Vicious Circle (44 page)

“I picked up a beer bottle and let fly. Caught him in the mouth and almost floored him. Then Mel turned around and saw him and she got the drop on him with the gun before he could get his feet under him again and use the stick. She stood up, pressed the gun to the side of his head, and told him to kneel down. She took the stick away from him with her left hand, still holding the gun right up against his temple.

“ ‘You were going to hit me with this?’ she said to him. ‘Because your friends tried to rape me and I wouldn’t play along?’ He was babbling something, saying he was sorry or that he didn’t want any trouble or whatever. Mel shook her head. No excuses. No mercy.

“She lifted the gun up, away from his skull, and she wagged it in his face like a schoolmistress wagging her finger. Then she brought her other arm back, just about halfway, and swung it down again. Smacked him in the mouth, really hard, with the nightstick. Crack.” Peace gestured vividly. “Blood and teeth everywhere. He went down, crying like a baby, clutching his face and rolling away from her across the floor. But she’d had her fun now. She tossed the stick back behind the bar and turned to me as though she’d only just noticed me. ‘We’d better get out of here,’ she said. ‘The police are likely to take his side.’

“But she didn’t leave right away. She looked down at the barman again, moaning and whimpering at her feet. She seemed to like that. She gave him a measured kick in the balls, pivoting on her heel so that she was more sort of stamping on him with her heel. I suppose she wouldn’t have got much force otherwise, with open-toed shoes.

“Then she led the way, and I followed.”

“Was that the night that Abbie was conceived?” I asked, breaking another reflective silence.

Peace shook his head, pulling himself out of the vivid past into the painful present with difficulty. “No. We did spend that night together, but Abbie—that came later. That all came later.

“Mel was staying at the Independence, and she took me back there even though the doorman looked like he were sucking a mouthful of lemons when he saw how I was dressed.

“She was incredible in bed: a little bit scary, even. Not just uninhibited but totally off the fucking leash. She was into bondage—degradation, submission, slave-and-master shit—and she had some games I’d never come up with in my wildest dreams. She was into drugs, too, and we were as high as Kiliman-sodding-jaro as we fucked. I’m not likely to forget that night in a hurry. I wish I could, in a lot of ways.

“I stayed with her for a couple of weeks. Fifteen days, actually, and some odd hours. And I found out a fair bit more about the weird shit she was into. It didn’t stop with sex games. In fact, I think the weird sex was a side effect of the other stuff.”

“ ‘The other stuff’?” I thought I knew what he meant, I just wanted to check, because it sounded like we might be getting to the point at last.

“Black magic. She was a necromancer. And when she found out I could do the binding and loosing stuff, she couldn’t get enough of me. She used to make me raise up ghosts and bring them to watch while we were . . . you know. While we were in bed, or wherever else she chose to do it. She was a natural sensitive, so she could always see them. It used to send her right over the top—infallibly. The kind of orgasms that go into legend.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, rubbed them hard with the balls of his hands. His head had fallen back onto the makeshift pillow again, and he looked even paler and more exhausted than before.

“It all got a bit intense,” he sighed, with what sounded to me like exquisite understatement. “I mean, it was fun. Most of the time. But she was a bit rich for my blood, all things considered, and I didn’t like some of the people she hung out with. There was this one guy especially who used to give me the creeps. Big blond bruiser with these weird violet eyes. His name was Anton, Anton Fanke . . .”

He stopped, seeing my reaction to the name. For a moment, a flicker of suspicion crossed his face. “You know him?” he demanded.

“No,” I said. “But I’ve heard of him. Recently. A friend of mine was looking for information on you, and his name came up.”

“Yeah,” Peace agreed, grimly. “I’m not surprised. Fanke was something really big and special in the circles Mel moved in. Carried himself like he knew it, too. Fucking arrogant son of a bitch. Charming enough, but you know that sort of charm where it’s just another way of fucking you up the arse? Like what matters is being on top the whole time, and if he can’t do it one way he’ll do it another. You don’t want to be there when the charm offensive stops, because you know it’s going to be bloody.

“But there was no way past it. Being around Mel meant being around Fanke, too. I thought she was screwing him, too, at first, but I don’t think his vices were that close to normal: he was her priest, not her boyfriend, and that was a lot harder to deal with. After two weeks I’d had just about enough.”

Peace looked up again and met my gaze, again inviting or defying me to judge him. “So bearing in mind what I’ve already told you about my MO,” he said, with a sarcastic smile, “what do you think I did next?”

I shrugged, took a gulp of my coffee while I gave that one what little thought it deserved. The stuff was half-cold now, but the liquor still had a little bit of a kick to it. “You woke up before she did,” I said, “and you cleaned her out. Took that necklace you mentioned, and whatever money you could get your hands on, and did a runner.”

Peace nodded. “Got it in one,” he acknowledged, his tone a little bleak. “She had almost two thousand dollars, and the jewelry was worth that much again even to one of the fences down on Banfora Street. I took her stash, too. Swiped the lot and scarpered, thinking what a nasty, clever little bastard I am. I get the girl and I get the money, just like James Bond.

“I went back to the scummy little flophouse where I was staying, and turned in for a bit more sleep. I’d never got much of that in Mel’s bed. The next thing I know, the police are smashing the door in and I’m under arrest for drug trafficking.

“I never did figure out the ins and outs of that one. Most likely it was coincidence—or the gents I’d been working for getting their own back in a slightly subtler way than I’d have given them credit for. Maybe they’d been watching for me to go back home again, and this was a trap they would have sprung earlier if I hadn’t been otherwise engaged. But at the time, it made me wonder. It was so pat: like, I burned her, and I got burned back, twice as bad.

“The cops took all the cash I had on me, so I had nothing left to bribe the judge with. They sent me down for two years. Could have been worse: if I’d been a local lad, I’d probably have been swinging on the end of a rope.

“Didn’t matter much in the end, in any case. Mel came down and bought me out before I’d done a week of that time. Probably just as well, because I was already in trouble. The only white boy on the yard, and too stupid to stay out of fights. I’d taken at least one beating every day I was there, and by the time she came to get me I could barely walk.”

“Everyone needs a guardian angel,” I observed, downing the last of the tepid coffee.

Peace laughed. “Yeah. Everyone does. God forbid you should ever end up with mine.”

“You need another drink?” I asked him, because he’d gone quiet again, his face reflecting a parade of mostly unpleasant memories.

“No more booze?”

“No.”

“Then don’t bother. Where was I?”

“You’d just played your get-out-of-jail-free card.”

“Not free, Castor. Nothing like free. I’d already hit the eject button on Mel once, and she wasn’t going to let me do it again. Or maybe it was Fanke who set it up, I don’t know. Anyway, the way it worked, it wasn’t exactly like I got a pardon or anything: it was more like they had me on lease, and Mel made it clear that they could send me back if I didn’t mind my manners and say my prayers at bedtime.

“I said she was into slave games. She’d been the slave the first time around. Now it was my turn, and she really went to town. If ever a man was made to eat shit, that man was me.”

I opened my mouth to interject a question, then shut it again, better just to assume that that was a metaphor. I looked at my watch. It had been twenty minutes since I called Pen: I reckoned another ten or fifteen before Dylan got here.

“Tell me about Abbie,” I suggested to Peace. I was getting a little sick of hearing about his sex life. But I could tell from his expression that he wasn’t drawing this out because of any misplaced sense of drama: there was a place in his past that he really didn’t want to revisit, and we were almost there.

“I thought Mel was just a sort of weird life-form that lived on sex and pain,” he murmured. “I never thought she had any agenda beyond what was happening right there, right then. But I underestimated her. I really did.”

He took another tremulous breath. His voice was getting fainter, with a breathy hoarseness around the edges of it that I didn’t like at all. “Fanke used to talk about something called a sacrifice farm,” he said. “It was an idea he’d put together for himself by reading between the lines in the medieval grimoires. He’d read them all in translation, and then he’d gone back and read them all in the original languages—mostly Latin and high German—and if there was one thing he’d gotten hung up on, it was this idea of sacrifices. I know because I had to listen to it every time Mel had him and her other crazy friends over to play.

“If you’re going to make a sacrifice to a god, Fanke said—to any god—then the sacrifice has to be earmarked well in advance and treated differently. It has a special status, and it gets special treatment. It lives apart. Until the time comes.

“He went on and on about this stuff, but I didn’t listen. I didn’t fucking listen.”

Disconcertingly, Peace began to cry. I still couldn’t see his eyes: the single candle cast deep shadows, and most of his face was in one of them. But the plane of his cheek was in the light, and I saw the tears following a single, wavering track across his pitted skin.

“So one night,” he said, “Mel told me it was my turn to be on top again. And this one was going to be really special. Because this time we were going to make a baby, and we were going to do it in a brand-new way.

“She used the word ‘transgressive’ a lot. We were going to transgress: we were going to breach the laws of nature. That idea seemed to get her even more excited than having an audience, but when I asked her exactly what we’d be doing, she got all shy.

“There was a lot of crap: a lot of arcane paraphernalia, a lot of chanting. It built up and it built up and it built up, and it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. I lost my hard-on somewhere along the way, and I almost dozed off, but she slapped me awake again. That was part of regular foreplay as far as our sex life was concerned. But then she went off-script. She stabbed herself in the stomach, with a poncy little silver dagger that had runes all up the blade, and then she got me to use the wound instead of—going in by the normal route.

“I told her she couldn’t get pregnant that way. It wasn’t transgressive, it was just stupid and sick. And incredibly messy. She didn’t care. She wanted it. She wanted it more than she’d ever wanted anything.

“And as soon as we were finished she staggered over to the door and opened it, and Fanke walked in along with a couple of guys in surgical whites. They hustled Mel away, and he told me I could leave. Just like that. Actually it was more like on your marks, get set, go. He said he’d removed his protection from me. The cops would be looking for me as a bail defaulter, and I’d better sod off out of the country or I’d be finishing out my sentence at the
maison d’arręt,
without remission.”

Peace held up his hand, on which the golden locket glinted dully. He checked the clasp: a nervous tic that I suddenly realized I’d seen a couple of times before while he spoke.

“So I went,” he said flatly. “How are we doing for time, Castor?”

“We’ve still got a while. Peace, are you telling me that that was how Abbie—?”

I let the question hang. Slowly, he nodded his head.

“I didn’t know anything about it then. They fired the starting pistol and I was off. I’m not kidding myself, though: I’d have run even if I’d known Mel was pregnant. I’m not the nurturing type.”

There was a hectic energy in his voice now, and his face was strained like canvas on a frame. It was alarming to watch, almost as though he were coming unraveled, using himself up in this cathartic information dump so that he’d reach his own ending at the same time as he ended his story. I tried to call a halt again—for the last time.

“Peace,” I said, “I can put the rest together for myself. Get some sleep now, and I’ll wake you up when it’s time to take your medicine.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Castor,” Peace muttered, with fierce heat. “You don’t know shit. You listen to me, and then you can talk, okay?”

I held up my hands in surrender. “Okay. But I haven’t been sitting on my hands, you know. Let me at least tell you what I’ve got already—you can save yourself some breath and use it elsewhere.”

He rolled his eyes impatiently, but I’d already started in. “You found out somewhere along the line that you had a kid,” I said. “And maybe you got curious. You tracked Melanie down to New York, and you went out there to visit her. Abbie would have been about eight years old then. You met her, got to know her, and”—I went out on a limb, but it felt like a safe one—”you gave her a gift. That locket.”

Peace grunted. “Fucking amazing, Holmes. What was I wearing?”

“I’m guessing that was the first gig you ever walked into that you found it harder to walk out of,” I said. “You ended up fighting for Abbie in the courts. You wanted to be her father, and not just on her birth certificate.”

I stopped because he was waving his hand backward and forward in an impatient “stop right there” gesture. “I told you you didn’t know shit,” he said, thickly. “The court case, that was another scam. Mel was still with Fanke, and Fanke was a big wheel by this time. Fucking multimillionaire. He’d set up the First Satanist Church of the Americas—become a guru, like the Maharishi, with tax breaks and limos and all that garbage. And there’s him and Mel living together like husband and wife, and bringing up Abbie like she’s theirs. I bumped into an old crony somewhere in Rio and got the whole story, and I thought it had to be worth trying to shake them down for some hard cash. That’s all she was to me, Castor: a fucking lottery ticket.”