Second Skin (17 page)

He must be desperate for my help,
Nicholas thought.

The two men were silent for some time, Nicholas because he was working out the vectors of this new situation, the prosecutor because he wanted to give Nicholas time to recover his inner equilibrium.

At length, Tanaka Gin stirred. ‘When I arrested the
oyabun
Tetsuo Akinaga, I did so in public. He lost a great deal of face. Perhaps that was a tactical mistake on my part. Akinaga-san is a formidable enough foe without enraging him. But I was very angry myself because, in a way, he caused the death of an honorable man and a good friend.’

Tanaka Gin looked away, at the wall and its tiny constellations of blood spots.

‘In any event, he warned me, “There are mechanisms in place within your own department that will lead to your destruction.” Those were his words exactly. I have not forgotten them nor the look in his eyes.’

‘Bluster from a man trying to regain some face.’

Tanaka Gin inclined his head. ‘My thoughts also, Linnear-san. Except that Akira Chosa, another of the Yakuza
oyabun,
told me much the same thing. “If it’s corruption you’re after, look to your own department,” he said. As you have said, I have developed some small repute as a reformer. Understandably, this has alienated me from more people than you would imagine. Also, it has spawned some powerful enemies in highly unexpected places.’ Tanaka Gin cleared his throat. ‘Someone is hindering my case against Akinaga and I cannot tell who it is.’

‘You think I can?’ At last it was becoming clear: Gin’s acquiescing to Nangi’s request, allowing Nicholas the run of a murder crime scene, his deliberately leaving provocative clues in situ. Here was Gin’s need, spread out on the table.

‘I know it, Linnear-san.’ Tanaka Gin’s eyes glittered. ‘It is the Tau-tau. How you were able to see – the violence here, the rage inside the marriage.’

‘Perhaps there was that between Rodney and Giai Kurtz, but what I see, what I feel here, is far stronger. It is from someone else.’

‘The murderer, Linnear-san!’

‘Yes, perhaps.’

Tanaka Gin, his eyes alight, leaned forward. ‘You saw him, didn’t you? Tell me who he is.’

‘I don’t know. I can scarcely believe what I...’ Nicholas had to start all over again, but his voice was now a harsh whisper as the psychic wound that had been opened at the death wall regathered its force. ‘Gin-san, I reached out with Tau-tau, with my mind to see who murdered Rodney Kurtz and perhaps Giai Kurtz as well... and it was like looking into a dark mirror.’ He pressed his fingertips to his temple. ‘I saw myself.’

The man who sees two or three generations is like one who sits in the conjuror’s booth at a fair, and sees the same tricks two or three times. They are meant to be seen only once.

Schopenhauer

SPRING 1961

For as long as he could remember, Mick Leonforte had had the same dream. He was a young man – not the boy he had been when he first started having the dream – and he looked nothing like the darkly handsome Mediterranean-blooded person he saw in the mirror every morning. He was blond and blue-eyed, smartly dressed in white – always white – and he was a long way from his family apartment on 101st Avenue and Eighty-seventh Street in the Ozone Park area of Queens.

Exactly where he was he could not say. Maybe it was Florida or Europe or something because there were palm trees and cool trade winds and sunlight sparkling off a green ocean studded with luxury yachts. But maybe it wasn’t Florida after all because everyone was speaking a foreign language, not Italian, not English, even him. Anyway, come to think of it, he’d been to Florida once with his father and his brother, Caesare, and this wasn’t it.

For sure, it was someplace exotic and he was with someone heavenly, a girl tall and lean with long brown limbs so shapely you didn’t want to take your eyes off them, and blond hair tied back off her oval face in a French braid and green eyes cool and deep as that ocean.

She was sitting next to him on the buffed tan leather of the gold and black Stutz Bearcat’s seats, and her tan knees were visible below the hem of the silk skirt she’d had to hike up to get into the car. She was smiling at him while a few wisps of hair by her ear fluttered against her cheek. The sight of those knees and just an inch or two of thigh above was enough to give him heart palpitations.

‘Michael,’ she said into the wind. ‘Michael.’

She always called him Michael, never Mick, and he loved her for it. But then he adored everything about her, so much so that the feeling was like an ache in his heart, as if she were part of him, inside him, privy to all his thoughts, all his secrets. All the darkness.

And still she loved him.

He felt lighter than air, as if he could scale the white clouds painted on the sky like cartoons.

In the dream, he drove her in his Stutz Bearcat along a road that wound through dark green cypresses that rose thin as pencils out of a white cliff that hung at the water’s edge. Every so often they’d pass a house, bright with a tomato-colored tiled roof, its stucco walls white and pristine as milk.

The feeling of freedom was like a drug in his veins. It pulsed like a tropical moon over water, shivering his spine. He reached out to touch her and she grabbed his hand, engulfing his fingertips with her ripe red lips.

Then they were on a slate dance floor at an open-air nightclub that hung high above the ocean on a cantilevered terrace, lined with heavily scented roses. A band in tuxedos was playing ‘Moonlight Becomes You,’ and the girl was in his arms, warm and syrupy, as if she were made of honey. Her eyes held his and in them he could see reflected the line of Chinese lanterns strung diagonally across the dance floor, tiny saintly auras through which they passed, one by one, as they danced.

What he particularly loved was that the band was playing just for them. There was no one else in the nightclub and no one else would come. This was his place, and tonight, he did not want to be disturbed.

As if reading his mind, the band segued into ‘Moonlight Serenade’ and he drew the girl closer to him so that he felt her hard body from breasts to knees, felt her like an electric current as her thigh slipped between his, felt himself getting hard, not just his penis, but his entire body – his mind, as well, until she was all he could think of, even the band and the Chinese lanterns and the ocean fading into a pale distance, leaving him there with her, united.

He could recall with an almost suprareal clarity the first time he had had this dream. Upon waking, he lay staring up at the ceiling with blind eyes, watching the play of light thrown off by the Chinese lanterns, strains of ‘Moonlight Serenade’ still in his ears, the ineffably exquisite feel of her resilient thigh rubbing his crotch to unbearable smoothness like a sculptor’s cloth.

Then a sharp rap on his door dissolved the dream’s last residue, and he turned his head as the door of his bedroom opened inward and his sister, Jaqui, poked her head in.

‘Time to get up, Michael.’

That moment was, for him, frozen in time, as with an immense erotic charge and a superhot gush of mortification he realized that she was the girl in his dream.

Michael Leonforte’s grandfather, for whom his older brother, Caesare, had been named, had emigrated to the New World in 1910. He had lived in an area of East New York called the Old Mill. It was a Sicilian ghetto at the bottom of Crescent Street at Jamaica Bay known familiarly by the younger generation as the Hole on account of the fact that its streets were twenty to thirty feet lower than any other in Brooklyn, or anywhere else in the five boroughs of New York, for that matter. At the turn of the century, the city fathers had declared all streets had to be a certain height above river level and they raised those found wanting. All except those in the Hole. No one knew exactly why. Perhaps there were too many existing houses there already or, more likely, because it was a ghetto and no one gave a shit.

In the early days, Mick’s grandfather raised goats, selling their milk and their flesh to his fellow immigrants. Soon, though, he graduated to protection, which was far more lucrative. He also emigrated for the second time – out of the Hole and into a spacious third-story apartment in a brown-brick building on 101st Avenue and Eighty-seventh Street in Ozone Park, an area of Queens within which Sicilians and Neapolitans resided as uneasy neighbors.

Even in those days, moving from East New York to Ozone Park was not an easy thing. Both areas were populated by hooligans, wiseguys, toughs, and just plain crazy button men in training. East New York was dominated – and always had been, it seemed – by the F&R, the Fulton-Rockaway Gang. They owned the turf bounded by Rockaway Avenue and Fulton Street, south of Atlantic Avenue. In Ozone Park, the Saints held sway, a newer but no less savage group of young men and pimply teens that had been born in the 1950s. Not to be outdone by their older enemies, the Saints even boasted a six-man suicide squad – point men in any turf rumbles. These certified madmen rode Cross Bay Boulevard in a prized Ford, full-panel, low pickup truck and were armed at all times with tire chains, handguns, and a variety of unpleasant-looking knives.

It was in this highly charged atmosphere that Mick grew up. Every time you went out into the street you had it in mind to defend yourself. But if outside life was violently confrontational, his family life was no less so. As the younger of the two brothers – he was also younger than his sister, but in the family scheme of things she didn’t count – he was constantly tormented by thoughts of his father, John. In those days, no one spoke about Johnny Leonforte, not Johnny’s older brother, Alphonse, not Johnny’s own father, Grandfather Caesare, for whom Mick’s older brother had been named.

What had happened to Johnny Leonforte? No one would speak of it. If he was dead, his children had not been told; if he was alive, he had never contacted them. To be sure, there were rumors in the neighborhood of humiliation and disgrace of such magnitude that it had broken Grandfather Caesare’s spirit. Some said the Leonfortes were never the same again. But if anyone knew the exact nature of the secret, they would not say. Mick did not know what to believe, but Caesare, always the hothead, was constantly on guard, ready to get bloody to defend his absent father’s honor. The fact that Mick would not join him, was in fact silent on the subject, only served to further inflame him.

Grandfather Caesare was slim and very tall, and he was so smart it didn’t matter that he lacked the usual Sicilian trait of physical intimidation. Everyone was automatically terrified of him. As for Alphonse, he was as big as a bear and just as tough. Many was the bruising fight he’d get into just for the sheer pleasure of mauling another human being. Mick’s older brother, Caesare, wished for that ability, but all he got for it was a series of bloody noses and, worse, Uncle Alphonse coming to his rescue. This constant humiliation he took out on Mick, who seemed to lack all the skills at petty perfidy that Caesare possessed in spades.

Caesare, having been named after his beloved grandfather, was the favorite, that was common knowledge inside the household, and perhaps as things fell out, outside as well. Uncle Alphonse had a strap hanging on the inside of the door to the bathroom that he used on Mick and Caesare with liberal and gleeful intent, recalling, perhaps, the beatings his father had inflicted on him in the ‘backhouse,’ as the outhouse was called.

In this situation, Mick had two choices: he could hew to the traditional upbringing his odd family provided and continue to love his father’s memory as Caesare did, or he could rebel and hate his father for abandoning the family. What it was inside Mick that caused him to choose the latter path it was impossible to say. But the fact was, by the time he was fourteen, he was already inwardly estranged from a father he could not remember and was immutably bonded to his grandfather.

Old Caesare, in his ubiquitous black suit and fedora, looked like a Sicilian crow on a fence rail. His black eyes, ringed by squint lines, peered out from the penumbra of the fedora’s brim with a startling clarity. He had these enormous square hands that invited attention. He would sit at the kitchen table, a water glass of valpolicella in front of him, smoking cigarettes, which he placed between the pinky and ring finger of his right hand. Yellow with nicotine, this right hand felt like a bear’s paw when it gripped Mick, which was often. Grandfather Caesare was animated when he spoke or lectured on topics that were dear to him. He could come to an important point in his narrative, jam his cigarette into his mouth, and clamp Mick’s shoulder with a viselike grip whose terrible intensity at first made Mick tremble.

‘You’re a good boy,’ he would say. ‘You’re smart enough, but it’s a different kind of smart. This work – the biziness – it is not for you – unnerstand?’

Mick would come to understand what the old man meant, but all he got from his grandfather then was that he was loved even though he was different. For the moment, that was enough, though it wouldn’t be for long.

Mick’s brother, Caesare, was a complete mystery to him. Looking in Caesare’s eyes, Mick could see a light that seemed not very distant from the one he observed in red stars as he peered through the telescope his grandfather bought him that year for Christmas. Each night he’d throw the telescope over his shoulder and climb up to the roof, setting it up on the black asphalt to peer through the big-city light-haze into the night-darkened sky. What he saw there fascinated him because in imagining himself far, far away he could look down upon Earth and see continents other than his own.

He was also as far away as possible from Uncle Alphonse, who was, in any case, increasingly away setting up his family in his new home base of San Francisco.

Every so often, up on the roof, as he was folding up his telescope for the night, he’d hear a heavy car door slam, and looking over the parapet, he’d see Grandfather Caesare walking across the courtyard, coming home after being driven from a nighttime meeting at his office or perhaps at the Fountainbleu Florists on Fulton and Pine Streets, where a lot of heavy-duty meets were set. Seeing the old man from above with his black fedora and the spring still in his step after so many years gave Mick the sense of continuity he’d never received from a father who was entirely absent.