White Tiger by Stephen Knight Page B

walking out in front of a bus. He was killed instantly, his body dragged for dozens of yards before the horrified bus driver could stop.
    For Ryoko, those were the blackest of days. She discovered she had endless tolerance for abuse, and could absorb the ravages of alcohol, of drugs, of rough-handed men who only wanted to use her, from low-level Yakuza henchmen to the captains of Japanese industry for whom she prostituted herself at the rate of ¥1,000,000 per night. She descended into a spiritual darkness she had never before known, never taking pleasure from the couplings, never able to maintain any kind of relationship, not able to buy enough things with all her money to fulfill her. But her fate was firmly established; no matter how bleak things got, no matter how utterly decimated she was on the inside, she was unable to summon the courage her father had. Where he had the steel in him to know what to do when life’s punishments far exceeded its rewards, she lacked that strength. So while she was sexing and drinking and drugging, she was also slowly going insane. Trapped in a life where there was no way out.
    Until the day she called Manning. She was intending to hire him — after all, he was a killer, right?—her only sole desire at that point was to beg him to make the pain stop. To end her miserable existence, and take from her the shame that always threatened to drown her, but never quite did.
    “I need to talk with you,” she had said when she called him. Hot tears burned down her lovely face, leaving trails of fire, her misery a black hole that threatened to consume every last bit of sanity, leaving behind only a mindless animal cowering in a beautiful package.
    “Please let me come see you,” she had begged.
    And of course, he did.
    At first, she found him to be cruel, refusing to honor her pleas, even though she had promised him every penny of her $250,000 net worth. He instead gave her $1,000, then took her north, to the island of Hokkaido, where he rented a house in the colorful, rustic wilderness outside of Sapporo. He denied her drugs, denied her alcohol, but provided her with companionship, understanding, and kinship. He never touched her sexually, never abused her, but forced her to confront her shame, as he had done so many years ago. She found strength in discovering his own pain, the pain borne from lost love and betrayals and fallen comrades on distant battlefields when he still considered himself a man of honor.
    She was not alone, and that gave her the boost she needed. While she didn’t hold any allusions that she and Manning were kindred spirits, as she groped her way back to reality she could understand they were more alike than not. He could never heal her, nor did he promise to do so; but he did make life bearable for her again, made her strong enough that she could awaken and face each new day without feeling the need to start it off with a scream...or a shot of whiskey or the pinch of the hypodermic.
    There were only two spots of trouble. One was when her employers found out where she was and sent a legal representative to order Ryoko to return to work, as she was still under contract. Manning rebuffed him, and the next day two yakuza showed up. Manning almost killed one but left the other functioning well enough to take his wounded compatriot to a doctor who would treat their kind without asking too many questions...or notifying the police. After that, other men with faces as hard as the yakuza ’s would come, but they spoke mostly Chinese and referred to him in only the most respectful of ways. Ryoko came to know that the Chinese addressed him with a special name: Bái Hu, the White Tiger.
    The second spot of trouble were the phone calls, those terse conversations he tried to keep hidden from her, when he spoke mostly Chinese. It was during these calls that his black times would return, and while he did all he could to shield her from them, she perceived them as easily if they were