Second Skin (8 page)

This was the cover story she had chosen because, like all the best lies, it contained more than a grain of truth. Her teenage daughter, Francine, caught in the middle of Margarite and Tony D.’s abusive relationship, had become depressed and bulimic. Francie’s encounter with Lew Croaker, the ex-NYC cop and Nicholas Linnear’s best friend, seemed to have turned her around. Her deep-seated rage at her parents still existed, but Croaker’s influence had shaken it from the dark recesses of her subconscious. Francie loved Croaker with an absolute devotion that sometimes made Margarite jealous. She might love Lew – a sad, ironic love, since Lew’s overdeveloped sense of right and wrong was immutable – but his harmonious relationship with her daughter was sometimes so maddening that she cried herself to sleep. How she longed to have a normal, loving relationship with Francie. She wondered whether that might ever be possible.

‘She’s better. Rich, really,’ she said, sitting down in the chair he had pulled out for her.

Rich Cooper was a dapper-looking man. He was fluent in all the Romance languages and was currently breezing through his Japanese lessons. He had a certain adaptability to different cultures and mind-sets that others sometimes mistook for glibness. But to underestimate him was to give him an advantage he would exploit to its fullest. He was in his early forties but his unruly sandy hair and quick blue eyes gave him a boyish air. He was small and compact and possessed of a seemingly inexhaustible nervous energy. He was the only man she knew who could spend five days working the Milan couture show, fly off to Tokyo, then jet to Paris for a week and return to the office ready to work. His favorite thing was to travel, to meet new faces and win them over to his cause.

He was fervid about Serenissima – always had been – and he took great pride in its enormous success. From time to time, he had brought up the idea of going public, but Margarite was firmly against it. ‘Think of all the added capital that will flow in!’ Rich would say excitedly. ‘A virtual avalanche,
bella!’
But, no, she would tell him. Going public meant a board of directors, answering to investors, the threat of being taken over or, worse, ousted from their own company. Margarite had seen it happen time and again. ‘What’s ours is ours,’ she had told him firmly. ‘And I intend to see that it stays that way.’

‘So, bring me up to date,’ Margarite said now as she opened her overstuffed Filofax.

For the next hour, Rich gave her a rundown on sales – up 30 percent for the quarter; research and development – a new overnight cream that dissolved the puffiness of too much alcohol and not enough sleep; the franchise division – seventy-five and counting; the German putsch – the department store experiment at Kaufhof and Karstadt had been wildly successful, and their first two stand-alone boutiques were scheduled to open in the spring in Berlin and Munich. In fact, Rich told her, he had just wrapped up the deal with the German partners who were going to build and manage the boutiques.

There was not a negative note to Rich’s profit aria, and yet, watching him, Margarite could not shake the feeling that something was amiss. He played nervously with his silver Pelikan fountain pen – a gift from the Germans – and seemed to rush through his presentation instead of drawing it out, relishing every moment as he had every right to do.

When he was finished and she had initialled the papers and co-signed every contract he had placed before her, she looked over to him and said in her usual blunt style, ‘Okay, what’s up?’

For a moment, Rich said nothing. He rolled the Pelikan between his fingers like a drum majorette with a baton. Then, abruptly, he shoved his chair back and went to the windows. He pulled apart the heavy drapes, peered out across the city to the Hudson River and, beyond, the smoky haze of industrial New Jersey.

‘Rich...?’

‘I wish to God you hadn’t come back.’

‘What?’

He let go of the drapes, turned to face her. ‘I had the letter all drafted. It was going to be typed up this morning, sent over to Tony’s office.’

She stood up, her heart pounding in her chest. ‘What letter?’ She could see him take a deep breath, bracing himself, and she felt a painful constriction in her throat.

‘I’ve sold my share,
bella.’

Margarite stared at him, her mind in a numbed state of shock. She could not think of even one word to say except ‘Shit!’ The kind of unconscious expletive you come out with when you see a car coming at you broadside and you know it’s too late to do anything but brace yourself for the impact and hope the seat belt and air bag are enough to save you. What was going to save her now? she wondered.

At last, as the shock dissipated, she found her voice. ‘You bastard. Why?’

He shrugged, looking sheepish now in the face of her growing anger. ‘Why else? Money.’

‘Money?’
Outraged, she could hardly believe what she was hearing. ‘You mean you aren’t getting enough
money,
enough
perks,
now?’

He shrugged again. ‘There’s always more money,
bella.’

Bella.
‘Stop that! You’ve no right to call me that anymore.’

He went white, and stricken, he turned back to the window. ‘You see now why the letter would have been better.’

Margarite put her fingers to her throbbing temples. She went to the credenza, poured herself a glass of water, fumbled in her purse for some extrastrength Bufferin, downed them with a gulp. Then, blotting her lips, she turned to him. ‘Why didn’t you discuss this with me before –’

‘Because,’ he said, rounding on her, ‘you haven’t been here in months!’

They stood close together, panting like two animals caught in a crossfire of headlights, terrified, unsure what step to take next.

‘Rich’ – she put out a hand – ‘let’s talk about this now. It’s not too late to –’

‘It
is
too late, Margarite. I signed the papers late yesterday. It’s a done deal.’

She looked into his blue eyes, trying to fathom the truth. This was so unlike him. It was as if she were seeing an entirely different person from the one she had come to know over the course of their twelve-year partnership. How many times had he been over to the house? He had come to Francie’s Communion, had bought her that six-foot, cuddly bear she still loved, had presented her last year with that massive multimedia system – stereo speakers and all – for her top-of-the-line MAC. And now this: betrayal. Why? For money?

‘Who did you sell out to?’

‘Oh, come on,
bella,
nothing’s going to change. I’ll still be working here. I signed a personal services contract–’

‘A contract!’ He reacted to the sneer in her voice. ‘A paid employee in your own company.’ She shook her head, raked fingers through her dark, thick hair. ‘Madonna, listen to yourself. You still don’t get it. These
petzinavanti,
whoever they are,
own
you. The minute they don’t like the job you’re doing or disagree with it or, even, don’t like the suits you’re wearing or the smell of your breath, you’re out of here, no recourse. Everything you’ve worked for for more than a decade, down the drain, over,
finis
.’ She stared at him. ‘Oh, Rich, what have you done?’

‘What had to be done,’ he said, turning away from her, ‘believe me.’

‘Right now I don’t believe anything or anyone.’ She finished the rest of the water, poured herself more. Her throat was so dry. ‘So who is it? Perelman? Am I now co-owned by Revlon?’

‘No, no one like that,’ he said, biting his lower lip. ‘In fact, this is the company’s first foray into cosmetics. Its name is Volto Enterprises Unlimited. They’re out of West Palm Beach in Florida, but they have offices all over the globe. They flew me down to West Palm,’ he continued, in a pathetic attempt to attach his enthusiasm to her. ‘Christ, you should see the layout they have there. This huge white stucco mansion over the Atlantic – breathtaking.’

‘So they had people schmooze you, probably fuck you till you couldn’t see straight, then greased you,’ Margarite said, the disgust evident in her voice. ‘What was Volto’s head honcho like?’

‘I don’t know. I never met him. Just a bunch of upper-management people – the board of directors, I believe – and, yeah, some good-time, um, people.’ Rich was bisexual, which was often something of an asset in Europe. ‘And a shitload of lawyers. It was unbelievable.’

‘Breathtaking... unbelievable,’ she said bitterly. ‘I can’t wait to meet my new partners.’

‘Nothing’s going to change.’ But he had already turned away from her, as if even he could not believe his words. ‘The Volto people will be in tomorrow to take a meeting with both of us. You’ll see, then, that this isn’t going to be the disaster you anticipate.’

‘Madonna, what cabbage patch did you grow up in?’ She found herself on the verge of laughing, which was okay because it stopped the tears from forming. She finished her water, went straight for the sambuca. ‘You betrayed me, betrayed everything we had together.’

Silence. Air rushing through the vent like a live wire, buzzing like the blood singing in her temples.

‘I
trusted
you and you sold me out.’ She swung the empty glass at his head. ‘Bastard!’

Every Thursday at five Tony D. had a massage. Even when he was out of town – which he often was, in LA – work stopped on that day at that hour so he could relax. Relaxation was one of Tony D.’s requirements of life. He found deal-making impossible without it. A clear mind enabled him to conceive of new ways to fuck people over with impenetrable paragraphs of legalese that, like soft timebombs, would tie his adversaries into knots one, two, or five years hence.

When, as now, he was working in his New York office, he retired at four forty-five to a back room adjacent to the gym he had had installed during the recent renovations.

It was just four-thirty and Tony was on the phone with the head of Trident Studios in LA.

‘Listen, Stanley, my client has a legitimate beef.’ He nodded his patrician head. ‘Sure, I know all about it. I negotiated that sonuvabitch contract with your legal department. There’s three months of my blood in it and that’s why I’m telling you it’s not gonna work... Why? I’ll tell you why, Stanley, that prick of a producer is stepping all over my client. He wants him gone... That’s right, outta there... Good, Stanley, scream all you want, get it out of your system now. Because if you don’t do as my client asks, I’m gonna see that your studio is closed down tighter than a duck’s ass. The unions will... A threat, Stanley? Are you serious?’ He pushed a toothpick to the other side of his mouth. ‘You know me better than that. But I
am
what might be called a weatherman... Yeah, that’s right. And at the moment from where I sit there’s a storm front heading your way so my advice to you is pull in your sails – all of them – before you capsize.’

Tony D. slammed down the phone with an exhaled ‘Schmuck!’ He thumbed his intercom. ‘Marie, when Stanley Friedman calls back, I’m not in. And call Mikey in LA. Tell him three days at Trident, he’ll know what you mean.’ That ought to clean Mr Stanley Friedman’s clock, he thought. What would three days without a working studio cost Friedman? Plenty.

He glanced at his slim gold Patek Philippe. Four forty-five. He stretched, rose, and went through a door at the rear of his office, kicking off his handmade loafers. All things considered, it had been a good day.

Padding through the gym, he entered the massage room. He went to the window, stood looking out at Manhattan with blind eyes. Then he closed the thick curtains against the twilight glare of the city, disrobed, took off his jewelry, and lay facedown on a padded table with a freshly laundered towel draped over his hairy buttocks.

The masseuse, the same one he had used for five years, entered the outer office, was sent by his receptionist down the long, richly paneled hallway smelling of new paint and a tweedy Berber carpet to the reception area of his own suite of offices. There, she and all her equipment were thoroughly searched by a pair of bodyguards. Then, and only then, was she escorted into the massage room.

She entered today as always without a word, placing an audiotape in the stereo – Enya’s ‘Shepherd Moons.’ He heard the water running as she washed up, then the soothing scent of rosemary as she opened a bottle of oil and, warming her hands by rubbing her palms briskly together, got down to work.

The placid music washed over him as her strong, capable hands began kneading the tension from his neck and shoulders. As always, as he sank deeper into the growing lassitude, memories of his childhood surfaced like long-buried artifacts at an archaeological dig. The comforting smell of bread baking as his mother hummed a Sicilian tune under her breath; her forearms covered with flour and confectioners’ sugar, white as a ghost’s, thick as a plowshare.

The sharp odor of rosemary reminded him, too, of the acrid smoke of the crooked, hand-rolled cigars his father used to make from Cuban leaf down in the dank cellar. The one time he snuck down there to have a look around, his father beat him senseless. That was okay; he had been stupid, straying into a man’s world before he was a man. His taciturn father, who spoke infrequently about sports but never about his job in a dingy factory across the river in Weehawken where he was daily exposed to the chemicals that one day killed him like that, wham! Better than a decade of emphysema or a year or two of lung cancer, Tony overheard a neighbor say to his mother at the funeral. Later on, when he got into Princeton, Tony D. realized that his father never spoke about his job because he was ashamed of it, ashamed of his lack of education. And when Tony graduated law school, his only wish was that his father had been there to witness his triumph.

He grunted now as the masseuse’s fingers dug into the nerve complex at the base of his neck. His breathing deepened as he relaxed even more.

The rosemary reminded him of Sunday dinners at his brother’s. Marie knew how to cook, you only had to look at her to know. But she was sweet and she had given Frank two strapping boys. More than Margarite ever gave him. Besides, Marie didn’t know the meaning of back talk. She knew a woman’s place and kept to it, let Frank bring home the bacon. While he was just a glorified messenger boy, a stooge, fronting for Margarite. God
damn
Dominic and his obsession with women!