Don Winslow: Satori

“I apologize for my rudeness,” Nicholai said. “I have become unused to conversation.”

“Pas de quoi .” She liked that he apologized.

The tarte was delicious, the coffee, surprisingly more so. Nicholai sat back in his chair and Solange nudged the pack of cigarettes toward him. “Take two,” she said, “light them, and give one to me.”

“Seriously?”

She laughed. “Didn’t you ever go to the cinema?”

“No.” It always seemed an odd concept to him, to sit and stare at other people’s fantasies projected through a strip of celluloid.

“I love the cinema,” Solange said. “I wanted to be an actress.”

Nicholai thought to ask what had prevented her – certainly she was attractive enough – but then decided that the answer might cause her sadness, so he refrained. Instead, he shook two cigarettes from the pack, put them both in his mouth, then struck a match and lit them. When the tip of one glowed, he handed it to her.

“Formidable,” Solange said. “Paul Henreid would be jealous.”

Nicholai had no idea what she meant, but he inhaled the smoke and endured a spasm of coughing. It hurt where the stitches were. “It’s been a while,” he said when he recovered.

“Apparently.” She laughed at him but he didn’t feel in the least offended or embarrassed. It was more as if they were sharing an amusing moment, and he started to laugh himself. Again, it hurt a little bit, and he realized that it had been a very long time since he’d laughed with another person.

Solange discerned his thought. “It is good, no? We have not lived through laughing times, I think, you and me.”

“Nor the world at large,” Nicholai said

She refilled his wine glass, then her own, lifted it and said, “To better times.”

“To better times.”

“You must learn to smoke, Nicholai,” she said. “All Frenchmen smoke.”

“I sneaked cigarettes when I was a boy in Shanghai,” Nicholai answered. “The Chinese smoke like chimneys. Smoke, and spit.”

“We can do without the spitting, I think.”

After lunch he strolled in the garden.

It had been very well done, indeed. Pathways led around an area of gravel carefully raked to replicate the ripples of the ocean. A small “island,” of short grass and stone, in the middle of the “sea,” represented the mountains of Japan. Shrubs had been perfectly placed around the path to offer a fresh perspective at every curve.

Like life itself, Nicholai thought.

THE NEXT FEW WEEKS passed in pleasant routine.

Nicholai woke early and went into the garden to meditate. When he came out, Solange had a café au lait and a croissant ready for him, and while it took him some time to get used to the concept of bread for breakfast, he came to enjoy it. After breakfast they engaged in conversation, during which she corrected his accent and suggested current slang and vernacular. Solange was an exacting taskmistress, which Nicholai appreciated.

For her part, Solange knew that the slightest slip, a careless anachronism or a lapse into a stilted formality, could cost him his life. So she pushed him hard, insisted on perfection, challenged his intellect and considerable talent for languages. He exceeded her expectations – his pride made him a superb student.

They conversed through lunch, and then Nicholai took his customary walk in the garden. Knowing that he needed solitude, she was discreet enough never to accept his polite invitation to join him. Instead, she had a small rest before starting preparations for dinner. When he came back, they would go over maps of Montpellier, photographs of certain cafés, restaurants, and landmarks that a native would know. She quizzed him about the Place Ste.-Anne, the marketplace, who sold the best peaches, where one could get a decent bottle of wine for a price.

Following the afternoon study session, Nicholai repaired to his room to rest, study, and bathe, which he did in a gloriously hot Japanese tub. He emerged from the near-scalding water delightfully refreshed, and then dressed for dinner, which was always French and always superb. After dinner they had a coffee and a cognac, conversed casually, perhaps listened to a little radio until Solange retired to her bedroom.

Then Nicholai changed into a gi and went out into the garden for his nightly ritual. At first, Solange peeked through her window blinds to watch him perform the intricate maneuvers of the kata – the repetitive martial arts routines – of hoda korosu, “naked kill.” He appeared to be dancing, but after a few nights of watching Solange started to perceive that he was fighting numerous imaginary enemies coming at him from all directions, and that the motions of the “dance” were in fact defensive blocks followed by lethal strikes. If it was a dance, it was a dance of death.

Nicholai enjoyed these sessions very much – it was a joy to exercise in the garden, it calmed his mind and spirit, and besides, his instinct told him that he might very well need to polish his rusty skills to survive the mission, the target of which Haverford would still not disclose.

So Nicholai exercised with a purpose, glad to find that his mind and body responded even after the years of relative inactivity – although he did thousands of press-ups and sit-ups in his cell – and that the complicated and subtle movements of the hoda korosu kata came back to him.

He had started studying “naked kill” during his second year in Tokyo. The rarefied form of karate – which itself means “empty hand” – was taught by an old Japanese master of the lethal art who at first refused to teach an apparent Westerner the ancient secrets. But Nicholai persevered, mostly by kneeling in a painful position at the edge of the mat and watching, night after night, until finally the master called him over and administered a beating that was the first of many lessons.

Essential to hoda korosu was the mastery of ki, the internal life force that came from the proper management of breath. It was ki, flowing through the body from the lower abdomen to every vein, muscle, and nerve in the body, that gave the hoda korosu strikes their lethal force, especially at close range.

The other necessary element was the ability to calm the mind, to free it for the creativity to find a lethal weapon among common objects that might be at hand in the suddenness of an unexpected attack.

As he resumed his practice now, the first few nights were brutal in their clumsiness and would have been appalling had he not found his ineptitude almost comical. But his quickness and strength developed quickly and it wasn’t long before he reacquired some skill and even a measure of grace. His master had taught him – sometimes with a bamboo rod across the back – to train with utter seriousness, to picture his enemies as he dispatched them, and Nicholai did this as he slid back and forth across the garden, repeating the lengthy kata dozens of times before he stopped, his gi soaked with sweat. Then he treated himself to a quick bath, collapsed into bed, and was soon asleep.

One morning, two weeks into his stay, Solange surprised him by saying, “This is a big day for you, Nicholai.”

“How so?”

“The unveiling, so to speak.”

“Of…”

“You, of course,” she said. “Your face.”

He had gone to the doctor’s office once a week for the hefty Irish nurse to change his wrappings, none too gently at that. But she had deliberately kept him away from a mirror until the healing process was complete, so this would be the first time that he would see his reconstructed face.

If he was at all nervous or anxious, he didn’t betray it. It was as if Solange had told him that they were going to see a photo exhibit or a film. He seemed detached. If it were me, she thought, I would be a mess – he was as cool as a March morning, placid as a still pond.