Vicious Circle

“Open your coat, Castor.” Nicky’s voice doesn’t carry all that much, so it wasn’t a shout—just an insinuating murmur that didn’t seem to come from any particular direction, but crept along the ground with the sparse tendrils of water vapor. I finally placed him, though: he was standing behind the row of spindly cane trees looking like Davy Crockett at the Alamo—except that the pistol he was holding in his hands was no museum piece: it was a chunky service automatic with a lot of miles on the clock but a very convincing, businesslike look about it. Nicky was looking pretty serious, too; ordinarily the fake tan he insists on wearing gives him a slightly clownish look, but a gun adds a whole big helping of gravitas.

“Have you lost your fucking mind?” I asked him.

“Nope. There’s some fucking weird shit going down in the big city right now, and I’m not planning to be a part of it. Just open your coat up. I want to see if you’re carrying a weapon.”

“Only the usual, Nicky. Unless that’s some kind of coy euphemism for—”

“Do it, Castor. Last time of asking.” The volume was turned up a little bit this time, which meant he’d taken a big breath just for the occasion; when he’s not talking, he forgets to do that.

Swallowing some very bad words, I unbuttoned my paletot and shrugged it open to left and right. “There you go,” I said. “No shoulder holsters. No bandoliers. Not even a machete in my belt. Sorry to disappoint you.”

“If you’d disappointed me, you’d know it. Turn out your pockets.”

“Christ Jesus, Nicky!”

“I told you—this isn’t anything personal. We’re friends, as far as that goes. If I trusted anybody, it’d be you. But we’re in uncharted territory tonight, and I’m honest to God not taking any risks.” His hand made a pass-repass over the gun, and I heard a sound that I recognized from countless movies and maybe twice in real life: the sound of the slide release on an automatic pistol being racked back and then forward again.

I stopped arguing. There wasn’t that much in my outside pockets in the first place; what there was—keys, wallet, Swiss army penknife with things for getting stones out of horses’ hooves—I hauled out and dropped to the floor. There was a second set of pockets sewn into the lining of the coat, though, and with the things that were stored in there I took a fair bit more care: an antique knife with an inlaid handle; a small goblet in stained and heavily oxidized silver, the porcelain head of Abbie’s doll. These I laid down on the floor with care, one at a time. Last of all came the tin whistle. “Just one hand,” Nicky warned as I slid the whistle out and held it up. As far as he was concerned, this was a weapon—and it had his name on it.

I’d had just about as much of this as I could take by this time, and I was in the mood to do something rash. Slowly, with elaborate and exaggeratedly unthreatening gestures, I bent from the waist and laid the whistle down on the bare cement floor. I gave it a little flick with my thumb as I did it, so that it rolled. I knew Nicky’s eyes would follow it, the way your eyes would follow a grenade without a pin. Then I knelt down a little lower. The bucket that held the cane tree at the end of the line nearest to me was just within the reach of my left hand at full stretch. I grabbed it right below the rim.

I stood up in one smooth movement, and the bucket toppled: the tree that was rooted in it went over, too, toppling its neighbor and starting a chain reaction that sounded like the swish of a thousand canes. And Nicky was standing in line like he was waiting for a spanking. Without a gasp or a whoof or a yell—because again he hadn’t laid in any spare breath for it—he went sprawling. His head hit the wall with a dull thud, but that wouldn’t slow him down much. From off to my right, though, there came a different sound: a metal-on-stone clatter, quickly swallowed. That seemed like the better bet, so I made a lunge even before I saw where the gun had ended up, in the spreading pool of sludge from the overturned buckets. Nicky had managed to disentangle himself from the undergrowth and he was scrambling on all fours in the same direction. Being at ground level already he got there first, but my foot came down on his wrist just as his fingers closed on the gun.

“I’m not putting my full weight down,” I pointed out. “If I do, something’s going to break.”

Nicky has a morbid fear of physical trauma: being dead already, he doesn’t have any way of repairing it. All the systems that in a living body would reknit flesh and bone and channel away infection are nonstarters in a walking cadaver. He dropped the gun in great haste and I scooped it up. It was old and heavy—but someone had been looking after it and I had no doubt at all that it would work, even covered in thick brown slurry. Not knowing how to put the safety back on or eject the clip, I aimed it at Nicky instead. He threw his hands up, desperately scrambling back across the floor on his backside.