Kiai! & Mistress of Death

  Only then did I realize what I'd told Jim, and understand my own private motivation. There was a great deal of money to be had at that tournament. Enough to cover any likely medical expenses.

  And Jim wanted me to go.

  Now I was committed to take his place—and it was better that he never know the truth about my selection.

  How was I going to do in the Martial Open?

  CHAPTER 4

  MARTIAL OPEN

  I faced Makato. The Korean was not large, but his arms were enormous. His knuckles were one continuous band of scar tissue from his decades of intensive karate training. A blow from his fist could fell a bull, literally; he had done it many times. Often he would cut off the horns first, with short chopping motions with the sides of his hands. Then he would stun the bull with a direct punch, and finally kill it by twisting its neck.

  Now those hands were lifted against me.

  I went for a quick throw, certain I could handle him more safely on the mat. I lifted him with a harai-goshi, the hip sweep. I pulled him toward me and turned, using my right leg to sweep his right leg to the rear, and I threw him over my back.

  Makato went down, but his iron fist punched my kidney as he fell. It felt as if he had stuck a hot knife in my lower back. There was a hard burning pain, and the shock made my breath short.

  "Ahhhh!" I groaned involuntarily, to minimize the agony.

  I reeled for a fatal instant, failing to drop on top of him for an effective judo hold when I had the opportunity. Makato kicked me from the floor, aiming for a crippling knee blow, but I saw it coming and flexed my legs slightly. The calloused, horn-hard ball of his foot struck my thigh numbingly. An expert never hits with his bare toes, but lifts them out of the way to let the more solid part of the foot take the brunt.

  I stepped back, but he had hooked his other foot above my heel, and I stumbled and fell to the rear. I might have recovered my balance despite the double force of the blow and hook, but it was safer to take the fall and somersault back to my feet, than to remain open to another kick. Makato could instantly shatter my knee and my career.

  I rolled back on my shoulders, still smarting from the kidney blow. I tried to stand up, but just as I got my feet under me I was smashed by a kick to my temple. This was worse than either of the other blows; it was like being hit by a hurled stone. I was dazed. I saw double. I had trouble coordinating, and when I moved it was like pushing through water. My head seemed to swell until it was ready to explode.

  I had to get a lock on him before he could bring those terrible hands into play again. But Makato feinted to the right, jumped into the air, turned while aloft and made a terrific back kick. His heel connected with my chin...

  It was about five hours by jeep, on a dirt road through almost untouched savannah. Low hills were covered by sparse grass and a few pine trees. I could see that there had once been larger forests, for there were many lumber cuttings: stands of stumps, like grave markers. A line of metal towers paralleled our route, perhaps used for carrying electric power to the primitive interior.

  This was Nicaragua: the northeast corner near the Honduras frontier. I had arrived by plane at the Managua airport, where I soon tired of waiting in the red-dust covered terminal for the local flight across the country. There was no other way to do it; even in the dry season the road was said to take two weeks.

  Meanwhile, I toured the city in my amateurish way, trotting along the narrow cobblestoned streets despite the heat. The natives stared, and I knew they thought me crazy, but it was good exercise. Traffic was my worst hazard, for nobody obeyed the rules. I saw crosses erected, one at each place there had been a fatal accident in the past; there must have been more than a hundred of them all told.

  North of the city I encountered Lago de Managua, and I jogged along the walk beside it. I learned later that this was the only place in the world where freshwater sharks lived. Good thing I hadn't decided to swim. I rested under one of the shade trees of the park, looking at the large statues of Central America's foremost poet and felt ignorant as hell for never having heard of the man. I was admiring the beautiful cathedral of Managua when I looked at my watch and realized the time. Puffing like an old steam engine, I made it back to the airport and boarded a Nicaraguan Airline Lanica. Ahead of me sat a nun; beside me was an Indian woman suckling her baby. It was a far cry from my dojo.

  I had the window seat and looked out to see the fringe of Lago de Nicaragua, the great interior lake. I wondered irrelevantly just who my strong local sponsor had been, and whether he had really intended to send me to a foreign country. If I had balled Johnson Drummond's daughter, he might have been glad to send me into the fight-for-life that the Martial Open promised to be; but I hadn't, and he knew it. Dato would have been happy to get rid of me, but I couldn't believe he had such influence with the judo associations. So it remained a nagging mystery.

  About a hundred miles beyond the lake we set down at Bluefields, on the Atlantic coast, where I transferred to the flight to Puerto Cabezas, a hundred and fifty miles north. There a private car met me. The driver was a stolid Indian who could have had a cut tongue, for all the conversation he made along the way.

  We crossed the Ulana River, forged into steeper country, and came abruptly to a checkpoint. Armed guards stood by a barricade across the road, rifles ready. The jeep jammed to a stop.

  I didn't like it. I slumped in the seat and closed my eyes as if sleepy. I don't fool with firearms if I can help it, but I had no inclination to be locked up in some wilderness cell, ignorant of language and custom.

  But the driver made a signal, and the guards nodded. They recognized him. They hauled aside the barricade, and we ground on through.

  This, then, was the huge estate of Vicente Pedro, said to be one of the real owners of this Latin American nation. Fabulously wealthy, but with resources that went beyond money: fisheries, lumber, gold mines, sugar, cattle, and manpower. Educated in Europe, but specializing in good American graft and influence. I could not claim to have respect for my host's nature.

  But this was evidently the kind of man it took to bring about a tournament of this nature: a fight-to-the-finish matching of the top representatives of the world's leading martial arts. No such meeting could occur in the United States, for there were laws about manslaughter, as there were in most developed countries. But here Vicente Pedro was the law.

  The jeep slowed, coursing through elegant gardens. The contrast with the barren landscape outside was striking. This was an oasis in the wasteland; I gazed amazed at what seemed to be millions of beautiful flowers. Red, white, yellow roses; bougainvillaea bushes covered with purple blossoms; flowering trees, yellow, blue and white. Orchid vines hung from trees and trellises. Ferns ranged from a few inches long to tree size. Stately royal palms lined the curving road.

  There were statues, too. One was of Neptune, king of the sea, holding his traditional trident. Mermaids and fish surrounded him, each well-shaped in its mammalian or piscine torso. Another statue was a small naked boy, a fountain, with the stream of water jetting from the obvious place. I had never seen much of that sort of humor in America. Other statues verged on the pornographic. Was our host given to revels of this kind, or was such display standard regional art?

  Then we passed a twice-life-size, bronze statue of Vicente Pedro himself, on a black marble pedestal. It dominated everything, that huge handsome man seated before the mansion.

  The house itself was, unsurprisingly, Spanish style, and very large. The walls were bright white stucco, the tiles red. There were grandiose columns, and a portal surrounded the whole, with chairs in the shade.

  A mulatto girl waited at the entrance to guide me inside. The interior was even more impressive than the outside. The woodwork was of black mahogany and fragrant teak; the floor consisted of mosaics in beautiful patterns. I saw a big interior courtyard with a scenic fountain; all the rooms on each floor opened onto it, probably for coolness at night.

  On the ground floo
r there were a number of huge rooms with tall ceilings, too high for effective cleaning, it seemed, for there were swallows nesting on the beams.

  At first I thought the maid was giving me a tour of the upstairs, for the room she showed me was like a gallery in a museum. Ivory statuettes sat in alcoves, alternating with ancient Greek or Roman vases and Chinese Ming Dynasty porcelain, and there were screens of lacquered hide and inlaid ivory. A balcony was outside, overlooking the central fountain. The giant canopied beds were protected by mosquito netting, a necessary precaution here in the tropics, where the biting insects could transmit malaria. The furniture was massive, being of old, handcarved wood and hide. Costly carpets and rugs were scattered around the floor. Paintings hung on the walls, and I knew without recognizing the artists that they were semi-classics.

  I found out that this was to be my room for the duration. As soon as the girl left, I stepped into the ornate lavatory to clean off the grime of travel. I hardly had time to assimilate the black marble bathtub, silver faucets and bidet before one of my roommates appeared. He was Japanese, in his mid-fifties, about five-feet eight-inches tall and weighing perhaps two-hundred-and-forty pounds. Obviously not a contestant. But he looked familiar, and in a moment I placed him.

  "Takao Kawaguchi!" I exclaimed, smiling, though actually I was not certain I liked his presence here.

  "You must be Jason Striker, the American," he said with passable inflection, affecting a brief bow. "I regret having intruded on you."

  "By no means!" I said, chagrined to have him pick up my private reservations so easily. "I am merely surprised to meet you in this context."

  "No need to hide your feelings from me," he said, making a little gesture of conciliation. "It is well known that I am barred from competition, because I practiced special death blows on Chinese prisoners during the war." He meant World War Two. He had been a Japanese bomber pilot, shot down over China, and later an official in an internment camp. When Japan lost the war, his reputed atrocities were enough to rule him out of further judo competition, though he was in fact an eighth degree black belt and one of the all time judo greats, never beaten in tournament competition.

  How much of his one-time skill derived from that illicit practice against prisoners of war was problematical, but it was a severe personal liability, in my view. I had heard nothing of him for a number of years, and had assumed that he was no longer active in judo.

  "I do not hide it," Takao continued. "I do not apologize. I only point out that I was younger then, and war had a brutalizing effect. They were the enemy. Even so I gave them a fair chance. I always chose strong and trained men, and they were permitted to fight, and any of them could have killed me, thus recovering honor. I thought I was doing valuable research, re-discovering lost techniques. Those prisoners were dead already, according to their military code, because of their defeat and capture. The Imperial Authority intended to allow none of them to survive Japan's defeat, and very few did. Those that I killed died cleanly, almost without pain, and were given honorable burial. It was a better death than the alternative."

  I did not attempt to argue against his viewpoint. Mitigating factors such as these had been brought out at his trial, resulting in a nominal sentence. The judgement had been rendered, the legal price paid. I had no right to hold the past against him.

  "I can't say anything," I said. "My own record is not clean." His eyebrows lifted. He did not inquire, but now I had to match his confession with my own.

  "I was in the Green Berets, Vietnam. Captured—there was a girl who died. I escaped—but there was no honor in it."

  "There is little honor in war," he said.

  So we had come to a sort of accord, but still I could not like him, any more than I liked my own bad memories. And I knew he was too old to enter this tournament, even if the proscription against his competition did not apply here. The days of his physical greatness were long behind him.

  "I am here as a judo judge," he said. "I need the money to bring my wife and three children from Japan to Brazil, where I am settled now. Our host desired knowledgeable officials."

  Just as I needed the money for Jim's probable medical expenses. Were all the participants of this tournament justifying themselves similarly?

  But one concern had been eased. So he was not to be a combatant. Now it made sense. Whatever his age and whatever his ethical reputation, there was no doubt that he knew more about judo than almost any man living, and this was exactly the kind of knowledge required for a tournament like this.

  Seven major martial arts were to be represented, with two participating and one judge for each. Every art would meet every other art twice, for a total of forty-two matches, or six by each participant. The best won-lost record would determine the tournament winner—and, by implication, the leading martial art of the world. For the Martial Open was the dream tournament: the one in which boxer met wrestler, karateka met judoka, and kung-fu sifu met aikido sensei, in fights to the finish. The debates of centuries were about to be settled here, and the matches would be broadcast on worldwide television.

  There were virtually no rules of combat. A match would end when one man surrendered or was obviously unfit to continue. No fouls called, no techniques forbidden, no repercussions if men should die. The judges were merely to ascertain the situation, in the event it was not obvious, and to minimize injuries when the outcome was inevitable. (There would be no deliberate maiming after a combatant was helpless, for example.) Certainly I would feel easier with a man like Takao watching while I fought, alert for my interest and that of judo. I knew there would be some very tough men here, and I knew my chances of coming through the tournament uninjured were slight. Judo was not well represented, unfortunately; my own presence was something of a fluke, as I would hardly be ranked among the top hundred judokas of the world today. If I had a strong partner, judo might still do well enough, but I didn't even know who my partner was.

  There was a master chart of scheduled matches in the main hall, and I studied them carefully. My judo partner had not yet arrived, so I could not be certain which days I would fight, and had to be prepared for them all. I guessed that the first judo match was mine.

  I whistled. Some famous men were here, all right—and some infamous. I was going to have to watch my step, particularly since Judo's first match was against Karate, and the man scheduled to meet me was Makato Kubota: probably the top practicing karateka in the world today.

  Something cold slapped against my face, bringing me out of my melange of dream and memory. "You're lucky!" the doctor was saying. "If he'd taken time to set up properly, your jawbone would have been plastered against the inside of your skull. Where did you learn to fight?"

  I sat up angrily, and regretted it, feeling nauseous. It is not fun to be kicked into unconsciousness. I felt incipient convulsions in my stomach, and a splitting headache came in pulses, and I still had trouble focusing. For the moment I could not recall what had happened to me, or even who I was. I had this picture of a young man lying in a hospital bed, and I heard an accented voice crying "You suffer!"

  "As I said, you're lucky," the doctor repeated. "No real damage done. But if you're the best judo can produce, it is not much of an art. You lost."

  I knew it. It was coming back now. Makato had put me away as if I were a white-belt novice. I had always thought judo was basically superior to karate, but I certainly hadn't been superior to the Korean. Was this a taste of what I faced in the next two weeks?

  I waved the doctor off and stood up unsteadily. My legs felt rubbery, and I suffered another siege of disorientation. I had taken a pounding. I walked with what grace I could muster to my room.

  Takao was there. "You total fool!" he said as he cleaned up my face. There was blood on the cloth, and I discovered I had bitten my tongue sometime during the debacle. "What were you trying to do—dance him to death?"

  For an instant a pure kill-rage suffused me. This killer of prisoners was trying to lecture me! But I contro
lled myself. I had lost, ignominiously, and I could lose again. Less luckily, if I did not improve my technique in a hurry. "You tell me," I said, hating him.

  "You tried to play it by sport rules," Takao snorted. "Against Makato, the deadliest karateka extant! You actually threw the bull with Harai-goshi, and of course you blew it! You had only to hold him and fall on top of him, breaking his ribs, or just kick him in the face, and the match would have been yours. Even a simple kneedrop on his skull—what did you think he was, a Bakayaro student, a dilettante?"

  Bakayaro: a Japanese swear word. I didn't know Japanese, but expletives are readily picked up. I think the human brain has a special affinity for them. It was really me he was swearing at, not Makato.

  I clenched my hurting jaw, knowing he was right. He had been there watching the match, in an excellent position to tell. For so many years in sport competition and in judo instruction, I had made every effort to avoid giving injury—and even then had not been careful enough with Jim. It was a conditioned reflex. So I was at a disadvantage facing a brute like Makato, who could shatter concrete tiles with his bare hands and had not pulled his punches in the match.

  It was an important lesson for me. I could have gotten killed, literally.

  "I'm here because I injured the young man originally assigned to this tournament," I said lamely. "The idea of deliberately hurting someone—"

  Takao rolled his eyes expressively, condemning my naivete. Then he smiled, not nicely. "It was the opposite with me. We all have good reasons for what we do, eh? But sometimes we are mistaken, and we have to adjust to the contemporary situation."