Second Skin Read Online Free PDF Page B

together.
    Two years before, Nicholas and Nangi had decided to buy the long-term lease of the stuffy French restaurant that had occupied the mezzanine level of the Shinjuku Suiryu Building when it had gone bust. For eighteen months, architects, technicians, and designers had been at work transforming a rather austere space into an opulent nightclub-restaurant suitable for entertaining on the grandest scale.
    Indigo had opened three months ago to great fanfare and, so far, extraordinary success. But, tonight, it was closed to the public so that Sato International could have its TransRim CyberNet launch party.
    The impressive three-story space was composed of an ascending series of flying-carpet-like platforms each occupied by three or four boomerang-shaped tables with semicircular banquettes facing onto a dance floor that had been laser-etched to resemble a vast Persian rug. Soft lights shone from high above the tables and, embedded in the dance floor, from below, giving the sensation of floating in a pool of blue-green light. Panels of cherrywood, stained indigo, rose in tiers at the restaurant’s curvilinear sides, and along one of them a long bar snaked, the lights glinting off its blued stainless-steel top. Bottles of spirits, liqueurs, and imported beers from Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and microbreweries in the States were arrayed on glass shelves hung against a long mirror.
    When Nicholas entered, the dance floor was alive with extravagantly dressed people and the hubbub of a hundred conversations in at least a dozen languages. People were three deep at the bar, the three bartenders kept humming with a constant barrage of orders. The cool jazz of Miles Davis was drifting from the sixty-six speakers sunk flush into the walls, ceiling, and floor.
    Heads turned at his approach, and it was no wonder. The guests saw a powerfully built man, graceful as a dancer with wide shoulders and narrow hips. What was most impressive – and intimidating – about him, however, was his fluidity of motion. He did not walk or turn as other people did but appeared to be skating on thin air, operating in very low gravity. When he moved, it was with all his weight in his lower belly, the place of power the Japanese called hara. He had dark, thickly curling hair that was at odds with the distinct oriental cast to his face – the high flat cheekbones, the almond-shaped eyes. Despite that, the face was long and bony, as if some English influence deep in his genes would not be denied its due.
    Nicholas picked out Kanda Tōrin, headed toward him through the crowd. Still in his early thirties, Kanda Tōrin was a tall, slender man with a long, handsome face and the cool, calculating demeanor of a man with a decade’s more experience. Nicholas’s opinion of him was still not completely formed. He had apparently proved to be an invaluable aide to Nangi during Nicholas’s absence. So much so that Nangi had recently promoted him to senior vice president, an unprecedented level for a man his age.
    To be truthful, Nicholas resented the younger man’s presence. It compromised his special relationship with Tanzan Nangi. That Tōrin was astute, perhaps even, as Nangi believed, brilliant, was beyond question, but Nicholas suspected he was also gifted with an overweening ambition. His power grab at the CyberNet was a prime example. Or was Nicholas being too harsh with his judgments? Tōrin could simply have had Sato International’s best interests at heart, filling the vacuum Nicholas had left. Still, Nicholas could not entirely shake the impression, admittedly hastily gleaned, that Tōrin was a team player only so long as it suited his own needs. That was a potentially dangerous trait.
    As Nicholas approached, he saw that Tōrin was being harangued by a florid-faced American with curly red hair and the belligerent demeanor of a man too long frustrated by Japan’s arcane and maddening protective barriers. Unfortunately, this was the attitude of too