Satori - Don Winslow [11]
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.