Second Skin (61 page)

Hatta nodded. ‘Of course. Almost all of them. But only
oyabun
and under
-oyabun.’

Pieces, floating in darkness, coming together, perhaps. ‘Are you a member?’

Hatta hesitated once more, then nodded his head in assent.

Nicholas was silent, watching the silver rain fall between the glass behemoths of Shinjuku. ‘You’re important enough to have a pipeline to Akinaga. You know where he hangs out, so let’s see how well they know you there.’

Hatta was, indeed, a member. And so well known he didn’t even have to produce his card, they knew him on sight. As a guest, Nicholas was required to sign in. He used Mick Leonforte’s name. They were both given plastic cards with laser-printed emblems.

‘Why do you want me here?’ Hatta whined as they descended a long flight of stone stairs, slick and uneven from decades of wear. ‘This can only end badly.’

‘I have no doubt.’ Nicholas prodded him on. ‘But you were there at the beginning, you were willing to destroy Tanaka Gin; now it’s only fitting you be there at the end.’

The stairway was lit by a line of flickering fluorescent tubes recessed into niches covered with the kind of metal grilles found in prisons. The unpleasant monochromatic illumination turned their skin as pale and waxen as that of a two-week-old corpse. Bone-jarring rock music made its way through the stone flooring, the soles of their feet, rising like needles up their legs.

A long, narrow passageway lay before them. The end was smothered in darkness. The floor was a series of flat stones slightly raised from a stream of black, purling water that appeared to drop off precipitously on both sides before the curving stone walls rose to meet in a kind of gothically arched ceiling. Wan disks of light filtered down from weak bulbs in wire cages. They looked to be traversing an underground cavern, possibly just above the level of the subway.

At length, they came to a metal gate, not unlike the portcullis in a castle. Behind it sat a moonlighting sumo of gargantuan proportions. He rose as they approached, took the plastic cards they slipped through the bars, ran them through a machine. The portcullis opened silently and smoothly on hidden gimbals, and he handed them back the cards.

The music was palpably louder now, a frenzied tribal tattoo, insistent as a heartbeat. They were confronted with a short, cramped entryway, dense with moving bodies. Squeezing through the mob, they found themselves in a long, low room. The heat and humidity of hundreds of human bodies made a dense, tropical fog. Colored lights flashed, strobes popped off at irregular intervals, and complex acid-jazz – a combination of jazz tonalities, hip-hop beat, and the occasional rap voice – blew through the swaying bodies like a moist wind through a forest of bamboo.

As he and Hatta moved slowly through the mob, Nicholas saw the minister of finance, the minister of commerce and industry, the ministers of the Textiles Bureau, the Commercial Affairs Bureau, the International Trade Promotion Bureau. After he spotted the superintendent of international trade, he stopped counting. Then there were the members of the Liberal Democratic Party, the Socialist Party, the New Lands Party, the deputy justice minister – the list was virtually endless. Members of the top ten industrial
keiretsu
were, here and there, in evidence, as were a number of Yakuza
oyabun.

Nicholas headed in their direction, looking for Tetsuo Akinaga. He saw a youngish
oyabun
he did not recognize talking to the chief of the Consumer Goods Industries Bureau and wondered what deal was being born. Hatta was trying to drift off, but Nicholas kept him close.

‘Where is Akinaga?’ Nicholas hissed.

‘I don’t know,’ Hatta almost shouted over the din.

They passed a circular bar, six deep with clamoring men, all commanders of industry, bureaus, or illegal activities. It was curious and unsettling to see them scrabbling for drinks, shouting and gesticulating like commodities traders in the pits.

‘Is it like this every night?’ Nicholas asked.

Hatta nodded.

How many deals were consummated in the shadows? Nicholas asked himself. Each night, more of Japan’s future was decided here than in the chambers of the Diet, the parliament. Here was the nexus of power, the great, dark engine that kept Japan chugging along in the traditional ways. Forget all the talk of reform, the lip service paid to clearing away the traditional abuses, finding new ways to conduct business among the steel triangle of business, bureaucracy, and politics. Too much money passed hands here, too many accommodations were made, too complex a web of friendship and favoritism that extended in all directions out of the light of public scrutiny. The people here – and not only the Yakuza – had grown too comfortable in this humid darkness where power was passed as an amulet from hand to hand, and all things were possible.

Nicholas, scanning the human cacophony, felt Hatta stiffen slightly, and without turning his head, Nicholas shifted his gaze. He looked where Hatta had looked. At first he saw nothing but a haze composed of smoke, heat, sound waves, superimposed over a kind of chainmail curtain of human bodies. He probed the semi-darkness with his eyes and then with his psyche. He opened his
tanjian
eye and felt something slippery as a tadpole skitter away from his consciousness. He tried to follow it, but there was too much sensory data sweeping over him and he began to close his
tanjian.

At that instant, something odd happened. As the light from his
tanjian
eye faded, he became aware not of the familiar darkness but of a maelstrom. Ten thousand bees buzzed, a rising chorus, and he instinctively recoiled from the onset of Kshira.

But this time he felt himself cradled as into his mind came Kisoko’s whispered words:
Let the darkness come.

The darkness was coming, a black orb opening, the veil of darkness shielding him from the psychic clatter of hundreds of other souls. Silence. And then, in one corner of that silence, a silver flash, as if from the tail of a fish breaking the skin of the water, a ripple in the darkness, a trail of phosphorescence along which he found himself moving, gliding between closely pressed people in earnest consultations, in amorous embraces, in meaningless conversations, in sweaty transactions, in venal quid pro quos, in malicious double crosses, in dangerous alliances.

Through this thorny lexicon of human endeavor Nicholas dragged Hatta, the traducer, the craven, as if he were a bleating sheep Nicholas was taking to market.

Through the black silence of Kshira, Nicholas identified Tetsuo Akinaga, not with his eyes but with his mind. The dark eye of Kshira had marked him just as if Nicholas had shot him with a quiverful of arrows. Nicholas honed in on him, quartering the room, coming toward him at an angle that would make escape that much more difficult. When he was near enough to Akinaga to glimpse him through the throng, he said to Hatta, ‘This is the end.’

He was almost close enough to the
oyabun
to reach out and touch him. He drew Hatta closer to him so that he would not make a sudden break. Akinaga was deep in a strategy session with a high-ranking member of the New Lands Party and Kansai Mitsui, the
oyabun’s
candidate for prime minister. It was clear Akinaga had not spotted Nicholas, who was maneuvering in to give him no room to run, and Nicholas wanted to keep it that way.

He was fully concentrated on Akinaga when he heard his name being called, felt a lunge to his left, and swinging his gaze, saw Honniko.

‘Nicholas!’ she cried. ‘Nicholas!’

At that moment, there was a rush on his immediate right and Hatta slammed into him, crying out as he was literally lifted off his feet. Nicholas felt a hot spray of blood, whirled to feel Jōchi’s hot breath on his face. Hatta was squirming like a fish caught by a boat hook, and another spray of blood flew up.

Jōchi grunted and rushed Hatta, jamming him harder against Nicholas’s right side. At the same time, the dark eye of Kshira told Nicholas that Akinaga was slithering away from the commotion, eeling backward into the shadows, heading for one of the rear exits almost directly behind him.

Nicholas swiveled away from Jōchi’s attack, bringing Hatta with him. The long knife blade came free of Hatta’s side, and he began to bleed like a stuck pig. All around, people locked into their hermetically sealed worlds were oblivious. They continued to dance and jostle and bob up and down, drink and smoke and talk and negotiate deals.

‘Honniko!’ Nicholas cried, letting Hatta go. He grabbed her wrists, pulled her to him through the thicket of bodies. ‘Hatta-san’s been hurt – stabbed by Jōchi.’

Her eyes were wide.

‘I think he was after me.’ Nicholas turned, saw the tall, slender woman cradling Hatta. There was blood all over her lap. As he stared down, her head came up and he was fixed in the gaze of those wide-apart green eyes. What was the mother superior doing here? he wondered.

‘Take care of him,’ Nicholas said to Honniko. ‘Get a doctor or an ambulance, preferably both.’

Honniko looked up from where she knelt beside the stricken Hatta and Sister Marie Rose. ‘Where are you –’

But he had already been swallowed up by the crowd.

Lew Croaker, looking ten years younger and as unprepossessing as a florist’s assistant should, entered Caesare Leonforte’s compound in the back of the green and yellow Amazonia Florist van that daily delivered fresh flowers to the white mansion. Rico Limòn, the F/X guru, had been right: even his mother wouldn’t recognize him. The latex prostheses – nose, cheeks, forehead, and the small but crucial areas at the sides of his mouth – were perfect, having been designed off the death mask Rico had made of his face.

‘These babies are made to withstand the glare of hot lights, but not without almost constant touch-ups,’ he had warned Croaker of the prostheses, ‘so my best advice is stay out of the noonday sun. And whatever you do, don’t press the left side of the nose until you want reinforcements.’

As usual, the van was stopped just inside the gate so guards could visually examine the contents and the dogs could get a good sniff at everyone and everything. For one terrible, irrational moment, as one of the dogs came up to him, Croaker was afraid it could sense the latex. But, as it turned out, the guard with the hairy hands was more interested in him because Croaker’s was a new face among the regular tradespeople.

‘Morty’s on vacation,’ the driver of the van said.

‘Yeah?’ Hairy-hands said, staring at Croaker as if this were a contest of wills. ‘Where’d Morty go? Fuckin’ Alaska t’get outta this heat?’ He guffawed.

‘He took his kids to Disney World.’

‘Fuck you talkin’?’ Hairy-hands’ eyebrows shot up. ‘Seemed t’me ol’ Morty was a little light in the loafers.’

‘Nah,’ the driver said, obviously used to this kind of cross-examination, ‘that’d be me.’

They both had a good laugh at that. Croaker risked a smile at Hairy-hands and was rewarded with a scowl. The other guard pulled the dog back, and Hairy-hands slammed the van door shut. ‘Get on up there. Boss don’t like the smell a dyin’ flowahs.’

With a profound sense of relief Croaker took his biomechanical hand out of his pocket where he had kept it hidden throughout the visual check.

‘C’mon, c’mon,’ he urged the driver.

It was just after two
P.M.
and he was both anxious and annoyed. He had been all set to penetrate Bad Clamsville at eight this morning in La Petite Bakery’s truck, which daily delivered fresh croissants, rolls, and baguettes, when by sheer good fortune he had discovered the dispatcher trying to make a call into the compound. Subsequent interrogation by the backup team of federal agents Vesper had requested had revealed that the dispatcher was on Bad Clams’ payroll. It had given everyone involved – including Croaker – a queasy feeling. How much of the area infrastructure was under Bad Clams’ thumb? There was no way of telling, but when they invaded the Amazonia premises, all outgoing calls were carefully monitored.

They spent the next forty minutes removing yesterday’s flower arrangements and replacing them with the load they had trucked in. Croaker was upstairs in a sitting room, putting the finishing touches on a tropical-looking centerpiece when Hairy-hands sauntered in.

‘Where’s your dog?’ Croaker said, placing a fiery-red bird-of-paradise in place.

‘Very fuckin’ funny,’ Hairy-hands said. He was so close Croaker could smell the sour remnants of lunch on his breath. He stuck out a sausagelike finger, the top of which was a forest of curly black hair. ‘What’s zis?’

Croaker looked at him.

‘Zis?’ Hairy-hands pointed more emphatically to a white flower. ‘What’sa name?’

Croaker had no idea. ‘Delphinium,’ he said. ‘Where’s the can? I gotta pee.’

Hairy-hands glowered at him. ‘Downa hall. I’ll take ya.’

Croaker dutifully went out into the hall at Hairy-hands’ direction, feeling him like a brick wall at his back. He opened the door to the bathroom inward. At the same moment, he jammed his left elbow in Hairy-hands’ solar plexus. He whirled, but before he could get his biomechanical hand around Hairy-hands’ throat, the big man slammed the heel of his hand into the point of Croaker’s chin.

He flew backward, hitting the cool tile bathroom floor on one hip. In one stride, Hairy-hands was on top of him, shaking him this way and that, then slamming him back against the side of the porcelain tub. Croaker felt lances of pain radiate from his side as he made an inarticulate sound.

Hairy-hands bent over him, grinning, and Croaker, his biomechanical hand balled up, drove this fist into the big man’s clavicle. It cracked beneath the force of the blow, and Croaker’s stainless-steel and polycarbonate fingers opened like the petals of a poisonous flower, pressing against the carotid artery in the side of Hairy-hands’ neck. The big man slipped to his knees, his huge hands flailing, still trying to do damage, and Croaker chopped down with his other hand onto the bridge of Hairy-hands’ nose. He collapsed amid a welter of blood.

Croaker tried to stand up, slipped on the tiles, righted himself by grabbing onto the sink. He saw himself in the mirror and did not like what he saw. He was breathing hard and his side hurt like hell. He wanted to splash cold water on his face, but what with the prostheses and the makeup, it was out of the question. His nose was slightly askew and he fixed it as best he could.