The Devil You Know

“And then we never hear from you again.”

“Exactly.”

“I could make life very difficult for you, too, Castor.”

“I don’t doubt it. But let’s make each other happy instead, eh?”

I let myself out. Barbara had very sensibly made herself scarce.

What now? No word from Nicky about the laptop. No way I was going anywhere near the archive again, in case Ajulutsikael the sex demon was still staking the place out. What did that leave?

It left Rosa. I knew the odds were stacked fairly heavily against me finding her, but she could make this so much easier. I was certain she knew the dead woman—reasonably certain that she could fill in the last few gaps for me and give me what I needed to make sense of this mess.

Of course, I had to assume that Damjohn knew that, too. If he was as heavily mixed up in all of this as I thought he was, he’d have put Rosa somewhere where I couldn’t get close to her, so Kissing the Pink was probably a nonstarter. All the same, that was where I had to go.

It was the dead time of midafternoon, when the lunchtime City crowd had evaporated away like a bead of sweat on a pole dancer’s cleavage, and the sex tourists were still sleeping off the debaucheries of the night before. I walked in off the street to find the doorman—not Arnold, fortunately—half asleep in his cubicle and the club itself three-quarters empty. Evidently we were in between dances—the wide-screen TV was showing a soft-core porn movie so old and so labored that it had to count as kitsch rather than titillation.

I was a little afraid of running into Damjohn himself or, even worse, into Scrub, but there was no sign of either of them. A guy I didn’t know from Adam was guarding the inner door that led up to the brothel, and he nodded me through without a look.

“You’ve got a girl named Rosa,” I said to the blonde apparition who was serving behind the upstairs bar. She looked like a centerfold, which is to say that her tan was carotene-poisoned orange, and I was nearly certain she had two staples through her midriff. She flashed me a nonjudgmental smile and nodded vigorously, but the nod didn’t mean anything. “That’s right, darling,” she said. “Only she’s not in today. We’ve got some girls who are just as young, though. We’ve got Jasmine, who’s five foot six and very busty—only just turned eighteen, and you can help her celebrate—”

I cut her off before she could start taking me through Jasmine’s tariff in detail. “I’d really love to see Rosa again,” I said, hoping the implied lie would be taken at face value. “When is she here next?”

“She does Fridays and Saturdays,” the woman said, the smile slipping almost imperceptibly.

“Today is Saturday,” I pointed out helpfully.

She nodded again. “That’s right, sweetheart. Only she’s not in today. She took a day off on flextime.”

Flextime. Right. I kept my face straight because I’m a professional, God damn it. But I knew the next kite wouldn’t fly.

“Do you have her home number?” I asked.

The smile was folded away abruptly and put back into storage for a more fitting occasion.

“I can’t give out personal details, dear, you know that. I’ve got lots of other girls here. You have a look around and see if there’s anyone you like the look of.”

I took the brush-off with moronic good humor, which seemed to be the safest way to go. And then I took my leave as soon as I could without drawing attention to myself.

So Rosa had disappeared. Nothing more I could do there for the time being. Nothing much I could do anywhere until Nicky called. Probably the best thing I could do would be to go back to bed and sleep, because I’d probably need the energy later.

But there was something else nagging at the edges of my mind—something I’d dismissed as coincidence, once and then again. It’s funny how coincidences look less and less coincidental as they pile up against each other. So I called Rich, who was surprised to hear that I was still on the job. “I dunno, Castor,” he said, only half joking. “After that business with Alice’s keys, you’re sort of a leper.”

I rubbed absently at one of the scratches on my arm. “Yeah, I’m feeling like one,” I said. “Keep losing bits and pieces of myself. Rich, remember when you told me about the Russian documents? You said they’d come from somewhere down around Bishopsgate. And you said that you were the one who found them. How did that happen, exactly?”

Like Cheryl, Rich seemed surprised that I was still harping on about the Russian collection. “It was a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend sort of deal,” he said. “One of my old lecturers at the Royal Holloway knew a guy whose grandad came here just before the Revolution. He had suitcases full of this stuff, and he didn’t even speak enough Russian himself to make sense of them. But I thought you said you drew a blank on all that stuff in the boxes. How can it be relevant now?”