Second Skin (2 page)

‘I cannot stand the sight of death,’ she said in a reedy whisper. Her eyes slipped out of focus, went to that spot over his left shoulder, and now he knew what she saw there: the past. ‘Ever since I found my mother on the floor of her room... The blood, the blood...’ She took a quick sucking breath. ‘All of her insides slithering over the floor like a nest of serpents.’ Refocusing in a flash, she sent him an accusatory stare. ‘You know this – you
know.
And yet you judge me by your own standards.’

He leaned forward a little, his gray and orange eyes glittering. ‘That’s all I know how to do, Giai. It’s nothing personal.’ He skewered a prawn on his fork. ‘Eat your food. It’s getting cold.’

Giai ate with a degree of eagerness now. Once or twice, he had the pleasure of seeing her tiny teeth as they flashed like lights behind her lips. In a way, he was sorry her husband was dead. Part of the pleasure he had in taking her was the knowledge that she belonged to someone else. He remembered once at an intimate dinner party, he had had her in the pantry, pushed up her skirt, hands pressing her jiggling breasts, impaling her again and again, listening to her mounting gasps while her smug husband, oblivious, drank his wine and made deals on the other side of the wall. There was a certain kick to cuckolding a man who had tried to fuck him over, and now that was gone. Pity. But, then again, Mick mused, it was time to move on. The intervention of Nicholas Linnear in Floating City had precipitated that.

Floating City had been a fortress, a city-state hidden in the northern highlands of Vietnam from which Mick and Rock had directed an unprecedented worldwide network of international arms trading and drug distribution. Floating City was just a memory now, nuked out of existence because of Linnear. That was okay with Mick; he’d known for some months it was time to move on; he’d just needed a kick in the ass to get him going – and Nicholas Linnear had provided that. Linnear had penetrated Floating City and had killed Rock. He might have worked his particular brand of magic on Mick as well had it not been for the nuclear explosion of the handheld experimental weapon known as Torch.

Mick had come face-to-face with Nicholas at last in Floating City, and it had come as a profound shock to him – like meeting the legendary Colonel Linnear, Nicholas’s father. Like meeting your own other half, your – what did the Germans call it? – doppelgänger.

There was a unique bond between the Colonel and Mick’s father, Johnny Leonforte – and thus a connection between the sons. But Nicholas did not know that yet. Mick had barely believed it when he had discovered it and had worked diligently – and fruitlessly – for months to disprove it. Accepting it had altered his life forever, just as it would change Nicholas’s someday in the not too distant future. But Mick, forever aware of playing all the angles, was determined that Nicholas should learn this particular bit of knowledge at the time and place of his own choosing.

Mick had spent years researching the life and personality of Colonel Linnear’s son, until he had felt more intimate with him than any lover he had taken to bed. But when they had come face-to-face in Floating City, Mick’s fantasy had burst like a soap bubble. The real Nicholas Linnear was someone more than Mick had ever imagined. Looking deep into Nicholas Linnear’s clear, clear brown eyes, he had felt the stirring of the short hairs at the back of his neck. In that moment when investigation and reality had come together, he knew this man’s fate was inextricably entwined with his.

In Nicholas Linnear, Mick Leonforte had recognized the ultimate adversary he had been searching for all his restless life. That was why he had provided the necessary means for Nicholas to escape the bamboo prison cage into which Rock had thrown him. In the endgame of the killing ground he knew he would need every advantage he could bring into play to counteract Nicholas’s Tau-tau, the secret knowledge of ancient psycho-necromancers. Mick had seen for himself the power of Tau-tau when Nicholas had overcome his guards and had killed Rock, a huge beast of a man who had outthought and outfought every dangerous opium warlord in the uplands Golden Triangle of Burma’s Shan States.

He could still remember barreling out of Floating City in a truck on which Nicholas had hitched a ride. (Had Nicholas’s powers allowed him to know that Mick had been driving that truck?) He could still see clearly Rock’s wounded body in the rearview mirror as he aimed Torch at Nicholas, could still feel the cold breath of Tau-tau as Nicholas redirected the path of the missile upward with the power of his mind.

Soon after, Nicholas had leapt from the back of the truck, plunging hundreds of feet into the roiling waters of the cataract far below. He did not know, of course, that Mick had had the truck lead-lined or that they were already out of the four-square-city-block radius of Torch’s ground zero detonation zone. Floating City had been incinerated, but Mick had not died and neither, he believed, had Nicholas Linnear. Mick had had a hand in Nicholas’s escape from Rock’s cage. Nicholas had had a hand in keeping Mick from being incinerated by Rock’s final attack.

They had an appointment in the future, a day of reckoning, a moment toward which, Mick now knew, he had been moving all his adult life. That was why he had come to Tokyo, and why, if he were brutally honest with himself, he was with Giai Kurtz now.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, pushing himself out of the banquette. On his way back to the men’s room, he turned to glance at Giai, who was finishing the tiger prawns, using her long, delicate fingers like chopsticks. He paused, watching her insert one long nail between head and torso to crack a prawn open. Then he went down a short corridor and into the men’s room. He urinated, checked all the stalls even though he knew no one was there. Then he pulled out his cellular phone and made a call.

‘Time to go,’ he said, when he returned a moment later.

‘Don’t you want dessert?’ Giai asked, staring up at him with those huge eyes that had captivated him nearly fifteen months ago at the embassy fete in Saigon. Such bores, those political parties, unless you knew the right people, and Mick knew them all. Having asked the Japanese trade legate about her, he had set about separating her from the pack with the obsessive single-mindedness of an Australian Border collie. Her husband, a ruddy-faced, blond-haired Aryan businessman from Köln, arrogant and tormented, who fancied he knew all about Southeast Asia, was interested only in making deals. Mick had had the impression that if he had taken Giai there and then on the Persian carpet, Rodney Kurtz would not have blinked an eye. As it was, they did it in the powder room with a crystal bowl of heart-shaped soaps crashing to the marble floor as she came.

‘Later,’ he said. ‘Not now.’

He held out one hand and she took it, rising. As they crossed the floor, he waved to Honniko, the blonde in the gold bustier. The chanteuse had finished her set, otherwise he would have saluted her as well.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Home,’ he said. ‘To Hoan Kiem.’

She pulled up, looking at him quizzically.
‘My
villa? I haven’t been there all day.’

He knew what she meant. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, shepherding her along, ‘he’s not there anymore.’ He smiled. ‘And whatever blood was spilled has been cleaned up.’

‘Where is he, exactly?’

‘Nowhere you want to know about,’ he said as they swung out the door into the riotous Roppongi night. Immediately, they were hip-deep in tourists and tripped-out teenagers. Just looking at them could give you a nosebleed, Mick thought. Tattooed heads, branded hands, and metal impedimenta pierced through noses, eyelids, tongues, lips, and nipples were the stuff of nightmares. The breakdown of society was everywhere evident. The hardworking races endure leisure only with great difficulty, Friedrich Nietzsche had said. Which was why, Mick supposed, he admired the Japanese. But look at them now! Lolling around, disfigured, grotesque as sideshow freaks.

The rain-washed street seethed with the peculiar hormonal vibrancy of youth. Crowds of people thronged the sidewalks, pushing off into the traffic-clogged streets, A permanent pall of diesel fumes hung in the air, giving the neon colors a lurid hue. In windows were displayed the cream of this year’s crop of designer clothes, some of which, Mick judged, were not meant for the human form.

They picked up a cruising taxi on Roppongi-dōri, took it to Giai’s villa in the Asakusa temple district. Hoan Kiem – Returned Sword – was a beautifully conical concrete and wood structure, more spacious than most Tokyo residences. Its cool, crisp interior was filled with dark-stained rattan in the grand Saigon manner, giving rise to the speculation that both Kurtzes were ultimately more at home there than in Tokyo. The rooms were illuminated at night by brass lamps and during the day by bars of sunlight filtering in through the wide jalousied windows. Through them, one had a spectacular view across the river to the futuristic Flamme d’Or, the Philippe Starke-designed building of black glass, a kind of tetrahedron on acid, surmounted by a vaguely flamelike shape derisively christened by Tokyoites ‘the Golden Turd.’

Giai hesitated as she unlocked the door and Mick swung it open.

‘I told you he isn’t here,’ Mick said, stepping past her and, grasping her hand, pulling her over the threshold. ‘Here, I’ll show you where it happened.’

‘No!’ she cried, and almost succeeded in pulling her hand from his fierce grip.

He stood in the center of what had been, until just after midnight this morning, Rodney Kurtz’s domain, smiling slyly at Giai. He raised his arms in an expansive gesture. ‘This is what you wanted, isn’t it?’

Giai glared at him darkly. ‘Bastard. Yes.’

He went to the mirrored bar, took down a pair of cut-glass snifters. ‘It isn’t me who’s the bastard, darling.’ He poured generous measures of Napoleon brandy, turned around, and handed her one. ‘It was your husband, Rodney. Remember?’ He clinked his glass against hers, took a sip, watching her all the while. He liked seeing her this way: nervous and a bit unsure. But then he liked to engender those emotions in everyone he met.

‘The nights I would call you up, after he beat me, raped me, spit on me.’

‘And you came back for more.’

‘He always apologized. He was so repentant, like a little child.’

Mick hid his disgust behind the mask he had perfected, thinking of what was to come.

‘You took it all.’

‘Not all,’ she said defiantly. Now she downed the brandy in two hard swallows. Her eyes watered. ‘Not
now.
I made my stand. He’s dead and I’m glad of it.’

‘So you did.’ Mick nodded. ‘Long life and health to both of us,’ he said, then took more brandy into his mouth and savored it. One thing you had to say for old Rodney, he thought, he did know how to live.

‘And so,’ he said, putting down his empty snifter and rubbing his palms together, ‘to bed.’

Mick took her in his arms, feeling her melt against him. He was a man who believed himself to be, in the words of Nietzsche, predestined for victory and seduction. Like Nietzsche, his wartime idol, he understood the profound connection between the two. He was a man bent on controlling and outwitting himself. Like two of Nietzsche’s own idols, Alcibiades and Napoleon, he had the craftsmanship and subtlety for war. He was, in sum, continually challenging life.

She tasted like burned sugar and he crushed her to him. He stripped her of her clothes and inhaled her musk. As usual, she wore no underwear. Her breasts reared into his hands and she moaned deep in her throat. He lifted her by her buttocks and her legs wrapped around him. Neither of them could wait for the bed. Her fingers, which had so skillfully cracked the prawn’s translucent shell, now deftly unbuckled his belt, pushed down his trousers. She brought him hotly against her, her eyes flying open with the sensation, then closing slowly, languorously, as they began their rhythm.

Quidquid luce fruit, tenebris agit,
Mick thought between mouthfuls of dusky flesh. Whatever is started in the light continues in the dark. It was one of Nietzsche’s favorite sayings, and his as well. How true it had proved itself in his life!

He pushed her roughly against the wall – just
here
– where he had made the first thrust with the push dagger, where the arrogance on Kurtz’s face had been supplanted by disbelief and, then, fear. Oh, the ecstasy of it! He, the true Nietzschean superman, bringing down the Aryan prey.

He was grunting now, not with the effort but with the images flooding his mind. Giai licked his ear and hunched frantically against him. While his body worked, his mind sang! Of course Kurtz was tormented, of course he beat his wife regularly. There are countless dark bodies that must be
inferred
to lie near the sun; we shall never be able to see them, Nietzsche had written. Kurtz was one of them. Obviously, in marrying Giai he had crossed the line. Dissolution, the base shuttling and rearranging of the races, was intolerable to the proud and pure Aryan in him. Yet he would not leave her. So he beat her, punishing her for the sin he dare not admit to himself he had committed.

Giai was soon to reach her pinnacle. She groaned, her eyes rolling, her belly rippling, the muscles of her thighs and buttocks clenching furiously. And, like a house plucked up by a tornado, he was brought along with her. She stroked the nape of his neck, his damp hair, crooning wordlessly like a child in delirium.

It was Mick’s firm and abiding belief that morality was merely timidity tricked out in a philosophical overcoat. Even if he had not read this in
Beyond Good and Evil,
his own experiences in the war in Vietnam would have taught him the same thing. As it was, they merely made Nietzsche’s words resonate in his mind all the louder.
And like all men of prey,
he thought,
I am misunderstood.
What was morality but a recipe against passion, an attempt to castrate the dangerousness in which man lives with himself?

‘Yes,’ Giai breathed. ‘Oh, yes!’

He held her, light as a feather, as she shivered and moaned, trembled and clung in great gasping sighs, then started all over again as he put his head down, his white teeth sinking into the tender flesh of her shoulder as he skewered her – once, twice, three times – gushing as he thought of life – Kurtz’s life – bleeding away in a mass of stinking, steaming innards.