Shinju Hakagawa. When he went in the Japanese was already waiting for him, on the dojo mat. Craig joined him on the mat and the two men bowed in the ritual of greeting.
'What style shall we fight?' Hakagawa asked. 'We'll just fight,' said Craig.
It was like very fast chess, every move played out to the limits of strength, every throw a potential opening to the checkmate that could end your life if you didn't get up, or counter, in time. At the end of twenty minutes Hakagawa signaled a halt, and both men were steaming with sweat. Hakagawa produced towels, and they dabbed at their sweating bodies, then knelt, facing each other, on the mat.
'You have been drinking too much,' said Hakagawa. 'You are slow. This time I could have killed you.' 'I'm old, Hak,' Craig said.
'Not as old as me. I am fifty-four years old.' Craig looked at the squat, bullet-headed Japanese. His face was astonishingly beautiful and almost unlined.
'Show me your hands.'
Craig held out his hands and Hakagawa very carefully examined the lines of hard skin along their edges, and across the knuckles.
'You have neglected them,' said Hakagawa. 'Suppose I asked you to punch the board.'
'I couldn't do it,' said Craig.
'It will take you two weeks to get your hands right. You will practice here every day.'
'I can't,' said Craig. 'I go to New York in three days.'
'I will give you the address of a master there,' said Hakagawa. 'You must become right again—or karate is finished for you.'
'Become right?'
'You do not mean it any more,' Hakagawa said. 'It is in your hands, but not in your mind. You are becoming what boxers call a gym fighter.' He paused, and looked at Craig in affection. 'Until your mind changes you will never beat me again. When it changes, you will beat me every time. Shower now. You drink too much.'
Each evening until he left, Craig fought with Haka-gawa. His hands began to harden and his speed and stamina increased as he sweated the alcohol out of his system, but his mind remained the same. He could not beat Haka-gawa. After the second defeat he went back to the department and booked a session on the firing range. He used the gun he'd always preferred, a Smith and Wesson .38, and that skill at least had not deserted him. Over and over he aimed and fired, and each time he scored a bull. The PSI who ran the place, an ex-gunman himself, looked on and was happy. Craig never gave him any problems. Craig began to relax, until the thought hit him: no matter what you do to a target, you cannot make it feel.
He went back to his flat and worked doggedly on his hands, punching and striking at the thin bags of hard sand. When he had had enough, he went to the phone and called Sir Matthew Chinn. Sir Matthew was the very eminent psychiatrist who had treated him after he had been tortured. Craig spoke to a housemaid, a butler, and a secretary. They were unanimous. Sir Matthew was unavailable for at least six weeks. Craig wondered if Sir Matthew's unavailability were Loomis's idea. Sir Matthew had not wanted Craig to work for the department ever again, but Loomis had insisted. He was insisting now. From time to time Craig hated Loomis, but there was no sense in it really, he thought. There was nowhere else for him to go.
New York began in the Boeing 707, and Craig was grateful for it. There was a hell of a lot of New York to get used to. The flight was all dry martinis and chicken a la king and the toasted cigarettes he could never learn to enjoy. There was a movie, too. Hollywood money, Spanish location. All about the war in Greece. It was bold, noisy, and totally inaccurate. Craig calculated that if the hero had behaved in reality as he did on the screen he would have been shot dead twenty-three times. He enjoyed the movie. It was right that he should. According to his cover, he was an advertising man sent over to study American techniques; not the ulcer-gnarled, thwarted genius advertising man, the extrovert, jolly kind, the kind that actually likes war movies that gross six million. After the movie he read a paperback about rape in Streatham, then abandoned that for
The run-in was slow and easy, the way Craig liked it, the wheels settled gingerly on the tarmac like a fat man in a hot bath. Craig remained seated and refrained from smoking as the signs and hostess told him to do, then queued, briefcase in hand, to be smiled at, wished a pleasant stay, and walk into the humid, infrequent sunshine of Kennedy Airport, the quick-fire politeness of immigration and the ultimate, grudging acceptance of the world's worst customs officers that he was not carrying heroin, marijuana, or fresh fruit. He joined another queue then, for the helicopter, and the lazy, clattering journey through the concrete canyons of Manhattan, to look down at the cars like beetles, the human beings like ants, except that these ants, these beetles, scurried only in the predestined straight lines that the avenues and streets laid down for them. The helicopter waltzed slowly down the sky and Craig marveled at the great ranks of skyscrapers, tall, thin giants that were sometimes elegant, sometimes ugly, sometimes—so quickly you grow blase in New York—just dull. Then the clattering died and he was on the roof of the Pan Am Building, and down or up New York was all around him as far as the Hudson River, and only the sky was closed to the scurrying ants below.
He took a cab to his hotel, an ant himself now, alive and scurrying inside a beetle. The taxi driver talked about the humidity, only fifty but still climbing, and what the figure would have to be before the race riots started. Seventy? Seventy-five? Eighty? Meterology and social science welded together to form an irrefragable law.
'What this city needs,' said the taxi driver, 'is one hundred percent air conditioning. Just one big unit all the way to Queens. Then we might have some peace in the summer.'
Craig, sweating in the back seat, agreed with him. They had found him a hotel in the East Forties, and it was the kind he liked; old, with a lot of leather, and pictures on the walls that related to people who had actually lived, actually achieved something in the hotel. There was a man waiting for him too, a single-unit committee of welcome, A. J. Scott-Saunders of the British Embassy. A. J. Scott-Saunders was lean and exquisite, his tie was Old Harrovian and his manner distant, which impressed the desk clerk and overawed the bellboy who took Craig's bags to the elevator, opened the door of his suite, and demonstrated lights, taps, and air conditioning like a saint performing all his miracles at once. Craig handed over money, and A. J. Scott-Saunders sighed.
'I'd like some ice,' said Craig, 'soda water, and ginger ale.' The bellboy went, and until he returned Craig kept up an uninterrupted flow of conversation about his trip, the food, the movie, and as he talked searched the suite for the kind of bugs unobtrusive enough to be smuggled into an exclusive hotel in the East Forties. There weren't any. When the bellboy returned he handed over more money and poured drinks from his duty-free bottle.
'You do yourself well,' said Scott-Saunders.
'When you're in the advertising game you have to,' said Craig.
Scott-Saunders looked disgusted and opened his briefcase.
'I have here fifty thousand dollars emergency money,' he said. 'The money is to be used at your discretion.' The thought obviously caused him pain, and the pain intensified as Craig counted it.
'All there,' said Craig, and waited. Scott-Saunders sipped Scotch and water.
'Have you got anything else for me?'
'Isn't that enough?'
'I didn't mean money,' said Craig.
Scott-Saunders looked surprised, his best yet.
'What else could I bring you?' he asked.
'Equipment,' said Craig. 'You know. Machinery.'
'I'm very much afraid I don't know,' Scott-Saunders said. 'Money was all I was told to bring. Money—and two requests: one, spend no more of those dollars than you have to; two, keep away from the British Embassy. I trust I make myself clear?'
'Transparent,' said Craig, and Scott-Saunders flushed, finished his drink, and made for the door. Somehow Craig was in his way, which was strange. Scott-Saunders could swear that he had scarcely moved.
'I've done this sort of thing before,' Craig said. 'Have you?'
'Never,' Scott-Saunders said.
'You have a regular man for this job?'
'We do,' Scott-Saunders said. 'He was busy today.'
Craig let him go. The regular man was busy, so they'd sent him an idiot with the right accent who knew
