Vicious Circle (14 page)

I couldn’t think of anything to add to that. Maybe she was the kind of Christian who thought that gay love was always a sin, in which case she’d just have to work it through for herself. Bur straight, gay, or agnostic, what Juliet did to you came as a shock to anyone’s system. I could tell her what Miss Salazar really was—by way of a prophylactic—but it wasn’t my secret to tell and under the circumstances it might make things worse rather than better. Carnal thoughts about a same-sex demon? Susan probably wasn’t in any state to take the knock.

I did the best I could to talk her down, and eventually she got out of the car, leaving the soggy tissue on the passenger seat. She mumbled something by way of thanks for the lift, to which she added, “Don’t tell her! Please, please don’t tell her!” Then she fled into the house.

There probably wasn’t anything I could have said to her that would have helped. Love is a drug, like the man said. But the harshest truth of all is in the gospel of Steppenwolf rather than Roxy Music: the pusher doesn’t care whether you live or die.

I called the Torringtons from the car as I was driving back east across the city. Hands-free, of course; I wouldn’t want you to think I don’t put safety first. Steve picked up on the first ring, which made me wonder if he’d been sitting with his phone in his hands.

“Mr. Castor,” he said, sounding just a touch breathless. “What news?”

“Good news as far as it goes,” I said. “You were right, and I was wrong.”

“Meaning—?”

“Abbie’s not in heaven. She’s in London.”

He exhaled, long and loud. I waited for him to speak.

“Can you please give me a moment?”

“Of course.”

Maybe he covered the phone, or maybe the voices were too low to hear over the sound of the car’s engine. There was about half a minute’s silence. Then he came back on. The pitch of his voice was unsteady—like the voice of a man fighting back tears.

“We can’t thank you enough, Mr. Castor. Do you think you can find her?”

“I’m prepared to try.”

He gave a relieved laugh, harsh and emphatic and broken off short by some kind of psychological wind-shear. “That’s excellent news! Excellent! We’ve got every confidence in you.”

“Mr. Torrington—”

“Steve.”

“Steve. I don’t want to raise your hopes. This still isn’t going to be easy, assuming I can do it at all. And I’m going to need to have some money to spread around. If you can front me two or three hundred quid to be going on with, then I can make a start on—”

He cut me off. “Mr. Castor, my wife and I count as affluent by any standards. You’re over-finessing, if I can use a bridge metaphor. Whatever you need, we can afford it. Possibly you feel as though you’re taking advantage of our grief. From our point of view, it’s not like that at all. We’ve heard that you’re the best, and we’re grateful that you’re prepared to help us.” There was a rustle, and then the
scratch-scratch-scratch
of a fountain pen nib on paper. “I’m writing out a check,” he said, “for a thousand pounds. I’ll put it in the post tonight. No, better—I’ll go over to your office and drop it off myself. I’ll add some cash, too, to tide you over until this clears. If it’s more than you were planning to charge, and if that makes you uncomfortable, then please just give the rest to the charity of your choice.”

Good enough. I should have more clients who are that respectful of my sensitivities. I asked him for Peace’s address, which turned out to be in East Sheen: not a part of the city I knew all that well, and a lot farther south than I was expecting.

“I’ll be in touch,” I said, and hung up.

Driving on automatic pilot, I’d already caught the Westway and driven on through Marylebone past Madame Tussauds and the planetarium—which now has commerce only with stars of the daytime TV variety. I was just about to swing off north onto Albany Street. But I had another call to make, and it was in the east of the city rather than the north. So I kept on going—east all the way, heading for the distant fastnesses of Walthamstow.

I was tired, and I still had a headache from that psychic mind-blast, but there was nothing to gain by putting this off until tomorrow. Night was always the best time to see Nicky if you wanted to get any sense out of him.

I parked the car at the top of Hoe Street. It was a fair walk from there, but the car was likely to be there when I got back, possibly with engine and wheels still attached. That was worth a little additional effort.

A couple of minutes’ walk past the station there’s a building with a Cecil Masey frontage that still looks beautiful through all the shit and peeling paintwork and graffiti. Aggressively Moorish, like all his best stuff: the centerpiece is a massive window in that elongated, round-topped, vaguely phallic shape, flanked by two smaller versions of itself. The same shapes appear up on top of the walls like crenellations, or like waves frozen in brick. The interiors are all marble and mirrors and gilded angels, courtesy of Sidney Bernstein or one of his underpaid assistants.

It opened in 1931 as a Gaumont, had its heyday and its slow decline like all the other prewar super-cinemas, and gently expired exactly three decades later. But then some ghoul exhumed it in 1963, and reinvented it as a members only establishment with some grandiose name like the Majestic or the Regal. For the next twenty-three years it screened softcore porn to jaded bank managers at prices set high enough to keep the riffraff out. Now it was dead again, its second demise mourned by nobody, and Nicky had bought it for a song—probably the “Death March from Saul.”

It was the perfect home for him: he was also on his second time around.

I went in around the back, up the drainpipe, and through an unlocked window, the front being boarded up solid. The council nailed the boards up in the first place, but Nicky has added some additional barricades of his own. You can buy Nicky’s services if you know his price, but he doesn’t have much use for the passing trade.

Inside it was dark and cold, heat being another thing that Nicky has no truck with. As I walked along the broad, bare corridor to the projection booth, past peeling posters from two decades before, a draft of arctic provenance played around my ankles. I rapped on the door, and after a few seconds the security camera up top swiveled to get a better look at me. I’d passed three other cameras on the way up, of course, so he knew damn well it was me, but Nicky likes to remind you that Big Brother is watching. It’s not so much a matter of security—although he takes his security more seriously than Imelda Marcos takes her footwear; it’s more the statement of a philosophical position.

The door opened, without a creak but with the faintest suggestion of roiling vapor at floor level, like the effect you’d get from a dry ice machine set on low: either a side effect of Nicky’s spectacularly customized air-conditioning, or something that he does on purpose.

I pushed the door open carefully, but I didn’t step inside right away. I don’t like to barge in without a direct invitation, because this is the keep of Nicky’s little castle—and he really does think in those terms. He’s installed all kinds of deadfalls and ambushes to stop people from intruding on his privacy. Some of them were ingenious, bordering on sadistic. In my experience, there’s nobody who can think of more varied and interesting ways to abuse living flesh than a zombie.

“Nicky?” I called, opening the door a little farther with the toe of my shoe.

No answer. Well, someone had to have unlocked the door, and someone had to be operating the cameras. Taking my life—or at least the integrity of my balls—in my hand I stepped inside, into a chill that you could reasonably say was tomblike.

I looked around, but saw no sign of Nicky. The booth is larger than that word makes it sound: a sort of first-floor hangar, with a very high ceiling which apparently helps the whole heat-exchange thing. Nicky keeps his computers up here, and anything else that’s close to his cold, cold heart at any given moment. Right now, that included a hydroponics garden, which seemed to be doing nicely despite the blisteringly cold temperature. There was a screen across one half of the room, made up out of a row of malnourished, canelike plants rooted in buckets of evil-looking brown swill. The tallest of the plants were stretching to the ceiling and spreading their leaves out across it—reaching for the sky just to surrender, as Leonard Cohen sang somewhere or other. They’d grown as far as they could without bending their backs and shooting out horizontally, and as it was they looked to be balanced pretty precariously on the inadequate foundations of the plastic buckets.

Normally Nicky would have been at the computer terminal on the other side of the room—or maybe leaning on his elbows at the plan chest off to my far right, poring over maps and charts of London, England, and the world scribbled over and over with his own hermetic symbols. Both of those spots were currently empty.

“Hey, Nicky,” I called, a little irritably. “Whenever you’re ready, mate. Meter’s running.”

“Open your coat, Castor.” Nicky’s voice doesn’t carry all that much, so it wasn’t a shout—just an insinuating murmur that didn’t seem to come from any particular direction, but crept along the ground with the sparse tendrils of water vapor. I finally placed him, though: he was standing behind the row of spindly cane trees looking like Davy Crockett at the Alamo—except that the pistol he was holding in his hands was no museum piece: it was a chunky service automatic with a lot of miles on the clock but a very convincing, businesslike look about it. Nicky was looking pretty serious, too; ordinarily the fake tan he insists on wearing gives him a slightly clownish look, but a gun adds a whole big helping of gravitas.

“Have you lost your fucking mind?” I asked him.

“Nope. There’s some fucking weird shit going down in the big city right now, and I’m not planning to be a part of it. Just open your coat up. I want to see if you’re carrying a weapon.”

“Only the usual, Nicky. Unless that’s some kind of coy euphemism for—”

“Do it, Castor. Last time of asking.” The volume was turned up a little bit this time, which meant he’d taken a big breath just for the occasion; when he’s not talking, he forgets to do that.

Swallowing some very bad words, I unbuttoned my paletot and shrugged it open to left and right. “There you go,” I said. “No shoulder holsters. No bandoliers. Not even a machete in my belt. Sorry to disappoint you.”

“If you’d disappointed me, you’d know it. Turn out your pockets.”

“Christ Jesus, Nicky!”

“I told you—this isn’t anything personal. We’re friends, as far as that goes. If I trusted anybody, it’d be you. But we’re in uncharted territory tonight, and I’m honest to God not taking any risks.” His hand made a pass-repass over the gun, and I heard a sound that I recognized from countless movies and maybe twice in real life: the sound of the slide release on an automatic pistol being racked back and then forward again.

I stopped arguing. There wasn’t that much in my outside pockets in the first place; what there was—keys, wallet, Swiss army penknife with things for getting stones out of horses’ hooves—I hauled out and dropped to the floor. There was a second set of pockets sewn into the lining of the coat, though, and with the things that were stored in there I took a fair bit more care: an antique knife with an inlaid handle; a small goblet in stained and heavily oxidized silver, the porcelain head of Abbie’s doll. These I laid down on the floor with care, one at a time. Last of all came the tin whistle. “Just one hand,” Nicky warned as I slid the whistle out and held it up. As far as he was concerned, this
was
a weapon—and it had his name on it.

I’d had just about as much of this as I could take by this time, and I was in the mood to do something rash. Slowly, with elaborate and exaggeratedly unthreatening gestures, I bent from the waist and laid the whistle down on the bare cement floor. I gave it a little flick with my thumb as I did it, so that it rolled. I knew Nicky’s eyes would follow it, the way your eyes would follow a grenade without a pin. Then I knelt down a little lower. The bucket that held the cane tree at the end of the line nearest to me was just within the reach of my left hand at full stretch. I grabbed it right below the rim.

I stood up in one smooth movement, and the bucket toppled: the tree that was rooted in it went over, too, toppling its neighbor and starting a chain reaction that sounded like the swish of a thousand canes. And Nicky was standing in line like he was waiting for a spanking. Without a gasp or a whoof or a yell—because again he hadn’t laid in any spare breath for it—he went sprawling. His head hit the wall with a dull thud, but that wouldn’t slow him down much. From off to my right, though, there came a different sound: a metal-on-stone clatter, quickly swallowed. That seemed like the better bet, so I made a lunge even before I saw where the gun had ended up, in the spreading pool of sludge from the overturned buckets. Nicky had managed to disentangle himself from the undergrowth and he was scrambling on all fours in the same direction. Being at ground level already he got there first, but my foot came down on his wrist just as his fingers closed on the gun.

“I’m not putting my full weight down,” I pointed out. “If I do, something’s going to break.”

Nicky has a morbid fear of physical trauma: being dead already, he doesn’t have any way of repairing it. All the systems that in a living body would reknit flesh and bone and channel away infection are nonstarters in a walking cadaver. He dropped the gun in great haste and I scooped it up. It was old and heavy—but someone had been looking after it and I had no doubt at all that it would work, even covered in thick brown slurry. Not knowing how to put the safety back on or eject the clip, I aimed it at Nicky instead. He threw his hands up, desperately scrambling back across the floor on his backside.

“Easy! Easy, Castor! I won’t heal! I won’t heal!”

“Easy? You fucking bushwhacked me, you maniac!”

“I wanted to make sure you weren’t going to kill me.”

“What?” I lowered the gun, pained and exasperated. “Nicky, you’re already dead. Did you forget that? Killing you would be fucking futile.”