Second Skin (7 page)

‘You were hired to do a job. If you were successful, then you will be paid – handsomely, as you know. Otherwise–’

‘Listen, errand boy,’ McKnight hissed suddenly, ‘I’m an
American,
see? You don’t talk to me like that. No one does, not even your boss. I’m tired of sitting on the sidelines, being fed a peanut salary by guys raking in millions in stock options. I want a piece of the action and what I have on me is my ticket.’

‘The data, please,’ Nguyen said stonily.

‘All in good time. I want a meeting with Mick Leonfor–’

‘Please,
no names,’ Nguyen said with some urgency.

McKnight laughed. ‘Yeah, I know, I’m not playing the good little spy. But I
did
get your attention, didn’t I?’ He released smoke through his nostrils. ‘Anyway, who’s around here to hear us, huh? A bunch of Jap pansies with wigs and eyeshadow.’ He guffawed. ‘Watch out, Van Truc. They might hit you with a falsie.’

‘Nevertheless, you will refrain from using any names, is that clear?’

‘Tell me why your
superior
needs this shit so quickly.’

At the mention of Mick Leonforte’s name Nicholas had gone as still as a statue. Gone was the aura of satisfaction at having successfully tracked a spy and a thief, replaced by a dark empty space into which he preferred not to look. While in the Vietnam War, Mick had been picked by a group of spies working inside the Pentagon to secure for them the major drug pipeline from the Shan States. They sent him into the badlands of Laos where Mick had promptly commandeered the pipeline and gone AWOL. Later, he had taken on Rock and a Vietnamese named Do Dur as his partners. Together, they had built Floating City in the nearly inaccessible highlands of Vietnam to house their fortune and the immense stockpile of armament they regularly sold to the burgeoning number of feudal warlords worldwide.

Nicholas had thought Mick dead – incinerated or rotted with radiation poisoning during the detonation of Torch in Floating City. Now he knew that Mick was alive and behind the theft of the TransRim data, and his thoughts were filled with the same kind of static he had felt in Floating City when the two of them had come face-to-face.

‘This is not your business,’ Nguyen said at last.

‘But, you see, I’m making it my business.’ McKnight flicked ashes from the tip of his cigarette. ‘This is a requisite for delivery.’

‘We did not contract for–’

‘I just changed the terms, asshole. Now deal with it.’

Nguyen waited a beat while he looked around the crowded bar. When he spoke, his voice had lowered almost to a whisper so that McKnight had to lean far across the table to hear him. ‘All right. But I daren’t tell you here. I know someplace more private.’ He threw some yen on the table and they pushed back their chairs.

By the time they stepped out onto the street, Nicholas was nowhere in sight. Standing in the shadow of a doorway to a sex club, he watched as the valet ran to fetch the white BMW.

‘You bring a car?’ he heard McKnight ask.

‘Took a taxi over,’ Nguyen replied. ‘That way, should anyone ask, there’s nothing to tie me to this place.’

As they got into the car, Nicholas looked past the gamy stage shots, clustered like pustules on the doorframe, of women bound and gagged on a small spotlighted stage.

The BMW’s engine sounded and he went across the street to the Kawasaki and climbed aboard. Still attached to McKnight, he moved in far behind them as Nguyen directed the American down a series of streets. They were heading east, toward the exclusive Shinbashi district where geishas still plied their ultracivilized trade. But Shinbashi was also home of the gargantuan Tsukiji Fish Market where the land abutted the wide Sumida River. The moon was obscured by thickening clouds, and the lights of the city bloomed like phosphorescent plankton in the ocean, white and ethereal, haloed in the inky night.

Nicholas watched as McKnight parked the BMW by the water and the two men went along the dock-side, stepping onto a small boat. Nicholas, physically marooned on the sidewalk, was obliged to rely solely on his psychic link to McKnight while he searched for a boat to follow them.

There was none around and he began to run along the slick, deserted streets of the market, paralleling the boat’s progress. Just past the market, where the only lights came from across the Sumida, Nguyen slowed the boat so that only intermittent ripples veed out from its prow.

Nicholas, deep in Akshara, heard voices coming over the water almost as if the two men were directly beside him.

‘Okay,’ McKnight said, ‘this is as private as it gets in Tokyo. Now tell me –’

Nguyen, stepping carefully down the center of the boat, struck him hard in the carotid nerve plexus at the right side of his neck. McKnight fell into Nguyen’s arms as if he had been poleaxed.

While the Vietnamese went methodically through McKnight’s pockets, Nicholas sprinted down the quay. He was still a good distance away, and it was now not a matter of getting there in time but just how late he would be.

Nguyen was an expert, and McKnight had not been particularly clever. The Vietnamese found the stolen TransRim data encoded on a minidisc within moments of rendering the American unconscious. It had been hastily pushed into the lining of one shoulder of McKnight’s tuxedo jacket, hidden by the padding.

Nguyen pocketed the minidisc, then hauled McKnight by his jacket. Spreading his legs to brace against the inevitable rocking, he dropped McKnight’s head and shoulders into the water.

Nicholas felt a cold ripple of recognition through his psyche and redoubled his efforts. He ran along the quay, passing through the reflections of lamplight that looked like a handful of tiny moons that had been thrown down from the sky.

Ahead, in the Sumida, Nguyen kept one hand on the back of McKnight’s neck and began to whistle a low tune, a snippet of a Jacques Brel song. Nicholas recognized it – it encapsulated all the dehumanization the world underwent during the war in the image of the whore, lying on her back, her legs spread, calling, ‘Next!’ to the soldier client.

The melody served as a tangible line in the darkness, an umbilical cord linking him to the terrible act in progress. Closer now, he felt the imminence of death – not his own, but McKnight’s. It was eerie and unsettling to be a fly on the shoulder of death as it advanced to claim another victim. He was at once aware of McKnight’s psyche and the essence of what was coming to claim him. He could feel the cold and the dark as if they were moving toward an unseen void.

There was a resonance in the air as of a winter wind blowing through a forest of icicles. This note combined with those Nguyen was whistling to create an entirely different melody that unexpectedly expanded into a dark symphony.

This was, Nicholas knew, the moment of McKnight’s death, when something inside him screamed or sighed, in any case breathed its last, evaporating out of the corpus like light freed from a labyrinth. Nicholas’s heart clamped so tight he felt a pain in his chest. All the breath went out of him, and for a moment, he slumped limply, his eyes squeezed shut.

The purity of the sound was absolute, and it continued to fix him in his tracks, his boat gliding silently across black, purling water, past huge facades that looked with blank-eyed stares at the death that had stolen silently across the water.

When the sound vanished without the hint of an echo, Nicholas felt diminished. Perhaps it was only that the psychic connection had been abruptly severed, but he suspected there was something more. McKnight was gone and there hadn’t been a thing he could have done about it. Frustration mingled with the thought that even a bastard like McKnight did not deserve that kind of death.

Now there was only the Vietnamese Nguyen, who, having ascertained that McKnight had breathed his last, tied him down with blocks of concrete, launched him over the side, and was on the move again.

Nicholas had to deal with Nguyen. But how? Instead of returning to the dock by Tsukiji, he was continuing down the river. This further reinforced Nicholas’s suspicion that Nguyen had planned this all along. He had taken a taxi to the Kabukichō, he’d had this boat with the concrete blocks in its bottom ready and waiting. Nicholas felt certain that if McKnight hadn’t forced the issue, Nguyen would have found some way to lure him on board. Any way the deal went down, McKnight hadn’t been meant to live through the night.

Nicholas took a deep breath; he had come to the place where the American had so recently been drowned. Extending his psyche, he could feel the black weight sinking down, down into the muck of the Sumida from which he would never resurface. Wherever Nguyen was headed, Nicholas reasoned he’d have to pull into shore sometime. Doggedly, gritting his teeth, he continued running, following Nguyen, paralleling the river lights and the dark blight heading down it, his mission now set firmly in his mind.

Margarite Goldoni DeCamillo emerged from her shiny new Lexus onto Park Avenue and Forty-seventh Street. New annuals had been planted in the avenue divider, and halos of green were just beginning to wreathe the English plane and ginkgo trees. Though it was after five, the afternoon light was still strong, a surer sign than the still chilly wind whistling among the skyscrapers that spring was on its way. She told Frankie, her armed driver, to wait; then, accompanied by Rocco, her bodyguard, she entered the glass and steel skyscraper.

On her way up to the thirty-sixth floor she had time to collect her thoughts. This respite, even so brief, was a blessing because over the past fifteen months she had had little time to devote to her business. Ever since her brother, Dominic Goldoni, had been brutally murdered, she had been thrust into a maelstrom of another life so alien and anathema to her that it had initially set her reeling. Even though Dom had tried his best to tutor her, introducing her to many of his most important contacts in New York and Washington, still she had been unprepared for the Machiavellian complexities of taking over his position as capo of all the East Coast Families. Her husband, Tony D., the highly successful show biz lawyer, had been her mask. Ostensibly, Dom had chosen him to be his replacement, but all along it was Margarite who was pulling the strings like a ghost from the shadows. She not only had to keep the peace among her own galaxy of Families but continually to fend off the advances of Dom’s bitter enemy, Bad Clams Leonforte, who, now that Dom was dead, was avariciously bent on expanding his domain from the West Coast eastward. In the last several months, he had, over Margarite’s protests and best defenses, maneuvered and manhandled his way to controlling the Chicago and midwestern Families. She knew he would never have dared attempt such an usurpation of power – let alone been successful at it – had Dom still been alive. Always now, there was the metallic taste of bile in her mouth as she struggled with the fact that she had failed her brother and all the Families he had devoted himself to shepherding.

The elevator slowed to a stop, a tiny bell rang, and the doors slid open. As she and Rocco strode down the gray and beige hallway toward the offices of Serenissima, her highly successful cosmetics company, she felt with a physical pang the heavy burden of responsibility Dom had placed on her shoulders. How she had missed being immersed in the excitement of her own business, the thousand daily decisions that would keep it on course, the triumphs and, yes, the failures, as well, because they were also part of the learning process.

She and her partner, Rich Cooper, had built Serenissima up from a small two-person mail-order business to the burgeoning international organization it was today. The company now had boutiques in Barneys, Bloomie’s, Bergdorf, and Saks in New York and all across the country through a newly formed subcompany that doled out franchises. The French loved the products, as did the Italians and the Japanese. Later this year, Rich was planning an all-out assault on Germany, and there was talk of going into the former Eastern Bloc countries.

Thank God for Rich, she thought. He had been minding the store while she had been busy battling Bad Clams and continuing Dom’s business partnership with Mikio Okami.

Serenissima’s offices were low-key and elegant. Colors of toast and burned rose predominated. The furniture in the reception area was actually comfortable – Margarite had insisted on it. The walls were dominated by enormous glossy blowups of the internationally renowned model she and Rich had chosen to be their sole figurehead. She had been with them from the beginning and had given the product line an instant recognition and cachet. Like Lancôme, they had decided to ignore fashion trends. One year the zaftig look was in among models, the next year the waif was all the rage. None of this mattered to Serenissima, whose net profits soared 25 percent per year.

Rich was waiting for her in the conference room, a sconced, heavily curtained rectangle softened by floor-to-ceiling bookcases and the Old World cornices and moldings she had had put up. The room was dominated by a highly polished teak table in the shape of a boomerang, behind which was a long credenza on which stood a Braun coffeemaker and cappuccino machine, twin carafes of ice water, a bottle of sambuca. Behind its carved teak doors lay a small fridge and well-stocked minipantry. You never knew. Experience had taught them that when they got into a brainstorming session it could go all day and well into the night.

Rich sprang up as she arrived through the double pocket doors. She took a last look at her bodyguard as he took up station just outside the boardroom. She hoped a day would come when he or someone like him would not be a necessity.

‘Bella,
it’s been so long!’ Rich opened his arms and embraced her, kissing her warmly on both cheeks in the European style. ‘I was getting worried about you. It was like you had fallen off the ends of the earth. I got so tired of speaking to your answering machine I blew a raspberry at it!’

‘I know,’ Margarite said, laughing. ‘I heard it last night when I got home.’ She disengaged herself. ‘I’m sorry I’ve left you in the lurch, but –’

‘I know, I know,’ he said, putting up his hands. ‘You’ve had a helluva time with Francie.’