Second Skin (35 page)

‘Damned if I know. We found him and I called you. He hasn’t been touched by us.’

Mick moved in, used the toe of his shoe to kick Nguyen over. The stench billowed up as if from the depths of hell.

‘Ugh!’ Honniko said, but she stood her ground.

Mick glanced at her. She was not the kind of woman to get sick at the sight of death. She’d seen her share. Not like him, of course. But he’d been in the war in Vietnam, where monstrous atrocities became mundane.

Mick kicked the corpse around good, until he had seen all sides of him. ‘He wasn’t shot, knifed, or garroted.’

‘He could have been smothered to death,’ Honniko said.

‘Not this man,’ Mick said. ‘He’d have never let anyone get that close.’

Mick kicked at the corpse one more time so that Nguyen’s face was up. He directed Jōchi to move the light in closer, then he squatted down. He breathed shallowly through his mouth, feeling the stench claw at the back of his throat. Peering at the features, he said, ‘You know, I do believe our friend here was drowned.’ He pointed. ‘You see here – and here – there’s evidence of bloating, as if he’d been in the water some.’

‘You mean someone drowned him then dumped him here?’ Honniko asked. ‘But why?’

Mick had seen so many dead in his time you’d think one more wouldn’t matter. But it did. Death was not like the films made it out to be, ennobling and featureless. It made you sick to your stomach, it made you examine what was inside you, question what life was all about. Maybe it didn’t diminish you, as books said it did, Mick thought. But it sure as hell changed you.

‘Only one reason I can think of,’ he said, standing up. ‘Look where he was dumped. At the back of the Criminal Museum. Get the message? Whoever killed him wanted us to find him.’

‘But no one even knew Nguyen was working for you,’ Jōchi said.

That was when Mick thought of the computer virus. It had been contained in the minidisc, riding piggyback on the CyberNet data. That meant one of two things: either Kappa Watanabe, the Sato R&D tech Mick had co-opted, had fucked him over, which, knowing Watanabe, he seriously doubted, or the minidisc had somehow been intercepted and switched.

‘Shit!’

Mick clenched his fists in rage. Only one man had had the means and the opportunity to make the switch: Nicholas Linnear.

He looked skyward, his lips pulled back in a bloodless grin. He had found that there were moments in life when a mixture of circumstance and emotion caused the world to change shape. The evening he had spent with Jaqui up on the roof the night his grandfather had been murdered had been one such incident, and there had been a second in the highland jungles of Laos with the Nungs when he had been initiated into their tribe and had been inscribed with the Gim, the dark blue, vertical crescent tattooed on the inside of his wrist. This was yet another. Everywhere he looked, the sharp edges of buildings had taken on a preternatural clarity, the ruthless acuity of a razor blade’s edge. He sucked in the humid Tokyo air, and it had the mind-expanding chill of a Himalayan night, and he rejoiced in the knowledge. So now they were into it, just the two of them. And isn’t this exactly what he had wanted? A chance to pit himself against his shadow double, his doppelgänger, the man with whom he had so much in common?

Linnear was doing a number on his head.
Smile,
the computer virus had written on his screen, and having writ refused to get the hell off. So Linnear was stalking him just as he had been stalking Linnear. A dance of death, the two of them in a prescribed circle, moving from the darkness to the light and back again, tied together by the mysterious cord that linked their pasts.

Now, truly, reality seemed to fade into the hazy distance. Instead, Mick found himself in a heightened state, the entire universe traveling the path of darkness and light with nothing in between. It was as if he and Nicholas Linnear were polar opposites, proton and electron inhabiting the last atom, circling one another at higher and higher speeds, both repelled and attracted, coming inevitably closer to the clash that would mean existence for one of them – and destruction for the other.

The samurai of old were mortified by the idea of dying in bed; they hoped only to die on the battlefield. A priest, too, will be unable to fulfill the Way unless he is of this disposition –

The priest Ryōi

From chapter 10 of
Hagakure,
the book of the samurai

SPRING 1957/WINTER 1945/SPRING 1961–62

Jaqui Leonforte knew she was destined for something special the moment she met Bernice. Within the boundaries of the Convent of the Sacred Heart of Santa Maria, Jaqui felt as if she possessed a curious inner light, as if she could look straight through the mother superior’s facade of warmth and wisdom to her warrior’s heart.

Out of the corner of her eye, Jaqui looked at Mama, who, she was now certain, did not possess this inner light. Mama was, after all, a normal woman in every respect. Sometimes, lying in bed at night, Jaqui wondered restlessly if she had come into this family by mistake. Maybe she and another female infant had inadvertently been switched in the hospital, and somewhere across the city another girl was living the life Jaqui should have been living. At times she was so certain of this that she had become almost autistic, as if responding to any stimulus in her environment would give it a legitimacy it did not deserve.

So obsessive did this behavior become as Jaqui grew up that Mama, terrified, had taken her to a specialist in Manhattan. Jaqui remembered the train ride across the bridge more clearly than she did the doctor’s myopic face.

‘There is nothing wrong with your daughter,’ he had pronounced. Mama was so relieved that she cried. ‘All that’s really needed is for you to engage her attention more. She’s just bored.’

On the train ride home, Mama said, ‘I know you are unhappy. I’ve known for some time, but I’ve been putting off doing anything about it. I thought’ – she wrapped Jaqui’s hand in her own – ‘I thought you would grow out of it.’ Mama sighed wistfully, staring out the grimy train window. ‘Instead, you’ve grown into it.’ It was time, Mama said, she took Jaqui to Astoria.

Jaqui fell in love with the Sacred Heart of Santa Maria the moment she stepped through the iron gates into the heavily treed grounds. She loved the smell sunlight made as it dried out the dew-dampened foliage, the heavy drone of the bees as they pollinated the roses, the bright twitter of the birds as they flitted through the branches of the trees.

But, above all, she felt a
presence.
Perhaps, after all, it was God, as Bernice so fervently believed. Or, then again, perhaps it was simply a lack of the quotidian violence that invaded Jaqui’s world at every turn.

But whatever it was, Jaqui felt it as surely as a strong, guiding hand upon her shoulder. And Bernice knew she felt it.

The white stone facade shone in the sunlight like a polished mirror. In one of the small, slitted windows that flanked the front door, Jaqui felt, rather than saw, eyes peering at her with curiosity and keen anticipation. When Mama led her up the wide flight of steps to the iron-banded wooden door and it opened inward, Jaqui knew that she was entering a world apart, that she was about to begin a journey that would last the rest of her life.

It was the spring of 1957; Jaqui was fifteen.

‘Do you believe in God?’

‘I believe...’ Jaqui broke off, at a loss. It was not that she was intimidated by those piercing blue eyes, or by the peculiar iconography of Catholicism that adorned the walls of Bernice’s office. The fact was that after being baptized and confirmed, after attending church regularly with her parents, after years of reciting the catechism, of staring at Jesus bleeding on the cross, of confessing in a booth that smelled of shoe polish and sweat, she had no more idea of her beliefs than she did about what would befall her a year from now.

‘I don’t know whether I do or not.’

‘Good,’ Bernice said with such enthusiasm that it caught Jaqui’s attention instantly. Mama had remained in the rose garden, wandering, putting her face up to the sun and worrying whether she had done the right thing in bringing her daughter here.

‘How is that good?’ Jaqui asked now.

‘You answered honestly and that’s a start,’ Bernice said flatly. She had the gift of transforming opinion into fact.

Jaqui looked around the office at the religious paintings, the statue of the Virgin and Child, the large wood and gilt crucifix, and she was at once suffocating beneath the weighty religious symbols. ‘I don’t want to become a nun.’ Bernice leaned forward and, taking Jaqui’s hands in her own, smiled. ‘Child, I have no intention of making you become a nun.’ At that moment, Jaqui knew it had been Bernice peering at her through that very medieval window. A castle window, slitted and fortified against the arrows and spears of the enemy. And it resided here, on a quiet, poplar-lined street of Queens. She looked at Bernice and, in astonishment, saw her clad in burnished armor, a great broadsword scabbarded at her side. This armor shone with the same quality as had the white stone facade of the building in the sunshine.

Jaqui murmured something under her breath, then blinked several times. When she looked at Bernice again, the mother superior was as she had been, clothed in her habit.

‘What is it, my child?’

‘I thought –’ Jaqui blinked again. Then she let out a small, embarrassed laugh. ‘I thought I saw you covered in medieval armor. Crazy, isn’t it?’ Bernice let out what seemed a long-held exhalation. She was on the verge of tears as she rose. ‘Come, I want to show you something.’ But instead of leading her to the door, she took Jaqui back to a rear alcove, where floor-to-ceiling bookcases rose. She put her hand behind a row of books.

There was a soft click and one part of the bookcase opened inward.

They crossed the threshold and Jaqui found herself in a stone corridor with an arched ceiling. It was lit by small electric lights in niches in the wall where, in Europe, one would expect to find torches. Their shoes echoed against the stone flooring. At the end of the corridor, Bernice used a set of keys she drew from her pocket to open an iron door.

It creaked loudly. Bernice locked it carefully behind them and, lifting her hem, marched up a metal spiral staircase.

The room they entered at the top was not large; nevertheless it was impressive. It featured one wait that, like a castle’s turret, was semicircular. From perhaps three feet off the floor to just below the ceiling, the wall was a line of the most magnificent stained glass Jaqui had ever seen. Oddly, only one panel had a religious theme, and that was of Joan of Arc on a white stallion. The remainder of the panels depicted scenes from the history of France and Italy. As far as Jaqui could tell, war was the predominant motif.

The massive expanse of stained glass flooded the room with a multicolored light so extraordinary it seemed magical. It spilled over Bernice and Jaqui, and Jaqui felt transformed. A curious warmth suffused her, and it was as if the horrors of Ozone Park and East New York had ceased to exist.

‘Oh, Bernice,’ she cried, ‘it’s so beautiful!’

‘Do you really think so?’

‘Really and truly,’ Jaqui said, turning to face the mother superior. ‘I feel...’

Bernice gripped her shoulders, her blue eyes piercing Jaqui’s flesh. ‘What do you feel?’

‘I don’t know.’ Jaqui was as breathless as if she had run all the way here from Ozone Park.
‘Something
…’

‘Yes,’ Bernice said fiercely. ‘I was right about you.’

Then she turned Jaqui around until she was facing the one flat wall of the room. It was made of the same stone as the corridor and was unadorned save for a painting. The painting was not large, nevertheless it dominated the room as if it were ten times the size.

‘My God!’ Jaqui breathed.

‘Indeed,’ Bernice said, her electric-blue eyes alight.

Jaqui found herself mesmerized by the painting. It depicted an armor-clad figure with a great broadsword strapped to one hip. The helmet was off, held in the crook of the figure’s left hand, and the face could plainly be seen. It was a woman. A woman whose countenance was not so dissimilar from that of Bernice. The artist had rendered the handsome face enrobed in an inner light that burst upon the canvas.

‘This is the vision I had in your office,’ Jaqui said with her heart pounding so hard it seemed ready to leap into her throat. ‘Is that you?’

‘How could it be? The painting is hundreds of years old.’

‘And yet –’ Jaqui stepped closer. She looked back at Bernice. ‘It
is
you!’

Bernice shook her head. ‘Only in one sense. This is a portrait of Donà di Piave, the founder of this order.’

Jaqui continued to gaze at the painting in wonderment. ‘But it is my vision! Bernice, I
saw
her.’

‘More likely what you felt downstairs was her presence inside me.’

‘Look at her face. It is alight with...’

‘Divine animation.’

‘Yes,’ Jaqui said, knowing instinctively that Bernice was right. ‘But she was some kind of warrior.’

‘Donà de Piave was a nun,’ Bernice said softly. ‘But she was also a great champion, a defender of her people. Sometimes, in a world full of fear and evil, they can be one and the same.’ She nodded to a pair of Savonarola chairs facing one another, glittering in the light from the stained glass. ‘Sit, my child. There is much you must be told before you can make your decision.’

‘What decision?’

‘You are special, Jaqui. Part of the chosen. That is why your mother brought you here.’ Bernice smiled her most benign smile, but Jaqui was not fooled. Already she could see behind that mask, clever as it was, to the woman warrior who stood beside her.

Bernice said, ‘In our world women are dismissed as mothers or as whores. Either way, they’re considered irrelevant to business.’ She waited until Jaqui had settled herself on the left-hand Savonarola chair. ‘Do you know Goethe, the German philosopher?’

‘I’ve heard of him, but I haven’t read him.’

‘You will read him here if you choose to join us,’ Bernice said, sitting opposite the girl. ‘He wrote that few men have imagination enough for reality.’ She was staring at the portrait of Donà di Piave. ‘But he quite rightly did not include women.’