The Devil You Know (34 page)

“I’m a weed,” I said amiably. “The more poison you put down, the more I spring up again.”

“Yeah? Well, I’ll fucking poison—”

“McClennan,” Damjohn said, “if you speak again, I’ll become aggravated with you. Do you really want that to happen?”

Gabe left that question hanging, and Damjohn went on as if he hadn’t been interrupted by either of us. “In point of fact,” he mused, giving me a thoughtful stare, “I believe you may have the right skills and the right temperament to fit in well in one of my little enterprises.”

“You’re offering me a job?” I had to ask, because I didn’t believe what I was hearing. Bribery was the last thing I’d been expecting.

“These things are never offered unless they’ve already been accepted, Mr. Castor. I’m sure you understand. Are you
looking
for a permanent position?”

Gabe was going a very scary color, fetchingly set off by his snow-white hair. It looked as though the effort of not speaking was going to cost him a major blood vessel.

“You’ve already got an exorcist,” I pointed out with a nod in his direction.

“My table is long and wide. It’s all a question of what good things you bring to it.”

“And that’s where I stick,” I said. “I mean, all I can do are the basics. I can’t raise demons, for example.”

“No.” Damjohn’s eyes flicked over to Gabe for the merest instant. “But for dangerous and marginal activities of that nature, one uses the reckless and the stupid. For you I’d have other tasks.”

I shook my head, not in refusal but in lingering disbelief. This was surreal. Damjohn was between me and the stage; from where I was sitting, a hugely pneumatic redhead was spreading her legs right behind his head, giving him a most unusual—but somehow appropriate—halo. “How much would you be looking to pay?” I asked, just for something to say.

“As a starting salary? Let’s say two thousand pounds a month. With a lump sum to cover moving expenses and any possible friction on the more tender areas of your conscience. And it goes without saying, but I will say it anyway, that any of my girls would be delighted to receive a visit from you at any time. More than delighted—because you’d be coming to them as my personal friend and associate. If you have any unusual needs of a sexual kind, they would be well catered for.”

Damjohn looked at me shrewdly, and I got the feeling that I was being weighed and assessed by a very skilled fisher of men. “I can see,” he said, “that I’ve still failed to find the measure of you, Mr. Castor. But I do have one other inducement to offer you.”

He stopped and waited for a response. I shrugged to indicate that I was still listening. On the stage, the redheaded woman was gone. In her place, a sax player was laying down some very lazy and half-hearted licks to a recorded backing, no doubt making the sex tourists feel like real urban sophisticates.

“You must have wondered—a man who does what you do for a living and who has been gifted by nature as you have would
have
to wonder—what conceivable scheme of things would allow the dead both to return as they do, in the forms that they do, and then to be sent away again by the likes of yourself and Mr. McClennan here. You must, in other words, have questions about the structure and logic of the invisible world—its geography, for want of a better word. You must have asked yourself what it all means.”

I’m sure that Damjohn saw me tense. Up to now, I’d been feeling pretty much on top of this conversation, because I knew that there was nothing he could offer me that I’d want. Me and love—even me and sex—is a complicated equation, and you can wear empty pockets with a certain chic, like a badge of integrity. But answers? Oh yeah. I’d gone halfway around the fucking world looking for answers.

Damjohn smiled, and this time he meant it—not as an expression of any warm feelings toward me, but from the pure and simple pleasure of having found my weak point.

“And you’d know?” was all I could find to say. “How’s that, then? I heard that Jesus walked among the prostitutes, but that was a while ago now. You’re not telling me the two of you met?”

The smile curdled slightly, but Damjohn’s tone stayed light and relaxed. “No. I’ve not had that pleasure. But I have spoken to his opposite number, as it were. I have knowledge that comes with a price many would consider too high. Of course,” he glanced across at Gabe again, this time with undisguised contempt, “I’ve usually been able to persuade others to pay it on my behalf.”

He leaned forward, his stare spearing me. “I know where they come from, and I know where you send them to. I imagine that information would pique your curiosity. Am I wrong?”

The look on his face was the overintense benevolence of a man who’s just invited you into the deep woods to look at some puppy dogs. I stared back at him, my feelings for a moment in too great a turmoil to allow me to speak. While that moment lasted, I was a six-year-old boy again, the remains of my birthday cake still in a Tupperware box in the bottom of the fridge, screaming at my kid sister to get out of my bed because she was dead already and she was scaring me. I saw her fade into nothing, her sad face last of all like the fucking Cheshire Cat in
Alice in Wonderland.

“But you understand,” said Damjohn, sitting back, “the offer hasn’t been made. Not officially. Because the answer comes first.” He looked at me expectantly, really enjoying himself. McClennan was staring at me, too, with so pure and incandescent a hatred that he reminded me of one of those South American frogs that sweat venom. That wasn’t because I’d rifled his filing cabinet; it was because Damjohn was trying to seduce me instead of just getting some heavies in to make my arms and legs bend the wrong way.

And that made it easier, in a way. So did Katie, in another way, but that’s more than I can explain. I stood up.

“The offer hasn’t been made?” I repeated.

Damjohn shook his head reassuringly, imperturbably.

“Then I’m not telling you to shove it up your arse and tamp it in with a polo mallet. I’ll stick with the devils I know. Until next time, eh?”

I left my drink unfinished on the table. Gargling it and spitting it in Damjohn’s face would probably have counted as rude.

As I was walking through the foyer, heading for the street door, the phone rang in the little alcove, and the duty bouncer picked up. At the same time, a burst of louche jazz sounded from behind me and made a synapse connect somewhere in my memory.

It took only a second to try it out. I stepped outside and stood to one side of the door. On my mobile phone, I flicked through the last dozen calls or so until I found the number I was looking for: 7405 818. When I dialed, I got the engaged signal. I waited about thirty seconds; tried again.

From inside the club, I heard the phone ring. On my cell, I heard the gravelly voice of the bouncer. “Hello?”

“Wrong number,” I said. “Sorry.”

ICOE
7405 818. Someone at the Bonnington Archive had the number of a brothel in his Rolodex. Not sinister in itself, maybe—but given Damjohn’s touching interest in me, it was another link in the chain.

Then, when I was heading west toward the Bonnington, I made another connection. I’d been thinking about that missing page in the incident book, and suddenly I saw a way that the book could help me even in its maimed form.

So despite almost being carved up with a steak knife and failing to find hide or hair of Rosa, I was in a pretty good mood when I got back to the archive. I’d resisted temptation, discomfited my enemies, and started to put the pieces of this sad-ass puzzle together in a new order. All in all, I was feeling the smug satisfaction of a job well begun and therefore half done.

Right up until Alice told me I was fired.

I
JUST
NEED
ANOTHER
DAY
,” I
SAID
,
AMAZED
TO
HEAR
a tone in my voice that sounded like pleading. “Honest to God. One more day will do it. Peele said I could have until the end of the week.”

Alice’s stony face didn’t soften by so much as a muscle. She was holding my trench coat in her hands, and now she thrust it back at me.

“Is this yours?” she demanded in an overemphatic, “this is for the record” voice.

“Yeah. It’s mine. Look, Alice, I’m serious. All I need to do now is nail down a few more bits and pieces. I’m there. Really.”

“Frank stowed your coat on one of the racks,” Alice said, ignoring me completely. “Then he needed to leave the desk, so he decided to put it up in a locker, where it would be safer. When he folded it up, these fell out of the pocket.”

She brandished her keys in my face.

Shit. I’d had a fuzzy half memory of transferring the damn things to my trouser pocket. That probably didn’t count as extenuating circumstances, though.

“You left them behind in the church the other night,” I said. “I was going to give them back to you, but it slipped my mind.” Come to think of it, that didn’t sound a whole lot better.

“Did it?” she inquired with biting sarcasm. “Castor, the first conversation we ever had was about the value of the collection and how seriously we take our security. Since then, you’ve been in and out of here for the best part of a week, having to be swiped through card readers, having to wait while doors were unlocked for you and then locked again behind you. I find it hard to believe that none of that made any impression on you. That it all just . . . slipped your mind.”

“Is all of this aggression intended to cover your embarrassment at losing the things in the first place?” I asked.

If I thought candor would disarm Alice, I was wrong. She unleashed a torrent of profanity that surprised me not so much by its vehemence as by its breadth. Her face flushed first deep pink, then red, and although she wasn’t entirely coherent, a few key points did stand out of the rushing tide of invective. One, I was a thief; two, I’d compromised the archive’s security; three, Peele had agreed I shouldn’t be allowed back inside the building.

“You’re out!” she yelled at me. “You’re out of here, Castor. Now! And we’ll expect our deposit back tomorrow. Otherwise, we’ll get it back through the courts! Get him out of my bloody sight, Frank.”

Frank gestured toward the door—an action that fell a long way short of pitching me out on my ear and probably left Alice feeling a certain sense of coitus interruptus. But there was no getting around it, all the same.

I made one last try. “I think your ghost is a murder victim,” I told her, laying my cards on the table. “I also think you’ve got a thief on the staff. Someone who’s been systematically pilfering stuff from the collection over months, or maybe years. If you’ll just let me—”

Alice turned her back on me and walked away. Frank touched my shoulder very lightly, but his face was set hard. “We don’t want any trouble, do we, Mr. Castor?” he said.

“No,” I answered with glum resignation. “We don’t. But it’s a hell of a thing, Frank. We always seem to get it anyway.”

“You’ve got everyone well pissed off with you, Felix,” Cheryl said cheerfully as she threw herself down on the seat opposite me in the Costella Café. She tossed a lick of hair back from her forehead, stifling her broad grin with some difficulty. “Sorry, I know it’s not funny. I just can’t help laughing when Alice loses it like that. It’s like seeing Nelson get down off his column to have a punch-up with a cabbie.”

“You were watching from the balcony when she chewed me out,” I accused her.

“Yeah, I was—and I could’ve sold seats, easy. She’d been after you all day. When she asked me if I’d seen you, I lied and said I thought you’d left already—then it turned out you had. If I had your mobile number, I would’ve warned you. But you’ve got some other jobs lined up, yeah?” By the end of this speech, she was managing to sound solicitous rather than on the verge of giggles.

Instead of answering, I took her hand in mine. “Cheryl,” I said, staring solemnly into her eyes, “there’s something very important I want to ask you.”

That made her lips quirk in alarm. “Hey, it was a good bang, Felix, and I like you and everything. But you don’t want to get the wrong idea . . .”

“I want you to steal something for me.”

Cheryl’s face lit up. “Black ops! You star! What do you need?”

“The incident book. Peele keeps it in his desk drawer.”

The light went out again. “Don’t be stupid! How am I gonna get it out past Frank? If I get caught, I’ll be out on my arse—and probably on a charge, too. I thought you meant secret information or something.”

I nodded. “I do mean information—but I need the hard copy, as they say. And you
don’t
bring it out past Frank.”

“There’s only one way out of the—”

“You wrap it in a plastic bag and throw it out of the window of that room where we had our brief encounter this morning—just like someone else is doing. I’ll climb up and get it later on tonight.”

Cheryl blinked. “Someone’s stealing from the archive?”

“Yes. That’s what was inside the bag. A whole bunch of letters and papers and at least one bound book. Some of it comes from the Russian collection—but there’s a fair bit that looks older. A lot older.”

She stared at me hard. “Why haven’t you called the police?” she asked.

“Because I’ve still got a job to do, and there’s a lot more at stake here than a few old papers. I want to find out how Sylvie died and what her connection to the archive is. Calling in a load of plods who’ll lock the place down will just make that harder. Plus, if Alice has her way, they’ll arrest me, too. No, I’ll go to the cop shop when I’m good and ready.”

“And in the meantime, you want to knock some stuff off on your own account.”

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Look, Cheryl, I’m onto something. Something a lot bigger than stolen papers—big enough that whatever happened to Sylvie was just collateral damage. But I need that book. I was about to ask Peele to lend it to me when Alice put the boot in.”

Cheryl looked puzzled now. “So you’re pitching for Sylvie now?”

“Pitching. Batting. Fielding. Working the scoreboard.”