Second Skin (29 page)

This was not a good position for her to be in and she knew it. She got up on the rail, spread her arms wide, balancing there. ‘Then push me in. As you said, it’ll all be over in minutes.’

The red running lights were coming closer, and now the deep throbbing of engines could be heard faintly.

‘Nah. I’d rather let you think about it some.’

‘Why wait, Caesare? Do it now. You can get back to your life and forget all about me.’

He looked at her for a long time. Behind her, she heard the engines quit as the unknown boat slid silently toward them. Only the faint wash of the waves could be heard.

‘I’m curious,’ he said. ‘I wanna see if you’re bullshitting me.’

‘Really?’

Caesare held out a hand but he did not touch her. ‘That and I don’t want to forget about you.’

But now she knew what he was really saying, though at the moment he might not have understood.
I don’t want to forget about Jaqui.

‘You’ve hurt me. I’m not one of your bimbos. Do you think you can just put on one of your macho shows, announce that you’re thinking of plopping me in the water, and watch while my insides turn to jelly?’ She kept her voice on a steadily rising pitch. ‘You think that’s amusing or fun?’

‘Look at it from my point of view. What if you’re the heat?’

‘You’re still the fucking monster you were when you hit your sister!’ she shouted.

‘Naw, c’mon, babe. Cut out the crap.’

‘You
like
fucking with my mind, you sadist.’

‘Don’t – Jesus, don’t, for God’s sake, use the f-word.’

‘Why the hell not?’ Of course she knew why not. She’d bet the farm Jaqui had never used the f-word. ‘You do. Besides, you’ve scared the piss out of me. How the hell do you think I feel?’

‘Yah, well...’ He shrugged, took a step toward her, enfolded her in his arms, and she let him take her down from there, hold her close to him. He kissed her on both cheeks, on each eyelid, on her forehead. Very formal, very tender. Then his lips pressed against hers, opened, and their tongues met briefly.

A soft hail came on the night air, and Caesare put her down. ‘Business now,’ he whispered. As he gently touched her cheek, he returned the hail.

She nodded. ‘I’ll go below.’

But as she turned, he grasped her hand, pulled her back. ‘No, stay here.’ He neatly and efficiently tied off the lines thrown to him. ‘You say you were in the business.’

‘I
was
in the business,’ she whispered fiercely, as a man thin as a whippet climbed over the side from a dinghy lying to.

‘Okay, then.’ He turned back to her. ‘I want you to give me your opinion of this motherfucker.’

Vesper turned to see a Coast Guard cutter off the starboard bow. It was showing no lights, which was highly unusual. She checked its markings, saw the designation: CGM 1176. The whippet-thin man was dressed in the standard uniform of a lieutenant in the US Coast Guard. He was carrying a blue and white nylon gym bag.

‘Caesare,’ he said. His smile showed about an acre of gold-capped teeth. He had the close-set nervous eyes of a rodent, and he had a twitch in his right shoulder as if he had a gun butt digging into his armpit.

‘Milo.’ Caesare lifted a hand. ‘This’s Vesper. She’s gonna check the shipment. Okay with you?’

Milo shrugged. ‘Me, I don’t give a shit if you want the pope to taste it. Alla same t’me.’

He unzipped the gym bag, handed over a clear plastic bag filled with a white powder. Vesper took it and the knife Caesare handed her. She made a small X in the bag, drew out some of the white powder on the flat of the blade, tasted it. Then she turned her head, spat over the side. She looked hard into Caesare’s eyes for a moment before nodding.

‘Bring the shit over,’ Caesare said.

The transfer took approximately seven minutes. During that time, Caesare brought out an attaché case in which Vesper assumed was the money to pay for the cocaine. With her back to Milo, she whispered to Caesare, ‘Don’t pay him yet. Just follow my lead.’

‘Is this all of it?’ Vesper asked as Milo counted out the last of the 150 bags.

‘That’s it. I’ll take the money now.’

‘Just a moment.’ Vesper stood in front of the shipment and, kneeling down, plucked out two bags at random from the inside of the pile.

‘What’s she doin’?’ Milo said in mild alarm. ‘We gotta deal.’

‘I’m checking the merch,’ Vesper said as she slit open the bags.

‘You already done that.’ Milo looked at Caesare. ‘She already done that.’ His mouth screwed up. ‘Now you lettin’ a broad wear the pants, Bad Clams?’

‘Shut your fuckin’ yap,’ Caesare said.

Milo looked down to see a MAC-10 machine pistol in Caesare’s right hand. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he cried, ‘take it fucking easy, would you? I didn’t mean anything.’

Vesper stood up. She was careful to keep out of Caesare’s line of fire. ‘The bag on the left’s okay. But the one on the right’s laced with something really nasty: arsenic.’

Caesare hefted the MAC-10, pointed his chin at Milo. ‘Well?’

Milo dipped his pinky into the open bag on the right, tasted off the tip. He nodded, his face expanded with astonishment. ‘Damned if she isn’t right on the money, boss.’

All at once Caesare leapt across the deck and jammed the muzzle of the MAC-10 into the soft spot between Milo’s neck and chin. ‘I wanna know right now, you lying, cocksucking sonuvabitch if you’re tryin’ t’fuck me ovah, because if you are an’ deny it now, you’ll be singin’ alto inna girls’ choir.’ A red madness was in his eyes, like that of a berserk or rabid beast, a vast and burning rage not wholly under his control.
‘Answer me,
you fucking weasel nothing!’

‘Jesus Christ, don’t kill the messenger just ’cause the news sucks. I’m not the source, for Christ’s sake. Besides, you know drugs aren’t my thing. I haven’t touched your shit an’ I’ll kill the motherfucker what says I did.’ Milo almost choked on his fear. ‘This’s the first I’m hearin’ of it, I swear!’

Caesare drew himself up slightly, and taking a deep breath, he turned to glance at Vesper. She nodded to tell him she believed Milo was telling the truth.

In a way, Caesare seemed disappointed. He wanted immediate satisfaction for this outrage, and Vesper could see he was just itching to go after Milo.

‘Okay,’ Caesare said at length. He let Milo up. The whippet-thin man was drenched in sweat and his knees almost buckled when Caesare let go of him. He knew just how close he had come to disaster.

‘Someone’s trying to fuck me over, Milo.’ Caesare kept the MAC-10, but now held it muzzle down at his side. ‘Let’s see, there’s a delivery set up for tomorrow night, right?’

Milo nodded numbly.

‘We’ll take care a this mess then.’

Milo began to breathe again. ‘Inna meantime, I’ll get this gahbidge outta here. Let the fuckin’ sharks choke on it.’

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Caesare snapped. ‘Who told you to think?’ He pointed to the bag of arsenic-laced dope. ‘Wrap that up an’ make sure it’s on the boat tomorrow night. I’m goin’ with you.’

‘You, boss, but nevah –’

‘Get outta here!’ Caesare screamed at him and Milo scrambled to obey.

When they were alone, Vesper turned on Caesare, her eyes blazing. ‘You set me up. This was a test.’

He shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, can you blame me? A broad too good t’be true drops outta the sky inta my lap, I gotta wonder ’bout that. Problem?’

‘No problem.’

‘Good. Anyway, looks like you did me a big one, fingering the shit with the arsenic.’ He broke out the Styrofoam chest, which was filled with food and iced champagne. ‘Let’s eat. I’m starved.’

The pink and acid-green neon glow of Tokyo radiated like the heart of a gigantic generator. But here amid the modern concrete shell of Karasumori Jinja, the soft nineteenth-century light of lanterns cast a flight of hazy circles within the environs of the Shinto shrine. Despite the looming bulk of the nearby New Shinbashi Building, the Jinja was set within a series of narrow alleys whose appearance harked back to a different Tokyo before war and economic miracle had made of it another country.

‘Japan is now without a political leader,’ Mikio Okami said. ‘In this time of economic chaos it lies adrift and rudderless in violent seas. As with all vacuums nature will not long tolerate this one.’

‘But you told me that there are no leading candidates to become prime minister,’ Nicholas said.

That was then,’ Okami said as he stepped from lantern light into relative darkness. This afternoon, the name Kansai Mitsui was put forward by the coalition as a kind of compromise.’

‘I don’t know him.’

‘Not surprising. Not many people who aren’t on the political inside do. But he’s a dangerous man. It’s his contention that the rape of Nanking was nothing more than a fabrication.’ Okami was speaking of one of Japan’s most notorious – and bestial – war crimes. In 1937, Japanese soldiers massacred hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians. More than twenty thousand women were raped and the city was torched. Eleven years later, a war crimes tribunal sentenced the commander of the Japanese forces in Nanking to death.

‘Kansai Mitsui is a deconstructionist, pure and simple,’ Okami continued. ‘He’s intent on remaking history in his own image. To that end, he’s made threats against the current prime minister for trying to heal the wounds of the war in the Pacific. He claims our invasion of the Asian mainland should be remembered – lauded as an act of liberation. In denying that Japan was ever intent on expanding her territory, he insists that we were merely liberating the Asian people from their enslavement by Western colonial aggressors.’

Okami stopped just out of another circle of lantern light. ‘Also, what almost no one knows is that Mitsui is backed by Tetsuo Akinaga. But that may be of little moment. Akinaga is destined to rot in prison.’

Nicholas’s eyes glittered. ‘Late this afternoon I received word that our old friend Akinaga will be walking free within days. His lawyers have sprung him on a series of technicalities.’

‘Akinaga is going free?’

‘Someone or some people within the Tokyo Prosecutor’s Office are in his pocket. I am working with a prosecutor named Tanaka Gin. He’s a good man, a dogged and dedicated detective. Akinaga was his case. He believes his brief was sabotaged by someone in his office. Maybe you could look into this.’

Okami grinned fiercely. ‘It will be my pleasure.’

They came upon a local musician, who took up his samisen and began a haunting melody. They walked on, needing the space in which to talk, but the music followed them, drifting like smoke amid the lanterns.

‘How big a threat is this man, Mitsui?’ Nicholas asked.

‘That remains to be seen. But, undoubtedly, the greatest threat is Akinaga himself. I want to see if he still has the muscle to push Mitsui’s nomination through.’

‘By then it may be too late.’

‘Not really.’ Okami resumed walking. ‘Akinaga’s the key. Without him, Mitsui will fall into line, another weak prime minister who won’t accomplish much. Right now, I think it’s worth biding our time and letting Akinaga run out his skein.’

‘The talk of threats has made more urgent something that happened to me twice this afternoon.’ Nicholas related the odd and disquieting sensations of Tau-tau he had experienced while with Honniko and Tanaka Gin without having consciously summoned it up.

‘I have never known Akshara to manifest itself in this manner,’ Okami said, clearly concerned.

‘But it was strangely different from Akshara.’ Nicholas had not told Okami about the eerie doppelgänger sensation he had experienced at Rodney Kurtz’s, and he had no plan to until he could better sort it out for himself. It was too personal, too intimate in a way Nicholas had yet to define, to confide it in anyone – even Okami.

‘What was it like?’

‘I’m not sure. Like the sky was melting, like ten million voices speaking to me at once.’ He shook his head. ‘I know. All of that sounds crazy.’

‘Not at all. But I do believe we ought to continue with our attempts to heal the defects inside you.’ Okami reached out a hand. ‘Are you prepared?’

Nicholas nodded, though after the unsettling experiences of the last few days, he approached this session with a heightened sense of trepidation. He stood very still, listening to the city sounds around him first growing unnaturally loud, then fading into the distance, as normal reality fled through a hole in the universe.

‘That’s right,’ Mikio Okami said, ‘drink in the night.’

He watched as Nicholas, head thrown back, stared into the void that was Akshara. High above and with each heartbeat growing more distant were the lights of Tokyo, a dome of neon, receding into darkness.

‘Enter deeply into Akshara,’ Okami said. ‘So deeply that you begin to see the dark patterns in the void. Here is Kshira.’

Kshira was the dark path, the other half of Tau-tau, the part almost never spoken of because those who dared try to master it either died or went mad. Such had been the case with Kansatsu, Nicholas’s Tau-tau
sensei,
who had embedded pieces of Kshira inside Nicholas’s mind like cunning timebombs.

Nicholas had been told that Okami possessed
koryoku,
the Illuminating Power. It was said among the ancients who practiced Tau-tau centuries ago that
koryoku
was the sole path to Shuken, the Dominion, where the two halves of Tau-tau could be united into a working whole. But others insisted that Shuken was merely a myth, that Akshara and Kshira were never meant to meld into a whole.

Nicholas fervently believed in Shuken. He needed to. Otherwise Kshira, the soul destroyer, would eventually take him over and drive him mad as it had Kansatsu.

Abruptly, he felt the jellied sky covering his limbs, heard the chittering of ten million voices speaking in unknown tongues directly at the center of his mind. It was as it had been this afternoon. It was Kshira, and it was too much. It –

‘No,’ Okami said sharply, ‘do not pull away from Kshira. You will only draw the dark patterns closer to you, and once they attach themselves to your conscious mind they cannot be severed.’

Deep within the trancelike state of Tau-tau, Nicholas was beyond time and space. He existed as a point of light in a void without dimension. All around him the cosmos breathed like a beast in the forest, but now instead of being encased in the armor of Akshara, he felt the unquiet darkness all around as the shards of Kshira swirled in the void. Once, they seemed almost harmless, distant clouds on a limitless horizon. But now they circled him so swiftly that at any given moment they blocked out increasing sections of the void, impairing his psychic vision. All too soon, he knew, they would link up, making a continuous band around him, cutting him off from chunks of Akshara until all he could see and feel would be their black weight, and then the madness would set in.