The Devil You Know

What was sauce for the goose came near to choking the gander. Damjohn’s eyes, already screwed up almost invisibly small, disappeared for a moment in their own intricate folds as he digested this small touch of warmth and familiarity. But he bounced back again and didn’t stoop so low as to make a whole thing out of it. He changed the subject instead. “In terms of remuneration,” he said, “I can offer you an arrangement that I think you’ll find to your liking.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. When you’ve previously heard a precise sum, and then you hear the words “an arrangement,” or “sweet deal,” or for that matter “undying gratitude,” in my experience, any movement you’re making is in the wrong direction. “The sum of two hundred pounds was mentioned,” I pointed out.

“Of course it was. It was I who mentioned it. But if you wanted to factor in some time with Rosa or one of my other girls, then that could also be arranged. Pari passu.”

So Damjohn was a pimp as well as a club owner. He had very refined manners for a pimp—but then a pimp with a public-school accent could have ended up as a lawyer; you had to give him credit for his moral integrity. I saw what he was doing, though, and I didn’t like it.

“Pari passu?” I repeated, sitting back. “And pro bono publico? Very laudable. But given that we only just met, we should probably keep this on a cash-and-carry basis.”

Damjohn’s manner became a little less cordial, but on the credit side, he didn’t bitch-slap me. “As you wish. But you’ll do the job? Now? Tonight?”

There’s a time and a place for the lecture that I gave to Peele, about how slow and steady wins the race. This wasn’t it. I could take a look around, and I could lay down some wards if it turned out they were necessary. If he had a real problem on his hands, we’d have to renegotiate. I shrugged. “Well, now that I’m here . . .”

“Good. Scrub, take Mr. Castor upstairs.”

My audience was over. Damjohn gave me a slightly austere nod and returned to his figures. Scrub lumbered forward as I stood up, then waited at my shoulder as I drained the whisky in a sacrilegiously quick swallow. He led the way, off to the far right, where an unmarked door stood open in a corner of the room, left strategically unlit. Like the main door that led from the foyer into the club, this one, too, had its own Saint Peter: a slab-face Saint Peter in a rumpled tux. He gave Scrub a respectful nod and stood aside to let him pass through. I followed in his wake.

On the other side of the door there was a staircase, and at the top of the staircase there was another bar. Nobody was dancing up here, or at least not vertically and not anywhere I could see. About a dozen women in unfeasible underwear sat at the bar in small groups, talking in low voices. They all looked me over as I walked in, but seeing that I was with Scrub, they lost whatever interest they’d had in turning a trick and went back to their conversations.

“The members’ lounge,” Scrub rumbled.

Some old jokes rise from the dead often enough to arouse my professional concern, but there was nothing in Scrub’s imperturbable grimace to suggest that he saw the funny side of that phrase. I looked from him to the little clusters of working girls, then back again.

“How does Damjohn want me to do this?” I demanded. The thought of looking under the beds while these good ladies were earning their keep on top of them didn’t delight me.

“Check the knobs,” said Scrub.

Oh lord. I looked at him with pained interest, deciding that there had to be more.

He held his hand out in front of my face, fingers together, palm vertical—the “paper” position from rock/paper/scissors. “If the knob’s like that, the room’s empty. If it’s like this”—he rotated his hand through ninety degrees—“then there’s someone in there.”

“And what do I do with the occupied ones?”

“Miss them out,” rumbled Scrub. “Unless you want to look through the keyholes.”

I let that pass and started on my rounds. I’d been in three brothels in my life—one in Karachi (looking for beer), one on the Mile End Road (in my professional capacity), and the third in Nevada in a moment of weakness I regretted afterward and even during. All three had had a lot of things in common, and this one was cut from the same cloth. The rooms were all one degree more desolate even than hotel rooms. Each one just had the bed, the functional center of the room, a table with a few girly magazines strewn across it like holiday brochures (“you’re going to Brighton again this year, but would you like to see Paris, Rome, and the Algarve?”) and a small pedal bin with a thick plastic bag as a liner. There were no pictures on the walls and no ornaments on the bedside tables. No Gideon Bibles, either—this wasn’t the sort of place where either clients or employees let the distant prospect of salvation get in the way of the job in hand.