Second Skin (56 page)

‘It’s not a story. It’s the truth.’

‘Why did you tell me now? You must have known who I was the first time we met. Why didn’t you tell me then?’

‘I wanted to but –’ She stopped abruptly, turned her head away. ‘I have too many secrets,’ she whispered.

‘Like being Londa.’

She nodded, her blond hair gleaming. ‘I didn’t want you to know – or even suspect.’ She took a ragged breath, as if she were holding something mean and nasty tight to her breast. ‘I didn’t want you to misunderstand – to hate me.’

‘Why do you do it? You don’t have to be involved in the sex club scene.’

‘Have to?’ She almost laughed. ‘I
want
to.’ Her smile faded. ‘Now I
have
shocked you.’ He said nothing and her eyes held his, their gaze probing. ‘But maybe not. I’m like my mother – she got involved in the
toruko
because she wanted to. Also, it was what the order required of her. She did God’s work and so do I.’

‘I don’t understand. God requires you to perform sex arts on men?’

‘God requires me to gather secrets. God asks me to help the order amass power. In this world, a woman’s work is done in prescribed ways. Not so much has changed over the centuries.’

‘Then it’s not so tough a life after all.’

Honniko laughed. ‘You know, I liked you right away. There’s a difference. A –’ She leaned across impulsively and kissed him hard on the lips.

Nicholas took her by the shoulders and looked deep into her eyes. ‘I liked you, too. From the moment I first saw you in the restaurant.’ She kissed him again with a naked hunger that pulled on his heart. He disengaged himself. ‘But this isn’t such a good idea.’

‘I’m not a whore.’ That defiant look again.

‘It wouldn’t matter to me if you were.’ He looked at the small statue of the Madonna on a high shelf. ‘You haven’t lost your faith.’

‘Not in God,’ she said, following his gaze. ‘But men can be such bastards.’ She reached out and touched him. He thought the naked hunger would be in her eyes, but perhaps he still underestimated her. It wasn’t sex she wanted from him; from her vantage point, sex was a devalued commodity.

He smiled and took her hand in his, kissed her palm once, then let it go. ‘It’s after eight.’ He got off the futon and she swiveled around to look at him. ‘I’ve got to get going.’

‘You’d better wash up first,’ she said. ‘You look like you’ve been in a war.’

He stared down at her a moment.
I have too many secrets,
she had told him. How many more was she hiding? he wondered. ‘By the way, do you have any idea why Jōchi, your fellow maître d’ at Pull Marine, would want to kill me?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I played a very dangerous game of motorcycle tag with him earlier today. He was on a police cycle and, judging by the way he kept on my tail, he was a very determined man.’

‘No, I –’ She looked surprised – shocked even. ‘What happened?’

‘I made it through a hole in the wall and he didn’t.’

‘I’m glad you weren’t hurt.’ Her shock seemed to deepen. ‘But as for Jōchi, I have no idea what he was up to.’

She didn’t, but Nicholas certainly did. Honniko, Jōchi, Pull Marine, were all intimately connected to Mick Leonforte. Perhaps Mick even owned the restaurant. This little game of charades Nicholas had played with Honniko told him one thing: she genuinely did not know about Jōchi’s most recent actions. Maybe he couldn’t yet trust her fully, but he knew now that though she was in the enemy’s camp, she was not the enemy.

‘The Denwa Partners want an immediate meeting,’ Kanda Tōrin said as Nicholas strode into his office at Sato International. The night staff was in place and the place hummed as if it were the middle of the morning. ‘I have been trying to contact you via your Kami while working on possible responses. I didn’t want to leave until I spoke with you.’

‘Put Denwa off,’ Nicholas said, running quickly through the electronic messages that had not been automatically forwarded to his Kami. More problems in the Saigon operation. Continuing instability in South America. And three messages – the last one urgent – from Terrence McNaughton, the company’s DC lobbyist. Nicholas saw that McNaughton had reduced to three the candidates for president of Sato-Tomkin, the American company Nicholas had merged with Nangi’s Sato International.

‘I can’t put them off,’ Tōrin was saying. ‘The contract we signed with them stipulates we must brief them in person every thirty days. We’re five days overdue.’

‘Put them off a couple of days more. We can’t have much to report yet on the CyberNet. It’s only been online in Japan for four days.’

‘Linnear-san, they have requested this meeting because they have grave doubts about Sato International’s long-term viability as a
keiretsu.
The CyberNet, along with our fiber-optic businesses in South America, have drained us dry.’

Nicholas looked up, concentrating fully for the first time. ‘They’re overreacting. All we need is an infusion of short-term capital to get us through the next six months.’

Tōrin hesitated, a look of obvious pain in his eyes.

‘Go on. Spit it out.’

‘Pardon me for saying this, Linnear-san, but in their minds you are gaijin – and as such unreliable to be in charge of their investment. They have one hundred fifteen billion yen tied up in Sato through Denwa.’ That was more or less the equivalent of $2 billion. ‘Unless we meet with them as soon as possible, they are threatening to seek legal remedy.’ Tōrin’s eyes looked bleak. ‘They will sue for control of the CyberNet.’

‘That would just about kill Sato. Christ, how did we get into such a mess?’ But Nicholas knew. He should have been here. With Nangi so infirm, there had been only Tōrin to take up the slack. Ambitious Tōrin, who, he reminded himself, was behind the CyberNet deal with Denwa. He thought for a moment. ‘Okay, set the meeting for ten tomorrow morning.’

He put his eyes back on his notes, read through them twice before he realized he could not remember a word of what he’d read. Tōrin was cooling his heels, patient as sand. Let him wait, Nicholas decided.

He tried McNaughton but the time was wrong and he got his voice mail. There was a note for him to press in his code to download the files on the job candidates. Nicholas plugged in his Kami and downloaded the data. While he was doing that, he searched for a message from Okami. Nothing. What had happened to him? The phone rang. The night manager of the Osaka field office had a problem with his fiber-optic contracts, and by the time Nicholas solved it Tōrin was back. With no time to review the McNaughton data, Nicholas pocketed his Kami, put an expectant look on his face as he looked up. Tōrin was still dutifully standing there.

‘You came up with the Denwa Partners notion, which may turn out to be brilliant or a catastrophe,’ Nicholas said, ‘but how could you allow Nangi-san to sign a contract with such onerous clauses?’

‘I did nothing,’ Tōrin said in true Japanese fashion. ‘The Denwa Partners left us no leeway for negotiation. They knew we were desperate to get the CyberNet online and that we had nowhere else to turn.’

‘If I were here, I could have found American partners not quite so eager to squeeze our nuts into a tin can.’

‘I wish you had been here. We could have used your wisdom and experience. I admit I might have been influenced in no small part by Nangi-san’s overriding enthusiasm.’ Tōrin ducked his head deferentially. ‘But, again, that had a great deal to do with you. The vid-byte technology our American R&D division provided us fired him up. This recession has been a long, grinding affair and, along with the ongoing political destabilization, I think people of his age have had a fear that the country was on the verge of disintegration.’

‘Something new is forming beneath the slough of the old like a second skin. We should not be afraid of what it represents.’ It was only after Nicholas said it that he realized the same sentiment could be applied to his personal situation.

Let the darkness come.

Kshira.

His eyes flicked up at Tōrin and he made a decision. ‘Nangi-san has made it clear that I should trust you, so I am going to tell you what I plan to do tomorrow at the Denwa Partners meeting. From what I have been able to gather, I think they are going to make a run at wresting control of the CyberNet from us. We cannot allow that to happen. I am going to need your help if we are to defeat the Denwa Partners.’

Tōrin nodded. ‘I am honored that you are taking me into your confidence, Linnear-san. Rest assured I will do my utmost to prove worthy of your trust.’

Kanda Tōrin did not go home after work. He went, instead, to his car and made a brief call to a coded address on his Kami. Then he drove through rain-slick streets in an almost aimless pattern. More than twice, he doubled back on his route, watching in his side mirror for any cars that stayed with him. There were none.

At last, he arrived at a ferroconcrete building in Toshima-ku studded with antennas and a satellite dish. A large and incongruous mirror jutted from one corner, angled to catch the sun and reflect its rays onto a minuscule and otherwise shadow-stifled garden beside the building’s entrance. At the far corner of the block a bar’s neon sign flickered like an eyelid with a nervous twitch.

Glancing at the car’s clock, he saw that he was early. He turned on the radio and listened to the latest political news. The smart money had the reactionary Kansai Mitsui in the lead for prime minister. Hitomoto, the finance minister, looked as if he couldn’t muster coalition support. And while all the warring political parties dithered, the economy was going to hell. Dead meat, Tōrin thought.

Cars hissed by his window, throwing up brief sprays, rainbowed in the overbright urban night. A pair of headlights split the rain and streetlights flared off the hood of a large van as it passed by. Silence.

Tōrin looked at the dial of the illuminated clock and got out of the Lexus. He went up the block and into the bar. He took the last stool and ordered a Suntory Scotch and water. It was placed down on the dark wood bar on top of a small piece of folded paper. Someone was singing badly and drunkenly along with a karaoke version of Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way.’ Tōrin regarded this man with a certain amount of envy. He was a typical Japanese salaryman, with a boring job, a good salary, benefits, a wife and no doubt children at home. What did he know of high-stakes intrigue, industrial espionage, a man so formidable as Nicholas Linnear peering suspiciously at his every move? Life was simple for him; at the end of the day he could afford to sing karaoke and get blind drunk.

Tōrin took the tiniest sip of his Scotch, set the glass down, aware of the well of self-pity that had opened up inside him.
Keep calm,
he thought.
Big ambitions mean taking big risks. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?
He took another sip of his drink. As he put the glass down on the bartop, he slipped his hand over the paper. Unfolding it in his lap, he read the instructions. He left the Scotch on the bartop. The drunken man had segued into ‘Strangers in the Night’ and it was painful. Tōrin paid for his drink and left the bar.

The Nogi Jinja was lit up like a stage set, but then, Tōrin reflected, all of Roppongi was, in many ways, a stage set. By day, it gleamed with the newest fashions, the most expensive jewelry, the most extravagant art. By night, it glittered between the raindrops, throbbing to the beat of hip-hop, way-cool acid jazz, and the massed guttural roar of sleekly painted motorcycles. It was a bit of living sculpture, an ultramodern torso on which could be placed many heads, depending on the time of day and the Zeitgeist of the times.

He found Akinaga’s hideaway without difficulty and took the stainless-steel and cut-glass elevator to the top floor of the narrow high-rise. The door to the just-released
oyabun’s
apartment was open as he stepped into the hallway. This should have made him wary.

The darkness inside seemed alive, waiting for him. It was hot and sticky, as close as the inside of a coffin. He breathed shallowly through his mouth. There was a stench in here, like rotting flowers, like death reaching out its hand. It all but made him shudder. Then the lights blazed on, making Tōrin blink rapidly.

‘Good evening, Tōrin-san,’ Mick Leonforte said as Tōrin came into the apartment. Someone closed and locked the door behind him, then disappeared into another room. It was Jōchi. He had recovered from his high-speed motorcycle pursuit of Nicholas. Mick had sent him after Nicholas to keep him from making his rendezvous with Mikio Okami at the Shitamachi Museum. Mick, who, as a Denwa partner, had access to a Kami communicator and the TransRim CyberNet, had ‘read’ Okami’s vid-mail to Nicholas setting up the meet. He had sent Jōchi out to keep Nicholas away from the rendezvous site long enough for Mick to snatch Okami.

‘Pardon me,’ Tōrin said to Mick, ‘but do I know you?’

Mick gave a mock-bow, an offensive parody of Japanese custom, said, ‘I can imagine your surprise and confusion, Tōrin-san. You had been expecting Akinaga-san to greet you at the door.’ He smiled an unpleasant smile. ‘The great
oyabun
is otherwise occupied, but he kindly informed me of your imminent arrival.’ Mick ushered him into the living room. ‘He offers his apologies and asked me to take his place. He and I have come to a certain arrangement.’

‘And you are?’ Tōrin stopped in his tracks, all the breath going out of him. ‘Good God.’

He stood, rooted to the spot, staring at an old man who, naked, was hanging upside down from a chain from the ceiling. His skin was as white as milk, except for his neck and face, which were ruddy with blood. Over almost all his body great swaths of intricate
irezumi
spread like tapestries in a great hall. Mythical creatures, female sirens, great mailed warriors brandishing gleaming weapons, fire, ice, and wind-whipped rain, all painstakingly tattooed into the skin, spoke eloquently of the Japanese idea of machismo: violence turned inward, an exotic display of masochism.

At the old man’s side was a stainless-steel IV stand from which hung a soft plastic bag filled with a pale amber liquid that was by drips entering a vein on the inside of his left wrist, which was curled up like the claw of an animal.