The Devil You Know

They were all clean, too. Not physically clean (although in fact they were that, too), but metaphysically clean. To tell the truth, I was a little spooked by it. It wasn’t just that there were no ghosts—a lot of places get away without being actively haunted. But any place that’s lived in ought to have a few psychic fingerprints on it: echoes of old emotions held in the stones or the air or the dust on the windowsill. This place had nothing. It felt like it had been scrubbed clean.

In other words, it didn’t need an exorcist because one had been through there already and done an immaculate job.

The rooms were on two floors, thirty-eight in all and twenty-one that were empty—still early, I suppose. I was as thorough as I know how to be. I even ventured into the bathrooms, which being the backstage area, so to speak, were a fair bit less polished than the bedrooms. But here too there was nothing to make my antennae quiver, unless the absence of anything suspicious is suspicious in its own right.

I reported back to Scrub. He was leaning against the bar at one end, and all of the whores had casually gravitated to the other end. It wasn’t just me who found the big man’s presence unsettling. When he saw me coming, he stood up, straightened his jacket with a shrug, and led the way back down the stairs.

“Felix!” Damjohn exclaimed, as if I’d been gone for hours and he’d started to get worried about me. He laid down his pen and closed his ledger, gesturing me once again to sit down facing him, but this time I didn’t bother.

“You’re spotless,” I told him. “Whiter than white. Under the circumstances, I’ll be happy to settle for half of what we agreed, since I didn’t have to do anything besides—”

He waved me silent.

“Nonsense,” he said. “Nonsense, Felix. I’m only too grateful you were able to come.” This was overlooking the fact that he’d sent Scrub along to make sure that I did. “Scrub, please take Mr. Castor through to the front desk and tell Arnold to pay him out of petty cash. Felix, a pleasure.”

He held out his hand, and reflexively I took it. That was a mistake.

FLASH. They’re all lined up on the concrete apron behind the factory’s loading bay. Men in green overalls, almost like those that doctors wear in the west, but darker; women in dirty smocks, their hair bound up in scarves. They all smell faintly of vinegar, because what the factory does, in the autumn months at least, is bottle pickles. The captain is happy and strokes my hair. He has to lean down, because even for my age, I’m small. “Which one is Bozin?” he murmurs, and I show him just by looking. He nods. Bozin evidently looks as the captain thinks he should. He gestures to the soldiers, who haul the man out of the line. A middle-age man like all the others, his face stolid and stupid. The captain puts away his pistol, which he has been waving, and borrows a rifle from one of the soldiers. Then he drives the butt of the rifle three times into that stupid, belligerent face while two of the soldiers hold Bozin upright. The blows are hard. The man’s nose is smashed, his teeth driven into his throat, one eye caved in. But when he falls to the ground, he isn’t yet dead. He’s still making liquid gurgling noises in his throat. The captain turns to me, makes a gesture that means “help yourself.” I kick Bozin in the balls.