Procession of the Dead (29 page)

“Dee,” I said, knowing what I must do but trying to find another way, not wanting to commit myself to a path of damnation from which I could never come back. “If I leave right now and never return, will you let this drop?”

“Never,” she hissed. “I’ll follow you. I know where you’ll be and who you’ll be with. I’ll send the police after you, drag you back and make you pay.” She was telling me too much. The Cardinal could have warned her of the need to play her cards close to her chest. But I had her husband’s face. She hated me but she didn’t think I posed a threat.

I nodded resignedly and looked down into the grave at the grinning skull. “Dee,” I said dully in answer to an earlier question, “Ihave.”

Her face crinkled. “Have what?” she asked suspiciously.

“Killed,” I said.

Then I swung the blade of the shovel against the side of her head.

She reeled away from me, stunned, blood coursing from the cut to her scalp. I followed quickly and struck her again, full in the face, feeling bones crush. This time she collapsed. She tried to crawl away but I pinned her down and rolled her over onto her back.

She stared at me through disjointed eyes as I straddled her body and raised the shovel high. “Martin…,” she croaked, shaking her head, begging me not to strike. “Martin… please…”

“No,” I said. “Not Martin.
Capac
.”

And I drove the point of the shovel through her eyes and deep into her brain.

When she stopped spasming, I bundled her body into the grave, on top of her dead partner. They wouldn’t both fit inside the coffin so I left it open. Working as fast as I could, I shoveled the earth back in, pausing only once to scoop up a sliver of brain and chuck it down for the maggots.

When all was done and I’d patted the earth flat, I stood back and studied the freshly dug grave. It would be obvious in daylight that it had been interfered with. But it wasn’t conspicuous and it should be a few days before the police discovered evidence of the dark deed. By that stage I’d be long gone.

I hopped the wall easily this time and strode away briskly, tossing the shovels into a dark ditch. I felt no remorse, no sense of panic, anxiety or doubt. I’d done what I had to. That was all.

A few weeks earlier—even a few days—I would have been plagued by guilt. I’d have been thinking of my code of honor, my assertion that I’d never murder an innocent. I used to think I was a clean man in a dirty business. Now I knew better.

A man who might once have been Martin Robinson entered that dank home of the dead, but the one who left was definitely Capac Raimi. I no longer had any doubts about my identity. I was a killer, a monster, a man who could do anything and would. I was an Ayuamarcan, a cursed soul in league with The Cardinal. I’d thought that, beneath it all, in spite of what I did, I was good. But in truth I was as evil as they came, as coldhearted as The Cardinal, Paucar Wami or any other you might care to name. All that was left was to find out how I came to be such a damned, twisted mockery of a man.

There was only one place that question could be answered. So, after I’d visited the cottage one last time and cleaned up, I returned to the train station, never once pausing to worry about the men who might be waiting for me. The way I saw it, it would be their bad luck if our paths crossed. I was going home to the city, to The Cardinal. It would be the death of me, I was sure, but before he killed me, he’d talk. I’d make him. And pity anyone who got in my way or tried to stop me. No ordinary mortal could stand against a soulless monster like Capac Raimi.

ayuamarca

I
had to wait almost forty minutes for a train. I passed some of that by calling Ama. “Capac!” she squealed. “It’s really you? God, when I didn’t hear from you… Where are you? What happened with—”

“Ama,” I interrupted, “listen carefully. Get out of the city and never return. Understand?”

“OK,” she agreed instantly. “Where will we meet?”

“We won’t,” I told her. “We’re through. We can never see each other again.”

She laughed uneasily. “Quit fooling, Capac.”

“You remember what I told you? That I’d never harm an innocent?”

“I remember,” she said quietly.

“I lied. I lied to you and to myself. I’m a killer, Ama, as ruthless and bloody-minded as the worst of them.”

“That’s not true,” she said. “I know you, Capac. You have principles. You—”

“I killed a woman this morning.” I stopped her mid-flow. “She was a widow, harmless, innocent. She got in my way and I murdered her, brutally and clinically. Caved her head in with a spade and dumped her in an open grave. Get out, Ama. It’s not just The Cardinal you have to worry about anymore. Now there’s
me
.”

“Capac,” she sobbed, “you don’t know what you’re—”

I hung up. Leaned my head against the wall of the booth and sighed. That had been hard. All the time we were talking, I wanted to tell her I loved her and arrange a final rendezvous, one last passionate coupling. But I couldn’t allow myself that luxury. Because when the lovemaking was over, maybe Ama wouldn’t want to let me go. Maybe she’d cling to me and beg me to stay. Perhaps she’d try forcing me. If she did…

Could I raise a hand in anger against Ama? I doubted it. But I wasn’t sure. That’s why I had to sever all connections with her. I didn’t know myself anymore, or what I was capable of.

The train was almost empty when I boarded but it filled as we chugged closer to the city, commuters from nearby towns dragging themselves in for another day’s hard toil. It was a long ride. Plenty of time for silent deliberation.

What
was
I? A replica, a zombie, a ghost, the real Martin Robinson? Did I come from a pod, a lab or beyond the grave? Was I on my way back to reality or was this all a dream? Had killing Dee merely been my warped mind’s way of separating me from reality forever?

I shut my eyes and let the crazy thoughts slip from my mind. It didn’t matter. I’d be in the city soon, where all answers—or death—would come. Thinking was redundant. I let myself relax and nabbed a few hours’ sleep.

Nobody was waiting for me at the station. I stood on the platform and breathed the fumes of this orifice of the city, much as I had a year ago. But when I’d come before, it had been to start a new life. Now I was here to finish one.

A hand fell on my shoulder. With a sense of destiny I turned to face my captor, only to find—surprising me once again—the ever-grinning Paucar Wami. “I wasn’t expecting you for some time yet,” he said.

“What are
you
doing here?” I frowned. “You told me you were getting out.”

He shrugged. “I changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“We will discuss it on the way,” he said, sliding in front of me and heading for the nearest exit. “The Cardinal has revoked the call for your head, but that might only be a way of snaring you. I don’t think anyone is watching but who can say for sure. There could be a dozen guns trained on us right now.”

It was a convincing argument. I followed him quickly, reserving my questions. His scooter was parked outside. He didn’t ask where I wanted to go, just hopped on and kicked it into life as I climbed on behind.

“I take it The Cardinal didn’t send you to fetch me,” I said as we cut through the traffic around the station.

“Hardly,” Wami snorted. “I killed one of his men. He doesn’t take lightly to his pawns turning on one another without permission.”

“Then how did you know I was coming?”

“Our blind friends of course. They told me you’d return. They didn’t know the exact day but they knew the place. They said it would be worth my while staying to ensure your safe passage through the city.” He turned down an alley. “Damned if I know how they found me.”

“Why didn’t you ask them?”

“I didn’t speak with them directly. They sent a couple of messengers who knew nothing. I tortured both of them, to be positive, but neither could tell me anything.”

“Where are you taking me?” I asked as we turned down another narrow alley.

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” he grunted.

Wami dropped me at the front door of Party Central. Reaching inside his jacket, he handed me a tiny transmitter. “Wear this. I want to hear what he says. I haven’t gone to all this trouble only to be excluded from the final revelations.”

“What makes you think there’ll be any?”

“The blind men’s messengers said that through you I would learn the truth.”

I pinned the transmitter to my shirt, just beneath the collar. I didn’t look upon Paucar Wami as an ally—he’d rip my heart out if it served his purpose, and not think twice about it—but he’d saved my life a few times now. I owed him.

“Enjoy your meeting.” Wami grinned and peeled away.

Shocked faces greeted me in the lobby. I smiled at a startled receptionist and requested a meeting with The Cardinal. She buzzed up and stared with disbelief as I slipped off my shoes and handed them over. Moments later Ford Tasso appeared, face dark, eyes black, fists clenched. “You came back,” he growled.

“I was homesick.” I shrugged.

He smiled viciously. “You’ve got balls, kid. I like you, even though you killed Vincent and led me on a wild-goose chase. I think we could have been friends under different circumstances. I’ll miss you.”

“I’m not dead yet,” I told him.

“Aren’t you?” he said.

We boarded the elevator and ascended to the fifteenth. Everybody we passed in the corridor shot us darting, curious glances. They were stunned to see me. Ford left me at the door to The Cardinal’s office. “See you later,” he said.

“You think so?”

“Of course. I always clear up the bodies around here.”

I entered.

The Cardinal’s face was scarred and puffy, proof that our fight hadn’t been a figment of my imagination, that my healing was real, that my year in the city hadn’t been a dream. His fingers were steepled, eyes hooded, mouth a neutral line in an impassive face.

“Looking good, Mr. Raimi,” he said.

“Feeling good, Mr. Dorak,” I smiled. “No cuts, no bruises, no broken bones. I must be some kind of superman, the way I can heal, the way I can shrug off a broken neck as easily as a cracked fingernail. I’ll have to splash out on some of those insurance premiums I’ve been hawking—I can suffer the injury, collect the money, heal up quick. I’ll make a fortune.”

“You may just do that, Mr. Raimi,” he said, then added eagerly, “Tell me what you’ve learned.”

“You can’t keep a good man down. To get to the top, you have to dig to the bottom.
Now
means nothing without a
then
. Shit happens. I’m a killer.”

“The three men at the house,” he purred. “Nicely handled. How did you feel when you killed them?”

“Happy. It was a relief to get off the mark.”

“And now?”

“I feel nothing,” I said.

“Very good. There may be hope for you yet.”

“Sure,” I said sarcastically.

“I detect skepticism in your tone,” he said, eyes twinkling.

“I detect ridicule in yours. You’re goading me. We both know I’ve come here to die.”

“Do we?”

“I turned against you, betrayed you, beat you up. I’m a dead man. I’ve accepted that. All I want to hear from you now is the truth. When you’re finished, you can wash me from your hair forever. Only spare me the crap. I’m sick of it.”

“Mr. Raimi,” he sighed, and tapped the arms of his new chair, nowhere near as grand as his last. “So sure of yourself. So stubborn. So wrong. Sit.” Warily I took a seat. I noticed he had my puppet on the desk between us. “I’m not going to kill you,” he said. “This has all been a test. I wanted to see how you would react when you found your name crossed out, what you would do, where you would go when you had nowhere else to run, how long it would take you to come back. Cruel, hard, horrible tests.

“But you passed.” He paused and waited for me to speak. I said nothing. When he saw I wasn’t going to respond, he continued. “I know what you’re thinking. You want to know what you’ve won. But isn’t it obvious?
This
.” He waved an arm at the office. “Party Central, the city, my empire. I told you I wanted a successor. I said you were in the running. That was a little white lie—you were the
only
candidate, the only man I’d hand this over to. If you passed the tests. Which youdid.”

I massaged my eyelids with my fingertips. He was playing with me still. “I don’t want this,” I muttered. “I’m sick of the games. Tell me how you got me here and tampered with my brain. Tell me about the other Ayuamarcans, what happened to Adrian and Y Tse, what links us, why you’ve gone to all this trouble, how you fool people into forgetting us when we’re gone. That’s all I care about. Save your promises for the next guinea pig.”

“You don’t believe me,” he said. “How peculiar. But I will provide you with answers anyway. Are you comfortable, Mr. Raimi? This is a long, strange tale and I’ve never told it before. It might take a while. It’s an outlandish story but you will believe it because you are part of the proof. But before I begin, tell me where you went when you left this city.”

“You know where I went,” I snarled. “I told you—no more fucking games.”

“But this isn’t a game,” he said. “You are my heir now, believe it or not, and I will toy with you no longer. I don’t have all the answers. There are things which I too wish to learn. So tell me, where did you go?”

“I went to Sonas,” I snarled, “the town I lived in when I was Martin Robinson.” I told him all about my trip. Dee, my supposed death, the graveyard, the body, the murder. I left nothing out. When I was finished, he sucked the ends of his fingers, one at a time, biting the nails gently, and considered my words.

“How do you account for it?” he asked.

“You snatched me from the morgue and replaced my body.”

“Any other theories?”

“I’m a clone. A ghost. His twin. A zombie. This—you, my time in the city—is all a dream. Come on, quit teasing. Are you going to talk or not?”

“What if I told you I’ve never heard of Sonas or Martin Robinson?”

“I’d know you were as full of shit as ever.”

“Nevertheless, I never knew Martin Robinson. You are
not
that man and never were. That
was
him in the coffin and everything his widow told you was true. Your theories are flawed. You’re as far from the truth as you were before you left. You only came close to the truth when you suggested this might all be a dream.”

“I’m not Martin Robinson?”

“No.”

“Then who am I?”

“You’re Capac Raimi.”

“Before that,” I hissed.

He shook his head. “There was no before. You’re not human, Mr.Raimi. I created you.” Then he leaned back and let me gawk at him for a while.

“It started when I was a boy of the streets.” He had his chair turned toward the window and was half-facing away from me. He was determined to tell this his own way. I couldn’t rush him, so I sat back, bit down on my impatience and listened.

“The city was different then. There was no central criminal force, only dozens of transient gangsters. Every neighborhood could boast its own independent, self-determining gang. They fought and murdered without reason. It was uncivilized chaos.”

“I know some people who say otherwise,” I told him, thinking of Nathanael Mead.

He waved that away. “Some people would look on the bright side if eagles ripped out their eyes and shat in the sockets. The city was a cesspit. Anyone saying different is a fool or a liar.

“You had to be vicious to survive,” he continued. “People didn’t respect youth or make allowances for it. Pimps peddled two-year-olds at street corners. Boys were indoctrinated in the ways of the underworld as soon as they could walk. The papers rarely reported it and the police never admitted it, but that’s how bad it was.

“My mother was one of the lucky ones. She came from a good family, had a decent job, could have lived in happy denial like the upper classes always do. But she had an Achilles heel. Rather, an Achilles vein. One of those poor people who lose themselves entirely to the temptation of drugs. She lost her job, was disowned by her parents, moved into the east of the city, supported her habit by selling her body. I never knew my father. She didn’t either. A client, a pimp or just somebody who fucked her while she was lying in a gutter.” I was glad his back was to me. I didn’t want to see his face right then.

“I had to fend for myself from an early age. My mother rarely thought to feed me, change my clothes or wash me. She should have had an abortion. If she thought motherhood might prove the saving of her, she was wrong. She went on shooting up and selling her body while I crawled through mounds of garbage, scavenging, fighting cats and dogs for scraps of meat and potato peelings.

“When I was four I started stealing from her clients. I’d sneak into the room while they were busy fucking, scour their pants and coats, take what I could find. I was a sly child. I had to be. One night my mother caught me and beat me for going behind her back and not sharing. After that we worked together—she fucked them, I stole and we split the proceeds seventy-thirty. It was the closest I ever got to her.

“One night a customer realized what was going on. He kicked up a storm. He was a politician or a judge, someone with influence. He said he was going to put an end to our evil ways. So my mother pulled a syringe out from under the bed and stabbed him. He staggered away, gasping, shocked, over to where I was standing. He fell and looked at me pleadingly, fear in his eyes. I picked up his belt and strangled him.”

There was a long pause. “When we were dumping the body, I cut a piece of skin from his leg and kept it, much as Indians kept scalps. I lost it after a few months but I’ve always remembered the feel of it as it dried, the taste when I put it in my mouth and nibbled.