Second Skin (50 page)

The Nihonin took off in formation with Nicholas on point so they could all see him. He knew what was expected of him. They wanted no part of the establishment, and if he proved a part of it, they’d peel off in a minute and leave him stranded.

He took them through a series of tricky maneuvers, weaving fearlessly in and out of traffic, jumping lights in a massed thunder of rpms, speeding the wrong way down narrow streets that left no margin for error. They liked the escalating danger well enough, but when he launched himself over three car tops, onto a deserted stretch of sidewalk cracked with neglect, he really made his bones with them. They followed him eagerly, whooping it up, grinning from ear to ear, pumped with excitement.

He’d made their day and they were as good as their word, delivering him, an hour later, to Sunshine City, a complex of buildings in Ikebukuro. Sunshine City was built on the site of the infamous Sugamo Prison, where virtually all of Japan’s most prominent war criminals had been held and, in some cases, hanged. Besides apartments, the gigantic block-long complex housed a hotel, museum, cultural center, and a sixty-story office spire.

Kawa gave Nicholas the number of Londa’s apartment. Apparently, he had a grudge that, like an itch, needed to be assuaged. ‘She used to use us as bodyguards sometimes,’ he told Nicholas. ‘But since she moved upscale, she wants no part of us.’

Nicholas thanked Kawa, and as they thundered off, he saw Kawa turn around to stare at him. His snow-white hair shone like a halo. Nicholas parked the Kawasaki, went into the lobby of the building they’d indicated. There was a locked inner door and, on one wall, a sea of buzzers, each one marked with a letter and a number. No names. He pressed the one for the apartment directly above Londa’s. No answer. He tried another and another without luck.

The outer door opened and an old lady with packages entered. She was grateful when he held them while she inserted her key in the lock of the inner door and he pushed it open. He gave her back her packages and she nodded.

‘I’m looking for Mrs Okushimo,’ he said. ‘Do you know her? She’s in E twenty-nine.’

The woman looked at him as he came through the door but said nothing. He let her take the elevator alone, preferring the stairs. He reached Londa’s floor without incident, went down the anonymous-looking corridor. He could have been in any large city in the world.

He stopped in front of the door to Londa’s apartment and rapped his knuckles hard and fast against it.

It was a moment before he heard a muffled voice say, ‘Who’s there?’

He rapped again and the door opened.

Dark almond eyes and long black hair down to her buttocks. She was dressed in an informal kimono and was barefoot.

‘Jesus Christ.’ She stared at him with a stunned expression.

She had good reason to do that. The woman who stood framed in the doorway was Honniko.

She took off the long black hair – a wig – revealing her short blond cut.

‘I don’t want to know how you found me here,’ she said, ‘but you should not have come.’

Her eyes said something different, however.

‘Will you let me in?’ he said, playing to the emotion she so desperately wanted to keep hidden.

‘I don’t think that’s such a hot idea.’

But as at their first meeting, in the restaurant Pull Marine, she saw that he would not go.

She nodded mutely and stepped aside. He found himself in a bright two-bedroom apartment with typically low ceilings and small rooms. It was sparsely but expensively furnished with lacquer and cypress-wood sofa, easy chairs, dining table and chairs. There were no paintings, but a silver crucifix hung from a chain on the wall, and a small marble statue of the Virgin Mary was in one of the bookcases. The floors were a light, cool green granite, the walls stuccoed the color of pale bronze, behind a succession of bookcases filled with volumes of all sizes and descriptions. In short, it didn’t look like the home of a dominatrix – or of a maître d’, for that matter.

Honniko, hipsprung, arms folded across her breasts, regarded Nicholas with a slightly ironic smile. This was a woman of the shadows, used to keeping her inner thoughts and emotions tightly wrapped – perhaps once forced to do so.

‘I see it written all over your face. You don’t approve of what I do. Well, get lost! I’m not the poor little lost girl you thought I was back in Roppongi, someone you could feel sorry for. You forced yourself into my world, and now that you’re in it, you don’t like it, you’re full of contempt and loathing for what I do, for what I am.’

She said all of this in a breathless rush as she backed up until she was pressed hard against the wall holding the crucifix. While still facing him, she had got as far away from him as the room would permit.

‘An interesting theory, but that’s not at all what I think. Is it what
you
think?’

‘What?’

‘About yourself.’ He moved after her, across the room. ‘Maybe it’s you who feels contempt and self-loathing. Do you hate yourself, Honniko? Or should I call you Londa?’

‘Either.’ She turned her head away. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Oh, doesn’t it?’ He studied her with some curiosity. ‘Somewhere beneath all that cynical armor beats the heart of one woman.’

‘Stop it.’

‘One woman with a keen mind, unique insights, a worldview, likes and dislikes –’

‘Stop it, I said!’ she shouted.

He stopped in front of her. ‘Pleasure and pain. Dreams and so many, many fears she has erected an entire city of facades, personalities, and masks to protect herself. Who are you, do you even really know?’

‘You bastard!’ she cried. Then, reaching out, she literally pulled herself from the wall by grabbing onto him. Behind her, the crucifix jangled on its chain. She pressed her lips hard against his, her lips trembling, softening as they opened, as her hot tongue sought his. She seemed to melt against him, into him.

Then, abruptly, she hurled herself away, crashing backward, books flying as she fell, then scrambling up, staring at him as if he were a vision of her own private hell come to terrifying life.

‘Ah, God, what am I doing? I care about you. I made an oath never to care for a man. I promised myself –’

Nicholas felt something from her mind, a quicksilver current purling the surface of her consciousness. ‘Do you have someone here? A customer, perhaps?’ He strode to the door to the bedroom, opened it, and saw standing there a slender Caucasian woman with deep sea-green eyes. They were the kind of eyes in which you could see whole worlds appear and disappear in a heartbeat, intelligent, cool, kind, and something more – something in contrast, almost at odds, with the deeply ingrained empathy. She looked to be in her forties and possessed the kind of beauty one dreamed about if one were very lucky, but had no chance of finding. It was the beauty of a sort so fragile and febrile one could almost say it did not belong to this world.

She was dressed in a simple black suit and was clutching a black leather handbag. She smiled sweetly and he felt an immediate aura of serenity and determination. This was definitely not a client.

‘Hello,’ she said, holding out her hand. He took it. ‘My name’s Sister Marie Rose.’

‘Nicholas Linnear.’ Her hand was firm and dry and slightly callused, and he could feel her physical strength as well as her psychic mettle.

She gave him a little nod, another little smile as she slipped her hand from his. Now he could see the delicate gold chain around her neck on the end of which was a hand-carved crucifix.

‘Do I know you?’ Nicholas asked.

Sister Marie Rose answered him with her sea-green gaze.

‘Marie Rose –’ It was Honniko.

‘It’s okay, Honniko-san,’ Sister Marie Rose said in perfect idiomatic Japanese. ‘My presence here cannot remain a secret forever. I must get on with my work.’

‘And what work is that?’ Nicholas asked.

‘God’s work.’

As Sister Marie Rose brushed past him as she went into the living room, he smelled the faint perfume of roses. Did nuns wear perfume?

‘Marie Rose is mother superior of the Convent of the Sacred Heart of Santa Maria,’ Honniko said. ‘In Astoria, Queens.’

‘A long way from home, Mother,’ he said, ‘aren’t we?’

‘Mr Linnear, I am the head of the Order of Donà di Piave,’ Marie Rose said in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘Have you heard of it?’

‘Should I?’

‘Perhaps not.’ Some flicker passed through her eyes. ‘I thought the Colonel might have mentioned it to you before he died.’

‘My father?’ Nicholas shook his head. ‘No, he didn’t.’

Marie Rose smiled. ‘You were right, Honniko-san. I see it now, the resemblance. You look very much like your father, Mr Linnear. That long, handsome face, the dark, brooding eyes, but your body is so different from his.’

‘How would either of you know what my father looked like?’

‘From my mother,’ Honniko said. ‘She knew Colonel Linnear from the
toruko.’

‘The soapland in Roppongi. From Tenki.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then that wasn’t a lie you told at lunch. There really was a
toruko?’

‘Tenki. Oh, yes.’

‘I keep hearing that name. What is the significance of Tenki? It’s the name of the
toruko
where your mother worked as well as what Michael Leonforte calls his shell corporation. That’s no coincidence. What’s his involvement with this
toruko?’

The world canted over, the colors running like spilled paint, and he was sinking down through the crust of the earth into its molten core. Kshira turned the apartment inside out, inverted Nicholas’s consciousness. He heard Mick Leonforte’s voice:
I am the future. I am progress, efficiency, safety in one’s own kind. I am for God and country and the family; I am evangelical; I forbid abortion and foreigners and indiscriminate immigration. I am the new Fascism unfurled. You are wrapped in my banner of war. You and I are locked in a circle that’s slowly closing its circumference. Soon we will occupy the same space. But we cannot occupy the same space. What will happen then? I know. Do you?

His eyes snapped open. He was lying on the floor of Honniko’s apartment amid a welter of strewn books. Honniko’s face, white and stricken, stared down at him. She had been crying, her cheeks were streaked with dried tears. Above her stood the regal figure of Marie Rose, regarding him with her serene sea-green gaze.

‘When you fell, I thought you were dead,’ Honniko said. He felt the flat of her hand on his chest. ‘Then I felt your heart beating strongly, but so slowly!’

‘Honniko –’

Sister Marie Rose put her hand on Honniko’s shoulder. ‘You know your duty,’ she said as Honniko rocked slowly back and forth as if trying to calm herself.

‘Duty?’ Nicholas echoed. He was still partially stunned by the onset of Kshira. It had been far stronger this time, perhaps because he had deliberately summoned it not long ago. ‘What duty?’

Those sea-green eyes floated in his vision. ‘Honniko is a member of the Order of Donà di Piave, Mr Linnear, just as her mother was before her. Her duty is to God and to the purpose of the order.’

‘The order was here, in Japan, in my father’s day?’

‘Yes.’ Marie Rose smiled. ‘He met my predecessor, Bernice.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I know,’ Marie Rose said in her kindest voice. ‘But in a moment you will. Honniko will tell you everything. About Tenki. About what happened in the
toruko.
About your father and how their lives became irrevocably entwined.’ Marie Rose knelt and took his hand in hers. ‘But first I must ask you for a leap of faith. I must ask you to trust me, even though we have only just now met and you cannot know me.’

This close to her he could feel her aura, strong as iron, hot as the sun, but there was a cool undercurrent – no, cold, cold as ice, cold as death. She was in mortal fear of something. What?

‘I trust you, Mother.’

‘Yes.’ Her grip tightened on him. ‘You do.’ She nodded. ‘Then look into my eyes, Mr Linnear, and tell me who you see.’

It was an odd question but he did as she asked. Suddenly, he remembered his own question to her:
Do I know you?
And the silent reply he had seen in her eyes. No, he didn’t know her, not really, but the resemblance... A door opened in his mind and someone stepped through.

Sister Marie Rose saw shocked recognition forming in his eyes and she nodded. ‘Yes, with your extraordinary psychic powers you’ve intuited it, haven’t you? You see the family resemblance.

‘I took the name Marie Rose when I was ordained, but the name I was born with was Jaqui. I am Michael Leonforte’s sister.’

Borrowed armor, old,
getting fitted to my body –
oh, it’s cold!

Buson

In Col. Denis Linnear’s estimation the
toruko
was the perfect candidate to become his house of secrets. An anonymous-looking building in Roppongi – Tokyo’s burgeoning new pleasure district for foreigners – this Japanese take on a Turkish bath was a place for sex, pure and simple. As such, it was already a harbor for the darkest secrets. In Colonel Linnear’s estimation, there was nothing like the sex act to engender secrets. No other human occupation caused the body to be so free and vulnerable – or the soul to be so mortgaged by its secret whims. Fantasy, perversion, peccadillo, infantilism, shameful memory – all took flight during sex even as they took flight
from
an act as revealing as a hot and blinding klieg light.

In such a dark and overheated atmosphere, the secrets Colonel Linnear and Mikio Okami bore were as easily hidden as bullion in a vault.

Not that their secrets had anything to do with sex; at least not in the beginning.

The woman who ran this
toruko
– which was aptly named Tenki, a profound secret – was named Eiko Shima. She was a handsome woman, small and compact, with a deceptively slow pace. At times, the Colonel felt as if she were not quite following what he was saying, but he soon found out she was almost always way ahead of him.

Okami had his people check her out. She was from Osaka, where many women did the work and the men did nothing but take their wife’s surname in the Shinto marriage ceremony. She was a shrewd businesswoman as well as a keen observer of the human condition. While other
toruko
were systematically being taken over by the Yakuza, she refused to acquiesce. She had met the underworld’s blandishments and threats by besting them at their own game, blackmailing them with abuses so egregious even the SCAP government could not afford to look the other way.