Second Skin (25 page)

‘Yes, exactly. Their purity of purpose seems overly harsh, even at times incomprehensible to most Westerners.’

The waiter came with their drinks and Honniko ordered goat-cheese salads and stir-fried vegetable plates for both of them. ‘I’m a vegetarian,’ she said to Nicholas. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

He shook his head. ‘Do you know how Roppongi got its name? Once upon a time, it belonged to six of those daimyo I was speaking of. They all had the Chinese character for “trees” in their names, hence Roppongi – Six Trees. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when their status as samurai ceased to be a shield, then property was confiscated by the Meiji government and given over to the Imperial Army.’

‘I know the more recent history. After the war, it was requisitioned by the American Occupation, and gradually it became an entertainment quarter.’ Honniko fiddled with her dark glasses. ‘I know that because my father was stationed here in those years.’

‘He was Army, right?’

Around and around the tabletop the dark glasses went. ‘Military police.’ She glanced up at him. ‘He went after the bad guys, you know, the users: the currency runners, arms merchants, drug dealers, black marketeers.’

It was interesting. She was giving off two conflicting signals. She didn’t want to talk about her father, but she did.

‘Tell me about your mother,’ he said as the salads were served. Maybe that would take some of the pressure off.

‘There’s nothing much to tell. My father met her here in Roppongi.’ Honniko was watching a new marriage party – this group in black leather motorcycle jackets and silver studs – make their way across the terrace under the direction of a rather hyper photographer.

‘And that’s the end of the story.’

As the photographer placed the party in the sunlight, Honniko looked down at her salad and said nothing.

‘Forget it,’ Nicholas said. ‘It’s none of my business.’

Across the terrace, the party was shedding their leather jackets, revealing skin so covered with tattoos that there was hardly a flesh-colored patch anywhere to be seen.

Honniko, studying the array of tattooed flesh like a careful housewife picking over fresh fish, said, ‘Actually, there
is
more to the story.’

While the wedding photographer worked in a flurry of movement, Nicholas waited for her to continue.

‘My mother worked not far from here, in a
toruko,’
she said after a long pause. Her eyes caught his, flashed away. ‘Do you know what that is?’

‘Yes. Nowadays, it’s called soapland.’ He took up a forkful of radicchio, mâche, and goat cheese. ‘The word is a bastardization of the English
Turkish bath.’

‘Then you know that men went to a
toruko
not merely to get clean.’

‘I suppose it had to do with how much money they were willing to part with.’

‘And the imagination of the woman getting you clean.’ She looked down at her untouched salad. ‘My mother was a
halo
.’ The word was slang. Literally, it meant box, but the meaning was pussy. It was also the nickname of the women who worked the old-time
toruko.

‘Your father knew this?’

‘Yeah. It was called Tenki.’
Tenki
was Japanese for a profound secret. ‘He got a call to raid the place and dig out a black marketeer who was getting his genitals soaped. Everyone in the
toruko
was hauled out and arrested, my mother included.’

‘And they fell in love.’

‘Like hell.’ Honniko laughed uneasily. ‘My father was all-American and a pure, cross-eyed romantic. Also, he knew nothing about the Japanese.’ Finding no good use for her fork, she finally put it down. ‘He wanted to take her away from all that.’

‘And, of course, she went.’ He pushed his salad away; he’d had enough. ‘Because he wanted her to, not because
she
wanted to.’

‘She became his wife.’ Honniko watched the waiter take their plates away. ‘She became what he wanted her to be.’

‘Did she have a choice?’

Honniko shook her head. ‘Not really. He was the one who sprung her from jail. Her family, who lived in Ise, did not even know she was in Tokyo.’ The plates of brightly colored vegetables were set in front of them. ‘He paid her fine, got the authorities to wipe her record clean – so she could start fresh, he told her.’ She stabbed a piece of asparagus with more force than was required. ‘His life, not hers.’ She stared at the asparagus on her fork as if it might be alive and squirming. ‘Still, as you can imagine, she was immensely grateful.’

On the sun-splashed terrace, the photographer was nervously rearranging the wedding party into so many designs it was dizzying.

‘From that day forward the
giri
she owed him was so great she could refuse him nothing. The ironic thing is that if my father ever suspected, it would have blown his mind. Of course, he never did.’

Nicholas pushed the food around on his plate. Maybe her lack of appetite was contagious. ‘Did she come to love him in the end?’

Honniko gave him a wistful smile as she gave up on her food. ‘We all wish for happy endings, don’t we?’ She put down her fork. ‘The truth is I don’t know. I never will. She died last year and my father...’ She let out a long breath. ‘I don’t know where my father is, whether he’s alive or dead. He walked out on us when I was twelve and we never heard from him. He never sent my mother money for me. Nothing. It’s like he never existed, and from that time on my mother never spoke his name.’ She looked at him. ‘So I guess, yeah, she must have loved him in some fashion because he sure as hell broke her heart.’

Looking at the wedding party now filing inside for the ceremony, Nicholas thought maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to bring her here, after all.

Abruptly, the world canted over on one side. The disappearing wedding party looked like stretched-out bars of Turkish taffy and the sky had turned the color of bubble gum. Nicholas, alarmed, looked down at his right arm. Had it gone
directly through
the table, as it now seemed? He shook his head, but the buzz of ten million bees refused to abate. He sensed Honniko looking at him oddly, but he could not actually see her. The bubble gum was coming down from the sky.

Then, like a rubber band snapping back into place, reality returned to its previous form.

‘–all right?’ Honniko was saying. ‘You went white there for a moment, and now you’re sweating.’

Nicholas wiped his forehead with his napkin. His tongue felt as thick as a log. What had happened? Another small seizure of Tau-tau, but not Akshara, no. Kshira. His power rising, unbidden. Toward what end? The question made him shiver.

‘It’s nothing. I’m all right.’ But even as he said it, he knew it for a lie.

Thirty years ago, the Golden Gate Inn had been a hip and happening place. Despite its unlovely exterior, the six-story building had the right location for the wise-guys of Queens and East New York. It overlooked Sheepshead Bay at Coney Island Avenue and the Belt Parkway. As such, it was prime location for what the wiseguys favored most: beach, boats, and bodies.

The bodies – all dead, all, in one form or another, enemies – were discovered from time to time in the section of overgrown weeds and steel-woolly underbrush where, in 1961, Mick Leonforte had whacked Gino Scalfa. Scalfa was by no means the first to get it there and he certainly wasn’t the last.

Nowadays, the hotel was no longer hosting wiseguys to drinks, broads, and braggadocio. It was, in fact, closed up and all but derelict. But the area next to it that had never been developed, wild with weeds, grasses, and goldenrod in summer, enriched over the years with their blood and brains, still abided by the side of the service road.

It was at this place that Caesare Leonforte had set the meet with Margarite. She arrived in the vicinity ten minutes early and sat in her car waiting. It was not cold, nevertheless her arms were crossed over her chest in order to keep herself from trembling.

To calm her wildly beating heart, she took the time to review all the ways in which Bad Clams had turned her life upside down. And at once she saw how much she had been in shock these last two days. They seemed like days, weeks, so paralyzed had she been. Caesare – brilliant bastard that he was – had struck her heart three times in succession and had succeeded in robbing her of her best defense: her mind. She was in an intense state of fear for Francie’s life even while she had been mourning for her beloved business – and, yes, even for Tony, with whom she had shared at least some good times and a sense of intimacy. Tony might have abused her, but he had loved her as well, of this she had no doubt. She also knew that she had grown where he had not. And, in doing so, she had become a person with whom he could not cope. For men like Tony, women with aspirations were bad enough. But those who turned those aspirations into success were intolerable. Where, in his mind, she should have stayed at home banging out a succession of little DeCamillos for him, she went out, got educated, went into her own business. But for all that, she was a failure as a woman, as far as Tony had been concerned. And then had come the topper. Dominic had made Tony his successor as don in name only. All the real power had devolved onto Margarite. It was Margarite whom Dom trained, Margarite to whom he whispered all his secrets. It had driven Tony wild.

Now he was dead and though Margarite could mourn him in the traditional sense, she wondered whether a day would come when she would miss him.

She stared hard at the slashed and gaping hole in the dashboard where the CD player had been. She had used the crowbar in the trunk to gouge it out, had thrown it out the window as she had sped along the Belt Parkway. Then and only then, when she was certain that Caesare could not trace her calls, did she phone the beeper of the high-level Goldoni contact at City Hall. She had told the official to pull Jack Barnett, the cop who was investigating Tony’s murder, off that case and any others he was currently on. This is what I want Barnett to do,’ she told the official, and had then given the man a specific set of instructions.

The official did not complain. He was one of literally hundreds of municipal, state, and federal government officials on whom Dominic Goldoni had compiled dossiers. The Nishiki network constantly updated these dossiers, and when Dom had been murdered, Margarite had inherited these files and the power they brought anyone who possessed them.

This particular man, Margarite knew, was a cross-dresser, not a peccadillo that would be condoned if it were made public. A man – especially a government official – dressing up in woman’s clothes would cause a scandal of epic proportions if it hit the news media.

The phone rang and she jumped just as if a shot had been fired at her.

‘Yes?’ she answered warily. What if it was Caesare calling to torment her again?

‘Mrs DeCamillo? Barnett here.’

Her eyes closed in relief. ‘Where are you. Detective?’

‘Close. Very close.’

Margarite glanced at her watch. ‘It’s time.’

‘I know.’

‘My daughter, Francine –’

‘You’ve made yourself very clear, Mrs DeCamillo. You pull some extremely powerful strings at City Hall.’

‘All in a day’s work.’

‘Your work, Mrs DeCamillo. I’m only brought in to clean up the messes you and people like you make.’

Her face was a mask of concentration as she put the Lexus in gear. ‘I’m going in.’

‘Understood.’

She broke the connection as she nosed down the service road toward the patch of weeds and underbrush. Beyond, the bay twinkled with lights and reflections. The lights of the city bounced eerily off the underside of low clouds. The air was heavy and wet with incipient rain. A plane following a flight path into Kennedy roared by, sounding like thunder.

Bernice was wrong, Margarite thought, as she kept her eye out for the other car. And, anyway, it was, impossible to put aside thoughts of vengeance. This was Francine, her baby, they were talking about! Business was one thing, but Bad Clams had violated every code of their world: he’d gone after her family. That was, as Mrs Paglia had said, an
infamia,
and now, whatever Bad Clams’ fate, he had brought it down on himself.

She knew she was taking a terrible risk. But this situation wasn’t that cut-and-dried. In snatching her daughter Caesare had crossed a line. His unspeakable act had branded him for destruction, and Margarite was determined to be the agent of that annihilation.

Up ahead, in the tarmacked space between the service road and the place where the weeds began heading down to the bay, she could see a dark Lincoln, lying low and in wait like a hunter. It had kept dark all this time, but as she approached, its golden running lights were switched on. She rolled to a stop, the Lexus’s engine ticking over like a clock, like her pulse. She stared hard at the car, as if she had X-ray vision that could penetrate its armor plate and see her daughter.

Francine!
Her mind screamed in her agony. Oh, Bernice, for all her wisdom, could not know such profound fear and pain!

She blinked several times, then slowly and methodically disengaged her white fingers from their death grip around the steering wheel.

‘Mrs DeCamillo.’ A voice, disembodied by distance and darkness, made her shiver.

Breathe,
she commanded herself.
Breathe.

‘Yes,’ she called out of the open window. ‘I’m here.’

‘Please get outta the car an’ open all four doors.’

It will be over in a minute,
she told herself as she got slowly out of the Lexus.
That’s what Barnett said and I believe him. I have to believe him.

‘Now step away from the car so we can see inside an’ make sure you’re alone.’

‘I told Caesare –’

‘Gotta make sure, Mrs D. You know how it is. I got my orders.’

She walked carefully out of the headlight beams.

‘Stay where we can see ya. Right in fronta the car.’

She did as she was told, but she had the .45 in her hand, hanging at her side, hidden by her body and her handbag. She had already killed once in defense of her life, and she knew she was prepared to kill again to get Francie back. She had become the agent of Caesare’s annihilation.