Second Skin (48 page)

This was a first for him, a man trained by circumstance to look out for Paul Chiaramonte first, last, and always and fuck everyone else, as he had been fucked over by his father, by Faith Goldoni, by his mother even, who by dint of being Jewish could not even keep Black Paul by her side.

He
wanted
to help Francie, even though it would surely cost him dearly – maybe, knowing Bad Clams, even his life. But, by God, he’d have fun doing it.

Slowly, as if in a dream, his hand came up and clasped hers in the only embrace he felt comfortable giving her. It was done. The pact was silently signed. It boggled the mind.

Koei was scrolling through the computer at the Nipponshū Sake Center on Harumi-dōri, a block from the mammoth Ginza Yon-chōme crossing. Everything you wanted to know about the Japanese national liquor made from fermented rice was here. Nicholas loved sake, and the computer program was helping her to locate the brands that would best suit his taste.

A shadow passed across the screen and she looked up into the face of Mick Leonforte. He had appeared as if from the ripples of a mirage, a dark and evil place in her mind.

‘Hello, Koei,’ he said. ‘What a surprise running into you here.’ Said in that tone of voice she had come to know well during the time they had lived together – she miserable and self-castigating, he rampant all the time, filled with sinuous and disturbing suggestions regarding their sexual conjoining. A tone of voice that told her everything he wished her to know: namely, that this had been no coincidence, that he was far from surprised.

Outside, a thousand people marched by, hustling along the rain-slick streets, black umbrellas crowding each other, bobbing and weaving. Koei felt a little shudder go through her, isolated here, herded out of the moving crowd by this sinister animal she knew too well.

He smiled like a boy on the way to a prom. ‘Aren’t you happy to see me? I mean, it’s been a long time since we lived together, a long time you’ve been in hiding.’ He gave her a quizzical look, almost sad but not quite because the overhead lights were doing odd things to his features, elongating them as if they were made of tallow. ‘What made you change your mind?’

Koei automatically glanced around to see who was near them. A lot of people, as it happened, but no one was paying them the slightest attention.

Mick, emotions sliding like quicksilver, laughed. ‘You’re not nervous, are you?’ He spread his hands. ‘I mean, why should you be? Just because you were supposed to marry me and didn’t? You ran to Mikio Okami, if memory serves, and he stashed you away someplace where I couldn’t find you.’ He put his arm out, strong and menacing as a prison’s steel bar, and she flinched. He saw that and it seemed to please him. ‘I tried, you know – to find you, I mean. I used every means at my disposal – I made a lot of people miserable, crawling all over them for information. And what did I get for my time and trouble? Not a fucking thing. You were gone, vanished like a puff of smoke. That bastard Okami’s a real magician.’

He moved closer to her, wedging her against the computer screen, which kept prompting her to ask the next question.

‘That’s not strictly speaking true,’ he continued, enjoying her increasing discomfort.
‘I did
get something for my time and trouble. Humiliation. It got to a point where everyone I went to knew how badly I wanted you back. I sweated out that search while behind my back they must have been laughing.’ His face darkened suddenly. ‘Laughing at me.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Bullshit.’ He shook his head, his eyes boring into her. ‘You’re not sorry. You did just what you pleased. You always did. You never cared about me, you never cared about anyone but yourself.’ His face was twisted with rage. ‘No, don’t worry, I won’t hurt you. But I pity the poor bastard you’re with now.’

He was gone before she could form a reply. Humiliated and sick to her stomach, she turned her back on the crowd inside the center and blindly scrolled through screens she did not bother to read. She could feel hot tears forming and she tried to force them back, but they dropped one by one onto the keyboard. She wanted to run home, to tell Nicholas what had happened, but she knew she must not. She remembered all too well his reaction when she had told him that Michael had fallen in love with her.

The computer beeped, and wiping away her tears, she saw that she had reached the final screen. She had found the perfect sake for Nicholas. Somehow, it seemed totally irrelevant now.

I’ve got to figure out why my life seems to be running in parallel with Mick Leonforte’s,
Nicholas thought as he drove crosstown toward the address Tento had given him for the dominatrix Londa. He had been on stakeout, parked across the street from the restaurant Pull Marine in Roppongi, on the lookout for Mick. This was the place to which Nicholas had come when he was following the trail of the stolen TransRim CyberNet data, and it was here, he felt certain, he would eventually find Leonforte.

He felt as if Mick were a vast penumbra, a shadow mirror image of himself where all the dark forces were held in check. And this led to a truly chilling thought: Mick was the very personification of the Kshira that was rising like a tide inside him, that threatened with its increasingly powerful seizures to strip him of his sanity. Because what was Kshira but the coalescing of those dark forces, breaking the bonds that had kept them in the prison of his mind. Every man and woman walking the earth had these dark forces – evil thoughts, selfish, avaricious, jealous, rage-filled. More often than not they remained mere thoughts, passing through consciousness like clouds momentarily obscuring the sunlight. But the sun returned; it always did. Except in those individuals for whom these dark thoughts became real, metamorphosing into deed. These were the people the police hunted down like animals and shut away for the rest of their lives. This was what Mick had become – was part of him truly a reflection of what lay inside Nicholas?

A police siren’s harsh on-and-off blare broke into his thoughts, and glancing in his mirror, he saw a motorcycle cop on his tail, lights flashing. Since he had been speeding, Nicholas slowed slightly, trying to find a place to weave out of the narrow lane between traffic and pull over. He found one, finally, and headed right between two Toyotas. In that moment, he glanced in the mirror to keep track of the cop and, at this closer distance, saw the cop’s face and recognized it. It was Jōchi, the hulking maître d’ at Pull Marine, the restaurant where Honniko worked. What was he doing impersonating a cop?

Nicholas looked for and found a gap in the traffic, and with a squeal of burning rubber and a cloud of blue exhaust, he took the Kawasaki through a scarifyingly narrow gap between vehicles, accelerating away from Jōchi on his big police motorcycle.

Slamming on his siren, Jōchi took off in pursuit. Now Nicholas would get a field test of all the modifications he’d made on the big Kawasaki engine. As soon as Jōchi got his initial clearance through the traffic, he cut the siren. That figured. His cop impersonation had been blown and he had no wish to attract real cops by keeping his siren on.

Nicholas whipped by the south exit of Shinjuku Station with Jōchi on his tail. Nicholas kept the station to his left for as long as he could, then, at the last instant, he ripped across the divider, almost colliding head-on with a red Mitsubishi. A blare of horns followed him as he bounded up on the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians, then bouncing down at street level, heading toward Shinjuku Gyoen, the park filled with both Western- and Japanese-style gardens as well as a now rather shabby pavilion in the Chinese style dating back to 1927.

Risking a glance in his mirror, he saw Jōchi right behind him, with a brief shout of his siren, rounding the corner that Nicholas had just so dangerously cut. Nicholas, grinning into the quickening wind, accelerated into the park. Because of the poor condition of the structures, it was a relatively deserted place, and the few strollers had plenty of warning, scrambling out of the way of the huge black Kawasaki and its pursuing police cycle.

Nicholas went airborne, flying over a small, rock-strewn pond filled with koi. He hit the other side, skidded briefly, recovered, and was off, heading toward the pavilion that had been built in honor of Emperor Hirohito’s wedding. Jōchi made it safely across the pond, his cycle coming down with a jarring thud and almost stalling out. In expert fashion, Jōchi used his booted left foot to right the cycle while he swung it around, then, gunning it, set off after Nicholas.

The pavilion was coming up and Nicholas headed straight for it. Seeing this bit of madness, Jōchi slowed, swinging wide of the course Nicholas was on.

When it seemed that a collision was inevitable, Nicholas swerved so close to the corner of the pavilion he felt a chunk of wood fly off, striking the top of his helmet and glancing off. As it was, his head was swung hard around and pain flared momentarily in his neck. He almost missed the workman’s ramp, made out of bamboo sawhorses and banged-up wooden planks. He rode along it, paralleling the side of the pavilion, Jōchi’s silhouette disappearing behind the facade.

But he could hear the cop cycle’s exhaust booming off the building’s facade. In a moment, the cycle appeared on the other side of the pavilion, and Nicholas was obliged to turn sharply left, off the planks, the wild spin of his wheels making the boards and sawhorses fly apart like straw in the grip of a twister.

Around the side of the French-style garden he went, with Jōchi almost on his flank. Into the street, with cars spinning this way and that, more horns blaring, pedestrians screaming, onto the wide staircase that led up to a huge granite-slab plaza. He and Jōchi raced across it. Ahead of them rose the glittering spaceshiplike dome of the newly erected Tokyo-kan, the gigantic underground mall, virtual-reality center, and sports complex.

There were no doors, just a rectangular opening in the dome made to look like a gaping mouth.

Into the mouth Nicholas zoomed, jumping the magnetic-admission-card barrier, screeching down the ramp filled with people running this way and that, scrambling for whatever cover they could manage to find. Nicholas passed gymnasiums for weight lifters, sumo, sprint track, and marathon conditioning. Boutiques of all sizes and descriptions blurred away behind him. He had modified the Kawasaki to be tremendously responsive to even the most minute changes in pressure on the accelerator and brakes. This made for a supremely responsive machine that held him in good stead as he zigzagged his way around terrified people and octagonal ferroconcrete columns set in a double line down the length of the mall.

Nicholas was rocketing down the center, with the columns streaming by on either side of him. And here came Jōchi on his big cop bike. Ahead was the long ramp up toward the other entrance to the mall. At the far end were the virtual-reality parlors on the left, the largest of the gymnasiums on the right. Up there, because of the layout of the city, the mall ended at street level instead of being underground as it was here.

Now Nicholas began to weave back and forth across the width of the emptying mall, coming closer and closer to the columns. He opened his
tanjian
eye, and for the first time, summoned Kshira. The world tilted over, colors deepened to the dark and fiery hues one saw in the heart of a furnace that had been running for weeks on end.

He shot past a column, almost clipping its side as he crossed to the side of the mall. Jōchi, following him, almost crashed and was forced to drop back the space of two car lengths in order to keep his speed under control.

This is what Nicholas had been counting on. He took off up the long ramp and, at the last instant, veered to the right, banging open a set of doors. He found himself streaking along the polished wooden floor of a huge gymnasium. Athletes scattered, leaving their equipment and gym bags where they lay. Dead ahead was a wall in which was an enormous round window looking out on Shinjuku Central Park. The oriel window was perhaps twenty feet off the floor.

Nicholas, in Kshira, shifted his weight back on the Kawasaki. Then, two-thirds of the way across the gym, he lifted the front of the bike off the floor, kicked down hard on the second accelerator he had installed himself, and the Kawasaki was launched upward.

Airborne, Nicholas leaned out over the front of the bike as a ski jumper will over his skis. For an instant he thought he was not going to make it, that he was going to hurtle headfirst into the ferroconcrete wall of the gym. Then the trajectory of the bike trued and he hit the window square on, the glass bursting upward as he broke through, the front wheel, then the back, landing on a grassy knoll, slipping, the bike almost skidding into a cypress tree, then the rear tire gripping and, as he kicked down the accelerator, the Kawasaki speeding off through the park, into the busy street, between the lines of traffic, far from Jōchi, left in his dust in the middle of the chaotic gym.

It was almost closing time at the Fūzoku Shiryōkan, the Shitamachi Museum, and with just twenty minutes left, almost everyone had left. One who remained was Mikio Okami. He liked to come to this particular museum to rest and to think because of its magnificent reproductions of Shitamachi shops from centuries past. There was a tenement, a merchant’s counting house, and the shop in front of which he was sitting that sold sweets, called
dagashi.

He had come from a meeting with Jō Hitomoto, the current finance minister, who was one of the leading candidates for the vacant prime minister’s position, along with the rightist Kansai Mitsui, Tetsuo Akinaga’s choice. They had met in the Nakamise-dōri, the shopping street within the precincts of the Sensō-ji, the Asakusa Kannon Temple. Okami, who had been saved from alcoholism by Colonel Linnear, nevertheless had an addictive personality, and there was a two-hundred-year-old shop in the Nakamise-dōri that sold
dagashi,
which he visited whenever he could.

This was yet another reason, he reflected, why it was so good to be back home in Tokyo. It astonished him how much he missed it. But his past resided here not unlike this museum, a living treasury filled with glittering artifacts and incidents that continued to exert their influence over time.