His annoyance tamed by this information, Bob nodded.
“Doshu says you learn fast. You are athletic. You are strong, with quite a bit of stamina. Your left side is stronger than your right side, and your rising diagonal is stronger than your falling diagonal. He does not know the explanation.”
“Tell him I spent a summer swinging a scythe, low to high, left to right. Those muscles are stretched and overly developed.”
“Well, he really doesn’t care. Next, he says you have good character and work habits. He worked you like a dog. If you had a weak character or bad work habits you would not have stood for the grueling ordeal and the humiliation. He was very impressed with that aspect of your behavior. He thought, after the first day, you might make a swordsman. Your mind was right. Untrained but right.”
“Well, thank him.”
“He doesn’t require thanks. He’s not congratulating you, he’s telling you what is.”
“Sure.”
“But, he says, it is possible to be too athletic, too strong, too hardworking. The hard worker tends to oversegment, the athlete to trust reflex and muscle. So, though you picked up the moves very quickly, you had trouble integrating.”
“He said ‘integrating’?”
“He said ‘becoming one timing.’ I said integrating.”
“Okay.”
“He says that yesterday, finally, under pressure of the match with Sueko Mori, you integrated. Your learning curve in that match was extraordinary. You went in a nobody, you came out a swordsman. You must learn to develop that feeling, that sensibility; it is your only hope.”
“So he thinks I’m okay?”
“Well, that’s where he goes a little opaque on me. He stops well short of declaring you the next Musashi. He says you still have problems. But he says you have advantages too. Thus he has an idea of what you can or can’t do, and how you must operate.”
“Please, go ahead.”
“He says you are not Tom Cruise. There is no Tom Cruise. No one can learn the sword in days or weeks, except in movies. He hated that movie, by the way. However, you have done a great deal more than most.”
“Okay.”
“You must know your weaknesses and strengths and maneuver accordingly. That is strategy. You have not become a great swordsman. You have become an almost proficient swordsman. You will lose to any proficient yakuza swordsman. You will only win under one circumstance: against someone younger, who hasn’t been in a fight and will panic at the sight of his own blood. You’re a warrior, you’ve seen blood, others’ and your own. Blood doesn’t scare you, turn you to jelly. Thus, you know that in a fight you will be cut, you will bleed. Your opponent may not. He will see blood, his own or even yours, and he will tighten, lose his rhythm, his concentration. He will die; you will survive.
“Other than that, stay away. If you fight others, you will die. You are not strong enough to cover all the sectors of defense. The longer you go, the slower you will get. A good swordsman will play you out, waiting for your sword to still or drop, for your concentration to falter, and then he will kill you. In fights, you must win quickly, one, two blows, or you will die. The longer you fight, the larger the chance that you will die. You survive not merely on your sword, but on your guile in fighting only those you can beat and never those you cannot beat. A great swordsman will kill you in a split second.”
“He knows,” Bob said. “He sees where this is going. He’s telling me I cannot fight Kondo.”
Doshu heard the name and turned to Bob.
“Swagger-san,” he said, with something almost but not quite like affection. “Kondo: death.”
They roared through the Japanese night in her Mazda, the rush of the wind so intense it precluded conversation. Maybe there wasn’t much to say, anyway. Kyoto was a blur of light behind them, Tokyo not yet a blur of light ahead of them. She kept the red sportster up well over eighty miles an hour, driving with calm deliberation, all intensity and concentration.
But after a couple of hours, it began to rain. She pulled over to the shoulder. A car, too close behind, screeched and honked.
“What’s his problem?” Bob said.
“He was too close. I should have signaled. Can you latch the top?”
“Sure.”
She pressed a button and the rubberized roof came out of its compartment, unfolding on an ingenious structure until it covered the cockpit. He got it latched without trouble, though the mechanism, clever and Japanese, was new to him.
“Do you want me to drive? You must be exhausted. Now it’s raining.”
“I’m fine. I’m a big girl. Anyway, you’re just as tired as I am.”
“No, I didn’t get much sleep there, that’s for sure. That old guy worked me to the bone. ‘Eight cuts! Eight cuts!’ I haven’t worked that hard in years.”
“You are a hardworking guy,” she said. “Believe me, I know plenty who aren’t. My supervisor likes to cultivate ‘the big picture,’ which means I do the work and he’s out on the links chatting up businessmen. But I guess it’s okay that he’s lazy, because he’s so stupid if he worked hard he could really screw up.”
“Amazing how full the world is of assholes,” he said. “Anyway, have you heard from Nick yet?”
“No, nothing. I checked my phone and e-mail before we left. I’ll check again.”
She flipped open the little jointed piece of plastic, worked it over, its bright glow illuminating her grave face, and then announced, “No, nothing yet.”
“Okay.”
“What are your plans? You have to tell me, Swagger. I’m so afraid, now that you think you’re Yojimbo, you’ll go out on your own.”
“No, I told you I’d clear everything through you and I will. I’d hoped to hear from Nick, that’s all.”
“Suppose you don’t.”
“Then I’ll try and find a private investigator, a guy with yakuza connections, maybe an ex-cop, and we’ll turn him loose on the case. Maybe I should have done that already. I didn’t think of it. I was just thinking of how to keep that old man from whacking me black and blue.”
“A private eye won’t work. If Kondo doesn’t want to be found, the PI will know it and he will just take your money and conveniently come up with nothing. Nick’s got the guts to ask around; I doubt anybody else does.”
“Then I’ll go to Kabukicho and start kicking in doors on yakuza joints and asking loud, impolite questions about Kondo. That should get me noticed.”
“That should get your head delivered to the embassy by Black Cat Courier by Monday.”
“Then I don’t know. Maybe I am overmatched on this one.”
“On the other hand, you’ve learned stuff-”
Her cell phone rang. She checked the number ID and said, “It’s Nick.”
She hit talk.
“Hello, Nick, what is-”
But then she was quiet.
“Oh, hell,” she said.
“What?”
“It was Nick. But he said ‘Susan, I fed the dragon.’”
“‘Fed the dragon’? What the hell could that mean?”
“I don’t know. But it was also his voice. It was full of fear. Real, ugly fear.”
“Oh, Christ,” Bob said.
She dialed Nick’s number. There was no answer.