Dead Men's s Boots

her.

But as soon as we hit the runway at Birmingham her eyes snapped open.

Then she leaned forward in her seat and dry-heaved for a good long time.

16

The Birmingham in Alabama took its name and inspiration from the one back in England, but as soon as we walked out of the terminal into the heavy, humid, soupy, sledgehammer air I knew that comparison was going to turn out to be fanciful.

Nicky had taken care of car hire with his usual near-mystical thoroughness, so that all I had to do at the Hertz desk was wave my passport. We found our car, a trim little Chevrolet Cobalt in a fetching red livery, parked only a hundred yards or so from the airport entrance. For most of those hundred yards, though, Juliet was leaning her weight on my arm and walking like a frail octogenarian. I felt a little light-headed myself: it was mid-afternoon here, the hot air thick and heavy with the day’s freight of sweat and tears.

Inside the car, Juliet slumped back in the passenger seat with her eyes closed.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, her voice faint. ‘I started to feel better as soon as I was back on the ground. But – it’s taking me a while to get my strength back.’

‘You think it’s something to do with flying, then?’ I asked.

She nodded slowly. ‘It must be. It’s not something I’d heard of before. But then, your species only left the ground very recently. Perhaps – I’m the first of the powers to try it out.’

‘What about demons with big leathery bat wings?’

Juliet smiled one of the least convincing smiles I’ve ever seen. ‘They fly low,’ she muttered.

‘You want to find a motel and lie down for a while?’

That got a faint rise out of her, at least. ‘What a great idea. And you’d watch over me while I slept?’

‘Like a mother hen.’

‘Just drive, Castor. I’ll be fine.’

Brokenshire is south-west of Birmingham, out towards Tuscaloosa. We found our way out of a maze of crisscrossing sliproads onto Interstate 59, and headed down through the heart of the city. The skyline of Birmingham’s financial district floated off my left shoulder on a haze of dawn mist, the inaccessible towers of a distant Camelot: nearer at hand we drove past derelict factories with eyeless windows and weeds growing taller than man-height across the endless deserted aprons of their parking lots. Most cities have at least two faces: I was seeing both the Magic City and the ashes from which it periodically gets to be reborn. I was aware that neither was the truth, but they were all the truth I was going to find out this time.

South of Birmingham was Bessemer, but I wasn’t really aware of where the one ended and the other began. After a couple of hours’ driving, with Juliet awake but silent and unmoving beside me, we turned off the interstate and then off the state highway onto the back roads, rapidly exchanging cityscape for something a lot more rural and homespun. The houses we were passing now were made of wood, with big front porches. Some of them were pretty grand, the porches extending to two storeys with burnished banister rails gleaming in the slanted morning sun: others were cramped bungalows whose porches seemed to serve the same function as garages do in England, piled up with all the detritus of living that never gets either used or thrown away. In a yard, a huge black dog tethered to a post barked at us and ran around in crazy circles as we passed. A man who looked like the male half of Grant Wood’s American Gothic couple stood with a pair of secateurs in his hands and – although he had a lot more self-possession than the dog – he too kept us in sight until he faded into the distance in the rear-view mirror.

Tiny townships alternated with vast stretches of open farmland and the occasional patch of forest. There was a lot less traffic on the roads here, so I was able to give the Cobalt her head. I was also able to positively identify the car that was following us. I’d been nearly certain it was there back when I was lane-hopping in Birmingham: certainly someone way back behind us had been zigging when we zigged and zagging when we zagged. But the press of traffic in the city and the need to keep my eyes on the road in an unfamiliar car had meant that I never got a decent look at it. Now I could see that it was a big dark grey van with an ugly matt-black bull-bar, the driver and any passengers invisible behind tinted windows.

It kept pace with us as we drove on south and west. It kept a long way back, but then it could afford to: there was no traffic besides the two of us, and the turn-offs were five miles apart.

Brokenshire is a town of twenty-eight thousand, situated in a valley close to a railhead serving a now-defunct copper mine. Literally and figuratively, it’s the end of the line. Where Birmingham mixed affluence and entropy in roughly equal measure, Brokenshire just looked as though it had quietly sailed past its sell-by date without anyone caring enough to mark the occasion. On the map a small creek runs through it, but there was no sign of it as we drove in towards the town square past post-war houses as small as egg boxes, many of them burnished with the variegated silver and red of half-rusted aluminium siding. I guess at some point in the town’s history the creek got covered over. Probably just as well: if we’d had to drive across running water, there would have been logistical problems for Juliet. In fact, in her current weakened state there was probably no way she could have done it.

We parked up in the town square, in front of a prim granite courthouse like something out of Gone With the Wind, and got out to look around. The car got some looks, and so did we. Juliet’s mojo was slowly starting to come back, which meant that the unsubtle aura of sexual promise hung over her again like an invisible bridal gown. We ignored the hungry stares and did a slow, ambling tour of the downtown area that took us all of half an hour.

Unsurprisingly, maybe, Myriam Kale had been turned into something of a local industry. The town’s bookshop had turned its whole window display over to books about great American gangsters, with a – presumably secondhand – copy of Paul Sumner’s out-of-print biography as its centrepiece. It was the same edition as mine: maybe there’d only ever been the one. Beside it was a reproduced photo: the photo of Kale and Jackie Cerone in the nightclub, which Sumner had included in his book. It brought home to me how small a pool of facts and images about Kale was being recycled.

A sign in the bookshop window advertised maps of the Kale Walk, taking in the street on which her first married home still stood, her grade school out in nearby Gantts Quarry, the old Seaforth farm where she’d grown up. There was also a museum of local history, which turned out to be ninety per cent Kale to ten per cent prizewinning pigs. No insights there, either, though: just the familiar photos, the familiar truncated history.

‘I think we’re ready for something harder, don’t you?’ I said to Juliet.

‘Do you mean hard information, Castor,’ she asked mildly, scanning one of the photos with narrowed eyes, ‘or hard alcohol?’

‘Neither.’ I headed for the door. ‘It was just sexual banter. But the nice man at the desk says the offices of the Picayune are on the next block. And since we’re expected . . .’

In fact it was barely fifty yards to the modest two-storey brownstone building that bore the Picayune’s masthead in German black-letter type over the door. It looked like the kind of newspaper office that might have had a pre-teen Mark Twain as a copy boy. The bare lobby smelled of dust and very faintly of fish: that turned out to be because they had an office cat, lean and tabby, and I flinched in spite of myself – recent memories sparking inside my head – as it uncurled itself from a mat beside the open door that led through into the newsroom. It rubbed itself against my leg, refusing to take offence, then looked up at Juliet and let out a long, yawling cry. Juliet mewed back and the cat turned its tail and fled.

‘You talk to cats?’ I asked her.

‘Only when they talk to me,’ she answered shortly.

She let me lead the way into the newsroom. It was a tiny space with only two desks but lots and lots of shelves and filing cabinets. The shelves were full of box files, the desks were groaning with papers and I was willing to bet the filing cabinets were stuffed to bursting, too. The good news about the paperless office hadn’t penetrated as far as Brokenshire yet.

They had computers, though, and the only thing in the room that looked like a journalist was hammering away at one with a lot of superfluous violence. He was a heavy-set black guy in his shirt sleeves, with thinning