Damnation

by Peter McLean

  I reckoned that was us winning then. At the time I did, anyway. Trixie was very quiet though, sitting beside me in the darkened interior of the car.

  “You all right?” I asked her.

  “Mmmm,” she said. “I’m not sure.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well you stood up to her, you and… yes. And she backed down, but… well think, Don. She said she would go once this thing is done and this last revenge is taken. So she still means to do it.”

  “So what?” I said. “I don’t see that we care one way or the other, do we? Not so long as we aren’t expected to do it for her, anyway.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Trixie said, but she didn’t sound convinced.

  I sighed and stared out of the window, watching West London flow past as Mazin guided the big car effortlessly through the traffic.

  Something was bothering her, I could tell, but I didn’t know what and she obviously didn’t want to talk about it right now. I knew better than to press Trixie when she wasn’t in a talkative mood.

  Still, like I said, our visit to Menhit hadn’t gone too badly, all in all.

  * * *

  I spent most of the next day at my desk, reading Mazin’s famous book at long last. I still wanted to understand what this Order of the Keeper of his was actually for.

  It is all in the book, he had told Trixie when we first met him, but as far as I could see it really wasn’t. The book, a slim black volume filled with cramped handwriting and columns and columns of figures, didn’t really tell me all that much. Trixie had told me I should read it, but to be fair she hadn’t actually said it would be helpful.

  There was some preamble dedicated to the glory of Menhit’s bountiful wisdom that had obviously been written a very long time ago by someone who had never actually bloody met her. After that it was all business shit and the histories of companies they had bought and sold, merchant ships and banks and accounts and investments and credits and debits and things that made my eyes sting just trying to follow them. I wondered if Trixie had actually understood any of it, because I knew damn well that I didn’t. All the same, some of it didn’t look quite right to me, but then I’m afraid I was no one’s idea of a businessman. But I knew someone who was.

  I picked up the phone and called Wormwood’s office.

  The phone was answered by Selina, his secretary. I know I had his personal number but I didn’t want to abuse that too much, and anyway it seemed to me that if I wanted to set up an actual business meeting the least I could do was go through the proper channels.

  “Mr Wormwood’s office,” she said when she picked up. “May I help you?”

  “Hi Selina, it’s Don Drake,” I said.

  “How nice,” she said, in a tone that meant the complete opposite.

  Damn, I had forgotten just how much she seemed to dislike me. I had never even met the woman, after all.

  “I was wondering if I could get some time with his nibs this afternoon?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said. “He’s a very busy man, Mr Drake. The best I can do is…” There was a pause as she checked his diary, the clicking of her fingers on a keyboard clearly audible down the phone. “This evening at eleven pm. At the club. You are still a member, Mr Drake.”

  Well I must admit I had bloody well assumed I was still a member, for all that she sounded surprised to be reading that particular fact from her screen. That was just charming, that was. Wormwood owed me, after all. That and I still had a good couple of grand in winnings sitting on my account at his club. If he had cancelled my membership in my absence I would have wanted a pretty stiff word with him about it. Obviously by that I mean I would have set Trixie on him. He knew that.

  “Right,” I said. “OK, that’ll do. Tell him I’ll see him then.”

  Now, Trixie had been through this book of course, and I didn’t want her to think I was doubting her. Not that I was, exactly, but… Well, I don’t know how much she knew about business accounting but I was willing to bet it probably wasn’t a hell of a lot. No more than I did, anyway.

  We had a bit of dinner together before I got round to bringing it up. Well sort of, anyway.

  “I thought I’d pop over to Wormwood’s tonight,” I said. “You know, show my face and all that. It doesn’t hurt to keep the relationship going, does it?”

  “No,” Trixie said. “No, that’s a good idea. You do that.”

  She still seemed distracted, but after the previous day’s confrontation with Menhit I supposed that was only to be expected. I had been rather counting on it, in fact.

  “Want to come with me?” I asked casually as I forked another heap of takeaway Vietnamese noodles into my face. Damn they were good.

  “Not particularly,” she said. “Anyway, I think it would probably please Wormwood if I stayed away, don’t you?”

  Of course it would. The last thing on God’s green Earth Wormwood wanted to see was Trixie walking into his club again. Every time she had been to the place there had been violence, or the very heavy threat of it. No, Wormwood was going to be more than happy for Trixie to avoid him for the foreseeable future. Which suited me just fine, of course.

  “I suppose so,” I said, as though I hadn’t given it a moment’s thought.

  I know, I know, but… well look. Trixie was as fragile as a glass vase at the moment, and the very last bloody thing she needed was to be mixing with demons. She didn’t need to see me second guessing her about Mazin either. I need to have a word with myself sometimes, I know I do, but I really was trying my best to look out for her.

  “You go,” she said. “I don’t mind. There’s a programme I wanted to watch on the television later, anyway.”

  I nodded. That suited me fine, although I still found it a bit hard to get my head around an angel watching the bloody telly. I only had a telly so I had something to watch old films on, you know what I mean?

  Once we had eaten I cleared away the takeaway containers and left her to smoke and drink coffee in peace. I had a bit of a wash and brush up before I went out. Wormwood’s place is fairly formal, and I had to iron a shirt and shine my shoes and all that shit before I was ready to get suited and booted. It was about half ten by then so I called a cab and headed off, leaving Trixie with her feet up on the sofa in front of the TV. How domesticated, I thought with a wry smile.

  The cabbie dropped me at the end of a dark alley a few miles away, and I paid and waited for him to bugger off before I headed down there. Walls of damp, graffiti-covered brickwork loomed on either side of me, and somewhere in the darkness I could hear a siren wailing as a police car hurtled through the city night. Ah, London. Home sweet home.

  I could see the glamour that covered the front door of the club, of course, and it gave way as I muttered the words of entry under my breath and walked into the wall. The illusion parted like cold, sticky cobwebs and I stepped through into the snug little downstairs bar. This was where patrons who weren’t actually members of the club itself were allowed to hang out and drink and generally brown-nose for an invitation upstairs.

  There was no one in there that I knew except Connie, Wormwood’s faithful minder. He was standing at the bottom of the stairs and looming like a good bouncer should, easily nine foot-tall in his ridiculously huge tuxedo. His horns were almost brushing the ceiling.

  He turned and stared at me as I walked in.

  “Don!” he exclaimed, his big, ugly face breaking into a wide grin. “I thought you were dead!”

  I really did like Connie. I could have got the hump at yet another person writing me off for dead but he was so affable I just couldn’t hold it against him.

  “All right Con,” I said, giving him a smile in return.

  I got myself a beer from the bar and went over to talk to him.

  “How’s it going?”

  “I can’t complain, Don,” he said. “I look after Mr Wormwood and he sees me all right, you know how it is.”

  He coughed and wiped his left hand slowly and con
spicuously over his mouth to make very sure I could see the thick gold band on his ring finger. Bless him, no one had ever accused Connie of being subtle.

  “Did you get married, big lad?” I asked him.

  “Me and Tasha,” he said, and I swear to God the great lunk was blushing. “We tied the knot a couple of months ago.”

  Tasha was a pretty little demon with a cute tail who waited tables upstairs in the club. I knew her and Connie had been seeing each other but this was a bit of a surprise, I had to admit. I hadn’t even realized demons did get married. I assumed it hadn’t been a church ceremony.

  “Nice one,” I said, and reached up to give him a friendly clap on the shoulder. “Good for you, mate.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” he said. “What about you, Don? Are you and the Lady still, you know, friends?”

  I could hear the capital letter in his voice, and I knew he meant Trixie. I nodded.

  “Yeah, we’re still friends,” I said. “Not really any more than that, I’m afraid.”

  Connie nodded with the sage wisdom of a man who has been married for two whole months.

  “You will be,” he said. “Give her time, Don. I gave Tasha time until she said yes.”

  If only it was that simple. I gave him another pat on the shoulder and headed up the stairs in search of Wormwood.

  It was eleven by then and the club was starting to fill up. It was dim and smoky up there, the way a proper club should be, and 1940s jazz was playing from nowhere in particular. I could hear the clatter of the roulette wheel, and the rattle of dice on the craps tables. I breathed in the scent of whisky and rum and cigar smoke as I finished my beer, looking around for Papa Armand.

  For once he didn’t seem to be there, but Wormwood was. He was sitting at a card table by himself reading the Financial Times and smoking a cigarette, the two decks of cards on the table in front of him set out ready for Fates. There was a bottle of single malt and two glasses there too, waiting for someone to come and play him. I wondered if Selina had “forgotten” to tell him that he was supposed to be meeting me.

  I snagged a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and wandered over there.

  “Evening Wormwood,” I said.

  “You’re late,” he said. “Three minutes.”

  For fucksake…

  “I was congratulating Connie on his recent wedding,” I said, sitting down opposite him.

  Wormwood snorted.

  “Fucking ridiculous, that is,” he said. “Stupid bleedin’ human custom.”

  He folded the huge salmon pink expanse of his newspaper and set it down on the table, and grinned at me. Wormwood had a truly repulsive grin. It was every bit as bad as Davey’s, but where Davey didn’t have enough teeth Wormwood had far too many, and they all looked very rotten but very sharp. His long, greasy hair was limp and lank, and there was a strand of it stuck to the stubble on his sallow cheek. He stank of cigarettes and other people’s misery. You’d never think he was amongst the hundred richest men in London, to look at him. Well not officially he wasn’t, of course, on account of being an archdemon and therefore not officially even existing. That didn’t seem to stop him living in Mayfair and being chauffeured around in a bloody great Rolls Royce though. He was truly and utterly horrible, but he was a child of Mammon and if anyone knew business it was him.

  “What do you want, anyway?” he demanded. “If you’ve come to ask me to let your fucking psychotic goddess back in here you can fuck right off. Bleedin’ bad for business, that was, and good waiters don’t grow on trees. I ain’t having it.”

  “No, it’s not that. I want your opinion on something,” I said, and took Mazin’s book out of the inside pocket of my suit.

  “Oh yeah?” he said. “It’ll cost you.”

  I sighed. Of course it would cost me. Getting Wormwood to say more than “hello” always cost you something, I knew that all too well.

  “There’s money on my account,” I said with another sigh. “Take a grand out of it for business consultancy services.”

  It hurt, but any less than that would have insulted him. Wormwood didn’t talk in hundreds, if you know what I mean. He grinned again and took the book from my hand.

  “Deal,” he said.

  He lit another cigarette and looked at me.

  “You’ve changed, Drake,” he said thoughtfully. “You’d never have come to me with this a year ago. Finally starting to realize which side your bread’s buttered on, are you?”

  Fuck me, was I?

  “Something like that,” I muttered.

  Wormwood snorted and started to read.

  I finished my champagne and helped myself to a scotch from Wormwood’s bottle. Champagne is the most overrated stuff on Earth, if you ask me. All it tastes of is bloody bubbles. I swallowed a mouthful of very old, very expensive whisky, and smiled. That was more like it. That was a proper drink, right there. I looked at Wormwood and saw his brow was furrowed in concentration as he ran a nicotine-stained finger down one column of figures after another, starting from around 1740 when the accounts began. Fuck knows what had happened before then. His mouth worked silently as he mumbled numbers to himself under his breath, factoring inflation and historical currency conversion ratios in his head as he went. There are supercomputers that aren’t as good at this shit as Wormwood is, I tell you.

  He leafed through the pages of cramped figures with alarming speed, his frown deepening as his finger kept tracking down the lines. At last he looked up at me with a scowl.

  “These numbers don’t work,” he said.

  No, no I didn’t think they did.

  “I guessed as much,” I said. “How badly is it out?”

  His mouth twisted with distaste. “By now? About three hundred million fucking quid, all in,” he said. “Whose fucking money is this, anyway?”

  Ah, now this was where me and the truth were going to have to part company, I realized. It would never do for Wormwood to know I had even a tangential connection to that sort of wealth.

  “A client of mine,” I said. “Highly confidential, sorry. Any idea where it’s been going?”

  He shrugged. “From this? No. But I’d suggest you ask whoever’s been cooking these fucking books.”

  I coughed and had another swallow of whisky. Yeah, that might be tricky. Those numbers went back hundreds of years, after all. Sometimes Wormwood seemed to forget that not everyone was immortal. Still, it went to show though, didn’t it? Whoever you are, however powerful you think you are, there’s always someone who will betray you, cheat you, steal from you. Even if you’re a goddess. Money is the dark heart of… well, everything really. You only had to look at Wormwood to see that.

  “Right,” I said, taking the book off him and slipping it carefully back into my pocket. “Thanks for that, Wormwood.”

  He nodded, but I could see he looked tense. The very thought of embezzlement made him itch, I could tell. Unless it was him doing the embezzling, no doubt. He was a grotty, avaricious little bugger at the best of times, and… That made me think of something. Grotty old Davey had reminded me a bit of Wormwood, I remembered.

  “One other thing,” I said, offhandedly. “You’re good at Fates – what would you make of a man who drew the Hermit as his trump?”

  “Just the once, or repeatedly?” Wormwood asked.

  “Can’t really say,” I said. “I only played him the one hand.”

  “Hmmm,” Wormwood said. “Then it might not mean anything. It might just be the luck of the cards, a quirk of fate, whatever. But if he kept drawing it, well, that might mean all sorts of things. The Hermit means achievement and accomplishment, a spiritual pinnacle and maybe a teacher for those willing to undergo hardship to earn his wisdom.”

  I nodded. That was pretty much my understanding of the card too.

  “But I can’t tell, based on just one hand?”

  “If you think you can tell much of anything based on one hand, you’ve drawn the Fool,” Wormwood said. “It takes time, and patien
ce, and a lot of hands to really get the measure of a man from Fates. Now piss off, I’ve got a club to run.”

  I nodded and left him to it. He had a point, I supposed.

  Still, as these things went my visit to Wormwood’s club hadn’t gone too badly either.

  Maybe things were looking up at last.

  * * *

  Things kept on not going too badly for the next few days, in fact, and then everything went to shit in the most horrendous way possible.

  It was about nine in the morning when the phone rang.

  “Don Drake,” I said as I picked up.

  “It’s Debbie,” she said. I blinked in surprise. “You’ve still got the same phone number.”

  I had, but only because I had refused Mazin’s offer to move to somewhere better than my flat. There was some benefit to resisting temptation after all, I thought. Sometimes, anyway.

  All the same, that struck me as a bit of an odd thing to say.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I have. How are you?”

  “Very heavily sedated,” she said, and that made me sit up in surprise.

  Alchemist or not, Debs had never been one to sample her own wares. Now that she mentioned it I noticed how flat and hollow her voice sounded.

  “Um, why’s that then?” I asked cautiously.

  There was a pause, and I heard her talking to someone in the background.

  “Olivia has been taken,” she said.

  I felt my heart drop through the floor.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. In the night. At gunpoint.”

  “Fucking hell, Debs! Have you gone to the police?”

  “Of course I’ve gone to the police you fucking cretin!” she screamed at me, and I couldn’t help thinking that whatever sedative they had given her might not have been quite strong enough. “That’s what people do when their only child is kidnapped! I’ve got the police here with me right now.”