Second Skin (52 page)

‘Colonel-san,’ she said, mangling the els in his title.

He poked his head inside. Eiko’s smile was half-hidden behind the wide sleeve of her kimono. ‘I am about to have tea. Would you join me?’

Eiko had never before asked either the Colonel or Okami to tea, and curious as he was about the safe house, this invitation was so unusual he did not think he could afford to pass it up.

He bowed formally. ‘Thank you, Eiko-san.’

She cleared papers off the table she was using as a desk. She possessed the tension of a coiled spring deep inside her. Was that from ambition or from having to fend off male business rivals, including the Yakuza? The Colonel did not yet know. ‘You work day, night, time doesn’t matter to you. When do you ever have time for your wife, Cheong, or your son, Nicholas – when do you have time to rest?’ She slid a tray onto the table, set about boiling water in a kettle she placed atop the hibachi set into the tatami of the floor. She had strong, slender hands and a neck like a swan. Her narrow face gave her a patrician’s look. The Colonel could imagine her as the strong-willed wife of a powerful daimyo – warlord – in feudal times.

‘There is much to do and too little time to do it in, I’m afraid.’

‘Spoken like a true Englishman,’ she said as she deftly distributed
macha,
the finest and most expensive of the green teas, into two cups. This interested the Colonel.
Macha
was normally prepared only for the tea ceremony or for important meetings, when the server wanted to impress his or her guest – or when there were matters of consequence to discuss.

Eiko averted her eyes and ducked her head. ‘I hope I haven’t offended you. In many ways you are very Japanese.’

He bowed. ‘Thank you, but I hardly deserve such praise. And, no, you haven’t offended me. My soul is still at least a little British.’

‘But your heart is Japanese,
neh?’
She poured the boiling water into the cups, whisked the tea into a pale and delicate froth. She held out a cup and he took it in both hands. She waited until he had taken his first sip before touching her own cup.

The silence lengthened. Eiko stared into her tea as if observing an entire universe there. She asked a series of polite questions about Cheong, Nicholas, and the Colonel’s garden, which she knew he loved but hardly had any time to appreciate. They finished the pot of tea and she made another. The thing was, the Colonel knew, to be patient. Whatever it was Eiko wished to speak to him about would eventually be made clear to him.

At last she said, ‘I am not totally unaware of your work here, Colonel-san.’ She shrugged. ‘I make no special effort to eavesdrop, but one cannot help noticing the parade of people you and Okami-san bring in here for meetings and, er, other occasions,’ She paused and he waited. ‘Personally, I applaud your efforts on behalf of my country. I am pleased that I can, in some small and insignificant way, contribute.’

Eiko poured more tea. Now she placed between them a selection of pastel-colored sweets made of soybean paste carved into the shape of maple leaves. The Colonel bit into one, took some tea. The confluence of concentrated sweet and intense bitter made for a pleasing whole. So, too, the Japanese believed, in life.

‘I have a certain client,’ Eiko said. ‘I work on him myself – he likes me above any of my girls.’

The Colonel cocked an ear. Eiko made it a strict rule never to speak of her clients, so the fact that she was breaking that rule now was of great significance.

She seemed abruptly unsure of how to proceed. ‘Something about this client disturbs you, Eiko-san?’

She nodded. ‘Yes. That is it precisely.’ She extended her forefinger and touched one cheek. ‘He has scars.’

‘From the war. He’s a veteran, cut by shrapnel, perhaps.’

‘No. I have seen such wounds. They have a particular look. Plus, the stitching is not of the finest quality in field hospitals.’ She shook her head again. ‘No, these scars are perfect, and they are almost evenly placed. Plus the skin between them – it has an ever so slightly different color.’ She took her finger from her cheek and held it up. ‘I have seen such scars before on a female acquaintance who thought she was ugly.’

‘Are you saying this client has had plastic surgery?’

‘Hai.’

‘I take it this man is Caucasian. American?’

‘Hai.’

The Colonel looked at her. Why would she think someone who had had plastic surgery would be worth mentioning to him?

‘But not just plastic surgery,’ Eiko continued. ‘It appears as if he has had his entire face remade. Bones have been broken and realigned, cartilage removed and transferred.’ Her fingernail tapped a staccato tattoo on the tabletop. ‘For instance, his cheeks have been built up, along with the ridge of his forehead. His nose has had a great deal of work – more than one operation. And the skin around his eyes has been tucked to give the eyes themselves a somewhat different shape.’

‘Sounds to me as if he’s got something to hide.’

‘Yes.’

The Colonel inclined his head. ‘Do you know what it is?’

‘He asked me if I could find him a man he has been looking for. He had discovered that I am connected, that I have many friends. He offered to pay me a great deal of money if I found this man for him.’

‘Who does he want you to dig up?’

At last, Eiko’s eyes met his and he could see a trace of anxiety there. ‘Okami-san.’

The Colonel wanted to laugh. ‘Many people want to speak with Okami-san.’

‘This man does not want to speak with the
oyabun.
He wants to kill him.’

The Colonel cocked his head. ‘Kill him? Did he tell you that?’

‘Of course not. But I could see it in his eyes when he made his request. His hatred for Okami-san was naked as a newborn baby.’

The Colonel nodded. ‘All right, I’ll look into it. Does this client have a name?’

‘Leon Waxman.’

The first thing the Colonel did was swear Eiko to absolute secrecy. He wanted no one – least of all Okami – to know that a Leon Waxman, a man with extensive facial reconstruction, had suddenly surfaced two years after Johnny Leonforte had floated the name around.

In 1947 the Colonel had harbored the suspicion that Leon Waxman had been nothing more than a fiction. But if that was so, who was this flesh-and-blood Leon Waxman?

The Colonel asked Eiko to find out from her friend where she had had her plastic surgery done and started there. During the following two weeks, the Colonel visited every clinic and surgeon specializing in plastic surgery, without luck. There weren’t that many, and he was beginning to toy with the notion that Leon Waxman might have had the surgery performed outside Tokyo – improbable as that seemed, given the capital’s superior facilities – when he met a second time with a surgeon named Hiigata.

Their first interview had been terminated prematurely when the doctor was informed one of his new patients had begun to hemorrhage in recovery. Five days later, he agreed to meet with the Colonel again.

He was a small, intense man with iron-gray hair and a narrow, almost cadaverous face. ‘I’ve been thinking about your problem,’ he said as they sat in his small, cramped office. Books and skulls loomed on almost every shelf, on every horizontal surface. ‘You’ve been making the rounds of plastic surgeons because you’re apparently under the impression that this man – what’s his name?’

‘Leon Waxman.’

‘Yes, Waxman. You’re assuming that his surgery was voluntary.’ Hazy sunlight filtered through a small window that desperately needed cleaning a year ago and now seemed to be growing a lab experiment on its outer side. ‘Well, what if it wasn’t?’

The Colonel sat forward. ‘What do you mean?’

Dr Hiigata steepled his fingers. ‘Just this. If he had been in some kind of accident – a serious car crash or a nasty fall down a flight of stairs, for instance – he might have required extensive neural surgery as well as bone, cartilage, and skin reconstruction. Tell me, Colonel, have you tried the Hospital for Neural Surgery attached to Tōdai University?’

Another week went by before Dr Ingawa, the doctor the Colonel had been referred to by Dr Hiigata, was available. He was chief surgeon for the Hospital for Neural Surgery.

‘Leon Waxman? Yes, he was a patient here for upwards of, oh, ten months, I should think.’ Dr Ingawa consulted his records. ‘Yes. Just over, actually.’

The Colonel’s heart turned over. ‘When was he discharged?’

‘Last year.’ Dr Ingawa looked up and smiled politely. At cherry-blossom viewing time.’

That would be mid-April of 1948. That meant he would have been admitted a little less than a year before: May 1947.

His pulse pounding in his temples, the Colonel said, ‘Would you by any chance have photos of Mr Waxman before his surgery?’

‘Naturally,’ Dr Ingawa said, shutting the file with a defensive snap. ‘But they are confidential.’ He was a large man for a Japanese, thin as a rail, with large, bony hands on which all the joints were visible. He wore small, round glasses, which unfortunately emphasized his small, permanently pursed lips and pinched nose. His ears stuck out from his head, making them look like butterfly wings pinned to a lepidopterist’s board. He exuded the professor’s rather musty air of chalk dust and academic debate. In every glance and gesture he exhibited a sense of existing on a loftier plane than those around him.

‘This is official business of the United States armed forces,’ the Colonel said in his most pleasant voice. ‘Mr Waxman is wanted for questioning concerning a series of felonies including trafficking in contraband and murder in the second degree. Please don’t force me to return with the military police.’

Academic infighting at the university had apparently honed Dr Ingawa’s political skills. He knew when he was defeated. Even so, he hesitated just that fraction in order to let the Colonel know that this was still his territory and he was handing over confidential material of his own free will and not on the command of the US Army. It was a way to save face and the Colonel let him salvage what he could from the confrontation. He waited patiently for the folder.

Only when Dr Ingawa placed it on his desk and slid it across to the center did the Colonel say, ‘Thank you for your cooperation, Doctor.’ He waited just that moment before reaching out for the folder, preserving his own face.

Then, placing it on his lap, he opened the cover and his blood ran cold. He found himself looking at the face of Johnny Leonforte – the supposedly late and unlamented Johnny Leonforte.

‘When he was brought in here he was a mess. Frankly, I didn’t think we’d be able to save him. He was –’

‘Excuse me, Doctor, who brought him in?’

‘I’m not sure.’ Dr Ingawa hummed to himself as he thought back. ‘I think she said she was a nun.’

‘A nun?’ That was curious. ‘Japanese?’

‘No, American.’ Dr Ingawa nodded. ‘I remember because of her eyes. They were a magnificent color. A kind of electric blue. Extraordinary, really.’

‘Did she give you her name?’

Dr Ingawa shrugged. ‘She might have but I don’t remember.’

‘You mean no one wrote it down?’

Dr Ingawa cocked his head and in his most supercilious tone said, ‘My dear Colonel, the man she brought in was our only concern. He was near death; he’d lost a great deal of blood and his wounds were both grave and extensive. I don’t know what kind of disaster befell him, but it must have been excruciating. My team and I were concentrated wholly on the patient.’ His thin shoulders lifted and fell. ‘By the time I came out of surgery for the first time, she was long gone.’

‘And she never returned – or rang you to ask about Mr Waxman’s condition?’

‘Not to my knowledge. No one ever inquired about Mr Waxman. And to be perfectly honest I think that was how Mr Waxman wanted it.’

The Colonel was finished going through the file. ‘What makes you say that, Doctor?’

‘Oh, nothing concrete. But from observing the patient – well, despite the fact that he had violent nightmares almost every night, he refused to speak to the psychologist I recommended see him. He was rather rude to the man, as I recall.’ Dr Ingawa paused. ‘Then there was the fact that he never made any calls – even when he was on the mend and mobile again. He made no friends among the patients or staff. In fact, he spoke to almost no one save for me and a couple of the nurses – and only then when it was necessary. Yes, on reflection, he seemed to be a man very much on his own.’

‘Isolated?’

‘Why, yes. Very deliberately so.’

The Colonel thought for a moment. ‘He had extensive reconstruction on his face.’

‘Yes.’ Dr Ingawa nodded. ‘There isn’t a part of it, in fact, that remains from his previous face.’ He said this with an unpleasant smugness, as if Waxman were a prized creation of his, which, the Colonel supposed, was not too far off the mark.

‘You said his injuries were both grave and extensive.’

‘Correct.’

‘Is this why you redid his face so completely?’

‘Why, no. I repaired his injuries during that first surgery. It took us, oh, fourteen hours or so because of the delicate nature of the neural work. The three subsequent operations to give him a new face were entirely at Mr Waxman’s request.’

‘There’s another thing,’ Eiko said one night not long after. ‘Waxman’s making friends here.’

The Colonel, who had been filling his pipe, paused. ‘You mean among the clients?’

‘Yes.’

He knew what that meant. Tenki had become a kind of clandestine crossroads, attending to the various sexual needs of the who’s who of the American Occupation staff. Not just military men, either, but the flood of technicians, economists, politicos, and businessmen who were, weekly, being flown in to assist in Japan’s economic reconstruction. On any given night, a tenth of the top men in Washington were here. The Colonel had seen most of them.

‘This is his real reason for being here,’ he mused.

Eiko nodded. ‘From what I have observed, I would think so.’

She had brought him food – sushi from the all-night place down the street. It stayed open to service her clients, who, invariably, were famished when they exited Tenki. He ate less than he wanted, leaving a third of the raw fish and pressed rice so that she might eat as well. Eiko would never have bought enough for herself.