Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  “No.”

  “Then—”

  “You really want me to run through all the loose change you were dropping?”

  “If you don’t mind, yes. I still find it hard to believe that I’ve developed a death wish after working so hard for so long to stay alive. Indulge me.”

  I delved into my scattered thoughts again. “I was actually looking for you,” I said. “Or at least—not for you, specifically, but for someone behind the scenes who was making things happen. You had to be there. Someone hired John and gave him a small fortune to spend on those death-row trinkets. Someone told him about the setup at Mount Grace but for some reason let him grope around in the dark for weeks on end, checking out cemeteries rather than just giving him the address. Someone playing games, in other words. Feeding him crumbs to keep him moving, but not wanting to show his hand. Maybe because if John went directly to Mount Grace, all your dead friends would know who sent him.”

  Covington smiled coldly—maybe at the word “friends.” “Go on.”

  “Jan Hunter had a mysterious benefactor, too—someone who called her up claiming to be Paul Sumner, but Paul Sumner was already dead. You again, I’m guessing, trying to keep the momentum going in spite of John’s death—and maybe also looking for a way to stop Doug Hunter from going down for a murder he didn’t commit. Strings were being pulled all the way down the line. Did you summon Moloch, too?” Covington nodded without speaking. “Yeah, I thought so. Big coincidence otherwise—that a demon with those dietary needs happened to be raised from hell where he’d catch the scent of the Mount Grace permanent floating barbecue. But there weren’t any coincidences operating here. It was all part of the master plan.” I took a long swig on the whiskey. It burned pleasantly in my mouth.

  “So that was the main thing,” I said. “The strings. You don’t get all those strings without someone to pull on them. How did I know it was you? Just lots of little things. Your real name—Aaron Silver’s real name, I mean—was Berg, and the name you gave to Ruth Kale was Bergson.” He opened his mouth to speak, and I anticipated his objection. “No, you’re right. I wouldn’t have picked up on that if I didn’t already know. It was the Paragon, Silver. You let yourself get seen by two people there.”

  He looked surprised. “I know. But I had my collar drawn up, and I was moving fast. I didn’t think either of them got a good look at me.”

  “They didn’t. But their different descriptions got me thinking. The desk clerk, Merrill—he said you were an old man. But Onugeta jostled against you in the hallway and felt how solidly muscled you were; he knew you had to be a young, fit guy. So why would Merrill think you were old?”

  “I don’t know, Castor. Why would he?”

  I pointed at his head. “Your snow-white locks. You walked past his desk with your head down and your collar up, and all he saw of you was your hair. And I dunno, maybe there’s something about how you walk: another echo. Something that goes with being a century and a half old. Either way, the paradox got my mind working. And once it was working, I saw that the little question—who was that masked man?—was the same as the big question. Why were you there at all? Why did you take the hammer away with you? Locking the stable door after the horse had bolted, even though Doug Hunter—with Myriam Kale inside him—was going to be arrested anyway.”

  Covington shook his head slowly. “You really thought this through, didn’t you? Why did I?”

  “Because flesh is clay. When a human soul possesses an animal body, it bends it as far as it can into a human shape. Sometimes the animal soul pushes back, and you can get some really interesting—not to say nasty—results as the seesaw tips. The same thing happens to you and your friends, doesn’t it? The longer you stay inside a body that isn’t yours, the more it adjusts to having you there. The more it slides into the shape and form you remember having in your old body. That’s why you’re snow-white blond as Peter Covington, and why you were snow-white blond as Les Lathwell—because Aaron Silver’s soul remembered having snow-white hair. And that hammer, gripped in Doug Hunter’s hand as Myriam Kale came bubbling up out of his soul and into the driver’s seat—”

  “—had Myriam Kale’s fingerprints on it. Right. The hammer is behind the bar, by the way. I assume you’ll be wanting to take it with you when you go. And it won’t make any difference to me or to Mimi after tonight. Can I refresh your drink, Castor?”

  I looked at my empty glass. “Probably better not,” I said. “I need a clear head if I’m going to play you out.”

  “You don’t need to worry. I won’t make it hard for you. But I’m in the mood to confess before I die. I’ve got a favor to ask you, too. Have another drink with me.”

  Fuck it. Why not? It was his house and his booze. I held out the glass, and he filled it from the bottle he’d been drinking from. Well, alcohol is meant to be a good disinfectant.

  “How long has it been since your last confession?” I asked him.

  He laughed. “A hundred and some years. And I’m Jewish, not Catholic. Born Jewish, anyway. Religion never meant very much to me, which is why I had myself burned rather than buried. I didn’t believe in the bodily resurrection. All my life I just did what I had to do to get by, and that never seemed to leave much room for thinking about God. The last time I went to shul was on my bar mitzvah. Three years after that, I killed my first man. Probably the one thing had as much to do with growing up as the other did.”

  Suddenly, the prospect of hearing all this seemed a lot less attractive. “So you were a bad man,” I said. “We can take that as read, if you like. Move on to the atonement and the absolution.”

  “I’ve been handling the atonement in my own sweet way, Castor. And for your information, I haven’t started telling you my sins yet. I don’t think any of the men I killed back when I was Aaron Silver had any reason to complain. They would have done the same to me if I’d given them an opening. One of them did in the end. Henry Meyer-Lindeman got the drop on me in a whorehouse in Streatham. Actually on the job. Shot me and shot a lady by the name of Ginny Tester under me. We both died instantly.”

  “And in your end was your beginning.”

  Covington grimaced. “Not right away. It was a shock, waking after my own death and finding that I was trapped in Mount Grace. Tied to my own ashes. You never really are, of course. The trap consists of your own habits. Your own ways of thinking. But it felt real. It felt as though I’d be spending eternity on that one little plot of ground, and eternity would be a long time passing.

  “But a year later, Stephen Kesel died, and he felt the same way about burial that I did. And four years after, it was Rudolf Gough’s turn. And that was critical mass. There was an old janitor who used to live on the site. We took him one night while he was asleep—the three of us working together. Then we took turns to ride him. We were back in business.

  “The first thing I did was to visit Meyer-Lindeman and pay him back with interest. I liked Ginny Tester a lot; she deserved better than to die in that undignified way. Steve and Rudy had similar visits to make—good ones and bad ones.

  “But we realized pretty quickly that this went beyond dealing with unfinished business. We also figured out that it wasn’t possible for one of us to betray the others. Steve tried to take off on his own, but he came limping back three days later. The janitor was fighting back, and it took the three of us to whip him into line again.

  “So there we were. We were immortal, but only so long as we stuck together. An immortality collective. Till death us do part, only it never could, whether we wanted it to or not.

  “All the rules and refinements came over the next twenty years or so—the years of throwing things against the wall to see whether they stuck. Experimentation and refinement. We discovered that the ashes made everything ten times easier, and they made the possession stick longer. We discovered that night was better than day, particularly for the initial breaking in of a new body, and that the dark of the moon was the best time of all. We turned it i
nto a very streamlined process. Tried and tested. It helped that nobody believed what we were doing was even possible. That meant nobody was on their guard.”

  “What about Myriam Kale?” I asked. “Where does she come in?”

  For a moment I thought Covington hadn’t heard me. He was looking up at the ceiling, his posture one of acute attention. “Did you hear Lionel crying?” he demanded.

  “I didn’t hear a thing.”

  He relaxed a little. “Okay. Just the wind, I guess. I picked this room because it’s right under his. If he stirs, we’ll hear him. You’ll notice I sent the nurses away, so I’m… on duty tonight. Myriam, right. Myriam was Yoko Ono. The femme fatale who gets the blame for breaking up the band.”

  He took another long swig of whiskey. He’d been drinking pretty regularly and pretty determinedly at every pause in the conversation, and the bottle was mostly empty. He was nerving himself up for something, but I wondered whether he might already have missed his stop.

  “By the sixties,” Covington said, “I was in my eighth body, if you can believe that. We wore them out pretty quickly: The psychic punishment is reflected in premature aging. Our numbers were up to two hundred, which is where they’ve stayed ever since, and we’d already had the idea of moving out of organized crime into legitimate business—things that would make us just as rich but at the same time lessen the chance of any police investigation finding us by accident.

  “For me, it was getting… claustrophobic. I wasn’t enjoying the company of my peers much at all. And I’d been practicing meditation techniques. I found that if I was really disciplined, I could maintain control of the body I was in more or less indefinitely, without reinscription.

  “I went to the States intending to take a good long holiday—to stay away from Mount Grace for as long as possible. But I needed an excuse, and so I made up this bullshit story about making contact with the American mobs. Then to make it look like I was doing that, I spent some time with the Chicago families. That’s how I met Myriam.

  “I think I loved her because she was the opposite of everything I’d become. Okay, she was a killer; to that extent, we were the same. But there was no calculation in anything she did. She was spontaneous, following her instincts all the time, whether they were bad or good. Whereas at Mount Grace, calculation was our heart and soul. We’d become parts of a machine, and the machine ground on. And she was vulnerable and damaged, where we were immortal and beyond all harm. I don’t know. I can’t psychoanalyze myself. I was drawn to her. I wanted to help her. Probably the love came later, and it was never consummated. The closest we came to having actual sex was me masturbating her once while we were at a drive-in movie. She cried when she came, cried buckets. Like she couldn’t bear it. God, what had been done to her! She was still strong, but… broken. Broken way past mending.

  “But like I said, this was a holiday. I came home and threw myself back into the day-to-day, life-to-life stuff. The Krays, who were never part of our little clique, were arrested and carted off to Broadmoor, and we had the whole of the East End to ourselves. Then I read about Myriam being caught and convicted, and I made up my mind right then to bring her in.”

  “Are we up to the sins yet?” I asked.

  He smiled humorlessly. “Almost. The rest of the committee was against it from the start. They could see all kinds of trouble arising from having an actual psychopath in our club—and they were right, obviously. I saw most of the potential problems myself, but I didn’t care. I was determined to try. I felt… responsible for her somehow. And I hoped against all the evidence that in a new body, she might recover. Get over her madness and become what she was meant to be before all the rapes and the beatings.

  “It didn’t work. And yeah, now we’re up to the sins. I feel sorry, and I feel ashamed when I think of the men she murdered. I never did acquire much of a taste for torture—and for personal reasons, I hate it when violence and sex get mixed up together. It always makes me think of poor Ginny.

  “But the harm was done. The committee was terrified that Myriam would draw unwanted attention. They even paid to have that poor bastard Sumner—the hack writer—bumped off because he wrote a book about her. It got harder and harder to convince them to give her another chance—and last year, when I suggested giving her a man’s body as a way of jolting her out of her old behavior patterns, they told me it was the last time. That meeting got kind of heated. I told them they were pathetic little echoes of what they’d been when they were alive, so scared of losing their creature comforts that they weren’t really living at all anymore. They accused me of being too big for my boots, trying to run Mount Grace as though it were my personal empire. They threatened to expel me, and I told them they couldn’t. Not anymore. I didn’t need them to keep my hold on this body, and I could take another one anytime I wanted to, without their help. That was probably an unwise thing to say. When they realized how strong I was, they broke with me completely. By that time, it came as something of a relief. Because by that time I had something else eating at me. Worse even than Myriam.”

  “Palance,” I guessed.

  “Yeah,” Covington whispered. “Lionel.” He emptied the bottle in one final three-glug swallow.

  “Who is he, Covington?”

  “He’s my son.”

  In the dead silence that followed this flat assertion, I did the math and failed to make it come out even close. Covington read the calculation and the outcome in my face and made a sweeping gesture with his hand to head off any objection. “I didn’t father him as Aaron Silver,” he said. “I was in one of the other bodies. I can’t even remember which one; they all merge together now. They all ended up looking exactly the same after I’d been wearing them for a year or so, anyway.

  “You see, Castor, once we’d gotten the mechanics of possession all worked out, the only problems we had left were the legal ones. We had a lot of property that we had to pass on from one generation to the next—from one body to the next—and we wanted to do it in ways that didn’t look odd to someone looking in from outside. Some of us had trained as lawyers, which meant that as far as contracts went, we could nail down any arrangement we liked. But it had to look right. Right enough to keep anybody from wanting to look any deeper.

  “So Seb Driscoll—the guy you met as Todd—he had a brilliant idea. We have kids. Doesn’t have to be a church-wedding, house-inthe-suburbs kind of deal. We knock up some woman every now and then, so we’ve got biological children of our own. Because if you’ve got a kid—certifiably, genetically yours—everything becomes really easy. When the time comes to take a new body, you leave everything to the kid. You top yourself. You jump. Now you’re the kid, and you’ve got the fortune, and nobody is going to ask any questions. You just look like a mensch, like a stand-up guy who saw his duty right at the end of his life and did it. End of story.” Covington stood up slowly and carefully. To judge from the look on his face and the slight jerkiness in his movements, the booze was starting to kick in.

  “So what went wrong?” I asked.

  “Nothing.” His voice dripped with bitterness. “Except—human nature, maybe. You could forgive me for thinking I didn’t have any by this time, couldn’t you? After all the things I’d done. All the mayhem, the killings, down through the years. Life is cheap, right? But not your own. And your kids are a little bit of your own life growing in someone else.”

  He didn’t seem to know what to do with himself now that he was up on his feet again. He tried pacing, but that didn’t seem to work. He’d stop after every few steps as though trying to remember a specific sequence of movements and it kept escaping from him, forcing him to break off and start again.

  “There were problems with Lionel,” he said, staring at the floor. “We needed to make a certain land transfer at an awkward time—when he was only two years old. We went ahead and did it because there wasn’t any other choice. Then the woman who was Lionel’s mother started making difficulties—trying to spend our money—and Dri
scoll ordered a hit on her. But it was botched, and she went public, and it wasn’t easy after that to get close to her. Or rather, it wasn’t easy in any of the regular ways.

  “But Driscoll saw a way of squaring the circle. He possessed Lionel, and we got Lionel to kill her.”

  In spite of everything I’d already seen and done that night, I felt an uncomfortable movement in my stomach. “His own mother?”

  “Yeah. When he was three months past his second birthday. Cute, huh? That train set upstairs—I don’t know if you saw it—that was what I sent him. Stupid gift for a two-year-old. He couldn’t even put the fucking track together. But it didn’t matter, because he wouldn’t get to play with it.

  “Driscoll thought it was funny. He’d worn a lot of bodies by that time, but he’d never tried wearing a kid. So he stayed there for a few months. Made quite a joke out of it, turning up for the monthly inscription with a—with a sharp-tailored suit, and looking at me out of my own son’s— Do you mind? I need some fresh air.”

  He took aim with the bottle and hurled it against the picture window. The bottle shattered. The window fractured across but stayed whole. Frustrated, Covington crossed to the bar, picked up a heavy glass ashtray, and slung it like a discus. That did the job: It went pin-wheeling through the window, which shattered spectacularly, and impacted on the stone flags outside in a fountain of shards that winked and sparkled briefly in the glare of one of the security lights. As though it hadn’t happened, Covington turned to me again. His eyes were dry, but his cheeks were flushed, and a terrible strain twisted his mouth, making his handsome face a thing you wanted to look away from.

  “So anyway, that started a whole craze. Driscoll talked it up so much, everyone had to try. Between his second and tenth birthdays, I’d estimate that Lionel had forty or fifty different passengers. And I let it happen. I stood by, and I—did nothing. Didn’t think about it. Didn’t care. Told myself I didn’t care, anyway. Life is cheap, and the rest is—sentiment. Which is even cheaper.