"Donahue, John - Sensei" - читать интересную книгу автора (Donahue John)

known it, but he had just committed a gross breach of etiquette.

"I am sorry, Mr. Reilly. I regret that we cannot accommodate you in
your request for a lesson. You are clearly not ready for any serious
training." With that, Yamashita looked right through him and stood up
like he was preparing to leave the floor.

"Wait a minute..." Reilly shot up and looked like he was going to
reach for the old man. Which was how I got to wondering about whether
I could poleax him. I was targeting him for a knuckle strike right
below the ear (I figured with any luck I could dislocate his jaw), but
there was really no need. Yamashita had about reached the limits of
his patience.

As Reilly came at him, Yamashita shot in, a smooth blur. There was an
elbow strike in there somewhere before he whipped Reilly around to
break his balance. Then Yamashita was behind him, clinging like a
limpet and bringing Reilly slowly down to the floor. The choke was (as
always) precisely executed: the flow of blood to the brain was
disrupted as he brought pressure to bear on the arteries and Reilly was
out cold.

Yamashita stood up and beckoned to Reilly's pals. "Remove him. Do not
come back." Not even breathing hard. They dragged Reilly off the
practice floor and trundled him away.

"What a foolish man. An arrogant and violent man." He looked around
at us all, then turned to me. "I am surprised at you, Burke. I would
have tried for the jaw dislocation. Work on your reaction time,
please."

He glided away and the lesson ended.

THREE

The Smell of Money

I live in Brooklyn because the rents are cheaper and Yamashitas dojo is
there, but I work in Bloomington, a planned suburb on Long Island that,
among its other unremarkable features, harbors the pedestrian
university that employs me.

Of course, it's not that I really work there. Dorian, like many other
colleges, pays a horde of part-time teachers to do the dirty work of
modern education. As an adjunct instructor I labor in obscurity so
that the full-time professors can think deeply in a measured, quiet,
unpressured life that, in my more bitter moments, I think must be like
the early onset of Alzheimer's.

A part-time college instructor typically makes about an eighth of the