Linnear 01 - The Ninja Read Free Page A

said, his voice now radiating confidence. ‘The course is a seminar, you see. Taught by four professors. Well, three now that Dr Kinkaid has fallen ill. It meets twice a week during the spring semester with the four - I’m including yourself, of course - rotating. You see the beauty of it, Mr Linnear? You can leave the curriculum to the others and stick to what you know better than anyone else in the Western Hemisphere.’ That strange, oddly likeable chuckle came again, reminding Nicholas of mint chocolates and crime sweets. ‘I don’t imagine you would have to concern yourself with overlapping the others’ material, would you? I mean to say,’ he rushed on, as if enraptured by the wholehearted assurance of his own voice, ‘the kind of things - uh, insights, as it were - into the Japanese mind are just the kind of things we are looking for. The students would be delighted, no doubt - as would we.’
    There was a singing discernible on the line in the ensuing silence between them and, faintly, Nicholas could make out the inconstant sibilances of other voices, like ghosts’, raised in argument.
    ‘Perhaps you would care to see the campus,’ Dean Whoolson said. ‘And, naturally, it is most beautiful in the spring.’
    Why not try something different? Nicholas had thought. ‘All right,’ he had said.
    People were still running past him, attracted by the anxiety the wailing siren brought out. A growing knot of curious onlookers hovered, quivering on the borderline between revulsion and fascination, moths circling a flame in an ever-tightening orbit. He concentrated on the sound of the surf, curling and rushing in towards him, calling like a friend, but the human voices, raised in excitement and query, pierced the afternoon like needles. For them it was but a side-show attraction, a chance to turn on the six o’clock news and say to their friends, ‘Hey! See that? I was there. I saw it happen,’ exactly as if it were Elizabeth Taylor and her touring party who had rolled through that particular stretch of surf, and then, as placidly as if they were contented bovines, -return to their icy astringent martinis, the sliced pepperoni dial someone had thoughtfully brought out from Balducci’s in the city.
    His house was of weathered grey shingle and coffee-coloured brick with neither the pop-eyed Plexiglas bubble windows nor the bizarre cantilevered walls dial many of the homes had along this stretch. To the right of the house, the dunes abruptly gave way to flat sand, somewhat lower man dial of the surrounding area. There had been, until early December, a house worth roughly a quarter of a million dollars on that property, but the winter had been fully as foul as the one in 1977-8 and it had been washed away with much of the land itself. The family was still trying to get the insurance money to rebuild. In the meantime, there was more open space to the side than was usual along this densely populated and highly fashionable beachfront.
    The breakers seemed to be pounding harder as the tide continued to sweep in and he felt the cold salt water licking up his ankles to his calves. The bottoms of his jeans, though turned up several times, pulled heavy with washed sand. He was reaching down to brush them out when a figure barrelled into him. He fell backwards with a grunt, someone sprawled on top of him.
    ‘Why the hell don’t you watch where you’re going?” he yelled crossly as he disentangled himself.
    ‘Sorry, but you don’t have to scream, do you? It was a simple mistake.’
    The first thing he saw was her face, though before that he smelled her perfume, faintly citric and as dry as Dean Whoolson’s voice. Her face was extremely close to his. Her eyes he thought at first were hazel but then he saw that they certainly had more green in them than brown. There were one or two red flecks floating in the left iris. Her skin was creamy and lightly freckled. Her nose was rather too wide, which gave her character, and her