Enzan: The Far Mountain (20 page)

Chapter 20

I left my teacher with his granddaughter and made my way to my room. The roshi sat with me for a time. The monastery occupied territory with a thick past. It had been in stuttering procession: an obscure boarding school, a seminary that grew increasingly empty and forlorn over time, a failed conference center. As a result, it had no shortage of places for guests. The room they put me in had a small closet with a fabric curtain, a desk, a brutally designed hardwood chair, and a narrow bed pushed against one wall. Who knew the Buddha and the Spartans had so much in common? I sat on the mattress, my spine digging against the hard wall. The bedsprings creaked when I moved. My body creaked as well.

“I wasn’t sure what to do exactly,” I explained. “So I brought her here.”

He sat quietly in the chair, his face impassive. The storm howled outside. We could hear it tearing across the roof.

The roshi nodded. “Yamashita was expecting you.”

“Really?”

“Indeed.” He raised a hand, his index finger pointing up. “Almost to the hour.” He saw the look on my face and smiled. “Your sensei is a man of many talents, Burke. Surely you have felt the connection between the two of you?”

I remembered the experience back in Brooklyn of Yamashita’s voice calling me, a summons that was bell-clear for all that it was entirely in my head. I nodded.

“Besides,” the roshi continued, “he read the journal that was left for him. I explained your involvement with the Miyazaki.” He paused and waved an arm around us. “And then this. The storm. Where else would you go?”

“Home,” I suggested.

His eyes crinkled. “Precisely.” He saw my confusion and his expression of amusement deepened. “Home is the place that nurtures us and gives us meaning, Burke. It is not so much a place as an experience. And for you, now, that experience is one linked to Yamashita more than anything else.”

I wondered about that, struggling against the roshi’s words. I had a home, I thought.
I wasn’t raised by wolves
. I had parents and brothers and sisters. Good memories. My dad was gone, but my mom was still alive. I thought of Mickey, my brother. My sisters. Their spouses, and my nieces, nephews. A sprawling, messy Irish Catholic clan, fruitful, and dutifully multiplying. I was awash in family.

But the life I had chosen created a distance between us. Maybe “chosen” is the wrong word. Perhaps my life is not so much the product of a conscious choice as it is the result of a stumbling pursuit of half-seen goals, of options pursued in the moment. And distance? Not a good characterization either. I think I am still bound to my family. Emotion and experience, the years shared, all of this can’t be easily dismissed. But I also realized I had changed over time. The pursuit of Yamashita’s art created a mindset that viewed the world and the people in it in their essence, stripped of affection and pretense. My life is one focused on motion, angle, velocity. The potential for attack and the variations of response. It is critical, evaluative. And if my vision is clear and razor-sharp in some ways, it is as if it has been bleached of some of the gentler colors in others.

If home is the place where you see yourself in others, then maybe the roshi was right. Home for me was the dojo. But more fundamentally, it was anywhere Yamashita was. I remembered the scroll in the training hall:
Be in the dojo wherever you are
…

“Are they still talking?” I asked him, meaning Chie and Yamashita. The roshi nodded in answer to my question but didn’t offer a comment. It seemed as if he were waiting for something else from me.

“Did you get a chance to talk with her much?” I finally said.

“Some,” he replied. Again, the silence.

“What do you think?”

“I think right now she is exhausted,” the roshi told me. “She is angry and confused.” He smiled grimly. “From what you told me about her before, I would say confusion is probably a central condition of her being.” The monk looked at me to see how well I was following him. I realized my eyelids were drooping.

I stirred on the bed and the springs creaked. Various body parts ground together and the spike of sensation woke me up a little. I thought about Chie and what I had seen through the windows at the chalet before I had broken in. The pictures sent to her father. The mystery of Lim and what he was really up to.

“She’s not sure who she can trust in this world, is she?” I said. “I mean, she’s conflicted about her family, rebellious. She connects with men mainly through sex … a way to create connection without intimacy.” I looked at him to see if I was getting it right.

“She is trying to make her own way through life,” the roshi commented. “She thinks she is breaking free of whatever conditions in her past shaped her. At least she thought that … until you came along and ruined everything.”

The comment made me sit up straight. “What!” I winced at the stabbing pain in my ribs.

The roshi held up a hand. “This is what she thinks … what she feels, really.”

“I’m trying to help her!”

“She didn’t want your help.” His voice was quiet and measured. He watched my body language: the frustration, the denial. He waited until I settled back against the wall. “You have to understand, Connor. Whatever you or I may think about her life, it was hers to create. We may both agree that Chie’s choices are not healthy ones, but they are her choices anyway. That’s the important point for her. She got to choose. Not her family. Not you. Not me.”

“It’s an illusion,” I protested.

Again, the wintry smile. One of the roshi’s eyebrows rose and his long face was all amusement. “Now who’s being all Buddhist?” he commented.

I waved my hand. “You know what I mean.”

His smile collapsed. “Oh, I do indeed. But people come to recognize illusion at their own pace, Connor. Forcing it on them … never a good idea.”

He let that sit for a while and finally I stirred.

“So … she resents me.” More a sigh than a statement.

The roshi nodded. “Yes. You broke into her life. You’ve laid bare some things she didn’t know. Probably things she didn’t want to know. And it was all done so suddenly.”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.” Even as I said it, I knew it was a lame defense, but the roshi had the kindness not to point it out. Besides, it was one of very few, yet well-respected, Burke family mottos.

“A young woman with trust issues. With control issues. Identity issues. You barge in, unwanted, unknown. And.” He paused, then sighed. “You kidnap her.”

He didn’t need to say any more.

We sat there for a time, listening to the blizzard scouring the hills outside.

“How do I fix this?” I finally asked.

“I am not sure you can,” the roshi said.

It was obviously a widely shared opinion.

“Connor,” my brother Mickey said, his venom crackling over the phone. “I mean, what the fuck is wrong with you?” It was a rhetorical question and he plowed right on without waiting for a response. “Didn’t we tell you to leave this alone?”

“Well, yeah, but …”

“But nothing. You complete moron.” He fumed into the receiver on his end for a time, then was rendered temporarily mute from anger and disgust. I could imagine him sitting there on Long Island, his grey eyes hard enough to strike a spark, his free hand gesturing wildly.

“Hey, come on,” I protested. “I mean, I got the girl. We’re safe. And there’s more going on here than I thought.” It didn’t seem to calm him down.

“You. You complete dickhead … Whattaya think it means when ya say, ‘I got the girl?’” My brother has a pretty strong Long Island accent and the impressive engine of his temper was cranking out a thick, coiling verbal cloud of run-on words, vanishing
r
’s and flat vowels. And he wasn’t letting up. “I’ll tell ya what it means. You just kidnapped someone. You unnerstand? You moron! As in a federal offense. Jesus Christ!”

“Mick,” I protested. “It’s more complicated than that …”

“You want complicated? Try doin’ hard time in the federal pen.”

But now my temper was up. “Will you shuddup?”
Geez we almost sound identical
. “I’m trying to tell you the boyfriend was up to something.”

“I’ll bet he was.” The sarcasm was heavy.

“No, really. Look, she wasn’t sending pictures to her old man. As far as I can figure out, he was.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So, the father’s a diplomat, Mick. He’s got a history of working as a liaison between the Japanese government and our military.” I closed my eyes, trying to concentrate, dredging up information Owen had given me over the phone. Between the beating I had taken and the drive through the storm, I wasn’t sure I remembered all the details and I was still trying to process them fully. But as groggy as I was, a pattern was starting to emerge.

“Yeah. Miyazaki the diplomat. This I know,” he told me. I should have wondered how he knew and why, but I was not exactly razor-sharp at that point.

“He’s up for a new post, Mick. That’s why he’s here—visiting D.C. I don’t have all the details, but it’s all involved with the whole pivot-toward-Asia strategy Washington’s cooking up.”

“More,” he said, the detective part of his brain sputtering to life, the mixture still too rich with anger, but slowly smoothing out and coming back on line. “Tell me more.”

“And the boyfriend,” I rushed on, sensing an opening suggested by the change of Mickey’s tone. “He’s a complete lowlife.”

“He’s a lowlife with a really unusual set of friends,” Mickey finished.

“You know about the Koreans?”

“I know about the Koreans,” he told me, sighing. “Do you want to know how I know about this … this incredible shit storm you are wading through?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Charlie Wilcox.”

“Charlie Wilcox!” He was a guy we had grown up with who had somehow managed to get himself made an FBI agent. When we were in high school, Charlie was a real loose cannon whose major claim to fame was being shot through a windshield in a car accident and having to get his ears sewn back on. It seemed to tamp down his taste for the wild life, but still. At the time, nobody I knew was even sure he could actually read. But the years passed and something must have clicked. The last time we had seen him, Mickey had managed to wheedle some bureau surveillance data on the Chinese secret service’s activity in Manhattan. Charlie resented having to do Mickey a favor and was pretty clear that he was looking forward to never seeing the Burke brothers again.

“So,” my brother began, “Charlie is doing his usual boring analysis of surveillance photos of thugs from the Chinese consulate. He also dabbles in tracking Koreans from the UN. When lo and behold, a series of shots from a stakeout of an apartment of a suspected agent shows some interesting footage. Wanna guess what it was?”

“Me,” I said sheepishly.

“Correct.” He paused for effect. “You total idiot! Connor Burke, rogue operator, rolls up to the entrance of this place with some slick-lookin’ Hispanic dude. The two of you go in. He comes out and has a smoke. You are still rattling around in there, doing God knows what. Meantime, who rolls up but another car with one of the bruisers from the Korean mission. You know the type? Thick neck. Flat face.” I closed my eyes and there was the ghost memory of the fight I had with the Korean in Lim’s apartment—the set of his shoulders, the ferocity of his attack, all of it compounded by tight spaces and desperation.

“So,” my brother continued, “the stakeout team is having a field day. The motorized drives on the cameras are whirring and they’re happy as clams, snapping away at the new faces. A few minutes go by and the Hispanic guy goes back into the building. Then you both tumble out and away you go. The stakeout team makes a call and sits around with their thumbs up their ass, waiting for authorization to break cover and enter the building. They’re still waiting when the Korean stumbles out, looking a little shaky. He staggers to his car and boogies.

“This is the most excitement the stakeout guys have had in months. They’re pissed that they didn’t get to see what happened, but hey—good news—they have photos of all these new friends to look at. They run a match on the plates of the car you’re in, but guess what? They’re stolen. So they start shopping the headshots around and eventually, you—did I mention you’re an idiot?—you end up in an eight-by-ten on Charlie’s desk.”

“And he called you?”

“Of course he called me. Charlie is not really crazy about either of us, but he’s still not a complete pinhead. He gave me a heads up and also told me you’d been flagged as a person of interest.”

“What’s that mean?”

“What it means is that you’re on their radar. And they know something we don’t know about this guy Lim and his friends from the UN mission.”

“So?”

“So now we both know what you said is true—there is more to this than meets the eye. And we start putting the pieces together and it is not good.”

I sat back and sighed. The building was full of night sounds: the creak of heating units, distant hushed voices. Above it all, I could hear the snow blowing across the roof and feel the pulse of the storm as the wind pushed and pulled at the building.

“So what are we dealing with, Mick?” I said it quietly, as if I somehow hoped he would not hear the question and not give me an answer.

“Hard to say exactly,” he said. I could almost hear his shrug over the line. “My guess is you are right—please note that it pains me to say that—and they were probably trying to set Miyazaki up for some sort of extortion. Ya know, racy pictures of his crazy daughter … the sense that maybe she might make him a security risk …”

“He’d want to protect the family from disgrace,” I said.

Mickey snorted. “He’d want to protect his career. Ya ever wonder why, if this chick was such a wild child, they never did anything about it until now, Connor? They’ve probably been covering for her for years. I think the reason they wanted to get hold of her now had nothing to do with the family. It had to do with keeping her old man’s career on track.”

I wasn’t so sure. There’s a whole rich dimension of shame and honor and family reputation to consider in the Japanese psyche. “I’m not sure you totally get the Japanese, Mick.”