The Devil You Know (26 page)

Nicky was pleased to see me, because I usually bring him something to feed two of his three addictions—say, a bottle of some really good French red and a couple of jazz singles of 1940s vintage. Today I was short-changing him slightly; I only had the wine. All the same, he was cordial. He’d noticed some new pattern in the ephemeral ripples that stir the surface of the material world, and he wanted someone to bounce it off.

“Here, Fix,” he said eagerly, swiveling his monitor to face me. “Check this out. Look where it spikes.”

With his Mediterranean tan and his extensive (if largely shoplifted) wardrobe, Nicky doesn’t look like a walking corpse; he looks like a fashion model who’s hit hard times. That’s a tribute to his absolute dedication—his obsessive attention to detail. Most of the dead who’ve risen in the body tend to wander around in an unhappy and aimless way, getting further and further past their sell-by date, until the battle between decomposition and willpower shifts inexorably past a certain balance point. Then they fall down and don’t get up. In rare cases, the spirit freed from its flesh-house will find another vacant cadaver and start all over again. Mostly they just give up the ghost, as it were.

But that wasn’t Nicky’s style. Back when he was still alive—which was when I’d first met him—he’d been one of the most dangerous lunatics I’d ever met outside of a secure institution, and what made him dangerous was his ability to focus on one idea and squeeze it until it bled. He was a tech-head conspiracy theorist who cut open the Internet to read its entrails; a paranoiac who thought every message ever sent, every word ever written was ultimately about him. He thought of the world in terms of a web—a communal web devised by a great agglomeration of spiders. If you were a fly, he said, the only way to stay alive was to avoid touching any of the sticky threads, to leave no trail that anyone could follow back to you. Of course, he wasn’t alive anymore—a heart attack at the ripe young age of thirty-six had taken care of that—but his opinions were unchanged.

“Right. What am I looking at?” I demanded, stalling for time as I looked at the graph on his computer monitor. There was a red line, and there was a green line. There was a horizontal axis, marked out in years, and a vertical axis not marked at all. The two lines did seem to be in rough synchrony.

“This is the
FTSE
100 share index,” Nicky said, tracing the green line with the tip of his finger. His fingernail was caked with black dirt. It was probably oil; he had his own generator, which he’d half-inched from a building site. He didn’t like drawing power directly from the national grid for reasons given above. In Nicky’s world, invisibility is the great, maybe the only, virtue.

“And the red line?” I asked, setting down the bottle of Margaux I’d picked up for him at Oddbins. Nicky doesn’t drink the wine. He doesn’t manufacture any stomach enzymes anymore, so he wouldn’t be able to metabolize it. He says he can still smell it, though—and he’s built up a nose for the expensive stuff.

He shot me a slightly defensive look. “The red line is a bit of an artifact,” he admitted. “It plots the first and final readings of pro-EU legislation, or a statement by any government front-bencher in favor of greater European integration.”

I bent low to get a better look. Nicky smelled of Old Spice and embalming fluid—not of decay, because his body was not so much a temple as a fortress, and no crack in a fortress can be considered small. All the same, I liked it better when he had his rig set up down in the cinema’s main auditorium, which has better through-drafts.

“Okay,” I said. “The red line is a little out of phase. It spikes earlier.”

“Earlier, right, right,” Nicky agreed, nodding excitedly. “Two to three days earlier in most cases. Up to a week, sometimes. If you plot the recession line, the correspondence is even closer. Every time, Fix. Every fucking hail-Mary-full-of-grace time.”

I tried to get my head around this. “So you’re saying—”

“That there’s a causal link. Obviously.”

I frowned, trying to look like I was giving this serious thought. Nicky was watching me, hairy-eyed and eager. “How does that work?” I asked.

He was only too happy to explain. “It works like this. Satan is in favor of federalism, because that’s his preferred method of working. It’s like, you know”—he gestured vaguely but emphatically—”engineering the Fall of Man just by corrupting Adam and Eve. The more the nations of the world are brought under one rule, the easier it is for the infernal powers to assert direct control over the whole show—just by attacking and subduing one soul. Or a couple of hundred souls, if we’re talking about the EU Council of Ministers. So when the government pushes a European agenda, it’s because they’re in thrall to Satan and they’re doing his will.”

I chewed this over. “And the share prices?”

“That’s their reward from Satan for obeying orders. Whenever they push the whole plan forward, he makes their shares go up in value. He gives them the earthly paradise he’s always promised his servants.”

He was still looking at me, waiting for a reaction. “I don’t know, Nicky,” I said, temporizing. “The FTSE—that’s a composite figure, isn’t it? You’ve got a lot of companies there, with their own chief execs and their own business plans. And you’ve got a lot of investors with their own axes to grind . . .”

Nicky was disgusted. “Oh for fuck’s sake, Fix. Of course it’s a composite figure. I’m not saying that Satan can just wave his hand and make the share index go up and down. Obviously he works through human proxies. That’s why the lag time varies. If it was a perfect, frictionless system, it would be immediate, wouldn’t it? You’re proving my point.”

“I hadn’t thought it through that far,” I said cautiously. I sat down on the table where the printer rested; it was a heavy, old-fashioned laser jobbie, and I had to balance my buttocks precariously on about an inch of free space. “Nicky, I was wondering if you could help me with something.”

“With what?” He was instantly suspicious. He knows I don’t come around just to sniff wine and swap gossip, but he hates the fact that our relationship is mutually abusive. Like all conspiracy nuts, he’s a romantic at heart.

“A job I’m doing.”

“What kind of job?”

“The usual kind.”

Very pointedly, Nicky picked up the bottle of wine and examined the label. It was a ’97, and it wasn’t anything like cheap.

“Thought you’d given up that ghost-toasting shit,” he observed.

“I’m back.”

“Obviously.” The wine had mollified him, but only up to a point. “I’ll need another two of these,” he said. “And you mentioned some guy in Portobello Road who had Al Bowlly and Jimmy Reese together on some old Berliner hard rubber?”

I winced. “Yeah, I did say that, Nicky, but I’m not in the government, and Satan isn’t sexing up my share options just yet. The wine or the disk—not both.”

Nicky played hard to get. “Tell me what you’re looking for,” he said.

“A young woman. In her early twenties, most likely. Dark-haired. Possibly Russian or East European. The area around Euston Station. Murder or accident, could’ve been either, but violent. And sudden.”

“Time frame?”

“I don’t really know. Maybe summer. July or August.”

He snorted. “Congratulations, Fix. That’s probably the vaguest brief you’ve ever given me. Toss me a bone, here. Eye color? Complexion? Distinguishing marks?”

I thought about the blurry red veil that stood in for the ghost’s face. “That’s all I’ve got,” I said. And then, more to myself than to him, “Maybe . . . maybe her face was injured in some way.”

“The disk.”

“What?”

“I’ll go for the Berliner disk. But it better be fucking genuine. And it better be fucking Al Bowlly, not Keppard doing an Al Bowlly impression. I’ll know.”

“It’s the real thing,” I assured him. They were just names to me; my tastes run to classical, home-grown punk, and the raw end of alt dot country. I’ve got exactly enough savvy about jazz to know what to look for when I’m in need of a bribe.

“You know what your sin is, Fix?” Nicky asked me, already tapping some terms into a nameless metasearch engine that displayed in black on dark gray. “The particular thing you’ll go to Hell for?”

“Self-abuse?” I hazarded.

“Blasphemy. The last days are coming, and He writes it in the Heavens and on the Earth. The rising of the dead is a sign—I’m a sign, but you don’t want to read me. You don’t even want to accept that there’s a point to all this. A plan. You treat the Book of Revelation as if it’s a book of police mug shots. That’s why God turns His face from you. That’s why you’ll burn, in the end.”

“Right, Nicky,” I said, already walking away. “I’ll burn, and you’ll tan. For so it is written. Call me if you get anything.”

I think I was in a fairly somber mood as I walked back along Hoe Street. Something about Nicky’s tirade had brought another recent memory to the surface of my mind—Asmodeus, telling me that I was going to miss the boat because I wasn’t asking the right questions.

Everyone’s a fucking critic.

Suddenly I was dragged out of my profitless thoughts. Passing a shop, I caught my own reflection in the window, at an odd angle, and someone else was moving behind me—someone I thought for a moment that I recognized. But when I turned, she was nowhere in sight. It had looked like Rosa—the girl at Damjohn’s club, Kissing the Pink, for whom Damjohn had sent because he thought I’d like to admire her backside. Pretty unlikely that she’d be here, I had to admit, but the impression had been a really strong one all the same.

Visiting Nicky is dangerous. You can catch paranoia as easily as you can catch a cold.

By the time I got back into Central London, it was the gloomy, smoky dog-end of the afternoon. Thus runs the day away. I tried Gabe McClennan’s office again, but this time even the street door was locked.

Well then, that encounter was postponed—but not canceled. And I was left full of a restless impatience that had me striding down Charing Cross Road as though there was actually somewhere I needed to be. If it had been a few months before, I would have taken a cab over to Castlebar Hill—to the Oriflamme, which for exorcists in London is home away from home. But the Oriflamme had burned down a while back when some cocky youngblood had tried to demonstrate tantric pain control in the main bar and had set fire to himself and the curtains. There was talk of reopening elsewhere, but for the time being, it was just talk.

So I retired to a pub just off Leicester Square that used to be the Moon Under Water and was now something else, where I downed a pint of 6X and a whisky chaser to fuel my righteous wrath. Nothing was adding up here—and a job that should have been textbook-simple was developing the sort of baroque twiddles that I’d come to loathe and mistrust.

The ghost was recent. She’d lived and died in a world that already had factories, cars, and wristwatches. Okay, in theory, that could still have placed her at the turn of the century, but that wasn’t the impression I’d got. The interior trim of that car had looked very modern and very luxurious, and watches with stainless-steel bands probably didn’t even exist before the 1940s. So she didn’t come into the archive with the Russian collection. And so the thing that tied her to the building in Churchway was something different—something I’d missed in the general rush to judgment.

Of course, I didn’t really need to know who she was or who she
had
been—not to do the job I was being paid for. All I needed was enough of a psychic snapshot to form the basis of a cantrip, and after last night’s adventures, I already had that. So why wasn’t I breaking out the
méthode champenoise
round at Pen’s instead of brooding in a loud bar in Soho?

Because I was being played for an idiot—and I never did learn to take to that.

If Gabe McClennan had been at the archive, this ghost had a history that I wasn’t being told about. And if someone was scampering around the building after hours, it seemed a fair bet that they were there to keep tabs on me. Either that, or it was somebody conducting some kind of business that they didn’t want daylight to look upon. I chased my thoughts around in decreasing circles for a while before getting back to the point—which I’d been avoiding pretty strenuously.

I’d told Peele that I’d do the exorcism by the end of the week. That gave me two more days, not counting today. But I had a strong enough fix on the ghost now to weave a cantrip anytime I wanted to. The job was effectively done. I could go in tomorrow, whistle a few bars, and walk away with the rest of that grand in my pocket.

And I’d be alive and in one piece and able to do this only because the ghost had stepped in to stop me before I made that fatal misstep in the dark.

There’s a good reason why I don’t think too much about the after-life, and it’s not squeamishness. Or at least, it’s not the kind of squeamishness that would make you swerve aside from thinking about your brakes failing when you’re driving down a one-in-three cliff road—or shut off thoughts of sharks when you’re bathing in the sea off Bondi Beach.

It’s my job. Can I put it any simpler than that? It’s what I do. I send ghosts on to whatever comes next. Which means that if there’s a Heaven, say, then I’m doing a good thing, because I’m opening the door to their eternal reward. And on the other hand, if there’s no world after this one—nothing at all aside from the life we know—then I’m just erasing them. I’ve always had my own way of getting around the problem, which is by refusing to think of the ghosts themselves as human. If they’re just psychic recordings—the residues of strong emotions, left on play-and-repeat in the places where they were first experienced—then where’s the harm?

Now I could feel that particular defence crumbling and water leaking through more holes than I had fingers to plug them with.

I nursed the whisky for half an hour, then ordered another and brooded on that. And I was about to order a third when a glass appeared in front of me. It was black sambuca, and it had been served in that showy way that normally annoys the hell out of me—set on fire, with a coffee bean floating on the top—but when the woman eased herself in on the stool next to mine and leaned forward to blow out the flames, I forgot all about that.