Second Skin (40 page)

But it was her one lubricious evening with Paul Chiaramonte that almost undid everything. She and Bernice had been plotting her death ever since Caesare had made his threat to her. It seemed excessively extreme – at first, all Jaqui could think about was the pain she would cause Mama and Michael – but Bernice, ever the warrior-nun, convinced her that only an extreme solution would have any chance of success.

Though Caesare had not come back to Santa Maria, Jaqui’s uncle had. Alphonse, annoyed at having to come all the way east from his home in San Francisco, had pushed himself into Bernice’s chambers as if assaulting the very gates of heaven. But, in the end, he had been defeated.

‘It is Jaqui’s choice to be here,’ Bernice had told him with all the fierce determination at her disposal. ‘And it is God’s will. Neither you nor anyone can take that away from her.’ The divine charisma was upon her, and Alphonse, usually so clever and forceful, could do nothing but retreat to the street, where he climbed into his limousine without a backward glance, returning to the airport from which he had come.

But Bernice was not fooled. ‘You are a Leonforte,’ she told Jaqui, eerily echoing Caesare’s phrase. ‘Your family will never forget you are here – and never forgive. There is only one way to put an end to it. You must die.’

As it happened, there was a young nun, Sister Agnes, at the convent who was dying. The doctors could do nothing for her, and rather than being left to the inconsiderate ministrations of hospital personnel, she had requested that she live out her remaining days in a place of God’s radiance. Of course, Bernice had acquiesced.

‘She is not so dissimilar to you in physique or in features,’ Bernice said. ‘Though no one would ever mistake you for sisters, still there is enough of a resemblance for our purposes.’

‘But –’

‘No buts. I have discussed the entire matter with her. She has no family of her own and she has agreed to everything. It is God’s will.’

Jaqui, after speaking to Sister Agnes herself, had reluctantly agreed. But in the deepest recesses of her mind she wondered whether the plan was indeed God’s will – or merely part of Bernice’s byzantine design.

She and Bernice continued to discuss the plot until they believed they had covered every angle, aspect, and contingency. But, as Mary Margaret had liked to say, God dislikes plots and so does His best to unravel them in one way or another.

The way He contrived to unravel this one was to make sure that Paul Chiaramonte was on his way to the bakery when the car that was meant to hit Jaqui came hurtling down the street. She had made certain that she had been coming back from errands to the greengrocer and the bakery at precisely the same time each day for the past six months.

The day of the staged accident, however, she had been at the corner window of the convent that had an unobstructed view of the scene. In her place was the person they had secretly hired to dress up like her – a stunt-woman who got ‘killed’ every day of the week in the incomprehensible world of films and television.

Intent on carrying out the complex timing of the plot, the stunt-woman had not seen Paul until it was too late. He had cried out, she had turned, and for a split instant he was staring straight at her.

Dear God! No one was supposed to see her face.

Then he was leaping toward her, knocking her sideways, dear Lord, the car striking him, twisting him in midair so that even from a distance Jaqui imagined that she heard the bones snap.

It was Bernice who took care of most of the arrangements – Jaqui’s mother being too overcome with grief. It was she who spoke to the police – the beat cops who first responded and then the plainclothes detectives, all of whom she knew personally. She spoke to the coroner, and to the funeral director, making absolutely certain that the coffin’s lid remained closed, hinting to the world at large in hushed tones that the face had been mangled beyond the repair of even the finest mortician.

It all went smoothly, as Bernice had predicted.

Afterward, following the funeral, when the world believed that Jaqui was really and truly dead – when Sister Agnes’s body was buried in the coffin the Leonfortes had picked out – was when it almost came undone. Bernice assured Jaqui that Paul was receiving the best care. The convent had anonymously sent the money to pay for his operations, and it all seemed to be working as they had plotted.

Then one day Bernice told Jaqui that Paul had been asking questions about the accident.

‘I don’t think he believes you’re really dead,’ Bernice said.

‘Leave it alone,’ Jaqui counseled. ‘Do nothing.’

‘But he could cause problems. He’s saying he saw someone else, that it wasn’t you who got hit by the car. He thinks there’s a conspiracy of some kind.’

‘It’s just a reaction,’ Jaqui insisted. ‘I know him. He was almost killed himself, and now he has come out of the hospital a changed person. He
wants
to believe, that’s all.’

But, when she was left alone, her resolve failed her and she was consumed with guilt. Look what her one evening of bliss had created. Paul knew what he knew. He had seen the stunt-woman’s face, had known something was wrong with the entire picture. No wonder he was conjuring up conspiracies.

She hoped to God that he would leave it alone, as she had told Bernice. Perhaps, as the sense of trauma faded, his memories of the moment would become less reliable until doubts would creep in and he would begin to suspect that he saw only what he wanted to see. Yes. His troublesome questions would soon subside and he would get on with his life. He would forget all about her.

But alone in the night, the question returned again and again to haunt her: what if he didn’t? They had gone to so much time and trouble to assure Jaqui’s place at Santa Maria, and now one man, one night of passion, was threatening to unravel what she had come to think of as a lifetime of commitment: to God, to the Sacred Heart of Santa Maria, and to its legendary protector, Donà di Piave. But, as is God’s way, the crisis had an altogether different side to it. And this led her, inevitably, to thoughts of her mother.

On a beastly day in the July following her ‘death,’ when, at eight
P.M.,
the thermometer still hovered near ninety, Jaqui slipped to her knees in the chapel and clasped her hands in fervent prayer. The truth was, beneath her innate love for her mother festered an unmistakable contempt. In accepting the family’s way of life, in turning a blind eye to the extorting, intimidation, and murder, Jaqui had seen her as no better than the men who perpetrated those despicable acts. They were sinners, all of them.

But now God had revealed the truth, as He always did in His own time and in His own way: that her mother, in bringing her to Santa Maria, had shown extraordinary courage. What kind of punishment had she received at Uncle Alphonse’s hands for what she had done: taking her daughter into the den of the Goldonis and leaving her there for permanent indoctrination?

Alone in the chapel, sweating beneath her habit, Jaqui shuddered. Her own courage seemed a small and unformed thing next to that of her mother. The bells of the chapel began to toll, the echoes filling the stone space, and Jaqui continued her prayers, for her mother and for herself.

One has not watched life very observantly if one has never seen the hand that – kills tenderly.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Kisoko’s town house looked stark and bare in the early-morning light. All the huge warehouses near the Sumida River loomed over it, as if frowning in disapproval. The rain had stopped, and as Nicholas dismounted his Kawasaki, sunlight, pink as the inside of a seashell, streamed through a break in the clouds. Green leaves, blown off the trees during the night, skittered along the pavement like the footsteps of unseen spirits.

A young woman in uniform opened the door and Nicholas introduced himself. She let him into the vestibule with, he felt, some reluctance.

‘The mistress is not yet seeing guests.’ Her voice was a mere wisp, like a reed in the wind.

‘No need to bother Kisoko-san,’ Nicholas said. ‘My business is with Nangi-san.’

‘I’m afraid the old boy isn’t awake yet,’ came a commanding voice from the far side of the foyer. ‘Perhaps I can be of assistance.’

Nicholas saw a man in his early forties wheel himself through into the vestibule. He had a long, brooding face, with large liquid brown eyes that seemed soft but soon proved otherwise. The muscles of his powerful upper body flexed as he swung into the room on the chrome wheelchair. It glided across the marble with not so much as a whisper of its rubber tires. The maid gave him one look and vanished up the stairs.

‘I gave Kisoko-san –’

‘My mother.’

As Nicholas continued to look at him, the man grinned. ‘She didn’t tell you anything about me, eh?’ He shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘Typical. My name’s Ken and I already know yours, Linnear-san.’ He did not bow or hold out his hand. In fact, he gave no sense of greeting at all.

‘Even though I gave your mother my word, I must speak with Nangi-san. There are a number of business matters I don’t understand.’

Ken laced his fingers together. Their calluses were like armor plate. ‘That is the prevailing creed of the human condition. Ignorance.’ He grinned again. ‘Some people are simply more ignorant than others.’

Nicholas stared at Ken. Whom did he remind Nicholas of? ‘I am concerned about Nangi-san.’

‘I expect you are. Nasty disease, old age.’ Ken arranged his huge hands in his lap. ‘But he’ll be fine, never fear.’ He cocked his head to one side. ‘You know that they were once – and future – lovers.’

He had the disconcerting habit, not unlike an expert interrogator, of jumping from one topic to another without using subject names as guideposts.

‘I had no idea.’ This was a lie, but Nicholas had no difficulty telling it.

‘Well, don’t worry. Hardly anyone else does.’ He appeared to consider a moment. ‘They met in 1948 at a
toruko,
one of those odd places – the Japanese version of a Turkish bath – that catered to American soldiers in the occupation years after the war.’

Nicholas felt a tiny thrill of recognition go through him at Ken’s mention of the
toruko.
Honniko’s mother had worked in such a place after the war called Tenki. ‘Where was this
toruko?’

Ken shrugged. ‘In Roppongi. That was where most of them were in those days.’

Nicholas could not contain the creeping along his flesh. What was he feeling? The present and past swirling together in a nexus of unanswered questions. Nangi and Kisoko had met only eleven years ago. Ken was lying to him, but for what purpose? ‘What was the name?’

Ken rolled his eyes up to the ceiling as he called up his memory. ‘Let me see. I think it was called Tenki.’

Nicholas shivered slightly. The same
toruko
where Honniko’s mother had worked. It was as if Ken were trying to tell Nicholas something.

‘Ken!’

The sharpness of Kisoko’s voice caused Ken to stare silently at Nicholas.

‘You have pressing obligations elsewhere!’ Kisoko came down the staircase up which the maid had fled a moment ago. Perhaps she had told her mistress what was going on down here.

Ken was facing away from his mother, and as she came toward them, he gave Nicholas a swift and inexplicable grin that was more like a grimace of pain. Then, without saying another word, he wheeled himself around and disappeared down the hallway to the rear of the house.

‘I can make no adequate excuse for my son’s rudeness,’ Kisoko said as she came toward him. ‘All I can offer is that his... disability has made him something of a social misfit.’ She wore an informal kimono of indigo-dyed cotton, but her hair and face were, as usual, exquisitely made up.

‘He’s quite a handful.’

‘Forgive me.’ She smiled. ‘I haven’t had time to explain him to you, and Ken requires so much explaining. Why, you and I have only begun to get to know one another.’ Her arm swept toward the back of the house. ‘You’re just in time for breakfast. Would you care to join us? I’m afraid Nangi-san is still in bed.’

Nicholas felt a momentary stab of fear. ‘Is he all right?’

‘Perfectly.’ Her smile softened. ‘I told you, Linnear-san. All he needs is time. He will be fine, don’t worry.’

Nicholas opened his mouth to reply and felt as if a wooden stake had been jammed between his jaws. Darkness came down like dirt into an open grave, and he felt the marble floor bubbling, turning molten beneath his feet. He slipped, tried to regain his balance, but as the Kshira seizure gripped him, he fell to his knees.

Darkness all around and, in his center, an eye opening, not his
tanjian
eye – or then again perhaps it was, but if so, it was of such a different aspect that he could not recognize it.

It opened fully and he saw his surroundings as if from a dimension he had never known existed. He saw the house in its many incarnations. He saw gangsters here, and the hand of God; he saw love fulfilled and love broken, hearts filled with joy and shattered; tears of pain and enormous sorrow; rage and a flash – as of heat lightning, gone almost before it had begun – of evil...

His eyes opened and he found himself gazing up into Kisoko’s concerned face. She was kneeling on the cool marble floor of the vestibule, cradling his head in her lap. She was rocking slightly as a mother will a sick and terrified child.

‘I...,’ he began, but a wave of dizziness stopped him.

‘I know,’ Kisoko whispered, bending over him. ‘I know what you are going through, how you are suffering.’

‘How could you possibly –’

He stopped as he saw an image taking form in his mind. It was of Kisoko as she had been in 1947. All around her was a penumbra of darkness within which he could just discern the movement of shadows without faces or voices. It was as if reality had shifted and the past had been made to live again. He felt her love as a living thing, a jewel that radiated warmth in the palm of the hand, and he knew she had extended her psyche, cradling him as she was doing with her arms.