Vicious Circle

“I’m not the society pages, Castor. Last I heard, Reggie Tang was over there. Couple of guys from South London I don’t know from fucking Adam. It’s nine-tenths empty, like always.”

“Thanks, Nicky.”

“Yeah, you’re very welcome. We live to serve. Since you’re here, though, there are a couple of things I can tell you about your man Peace.”

I pricked up my ears. “Go on.”

“When I’m trying to get a handle on someone I don’t know, I go on the principle of cherchez le dirt. In Peace’s case, I’m telling you, you could open up a pig farm.”

“Go on.”

“Well, just for starters, he’s done time.”

“Oh yeah?” I was a little disappointed, but it was something. At least it was something if it was recent: ex-cons have got their own networks in the real world, and you can crash them sometimes if you know where to start from. “So how long was he pleasuring Her Majesty for, then?”

“Uh-uh. Wrong time. Or rather, wrong place. This was in Burkina Faso—French West Africa. He got himself hauled in for drugs possession, pissed off the magistrate, and ended up being sent down for two years. Then he managed to grease the right palms, which he could have done for half the price before the conviction, and walked out on a procedural pardon. He was only inside for a week or so.”

“And this was—?”

“Nineteen ninety-two. The year that Unforgiven got the Best Picture Oscar—but that son of a bitch Pacino scooped Best Actor, and for what? Scent of a Woman, for Christ’s sake!”

“Thanks, Nicky.” I cut him off before he could run through the list of top-grossing movies—which would be bound to lead in to some conspiracy theory he was currently shaping. None of this stuff was any good to me: it was all too long ago. Even if Peace had made some good friends in Ouagadougou State Prison, and they’d all moved to London when they’d gotten out, I couldn’t pick up a trail that was well over a decade cold. It was a dead end. “You got anything else?”

“I’ve got plenty.” Nicky sounded hurt—as though I was impugning the quality of his intel. “The West Africa thing, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This guy was a real hell-raiser in his youth—into all kinds of shit, invariably up to his eyeballs. Did a stint in the army—royal artillery—then bought himself out about a day or so ahead of a dishonorable discharge and did the usual street shit for a while. Added a few column inches to his charge sheet along the way—breaking and entering, public affray, felonious assault. Sometimes it stuck, sometimes it didn’t.”

“No more spells in jail, though?”

“Nope. He moved around too much. Jet-setting lifestyle, you know? The world was his fucking playground. He was in the States for a while and he got mixed up with Anton Fanke’s crowd.”

“Anton Fanke? Who’s that?”

“What, you never heard of the Satanist Church of the Americas?” Nicky sounded incredulous.

“Obviously not,” I said.

“Fanke’s one of these religious boot boys, like the Bhagwan or Sun Myung Moon. Only his religion happens to be devil worship. You know the type—gets a million grunts to sell flowers at major airports so he can run a fleet of limos and live in a mansion in upstate New York.”

“Got it. So Peace is a satanist?”

“Dunno. Maybe. I’m just saying his name was linked with Fanke’s. There was some court case they were both involved in, way back. I haven’t managed to shag the details yet.”

It was a disturbing thought. If the Torringtons were right, Peace was mainly concerned with using Abbie’s ghost as leverage to restart a dead relationship. But if he was into necromancy, all bets were off.

“Thanks, Nicky,” I said. “Keep up the good work.”

“Yeah, well, you bought a lot of goodwill. Makes a change.”

He hung up.

I really didn’t want to think right then about the implications of what he’d told me, or about the weird, circuitous threats and warnings that the werewolves had been doling out. Truth to tell, this had been about as stressful a Monday as I could remember. I tumbled into bed, already half-unconscious, and slept it all away.

* * *

I had some really nasty dreams, involving men who mewed like cats and jumped out at me from a variety of unexpected angles, and a little girl who was walking through a maze of gray stone with church bells ringing up ahead of her. Mercifully, the details didn’t stay with me when I woke up.

The headache did, though. It felt like a really bad hangover, but casting my mind back over the night before it didn’t seem to me like I’d overindulged. I could only remember the whisky I’d swallowed to dull the edge of the pain while Pen scrubbed my wound out with TCP and lavender soap.

The wound. It felt uncomfortably hot, but not particularly painful. I prodded it gingerly, and flexed my arm in various directions to see how much traverse it had. There was a little bit of stiffness, but all things considered it didn’t feel nearly as bad as it had the night before. If I were a concert pianist, I’d probably be worried; being the human wreck I am, I figured it would all come out in the wash.