Second Skin (68 page)

‘Michael? Is he coming here? But how do you know that?’

‘God has told me.’ Koei sensed Jaqui moving through the darkness toward the curtains.

With a great crack of thunder, the windowpane blew inward and the thick drapes were hurled backward. Koei jumped up with a little scream. She was brought up short as she saw Mick crouched on the windowsill. He was outfitted in strange matte-black garb, girdled by a wide leather cinch that seemed bound by ropes that dropped into the oyster-gray darkness beyond the building.

‘Michael, what –?’

Koei started as she heard Jaqui speaking perfectly accented Japanese. She felt as if she were in a dream, hearing herself speak. Another of Jaqui’s so-called unexpected talents.

‘Time to pay all debts, Koei,’ Michael said in a guttural voice.

Koei stifled a scream as he grabbed Jaqui and, pulling once on one of the ropes, disappeared out of the shattered window. In that brief glimpse through the wildly swinging curtains, Koei had seen that Jaqui had hair just like her own and was wearing some of Koei’s clothes.

‘Michael!’ Koei cried, hurling herself across the welter of broken glass and leaning out the window. She could see him, with Jaqui over his shoulder, sliding down the system of ropes and pulleys he had connected from the top of the Naigai Capsule Tower. Now she knew the truth: Jaqui had deliberately placed herself in harm’s way. She had fooled Michael into thinking she was Koei.

When, eleven minutes later, Nicholas stormed into the apartment, followed by a strange-looking Nihonin with hair the color of snow, she had much to tell him.

The energy of the Kaisho, residing like an imploding star within his stomach and intestines, had honed Mick’s senses to superhuman pitch. It synthesized with the drug he’d ingested without which the Nung ritual was ineffectual. The drug was made from herbs and the ground shell of a horned beetle indigenous to the hills of Vietnam. The insect, as large as a child’s hand, was trapped, hung in the sun for a week, where it turned black as obsidian. Then its carapace was carefully stripped off and ground to grit by stone mortar and pestle. Its horns were used in the insides of the shaman’s sacred rattle.

It was with these heightened powers that Mick sensed he was being stalked. Rappelling down from the top of the Capsule Tower, he hardly missed a beat as he thought of Nicholas Linnear and reached up over his head to unsnap a metal clip. This was what he wanted, after all, a chance to take away everything Nicholas held dear, and then to defeat him one on one. That was important because Nicholas was everything that Mick was not; he was everything that Mick, as a lovesick young man in the meditation garden of the Convent of the Sacred Heart of Santa Maria, had longed to be. Denied by blood and evil circumstance the love of the one woman he would gladly have died for, he had tried to outrun memory, love, his past, everything that he had been and would always be. He had tried to bury all of that in the wilds of Vietnam by creating an entirely new Michael Leonforte, but all that he had concocted was a wicked shaman’s stew, a walking, talking nightmare, a golem, a hollow-eyed and hollow-souled doppelgänger. Because no matter how hard he tried, the old Michael Leonforte would not stay buried. That Michael Leonforte had looked into his young heart and had found it filled with the unthinkable: a soul mate whom he could never have and never even love as he so desperately longed to love her.

As he had said to Nicholas, you can’t outrun heritage no matter how hard you try.

He reached the first capsule and, ducking through a lozenge-shaped interstice between steel girders, clambered onto the black metal grid landing. He unbuckled himself from his mountaineering rig and, with his heavy bundle over his shoulder, took off down the landing.

He was eighteen floors up, and as he loped along, he passed through thick blades of shadow and wan flowers of light that seemed to have drifted into the tower from another time. The wind soughed with a peculiarly childlike cry through the webwork. It was punctuated by the humming and gurgling of the tower’s machinery – for the elevators, the heat and air-conditioning, plumbing and sanitation, the electricity, phone lines, and television hookups. The conduits for these services ran in thickly cabled bundles of flexible PVC throughout the levels, looking much like the veins and arteries of a cut-open body. His head whipped around as a bird fluttered through the structure, panicking in a flurry of wing beats, until it found its way. He wiped sweat away from his eyes and listened.

Nicholas had taken a towel from the bathroom and, looping it over the nylon rappelling line that ran from a spot just beneath his broken-out living-room window to the top of the Naigai Capsule Tower, gripped its ends on either side of the line and dropped into the pearly light of dawn.

With this crude method of sliding down the line he had no way of slowing or otherwise controlling his momentum. A third of the way down he began to smell charring fabric and, glancing up, saw an ominous tendril of gray smoke whipping away from the center of the towel. The abrasion against the nylon was causing the towel to combust.

He was halfway across when the first flame sparked, licking at the cotton cloth. The very speed at which he was sliding caused it to flicker out, but almost immediately, more flames burst through the fabric and he could feel some of its support give way. He was now approximately three-quarters of the way down to the tower. Below him was nothing but humid air for hundreds of feet until the roofs of other buildings rose far below, needled with antennas, satellite dishes, and the like. It would certainly be a fatal fall.

The stench of burning fabric was thick in his nostrils and he began to sway back and forth beneath the nylon line, clutching at the fast-disintegrating towel. He looked ahead and knew he was not going to make it. He sensed the final rending of the cotton seconds before it happened and, swinging his torso and legs backward to gain momentum, lifted his legs in an arc up, over his head, until the sides of his shoes clamped the nylon line down which he was speeding. He could feel the intense friction almost immediately eating away at his thin shoes, but more than half his weight came off the flaming towel and it bought him two seconds, three, precious time at this stage.

Below and ahead, the top of the Capsule Tower loomed large, the soft light of incipient dawn creeping through the geometric gaps between the girders. It looked momentarily beautiful, a powerful atavistic puzzle of a structure like a Mayan pyramid rising in a precise urban cityscape. He was coming down to it fast. Only a few seconds more, that’s all he needed...

He didn’t get it. The flames ate through the center of the towel and it came apart in his hands. His head, shoulders, and torso dropped down until he was hanging vertically off the nylon line, held to it only by the power in his legs as he clamped the line between his feet. He slid down, faster and faster, the muscles of his legs and feet hard as rock and beginning to cramp. There was pain there already, as the friction burned through the leather and thin cotton lisle of his socks. The skin on the insides of his feet began to blister.

He had no other choice and was readying himself to leap off when he passed the clip that Mick had unfastened and the line collapsed, swinging wildly away from the tower. Nicholas scissored his legs open, leapt for an oblique girder, missed it, slammed his shoulder against another, and reaching out, wrapped his arms around a third.

He swung like a pendulum, fighting the pain, the fatigue of a long, virtually sleepless week, the delayed shock of Mikio Okami’s horrific death, and the residue of the Banh Tom venom he was still hypermetabolizing out of his system. Slowly, he steadied himself, fighting the pounding in his head, a combination of being inverted and having a host of toxins breaking down inside him.

He drew inward and at the core of himself rejected his
tanjian
eye, opting for Kshira. The dark eye opened onto a violently changed world. He saw the Capsule Tower for what it was: an unsuccessful attempt to integrate the permanent and the impermanent, the darkness and the light. He saw the city all around as a gray ocean, vast and remote. Only the tower existed now, black as a crow’s head – and the three people climbing upon it like ants crawling up Mt Fuji.

The dark eye swung upward, inward, through the interstices of the tower, and he located Mick. He began to climb.

‘Michael...’

Mick paused, crouched upon the metal grille of an outside walkway. He had been concentrating on Nicholas, on his approach. He was on the tower, he knew that much. He had survived the booby-trapped rappelling line.

‘Michael...’

That voice. It was not Koei’s at all, and yet he knew it as well as he knew anything in his life. He turned, his heart flipping over in his chest even before his mind had begun to work it out. In shock he stared at the woman taking off a wig. She was dressed in Koei’s clothes but she was not Koei.

He stared into those deep sea-green eyes that out of self-defense his mind had set adrift in the sea of forgotten memory. Some memories were too painful and had to be set aside, relegated to the shadows. They rose up now like specters in a graveyard. His eyes opened wide.

‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘It’s me, Michael. Jaqui.’

‘Jesus, it can’t be.’ He felt as if he had dipped in ice, as if someone had reached inside him and turned him inside out. He felt raw with disbelief. ‘You’re dead.’

She took a step toward him. ‘Am I?’

He cringed as she reached out to touch him.

‘Agghh!’
he cried. ‘My God, what’s happening?’

‘It’s God that’s brought us together.’ Jaqui’s voice was soft, soothing, blending into the eerie susurrus of the wind and the workings of the tower. ‘See, Michael’ – she pinched the flesh of her arm – ‘I’m alive and well. My “death” was a ruse to allow me to enter the order, which was owned by the Goldonis.’

He was pressed back against the railing that ran along the outside of the walkways. ‘But why?’

‘Because of the enmity between the Goldonis and the Leonfortes. No one really knows how it began. Like all such vendettas it was perpetuated by terrible stories handed down from one generation to another, and each time they were retold the stories became more horrible until they passed into the realm of myth.

‘Grandpa Caesare knew this and wanted very badly to end it, but until I came along, he did not know how. He was close with the order’s previous mother superiors, and as he observed me growing up, he saw in me the kernel of an answer.

‘It was he who convinced Mom to take me to the convent when I turned a certain age, and he was right. God had chosen me to enter the order – and more. After my staged death, I began to be trained under the name Sister Marie Rose to replace the existing mother superior. None of that would have been possible had I not “died.” The Goldonis would not have allowed it and neither would Uncle Alphonse.’

‘I remember...’ Mick’s voice had taken on a certain dreamlike quality. ‘Alphonse was pissed when he came back from the convent. He was sure he could get you back and he vowed he would someday. Not long after, you died.’

Jaqui nodded. ‘That was how it was.’ She took another step toward him, holding out her arms. ‘Michael, I’m here to end once and for all the vendetta. I’m here to heal you.’

‘Ah, no!’ Mick clapped his hands to his ears as he slipped to his knees. ‘God protect me from my own thoughts.’

Seeing his anguish, Jaqui knelt beside him. ‘I’m here to protect you, too, Michael. You have done terrible things, evil things. You are not the brother with whom I spent evenings on our rooftop, sharing dreams.’

Mick’s head whipped from side to side. ‘Don’t you see it? We shared nothing. What we spoke about was all bullshit.’

‘Why do you say that? We shared the same dream. To fly as far away from the life of the Leonfortes as we could. You remember, don’t you?’

‘Ah, Jaqui. The only dream I ever had that meant anything to me I never shared with you. I couldn’t.’ His eyes flicked up to that wondrous sea-green gaze that had so captivated him.

‘What was it? Tell me. I’m here now. Tell me.’

His face twisted up. ‘I... can’t.’

‘Yes, you can. God will give you the strength.’

‘God.’ His face twisted further. ‘I have fallen so far from God He no longer exists.’

Jaqui reached out. ‘He exists, Michael. I am here now because of Him. Believe me, He exists.’

‘You’re so pure, so good, holy even, like a shaman who has touched the underside of heaven.’ His eyes squeezed shut. ‘God exists for you.’

‘He exists for everyone, Michael, you included.’

He felt her touch him and his desire to shrink away and hide his face vanished. ‘Oh, Jaqui, I’m like a leper. Be careful. There must be poison in my sweat.’ She only held him tighter. The wind rushed around them as dawn rose, speaking in tongues.

‘Tell me the dream,’ she whispered.

He shuddered. ‘If I tell you, I’ll die.’

‘You cannot die while I am holding you. You have nothing to fear, Michael.’

‘But I do. I fear myself and... oh, God, help me, I fear you.’

‘Me? Why?’

‘What you will think of me if I tell you the dream.’ He was trembling as if with the ague. ‘You’ll hate me.’

‘Then say nothing and just listen.’ She gathered him to her. ‘When we were younger, I had a crush on you. One night I dreamed you came into my room. It was very still, as if we were far away from Ozone Park. Perhaps I heard the distant boom of the surf, I don’t know. You came into my room and though it was pitch-black, I knew it was you. I felt your skin burning mine as you lay down beside me. You whispered my name and I whispered yours, and we made love.’

Mick had gone limp in her arms as she spoke. He felt as if he had turned to liquid. There was a heat inside him he could no longer control. Tears burned his cheeks even as he squeezed his eyes tightly shut. It was too much, hearing what he had longed to hear from her for so many years. He felt as if he had found his heart again only to have it shattered to pieces.

When he was able, he told her his dream of them together dancing at the lantern-lighted terrace on some unnamed part of the Mediterranean seacoast. ‘I loved you, I wanted you, I could not have you,’ he concluded. ‘It was impossible, terrible and terrifying. I was certain I would fry in hell, and yet it held me in such thrall I could not walk away from it, much less stop thinking about it. Then you went into the convent and I knew I had to get as far away from you as possible.’