Kiai! & Mistress of Death Read online

  "Diago!"

  "That's right," she said. "It's diluted, but we're blood relations. Same great-grandfather on the Caucasian side. He likes to claim he's half Japanese and half black, but the black's half white."

  "He came to my dojo," I said, things falling into place.

  She shrugged indifferently. "Is that your judo shop, you mean? He must've been checking out the local scene, after Daddy paid his way here. It had to be quiet, 'cause Diago's in some kind of trouble with the law, but what he knows, he knows, Daddy says. I guess you passed."

  I didn't know whether to be relieved or furious. Sending a man like Diago just to check me out.

  "All right," I said. "Cheeseburger and shake."

  "Ninety seconds," she said as she disappeared.

  Out of curiosity, I checked my watch, setting the bezel. Thera was very nearly as good as her word. In just under two minutes she returned, fetchingly dressed in blouse, jumper and bobbie-soxer shoes. A yellow ribbon held back her brown hair. How she had done it all in that time I didn't know, but I had to admit that she had really brought out her distaff assets. I had forgotten how pretty seventeen could be.

  "I'll drive," she said.

  I shrugged. It was her show, at fifty dollars an hour. All I wanted was a chance to get her off-stage and relaxed so that I could get through to her about judo. Because I could see that I did have things to teach her. If anybody was going to need the womanly art of self-defense in college or in life, she was the one. She was a rich vamp who thought male-female was no more than a game.

  She had a high-powered sport car, of course, with an inverted silver Y circled on the hood. I hung on as she tooled it through midmorning traffic, and I felt insecure even in the shoulder harness.

  It was no hamburger shop she parked beside. The lighted sign said CALVIN'S BAR.

  "Not here!" I said. But she had already jumped out of the open car while I fumbled with the unfamiliar harness. She was pushing through the door, and I had to follow.

  It was dark inside, and I didn't spot her immediately. The decor was red, the bartender big and black. Now I knew the game Thera was playing, but there was no polite way out of it.

  I tapped on the counter. Two mini-skirted B-girls, blonde and redhead, glanced my way, but I fixed my stare on the man. "The girl is underage," I said.

  Bartenders are wary of such statements. "Who are you?" he demanded.

  I laid down my card. Now I could see well enough in the twilight.

  He squinted at the paper, then at me, appraisingly. I knew he didn't want trouble; no bartender does, however tough he looks. Particularly not age trouble.

  "Her?" he asked.

  "Thera Drummond. Daughter of the founder of Drummond Industries." That was identification enough; Drummond was by far the largest local employer. "I'm supposed to be teaching her self-defense. Once I get her attention."

  He decided I was legitimate. He glanced nervously into the back where there were several small tables and chairs. Thera was there, talking with a pair of husky college types. No wonder she had gotten herself up like a co-ed.

  "Can you get her out quietly?" the bartender asked.

  I shook my head dubiously. "She wants a scene."

  "No rough stuff," he cautioned. "I don't want to blow the whistle, but—"

  "I'll try." I walked to the corner.

  Thera was watching me covertly, waiting to see what I'd do. I could guess what she had been telling the boys.

  "My card," I said, setting one down on the table. "This girl is with me and she's underage."

  Both boys stood aggressively. "That ain't the way we heard it!" the one on the left said.

  I didn't fool with him. I put out my left hand and applied the Shi-atsu grip, pinching his upper trapezius muscle between my thumb and fingers. I put pressure on the nerve center halfway between shoulder and neck, producing extreme pain. The Japanese name for the grip, loosely translated, means "pain hold."

  "I'm sure you didn't mean to question my integrity," I said quietly, bearing down just enough to paralyze him. "Come to my club this afternoon for a free lesson, and no hard feelings. Okay?" I was giving him an out.

  "S-sure!" the youth whispered, sweating.

  I let him go. If there is one thing tough punks respect, it is superior force, and they know it when they experience it. I spoke to Thera: "More trouble from you, child, and I'll haul you out of here bottoms up!"

  "Nice bluff," she said, seeming unconcerned. But I had gotten to her too, for she came out. If there is one thing the spoiled children of millionaire recluses dislike it is being made to look ridiculous in public. I had, in effect, put a pain hold on her pride.

  Jim had to fill in for me in the morning class two days a week, because of the tutoring conflict. Mostly this was just a matter of warmup and uchikomi set throws, and I would make it back in time for the real instruction. I don't like to delegate that part of it, because they are in the end my students, nobody else's.

  Jim also took care of the roll-call and much of the paperwork: registering new students, selling judogi uniforms, listing lesson payments and paying our bills. He taught the new students the basics, the first two or three lessons, saving my effort for the serious techniques. All part of learning how to run a successful judo club, which of course was his long-range ambition.

  "New student, looks promising," he announced as I entered.

  "Good! We need that kind! What's his name?"

  "Charles Smith. He's had some prior training."

  Something nagged me. "Where?"

  "Dato's. He was there several months, but just didn't like the method. So he—"

  "So that's the student I'm supposed to have stolen."

  "Stolen?" Jim looked at me quizzically.

  "Dato called me a few days ago, accusing me of—never mind. Dato's crazy." I paused. "But maybe I'd better have a talk with Charles Smith, just to get things straight."

  "I'll point him out to your tomorrow," Jim said.

  The next morning the mat was there, and so was Thera, in her judogi uniform. But her attitude had not improved.

  "This is pointless," she said. "College isn't the jungle Daddy thinks. He never went himself."

  "Maybe not," I said carefully. "I went only a couple of years. But you won't spend your whole life there. It's smart to know how to take care of yourself."

  "I know as much as I need! Only stupid girls get raped."

  "Any woman can run into trouble," I said. "If her car breaks down in a bad neighborhood, or if she's alone."

  "Pooh!" she said, tossing her head. "All she has to do is lock her legs together and scream. And bite, if necessary."

  I shook my head. "A man can overcome a woman, if he has the time and the privacy and the nerve." Not strictly true; it depended on the particular man and woman. But her foolish certainties annoyed me.

  "That's a lie! You couldn't rape me!"

  So that was her game today. Set me up for a demonstration, then scream rape.

  "You teenagers have funny ideas," I said, emphasizing her youth again. "Do you really want a demonstration?"

  "Sure," she said, eyeing me sidelong. "Try it."

  I applied the shi-atsu pain hold to her shoulder. "Try to scream," I suggested.

  Thera opened her mouth and took a breath. I increased the pressure. Her lungs deflated, but she did not scream.

  "Bite," I said.

  She tried to turn her head to find flesh, but couldn't.

  "Spread your legs," I said.

  She resisted. This time I wasn't inhibiting her response, I was forcing her active cooperation, and that is much harder. But I pinched more firmly, giving her a real taste of what pain could be. Tears beaded in her eyes, but still she held out. Slowly I tightened the grip yet more, centering directly on the nerve complex. She was in agony, I knew, but it was a necessary cruelty. "Spread," I repeated softly.

  And slowly she spread.

  I let her go. Thera fell away with a little anguished cry. S
he rubbed her shoulder and looked at me, smoldering.

  "Would you like to learn the countermove?" I inquired innocently.

  "So you're Charles Smith," I said. "Why did you leave Dato?"

  The young man—a tousle-headed blond, not large but strong and graceful—shook his head. "If it's all the same to you, sir, I'd rather not talk about it."

  "If it's all the same to you, don't call me 'sir,'" I said, smiling. "Okay, I know Dato, so you don't have to say anything there. But you ought to understand that he was most upset about your departure."

  He looked at me sharply. "That's not true!"

  "Uh-huh. Then why did he call me up and cuss me out about it?"

  Smith shook his head in bewilderment. "That doesn't make sense! I thought he'd be mad when I told him it was my last day, but he wasn't. He was very calm about it. Wished me well and everything. So you must be wrong."

  "He certainly seemed upset," I said. "Maybe he cooled off before you actually parted."

  "Sir, I only talked with him the last day, at the end of the session. Couldn't bring myself to do it earlier. But I needn't have worried. And he didn't get mad later, either, because he asked me to come in the next day, no charge."

  "What for? Dato gives nothing away free."

  "He did this time, sir. He showed me several important blows, some death-blows too. Way beyond my present level. He really knows his stuff!" He paused. "I know what you're thinking. That he roughed me up. But he didn't. He was extremely nice. He explained each move and demonstrated it, not hard at all. Only one time he forgot and really hit me, and he apologized immediately. Said he was getting old, and had misjudged. And those blows are important, too. I'll be able to use them for self-defense, once I reach that proficiency. Now does that sound like anger or poor sportsmanship?"

  I shook my head. "No, it doesn't. I must have misjudged Dato." But I wondered about that abusive call, that must have been made between the time Dato learned his prize student was leaving and his demonstration of those select judo blows. What did it mean? I could imagine only one consistent pattern and that was so ugly it was paranoid. I put it out of my mind, ashamed to harbor such a suspicion.

  Thera's lessons went well enough thereafter. She was a healthy girl and well coordinated. She had gone the physical sports route, of course: horse riding, tennis, swimming and so on. She liked to excel, and that's a good attitude, when not pushed too hard. But I suspected I had a price to pay for my early victories over her unruly will. Thera had seldom been curbed before, and it was possible she was merely biding her time before making some more effective move.

  I didn't like the empty house. Not when I had an attractive seventeen-year-old girl to train. Judo entails considerable handling, necessarily; you can't throw anyone to the mat without physical contact. Certainly you can't initiate a complete novice without intimate demonstration.

  No problem in itself, of course. That's my business: training people to be judokas, and to defend themselves. I have trained women and children. But always in the club. Always in the semi-public atmosphere of the class, where parents may freely enter and watch. There is no such thing as sexual temptation in such a situation. More importantly, there is no question of propriety, for there are many witnesses to every act of instruction. I have pinned beautiful women and felt their soft bosoms heaving under my body as they struggled to nullify my advantage; I have had their rounded resilient buttocks against my masculinity; I have been subjected to kamishi-hogatame, my head locked between feminine thighs so that I smelled the odors of passion or of struggle while feeling her panting breath upon my private parts. What tales I might tell, if I were a taleteller! But on the mat I am like a doctor: I observe without arousal.

  Until this tutoring sequence.

  "We'll start with osoto-gari," I said, taking my stance before her. "In English, that's 'major outer reaping.' It is an elementary judo throw."

  I grasped her lapels, and with my right foot I swept her right leg out from under. She had to fall, but I let her down gently. She landed and rolled. Her belt had gotten loose, and her jacket fell open. She wore no halter underneath. She lay for a moment on her back, one breast exposed.

  I didn't comment. Dishabille happens, in judo. I've seen jackets torn off in the throes of mat-work, and trousers yanked down, male and female. All one needs to do is get on one knee, dress again, retie the belt, and proceed as if nothing has happened. That way, nothing has happened.

  But I had to admit, privately, that Thera had a fine figure. She was not voluptuous, and she was a bit scant in the bosom, as teenagers tend to be, but she was lithe and slim and strong and as nicely formed overall as I had seen. Ah, youth! No other age could match the splendid physical tone that came naturally to the newly mature. If only her temperament could be as pleasant.

  "That was not a good landing," I said. "You hung onto me instead of striking the tatami with your hand. That way can make me lose my balance so that I fall on top of you, perhaps breaking your rib."

  She nodded thoughtfully.

  "Now I'll show you how to take a fall. Try osoto-gari on me." She got up and I showed her how to make the push and sweep, and I took a couple of dramatic spills for her, showing her how to break the fall without dislocating the elbow.

  The next time she did it perfectly. She learned quickly.

  It is possible to progress quite rapidly in judo, if the student is apt and industrious and if the instructor is competent. This is especially true in tutoring, for the instructor's whole attention is given to the one student. Thera worked hard, much harder than her original attitude had promised. When I told her to practice a particular motion, she practiced it, and next day she had it down pat. I gave her more difficult assignments, and she mastered these too. But she was not slavish about it; she asked intelligent questions, trying to grasp the purpose as well as the mechanics.

  "Why is it so stylized?" she asked when I drilled her on the katas. "For self-defense, wouldn't it be better to get right into it and not give the guy a chance to counter?"

  "For pure self-defense, yes," I admitted. "But this is not self-defense, now. This is training. Your object is to learn without being hurt, or hurting another. This formal drill will fix in your mind the proper response to any attack, so that you do it automatically in an emergency. And don't forget the sport aspect of judo. As with any other sport, the purpose is to demonstrate superiority without actually injuring your opponent or being injured by him. So it must be stylized to a certain extent, so that the moves can be exploited without danger. Attack and counter are done in set ways, and the man who performs best wins without damage. In a real fight, the superior man will still have the advantage of this skill, so nothing is lost."

  "Hey, I see!" she exclaimed. "It's like fencing with caps on your foils!"

  So she had fenced, too. "Pretty much," I agreed. It was becoming a real pleasure to work with her. But I remained alert for trouble, not trusting her moods.

  In the fifth week of training I arrived to find her sitting in the middle of the tatami, her legs crossed in the yoga position, her hair hanging loose. She was nude.

  "Meditation is good," I observed. "But this is practice time."

  She pouted. "Don't you ever think about anything but judo?"

  "Sure," I said lightly. "Karate, aikido, kung-fu, ninjitsu." But looking at her, I had urgent other thoughts. The muscle she had put on in the course of this training had filled out her thighs, cinched her waist, and lifted her breasts, forming her into a splendid figure of a woman. It is not true that muscle defeminizes; flab does. A truly healthy girl has more sex appeal than any bedroom-soft cow. Seventeen...

  "Really?"

  Of course she had me there. "I'm thinking about how much you'll need judo if you pull that stunt in the college gym."

  "That must be a compliment," she said, her eyes serenely closed. "Thanks, I suppose. I knew I could get one if I worked at it for two years or less."

  "Wisest not to shop too hard for sexual
compliments," I warned. "Many a girl gets in trouble because of unwitting come-ons."

  "Unwitting!" she exclaimed. "Do you need bifocals?"

  "I'm here to do a job."

  Her eyes opened. "You've done it, Jason. Who could rape me now?" She paused, giving me a level gaze. "Except you, when you get the nerve." She touched her shoulder where I had demonstrated the pain hold, and smiled.

  Fair enough. I had prepared her well to defend herself against that kind of attack, and soon she would be virtually—I smiled at my mental pun—impregnable. That was the point of this tutoring.

  "And you wouldn't have to," she added, casting down her eyes. I felt a reaction coming on, and I knew I couldn't afford body contact with her at this moment. In these weeks she had shown me some of what she could do when she really tried, and it was impressive, and I did like her. More than I ought to. I was hardly blind to the thirteen years between us, but now I perceived in the girl the woman she would become, and it was a heart-throbbing, groin-tightening vision. In sex appeal Thera was already major-league, and I envied that someone who would one year marry her.

  I turned about and left the room. The phone was down the hall. I dialed the number I had memorized in case of emergency.

  "Johnson Drummond," the voice rapped immediately. There was no intermediary on the industrialist's hot line.

  "Jason Striker. I want a chaperone for the lessons."

  I thought he would laugh, but he didn't bother. "Striker," he barked, "this is no damned school prom! I hired a man I could trust to do the job, so I wouldn't need to fool with—"

  Nobody interrupts Johnson Drummond. But I did. "Sir, you can't trust me anymore. Your daughter is a woman."

  He wasn't fazed. "Don't waste my time with the obvious! Now you shut up and do what I hired you for."

  "Why not have Diago finish her training? He—"

  It was as though he hadn't heard me, though I knew he had.

  "Do what needs to be done! I'll double the fee. Just don't bother me about trifles again."