A really clean cut. Have you seen the edge on it?? I turned the blade edge-on to her so she could see it in all its scary beauty. That meant I was looking at the flat of the blade, and I noticed now that it had a floral motif on it: leaves in pairs, etched directly into the steel, ran from the hilt to within an inch of the point.
Pen gave the knife an ill-favored look as I put it down again on the sink top. Then I had a better idea: I took a used toilet roll tube that looked to be about the right width and slid the knife inside it. The broad tang stretched the cylinder enough to hold the blade rigidly in place. I was a lot less likely to lose a finger on it now.
?I hate it when this stuff happens,? Pen muttered, dropping blood- encrusted swabs of cotton wool into the waste bin. ?Why do you take jobs that get you beaten up and cut open and thrown off roofs and all that macho rubbish? Aren?t there enough of the other kind??
?The other kind??
?You know what I mean. ?Get that bogey man out of my closet. Bring Granny back so she can tell us where she put the rent book. Tell my Sidney I?ve remarried and there?s no room in my bed for him anymore.? ?
She turned her back on me to wash her hands. It looked unnervingly symbolic.
?I can?t always tell which kind of job is which,? I said, defensively. ?I don?t get any special kind of pleasure out of this stuff.?
?No,? she agreed glumly. ?I suppose not.?
?How?s Rafi?? I asked, to change the subject.
?Still asleep.? She turned to face me again, wet arms folded, face set. ?I?m serious, Fix. You should just walk out of this one while walking is still an option.?
This was a disturbing development: normally when I bring up Rafi it derails the conversation at least long enough for me to get to the door. Obviously we were starting to know each other too well.
?The problem is, Pen, I?m working on a lot of different things right now. I can?t walk out on all of them.? It was the plain truth for once: I really didn?t know which job Puss and Boots had been sent to frighten me away from. The answer could be right there in what they?d said to me, but I was buggered if I could dig it out. ?Someone didn?t close the circle, and a little bird flew the nest.? That didn?t sound like Coldwood?s drug barons. It might refer to the thing in the church, but there was nothing birdlike?or little, for that matter?in the presence I?d sensed there. Abigail Torrington? Maybe. But she hadn?t flown anywhere: she?d been flat- out stolen.
What it came down to was that I didn?t have enough information just then even to guess who wanted shot of me, still less why. But it didn?t matter in any case, because the part of me that?s stubborn and intractable and bloody-minded?which is not a small part, by any means?was determined to stay with this until I knew what it was about. Pen read that conclusion in my face and shrugged, giving it up in disgust.
?Just remember I told you so,? she said. ?So I don?t have to say it later on when something ten times worse happens to you.?
?I?ll sleep on it,? I said. Then I gave her a hug and retreated to my room at the top of the house, which normally gives me a bit more perspective on the world.
Tonight I was too bone weary to think. But before I surrendered to gravity and sleep, I called Nicky. He didn?t sound very happy to hear from me.
?Christ, Castor. What is it, three hours? Even Buddy Bolden doesn?t give you the right to ask for fucking miracles.?
?I?m not looking for a progress report, Nicky. I was just wondering if you happen to know where the
?Thamesmead,? he said, without a pause. ?Thamesmead West. Pier Seventeen, just down from the Artillery Museum.? Yeah, that would be the sort of information a paranoid zombie would have at his well-preserved fingertips.
?Who?s on board??
?No, Who?s on first.?
?Ha ha ha.?
?I?m not the society pages, Castor. Last I heard, Reggie Tang was over there. Couple of guys from South London I don?t know from fucking Adam. It?s nine-tenths empty, like always.?
?Thanks, Nicky.?
?Yeah, you?re very welcome. We live to serve. Since you?re here, though, there are a couple of things I can tell you about your man Peace.?
I pricked up my ears. ?Go on.?
?When I?m trying to get a handle on someone I don?t know, I go on the principle of
?Go on.?
?Well, just for starters, he?s done time.?
?Oh yeah?? I was a little disappointed, but it was something. At least it was something if it was recent: ex-cons have got their own networks in the real world, and you can crash them sometimes if you know where to start from. ?So how long was he pleasuring Her Majesty for, then??
?Uh-uh. Wrong time. Or rather, wrong place. This was in Burkina Faso?French West Africa. He got himself hauled in for drugs possession, pissed off the magistrate, and ended up being sent down for two years. Then he managed to grease the right palms, which he could have done for half the price before the conviction, and walked out on a procedural pardon. He was only inside for a week or so.?
?And this was???
?Nineteen ninety-two. The year that
?Thanks, Nicky.? I cut him off before he could run through the list of top-grossing movies?which would be bound to lead in to some conspiracy theory he was currently shaping. None of this stuff was any good to me: it was all too long ago. Even if Peace had made some good friends in Ouagadougou State Prison, and they?d all moved to London when they?d gotten out, I couldn?t pick up a trail that was well over a decade cold. It was a dead end. ?You got anything else??
?I?ve got plenty.? Nicky sounded hurt?as though I was impugning the quality of his intel. ?The West Africa thing, that?s just the tip of the iceberg. This guy was a real hell-raiser in his youth?into all kinds of shit, invariably up to his eyeballs. Did a stint in the army?royal artillery?then bought himself out about a day or so ahead of a dishonorable discharge and did the usual street shit for a while. Added a few column inches to his charge sheet along the way?breaking and entering, public affray, felonious assault. Sometimes it stuck, sometimes it didn?t.?
?No more spells in jail, though??
?Nope. He moved around too much. Jet-setting lifestyle, you know? The world was his fucking playground. He was in the States for a while and he got mixed up with Anton Fanke?s crowd.?
?Anton Fanke? Who?s that??
?What, you never heard of the Satanist Church of the Americas?? Nicky sounded incredulous.
?Obviously not,? I said.
?Fanke?s one of these religious boot boys, like the Bhagwan or Sun Myung Moon. Only his religion happens to be devil worship. You know the type?gets a million grunts to sell flowers at major airports so he can run a fleet of limos and live in a mansion in upstate New York.?
?Got it. So Peace is a satanist??
?Dunno. Maybe. I?m just saying his name was linked with Fanke?s. There was some court case they were both involved in, way back. I haven?t managed to shag the details yet.?
It was a disturbing thought. If the Torringtons were right, Peace was mainly concerned with using Abbie?s ghost as leverage to restart a dead relationship. But if he was into necromancy, all bets were off.
?Thanks, Nicky,? I said. ?Keep up the good work.?
?Yeah, well, you bought a lot of goodwill. Makes a change.?
He hung up.
I really didn?t want to think right then about the implications of what he?d told me, or about the weird, circuitous threats and warnings that the werewolves had been doling out. Truth to tell, this had been about as stressful a Monday as I could remember. I tumbled into bed, already half-unconscious, and slept it all away.
* * *
I had some really nasty dreams, involving men who mewed like cats and jumped out at me from a variety of unexpected angles, and a little girl who was walking through a maze of gray stone with church bells ringing up ahead of her. Mercifully, the details didn?t stay with me when I woke up.
The headache did, though. It felt like a really bad hangover, but casting my mind back over the night before it didn?t seem to me like I?d overindulged. I could only remember the whisky I?d swallowed to dull the edge of the pain while Pen scrubbed my wound out with TCP and lavender soap.
The wound. It felt uncomfortably hot, but not particularly painful. I prodded it gingerly, and flexed my arm in various directions to see how much traverse it had. There was a little bit of stiffness, but all things considered it didn?t feel nearly as bad as it had the night before. If I were a concert pianist, I?d probably be worried; being the human wreck I am, I figured it would all come out in the wash.
It was about six in the morning, and Pen was still asleep: at least, there was no sound from the basement except for the occasional creaking and rattling as Edgar or Arthur stirred on his perch and shrugged his bony shoulders. Like rust, ravens never sleep. I went through into the kitchen and made
