Eric van Lustbader - Nicholas Linnear 03 - White Ninja.pdf - Eric van Lustbader - widez2

Eric Van Lustbader - Nl3 White Ninja AUTHOR'S NOTE White Ninja is the third

novel in a series - beginning with The Ninja and continuing with The Miko -

about the life of Nicholas Linnear. All the books are interrelated, but they

are by no means interdependent. Still, the novels may be seen as being akin to

concentric circles, and are meant to complement one another. This is for

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Henry Morrison, my friend as well as my agent, without whom... The winds that

blow -ask them, which leaf of the tree will be next to go! -- soseki He that

fleeth from the fear shall fall into the pit; and he that getteth up out of

the pit shall be taken in the snare... -- JEREMIAH 48:44 AUTUMN Tokyo He

awoke into darkness. Outside, it was noon. In the Kan, a businessmen's hotel

on the seedy outskirts of Tokyo, with the steel shutters closed like a raven's

claw over the window, it was as black as the grave. The image was apt. The

room was hardly larger than a coffin. The ceiling and the floor were both

carpeted in the same deathly shade of grey. Because there were only four feet

separating them, any light created an unwholesomely vertiginous effect upon

the unwary guest when he awoke. But this was not the reason why, when rising

from the futon bed, Senjin did not light a lamp. He had a far more compelling

reason to remain in the shadows. Senjin thought of his mother as he always

did when he was either drunk or homicidal. He'd had two mothers, really, the

one who had borne him, and the one who had raised him. The second mother was

his aunt, his mother's sister, but he always referred to her as Haha-san,

mother. It was she who had suckled him at her breast when his blood mother had

had the effrontery to die a week after he was born from an infection his long

labour had caused. It was Haha-san who had cooled his childhood fevers and had

warmed him with her arms when he was chilled. She had sacrificed everything

for Senjin and, in the end, he had walked away from her without even saying

goodbye, let alone thank you. That did not mean that Senjin did not think

about her. With his eyes open, he remembered venting his anger against the

white, marshmallow-like softness of her breast, of her giving while he took,

of his overstepping his bounds time and time again, and of her loving smile in

response. He hit out, wanting only to be hit back in return. Instead, she drew

him again into the softness of herself, believing that she could swallow his

rage in the vastness of her serenity. He was left with this dream, like

scoria upon the blackened side of a long exhausted volcano. Senjin watch-ing

while Haha-san is repeatedly raped. Senjin feeling a kind of despicable

satisfaction that borders on rapture, and which, without any physical means,

rapidly brings him to a powerful climax. For a long time, Senjin watched the

milky beads of his semen slide down the wall. Perhaps he dreamed. Then he

turned onto his back, and got up. In a moment, he was dressed, moving as

silently as a wraith. He did not bother to lock the door behind him. Late

afternoon. In the street, the sky was the colour of zinc. It was as dense as

metal, as soft as putty. Industrial ash turned the air to syrup. White filter

masks were much in evidence, not only among the cyclists whining by, but also

over the mouths of pedestrians fearful of lung damage. Daylight had torn the

neon night down, but what had it replaced it with? A colourless murk, aqueous

and acrid, the bottom of a sunless sea. He had many hours to kill, but that

was all right. It was how he had planned it, emerging from an anonymous lair,

travelling solely by foot, also anonymously, creating a path through the maze

of the city only he could know or follow. Despite his surroundings, he felt

galvanized, ten feet tall, monstrously powerful. He recognized the signs, as

familiar and comfortable as a well-worn shirt, and he smiled inwardly. He

could feel the slender bits of metal lying along his bare flesh beneath his

clothes. Warmed by his blood-heat, they seemed to pulse with a life of their

own, as if his burgeoning strength had infused them with a kind of sentience.

He felt like a god, a heroic avenging sword sweeping through Tokyo, about to

excise a disease that was rotting it from within. Down narrow streets he

went, a man of silence, a singular icon of brutality and death. He crossed

puddles of stagnant water from which arose like a miasma the stench of fish

innards. Like oil slicks, they threw back the rainbow colours of the

fluorescent dusk. It was evening by the time he made his way towards the

doorway of The Silk Road. It was festooned with multi-coloured neon, garish

plastic flowers and cheap glitter tacked against faded crepe paper. Seen from

a distance, the entire entrance was made up to resemble the inner petals of an

enormous orchid or, if one's mind ran to such images, a woman's sexual

organ. Senjin passed through the glass doors into a space filled with

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reflected light. It was like being inside a prism. Revolving disco lights

refracted blindingly off walls and ceiling, both covered in mirrored panels.

The result was as momentarily disorienting as had been Senjin's coffin-like

hotel room. He felt at home here. American rock music was playing at such a

volume that the speaker diaphragms were taxed to their limit. The result was a

thick, heavy sound, furry with bass and electronic distortion. Senjin walked

across the black rubber floor, identical to that used in children's

playgrounds. He passed a bar consisting of columns of coloured water bubbling

through plastic tubes. The top was Plexiglas. He caught the eye of the

manager, who turned away from him, hurrying to the sanctuary of his office

deep in the back of the building. Senjin found an empty table stageside and

sat down. He waved away the waitress as she began to weave her way towards

him. Senjin looked around him. The club was packed, mostly with businessmen

out on their companies' expense. The atmosphere was dense with the fumes of

cigarettes, Suntory Scotch and the sweat of anticipation. Senjin's tongue

emerged from between his lips, licked at the air as if tasting the mingled

scents. The minuscule stage before which Senjin sat was teardrop-shaped

Plexiglas, one of several on three differ-ent levels. The revolving disco

lights spun off the scarred surface of the Plexiglas, sending distorted

rainbows spark-ing through the club. Eventually, the girls emerged. They wore

oddly demure robes that covered them from throat to ankle so that they had the

aspect of oracles or sibyls from whose mouths the fates of the men in the

audience would soon be made manifest. Apart from their faces, one could not

see what they looked like at all. One had, rather, to trust those gently

smiling faces that looked like neither angel nor vixen, but were suffused with

such a maternal glow that it was impos-sible to find them intimidating or

frightening. Which was, of course, the point. Trust me, those expressions

said. And, automatically, one did. Even Senjin, who trusted no one. But he

was, after all, Japanese and, whether he chose to believe it or not, he was in

most ways part of the homogeneous crowd. Senjin concentrated his attention on

one of the girls, the one closest to him. She was as startlingly young as she

was beautiful. He had been unprepared for her youth, but far from

disconcerting him, her age somehow heightened his own anticipation. He licked

his lips just as if he were about to sit down to a long-awaited feast. The

music had changed. It was clankier now, more obviously sexual in its beat and

in the insinuation of the brass arrangement. The girls simultaneously untied

their robes, let them slip to the Plexiglas stage. They wore various forms of

street clothes, most of them suggestive in one way or another. Strobe lights

flashed. In unison, the girls began to strip, not in any Western

bump-and-grind fashion, but in a series of still-life tableaux, freeze-frame

images held on the video of the mind. The poses, as the garments came off,

were increasingly wanton, until, at length, the girls were naked. The music

died with most of the light, and Senjin could hear a restive stirring in the

audience. The scent of sweat outmuscled all others now. The girl in front of

Senjin had flawless skin. Her mus-cles had the firmness, the roundness of

youth. Her small breasts stood out almost straight from her body, and the

narrow line of her pubic hair would have revealed more than it concealed were

it not deftly hidden in shadow. Now the girl squatted down. In her hands were

fistfuls of tiny flashlights imprinted with the name of the club, The Silk

Road. She offered one to Senjin, who refused. But, immediately, there was a

mad scramble over his back, as the businessmen lunged to grab flashlights from

her hand. When the flashlights were gone, the girl bent her upper torso

backwards until her nipples pointed up at the mirrored ceiling where they were

replicated over and over. The bizarre image looked to Senjin like the statue

he had once seen of the teat-bellied she-wolf who had suckled Romulus and

Remus. Balancing herself on her heels as deftly as an acrobat, the dancer

began to part her legs. This was the climax of her act, the tokudashi,

colloquially known in leering double entendre as 'the open'. Senjin could

hear the clickings all around him as the tiny flashlights came on, insect eyes

in a field of heaving wheat. Someone was breathing heavily on his neck. He was

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sure that every man in the club was concentrating on that one spot between the

girls' legs. The flashlight beams probed into those inner sanctums as the

girls moved about the stage, keeping their legs remarkably wide open. It was

a discipline to walk this way, as difficult to master as diving or golf, and

no less deserving of admiration. Senjin watched the muscles in the girl's

legs bunch and move as she slowly scuttled around the entire perimeter of the

stage as easily as if she were a contortionist in a circus. All the while, her

face was as serene and in control as if she were a queen or a goddess under

whose spell these mortals had come. As long as she held her legs apart for the

most minute inspection, this girl- and the others above and around her -

maintained a magnetic power as hard to explain as it was to define. Senjin,

totally uninterested in that spot of female sexual potency, wondered at its

hold over others. The lights came up abruptly, dazzlingly, breaking the

hushed, florid silence. The rock music blared anew, the girls were reclothed

in their robes, once again mysterious, their faces now devoid of any emotion

or involvement. But Senjin was at that moment too busy to appreciate the

dancers' splendid manipulation of emotions. He was already wending his way

through the red-lighted warren of the club's backstage corridors. He found

the cubicle he was looking for and, slipping inside, melted into the

darkness.. Alone in the tiny space, he set about taking stock. Against the

rear wall he found the window, grimy and paint-spattered with disuse. It was

small, but serviceable. He checked to see if it was locked. It

wasn't. Satisfied, he unscrewed the bare bulbs around the large wall mirror.

There were no lamps or other sources of illumination in the room. He

reconsidered and screwed one bulb back into place. When Mariko, the dancer

who had been the object of Senjin's attention, walked into her dressing room,

she saw him as a silhouette, as flat and unreal as a cut-out. The single bulb

threw knife-edged shadows across his cheeks. She did not, in fact,

immediately understand what she was seeing, believing him to be the image on a

talento poster one of the other girls had put up in her absence. She had been

thinking about power - the kind she possessed here, but apparently not

elsewhere in her life. There was a paradox lurking somewhere within this

synergistic puzzle of power, but she seemed at a loss to discover what it was

or, more importantly, how it might help her attain a higher status than was

now accorded her. She had yet to learn the secret of patience, and now she

never would. Senjin detached himself from shadows streaking the wall as

Mariko opened the door. He was against her, pressing himself along the entire

length of her as if he were a malevolent liquid poured from the

shadows. Mariko, still half-stunned that the poster image had come to life,

opened her mouth to scream, but Senjin smashed his fist into it. She collapsed

into his arms. Senjin dragged her into a corner, and pulled apart the flaps

of her robe. There was now a small blade, warm from his own blood-heat, lying

in the palm of his hand. He used it to economically shred her clothes,

denuding her in precise, co-ordinated quadrants. Then he arranged the strips

just the way he wanted. For an instant, Senjin's baleful eyes took in the

full measure of this glorious creature, as if fixing an image in his mind.

Then he knelt and swiftly bound her wrists above her head with a length of

white cloth. He tied the other end around a standpipe, pulling the cloth tight

so that Mariko was stretched taut. He withdrew an identical length of cloth,

wound it around his own throat, slipped it around the standpipe, calculated

distances, knotted it tight. Then he unzipped his trousers, and fell upon her

flesh without either frenzy or passion. It was not easy to effect penetration,

but this kind of grinding pain acted as a curious spur for him. Senjin at

last began to breathe as hard as the men in the club had done during Mariko's

act. But he felt nothing from either his or Mariko's body in the sense of a

sensual stimulus. Rather, he was, as usual, trapped inside his mind and, like

a rat within a maze, his thoughts spun around and around a hideous central

core. Flashes of death and life, the dark and the light interwove themselves

across his mind in a flickering, sickening film that he recognized all too

well, a second deadly skin lying, breathing with malevolent life just beneath

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his everyday skin made of tissue and blood. Unable to bear the images and

what they symbolized any longer, Senjin dropped his upper torso and his head.

Now with each hard upthrust inside her, the noose was pulled tighter and

tighter around his throat. As he approached completion, his body was deprived

of more and more oxygen and, at last, sensory pleasure began to flood through

him as inexorably as a tide, a thick sludge of ecstasy turning his lower belly

and his thighs as heavy as lead. Only at the point of death did Senjin feel

safe, secure upon this ultimate sword-edge, this life-death continuum made

terrifyingly real. It was the powerful but tenuous basis on which Kshira,

Senjin's training, was built. At the point of death, he had learned,

everything is possible. Once one has stared death in the face, one comes away

both with one's reality shattered and with it automatically reconstructed

along different lines. This epiphany - as close as an Easterner will ever come

to the Western Christian concept of revelation - occurred early in Senjin's

life, and changed him forever. Dying, Senjin ejaculated. The world melted

around him and, inhaling deeply from Mariko's open mouth, he gathered to him

the susurrus, unique to every human being. Greedily, like an animal at a

trough, he sucked up her breath. He rose, unwrapped with one hand the cloth

from his throat as, with the other, he mechanically zipped his trousers. His

expression was empty, eerily mimicking Mariko's expression when, at the end of

her show, she had faced her audience. Now that the act was over, Senjin felt

the loss, the acute depression, as pain. He assumed one must necessarily

feel incomplete when returning from a state of grace. His hands were again

filled with the slender bits of steel that had lain like intimate companions

along his sweaty flesh. What he had done with Mariko's clothes, Senjin now did

to her skin, shredding it in precise strips, artistically running the steel

blades down and across what had.once been pristine, and was now irrevocably

soiled. Senjin chanted as he worked on Mariko, his eyes closed to slits, only

their whites showing. He might have been a priest at a sacred rite. When he

was done, there was not a drop of blood on him. He withdrew a sheet of paper

from an inside pocket and, using another of his small, warm blades, dipped its

tip into a pool of blood. He hurriedly wrote on the sheet, this could be your

wife. He had to return the tip to the blood twice in order to complete the

message. His fingers trembled in the aftermath of his cataclysm as he blew on

the crimson words. He rolled the sheet, placed it in Mariko's open

mouth. Before he left, he washed his blades in the tiny sink, watching the

blood swirling in pink abstract patterns around the stained drain. He cut

down the length of cloth that had bound him to the standpipe. Then he went to

the sooty window and, opening it, boosted himself up to its rim. In a moment,

he was through. Senjin rode a combination of buses and subways to the centre

of Tokyo. In the shadow of the Imperial Palace, he was swept up in the

throngs of people, illuminated by a neon sky, clustered like great blossoms

swaying from an unseen tree. He was as anonymous, as homogenous within society

as every Japanese wishes to be. Senjin walked with a step dense with power

yet effort-less in its fluidity. He could have been a dancer, but he was not.

He passed by the National Theatre in Hayabusa-cho, pausing to study posters

outside to see if there was a performance that interested him. He went to the

theatre as often as possible. He was fascinated by emotion, and all the ways

it could be falsely induced. He could have been an actor, but he was

not. Passing around the south-western curve of the Imperial moat, Senjin came

upon the great avenue, the Uchibori-dori, at the spot which in the West would

be called a square, but for which there was no corresponding word in Japanese.

Past the Ministry of Transportation, Senjin went into the large building

housing the Metropolitan Police Force. It was, as usual at this time of the

night, very quiet. Ten minutes later, he was hard at work at his desk. The

sign on the front of his cubicle read: captain senjin OMUKAE, DIVISION-COMDR,

METROPOLITAN HOMICIDE. Under the knife, Nicholas Linnear swam in a sea of

memory. The anaesthetic of the operation, in removing him from reality,

destroyed the barriers of time and space so that, like a god, Nicholas was

everywhere and everywhen all at the same moment. Memory of three years ago

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Eric van Lustbader - Nicholas Linnear 03 - White Ninja.pdf

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