of sight underneath them, instead of plasterboard, there’s a layer of silver and steel amalgam, one part to ten. Don’t ask me how much that cost. It’s the main reason why I’m poor. On the floor, the metal isn’t even covered over. It shines dully up from between old scuff marks.
Rafi was sitting in the corner in the lotus position. His long, lank hair hung down over his face, hiding it completely. But he looked up at the sound of my footsteps, parted the foliage, and grinned out at me from under it. Someone had released one of his arms from the straitjacket and given him a deck of cards; they were spread on the floor in front of him in the pattern of a game of clock patience. Hard-edged, plastic-coated—that looked like a really bad idea in my book. I made a mental note to tell Carla to slap Webb over the back of the head for me and ask him what he thought he was doing.
“Felix!” Rafi growled in one of his more unpleasant voices—all in the back of his throat, gutturals so harsh they sounded like slowed-down shotgun blasts. “I am honored. I am so fucking privileged. Come on in, now. Come right on in. Don’t be shy.”
“He gives you any trouble,” Paul said, stolid and matter-of-fact, “you just call, all right?” He closed the door behind me, and I heard the key turn again.
Rafi was watching me in silence, expectant. I let my coat fall open and touched my fingers to the pocket where the tin whistle nestled, the top inch or so of its gleaming metal visible against the gray lining, like half-cooled cinders. He sighed when he saw it, a sigh with a jagged edge to it.
“You gonna play us a tune?” he whispered. And it was really Rafi for a moment, not Asmodeus stealing Rafi’s voice.
“It’s good to see you, Rafi,” I said. “Yeah, I’ll whistle something up for you in a minute or two. Give you some peace—or at least some headspace.”
Rafi’s face twisted abruptly—seemed to melt and re-form in an instant into a brutal sneer. “You fucking wish!” snarled the other voice.
Well, I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. It never is. With the feeling of a man about to jump up over the top of the trench and go charging across no-man’s-land, I sat down in front of him and got into a cross-legged posture that mirrored his own. I took the letter out of my coat pocket, unfolded it, and held it out for him to see.
“You wrote to me,” I said, deliberately leaving the “you” hanging in the air. Despite what I’d said to Carla, I still wasn’t 100 percent certain whether it was Rafi or his evil passenger who had really been sailing the ship when that letter got written—and I felt like I needed to find out.
Rafi took the letter out of my hand and stared at it for a second with a calm, half-amused look on his face. Flame blossomed between his fingers, shot in an instant to all four corners of the crumpled sheet of paper, and consumed it in a single
“Yeah,” was all he said. “I did that.” He dabbled his finger in the ashes, staring at the ground.
“You said that I was about to make a mistake,” I prompted him, feeling more pessimistic by the second. “What mistake was that, Rafi?”
He glanced up at me again, and our stares locked. Rafi’s eyes were brown, normally; these were liquid black, as though tears of ink were welling up in them.
“You’re going to take this case,” Asmodeus rasped. “And it’s going to kill you.”
Three
WHEN I FIRST MET RAFAEL DITKO, I WAS NEARING THE bottom of a spiral. I was nineteen, and I’d been in Oxford for less than a year—as a student, mechanically following a degree in English because it was my best subject at school and because my dad hadn’t sweated in shipyards and factories for forty years to see his children go on and do the same.
But despair and nihilism had been eating into me for years. The more I saw of the sad and futile dead, hovering at the edges of life like beggars at the door of a fancy restaurant, the grimmer and more hopeless the whole universe looked to me. If there was a God, my reasoning went, he was either a psychopath or a fuck-up— nobody you could respect would ever have created a universe where you got one chance to warm your hands at the fire, and then you spent the rest of eternity out in the cold. Even when I could manage to forget my sister Katie’s scared little ghost and the way I’d slammed the door in its face, life didn’t make enough sense for me to want to engage with it.
Ditko was twenty-two, an exchange student from Czechoslovakia, which was a rare thing back then (“then” being the hedonistic 1980s, the dawn of the new age of heroic capitalism). With his dark hair and dark eyes, he looked like the bastard son of an archangel and a temple dancer, and he poured scorn on the dreams of entrepreneurial apotheosis that afflicted most of his fellow students. A job in the Square Mile? Retirement at thirty? Fuck that. He was hurrying headlong into life and sex and death with a fervor that ruled out even that degree of calculation.
Rafi borrowed the self-worship of the Thatcher generation, tried it on, and turned it into something graceful and ironic. Yeah, he stole his mates’ girlfriends, smoked their grass, colonized their floors, and ram-raided their fridges, but he paid us all back by giving us tickets to the show. Nobody ever managed to hate him for it, not even the women he scooped up and sifted through like trinkets on a market stall. Not even Pen, for whom he was the first and (ultimately) the only one.
I wonder sometimes what his life would have been like if he’d never met me. Certainly he was already fascinated by the occult, but it was an academic thing back then, because he was too flippant and too sharp really to believe in anything. But in our drunken conversations about the dead—the ones who never leave and the ones who come back—that interest started to quicken into something else. Even as he tempered my bitter atheism with his own agnostic, indulgent gospel (suck it and see, hold your fire, look at the pretty pictures), he listened to my descriptions of London’s ghosts with an enthusiasm that was way too intense to be healthy. I was so stupid and self-absorbed back then I didn’t see it, but I was giving him something new to get hooked on.
I gave up on university just after the start of my second year and set out on the aimless but intense round- the-world ramble that would consume the next four years of my life—my where-do-you-go-after-nowhere tour. Rafi had provided the emotional fuel for that journey—had pointed me and aimed me and lit the blue touchpaper—and that meant, on a practical level, that I probably owed him my life. But I didn’t see him for another two years after I got back, and when I did, he’d changed. He’d turned into one of those guys who hang out in basement bookshops and pay ten times over the odds for Aleister Crowley’s laundry lists.
We had a pint or seven at the Angel, on St. Giles’s High Street, but for me, at least, it was a disturbing and dispiriting experience. What had drawn me to Rafi was that he had a handle on life that I was keen to get close to and if possible to imitate. Now all he wanted to talk about was death—as state, as destination, as source, as trout pond. He said he was learning how to be a necromancer. I told him that was bollocks; just because some of us could see and talk to the dead (I’d met five sensitives by then and heard about a handful more), that didn’t make death itself any less irrevocable. There was a line. Each of us would only get to cross it once, and we’d all be heading in the same direction. I’d never heard of anyone popping back to turn the gas off. I was talking bollocks, of course. But the zombies weren’t widely known about back then, and I’d never come across one.
In any case, Rafi didn’t listen. He was onto something, he said, and this something would make the things that I could do irrelevant overnight. “Quicker, even,” he repeated, snapping his fingers in my face with a wild grin. “As quick as that. Your round again, Fix.”
It was my round all seven times, and I drew some comfort from that afterward. In some respects, at least, Rafi hadn’t changed. He was still an elegant parasite who managed to make you feel you should be thanking him while he scrounged off you. Maybe the Ditko core was still intact under all this other bullshit. Maybe he’d ride it out and find yet another brand-new high.
The next time I saw him was in the spring of 2004. A phone call at midnight dragged me out to a studio flat in the Seven Sisters Road, where Rafi was sitting slumped and blank-eyed in a claw-foot bathtub with the taps running. His girlfriend, who was skinny and wasted, with the kind of wispy white hair that always reminds me of daffodil puffballs, had to top the bath off with a couple of packets of ice from the liquor store every ten minutes when the water started to boil.
