Second Skin Read Free Page B

passion, an attempt to castrate the dangerousness in which man lives with himself?
    ‘Yes,’ Giai breathed. ‘Oh, yes!’
    He held her, light as a feather, as she shivered and moaned, trembled and clung in great gasping sighs, then started all over again as he put his head down, his white teeth sinking into the tender flesh of her shoulder as he skewered her – once, twice, three times – gushing as he thought of life – Kurtz’s life – bleeding away in a mass of stinking, steaming innards.
    He opened his eyes. Giai was staring at him.
    ‘I’m free, aren’t I?’
    He could feel her hot fluids – and his, too, perhaps – sticky on his thighs.
    ‘Had enough?’
    ‘No,’ she cried. ‘No, no, no!’
    Of course not. It was part of their game.
    Before his erection could subside he rubbed cocaine into the reddened skin. He felt the familiar tingling, then the curious numbness through which only sexual desire could burn like a beacon in dense fog. Then he entered her again, walking her across the room, her heels bouncing against the tops of his buttocks.
    Giai, always wild with him, was particularly frenzied. In fact, her freedom, as she called it, had made her almost insatiable, and for once Mick thanked the lucky star under which he had been born for the cocaine-induced numbness. Otherwise, even he would not have been able to last.
    He had her on Kurtz’s dining room table, a polished teak affair from Thailand, on Kurtz’s desk, the cordless phone clattering to the floor, on Kurtz’s prize Isfahan rug, in Kurtz’s bed, and finally in Kurtz’s shower. And after Giai thought it was over, he did what he had wanted to do all along: he took her from behind.
    She wanted to sleep after all that exertion, but he was still wired. The cocaine, he told her, urging her to dress quickly while he struck a match and lighted his cigar. So instead of crawling between Kurtz’s silk sheets, they returned to the rainy, neon-lighted Tokyo night.
    The taxi he had called was waiting for them. It was after midnight and they made the trip to the warehouse district of Shibaura in short order. They emerged into Kaigan-dōri, and Mick told the taxi to pull over. He paid the fare and they got out, heading for Mūdra, one of the many hip dance clubs that had bloomed here like weeds in the early nineties.
    They had not walked more than a block when a black Mercedes rounded a corner behind them, heading along Kaigan-dōri. Mick glanced over his shoulder and saw it coming up behind them, swerving dangerously up onto the sidewalk, sideswiping a couple of moonfaced bohemians, chicly garbed in grunge, purple-black hair in exaggerated Woody Woodpecker top knots, their lips glossed in black.
    ‘What is it?’ Giai asked.
    Up ahead, two bikers in luminous trench coats and multiple nose rings sat astride luridly painted Suzukis, swigging beer and trading lewd stories of mutilated flesh. Incensed, Mick walked a couple of paces on, shouting at the drunken teenagers, while Giai stood waiting. He turned. ‘Morons,’ he said, but he was looking straight at the oncoming Mercedes, which, having cleared the cars ahead of it, now put on a last furious burst of speed.
    Mick shouted something incoherent and Giai turned, her eyes opened wide, just as the front fender of the Mercedes plowed into her. Instantly, she was slammed backward with such force that when she landed her back broke. But by then she was drowning in her own blood.
    The Mercedes had already taken off as people on line for the clubs came out of their shock and started to scream. There was a mad jostling, an almost carnivorous mass convulsing through which Mick slithered, heading up Kaigan-dōri, avoiding the jammed sidewalk, after the Mercedes. The familiar high-low police Klaxon could be heard, still some distance away but closing fast on the scene of panic behind him.
    He saw the Mercedes swerve left at the last possible instant, into a narrow alley, and he followed, his legs churning