Second Skin (67 page)

‘Yeah, he was smart, all right,’ Vesper said. ‘So smart that you could never control him, though I imagine you tried.’ Her back was aching from being bent over and her head hurt where her cheek was pressed hard against the wooden box that held the stolen DARPA weapons.

‘Fuck you talkin’? I never –’

‘Sure you did. You wanted to show the old man what he had missed out on by running off and leaving the family. You wanted to push his nose in your accomplishments.’

Caesare grunted. ‘That’s crap. Why the fuck would I wanta do that?’ Another ripple and unconsciously he let up on the pressure of the gun muzzle in her ear.

‘To show him you were better, smarter than he was.’

‘I wasn’t in competition with Pop.’

‘Oh, but you were, and it was the worst kind. It poisoned you through and through. You wanted revenge, Caesare. You wanted to hurt him, to pay him back for abandoning you.’

‘He had no choice,’ Caesare shouted. ‘He’d made a commitment, it was for the good of the family.’

‘That’s bullshit and you know it.’ Vesper kept up the pressure. ‘He was ambitious –
too
ambitious for him to consider the good of the family. He got married, had kids, but by that time he knew it was a mistake. A family, being a loving husband and father, was not what he wanted. He had no need for stability; he worshiped change. He wanted power and money, he wanted to live at the pinnacle.’

‘No, no, you’re wrong.’ The gun swung away. ‘I
know
you’re wrong!’

Vesper stood up painfully and saw he was looking at her differently. She was no longer the lodestone. She had carefully manipulated his rage away from her, turning it back on himself.

‘I’m not wrong, Caesare.’ Her voice was calm and clear. ‘Your father fucked his way through Tokyo. In 1947, he was sleeping with Faith Goldoni. Then, when that ended, after he got out of hospital, there were so many others. Woman after woman, a long succession of skirts – that was what he called them.’

Caesare was white-faced, paralyzed by confronting his greatest fear, which he had been able to suppress for so many years. Jaqui had been right all along: he
was
just like his father. But isn’t that what he had wanted? Yes and no. He’d idolized a father he’d never known when he was growing up. He’d made up stories – long, involved tales that he’d never shared with anyone about his father’s exploits undercover. He’d needed those stories to make certain he wouldn’t come to hate his father – as Jaqui had come to – for walking out on all of them.

Woman after woman – a long succession of skirts.
John and Caesare Leonforte, father and son – two of a kind. Jesus!

The emotional storm was building. Vesper could feel it like the first strike of far-off lightning, a slight rumble that would soon and perhaps without warning turn into a collapse of the universe.

‘You’re lying.’ It was a hoarse whisper and there was no conviction in it; his eyes told her he believed every word. He was guided by his own intuition now. She had disarmed him, if not literally then figuratively. That part of his mind that had for so long suppressed his intuition had been mortally weakened by his thundering anger. ‘You’re so young. How would you know?’

Vesper took a step toward him. ‘Because he told me, Caesare. He
bragged
about his conquests. It was the verbal equivalent of notching his belt; telling me – a woman – confirmed his stature in his own eyes.’

Caesare stared into her face; he wasn’t looking at her but through her to another time, another place.

Vesper took another step closer and kept her voice calm and without inflection. ‘If I learned one thing about your father, it was that he cared about nothing and nobody. It was almost as if he wasn’t human.’

Caesare blinked. ‘Wasn’t human?’ He swayed slightly as if in a semitrance.

She was close to him now. ‘He was incapable of feeling love, of giving it or receiving it. Love was as alien to him as breathing water.’

He stumbled backward and she followed him, relentless, taking on the final role in this twisted passion play – the accusatory finger of his conscience. ‘And you are just like him, Caesare.’

‘No!’

‘But, yes.’ She came on, her eyes electric, her hair fanning out behind her in the wind like some avenging goddess. ‘You have no God, no loyalty, nothing. Stripped bare, you’re just what your father was – all ego. I look at you and I see empty space – a pit – the void.’

He shook his head, words beyond him now. His eyes were wide and staring, fascinated by her, yet repelled by what she represented.

‘Why do you think your sister stopped talking to you? Just because you hit her?’

‘I wish I knew.’ It was a pathetic whisper, slapped away by the salt wind.

‘But you
do
know, Caesare. You knew all along. She saw all this in you and it horrified her. She could have loved you, Caesare – I’m sure she did, at one time. But your indifference and callousness killed that love. Even then you were becoming your father and she could not bear it.’ She pointed a finger. ‘It was you. You drove Jaqui away and now she’s dead.’

Out of the corner of her eye, Vesper saw Milo emerge from the cockpit. He was about to shout something when she waved him off. Instead, he pointed aft, into the sun-whitened sky. She risked a look, saw the copter winging its way toward them.

Croaker,
she thought, and she barely held back a sob of relief.
I know it’s him.

In this instant, she heard the gunshot and she jumped. Milo was running from his position and Vesper looked down at her feet. Caesare was on his knees, his gun to his head. He was swaying and she thought for an instant that he had shot himself. But no, there was still too much ego. Vesper slipped to her knees and put her hands on him. Her heart thundered, seemed about to break. His great and powerful aura had shrunk to the size of a fist, buried now so deeply within him she knew it would never again emerge.

‘I want to do it,’ he whispered. His finger was tremoring on the trigger. ‘I want to.’

‘No. You don’t.’ Vesper could feel the blackness within him, the bitter sense of being a pariah, and the familiarity of it momentarily sickened her. All the falcons inside her were loosed like a handful of rice at a wedding. She was bound to him, all right, but not in the way she feared. It was the wildness inside her, the call of her own shrieking falcons that he heard now as she used all of her charisma to reach out to him, pull him back from the brink of oblivion. The sound of the copter’s rotors was louder now, and the sea around the cutter had begun to flatten in a sun-drenched disk. She pulled the falcons down around her, around him, until even the hard shattering of the copter was obliterated. If she could do this, then she knew she would fulfill all the promise Mikio Okami had seen in her. Movement all around her on the cutter, movement she held back from them like Moses with the Red Sea. A connection was forming, she could feel it. That certain tension went out of him. Something inside him responded, recognizing a kinship beyond his comprehension. She glanced up. ‘The feds are coming,’ she told Milo. ‘Cut your engines. Tell the crew to surrender quietly.’ Milo nodded grimly.

She turned back to Caesare. His eyes had a milky quality she had seen before in the eyes of the newly dead. Where had his mind gone?

‘Jaqui?’

And then she knew. She answered him as he desperately needed her to do. ‘I’m here, Caesare.’

‘Jaqui, I’m... sorry.’

‘I know you are.’

She pried his fingers one by one from the grips of the gun and took possession of it. The air was thundering as if with the beat of angels’ wings.

‘Jaqui...’ He took a shuddering breath.

‘It’s all right, Caesare.’ She took his head in her hands and held him to her breast, rocking gently. ‘It’s all right now.’

‘You look like you died and nobody came to resurrect you.’

‘You resurrected me.’ Nicholas smiled briefly and gripped Kawa’s hand. ‘Thank you for coming.’

‘No big thing.’

They were squatting in one of the back storerooms of the restaurant Pull Marine. Neither of them mentioned the charnel house in the rearmost room. It was just as well. Kawa didn’t want to know why the mutilated corpse of an old man was hanging there, and right now, Nicholas did not want to remember. There would be many nights, he suspected, of remembering.

‘Think I oughta get you to a hospital, man.’

Nicholas shook his head. Now that Kawa had taken him off the drip, he was feeling better, he was hypermetabolizing the Banh Tom venom as quickly as he could, but he was far from being himself again.

‘There’s something I have to do and it can’t wait.’

Flash of bloody-faced Mick.
I’m not through with you yet. There’s another chapter that needs to be played before it’s done.

Flash of the Banh Tom venom dripping into his open vein from the IV. And beyond that the third chain hanging from the ceiling, empty; the third IV stand with its plastic bag of pale amber poison and its curling, needle-tipped line, ready for another victim.

‘Hey, man, no offense,’ the Nihonin said, ‘but you look too strung out to go anywhere but bed.’

I’m not through with you yet.

Through the haze of the venom Nicholas had worked it out. He knew where Mick was headed. He stood up and felt as if he were in an elevator in free fall. Kawa jumped up, grabbed him around the waist, supporting him as his knees gave out.

‘See? What’d I tell you?’

Nicholas turned to the Nihonin. ‘Kawa-san, the man who did
that
is on the loose and I am very much afraid he is going to kill again.’

Kawa stared at him. ‘Kill like that?’ His snow-white hair lent him a ghostly air, and Nicholas could imagine he was living a Japanese myth, a warrior being saved from death by an impish demon.

‘Yes.’

Kawa shuddered.

‘I’m going to need some help.’

‘Hey,’ Kawa said with a lopsided grin, ‘this night’s already turned out to be the trip of a lifetime. I figure why stop now, right?’

Koei was asleep. It was not a deep sleep. Contrary to what Nicholas believed, she did not sleep well when he was out. Resting on her back, she stared out at the Tokyo night reflected like a dream on the bedroom ceiling. She tried counting the lights, then seeing what patterns they formed. She closed her eyes and opened them again. It was almost five and Nicholas had not yet returned. She wasn’t worried; he often stayed out all night, especially since the crisis with the CyberNet a week ago.

She sat up, saw that she had forgotten to draw the drapes. Perhaps the lights of the city had kept her up. She rose and went to the high window and looked out. She could see the Naigai Capsule Tower just below her, seeming close enough to reach out and touch. Its steel scaffolding looked like the home of a gigantic spider. She remembered the Metabolism movement of the 1970s and had always found its insistence on segregating parts of the urban landscape a sinister attempt to further disconnect people from their environment. She wondered what it would be like to live in one of those metallic-skinned capsules, then thought she was better off not knowing.

She sighed. Sleep was impossible now. The sky had turned an oyster gray; perhaps today the sun would burn its way through the overcast. She pulled on a short cotton
yukata
and, drawing it closed around her waist, padded to the top of the stairs. At that moment she heard a sound.

‘Nicholas?’

Silence and darkness were the stillborn replies.

She stood very still, her hand on the top of the handrail, which curved dark and cool, down into the unknown shadows. What had the noise sounded like? A chink, as of metal, a rustle, as of clothes, a soft tread, as of footsteps? Or was it only the drapes being moved by the air coming from the floor registers? She couldn’t remember.

Slowly, silently, she descended the stairs. It was like sinking into an ocean trench. All the drapes had been drawn down here against the night lights of the city. Had she done that before she had gone up to bed? As with most acts repeated so often they had become unconscious, she could not recall.

Down in the shadows she felt her breath flutter in her throat. She stood at the bottom of the stairs, staring so hard into the pitch blackness her eyes began to hurt. Someone was in the apartment with her; she knew it with a certainty that made her heart constrict painfully in her chest.

Sound came to her then, as of clothing against flesh.

‘Koei...’

She shivered and lunged for a lamp.

‘Don’t turn on the light. Please.’

Something in the voice caused her to draw her hand back from the switch.

‘It is better for us in the darkness now.’ It was a female voice, clear and rich. In the comfortable softness of her tones Koei recognized a person used to being obeyed.

‘My name is Marie Rose. But Michael Leonforte knows me as Jaqui.’

Koei gasped and, feeling the strength go out of her legs, felt behind her with her outstretched hand for the edge of an upholstered chair on which to sit. ‘Jaqui, his sister?’ She perched on the edge as if she were a bird about to take flight.

‘That’s right.’

Koei could barely manage her voice. ‘But he told me you died... a long time ago.’

‘Someone died, but it was not me.’ By straining, Koei could just make out a partial outline of her face. ‘You see, I was chosen by God to become the mother superior of the Order of Donà di Piave.’

Koei’s breath was a gentle exhalation. ‘The Order...’

‘You know it. It is funded – and has been so since they brought the order over from Italy – by the Goldonis. However, since I am a Leonforte, a ruse had to be used so I could be installed. That was done.’ She shifted slightly, a brief rustle of garments the only sound. ‘The order has been in Japan since just after the war. Kisoko Okami, Eiko Shima and her daughter, Honniko, many others were initiated. They all became tiles in a vast mosaic.’

‘But why are you here now? It’s five in the morning. You frightened me half to death.’ Koei frowned. ‘And how did you get in here?’

‘To answer your last question first, I picked the lock.’ Her voice had changed modulation, as if she picked up the timbre and intonations of Koei’s speech. ‘I have many such unexpected talents. As to why I am here now, I will tell you. My brother needs me.’