Black Heart, page 29
'I think you're crazy.'
Thwaite smiled. 'Yeah. I guess I am at that.'
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July 1967-August 1968 Bar ay, Cambodia
There was a surprise awaiting Sok when he and his cadre returned from their mission in Angkor Thorn. Someone new had joined the main cadre. He was not a new recruit. He was not, to Sok's way of thinking, a young man. He was not even
Khmer.
All during the day the men saw him walking in and out of the encampment and they speculated about who he was. Sam seemed to know. He was now Serei's right-hand man. Serei was the main cadre's leader; the one who had first indoctrinated Sok. But when Sok asked him he just smiled and said, 'Wait until tonight. Then you'll all know at once. I don't want to spoil the
surprise.'
After the evening meal, Comrade Serei called them all into a circle and as Sam had predicted, introduced the man. It turned out he was Japanese. 'This is Mit Musashi Murano,' Serei said. 'He is a teacher who has travelled a long way to aid us in our fight for a free Kampuchea. Listen closely to him and when he speaks you will obey him as you would obey Angka.'
Murano was a short, heavyset man with iron filings for hair and lines in his face as if scored deep into a granitic core. He was a man who, Sok became convinced, had never learned how to smile. He showed his approval by baring his teeth in somewhat the same expression that Sok had seen on men who had died a
hard death.
Murano's eyes were extraordinary: they looked as if they were double-lidded like a lizard's. When he watched you there was the impression of intense almost painful concentration to the exclusion of all else. And when one was in the midst of a lesson he was teaching, those eyes would become almost pale in their milkiness, frightening in their alien cast.
Of all of Murano's Khmer Rouge students, Sok was the only one with the temerity to ask him why his eyes changed so during
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those times. The Japanese folded his arms across his barrel chest and stared straight at Sok. At that moment, his eyes went pale as if that translucent second lid had been tripped by some inner source.
Sok flinched. It appeared to him as if something hard and flinty had punctured his heart and kept on going into the very core of his soul. It stuck there, squirming like an impaled serpent, until he gasped and shook himself like a dog coming in out of the rain.
When his eyes focused again, he saw that Murano's own eyes were black as night once more. The writhing snake was gone from inside him.
'Now you know,' Murano said softly. 'I enter into the fray. I become one with you as you become one with your body, your mind, your reflexes, the animal core of you. Kokoro.'
At first, Sok found this impossible to understand but as he became more and more involved in the lessons Murano taught, the knowledge began to seep into him like the subtly shifting bed of a river being coaxed by a new tide. To an outsider, for instance, it might seem that Murano dealt with the physical side of aggressiveness.
Nothing could be further from the truth and, as Sok eventually discovered, that kind of traditional thinking in an opponent was a blessing, a state to be perpetuated rather than rectified.
'There is no physical,' Murano told him one day in his oddly accented French he did not, of course, speak Khmer. 'There is no mental. These two distinctions only exist within the artificial framework man has created for himself. These concepts are easy to deal with; the truth is not so.'
He lifted his right arm so that it was vertical from elbow to wrist. He made a fist. 'Now come here,' he said, 'and move my arm.'
Sok did as he was bade but found he could do nothing to budge the raised arm even a millimetre.
'So,' Murano said. 'If I tell you I am stronger than you, that is the truth. But if I say I used the strength in my muscles to defeat your efforts, that would be a lie. Can you tell me what 'he difference is?'
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Sok said that he could not.
'In combat,' Murano said, 'one enters a state that is whole. There is no, no inside. This truth is vast so listen well. If you understand this, you will be able to master everything else that
will come after.
'If you see an opponent and you think, "I will move my arm now", you are lost. There is a thing called reactive aggressiveness. It exists in every human being but it is little known and understood even less.' He lifted a finger. 'Let us say you are driving somewhere in a car. You are hit, the car begins to spin, then turn over.' The finger described movements in the air as if Murano were directing an art class. 'The car bursts into flame and now the situation has become lethal. The brain interprets this via the sense. It makes a judgement, then acts on it.
'Your arm lashes out against the locked door with such force that the metal springs open and you leap to safety. Has this happened because you have the muscles of a body builder? Has this happened because you have carefully worked out your escape route?' His head shook back and forth.
'It has happened because the human organism is in immediate danger of extinction. The primitive core is somehow set into motion. Without thought, the being is flooded with superhuman power and stamina.
'This is real. It happens every day. Now this is reactive aggressiveness and it is possible to reach down into your soul's heart and extract that strength when you need it.
'This is kokoro. Believe me when I tell you there is no one else in the world who can teach you this method of fighting. Elsewhere you may learn many methods from many sensei. That is good. I encourage experimentation when one is young.
'But the killing spirit is here. Believe that if you believe nothing else. I ask only for your undivided attention. Time will give the rest to you. Faith has no place in this discipline. You see; you hear; you feel. And you learn directly. This is the only method by which kokoro may be taught. 'Now we begin ...'
To say that from that moment on Sok's life changed would be a misnomer. In fact his life achieved a kind of metamorphosis.
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He found within himself or more accurately Murano put him in touch with the bedrock animal core. He found it violent and at first frighteningly primitive. In the first days he lived with it inside himself, shaking as if with the ague. It felt like some great lion let loose from its cage to stalk him. He could scent it, could feel its presence in a wholly palpable way.
And, in a frenzy of reaction, he tried to push it away from him.
In the process he almost killed himself. In that one terrifying moment not even Murano could get to him. He was locked in mortal combat with himself and, in the end, it was only Sam's intervention which saved him.
It was Sam who took him away from the makeshift cornpound in Baray and, off in the jungle with only the birds and the wide-eyed monkeys to watch, broke the inner deadlock within his younger brother.
'Own,' he whispered, crooning. 'Own.' At last he could hold Sok tight. They were both sweating heavily. 'Can you tell me what happened?'
For a long time Sok said nothing. He sat with his back against the bole of a banyan, his black blouse sticking uncomfortably to the damp flesh of his back. He looked out into the chittering emerald world around him and shuddered.
'Murano showed me ... feofeoro,' he said, finding his voice at last. It seemed to him that it had altered subtly, deepened and steadied. 'The heart of existence.' His head swung around and he looked into his brother's face. 'I think you were right to doubt the teachings of Preah Moha Panditto. Buddhism is not the universe.'
Sam looked sceptical. 'But now you think kokoro is.'
'No,' Sok shook his head. 'No, I don't think that at all.' He ran his fingers over his eyes and forehead; he dried his sopping face. 'But he showed me a part of myself I never understood before.' He put his hand in Sam's. 'You know, I used to watch your anger and wonder where it came from. I used to wonder why it was you were so angry. What could have happened to make you feel that way?
'Well I found out that I have the same kind of anger inside
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me. I just never could express it as directly as you always seemed to.' His face was sad; he was on the verge of tears. 'I could never explain it but when we were in battle, when I killed that way ... I don't know, it made me feel good. It distilled my anger into a recognizable shape and allowed it to pass out of me. Can you understand that?'
'Yes.' There was no hesitation in Sam's face. 'Our life is not safe; it's not secure. Looking back on it now, I don't think it ever was. The crisis was always just around the comer, lurking like an evil kmoch. Now, in a way, I'm glad it's all out in the open. For me at least it's less frightening because I can actively do something. I was never a talker.'
Sok looked out over the rim of trees. There was nothing but jungle though just beyond he knew there to be terraces of rice paddies, a kind of civilization. 'Sam,' he said softly, 'I've been frightened about what I've become. I've been frightened to say that this part of me is really me.'
'But it is you, Own. You know that.' He squeezed his brother's hand. 'You're not evil, Sok, if that's what's troubling you. None of us are.'
But he was not convinced of that; he had already been witness to too many atrocities. The priest in Angkor Thom haunted him: a vision of the beating replaying in his mind like a growling dog on a tight leash, ready to spring at his master's command. After the beating, they had erected a crude crucifix and nailed him to it, bloody and torn and already dead. 'As a sign,' Ros had said, 'that this is sovereign territory ofChet Khtnau.' He had raised his arm, the M-i filling his hand. 'Here is our flag!'
No, Sok thought now. This could not be the emblem of the new Kampuchea. But try as he might, he could not rid himself of that foul image. That priest could have been Preah Moha Panditto; only by the grace of the Amida Buddha was it someone else. But still a life; a life dedicated to peace and the teaching of peace taken by the sons of the revolution. What manner of beast had Kampuchea spawned?
Sok, sitting in the humid jungle, holding hands with his brother, did not know the answer to that question. Nor could he put a name to the creature let loose by Murano who now stalked inside, filled with an unnatural power.
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I What he could not quite articulate, even to his brother, what ^«was not yet fully formed in his mind was that this let-loose terror was wholly antithetical to what he had absorbed like mother's milk since the time when he could speak sentences: Buddhism. He had eaten it, drunk of it, breathed it for eight years without a second thought as to its significance or place in the world around him.
But the revolution had changed all that. He had many teachers now and all espoused different causes, taught different lessons, brought out different parts of him. Yet he was whole, not fragmented. He lived and as he did so, thought. There was only one Khieu Sokha.
With forceable will he calmed himself. As he had already told himself, this was not the time for the Amida Buddha. Those who turned to him were beaten down and hung up to be flayed away by wind and rain and sun and carrion birds. This was a time to make one's presence felt, to fight for a free Kampuchea, as Sam said. And then, when this evil time was over, he would return to the teachings of Preah Moha Panditto ... at least in his heart. He was still Buddhist but with no desire to forsake the real world for the priesthood.
Feeling much better now, he rose. Sam stood beside him, silently. Together in the great sparkling jungle, surrounded by palms and creepers, flora and fauna.
It was time for the evening meal.
But there were other metamorphoses in store. In battle, he used the knowledge Murano had imparted to him and thus gained the respect of all the cadre. And behind his back he became known as la machine mortelle: the killing machine. And he moved up in rank, becoming one of the cadre officers.
As for the Japanese sensei he watched Sok's rapid progress and felt that his emigration to Cambodia had been worth the trouble after all. Murano had had two wives in his long lifetime but no progeny. This he meant to rectify. He did not want a baby, of course. He knew he did not have enough years left within him to wait for a baby to grow into the youth from which the proper moulding could be achieved.
Outlawed in his native land, he began to move further east searching for a young man in his early teens with just the right
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psychological makeup. Physical requirements were less stringent: there had to be no abnormalities or deficiencies. That was all.
In Sok he felt he had found the perfect specimen. Now he could cease his wanderings. It was here in Cambodia where he would die and be buried. Well, that did not matter to him so much. He had never held the soil of Japan in that much reverence. Soil was soil as far as he was concerned. At least here he would be remembered as mentor, as sensei; he would be revered as a father of a sort.
That was all he required now for his life to be complete. He had always been a self-sufficient individual. The nature of his life's work made it so. One could not share kokoro with wife or aunt or uncle. The intimacy between sensei and student was all he had lived off of for more years than he could remember. It was all he had ever known. Orphaned as a boy, he had always wondered if somewhere in Japan lived a blood brother or sister. Now he would never know. Seeing Sok grow before his eyes he thought it no longer mattered. Here was all the family he would ever need. And through him a continuation of kokoro.
It did not seem at all odd to him that his true child should be a fleshless, bloodless creature of the mind. Kokoro. He had built his life from it and around it. For him it was the only form of existence; it comprised the Ten Commandments of the universe, more potent than either Shinto tenents or Buddhist catechism. It was the only law he acknowledged.
Deep within the second summer of his coming he drew Sok away from the cadre's encampment. Within the deep green bower made by a banyan tree swept around the remnants of an ancient temple, he whispered, 'Sok, my son, I am dying.'
Behind the Japanese Sok could see apsara, beautifully carved out of stone, caught frozen in the midst of her celestial dance. 'It cannot be,' he said. 'There are those within Angka who claim you're immortal.'
Murano bared his stained teeth. 'In that they are quite correct.' The sun was going down, the last rays filtering through the shifting layers of fronds to illuminate them; the rest of the
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camp was already dim in indigo shadow. Murano took Sok's calloused hand in his; his eyes seemed serene. ' You are my immortality, Sok.'
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Macomber met Senator Jack Sullivan at the Club. Although it had a much longer name, that was how Macomber always
referred to it.
The mansion-like greystone was located just east of Fifth Avenue in the mid-Fifties. There was no plaque on its facade, no insignia on its dove-grey awning save for the numerals of its address, written out in flowing script of the deepest maroon
- nothing at all to give the passerby an inkling of what was
housed inside.
There was, beyond the two sets of wide reinforced mahogany doors, a liveried attendant who would politely but firmly deflect the inquisitive individual who now and then ascended the worn marble steps to the Club's vestibule.
There were no blacks allowed as members and, especially, no Jews. There was more than enough money and power here to make certain of that.
A wide staircase gave out on the second storey gallery which it split in two. To the right, was the vast library where most of the members liked to congregate for a drink or a bit of a read before lunch. He turned towards the left. Here three smaller rooms could be reserved for meetings of a more private nature. A rigid-spined steward named Ben opened the gleaming panelled door to his knock.
'Good afternoon, sir,' His head bent slightly forward. His dark hair was parted and slick, as if it were brilliantined. 'Your guest, Mr Sullivan, has not yet arrived.' He ushered Macomber into the comfortable room.
Macomber, who had made certain to know this fact already, said, 'Quite all right, Ben.' He sat in one of the well-used but spotless wingback leather chairs of outsized proportions. To his left were the high carved mouldings, broken only by the black marble fireplace. Steel engravings hung neatly within each panel
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'1
described by the mouldings. The room was painted cream and robin's-egg blue. There was a small polished wooden table at his right hand. Across the room were table and chairs.
Macomber stretched out his long legs, crossing one ankle over the other. 'Bring me a dry vodka martini, will you, Ben?'
'Certainly, sir.'
'When Mr Sullivan gets here, bring him a drink if he wishes one, then you can attend to the food. Cracked crabs legs and cold lobster, right? Plenty of salad and I think we'll have Heinekens with that.'
'Very good, Mr Macomber.'
Ben was the only steward Macomber used when he booked one of his private meetings. A generous annual bonus was not necessary to ensure his discretion, Macomber was sure, but nursing homes were expensive and Ben's mother had been in one now for more than five years. He found the extra money indispensable.
Macomber was halfway through his drink by the time Ben ushered Jack Sullivan in. The two men shook hands and the Senator ordered a Glenlivet on the rocks. 'Better make that a triple,' he told Ben. 'I've had one helluva morning.' He sat down heavily opposite Macomber.
Jack Sullivan looked more like his pugilistic namesake than he did any senator Macomber had ever met. He was squareframed and broad-shouldered with a rather large head, given unnatural height by his wild wiry reddish-gold hair which came low down on his forehead. He had long arched eyebrows the same colour and cheeks so red you might think his skin held burst capillaries. He had a heavy square jaw and a nose verging on pug. It was, all things considered, a pure-blood Irish face as Sullivan himself loved to point out. He could name every one of his ancestors all the way back through six generations and once started on the revolution to his way of thinking there was only one - he could talk and, of course, argue, for seemingly endless hours.
