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.”
