Second Skin (28 page)

‘There’s a man maybe coming tomorrow, friend of mine,’ Bad Clams said as he headed out along the scimitared line the moonlight made on the ocean. ‘Real character, this guy. I think you’ll get a kick outta him. He’s gonna stay couple days, maybe. Bringing his girlfriend, she’s okay.’ He waited a moment. ‘Not that it matters, she’s a sickly broad, so you won’t be seein’ mucha her.’

‘Does this mean we can’t go to South Beach?’ Vesper drew wisps of hair off her face. ‘You promised me we’d go tomorrow.’

‘No, South Beach it is. My friend, Paulie, he won’t be here till sometime inna afternoon. We’ll go for lunch, ’kay? I’m sick of Il Palazzo, anyway.’

About three miles from shore, he abruptly cut the engines and they began to drift.

‘Look at that sunset,’ he said, pointing to the green and orange fire beyond the western horizon. ‘Makes you glad t’be alive, doesn’t it?’

It was preternaturally quiet out here, beyond the seabirds and out of the shipping lanes. The pleasure boats were all riding at anchor or safely in their slips. Only the distant drone of a plane could be heard wafting over the water. Far off, the lights of Palm Beach had come on, a spangle, part of another world, a reflection of the sunset riding the waves.

‘You hungry?’

‘Not really.’ She noticed a large Styrofoam chest that had been stowed beside the wheel.

‘Hey, you know what I did today?’ he said, his tone still light and conversational. ‘I checked you out. And y’know what I found?’ He was coming toward her and Vesper had sense enough to stand her ground. Not an easy thing given the pissed-off look on his face. ‘I found out that you worked for the federal government.’ He was close now. ‘Not only that, you worked for a virtually unknown unit called Looking-Glass.’ She could smell him, that curious, spicy animal scent with which he scared people. ‘Not only that, you worked for my father, John.’

‘It’s all true,’ Vesper said quietly.

He snorted. ‘I know that, lady. What I
don’t
know is what you’re doing here.’ His hands gestured. ‘I mean, it’s too much ova coincidence you showin’ up in Il Palazzo just in time for me to walk in and see you.’

Vesper was walking through a lethal minefield without a diagram of where the explosives were located. Being with Caesare Leonforte was like that. Not that she minded such an assignment. Almost all her life, it seemed, she had been a sister to risk. And to her credit or her damnation, depending on your point of view, she clove to it like a moth to a flame.

The essential attraction of risk was that it took you out of yourself. Like acting, it was the antithesis of self-contemplation, which had never been one of Vesper’s attributes. In being someone else, actors had no time to be themselves, and it was the same for risk. In those situations that entailed the greatest risk, you had to be whatever it was the other person needed you to be. Up to a point. Then you turned the tables on them in order to get what you wanted out of them.

Vesper’s relationship with Bad Clams was still in the first, and most dangerous, stage. For if she was found out, there would be no other stages to follow on. Everything would be lost.

On the risky theory that the best defense was offense, Vesper pushed herself against him, encircling him with her arms. She kissed him hard on the lips. Then she pulled her head away so she could see his eyes and grinned up at him. ‘Did I somehow magically make you come over and pick me up?’

‘No, of course not, but –’

‘But I
was
there hoping to run into you.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘Yeah, why?’

‘Because of the Pentagon investigation into your father’s dealings with DARPA, I need a secure place to hide.’ She was talking about the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA was so ultrasecret it was black-budgeted, which meant that Congress never knew about its funds and, therefore, never had to vote appropriations. ‘Your father was dipping his fingers into the DARPA experimental weapons cache virtually at will. When that came to light, it got a lot of people at the Pentagon really pissed off because it made the generals look foolish and compromised the entire fast-track advanced weapons research program.’

‘So okay, what’s that got to do with you?’

‘I needed to get out of Washington permanently before the investigation got around to me.’

Now he seemed really suspicious. ‘Yeah, why? You had nothing to do with the DARPA procurement network.’

Like most things in life, it was a trade-off. She’d gotten him more pissed off and suspicious of her, but in the process he’d given her a vital piece of the puzzle she was trying to solve. Now she had confirmed that Caesare had been involved in his father’s scheme to raid DARPA of its best weapons ideas.

‘No, but I worked closely with your father.’

‘On what?’

‘Drugs.’

For a moment, Caesare was too shocked to say anything. Then he began to laugh. He laughed so hard he held his sides and tears came to his eyes. ‘You?’ he gasped. ‘A beautiful, intelligent broad like you involved in the macho sleaze of the drug world? You gotta be kidding.’

‘I’m not.’

Caesare sobered up quickly. ‘Don’t you fuckin’ try to scam me, I’ll skin you alive.’ When he spoke like that, his street voice overrode everything.

‘No scam. I was your father’s administrative assistant, on the books, that is. What I
really
did for him was coordinate his drug operation from inside Looking-Glass.’

‘How come I never heard of you?’

‘Because I took care of the Asian side of things. Besides, Johnny had more secrets than a small town.’

‘Yeah, you could say that again.’ Caesare was calmer now. ‘That sonuvabitch never told anybody anything more than he thought they needed to know. Was always like that. Never trusted anybody – not even his kids.’ He snorted again. ‘Hey, shit, what am I talkin’ about –
specially
his kids. Nobody, an’ I mean
no
fucking-body, was close to Johnny Leonforte.’ This was said with a certain admiring machismo, but Vesper felt an undercurrent like a wisp of a breeze against her cheek, a dark and brooding hurt like a bruise that had never healed.

He sat down on the stern of the Cigarette, looked at her. ‘He keep you a secret ’cause he was boffing you?’

For a moment, Vesper wondered which way to play this. She knew now that Caesare would be intensely jealous if she said yes. The question was whether she wanted that.

‘Well, he certainly tried,’ she said, going solely on instinct. ‘And tried and tried and tried.’

Caesare stared at her in a kind of reverie. He had never met a woman even remotely like her, and he was intoxicated. Much to his astonishment, he found that he admired the way she stood up to him almost as much as he adored the fury with which she made love. For him, whose needs required that everything be larger than life, she was like a gift from heaven. Everything about her was larger than life – her passion, her humor, her intelligence, her fury. Rather than being intimidated, as most men would be, he embraced these things in her. After spending his life dismissing women as second-class citizens who did no more than inhabit the vast backdrop of his life, he had discovered a kind of soul mate who, by sheer force of her animal personality, had pushed herself to the foreground where he had always stood alone.

Not surprisingly, this revelation set up a series of ripples in his mind. Like unknown currents, they branched out, chilling him, firing him, taking him to places he had not known existed.

He shook his head. ‘You’re some fuckin’ broad, you know that? Whatta pair of
cojónes
on you.’

Then they were laughing together and she knew she had made the right decision because she felt one of his internal walls crumbling. She was further inside than she had been.

It was growing dark now, the string of lights on shore more brilliant. The eastern half of the sky was already black.

‘Y’know, I never met a broad before my father wanted who he didn’t get.’

‘That must’ve been hard on your mother.’

‘Ah, my mother.’ Caesare crossed himself. ‘God rest her soul. She hung in there, gotta give her all the credit inna world. She loved my father until the day she died, and nothing was gonna shake that love apart. But he was nevah there, y’know?’ He looked out over the waves. ‘But sometimes I think he sure did his best.’ He put his elbows on his knees, stared down at the deck. ‘Why’d he hurt her so to leave her like that? I mean, us kids, we were alla time runnin’ around so we hardly had time t’miss him. Leastwise I nevah did.’ But something far back in his eyes told Vesper he was lying – not only to her but perhaps to himself as well.

Caesare shook his head. ‘What’d she ever do to him but love him, make him the only man inna world? An’ then he skips out. But he hadda job t’do, y’know, she knew that, I mean, she had to, right? It was business, but she hadda miss him something fierce and it must’ve killed her inside, the love eating right through her. Anyway, I used to ask myself these questions when I was young an’ stupid, running around the streets of Ozone Park.’

His eyes flicked up to hers. ‘And, y’know, I never could come up with the answers until one day I had to do this errand, take my sister to Astoria, to this convent she was crazy for.’ His fingers laced and unlaced as he spoke. ‘She was so odd, my sister, Jaqui. Talk about someone I never understood, Jesus! Anyway, Jaqui, her dream was to be a nun, that’s why she was always going off to this convent, the Sacred Heart of Santa Maria. I was only there the once but I never forgot the name.’

He sighed. ‘Anyway, I was driving Jaqui there and we were talking. Poor thing, she was always trying to talk to me, only I don’t think I ever paid attention. I mean she was my
sister,
for Christ’s sake, what could she have t’say, alla time talkin’ about stuff I knew nothin’ about? ’Cept this time. I asked her those questions that were driving me batty. “When’s Pop coming home?” I asked her. “I mean, Mom’s gotta broken heart already from waiting for him.” An’ she said, “Don’t you get it yet? He’s never coming back.”’

Caesare’s hands opened wide. ‘Naturally, I got pissed off and yelled at her. I mean, what the fuck, she was talking bullshit, like she always did, no wonder I never listened to her. Of course, Pop was coming back. We were his family, right?’

He was staring down at his feet. ‘But, funny thing, y’know, she was right. Pop never did come back.’

Caesare’s head came up suddenly and he guffawed. His mood change was startling. ‘She could really be something, Jaqui. You remind me of her maybe a little ’cause she was big – in here.’ He tapped his temple meaningfully with a forefinger. ‘Y’know, she never called Pop Pop, or Dad or Father, even. Father was for the priests, anyway, far as she was concerned. I guess she hated him or maybe pitied him ’cause she felt abandoned.’

‘Didn’t you?’ Vesper asked. ‘I mean it’d be only natural.’

‘Who, me? Nah, I was too busy learning the family trade, so to speak, from Uncle Alphonse, that rat bastard.’ She heard that same dark undercurrent in his voice. He grew unaccountably melancholy again and she felt she was on one end of an emotional yo-yo. ‘An’ I always, y’know, stuck up for the old man. Not like Jaqui. She had some fuckin’ mouth, my sister. An’ no fuckin’ respect for family, either.’ He rubbed his palms together slowly as if he needed to warm them, and looked out to sea.

‘What happened to Jaqui?’ Vesper put a hand on his back, rubbing in circles. As she did so, she detached herself from her physical moorings as Okami had taught her until even the beating of her heart receded down a long crystalline corridor, until she was enveloped in the singular silence of thought. The
beat-beat-beat
of the wings of unseen birds pushed outward, past the barrier between humans, and entered Caesare’s psyche. Connected in this tenuous fashion, she did her best to push him on. Revelation would follow revelation, the first one being the most difficult. This Bad Clam shell was beginning to open.

‘That’s the really shitty thing, see.’ He took a breath even as he waved a hand dismissively. ‘She died inna car crash when she was twenty. Year after she joined the convent.’ He continued to stare bleakly out to sea. ‘Twenty, Jesus.’ He turned to her. ‘Y’know, the funny thing is, I miss her now. Never did when she was alive and inna convent. Never even thought of her much, ’cept to be pissed at her for not respectin’ Pop. But now I think of her all the time. Weird, isn’t it?’

‘Not really, and I think it’s good. It’s good that you can appreciate her now. She’d like that, don’t you think?’

‘I dunno.’ Caesare seemed so sad. ‘I think of that time I yelled at her inna car onna way to the convent, y’know? Truth is, I didn’t just yell – I slapped her. I hit her hard, y’know. I hurt her, outside and inside. I know it. I feel it’ – he curled one hand into a fist, pounded his chest over his heart – ‘here.’

‘But now you’re sorry you did it.’

‘Course I am. Jesus, what a fuckin’ monster I was then, trying so hard to be like Pop, ’cause he was gone and I had to be the head of the family, there was no one else. I mean, my brother, Mick, forgetaboutit, he always had his brains up his ass.’

Mick Leonforte, Vesper thought. What role had he played in the family dynamic – then and now? She was about to lead him into this territory when he abruptly rose and went to the wheel and switched on green running lights. This sudden burst of physical energy snapped Vesper’s delicate psychic threads, and he was gone.

‘See that out there?’ He had grabbed a pair of binoculars and was peering through them out into a dark part of the ocean.

Vesper walked to where he stood. She could just make out a pair of red sparks. ‘What are those, running lights?’

Caesare grinned. ‘Smart girl. Yeah, we’re meeting a boat out here.’

‘I’m flattered you took me with you.’

‘Don’t be,’ he said flatly. ‘This is an ideal place to dump a body. Sharks’ll make sure there’s nothing left to find.’

Vesper’s heart flipped over. ‘Is that what you plan to do with me?’

‘It was inna beginning.’ Caesare took the binoculars from his eyes. ‘But now I gotta bettah idea. It depends on whether I believe your story or not.’