Todd wiped the blade on his own palm, 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 was 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 probably should have been a watchmaker.”
“All right,” I muttered thickly. “All right, just don’t hurt me anymore.”
It was kind of an embarrassing line, but it did the job. Todd sat back down 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 away anything on his face. Overfinessed, 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 founding member.”
“Did he?”
I kept my eyes on his. “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? Les Lathwell had been out in America in the sixties, 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 in Myriam Kale, wasn’t it? So there he is, taking the lead again. Actively recruiting for the cause. I bet a real psycho killer was a feather in your caps.”
Todd raised the knife in his clenched fist but then thought better of it and gave 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 goddamn disaster right from the start. I told him: She’s sick in the head. For the rest of us, killing’s 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. 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 had been right about the veneer of civilization. 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. Mr. 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 forever. Live like kings forever. 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, “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 Mr. 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 cuntbubble 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 never going to let himself be caught with his pants down. If we did kill him…” He 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 temporized. “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 gotten.”
Todd was staring at me hard. 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 k
now,” I said, adopting a tone of bitter, naked resentment. “I figured it out later. Groves was the one who possessed John, right?”
“Possessed him, realized the guy’s brain was turning to cheese, shot himself. That was a hairy moment. If you’re in someone else’s body and he goes 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 either you’d be useful or we’d end up having to kill you. But it turned out it wasn’t an either-or kind of proposition.”
“I thought John knew too much about your operation to walk into a trap,” I said, trying to push his 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. “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 minimize 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 as the blade sliced 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 chairback. With a muffled exclamation, Todd leaned in over me, but the bars gave way, 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 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.
Or I would have if Todd hadn’t kept the gun in his pocket when he switched to the knife. He stepped back, the gun once again in his hand. He looked annoyed. “What the fuck did that achieve?” he demanded.
Was it a trick of the light, or was something moving behind him, outside the window? I took a step toward the door, and he moved in to block, which conveniently blindsided him as far as the window was concerned.
“You’re not going to kill me,” I said, playing for seconds.
“No?” Todd raised a mildly skeptical eyebrow. “How come?”
“The noise,” I said. “Someone will hear. And you’ll have a roomful of dead cats to explain as well as me.”
He aimed at my head, thought better of it, lowered the gun to point it at my stomach: messier and more painful but a safer shot. “Silencer,” he explained, and pulled the trigger. I was watching his hand, and I dropped as his index finger squeezed, but he still would have hit me. Even with gravity on my side, I couldn’t outrace a bullet.
But the window exploded inward, and a human figure danced in a blur out of the unfolding storm of broken glass, limbs scything so quickly that they left stroboscopic afterimages on the air. There was a wet, insinuating crack, and Todd’s arm folded backward at a point where the human body doesn’t actually have a moving joint. The figure landed and turned without any sense of haste or even intention. It was like watching someone practice the steps of a dance. The figure kicked Todd in the stomach; the sound this time was more muffled, but the damage seemed as profound. Todd slid sideways against the desk, crumpling inward like a flower closing for the night, and then slowly sank down onto his knees.
Moloch straightened his cuffs like a dandy after a duel, staring down with cold amusement at the man he had just crippled. I gawped at him, confused and uncomprehending.
“Not the savior you were expecting?” the demon demanded, giving me a glance of cold, sardonic amusement. Todd was curled up almost into a fetal crouch on the floor, absolutely silent, absolutely still. He could even have been dead. The kick to the stomach was easily hard enough to have ruptured some vital organ.
I struggled up on one knee but then took a breather, my legs trembling. “Not exactly,” I admitted hoarsely. “You told me you’d had enough of saving my life. I think you said it was my turn to scratch your back, or something to that effect.”
“Yes. That’s what I said. And that’s what you did, Castor. That sad wreckage downstairs”—he kissed his fingers—“perfectly aged. The spirit filleted and pared from the flesh with great delicacy. I can’t remember when I last ate so well.”
I fought the urge to throw up. Moloch had walked around behind me and was busying himself with the handcuffs. I heard the links part with a loud, grating clank of metal against metal. Flexing my arms, I discovered that they were free to move, although the cuffs still hung around my wrists like bracelets, and my right shoulder throbbed agonizingly where Todd’s knife had stabbed deep into the fleshy part of it.
I stood up a little shakily. “It’s all part of the service,” I said. “At least it is now. I didn’t plan it this way.”
“No,” Moloch agreed. “But I’ve found you to be worth following. Serendipity is your whore. And I thought you’d work a little harder if you felt you were working without a safety net.”
“Pick him up,” I said, pointing at Todd. “Put him in the chair.” Moloch nodded amiably, bent down, and hauled the lawyer to his feet. Todd wasn’t dead; he wasn’t even unconscious. But his face was deathly pale, and he screamed when Moloch lifted him, flailing with his good arm as his bad one dangled loosely at an impossible angle.
Moloch dropped Todd into the chair, then looked inquiringly at me. I’d crossed to the shattered window, and I was drinking in great gulps of the clean night air. I’d supped full with horrors, but it wasn’t even midnight yet, and I had darker work still to do.
“See if you can find some rope,” I muttered without looking round. “He probably won’t stay upright any other way.”
The sheet music had taken a bit of damage when Scrub-slash-Leonard took that last wild swipe at my chest and almost laid my insides open to the world. Nothing that wouldn’t heal, though. I laid it out on the desk and smoothed it down with the flat of my hand. Todd watched me with a shell-shocked lack of curiosity, his injured arm lashed across his chest, the other tied behind him. It turned out that the room where Scrub had been stowed contained a builder’s drum of rope—about two hundred feet, unstarted. Moloch had used all of it to secure Todd to the chair, virtually weaving a cocoon around him and leaving very little of him still in view, apart from his pale face.
I sat myself on the desk, more or less where Todd had been sitting during my interrogation. Moloch stood over by the window with his back to us, letting me make my play with no interruptions. Maybe he just wasn’t interested in this side of things.
“You started a sentence earlier,” I reminded Todd. “You were there when I something-or-other. How was that going to end?”
“I forget,” Todd said with a sneer that sounded convincing despite the slight slur in his voice. He had to be in a lot of pain. A
nd it was going to get worse before it got better.
“Okay. Doesn’t matter,” I reassured him. “Todd, I broke in here tonight to look through your files and get the lowdown on the Mount Grace posse. But since you’re here in the flesh—even if it isn’t exactly your flesh—there’s another favor you can do me. It’s going to be ugly, and it’s going to be messy, and at the end of it, I don’t know what kind of shape you’ll be in, but it won’t be good. To tell you the truth, it makes me a little bit sick just thinking about it, but I’ll do it if I have to. Because if it works, it could save my life later tonight. So I figure I’ll cut you a deal. Tell me about the setup at the crematorium. About inscription night. How many people are going to be there. What sort of defenses they’ll have laid on. When it will all get started and when’s the best time to go in. Tell me what to expect and I’ll leave it at that. I’ll walk out the door, and the cleaners will find you in the morning.”
Todd glanced up at me again from under half-lidded eyes. The pain of his injured arm seemed to have driven him into mild shock; either that or he was controlling it with some kind of meditation technique, because there was something otherworldly about his calm. He breathed out through his nostrils, conveying a world of contempt. “You bluff badly, Castor,” he murmured. “I’m a dead man already, so death doesn’t scare me. And I’ve got powerful friends. Torture me and kill me, I’ll just come back.”
“If you’re dead, I can send you on your way,” I countered. “That’s what I do.” Moloch perked up at that and looked around at me with a feral smile. The idea of catching Todd’s soul on the wing seemed to be a turn-on for him.
“You,” I said, pointing a finger at Moloch, “stay out of this or our deal’s canceled. Try to take this one soul now, and you’ll lose your chance of eating all the others. You understand me?”
Moloch’s answer came from between bared teeth. “Yes.”
“Okay, then.” I turned to Todd again. “You know what I’m talking about,” I said. “Don’t you. I’m an exorcist. I have the power to bind and break you.”
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