The Devil You Know

Nicky’s current place of residence is the old EMD cinema in Walthamstow. That gives him loads of room—more than he actually needs, if he’s honest. The place has been closed and boarded up since 1986. Entrance is via a second-floor window, but that’s less inconvenient than it sounds, because there’s a shed at the back of the building with a flat roof. It’s just a case of shinnying up a drainpipe, which, if you’ve learned it as a kid, is a trick you never really forget.

Nicky was in the projection room, as always, at his computer, as always. And, as always, the cold bit into me right through my tightly buttoned-up coat. The air-conditioning units are standard industrial ones, but Nicky has been over them himself, taken them to pieces and rebuilt them to his own more exacting specifications. The blast they put out now is like a wind sweeping off the South Pole across the Larsen B ice shelf.

Nicky was pleased to see me, because I usually bring him something to feed two of his three addictions—say, a bottle of some really good French red and a couple of jazz singles of 1940s vintage. Today I was short-changing him slightly; I only had the wine. All the same, he was cordial. He’d noticed some new pattern in the ephemeral ripples that stir the surface of the material world, and he wanted someone to bounce it off.

“Here, Fix,” he said eagerly, swiveling his monitor to face me. “Check this out. Look where it spikes.”

With his Mediterranean tan and his extensive (if largely shoplifted) wardrobe, Nicky doesn’t look like a walking corpse; he looks like a fashion model who’s hit hard times. That’s a tribute to his absolute dedication—his obsessive attention to detail. Most of the dead who’ve risen in the body tend to wander around in an unhappy and aimless way, getting further and further past their sell-by date, until the battle between decomposition and willpower shifts inexorably past a certain balance point. Then they fall down and don’t get up. In rare cases, the spirit freed from its flesh-house will find another vacant cadaver and start all over again. Mostly they just give up the ghost, as it were.

But that wasn’t Nicky’s style. Back when he was still alive—which was when I’d first met him—he’d been one of the most dangerous lunatics I’d ever met outside of a secure institution, and what made him dangerous was his ability to focus on one idea and squeeze it until it bled. He was a tech-head conspiracy theorist who cut open the Internet to read its entrails; a paranoiac who thought every message ever sent, every word ever written was ultimately about him. He thought of the world in terms of a web—a communal web devised by a great agglomeration of spiders. If you were a fly, he said, the only way to stay alive was to avoid touching any of the sticky threads, to leave no trail that anyone could follow back to you. Of course, he wasn’t alive anymore—a heart attack at the ripe young age of thirty-six had taken care of that—but his opinions were unchanged.

“Right. What am I looking at?” I demanded, stalling for time as I looked at the graph on his computer monitor. There was a red line, and there was a green line. There was a horizontal axis, marked out in years, and a vertical axis not marked at all. The two lines did seem to be in rough synchrony.

“This is the FTSE 100 share index,” Nicky said, tracing the green line with the tip of his finger. His fingernail was caked with black dirt. It was probably oil; he had his own generator, which he’d half-inched from a building site. He didn’t like drawing power directly from the national grid for reasons given above. In Nicky’s world, invisibility is the great, maybe the only, virtue.

“And the red line?” I asked, setting down the bottle of Margaux I’d picked up for him at Oddbins. Nicky doesn’t drink the wine. He doesn’t manufacture any stomach enzymes anymore, so he wouldn’t be able to metabolize it. He says he can still smell it, though—and he’s built up a nose for the expensive stuff.

He shot me a slightly defensive look. “The red line is a bit of an artifact,” he admitted. “It plots the first and final readings of pro-EU legislation, or a statement by any government front-bencher in favor of greater European integration.”

I bent low to get a better look. Nicky smelled of Old Spice and embalming fluid—not of decay, because his body was not so much a temple as a fortress, and no crack in a fortress can be considered small. All the same, I liked it better when he had his rig set up down in the cinema’s main auditorium, which has better through-drafts.

“Okay,” I said. “The red line is a little out of phase. It spikes earlier.”

“Earlier, right, right,” Nicky agreed, nodding excitedly. “Two to three days earlier in most cases. Up to a week, sometimes. If you plot the recession line, the correspondence is even closer. Every time, Fix. Every fucking hail-Mary-full-of-grace time.”

I tried to get my head around this. “So you’re saying—”

“That there’s a causal link. Obviously.”