Free Second Skin by Eric Van Lustbader Page B

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