Read Linnear 01 - The Ninja for Free Online Page A

have.”
    And all the while she watched his eyes for any hint that he might be mocking her. She found none.
    ‘What is it you wish to know, Justine?’ he said softly. ‘Are you afraid I won’t tell you?”
    ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m afraid that you will.’ Her nails plucked at the nubs of cotton as a musician fingers the strings of a harp. ‘I want to and I don’t want to,’ she said after a while.
    He was about to say, with a smile, that it wasn’t so serious but he realized that it was; he knew what she was talking about. He came around the end of the sofa, stood by her. ‘It’s only me, Justine,’ he said, ‘who’s here. There’s only the two of us.’
    ‘I know.’ But it was not enough because she had said it like a little girl who did not quite believe what she was saying, wanting only some outside reassurance for an important inner act.
    She broke away from this tight orbit, perhaps feeling the increasing magnetism beginning to influence the balance, and went across the room to stand in front of the large window. The outside lights were still on, and beyond the porch and the fluttering pitiful moths the sea broke endlessly onto the shore, the sand now as dark as coal.
    ‘You know, for some reason this view reminds me of San Francisco.’
    ‘When were you there?’ he asked, coming round and sitting on one arm of the sofa.
    ‘About two years ago, I guess. I was there for eighteen months, almost.’
    ‘Why’d you leave?’
    ‘I - broke up with someone. Came back here. Returned to the East, the prodigal daughter, into the bosom of her family.’ For some reason that struck her as funny, but the laugh seemed to strangle and die in her throat.
    ‘You loved the city.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I did that. Very much.”
    ‘Then why leave it?’
    ‘I - had to.’ She lifted her slim hand, then looked at it, surprised that it was in that position. ‘I was a different person then. Not at all secure.’ She clasped her hands in front of her, arms extended downwards. ‘I was so vulnerable. I felt - I guess I felt that I couldn’t stay there by myself. There was a kind of wind sailing through me.’ As if it were an afterthought, she said, ‘It was a stupid situation. / was stupid.’ She shook her head as if she still could not believe how she had acted.
    ‘I’ve been there twice,’ Nicholas said. ‘San Francisco, I mean. I fell in love with it. Its size; its whiteness viewed from Mill Valley.’ He was watching the thin line of phosphorescence, almost transparent, that marked the rise of the surf and its subsequent fall to earth, coming in, coming in. ‘I used to go down to the shore just to watch the Pacific and think: Here are these waves rolling in, rolling all the way across the world from Japan.’
    ‘Why did you leave?’ she asked. ‘What made you come here?’
    He took a deep breath. ‘That’s difficult to sum up in words. I suppose it was an aggregate of many things, a slow accretion. My father, you know, he wanted to come to America. He loved Japan. Fought for it, always. He might have come here himself but - it wasn’t his karma, I suppose. It was something he regretted.’ The spume was like silver lace far away - out there on the bosom of the sea. ‘If there is a part of him within me, then he’s here now and that makes me feel all right.’
    ‘Do you really believe that? Life after -‘
    He smiled. ‘Oh yes. Oh no. I cannot tell you truthfully. East meets West inside me like swirling currents and there is a kind of tug of war. But about my father, my mother. They are with me, yes.’
    ‘It seems so odd -‘
    ‘Only because we are here, standing on a porch in West Bay Bridge. If we were in Asia…’ He shrugged as if this explanation were sufficient. ‘And, too, I came here to prove to myself that I could be a Westerner as well as an Easterner. I majored in mass communications at college, launched into the atom age. Advertising seemed a logical choice