Dead Men's s Boots fc-3

by Mike Carey

  Todd shook his head. ‘The hard way is the way I know,’ he said. ‘And I tend to rely on the product more if I’ve squeezed it out myself, so to speak. Last time of asking, Mister Castor.’

  I hesitated. There are ways of slipping out of handcuffs, but it helps if the guy who’s putting them on you is a bit of a dim bulb. Play along, or lose a kneecap? I made the call and did as I was told, not liking it much. Unfortunately, Todd was skilled and careful. He pressed hard, closing the cuffs as far as the ratchets would let him, and even though I clenched my fists and tensed the muscles of my forearms in the best traditions of Ian Fleming, I could feel that there was no leeway. I was firmly attached to the chair, and the only ways out were springing the lock on the cuffs – only possible with a pick – or smashing the chair itself to kindling. It didn’t seem all that likely that Todd would sit still for either.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, straightening only after he’d tugged on each of my arms and satisfied himself that my hands didn’t have enough free play to reach my coat or trouser pockets. He didn’t bother to search me: probably he surmised, rightly, that there was nothing I was carrying that could trump a .38.

  He went back around the desk, opened the top drawer and took out a very serious piece of ironmongery: the blade was only four or five inches long but it was curiously shaped, with a slight thickening an inch below the point and an asymmetrical profile. The grip was of black polymerised rubber. This was a knife designed for lethal use in difficult circumstances: a weapon of very intimate and individual destruction.

  ‘You’ve come a long way from Mile End,’ I said, for something to say.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Todd agreed, testing the edge of the blade on the ball of his thumb. ‘But it’s an easy commute. You’re about to find out how easy.’

  ‘You think I was stupid enough to walk in here alone?’

  ‘Well, you arrived alone, so yes. That’s exactly what I think. If I’m wrong, I may end up being seriously embarrassed. But let’s look on the bright side: I’m not wrong and that’s not going to happen.’

  He ambled back around to my side of the desk where he half-sat, half-leaned against it: the posture of a man settling in for the long haul. ‘So who are you working for?’ he asked.

  I wasn’t interested in misdirection or strategy: I just wanted to find an answer that would, for as long as possible, keep me from getting carved up: the longer I stalled, the better the chance that something might come up that I could use against Todd. Okay, I was clutching at straws here: I knew how bad the situation was, but hope – even pathetic, bargain-basement hope – springs eternal.

  ‘A woman named Janine Hunter,’ I said. ‘Her old man’s up on a murder charge and she—’

  The tip of the knife dipped, then flicked across my cheek. Something warm and wet spilled down over my face, and I was tasting my own blood.

  ‘Janine,’ Todd said. ‘Yes. We know about Janine.’ He sounded so detached that I thought he might be on the verge of wandering away and finding something better to do with his time. ‘She works reasonably well as a cover story. Full marks for effort there. But what I want to know, obviously, is who told you about us. About Mount Grace, and Lionel Palance, and the whole operation. The way we come back. We saw it happen with Gittings, and then we saw it again with you. A little bit of fumbling around, just for effect, and then you go right to where the answers are. Because someone’s driving from the back seat. That’s the name I need, Mister Castor. Confession is going to be good for your soul. And for – let’s say – your left eye.’ To add emphasis to the words, he held the knife in front of my eyes and showed me my own blood on the blade. ‘Then your right, after a very short interval for reflection.’

  So the truth wouldn’t do, I thought: I’d have to fall back on bullshit.

  ‘I don’t know his name for sure,’ I said. ‘We only talked over the phone.’

  ‘Then how did he pay you? I’ve checked your bank account, and there’s even less action going on there than there seems to be in your sex life.’

  It’s meant to be harder to lie to someone if you’re making eye contact with them. I made myself stare Todd straight in the face, just so he didn’t run away with any ideas about my reliability as an informant.

  ‘He’ll kill me,’ I said.

  Todd shook his head. ‘No,’ he reassured me. ‘He won’t. I’ll kill you, as soon as I’ve got all the details straight. So don’t worry about him. Worry about me, and about how messy this will get if you start being coy. What does he look like, our man? Details. As many as you can give me.’

  I bowed my head as if I was giving in to the inevitable. ‘Tall,’ I said. ‘Taller than me. About my age, maybe a little older. Wore a suit even more expensive than yours. Had a beard. Not full – trimmed. A guy who cares about his appearance.’

  ‘Eyes?’

  ‘Didn’t notice?’

  ‘Hair?’

  ‘Blond.’

  I could only see the lower half of Todd’s body from this position, but even so he couldn’t mask a slight stiffening in his posture – a coming to attention. Either he hadn’t been expecting that, or it had just confirmed his worst fears.

  ‘Build?’ he said. He was trying to sound as bored and disengaged as he had before, but it rang false now. Interesting. It would be nice to live long enough to find out what that meant.

  ‘He was heavy-set,’ I said. ‘A bit of a brawler. But an upper-class brawler, obviously. None of your street trash.’

  ‘Look at me,’ Todd snapped. I raised my head again. Todd pointed the knife at my left eye. ‘I was there when you-’ he started to say, but then he obviously had second thoughts. ‘Accent?’ he demanded brusquely.

  ‘Like yours. Cultured, you know, but only the one coat of paint. Something else showing through.’

  ‘Is that right?’ He smiled the way a shark smiles. ‘You saw through me, did you, Castor? Right, right. You’re way too sharp for the likes of me.’

  The knife snaked in a second time, and I yelled in pain and fear. But when Todd straightened again, I was still seeing out of both eyes. It was my ear he’d cut, the knife blade coming away on a rising trajectory as though he’d drawn a tick. Cheekbone: check. Ear: check.

  ‘What did you call him?’ he asked, in the same conversational tone. ‘You must’ve had some moniker for him, this cultured prizefighter?’

  My mind was full of dancing devils, for some reason. ‘Louie,’ I said, thinking of Louie Cypher in the movie Angel Heart. What a crock of shit that was. You sort of hope that if the devil’s into wordplay he’ll show a little more class. ‘Louie . . . Rourke.’

  ‘And how did he contact you?’

  I shrugged, trying not to let my relief show on my face. If he’d swallow Louie Rourke without blinking, there was hope for me yet. ‘I told you – by phone. He said he wanted to hire me to do an exorcism. A really big one. He said it might be dangerous, but nothing a good ghostbreaker wouldn’t be able to handle. The money would be good – really good – and he’d give me all the information I needed to pull it off safely.’

  Todd wiped the blade of the knife on his own palm and inspected the smear of blood it left there. Then he looked at me again.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘You just bought yourself another five minutes of life. Tell me about that. About how this . . . Rourke prepped you. What he already knew about us.’

  ‘Why do you care?’ I demanded. A dangerous light flared behind Todd’s eyes. It was a calculated risk: I needed a few seconds to think through the moves I’d made along the way and to scrape together an answer that might convince him. Well, I got the few seconds, but it’s like they say: there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Todd swung the knife a little more recklessly, and blood poured down from my forehead into my eyes. There are a lot of blood vessels in your forehead, and they bleed promiscuously: my eyes were glued shut in an instant. Todd opened them again with his thumbs on my eyelids. I blinked through the blood, up into his wide eyes.

>   ‘I care, you fucking imbecile, because it’s him I want to get my hands on,’ he snarled. ‘Not you. What the fuck do you matter? You’re dead already. You tell me enough to get my hands on this guy who’s calling himself Rourke and you get to die a little bit cleaner, that’s all. That’s what your life has come down to, Castor. You should probably have been a watchmaker.’

  ‘All right,’ I muttered thickly. ‘All right, just don’t hurt me any more.’

  It was kind of an embarrassing line, but it did the job. Todd sat himself back down again on the edge of the desk and waved his interrogation tool expansively.

  ‘Then talk,’ he suggested.

  ‘He – he told me about the inscription,’ I said, and I saw Todd’s shoulders stiffen as he tried to avoid giving anything away on his face. Over-finessed, you bastard. Hunter had said three days. I did the mental arithmetic. ‘It’s tonight, isn’t it? He said it was going to be tonight.’

  Todd didn’t bother to answer. ‘Go on.’

  ‘He told me there were about two hundred of you,’ I said, quoting the figure that Moloch had given me. ‘And that the operation had been going on for a good few years now. Since –’ I tried to elide over the slight hesitation so Todd wouldn’t notice it ‘– Aaron Silver’s time. He said Silver was the founder member.’

  ‘Did he?’

  I kept my stare locked with his. ‘Well, was he wrong?’

  ‘The man with the knife asks the questions, Castor. Keep talking until I tell you to stop.’

  ‘He knew about Silver and Les Lathwell being the same man. I guess that’s what he meant, you know? That the guy had always been there, overseeing the whole operation.’ Todd’s lips curled back in a sneer: he didn’t like that form of words at all. Something else occurred to me: hadn’t Nicky told me that Silver’s real name was Berg? And Les Lathwell had been out in America in the 1960s, learning the gangster game from the Chicago mobs: and from Berg to Bergson wasn’t a big jump at all. I chanced my arm. ‘It was Silver – I mean, Les Lathwell – who brought Myriam Kale in, wasn’t it? So there he is, taking the lead again. Actively recruiting for the cause. I bet a real psycho killer was a real feather in your caps.’

  Todd flared up, raising the knife in his clenched fist but then thinking better of it and giving me an openhanded smack across the face instead. ‘Are you really that fucking stupid?’ he demanded. ‘Or are you trying to make me kill you before you talk? Kale was a goddamned disaster, right from the start. I told him: she’s sick in the head. For the rest of us, killing’s just a means to an end. For her it’s an addiction. A disease. She’s never gonna stop, and she’s always gonna draw the wrong kind of attention to herself. She’s the last thing in the world we want. Someone who shits in the nest because she doesn’t know any better and you can’t teach her any better. Fucking – madwoman!’

  Todd was right about the veneer of civilisation. Something earthy, East End and broad was creeping into his accent as his emotions got the better of him. I decided to encourage it: if he was angry then he was off balance and not thinking straight, and you never knew what kind of options might open themselves up.

  ‘But it was Silver’s choice,’ I said, ‘because it was his game. Mister Rourke said if I could take Silver out then everything else would fall apart of its own accord.’

  Todd laughed incredulously, shaking his head. ‘Take Silver out? Fuck, if I’d known that was on your agenda, I’d have waited and let you take a shot. We’d do it ourselves, except he’s too cagey to give us an opening. Him and his American whore have fucking ruined us. Made us visible again, after we worked for years to cover our tracks. Live for ever. Live like kings for ever. Build up an empire, stronger and safer than anything we had when we were alive. That was what was in the prospectus – and it was his own fucking prospectus! “We can own this city.” And we do! We do own it! We take our cut and we take our pleasure and nobody even knows – or if they find out they die, and their wives and kids die, and their gardens are sown with fucking salt. We’ve got it all. But you know what they say about love being blind. He wouldn’t listen to reason. From the moment he met her, he was a changed man. Take Silver out?’ He laughed again, but there was a bitter, choking sound in it. ‘You should have fucking said.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed, switching tack. ‘Kale was your weak spot all along. Every time you gave her a new body, she’d kill again . . .’ Todd was nodding, so I went on. All I was doing was what mediums do: using the stooge’s feedback to refine the guesswork, zeroing in on the truth so it looks like you’ve known it all along. ‘The old psychosis showing itself again, every time. But you couldn’t just stop. Couldn’t just leave her in the ground. Silver wouldn’t let you. So I guess Mister Rourke was right about the pecking order.’

  ‘We’re a collective,’ Todd growled. ‘Democratic and egalitarian. Everything is fair, and everything is set out nice and clear in the rules. You spend a year up on top, riding one of the bodies with the influence and the power and the celebrity lifestyle – then you spend a year as one of the grunts, earning your keep, minding the shop. We don’t trust anyone else to maintain the crematorium, or to guard it. We keep it all in the family.

  ‘But that cunt-bubble is as strong as the rest of us put together. He started to write his own rules. And because he’s the oldest we’ve got to go carefully. Time isn’t just money, it’s power too. We don’t know what kind of safeguards he put in place for himself back when he was the only one. Just in case of emergencies. He’s not ever going to let himself be caught with his pants down. If we did kill him-’ Todd didn’t finish the sentence, but his shrug conveyed his meaning: that killing Aaron Silver, in flesh or spirit or both, would be the start of something, not the end of it.

  ‘So that was your brief,’ he said, coming back to the point. ‘Not the rest of us. Just Silver. That’s why you went out to Alabama? Tracing his steps?’

  ‘Looking for information about Kale. She seems to be his weak spot.’

  Todd nodded. ‘Yeah, you’re right there. But the paraphernalia you collected from Chesney – most of that wasn’t anything to do with Silver. So what was the deal there?’

  ‘I didn’t know what Chesney had,’ I temporised. ‘I had to take a look.’

  Todd looked surprised at that – and suspicious. ‘Then you weren’t working with Gittings?’

  I had the feeling of thin ice starting to crack under me. ‘Not directly,’ I said. ‘Gittings and Langley were the first string. I was the second. Rourke didn’t activate me until they crashed and burned. And obviously the first thing I had to do was to find out how far they’d got.’

  Todd was staring at me hard now. Whatever was going on behind that stare, it wasn’t looking good.

  ‘Then how come you spent so long sniffing around Gittings’s widow?’ he demanded.

  I pretended to look uncomfortable and abashed. ‘Me and Carla are old friends,’ I said. ‘Kind of – more than friends, once upon a time. I thought – you know, there wouldn’t be any harm in reminding her of that.’

  Todd relaxed slightly, giving me a contemptuous grin. ‘That’s actually funny, Castor. Groves was stuck inside the house, right there with you, and all you were thinking about was getting your leg over?’

  ‘I know,’ I said, adopting a tone of bitter, naked resentment. ‘I figured it out later. Groves was the one who possessed John, right?’

  ‘Possessed him, realised the guy’s brain was turning to cheese, shot himself. That was a hairy moment. If you’re in someone else’s body, and they go into the whole second-childhood thing, what happens to you? Groves didn’t want to stick around and find out. And he thought he was safe because of the will. Return to sender. But he forgot about the wards on Gittings’s door: too strong for him. He couldn’t get out of the house. He had to pull that tantrum to get you interested. I wasn’t sure what to make of you right then. I thought you’d either be useful or we’d end up having to kill you. But it turns out it wasn’t an either/or kind of propositi
on.’

  ‘I thought John knew too much about your operation to walk into a trap,’ I said, trying to push Todd’s expansive mood as far as I could. ‘How did you get him?’

  Todd seemed to have momentarily forgotten his rule about the man with the knife. He shrugged. ‘Well, the actual recipe is a trade secret,’ he said. ‘But we got him the same way we get everyone. He came onto the premises and we got the drop on him. That’s what we had in mind for you, of course, on the day we burned Gittings. But your demon bitch walked in and we had to abort the mission. We weren’t sure we could take her down, and we didn’t want yet another loose end floating around. That’s the only reason you walked out of Mount Grace under your own steam. Best-laid plans. Listen, this has been illuminating, but I don’t want to draw it out any longer. You want to buy some more time, or are you all out of revelations?’

  He stood up and moved around to one side of me, knife in hand at the level of his waist. I could more or less see the angle he’d decided to use: an upthrust, probably to my throat, from behind and off to the side to minimise the amount of blood he got on himself.

  ‘Rourke isn’t alone,’ I said quickly. ‘There are two other guys. De Niro and Rampling . . .’

  ‘Don’t fight it, Castor. Under the circumstances, things could be a fuck of a sight worse.’

  I was already moving as his hand flashed up. I kicked with my legs, not against him – he hadn’t been stupid enough to bring himself into range – but against the desk. I pitched out and down, the blade slicing shallowly across my shoulder.

  I was hoping the impact would smash the back of the chair. It didn’t. Desperately I swung myself to the left and then to the right, sawing with the handcuff chain against the unyielding bars of the chair-back. With a muffled exclamation, Todd leaned in over me, but the chair-back shattered into loose kindling and I rolled aside as he reached for me, kicking out again in a one-two bicycling movement and missing him by a mile but fending him off for long enough for me to swivel, get my knees on the ground and lurch/stumble back up onto my feet. My hands were still cuffed behind my back, but at least I was in with a chance now.