Vicious Circle

“You’ve probably heard a lot about me by now,” Peace said, “and you can take it for granted that most of it’s true. There’s worse, too: things that never made it into the legend because I was careful who I talked to. I’m not going into detail, but you know the sort of thing I mean. I was big for my age—bigger at fifteen than most grown men—so I came to a lot of things early and learned a lot of bad habits.

“I’m not making any excuses for myself. I did bad things because I was stupid and immature and I didn’t care all that much. Saying I was too young to know any better doesn’t make a gram of difference in my book and I don’t see why it should in yours.”

Peace hesitated, as if he was poised at the brink of a revelation he wasn’t quite ready for yet. “I’m not a saint,” I told him, by way of speeding things along. “And I’m not your confessor, either.”

He nodded, but the silence stretched a little further before he spoke again. “It was like—I went into everything just wanting to know what I could get out of it. Screwed people over in all kinds of ways and never thought about it, because people who can’t look out for themselves deserve to get taken. That’s just the way the world works.

“I must have been about twelve when I found out I had the gift. For exorcism, I mean. I’d always gambled: horses, dogs, slot machines—but my favorite game was poker and no one could beat me at it. I’d be sitting at a table with four or five other blokes, and I could look at each one of them in turn, and think—yeah, that’s what you’ve got. You’re sitting on a pair of eights, aren’t you, betting on another one in the flop. He’s got a king high, he’s got jacks over threes, and Mr. Cool over there has got sod all so I can win this.

“But after a while I found out I could do a lot more than that. Instead of just guessing the cards that people were holding, I started to see people as cards—as hands of cards. Live or dead, didn’t matter, there was a particular hand of cards that stood for that person in my mind. That’s how I bind ghosts—I deal out the right hand of cards, and then I shuffle it back into the deck. Bang. They’re gone.

“Like I said, with me everything was a means to an end. I burned ghosts for money, sure—just like I gambled for money. And sometimes if I found a ghost that was still fresh and more or less together, I’d sweat it for what it had left behind when it died that might still be around for me to pick up. Like, what were the numbers on your bank accounts, and is there a little stash of money at home that you salted away against a rainy day and that your missus doesn’t know about?”

He looked at me hard, which was probably how I was looking at him. “There wasn’t anyone I’d have spared in those days,” he said. “Man, woman, or child, I didn’t give a fuck. I did it for the cash, because I went through a lot of cash, and I did it for the hell of it. Because I could.”

He seemed to expect an answer—maybe outrage or accusation—but after going over this ground with Nicky there wasn’t much he could say that would have surprised me. I shrugged. “Okay,” I said, “you were a bad man. Maybe the worst. Let’s take that as read.”

Peace gave a bitter laugh, shook his head. “Give me a break, Castor. I wasn’t the worst, not by a million sodding miles. Maybe I kidded myself that I was, but I was a fucking babe in arms compared to some of the people I met.

“Anyway. I went on my travels, didn’t I? With the forty-five medium regiment first, and then on my tod. Wanted to see the world. Hadn’t even turned twenty and Watford was too hot to hold me. I did Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East. Rolled on from place to place with a few bits of kit in a rucksack, living off the people I met up with and doing whatever paid. Worked as a mercenary after I left the army—not for long, though. I found I wasn’t quite dirty enough for that game. Then I got in with some gangster types and ran drugs for them for a while, mostly as a mule, occasionally selling.

“That was how I ended up in Ouagadougou. I was making a delivery, and I got rolled. Guy says he’s already paid, then when I refuse to hand over he gets a bunch of his mates to beat the crap out of me. So I end up on the street, penniless, and having to keep my head down because the blokes who hired me won’t be interested in hearing how I lost the shit—they’ll just want their money, which I can’t give them because I haven’t got it.

“Could’ve been worse, though. Burkina Faso was the edge of the bloody world in those days—the final frontier. They’d just kicked that crooked bastard Sankara out and nobody knew from one day to the next whether there was going to be another coup or a civil war or what, so people were in the mood to take stupid risks, spend their money now before it stopped being worth anything, and generally let their hair down. My kind of place, in some ways, if you leave aside the fact that everyone was shit-poor and you could get your throat cut if you flashed a dollar bill.