that was grey from exhaustion. Alejandro had a brief, quiet conversation in Spanish. The man looked at me with suspicion, then nodded at Alejandro in resignation. He shrugged his way into a worn canvas work jacket and grabbed a huge ring of keys.

We walked up one flight and down a hall. There was the faint sound of a distant TV playing somewhere, but the hallway was empty and the place was quiet. The walls were freshly painted and the industrial carpet muffled our steps. The super sifted his key collection, selected one, and unlocked a door. He nodded once at Alejandro, ignored me, and shambled back downstairs.

“Here you are,” Alejandro said, and pushed the door open.

I nodded. “Yes. But where exactly is here?”

“Lim’s apartment,” he answered.

“How’d you get the super to let us in?”

He shrugged. “Don Osorio requested his cooperation.”

“Just like that?”

He smiled a full smile this time. Alejandro had very white and very even teeth. “Sí.” Suddenly he had a small automatic pistol in his hand. He motioned for me to wait, slipped into the apartment, then came out. “It’s empty. I’ll wait by the car. Take your time. But hurry up, if you know what I mean.”

The apartment was not what I expected. It was a one-bedroom place with modern furniture and understated decorations. I had a hard time reconciling it with the punk drug dealer who had been portrayed to me. In the photos I had seen, he had been smoking. But there was no odor of tobacco in the apartment.

A tiny foyer opened on to the living/dining room. There was a coffee table with some ski magazines. A side table was piled with copies of the Times and Wall Street Journal from a few weeks back. One wall was lined with books, most of them involved with politics, economics, and history. I saw Karl Marx, but Immanuel Wallerstein was there as well. So was Braudel. And the three volumes of the life of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris. Lim appeared to be an eclectic, if serious reader. And he was disturbingly neat for a lowlife. The place was clean: no crack pipes or ashtrays filled with roaches. There was a galley kitchen. No dishes in the sink. The fridge was stocked with real food. At the end of the hall leading off the foyer was the bathroom. To the right was the bedroom.

I was at a loss as to what to look for. My preference would have been a note lying around that was entitled “Places I will take Chie Miyazaki.” No go. I peeked around and rifled through the drawers. Nothing. There were men’s clothes hanging in the bedroom closet. There was a duffle bag on the floor. I opened it up: a clean martial arts uniform with the black piping of a taekwondo enthusiast.

So. He cleans. He reads. He doesn’t smoke at home. He works out. Lim’s public persona wasn’t fitting with his private one. And that was interesting.

A laptop computer sat on top of a desk in the bedroom, neatly placed in the center of the work surface. It was already open and when I hit the “Enter” key, the computer woke up. The screen showed four different camera shots of the apartment. In one of them, you could see my back as I peered into the screen. Shit. I was blown. I folded the computer screen down, and headed out of the bedroom. Right into the arms of an angry stranger.

I never heard the apartment door open. He was that good. Probably the only reason he didn’t try to kill me right off was that the narrow hallway we were standing in constricted his range of motion.