Vicious Circle

Gwillam seemed impressed. “I have to congratulate you, Castor,” he said, with a solemn edge to his voice. “You’re easily ruthless enough to serve with the Anathemata, if you ever found the light. But—” he hesitated, massaging the bridge of his nose as if he was raising a slightly delicate subject with as much tact as he could “—why should that change my feelings about Abbie Torrington’s soul? She was consecrated to Asmodeus. What is there to stop some other adept, as ruthless and as lost to human feeling as Fanke, from finishing what he’s started?”

The question took me off guard, but I improvised as well as I could. “Nobody else knows about her,” I said. “You’ve just killed all of Fanke’s crew, and Zucker took care of Fanke himself.”

“True. But what has he written about this on his message boards? Whom has he confided in? What will his . . . parishioners in the satanist church do when they learn of his failure? No, you dealt very cleverly with the immediate problem, but in the longer term the threat still stands. The girl’s soul is still a detonator looking for the right bomb. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Render unto God that which is God’s.”

I opened my mouth to tell him to take his sanctimonious shit somewhere private and render it unto himself, but he hadn’t quite finished. “Yehoshua!” he said, almost in a singsong voice. “Yehoshua, of all men king and of all men brother, I praise thee and live in thine eyes! The vessels being diverse, one from another. What shall we do unto her, according to the law? And when it was day, he departed. Even unto Simon’s house.”

I was too slow out of the gate. I didn’t guess what he was doing until I glanced sideways at Juliet, realizing suddenly that there was a tension in her stillness. She was standing rigidly erect, completely unmoving, though the muscles in her neck stood out like cords.

“That was the cantrip that binds her,” Gwillam said. “Should I speak the cantrip that destroys her?”

I took an involuntary step toward him. The machine rifles converged on me like the eyes of snakes, targeting on movement. I stopped, realizing that I wouldn’t reach him alive.

“Should I speak the—?”

“No,” I said. “Don’t. Don’t do that.”

I would never have believed that he could get the measure of her so fast. But Juliet’s very power lay in filling your eyes and your nose and your mind with her essence: if you’re dealing with an exorcist, that’s a high-risk strategy. You take him out quickly, or you find that you’ve given him all the ammo he needs.

“Then give me the locket,” said Gwillam.

I looked down at the locket in my hand, but did nothing. The tableau stood for the space of three heartbeats.

“Castor—” Gwillam murmured warningly.

“You take the locket, and then you leave?”

“As opposed to killing both you and your demon whore, which I so clearly could? Yes. Take it. It’s the best offer you’re going to get.”

He was right there. I threw the locket across to him and he caught it one-handed. Juliet’s eyes narrowed, but that was the only move she made: the only move she could make.

Gwillam signaled to his men—a clockwise rotation of his index finger in the air that clearly meant “pack up the tents.” They started to file away in good order, two of them carrying Zucker, just as the stained glass windows to either side of the church door blew out in party-colored shards, vomiting smoke and fire up into the night.

Gwillam went last of all, and he lingered for a moment as if there was something else on his mind.

“I told you that we investigated Ditko, two years ago—very shortly after you signed him in at the Charles Stanger clinic,” he said.

“Yeah. You told me that.”

“It might make you feel a little better about your part in all of this if I tell you something we found out at that time.” I didn’t say anything that could have been interpreted as “oh, do tell” but he went on anyway, looking at me thoughtfully. “Fanke had a mistress back then—dead now. In his sexual liaisons he’s always favored the young and stupid. He seems—seemed, I should say—to take a certain pleasure in imprinting his own will on people too weak or vapid to resist.

“Her name was Jane—plain Jane—but she’d rechristened herself Guinevere when she joined the satanist church. Obviously she was living out some romantic fantasy of her own. Most people still called her Jane, in spite of all her efforts, but Rafael Ditko was introduced to her as Guinevere and usually shortened it to Ginny.”

Memory sideswiped me like a truck. Did Ginny see all this? Where is she? Is she outside?

“My Christ!” I breathed.