The Devil You Know

“I watched you as you were watching the act,” he said, his shoulders heaving as he chuckled throatily. “You prefer the steatopygous perspective, because that’s where your eyes kept going. Ergo, you’re an ass man. It’s always good to know.”

With these formalities now over and done with, the man turned to Scrub and the weasel, his hand flicking from one to the other in a brusque benediction. “Scrub, you stay with us. Arnold, you’re back on the door—and tell one of the ladies to come round and get Mr. Castor a drink, if you please. Saffron—or Rosa. Make it Rosa. She offers a rear view that Mr. Castor should find engaging.”

The weasel darted away while Scrub faded into the background—to the limited extent that a man the size of a forklift truck can do that. I stopped thinking about Mr. Waverly, and Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon loomed up to fill the gap. A squat, squashed-down Sydney Greenstreet. In paisley.

“I’m Lucasz Damjohn,” my host said. Luke-ash—not a name I’d ever heard before. “Please, Mr. Castor, you’re putting me at a disadvantage. Sit down.”

I dumped my coat, which I’d been carrying all this while, over the side wall of the booth and sat down opposite him. He nodded as if, along with my obedience, rightness and order had come back into the universe.

“Excellent,” he said. “Did I call you away from anything important, or were you merely relaxing after a hard day?”

“I run a twenty-four-hour service,” I said, which made him smile, very quickly on and then off.

“Yes, I’m sure. Since I started using Scrub as a messenger, everyone seems to run a twenty-four-hour service. And everyone makes house calls. I’m sorry if that was heavy-handed, but I’m not the kind of a man who finds it easy to wait. Quite the contrary. I belong to the lamentable breed who find that inactivity leads naturally to impatience and then to aggression. My formal education, you see, was never completed—and so I lack the inner resources that are necessary to make profitable use of idle time. I need stimulation, or boredom quickly sets in.” He threw me a glance full of speculative concern. “Is that the case with you, Felix? Do you feel that you’re getting enough stimulation in your life?”

Felix? I was Felix now? That came out of nowhere, and it threw me slightly, but with the massive form of Scrub still looming in my peripheral vision, I decided the better part of valor was to let it pass. “I’m not complaining,” I offered by way of nonanswer.

Damjohn nodded vigorously, as if I’d said something profound. “Well, indeed. Nobody is going to listen if you do, so where’s the profit in it? Where’s the profit?”

He stopped and looked up as a woman approached the table. Or a girl, maybe; she didn’t look much over seventeen, although presumably she’d have to have been to work in a place like this. Her face was beautiful: heart-shaped, dark-eyed, with lustrous chestnut-brown hair worn in a ponytail that extended down to the middle of her back. Her lips were sensuously full and glossily red, her skin pale except for a single overemphasized spot of blush on each cheek. Beautiful, like I said, but blank; the gaudy makeup only embellished the emptiness of her expression in the same way that the revealing costume emphasized how little she had in the way of breasts. Her eyes were dark with a natural darkness under the layers of mascara and eyeliner: more bleak than soulful, though. She didn’t look like she enjoyed her job much.

“Whisky and water, please, Rosa,” Damjohn said, flicking her a glance that was brief enough to count as subliminal. “And for yourself, Felix?”

“That sounds fine to me,” I said.

Rosa turned to go, but Damjohn reached out a hand and touched her wrist with the tip of his index finger, which was enough to make her stop and turn back again, looking expectantly at him as if she was waiting for further orders.

“This is a very important guest we have here,” he said with heavy jocularity. “Mr. Felix Castor. In case you’ve never heard of him, Rosa, he’s a big man in the ghost business. An exorcist, I mean. An inspector of specters.”

Rosa’s gaze flicked to me, her face as inscrutable as a death mask. Damjohn looked over at me, too, as though somehow he was making this ham-fisted joke for my benefit. I stayed deadpan. God knew, I didn’t want to give him any encouragement.

“When we’ve finished our little chat, Felix will go upstairs and give our premises a thorough examination,” Damjohn continued after a pause that seemed significant in a way I didn’t quite get. “Tell the girls to keep their backs to the wall, please. You see, Felix is an ass man.”

He lifted his finger from the back of Rosa’s hand, and she left without a backward glance. Damjohn returned his attention to me—although to be honest, it seemed as though he’d been watching me all the time.