Tiger turned to Bond. ‘You understand that it is night-time. In a few days, you will have to be doing something similar. Note that the lengths of rope terminate in an iron hook which they throw up and catch in crevices between the stone blocks.’ The instructor said something to Tiger and pointed. Tiger nodded. He said to Bond, ‘The man at the end is the weakest of the team. The instructor thinks he will soon fall.’
The line of climbing men was now almost at the summit of the two-hundred-foot wall, and sure enough, with only yards to go, the end man lost his foothold and, with arms and legs flailing, and with a scream of terror, fell back down the sheer black face. His body hit once and then crashed into the calm waters of the moat. The instructor muttered something, stripped off his shirt, clambered on to the rail of the causeway and dived the hundred feet down into the water. It was a perfect dive, and he swam in a swift crawl towards the body that lay ominously face downwards in the moat. Tiger turned to Bond. ‘It is of no account. He was going to fail the man anyway. And now come into the courtyard. The invaders have scaled the wall and they will now use bojutsu on the defenders, that is fighting with the stave.’
Bond took a last glance at the instructor, who was now towing the corpse, which it certainly was, to the shore by its black hood. Bond wondered if any of the students was going to fail his test at bojutsu. Failure was certainly total in Tiger’s training camp!
Back in the courtyard, individual couples, dancing and dodging, were fighting furious single combats with thick staves about two yards long. They swung and parried with two hands on the stave, lunged at the belly, using the stave as a lance, or did complicated infighting with face almost pressed against face. Bond was astonished to see tremendous thrusts and whacks into the groin leaving the victim unmoved when he, Bond, would have been writhing in agony. He asked Tiger about this. Tiger, his eyes bright with the lust of battle, answered briefly that he would explain this later. Meanwhile, the invaders were slowly being overcome by the defence. Black figures toppled unconscious or lay groaning with hands clutched to head or stomach or shin. Then there came a shrill blast on the whistle from one of the instructors, and it was all over. The defenders had won. A doctor appeared and attended the fallen, and those who were on their feet bowed deeply to one another and then in the direction of Tiger. Tiger made a brief and fierce speech which he later told Bond was of congratulation on the sincerity of the display, and Bond was then led into the castle to drink tea and view the museum of ninja armament. This included spiked steel wheels, the size of a silver dollar, which could be whirled on the finger and thrown, chains with spiked weights at each end, used like the South American bolas for catching cattle, sharp nails twisted into knots for defeating barefoot pursuers (Bond remembered similar devices spread on the roads by the Resistance to puncture the tyres of German staff cars), hollowed bamboo for breathing under water (Bond had used the same device during an adventure on a Caribbean island), varieties of brass knuckles, gloves whose palms were studded with very sharp, slightly hooked nails for ‘walking’ up walls and across ceilings, and a host of similar rather primitive gadgets of offence and defence. Bond made appropriate noises of approval and amazement and reflected on the comparable Russian invention used with much success in West Germany, a cyanide gas pistol that left no trace and a sure diagnosis of heart failure. Tiger’s much vaunted ninjutsu just wasn’t in the same league!
Out in the courtyard, again, the leader of the camouflaged troop reported the discovery of motorcycle tyre tracks that stopped and turned back a mile from the castle. That had been the only trace of a tail. Then came, to Bond, the blessed bows and farewells and they were on their way again, bound for Kyoto.
‘Well, Bondo-san. What did you think of my training school?’
‘I thought it was very sincere. I can imagine that the skills that are learned would be most valuable, but I would have thought that the black dress for night work and the various gadgets would have been as incriminating, if you were caught, as a pistol. But they certainly went up that wall damned quick, and that bojutsu business would be very effective against the usual night-prowler with a bicycle chain or a flick knife. I must get Swaine and Adency to make me a two-yard-long walking stick.’
Tiger sucked his teeth impatiently. ‘You speak like a man who only knows of the sort of fighting that goes on in a cheap Western. You would not get very far with your method if you were trying to penetrate North Korea dressed as a simple peasant with his staff.’
James Bond was rather exhausted by the day. He was also sorry for the student who had died showing off for his and Tiger’s delectation. He said shortly, ‘None of your ninjas would last very long in East Berlin,’ and relapsed into a surly silence.
11 | ANATOMY CLASS
To Bond’s unspeakable relief, they put up that night at the smartest hotel in Kyoto, the Miyako. The comfortable bed, air-conditioning and Western-style lavatory on which one could actually sit were out of this world. Better still, Tiger said that unfortunately he had to dine with the Chief of Police of the prefecture and Bond ordered a pint of Jack Daniels and a double portion of eggs Benedict to be brought up to his room. Then, from a belated sense of duty, he watched ‘The Seven Detectives’, a famous Japanese television series, failed to spot the villain, and went to bed and slept for twelve hours.
The next morning, hungover and conscience-stricken, he obediently fell in with Tiger’s plans that they should visit the oldest whore-house in Japan before a quick drive to Osaka for the day’s journey across the Inland Sea to the southern island of Kyūshū. ‘Bit early for visiting a whore-house,’ had been his only comment.
Tiger laughed. ‘It is a matter of deep regret to me that your baser instincts should always be in the ascendancy, Bondo-san. Prostitution is now illegal in Japan. What we are about to visit is a national monument.’
‘Oh, good show!’
There was a deal of bowing and hissing at the whore-house, a spacious establishment in the now defunct red lamp street of the ancient capital, and they were presented with handsomely bound descriptive booklets by the earnest curator. They wandered over polished floors from chamber to chamber, and gravely inspected the sword cuts in the wooden supports that had been inflicted, according to Tiger, by samurai infuriated by lust and impatience. Bond inquired how many actual bedrooms there had been. It seemed to him that the whole place was taken up by a vast kitchen and many dining-rooms.