Vicious Circle

“Easy! Easy, Castor! I won’t heal! I won’t heal!”

“Easy? You fucking bushwhacked me, you maniac!”

“I wanted to make sure you weren’t going to kill me.”

“What?” I lowered the gun, pained and exasperated. “Nicky, you’re already dead. Did you forget that? Killing you would be fucking futile.”

“To damage me, then.” He was trying to get his legs under him and stand up without using his hands, which were still high in the air.

“Damage you. Right.” I crossed to the window and tried to open it. Nothing doing: the sash was nailed down solid. I smashed it instead, raising a wail of indignation from Nicky, and dropped the gun out of the window onto the weed-choked sprawl of asphalt that used to be the cinema’s car park—a party favor for the next courting couple who decided to take a walk through the long grass.

Then I turned to face him again. He lowered his hands and came across to look out of the window, then favored me with a resentful scowl. I noticed for the first time that he was wearing a butcher’s apron over his usual Zegna suit. It was an odd and unsettling combination, even though the stains on it were mulch-green and mud-brown rather than bloodred.

You know what you’re getting with Nicky, most of the time. He was paranoid even before he died, and if anything that event had only reinforced his conviction that the universe was out to get him. So I wasn’t really surprised by any of this: just morbidly curious as to what exactly had triggered it.

“Why the fuck would I want to damage you?” I asked him. “No, let me rephrase that. I want to damage you all the time—but why would I choose today to de-repress?”

He was sullen and defensive. “Why does anybody choose a particular time to freak out? All I know is that a lot of people are choosing now. Did that get by you somehow? I thought you had this big umbilical thing going with London. Tuned in to the . . . zeitgeist. City geist. Whatever. So if a whole lot of Londoners eat poison and lose their minds, I thought there was a chance you might get brainsick, too. But I guess today you were receiving on other wavelengths.” He could see that none of this meant anything to me—and also that I was starting to look a little pissed off—so he came in again from a slightly less oblique angle. “You know how many murders there are in London in the average year, Castor?”

“Nope. I don’t. I know we’re behind New York but trying harder.”

Out of nowhere he put on a smug look that I instantly recognized—the look he gets when he’s dealing out arcane knowledge from undisclosed sources. “About a hundred and fifty. Worst year on record, a hundred and ninety-three. There was a big spike last year, but generally the rate stands nice and steady at two point four per annum per hundred thousand head of population. Say, one every couple of days, or just over. Know how many there were last night?”

“Again, no.”

“Seven. Plus two arguables, and six old-school tries. And that’s not counting in the rapes, the mutilations, the aggravated assaults. Sick shit for all the family, in a dozen different flavors. I’m telling you, Castor, we’re way, way over to the right of the bell-shaped curve.” He glanced off across the room, nodded toward the computer workstation. “Take a look.”

I shot him a wary glance, but at least he wasn’t armed now, and we seemed to be back on comfortable territory—wild conspiracy theories and tortured statistics. I walked over to the computer and glanced at the two monitors that he’s got set up kitty-corner-wise in the corner of the room. A whole lot of files were open on the desktop, and most of them were stories from Internet news feeds.

UXBRIDGE MAN SLAIN WITH OWN TIE

WOMAN IN REGENT’S CANAL WAS MURDERED, POLICE SAY

HUSBAND AND WIFE SLAIN, EXECUTION STYLE

SHOOT-OUT AT TESCO METRO

It did seem to have been a bad day—especially given that it was a Sunday, when most people in London are traditionally sleeping off hangovers or washing their cars. I took hold of the mouse and minimized some of the windows: there were more stories behind them, stacked one on top of another in an infinite regression of atrocities.

“You see?” said Nicky. “A sensible man takes precautions.”

“How would you know?” I countered. “So what, you think London lost its collective mind last night?”

“Well, it certainly looked into the abyss. And the abyss gazes also, know what I mean?”

“Right. So you get yourself a gun. How do you know you’re part of the solution rather than part of the problem, Nicky?”

He frowned, stopped in his tracks. “What?”

“There’s an outbreak of murder and mayhem. You get scared, decide to make sure you don’t end up on the wrong end of it, and the next thing you know, you’re waving automatic weapons at close friends. There’s such a thing as friendly fire, you moron.”