“It’s just a straight exorcism, isn’t it? What’s the problem?”
I opened my empty hands—a minimalistic shrug. “I think it got personal.”
“Oh Christ, don’t say that!” Pen looked genuinely unhappy, and I could guess what she was thinking.
“Not like with Rafi,” I said. “It’s just—I almost fell down forty feet of stairwell last night, only this ghost waded in to stop me.”
“The ghost—”
“Right. And tonight, some bastard lets a succubus off the leash and gives it my scent. I want to know what I’m doing and who I’m doing it to. I want to know what else is at stake here.”
She nodded slowly. “All right,” she said. “I can understand that.”
I pressed my advantage. “Pen, I hate to ask this, but would you be up to driving me somewhere? I don’t think I’d be safe behind a wheel right now.”
The discreet door on Greek Street was closed and locked, but there was a light on in a third-floor window. Right now, at four in the morning, someone was doing a photo shoot, or having their head massaged, or being spiritually healed. There’s a whole lot of sterling work that goes on while the city sleeps.
“And this Gabe McClennan is an exorcist,” Pen demanded. “Like you?”
“He’s an exorcist,” I allowed. “The rest of what you just said was actionable slander.”
In fact, in a profession not much known for its ethical probity or compassion, McClennan stood out as a twisting, weaseling, backstabbing bastard. I knew two or three guys from whom he’d stolen clients, money, or equipment, and half a dozen stories about people he’d screwed over. Someone even told me once that Gabe took a huge wad of cash from Peckham Steiner, the sanity-deficient granddaddy of all Ghostbusters, just before he died, on the pretext of building him a “safe house” where ghosts wouldn’t be able to touch him. But Steiner is likely to turn up sooner or later in any story that exorcists tell. I don’t normally listen to tattletale stuff like that unless I’ve got some personal experience to weigh it up against, so I’d been professionally courteous toward Gabe the first few times we’d met—and on one job, he’d actually sought me out because I had firsthand experience of a factory in Deptford he’d been asked to disinfect.
I’d agreed to help him and had offered him a thirty-seventy split, which he’d cheerfully accepted. Bearing the stories in mind, I asked for cash on the nose, and he counted it out into my hand underneath the green and yellow overpass at the Queen Mary’s end of the Mile End Road. Then we walked off in opposite directions, and before I’d gone a hundred yards, I was jumped and rolled by two guys who came at me from behind. They might have had nothing at all to do with McClennan, but it sure as hell looked like he was renegotiating the deal on the fly. At any rate, that was the last time we ever collaborated.
“Wait for me here,” I told Pen. “With the doors locked. Keep the keys in the ignition, and drive away if anybody comes.”
“Anybody but you, you mean?”
I gave her a solemn nod. “You’re on the ball, chief,” I said. “I like that in a woman.”
“After tonight, Felix, I think I know more than I ever wanted to know about what you like in a woman.”
I let that one pass. It was too close for comfort.
“What are you going to do if he’s not there?” she demanded.
By way of answer, I showed her the balding black velvet bag that held my lock picks. She shook her head in tired disapproval, but said nothing. She knows all about Tom Wilke and how I obtained my indefensible skills. She fervently disapproves, but right then I could see that it paled into insignificance next to all the other murky shit that was flying around.
I got out of the car and crossed the street. There were three bells over on the left-hand side of the door that roughly corresponded with the three signs. I pressed the one marked MCCLENNAN. Nobody answered. I pressed again and looked around me as I waited.
Greek Street is an after-midnight kind of place, but most of the nightlife had already rolled over and turned out the lights; we were only a couple of hours away from dawn.
But after a few moments, I heard footsteps from inside, accompanied by the atonal creak of badly warped floorboards. A bolt was drawn, then another, then a key turned, and the door opened a crack. Gabe McClennan, in his shirtsleeves and with a heavy stubble on his face, stood in the gap.
He stared at me for a few moments, looking totally nonplussed. It was clear that I was the last person he expected to see on his doorstep at four in the morning. Actually, it was one step beyond nonplussed, into the related domain of baffled and hacked-off.
“Castor,” he muttered. “What the fuck?”
“I wanted to consult with you on a job I’m doing, Gabe.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“Well, since you’re still up . . .”
He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand.
“Castor,” he said again. He laughed and shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it. “Yeah, whatever. Come on in.”
McClennan turned and walked back inside, and I followed. The light on the third floor clearly wasn’t anything to do with Gabe; the door he opened was right off the first-floor landing, next to a doorless cupboard full of electric meters and half-bald mops lying drunkenly against the wall.
Despite the shabby frontage and the dubious location, Gabe’s office was a hell of a step up from mine. It was dominated by a huge antique desk with ball-and-claw feet that was big enough to split the room in two. His filing cabinet had four drawers, a cherrywood veneer, and a vase full of chrysanthemums on top. He even had a diploma on the wall, although Christ only knew what it said. Two-hundred-meter swimming certificate, most likely.
“So what can I do for you?” he demanded as he walked around the desk. It wasn’t just the stubble; he was looking pretty rough in other ways, too. The bags under his eyes were so dark, it looked as though someone had given him a combination punch when he had his guard down, and if his shirt had had a map of the Lake District on it, the sweat stains under his armpits would have been Windermere and Coniston Water. It was an unusual sight. McClennan has an aquiline face, a spare build, and a thick bow wave of snow-white hair that he wears in a style intentionally reminiscent of Richard Harris. Normally he has a style that can best be described as dapper. Tonight— like me—he’d clearly been overworking.
He rummaged in his pockets, ignoring me for a moment until he’d found a small pill bottle that was about half full. He shook out two black tabs and popped them. Then, in the expansiveness of the hit, he remembered his manners and held the bottle out to me. “Mollies,” he explained unnecessarily. “You want some?”
I shook my head. A lot of exorcists have an amphetamine habit, occasional or chronic. They say—or some of them do, anyway—that it makes them more sensitive to the presence of the dead: lets them receive on a wider range of frequencies. There’s something in that, too, but I’ve always found I lose as much on the comedown as I gain on the rush. So usually I pass.
“The Bonnington Archive,” I said, parking myself on the edge of the desk. I didn’t want to take the client’s chair; it would only give Gabe an unwarranted sense of power and authority.
“Never heard of it,” he shot back, quick and easy. I glanced at his face, but he was looking down right then —searching in his desk drawers this time. Then he found what he was looking for and hauled it out—a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label, about two-thirds empty.
“You sure about that?”
McClennan stared at me, then shrugged; all ease and edges now that the mollies had kicked in.
“Yeah, I’m sure. Ghost-toasting may be easy money, Castor, but I don’t do it in my sleep. Why? What’s the skin?”
“Nothing, probably. But I’m doing a burn there, and your name came up.”
He was opening the drawers on the other side of the desk, bent over again so I was just getting the top of his head.
“My name came up? How? Who mentioned me?”
“I don’t even remember,” I lied. “But someone said you’d been there. Or maybe I saw your name on a receipt or something. So I just wanted to touch base with you, see what you made of the place.”
He slammed a drawer shut and straightened up. He looked the same as he’d looked when he’d opened the door—half blitzed with exhaustion, but not particularly fazed by anything I’d said.
“You didn’t see my name on any receipt,” he said, “because I was never there. If someone mentioned me,
