The bedroom had its own special sort of cliché: the mirror on the ceiling threw back the image of the devastated bed, sodden and twisted and wrecked. Stains and the smell of sweat were everywhere. Handcuffs, lined with soothing foam, still attached to the bedpost, suggested the way the night had gone. Also a coil of rope lay on the bottom half of the bed, so Nii had probably done some tying too. He must have had that Japanese thing for a well-tied knot. As an aphrodisiac, the form of the beautiful young girl, bound and helpless before him, had done wonders for Nii: three discarded, half-full rubbers lay like squashed snakes on the hardwood floor. Nick thought, Oh, to be twenty-five again!

Next, the closet: ten black silk suits, each with a swanky Italian tailor’s label, three pairs of black oxfords, twenty pairs of almost-new Nikes, and a pile of neatly ironed and folded white silk shirts.

Nick sat at the desk and began to work through it very carefully. One drawer had a collection of sports magazines, another bank statements, which showed the guy was indeed doing very well, and other bills: dry cleaning mainly, rent, and…well, well, well, here we have something very interesting.

It was a series of drawings: three diamonds, crude and amateurish, in the first. In the second, the diamonds had begun to be subsumed by superior imagery, as the new forms obscured the crudity of the original pattern. In the third, the imagery, drawn by a master, had triumphed, and no trace of the diamond remained. The third, a kind of design proposal, had been signed with a name from a tattoo parlor in Shinjuku, Big Ozu. Nick had once done a story for the rag on Big Ozu, favorite skin artist of the yakuza. He was your man for snake scales, imitation Kuniyoshi faces, lions, tigers, and bears, as well as fans, scrolls, bamboo, and kanji, all popular yakuza motifs. He still tattooed the traditional way: not by electric needle, but more slowly, more painfully by bamboo sliver. So now that he was in the bucks, Nii had hired Ozu to craft a design to absorb his no-class street-gang origins, as if obliterating his sordid past.

The big guy owed Nick a favor, for his piece had driven Ozu’s customer list through the roof, including some movie stars and rock singers. And he also knew that men tell their tattooists what they don’t tell their wives, bitches, shrinks, and buddies.

26

“I am not going to strike a child,” Bob said.

“Probably true. But she strike you, often,” said Doshu. He spoke quickly to the girl, who began to carefully assemble her kendo armor.

“This interesting,” Doshu said. “My pupil Sueko. She will be safe from your blow and armed with a bokken. As she short, bokken long. When she strikes, much pain. You wear no armor. On the other hand, with a shinai, even your strongest blows will not affect her, that is, if you are even able to strike her. Also, as you long, shinai short. Yet you must defeat her.”

“Sir, you don’t understand. I cannot strike a child.”

“Do not look and see form. Look at what is close as if distant and distant as if close.”

Bob dropped the shinai on the floor.

“No, sir. I come from a father whose father beat him terribly when he was a child. He never struck me and he made me understand, one does not strike a child.”

“Then you must go.” Doshu pointed to the door. “You do not know enough yet. Your mind is soft. You will die quickly if you stay. Go back to America, drink and eat and forget. You are not swordsman. You will never be swordsman.”

Bob saw how cleverly Doshu had penetrated him. The man had put him in a situation where his strength and speed were meaningless; he could not use them against a child, even if he had wanted to. Something deep in his fiber would prevent him. On the other hand, he had to win. If he didn’t win, he’d failed. He would not be a swordsman.

So how could he win? He had to find some way to fight soft. He had to anticipate, move, parry at a level higher than he’d ever been, much higher, and when he saw his opening, he’d have to take it but willfully disconnect from those things that made him a man-his strength, his speed. He had to take command of his subconscious and will it to govern him to a smoothness he didn’t have, a quickness no one had. He was trapped.

“I will fight,” he said. “But if I hurt her, I will hurt you. Those are the stakes here, sir. You understand that. You can’t put her in jeopardy without risking your own ass. And don’t think you can go aikido on me. I know that stuff too. I’ve been in a few dustups. Here, look, goddammit.”

Bob yanked down the corner of his little stupid jacket and showed the old man a few places where hot metal had tried to interrupt his life span. They were puckers, frozen stars of raised flesh, long gashes, healed but never quite vanished, relics of a forgotten war.

“I have seen much blood, my own and others’. I can fight, don’t you forget it.”

Doshu was not impressed.

“Maybe then you be good against little girl. But I think she whip ass.”

Bob faced the child. She looked like some tiny druid priestess. Her bokken, stout white oak, looked like Excalibur or Beheader of Kira and when she drove it into him, it would bruise to the bone. Her head was encased in a padded helmet, her face covered by a steel cage; the helmet wore two thick pads that flared laterally to cover her neck and shoulders. Her torso was encased in padding, and both arms and wrists as well; she wore heavy gloves; she looked part goaltender, part catcher, part linebacker, and 100 percent pure samurai.

They moved to the center of the dojo floor, bare feet on bare wood, under the wooden struts that sustained the place, which felt more like temple than gym. Swords hung on the wall, ghosts flitted in the distance.

She bowed.

He bowed.

“Five strikes wins. Also, kendo much head. I have asked Sueko not to hit head unless necessary. Also, war, not kendo. So any killing strike wins, not only kendo targets. Understood?”

He waited a second, permitting no questions, and then said, “Guard position.”

Bob stepped back, to segan-kamae, the standard high guard, his sword before him at 45 degrees, both elbows held but not locked, the tip pointing to her eyes. It was a solid defensive position, but you couldn’t do much with it. She, meanwhile, fell to gendan-kame, with her sword held low, pointed down and to the left. It was an offensive position, quick to lead to stunning blows, less efficient for blocking.

Bob tried to find the rhythm that had sometimes been there for him and sometimes not. He tried not to see “her,” that is, the child; instead he tried to see her bokken, for it was his real enemy.

Doshu stood between them, raised a hand, and then his hand fell.

He stepped in fluidly, she countered a little to the left, and suddenly, like quicksilver, she went low to high-“dragon from water”-and he could not get his shinai into a block fast enough by a hair, and she slipped her blade under his guard, screamed “Hai!” with amazing force, and he felt the bitter bite of the white oak edge, classic yokogiri, against his ribs. God, it hurt.

He realized, I have just been killed by a child. With live blades, she would have cut his guts out.

“One for Sueko. Swagger nothing.”

Rage went through him, red and seething. He had an impulse to revert to bully’s strength, flare and howl and race at her, using his bulk to intimidate, but he knew he wasn’t fast enough or smooth enough and that no answers lay in the land of anger. She would coolly destroy him.

She attacked, he gave ground and parried two of her blows; then, being limber and flexible, she split almost to ground level and swept at his ankles, but somehow the solution came exactly with the attack itself, and he found himself airborne-he knew that leaving the ground was a big mistake, one of the “three aversions,” to be avoided at all times, but in this case unavoidable-to miss the horizontal cut and, as he came down, he tapped her on the thick pad of the shoulder, near the neck, a somewhat uninspired kesagiri.