Eric Van Lustbader - Second Skin

www.headofzeus.com

Grateful acknowledgment is made to:

Frank Panico

Frank Capone, for insight and research into Ozone Park and East New York

Virgil England, for the design of Micks push dagger

Jim Schmidt, for his scholarly treatise on Damascus steel

Maybe a great magnet pulls
All souls towards the truth
Or maybe it is life itself
That feeds wisdom
To its youth

Constant Craving
k.d. lang/Ben Mink

Until the day of his death,
no man can be sure
of his courage.

Jean Anouilh

Time is a storm in which we are all lost.

William Carlos Williams

What is it that youve always wanted?

Mick Leonforte stared across the table at the tall, elegant woman who sat unmoving as she slowly smoked a thin, black cigar. Giai Kurtz was Vietnamese, a daughter of one of Saigons elite families. She was married, of course, but that was part of the kick. Alone and unattached, she would not have seemed nearly as desirable. She was also the kind of woman Mick had wanted to be with since he had come to Asia more than twenty years ago. Even before that, if he were to be perfectly honest with himself.

Staring at the jewel-shaped face with its high cheekbones, unblemished skin the lush color of teak, the heavy cascade of blue-black hair, he understood that this exquisite creature or someone very much like her had inhabited his dreams before he had ever known the first thing about Asia. It was no wonder that having come in-country for the war, he had never returned home. Vietnam was his home.

Tell me, he said with the hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth. Tell me and its yours.

The woman smoked her cigar, letting the gray-brown smoke drift languidly from her partly opened lips, and if one was not as well versed in the peoples of Southeast Asia as Mick was, one could easily miss the metallic glitter of fear far back in her depthless eyes.

You know what I want, she said at last.

Anything, Mick said. Anything but that.

They were in the rearmost booth of Pull Marine, a chic French restaurant that Mick had bankrolled in the posh Roppongi district. It was one of many burgeoning businesses throughout Asia legitimate and otherwise that he controlled. Mick was involved in numerous such ventures that he had kept secret from his late, unlamented partner, Rock.

I want you.

No, he thought, that is what I want. At least what I want you to feel.

You have me, he said, spreading his hands wide. See?

In the opposite corner from where Mick and Giai sat, a rail-thin Vietnamese woman warbled the songs of Jacques Brel, filled with melancholy and the black sails of death. She expressed Brels profound sadness like the wounds of war; the room was burnished as much by her serpentine voice as it was by the low, artful lighting.

You know what I mean. I want us to be together always.

But I wont be here, he said with deliberate emphasis on each word, always.

The chanteuse was accompanied by a guitarist and a synth player who made his instrument sound, at times, like a cathedral organ. This churchlike overtone caused Mick to remember the many stories of Joan of Arc his father had told him. Apocryphal or not, they stayed with the young Mick, perhaps because they were so much a part of his fathers worldview; saints as warriors for righteous causes had been a major theme in Johnny Leonfortes subconscious.

Then I will go with you wherever you go. She sucked on her cigar. Thats what I want.

Mick stared into her dark eyes for a long time, calculating. All right, he said at length, as she smiled, smoke escaping from between her ripe lips.

The restaurant was a piece of Saigon reproduced whole-cloth in Tokyo, a reflection of Saigons deliberate air of change and newfound prosperity. Gold-leaf walls gleamed and sparked, a black marble floor reflected the midnight-blue domed ceiling. The candles on the tables gave off the faint incense of a temples interior. Bathed in the cool bluish wash of spotlights, a highly stylized mask fashioned out of crimson lacquer from a traditional Vietnamese design dominated one wall.

Smartly dressed waiters were overseen by Honniko, a spectacular bare-shouldered blonde in a golden velvet bustier and form-fitting raw-silk skirt that came down to just above her ankles. She spoke perfect French and Japanese. She also spoke Vietnamese, and her air of authority was absolute. Normally, at this time of night, one would have been impressed by her genuine warmth in greeting patrons and adeptly steering them to their candlelit tables, but tonight she stood immobile behind her bronze podium, gazing slit-eyed at the chanteuse. In truth, she had nothing else to do, since the couple in the far corner were her only customers. Behind her, the front door to the second-floor restaurant was locked, its lace curtains pulled tautly over the narrow cut-glass panes. Through the glass bubble of the terrace, the brilliant Roppongi night glittered like a shower of diadems.

A waiter, his face as cool and detached as a doctors, brought plates of fish en cro te and whole unshelled tiger prawns in a delicate garlic and cream sauce.

Without a word, Mick reached for his fork while Giai continued to draw on her cigar. I wonder if you mean it, she said.

He began to eat with the relish of a man too long deprived of decent food. Giai watched him while two long fingernails lacquered the same color as the walls flicked against each other. Click-click. Click-click. Like beetles doing battle with a window screen.

Eat. Arent you hungry? Mick asked, though from his tone he seemed indifferent as to whether or not she would answer. Personally, Im starving.

Yes, she said at last. Im well aware of your appetites. She regarded him with the scrutiny of an angel or a devil. She saw a man with a rugged, charismatic face fronted by a prominent Roman nose and odd gray and orange eyes that gave him a fierce and feral aspect. His salt-and-pepper hair was long and he wore a neatly cropped beard. It was a face born to give orders, the face of a man who harbored radical philosophies and dark secrets in equal number, whose personal worldview was iconoclastic and unshakable.

Where is it? she asked in a voice that with considerable effort managed to remain calm. Show it to me.

Of course he knew what she meant. How do you know I have it with me? He popped the head of a prawn between his lips and crunched down on it.

I know you. She made to light another cigar, but he put his hand over hers, took it away. Momentarily startled, her eyes locked with his and something akin to a shudder could just be discerned in her shoulders. She nodded briefly, took up her fork, and obediently began to eat. But there was no gusto in her movements, merely a mechanical tempo. Mick thought it a shame she was so careful; he could not see the motion of her even, white teeth.

He found he very much needed to see those teeth, and he brought out from beneath the table the push dagger, holding it obliquely in the air so that the candlelight sent long glistening flashes along the black length of its Damascus-steel blade.

Giai was transfixed, her hand pausing in midair, flaky strata of fish sliding between the slick tines of her fork. Her nostrils flared like an animal scenting the fresh spoor of its prey.