Second Skin (62 page)

He turned back to Hairy-hands. Quickly, he undressed him, then with a grunt got him into the tub. He took out several plastic notched ties, bound his ankles and wrists. Then Croaker emptied the pockets of his green and yellow Amazonia overalls, took them off, and balling them up, threw them into the tub. He drew closed the plastic shower curtain on which was imprinted a French lawn-party scene à la Toulouse-Lautrec.

He climbed into Hairy-hands’ clothes and immediately began to smell like onions and peppers. He studied himself in the mirror. The trousers were too big, but by notching the belt tighter he judged they didn’t look too bad.

He stuffed all his paraphernalia into his new clothes, took Hairy-hands’ snub-nosed .38 in its shoulder holster, and swung it into place. All set. He checked the room one last time, neatening knick-knacks here and there. Then he went out into the upstairs hallway, shutting the door behind him.

There was a commotion behind him, people coming up the stairs. He turned and almost ran right into Caesare Leonforte.

‘Hot as a fuckin’ furnace out there,’ Caesare Leonforte said as he strode down the second-floor hallway of his house. When he brushed by one of his men standing there, he was already calling for Vesper, who hurried behind him. It wasn’t exactly as if Caesare remembered the man – he had only given him the most cursory of glances – but, like a ribbon of paper fetched up against a stanchion, something stuck in his mind, fluttering there.

Caesare went into his office, immediately turned down to tundra level the thermostat that controlled the central air-conditioning.

‘That fuckin’ Paul,’ he said. ‘I give him everything a man could ask for – money, opportunity, a chance to show his smarts – an’ what does he do? He turns around an’ fucks me inna ass.’ As usual when he was agitated, the shell of sophistication he had carefully crafted cracked, and more of his street accent came out. ‘But I don’t want any a this to fuck with our rendezvous with Milo.’ He said over his shoulder to Vesper as he checked his gold Patek Philippe, ‘I gotta make that pickup in less than an hour an’ I gotta settle a score.’ His huge fists struck his desk with a resounding thud, and he stared out the window. ‘I haven’t heard from the boys in South Beach an’ I don’t like leavin’ loose ends.’

He took out a cellular phone, autodialed a number. ‘Fuck!’ he shouted, throwing the phone onto his desk. ‘No answer. Out of range or out of brains. Either way, they haven’t found Paul an’ the kid.’

Vesper waited a beat. ‘You haven’t told me why your friend Paul would kidnap his girlfriend’s kid.’

‘An’ I appreciate you keepin’ your nose outta it.’ Caesare was still staring blankly out the window, as if by sheer force of will he could bring them back. ‘Actually, you’re right. The story I told you makes no sense now.’ He sighed. ‘The broad isn’t Paul’s dish, she’s a business rival a mine. She got a little, you know, overambitious, stepped outta line. I had Paul bring her an’ her kid here.’

‘Why the kid?’

‘Persuasion. The kid’s more important to her than her business.’

‘That’s pretty low, isn’t it? I mean, the Sicilians have rules against that sort of thing, don’t they?’

‘Fuck th’ rules!’ Caesare shouted. ‘The rules’re for old men with black suits an’ arthritis.’ He pounded his chest. ‘I make the rules around here an’ fuck anybody who doesn’t like it.’

Suddenly, Vesper saw his whole body stiffen like a hunting dog on point.

‘Well, holy shit, will you look at that!’

Vesper came up behind him, stared over his shoulder at the scene unfolding outside. Her heart skipped a beat. Through the window she could see Paul Chiaramonte leading Francie through the compound. He was accompanied by two of Caesare’s thugs. One of the dogs, at the extreme end of its chain, was sniffing at Francie’s knees. As they came toward the house, Vesper and Caesare could see that Paul had tight hold of Francie by the back of her blouse.

‘Now what d’you suppose
that’s
all about?’ Caesare said as he drew a .38 from his desk drawer and checked the cylinder.

‘It looks like he’s bringing her back. Maybe you were wrong about him.’

‘Yeah?’ Caesare snapped the chamber back in place. ‘We’ll see about that.’

As he turned away from the window, his cellular phone rang. For an instant he thought about ignoring it, then he snatched it up, yelled into it, ‘Yeah! What?’

‘It’s White Wolf.’

Caesare rolled his eyes. The chief of police, who was on his payroll, read too many spy novels. He insisted on using code names and something he called a parole – an exchange of these secret names, changed periodically, that identified two otherwise anonymous voices over the phone.

‘Green Dolphin,’ Caesare said, his mind on Paul Chiaramonte and whether or not he had crossed him.

‘On the matter of the killing of that ex-NYPD cop, Lewis Croaker.’

‘Yeah, what about it? I told you to make sure the investi –’

‘Forget the investigation. It was the most cursory thing I’ve ever seen, and there’s a good reason why. Croaker never was admitted to any area hospital.’

‘Course not. I croaked Croaker.’ Caesare laughed at that.

‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that. I just spoke with the coroner and he has no record of the body, either. I went through the prelim crime-scene reports. The team that secures the crime scene is required to get the particulars of anyone in or around it. That includes the ambulance crew. I called the hospital and got an official runaround. Then I made some unofficial calls, if you get my drift, and I came up with this kick in the head: the ambulance dispatched to the crime scene was a phony.’

All thoughts of Paul Chiaramonte and Francine Goldoni DeCamillo evaporated. Caesare slowly swung around until he was looking right at Vesper. Two things were now possible and he didn’t like the feel of either of them. Either Croaker was dead and the feds had him, which meant a thorough clandestine investigation that might or might not be beyond his reach, or it was all a setup and Croaker was still alive. Which meant that Vesper, who had after all shot him, wasn’t what she was pretending to be.

‘So who picked him up?’

‘I don’t know. Believe me, that was as far as I could get.’

Caesare took a deep breath. ‘You sure about everything you’ve told me?’

‘As sure as anyone can be in this uncertain world.’

Caesare nodded slowly. ‘Thanks. You’ve been a big help.’

‘A word to the wise. I have no control over whatever is happening, so until this blows over, I’d rather we didn’t have any further communication.’ The chief of police laughed, but with an ambivalent note. ‘Remember me in your will.’

As Caesare broke the connection, a memory fluttered in his mind like that ribbon of paper caught on a stanchion. The man he had bumped into in the hallway. Caesare could just about see his face: nothing remarkable about it at all – except he was sure he’d never seen it before.

With a growl of disgust and rage, he yanked open the door and kicked it back so that it banged against the rubber doorstop, twanging like a bow.

‘That guy!’ Caesare burst out into the hallway, Vesper just behind him. ‘Where’s that fuckin’ guy!’

The goon who was standing guard on the landing looked at his boss and said, ‘What guy?’

‘The
guy!’
Caesare screamed, gesticulating madly. ‘You know, the jamoke who I bumped into a minute ago.’

‘What guy? Mikey? Joey? Fredo? Who?’

‘Not any one of those, you moron!’ Caesare shouted, pushing past him, and thundering down the stairs. Caesare wanted to describe the guy, but he realized there was nothing to describe. He was just a guy – big, muscular, but featureless. ‘The fuckin’
guy!’
he screamed in frustration. ‘One a you morons musta seen him! Fuck do I pay you for? Stand around an’ scratch your nuts?’

He pushed past two more men on the first floor just as the front door opened. He whirled with the grace of a ballet dancer, his .38 coming up, expecting to confront Paul and Francie, but instead, Joey loped in. He looked flushed and worried, which wasn’t Joey’s normal state.

‘Boss, there’s a copter headin’ our way!’

Caesare lifted his hands. ‘So fuckin’ what? We get choppers in here alla time!’

‘I put the specs on it,’ Joey said, meaning binoculars. ‘This one’s a fed.’

‘A fed copter?’ Caesare couldn’t believe it, but Joey’s head was bobbing up and down like one of those annoying plastic dogs in the back window of a car. A small, almost reverent hush filled the grand foyer of the mansion, as if the shadow of the red death had entered.

‘Yeah,’ Joey said, a little more breathlessly. ‘It’s like a fuckin’ Nam gunship, fulla cammos wit’ sniper rifles an’ semiautomatics. It’s comin’ in low, right ovah the tops a the trees.’

‘C’mon!’ Caesare grabbed Vesper and headed through the now crowded foyer into a back corridor leading to the kitchen. His head felt as if a balloon were inflating inside it, and he could not control a throbbing in his temples.

‘This way,’ he hissed as he grabbed her arm and pulled her bodily into the walk-in pantry. It was cool and dark and that was good. Like a blind man in his own house, Caesare knew every inch of this room because he had personally overseen its construction. He felt his way to the right rear corner. At the bottom of the floor-to-ceiling shelving, he pushed aside two cans. His fingertip depressed a button, and as he was rearranging the cans, a breath of sulfurous air wafted up at them like the exhalation of a demon.

‘Down,’ he whispered, placing a hand on the back of Vesper’s head. He went down the shallow steps behind her, then felt for another button, and the sliding panel closed just over his head.

Down here, it stunk like the pits of hell. The mansion had no basement. This was typical of Florida houses because the water table was so near the surface. But after one of his holding companies had bought this compound, he had had this shallow escape route trenched in. He had told the builders that it was for existing and future fiber-optic cable bundles and auxiliary electrical lines, but he’d made sure it was wide enough for him to traverse.

He guided Vesper through the darkness, one hand firmly on her to keep her bent over in the low space, but also to keep control of her. She was the only immediate element in his life he now had control over, and this was important to him either way – whether she was who she said she was or whether she had betrayed him, was part of the conspiracy Croaker and the feds had launched against him.

On the most basic level, there was no difference, he reflected, as he crawled through the damp, sulfurous PVC piping, away from the house, the compound, and the feds. What mattered was that she was with him. She was like a magic amulet, his protection against, as the chief of police had said, an uncertain world. Either he would have her as his lover or as a hostage. Croaker and the feds could go fuck themselves till they turned blue.

Croaker, feeling stiff and uncomfortable in his prostheses, hurried out the front door and into the broiling Florida sun. He immediately began to sweat, and remembering Rico Limòn’s admonition regarding heat’s effects on his disguise, he began to sweat all the more.

He approached the two goons who were riding herd on the dark-skinned man who had a gun pressed into Francie’s side. He’d always found the best defense to be an offense, so he shouted, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’

‘I let the brat outta my sight for a minute,’ the dark-skinned man said, ‘an’ you can tell Bad Clams I found ’er. My fault, but all’s well that ends well.’

‘Who the fuck’re you?’ the goon with the dog on the chain said.

‘Joey Hand,’ Croaker said, displaying his bio-mechanical hand. He studiously ignored Francie’s brief wide-eyed look, but he wondered why she dug her elbow into the dark-skinned man’s stomach while the goons were staring at him.

‘Don’t know no Joey Hand,’ the goon said. The dog did not care for his agitation and was whining at the end of its leash. It looked as if it was itching to get its teeth into Croaker’s thigh.

‘From the New York machine,’ Croaker said, verbally dancing as fast as he could. ‘The boss brought me down to help ’im deal with the DeCamillo broad an’ the brat.’

‘This here’s Paul Chiaramonte,’ the other goon said. ‘He’s from the New York machine. He brought the broad an’ the brat down.’ He looked from one to the other. ‘How ’bout it? You
two
know each other, or what?’

Croaker saw Paul Chiaramonte open his mouth and almost make a sound as Francie stepped on his instep. He smiled, his eyes watering a bit. ‘Sure. Who doesn’t know Joey Hand in New Yawk?’ He shot out a hand, which Croaker gripped as their eyes locked. ‘We met – where was it? In Bensonhurst, must’ve been – the Donelli wedding.’

‘Right,’ Croaker said, feeling a line of sweat creep down his spine. ‘The Donelli wedding. Helluva affair, wasn’t it?’ How did actors keep this ton of shit on their faces without its melting like candle wax? he wondered.

‘Jesus,’ Paul said, getting with the program, ‘was it not? Remember Rose?’ He pushed out his chest.

‘And Sophia singing like a drunken lunatic.’

‘Okay,’ the goon with the dog said, ‘enough of
This Is Your Life.’
He turned to Croaker. ‘The boss ain’t sure about Chiaramonte. What does he want we should do with these two for the time being? Inna main house?’

‘I wanna see my mom!’ Francie cried, and began pulling Paul toward the guesthouse.

Croaker blessed her for her quick wit. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He wants the broad and the brat together so we can keep a better eye on ’em.’

The second goon nodded. ‘Sounds good t’me. We don’t want a repeat ova escape. The boss’ll roast us alive.’

They went across the emerald lawn, past high privet hedges and neat lines of boxwood interspersed with flower beds. Their soles made a hollow sound against the brickwork around the pool, and Croaker was acutely aware of the quick clicking of the dog’s long nails. Above their heads, a bird flitted among the cool leaves, free from the cruelty of man-made crises.

Croaker saw the guesthouse, shining brilliant white, and he imagined Margarite inside. What kind of shape was she in? Was she all right? He wanted to break into a run and he could feel the adrenaline pumping through him.