Second Skin (47 page)

‘I would not have gone to anyone else, Toyoda-san.’

The swordsmith shrugged. ‘I was a convenient source.’ What he meant was he was the
only
source. He made weapons other swordsmiths could only dream of. He appeared to consider for a moment. ‘I made a dangerous weapon for a man.’

‘A push dagger.’

Toyoda nodded.

‘You designed it?’

Toyoda stared at the hinoki, baking in a sliver of sunlight. ‘That was the intriguing part, Linnear-san. I worked from his own design. It was crude, yes, but quite ingenious and altogether functional.’

‘Functional?’

‘Oh, yes.’ The old head bobbed up and down. ‘You could kill a wild boar with this push dagger. If you had the strength and determination.’

‘Could it slash as well as puncture?’

A slow sly smile enlivened Toyoda’s face. ‘I told you the design was ingenious. Yes, it had a distinct blade signature.’

Nicholas took out a pad and pen. ‘Like this?’ He drew a weapon’s blade consistent with the slashes on Ise Ikuzo’s body.

The swordsmith’s eyes dropped down to look at the drawing. ‘Yes, just like that.’

Nicholas produced a copy of the US Army photo showing Mick Leonforte. He was a good deal younger, clean-cut and almost formal looking, but there was no mistaking the shape of the face, the sensual lips, or the hooded look of his dark eyes.

Toyoda stared at it for a long time before answering. ‘This is the man.’

‘Did he tell you his name?’

‘I did not ask.’

‘Why not?’

‘Name leads to purpose, and in my work any purpose other than my own is a distraction.’

‘Did you make anything else for him, Toyoda-san?’

‘No.’

Nicholas put the photo and the pad and pen away. ‘Tell me, Toyoda-san, why did you make this weapon?’

‘I would think that would be obvious. It is why I make any weapon. When it is finished, it is a work of art.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ Francie said as Paul Chiaramonte took her toward the kitchen.

‘Okay.’ He eyed her. ‘You nervous about Bad Clams?’ When she didn’t answer, he switched tactics. ‘Hey, how about a swim? That pool sure looks good.’

Francie shrugged. ‘I don’t have a suit.’

‘No problem,’ he said, herding her into another bedroom. She watched, passive as a sheep, while he rummaged through bleached-wood dresser drawers. ‘Here.’ He held up a turquoise tank suit. ‘This looks like it’ll fit.’

She took it from him, padded to the door of the bathroom. In the doorway, she turned back to him and with a perfectly serious face said, ‘Wanna watch?’

‘Jesus, kid, you’re the limit,’ he said, immediately nervous again. Judging by the look on her face, he was beginning to think she liked doing this to him. ‘Get in there an’ do your thing, okay?’

‘What about you?’

He pulled a pair of big trunks, gaudy with tropical fish in electric colors, out of another drawer, which brought a brief giggle from her. ‘I’ll get changed in heah,’ he said.

Francie closed the door behind her, and with a sigh of relief Paul collapsed on the end of the bed. This assignment was getting to him. First, he whacks an NYPD detective, then he’s got to bring the Goldoni wildcat all the way down here like some caveman dragging his unwilling mate to the slaughter. Then he’s got to deal with a sixteen-year-old who cracks wise and is, in all probability, smarter than he is. But a very special sixteen-year-old to him, for all that. Because there was a real chance that she had seen Jaqui, had – who knows? – even spoken to her.

Jaqui alive.

The thought sent tendrils of electricity through him. Or maybe this obsession of his was a decades-old delusion. Either way, he had to know. Somehow, he had to gain the kid’s trust to get more info out of her. Besides, he really liked her. She was smart, quick, and damned funny. It was rare Paul found anyone who made him laugh. To be honest, his life was a mess, running undercover for Bad Clams, betraying the Abriola family, who had taken him in as one of their own. And as for the private life, forgeddaboutit! He’d been hung up on Jaqui from the moment they had met in ’62; since then, no one could measure up to the perfect memory stuck in his head like a melody that played over and over until it made you crazy.

He began to disrobe. As he did so, he breathed out sharply several times as he’d learned to do in his yoga class. Stress busters, as it was billed; Paul knew he needed the extreme stress he was under busted or he’d for sure have a heart attack. He was already battling hypertension, and on too many occasions his doctor had cautioned him on his elevated blood pressure. The yoga was helping, for sure. Next stop, meditation.

He had his trousers and shirt off and his shorts were a puddle at his ankles when the door to the bathroom swung open and Francie stepped out.

‘Madonna!’ he cried, red-faced, shoving the gaudy trunks against his exposed crotch.

Francie stood in the doorway, clad in the turquoise tank suit, a look on her face like the cat who’d just swallowed the canary. The ghost of a smile that played across her lips made her look just like the
Mona Lisa.

‘You happy now?’ he said, frowning.

‘Like the way I look?’

She posed like some model in one of those women’s magazines,
Vogue
or
Cosmo.
Very professional, very sexy. Paul had to remind himself twice that she was not yet seventeen, though with the hard evidence of her body staring him in the face, it was next to impossible to believe.

‘Yeah, sure,’ he said sullenly. ‘What’s not to like?’

She came and sat next to him on the end of the bed. Staring him right in the eye, she said, ‘Why don’t you put on your suit? I want to take a swim.’

‘Why d’you think? You’re lookin’ right at me.’

‘So what? I’ve seen it before.’

Paul shook his head. ‘For Christ’s sake, kid. Turn around, at least.’

She complied and he scrambled into the trunks, but he was terrified she’d turn back and watch. He had some difficulty, though. To his horror and intense shame he found he was starting to get erect.
Oh, Jesus,
he thought.
Just what I need, or what?

‘Okay.’

She swung her head around and giggled. ‘You look cute.’

‘Why don’t you cover yourself up?’ he said, more crossly than he’d wanted.

Francie looked down at her body. ‘Don’t you like the way I look?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Kid, I like it
too
much is the problem.’

She sucked her lower lip between her teeth, contemplating this. Then she stood and, in front of the mirror above the dresser, ran her hand over her flat belly and hips. ‘You know, last year I would have given anything – a finger, an eye,
anything
– to be thinner than thin.
Painful
is the word that comes to mind.’

‘That’s sounds kinda extreme.’

She turned around to face him. ‘It’s the truth, all the same.’ She had these eyes that, when she leveled them at you, were filled with an emotion so naked they made you sure she’d never learned how to lie.

‘You have to understand, my body was the only thing that belonged to me. Everything else was controlled by my parents, and my parents were not getting along.’ She gave a rueful laugh. ‘“Not getting along,” that doesn’t begin to describe it. They were in a state of perpetual war. My mom was too smart – she’s got her own company, you know – and my father decided he’d punish her for her brains. So he beat her. Continually.’

‘Yeah,’ Paul said, nodding his head in acknowledgment, ‘you got it.’

Francie took a breath. ‘So, something deep inside me decided that if I stayed real, real thin, everything would work out with my parents.’ She kept her eyes on him, maybe to see if he would mock her. ‘It was like I made a deal with God. But it took me a long time to learn that what I’d really done was make a deal with the worst, darkest part of myself. I was punishing myself for my parents’ war.’

She plunked herself down beside him, so disconcertingly close that Paul felt as if he had been singed by a fire. ‘I hated myself; my body, most of all. So now it’s important to me. I take pride in it. I want to show it off.’

‘Yeah, but, kid, you should be showin’ it off t’kids your own age.’ She began to laugh and he immediately recognized his gaffe. ‘Naw, that’s not what I meant. You shouldn’t be showin’ it off t’
anyone
right now. Like I said last night, don’t be in such a hurry t’grow up. It’s not all it’s cracked up t’be.’

He looked at his watch. ‘C’mon, let’s take that swim.’

In the water she was like the dolphins Paul had seen at the New York Aquarium at Coney Island: long and sleek and playful, in love with the water, with its buoyancy, its supportive weight, its cool, clear blue depths. She swam rings around him, her long, deep red hair streaming out behind her like an animal’s tail or the dorsal fin of one of the exotic fish that decorated his trunks. He hated his voluminous swimsuit. It was nerdy, the way it kept filling up with air bubbles like a clown’s trick trousers.

At last, exhausted, the pads of his fingers looking like prunes, he paddled to the side of the pool and made careful note of the patterns the guards and their dogs took around the periphery of the property and key areas of the guesthouse.

Briefly, he wondered what was happening in that back bedroom between Bad Clams and Margarite Goldoni DeCamillo. Better not to know, he decided, turning away from the guesthouse as Francie surfaced with a great whip of water.

‘What happened to you? You gave up too soon.’

‘I guess I’m not as young as I used t’be.’

She swam over to where he floated, his elbows up on the coping. She was a perfect shape for the water, tapered as a torpedo, but as she neared him, her limbs splayed out like those of a starfish, her hands and feet gripping the pool on either side of him.

‘That’s not it,’ she said. ‘You’re not used to having fun.’

He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it with a snap. She was right. Her lithe body set up warm ripples, a kind of vibration he felt deep inside like the hammering of his heart.

‘Yeah, well, maybe I live a life doesn’t have too much call for fun,’ he said defensively. ‘I got a lotta responsibilities, y’know. People count on me.’

‘Like Bad Clams.’ When he said nothing, she added, ‘Is that why you said being a grown-up isn’t all it’s cracked up to be?’

He waved his hands. ‘Where d’you come up with these nutty ideas?’

But she wouldn’t budge an inch. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? Working for Bad Clams, ratting on people who trust you and count on you, isn’t so hot, right?’ Those preternaturally intelligent eyes just would not let him go. ‘In fact, I bet it sucks.’

Right again, he thought. But he’d be damned if he’d admit it to her or anyone else, for that matter. ‘It’s the life I chose,’ he said steadfastly, ‘because it’s right for me.’

‘Lying, cheating, fucking decent people over, you want me to believe that’s the life you chose for yourself?’

Now she was really bugging him. ‘Kid, I don’t give a flyin’ fuck what –’

‘I think that kind of low life chose
you.’

He made a scoffing sound in his throat. ‘Fuck does that mean?’

‘I think you know.’

‘What, you like talkin’ in riddles?’ He tried to turn his head away, found he couldn’t. Like a cobra going to its end at the hands of the mongoose, he was powerless to escape.

‘Maybe. But I know this: you’re being eaten up inside by everything you can’t let out – hate, revenge, love.’

‘Love?’ Paul was astonished.
‘Love?’

She put her head so close to his he could feel the soft beat of her eyelashes like angels’ wings against his cheeks and said in a low voice, ‘I know about Jaqui.’

Paul, who up to now had maintained at least a semblance of control over the situation, felt his heart freeze in his chest. ‘What did you say?’ His fingertips were like icicles. He had been racking his brains about how to pry this out of her, and whammo! here it comes, right down the chute.

‘I think I said that wrong,’ Francie whispered. ‘I have met her. Sister Marie Rose, as she’s known. I have spoken with her, been trained by her. The woman you have been trying to find; the woman you love.’

Paul was sure he was losing his mind. After so many years of digging, of coming to dead ends, of being so sure in his mind that Jaqui was alive, that someone else had been killed in that hit-and-run, and feeling increasingly paranoid as his conspiracy theory was derided by Santa Maria’s mother superior. Posing as a reporter and, later, as an intern from a nearby hospital, he’d tried to weasel Jaqui’s morgue shot out of the medical examiner’s office during the latter half of 1962, but had been rebuffed at every turn. So he’d never stopped believing in his heart, though he had grieved for her and, certainly, had never forgotten. And now this bombshell, laid on him by a very clever slip of a girl whom he knew – just
knew
– he’d better not underestimate. But he already suspected to his lasting sorrow that she was too much for him, for in those naked eyes he already foresaw his doom. And like a sleepwalker he saw himself already too far along the path down which she was all too eager to lead him.

Gathering himself as best he could, he said, ‘You lying to me, kid?’

‘No.’

And in that single-word answer he recognized the truth, for he had already noted the lie she had told him last night on the plane when he had asked her about that one special nun with eyes the color of the deep ocean. Jaqui.

‘Ah, Christ,’ he breathed.

‘You want to see her again?’ Francie whispered. ‘You want to talk to her?’

‘More than anything.’ He should have hated himself for letting that slip, but all he felt was a rush of elation so strong that the tips of his fingers, so recently numb, now tingled warmly with newfound energy.

‘You can,’ Francie whispered. ‘I’ll take you to her. But you gotta get us out of here. Me and my mom.’

This was his doom, the road he was already too far down to turn back. The moment she’d uttered Jaqui’s name, he knew what she would ask of him in return. She was far too smart to demand anything less. And the truly awful part was, he knew that she would make good on her end of the bargain. He could see it in her eyes, feel it in every fiber of her being. She wanted to help him, and with a heavy resignation he understood finally that he, in turn, wanted to help her.