Second Skin (12 page)

In overlooking the bright blue water of Lake Worth, the mansion did not have a view of the Atlantic, but it also lacked the flocks of tourists and curiosity seekers that drove by the glitzy areas in an almost unending stream.

‘Here we go,’ Bad Clams said with what Vesper thought was an inordinate amount of glee. ‘Weimaraner alert.’

The limo came to a halt just inside the iron gates while Bad Clams slipped down a window, said, ‘New blood.’

A gimlet-eyed sentry glowered, while another bearlike man slammed open the rear door. He had with him a powerful weimaraner on a short choke chain. The weimaraner stuck its ugly snout into the interior where Vesper was sitting beside Leonforte. A genuinely scary monster, it looked as if it had been fed a diet of bloody meat and steroids for the past six months. As it brought its powerful forepaws onto the carpeted floor, the sentry eyed Vesper with sullen lust.

‘Open your bag,’ he ordered.

Vesper snapped open her handbag, so the dog’s muzzle could root around in her personal possessions.
So this is how it’s going to be,
she thought. Bad Clams, crude but magnetic, was no dummy. He had presided over the large table, regaling his entourage with stories ranging over many topics. All the while, his hand was exploring Vesper’s thigh beneath her tight dress. Before he went too far she had clamped her fingers over his. This had astonished him and, not unexpectedly, had increased his ardor. It was Vesper’s experience that men coveted most what they could not have, so it had come as no surprise to her when Bad Clams had cut the luncheon short to invite her home.

The sentry grunted as the weimaraner strained to sniff her. ‘Out of the van.’

Vesper looked over at Bad Clams, who was staring at her with such fixed intensity it would have made her blood run cold had she not been prepared for him.

‘You gotta problem with my security, babe?’

She smiled sweetly. ‘Not a one.’

Clambering out, she drew on dark glasses, stood perfectly still in the Florida harsh sunlight while the sentry slipped the weimaraner’s chain. The dog almost skipped in its elation to be free. Sunlight sheened its sleek gray coat. It stalked around her, then buried its nose in her crotch. The sentry, watching her face, broke out into a smile.

Nobody said a word. Vesper’s cool blue eyes held the sentry’s until he was forced to look away.

Bad Clams laughed. ‘Some pair of balls on her, right, Joey?’

‘Yeah, sure, Mr Leonforte,’ Joey said, releashing the weimaraner.

Bad Clams gestured. ‘Come on back inside, babe. You passed.’ He watched her as she ducked her head to get inside the limo. ‘You okay?’

‘Sure. As long as that dog doesn’t mistake me for lunch.’

‘Leave that to me,’ Bad Clams chuckled. He covered her knee with his hand as they went up the drive to the porte cochere. Vesper sat back, content for the moment.

The mansion was as white inside as it was on the exterior.
It must be a bitch to clean,
Vesper thought. Not that that would mean anything to a sport like Bad Clams Leonforte. Curving walls made of blocks of translucent glass gave the sunlight a kind of explosive echo. The furniture, which looked made-to-order, had that low, sleek, frictionless look of ultramodern Milanese fashion. A pair of white leather sofas crouched like a pair of commas around a sunken pool in which spotted carp swam with lazy indifference. A ridiculous bronze fireplace large enough to stand in was filled with an enormous display of fresh flowers, the riot of colors startling in the stark formality of the room.

Music was playing: Jerry Vale on one of those CD endless loops. ‘You like this shit?’ Bad Clams asked rhetorically as he strode to the stack of matte-black audio-video equipment that glowed like the controls in an airplane cockpit. ‘Personally, I can’t stand it,’ he said, taking the CD off-line, ‘but the staff, you know, it’s kind of like a tradition. Reminds ’em of mom and pop or somethin’.’

‘Does Jerry Vale remind you of your father?’

He paused, turning slowly to look deep into her eyes. Perhaps he was just paranoid about whether she knew who his father was. She slowed her heartbeat with the same method she used to fool a lie detector. That kind of thing was fun for her – a challenge worthy of her extraordinary mind. She was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale, and of Columbia University with a degree in clinical psychology, plus a doctorate in parapsychology. She had also been a member of Mensa.

‘My old man never listened to Jerry Vale,’ Bad Clams said with exaggerated care. ‘Opera was his bag. Give him a good aria an’ within minutes he could be in tears.’

Vesper, feigning disinterest, was scanning his CD collection. She pulled out a jewel box. ‘How about this?’

Bad Clams took the CD from her, looked at it. ‘Gerry Mulligan? Really? You like jazz.’

She nodded. ‘Some, like Mulligan and Brubeck and Miles. Not the pop-fusion crap.’ She had done her homework, memorizing his CD collection in the time it would take other people to register the names of a few titles.

‘Me, too.’ Bad Clams slipped the disc into the player, and Mulligan’s elegant baritone sax drifted through the room.

Without warning, he swung her around and, taking her in his arms, began to dance. He was surprisingly good at it, light on his feet, looser, more open to the beat, than most men. His hips swiveled opposite hers. He had drunk quite a bit at the restaurant but he showed no signs of being high. She felt him, weighty as a dark star, pulling her inward with a force not unlike gravity. For a moment, she felt frightened, out of control, as if, like the weimaraner outside, something inside her had slipped its leash. Whirled around, she took a deep breath, swallowing whole the disconcerting feeling.

For Vesper, a self-imposed orphan, a child of the streets who knew what it was like to be savage and homeless, her worst nightmare was to feel out of control. She had been born in Potomac, Maryland, to Maxwell and Bonny Harcaster, but they were no longer a part of her life, if they ever had been. Gifted or doomed with a mind outpacing her body and her emotions, she had early experimented with drugs, sex, alternative lifestyles, everything and anyone she could lay her hands on. Nothing was too outré or taboo. She knew very well about AIDS – one of her friends had died of it long before it hit mainstream America between the eyes – and still she did not stop experimenting. She could not. Remaining still was her only fear, back then. Totally out of control, she careened from one bizarre encounter to another, self-destruction part of an alien vocabulary she could not recognize.

Like a discarded coin, scarred and grimy, she had been plucked off the mean streets by Mikio Okami. She had been absolutely alone when he found her, severed from humankind as if she had been a leper. In her feral and fear-driven state she had tried to bite him, to scratch his eyes out, believing with the fevered paranoia of the streets that he meant to rape her. It took time to purge her delirium, and still she distrusted him because she was convinced he wanted to tame her, to break her spirit, when all he wanted to do was to set it free.

Now, dancing groin to groin with Bad Clams Leonforte, Vesper’s old fear of losing control welled up once again, threatening to strangle her. She had for so long kept her wild emotions in check that the thought of returning to that ungovernable state had seemed unthinkable even a half-hour ago. But in Caesare’s arms she seemed to have been taken up by a primal force, thrown sideways out of herself – the self she and Mikio Okami had painstakingly built through three years at Yale and four at Columbia, then five years in Okami’s service. He had forged high school grades for her, and she in turn had scored full marks on the SATs, had wowed college examiners in interviews. She had had her pick of colleges, all at full scholarship. Mikio Okami had been right, the whole world had been waiting to take her up in its arms.

Caesare’s hand was at the small of her back, moving in an almost imperceptible circle. She stared into his eyes as he drew her hips against his. She saw the red spark; the scent of dementia was upon him, and it was so recognizable to her that her nostrils flared. If he were, indeed, mad, then it was an insanity with which she was intimately familiar. The very thought of it, a triumphant yowl in the night, caused a shiver to run down her spine.

Mulligan’s sax blew through the pockets of soft shadow and blazing light, bouncing off the glass blocks as if they were mirrors. Outside, the royal palms dipped as if in three-quarter time, and the shore lights blazed in the hot, spangled afternoon.

Vesper, swaying back and forth in Caesare’s arms, felt caught in the magnet of time, drawn inexorably back to when she was in her teens, tight as a rubber band, when she had managed to exceed every limit society put upon its denizens. She was a citizen of no land, accountable to no one, feverishly fucking one woman after another, loving them harder, treating them more roughly perhaps than any man would. Which was why her recruitment by Mikio Okami had been a godsend, because he had offered her a legitimate outlet for all her birds in flight, their talons drawn, their beaks open in a perpetual screech.

For the longest time, she had thought of her – well, her
mind
for want of a better word – as a flock of falcons, borne on the night wind, driving her aloft. Of course, this was probably drug-induced imagery, but it stuck with her nonetheless.

Now, as Caesare’s lips came down over hers, she felt the stirring of her falcons as they shifted restlessly on the dark perch where she had relegated them when she had seen Mikio Okami for what he was, had accepted him. And she knew if she did not find some way to deflect them, they would soon take wing and take her where she had promised herself she would never go again.

Caesare was whispering her name and she closed her eyes. She was aware that he was backing her toward one of the curving glass-brick walls, and her heart rate climbed. She felt the cool glass against her back and Caesare came against her. She was flooded in green light, diffused through the translucent brick, diamond-like sunlight bouncing off the water in the pool, casting a rippling funnel of illumination on the ceiling.

She drew one leg up along his thigh, surrendering, and his hand was at the place she had been denying him all afternoon long. He cupped her, then pressed his middle fingers gently in, splitting her open.

Her head went back and she released a low moan as her falcons took wing from out the darkness, the exile into which she had plunged them. Talons extruded, they began to scream in her ears. Once, when she was seventeen and in the full grip of her madness, her lust for women had caused her to consider undergoing the operation that would have completed the transformation she believed already begun. Strange as it might seem, Caesare Leonforte was the first man she had been with who made her forget that she had ever wanted to be a man.

He was panting now as he peeled her elasticized dress up over her hips. Her fingers unbelted and unzipped his trousers. When she freed him, he was hard and heavy and she could not wait. She rubbed him against her and almost fainted with the sensation. Then she guided him inside, all the breath rushing out of her at once, to be replaced by a liquid heat that filled her up.

At the feel of him inside her, she began to spasm, losing herself in the ecstasy of orgasm that made her cry out. She bit the meat of his shoulder, pulling him hard against her, coming again, shuddering and slipping down the glass wall. He followed her, on top of her, the weight feeling good, making her feel protected and whole. Somewhere, deep down, a tiny part of her that was still rational quailed at such insanity. But it was soon drowned out by the crying of the falcons, which merged with Vesper’s sobbing moans as she was shaken by yet another orgasm.

This was too much even for Caesare, who felt himself ejaculating. The feeling was quite beyond his control, and stunned, he hunched against her spasming body, wanting nothing more than to get more deeply inside her than he already was. That was the moment he knew he was in trouble.

She slept where she lay, wet with her own fluids and his, for the moment drained. While Caesare rose to start making his phone calls, while Mulligan’s eternal sax continued to drift through the mansion, Vesper dreamed she was back at Columbia, immersed in the parapsychology program, but in the curious symbology of dream she was thinking of Caesare. She had entrapped him by using the force of her personality, drawing him to her at the restaurant with a silent beckoning. But, this time, her charism – the charism that had terrified her, that she had been running from, that Okami had forced her to face and to manipulate – had backfired. It had somehow opened her up to his magnetism, letting the falcons free. And now she was in the most dangerous position of her life.

‘The French have a saying: Between the hour of the dog and the wolf lies the end of all things.’

‘Is that a real time?’

Mick Leonforte smiled. ‘Indeed, yes. It is the hour between twilight and dusk, when the sun has slipped behind the horizon but the night has not yet arrived, when the goat herders of the Luberon mountain range instruct their dogs to bring their charges from the grazing lands before the wolf can strike them down.’ Mick pursed his lips. ‘It is the hour when anything is possible.’

Ginjirō Machida, the chief of the Tokyo Prosecutor’s Office, sucked on teeth stained by tobacco the color of old ivory. ‘The end –’

‘Or the beginning,’ Mick said. ‘The
mutability.
You see, it all ties in.’

‘How so?’

‘History is constantly being rewritten by the present.’ Mick moved restlessly around the rhomboid-shaped room, prowling like a caged animal. ‘Great minds are defined by their ability to reinterpret the past, reject the lies propounded by a conspiracy of so-called historians, and extract the hard truths buried there. After all, what is history but a synthesis of language and text? But language, by its very definition, is notoriously unreliable, and texts are by and large ambiguous, open to interpretation, and therefore, distortion.’