Second Skin (44 page)

‘No. He’s proved he’s got a deadly, shrewd mind.’

‘What then?’

Nicholas breathed in the salt and fish tang of the air. The rain had taken most of the soot and carbon monoxide out of the atmosphere, and for the moment at least, the morning smelled good. ‘I suspect he’s leading us along a preselected path. What he wants is, right now, anyone’s guess.’ He thought a moment. ‘But perhaps you’re right. I’ve been thinking of the weapon he must have used for the murders. If I’m right about it being a push dagger, I think I know who made it for him. I’d better run by there first just to see if Mick’s got any other surprise weapons in store for us.’

‘I don’t like people playing God.’ Tanaka Gin put down his bowl, stacked his chopsticks across its rim. ‘They don’t know their place in the world.’

Nicholas looked at Tanaka Gin. ‘That’s as good a definition of Mick Leonforte as I can think of.’ But he could not help wondering whether it was also the correct definition of himself.

Mick ran his hand over Honniko’s breast and she moved like an impaled serpent. She was naked, her flesh gleaming with fragrant oil, bound at wrists, thighs, and ankles; there was a silk scarf tied across her eyes, two more beneath and above her breasts, thrusting them out like ripe fruit in a street market. Outside the small window rain beat a military tattoo on the circular glass. The chair on which they were fused like glass creaked with their movements. He smelled the heat rising off her like incense.

Honniko ran her tongue along the dark blue crescent tattoo on the inside of his wrist, so primitive the bamboo needles had left permanent holes in his skin, as if this were the one true way to identify him.

‘Men like me are misunderstood,’ Mick said, moving on her, slithering in the oil and their musk. ‘Passion frightens society and society is in the business of protecting itself first, last, and always.’ His hand found her nipple, erect and pliant. ‘Even when that society has outlived its usefulness.’

Honniko felt him deep inside her, moving easily from one orifice to another. She was used to him speaking in this way. It was like an incantation, his philosophy, the way she imagined Apollo or Dionysus might have spoken, once, so very long ago. It was part of this ritual – he made a habit of ritualizing everything – and it made her dizzy with sensation.

‘I am an inquirer after life, like Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and Nietzsche. I, like they, am feared and, when not feared, despised.’ In the saddle of Honniko’s own making, Mick stared out of the tiny prefab apartment in the Naigai Capsule Tower. ‘They were true heroes. They knew how to imbue their existence with a solidity and depth of meaning that made them feared. But fear did not concern them; it was the last thing on their minds.’ Rain beat against the glass, turning the cityscape into crazy streamers of light that ran like frosting off a melting cake. ‘What concerned them was the revelation of awe of themselves fountaining upward from their very hearts.’ His gaze fell upon the new and beautiful high-rise three hundred feet away, upon a particular set of windows above him through whose panes he could make out a familiar figure moving. ‘To make this happen they needed not only to subdue tradition but the gods within themselves in order to believe.’ The figure switched on a lamp and he could see her face now – Koei’s face. He was looking directly into the apartment she shared with Nicholas. She lifted her arms over her head, slid out of her shift. ‘How can this be done?’ he said, staring at Koei’s naked breasts and thrusting more deeply, more violently, making Honniko cry out. ‘King Vishvamitra discovered the truth centuries ago: the strength and fortitude to build a new heaven comes from the depths of one’s own hell.’

It’s just like drowning,
Vesper had said, and she’d been right. Eyes closed, back aching from the hit of the table edge, feeling as if he were on the verge of having a heart attack, Croaker nevertheless felt the unnatural lassitude overcome him. Vesper was doing it, but how? He’d heard stories about just this feeling from people who’d almost drowned, sinking into the depths where even semitropical seas were cold enough to chill the bones. Near death, air all but exhausted in the straining lungs, the body was seized by this same curious lassitude, carrying it downward into darkness.

Croaker heard the screams of terrified patrons as if from behind a thick concrete wall, was only dimly aware of the febrile rush of movement as Vesper used this gift that had been honed by Okami to damp Croaker’s senses and give the appearance of death. His pulse rate was way down, his heart pumped at a crawl. How
did
she do it?

Then he was being lifted onto a gurney, and bright sunlight against his closed lids was replaced by dimness as he was slid into the back of the private ambulance they’d contracted, and sirens blasting, they took off.

‘How’s he doing?’

Croaker recognized Rico Limòn’s voice. Limòn was a film special-effects expert Vesper had recruited through the Anti-Cartel Task Force, members of whom were even now posing as FBI agents as they took over the ‘investigation’ into Croaker’s ‘death.’
Right,
Croaker thought,
I’m starting to come out of it now.

‘What about this hand, would’ja? Never saw anything like it.’

Croaker tried to laugh. The paramedic was more interested in his biomechanical hand than he was in the bruises the bullets had made when they struck the Kevlar vest.

‘How’s it work?’

‘Revive him and maybe he’ll tell you,’ Limòn said crossly.

‘Yeah, yeah, okay. Keep your briefs on,’ the paramedic said.

Then Croaker coughed and snorted as the paramedic held the smelling salts under his nose. ‘Okay, okay, enough,’ he muttered as his eyes fluttered open.

He saw Limòn’s concerned brown face leaning over him. ‘How’s it feel to come back from the dead?’

Croaker grunted. ‘I don’t think I’m there just yet.’

‘So far, so good,’ said a voice from the recesses of the van. That would be Wade Forrest, the senior fed on this project. Forrest leaned into the light. ‘I want him in tip-top shape,’ he said to the interior at large. He was a large man, looked in fact like a football linesman with a neck as large as most models’ waists, small ears, brush-cut blondish hair, and what Croaker knew were light eyes hidden behind mirror glasses. He jutted his prominent jaw. ‘You okay, Croaker?’

For sure he had been the date of the homecoming queen each fall in college, Croaker thought. ‘Give me a minute, okay?’

‘We don’t have a minute,’ Forrest said in that flinty tone they taught you on the Potomac. He hunched forward as if giving quarterback signals in the huddle. ‘See, I’ve been after Caesare Leonforte for three years.’ He pulled at his brush cut. ‘I got gray hair because of this rotten sonuvabitch. I missed my daughter’s graduation because I was in LA setting up an infiltration, and all I got for it was a man down and a bleeding ulcer. I’m missing my younger daughter’s birthday today because I’m here.’ His hunched form was rock solid, his expression hyper as a greyhound’s, his bunched muscles making him look weirdly like a gargoyle. ‘But this time I mean to make it count for something. I want him, Croaker, and by God you and Vesper will get him for me.’

Croaker had been exposed to these fed types before and knew they were often wound up to within an inch of their lives. The best thing to do, sometimes, was to ignore them when they were venting. That was a relatively new thing, venting, suggested by fed shrinks and mandated in triplicate by their superiors, to cut down on field-agent burnout.

Croaker turned to Limòn. ‘Get me out of this contraption, would you?’

Limòn reached behind him, and as Croaker lifted his shoulders, he unsnapped the harness that held the Kevlar vest in place.

‘Look at those holes!’ the paramedic said in awe. ‘Right over his heart! And this blood looks real!’

‘It
is
real,’ Limòn said. ‘It’s chicken blood.’ He poked his finger through the holes in Croaker’s shirt. ‘How’d the impacts feel?’ Given Caesare Leonforte’s reach, neither Croaker nor Vesper had felt comfortable soliciting the cooperation of the Miami PD. In any event, Limòn had set off tiny charges by remote control that opened the plastic sacs of blood attached to the vest that gave the illusion that the bullets Vesper had fired had penetrated Croaker’s flesh instead of being repelled by the Kevlar.

Croaker grimaced. ‘How’d they feel? Like I was having a heart attack.’ He sat up slowly. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it for a steady diet, if that’s what you mean.’

With his shirt off, he stayed still as the paramedic probed the left side of his chest. ‘These bruises are pretty deep. I’d go easy on twisting your torso for a while.’ The paramedic shook his head. ‘Skin’s not even broken. Amazing!’ Then he began to pack up his instruments. ‘You need a painkiller? Those bruises will start to smart pretty good by tonight.’

‘No, thanks. Those things’ll only slow me down.’

‘Suit yourself.’ The paramedic was about to get up. ‘Uh, by the way, would you mind?’ He pointed to Croaker’s biomechanical hand.

‘Sure. Why not?’ Croaker leaned over and, balling the titanium and polycarbonate fingers, smashed his fist through the side of the ambulance.

The paramedic jumped as if stabbed and the driver yelled back at them. ‘What the hell was that?’

The paramedic, looking as if he had been struck by lightning, peered through the rent in the steel frame. ‘Jesus H. Christ.’

‘Okay, you’ve had your fun,’ Limòn said, elbowing the paramedic out of the way. ‘I got work to do.’ He hauled over a heavy black satchel and dug into its capacious interior. He was a young man, perhaps just thirty, slim and good-looking, with large chocolate-brown eyes, buzz-cut black hair, and a pencil-thin mustache right out of a Dick Powell movie. He knew his special effects – liked to have fun with them and so was inventive. Also, he was local, which helped.

‘All righty,’ he said, holding up a latex nose, ‘when I get through with you, even your mother would walk right by you without giving you a second glance.’ He waggled the nose. ‘What do you think, ordinary enough?’

Croaker shrugged. ‘You’re the expert.’

‘Damn straight. And the beauty part is there’s a tiny homing device hidden in the left nostril, so I advise you against sneezing.’ Limòn gestured. ‘Now lie down on your back and keep still. I have to make a death mask out of plaster to make sure all the prostheses I make for you fit your facial size and type.’

‘A death mask,’ Croaker said, settling back on the gurney and listening to the wind whistle through the rent he’d made in the wall of the ambulance. ‘That seems all too appropriate.’

When Tetsuo Akinaga,
oyabun
of the Shikei clan, was released from jail after his incarceration pending indictment, he returned not to his home or to his many businesses, for he thought of these all as tainted somehow by the death of Naohiro Ushiba, the chief minister of MITI. This was a death he, Akinaga, had ordered, for in the end, Ushiba had sided with Mikio Okami and had thus become Akinaga’s implacable enemy.

All these familiar places were tainted not only by that murder but by the events immediately following – most notably his public arrest by the prosecutor Tanaka Gin in the
o-furo
– the public baths – his father had built, and his humiliating subsequent incarceration.

When Tetsuo Akinaga entered one of a dozen apartments he kept for himself throughout Tokyo, the first thing he did was strip off his $3,500 imported suit – in fact, all his clothes – and, piling them into the kitchen sink, poured kerosene over them and lit a match.

In the resulting white-hot flare he felt his cheeks burning with rage with the face he had lost. All the familiar things in his life had been rendered unfit for habitation. Like a priest who finds his church has been summarily desanctified, he had nowhere to go except to these hidey-holes, anonymous places with no aesthetic value, as if he were this same priest forced to conduct services in the basement of an office building.

As the fire flared and sparked, his rage burned brighter than any kerosene-fed flame. The stench of the burning fabrics, the rapid evaporation of his own stale sweat, clogged his nostrils and almost made him gag. His rage burned all the brighter. Naked, he stood on his powerful bandy legs, gripping the warm porcelain of the sink, his mind consumed by revenge. He was so thin he looked like a concentration camp inmate, with his knobby joints. He was in his midfifties, but the vicissitudes of maintaining power and influence had made him seem older. His gray hair was unfashionably long, at samurai length, pulled back from his wide, flat forehead in a traditional queue. His deep-set eyes were impenetrable. In all, he was a hard man, someone who could take blows as well as give them. A man who asked for no quarter and gave none. A man who believed in nothing – save perhaps the sanctity of being an outsider in a world gone mad.

At that moment, a key turned in the lock and he heard someone enter. He did not turn around because he knew who it must be. Only one other person had a key to this apartment besides himself.

‘Shall I make you a drink?’ Londa asked in that voice that made you want to be staked out across her bed.

He said nothing, continuing to stare at the flames, dying now as they ate away the last of the fabrics, the remains of the fear that had gripped him when representatives of the establishment he reviled had taken him inside, when he had heard the hard steel doors clang shut and had seen nothing but iron bars and had known his world had shrunk to the size of his cell.

Even when he killed Tanaka Gin – which he would, very soon and with a great deal of ingenuity and gusto – he would never forgive him for making him fall prey to that disabling fear. Inside, Akinaga had felt helpless, and this, above all other things, he could not abide.

Londa came up behind him and wound her long, long hair around his throat. In this way, she pulled him back from the sink, from the brink of his one true fear, from the acrid foment of his revenge.

‘I need a bath,’ he said.

‘Later. You’ll stink more before I’m through with you.’

He was already hard. It did not take much from her: the feel of her hair on his naked flesh, the touch of her leather-gloved hand, even, sometimes, the steel-hard flash in her eye, because he knew what was in store for him and he could relax completely, forget about decisions of influence, money, corruption, and business. He could be a child in her capable hands, free from maintaining control – which was, after all, an exceptionally exhausting undertaking.