Vicious Circle

There was an upside to his madness, though: he still saw the exorcists—especially the London exorcists—as his boys, his special charges. He gave Bourbon Bryant the premises that became the Oriflamme, because he loved the idea of ghostbusters meeting up and sharing ideas (he was probably also working on the principle that there’s strength in numbers). And when he died, he left his yacht to a trust with Bryant as the first president, changing its name in his will to the Thames Collective. Money from his estate would be diverted to keeping it seaworthy and in a reasonable state of repair, and any London exorcist would have the right to live there at need for as long as they liked, with berths being strictly rotated if too many people took up the offer at the same time.

To begin with, it looked like that might actually be a problem: a whole lot of people liked the idea of living for free in a luxury yacht. But the Collective wasn’t as luxurious as all that: to increase the number of berths, Steiner had the big staterooms subdivided with plasterboard partitions, so living space was cramped and somewhat rough-and-ready. There’d been problems with the administration of the trust, too: the idea was that London-based exorcists would volunteer for one- or two-year stretches so that the burden wouldn’t fall too heavily on a small group. But not many, even of the people who wanted to live on the Collective, were enthused by the idea of devoting any of their time to running it. It was also hard to define who was eligible, because anyone could say they were an exorcist with no more proof than a letterhead or a shingle. In a welter of resentment, recrimination, and mutual backstabbing, the trust more or less imploded. The Collective still existed, but the money that should have kept it in good repair was legally frozen and it was falling apart in melancholy slow motion. It went from berth to berth along the Thames, bringing down the tone wherever it stopped and so always unwelcome even though it could pay its way. The people who lived on it now tended to be people who were only staying in the city for a short while, or who had no other options.

What did I know about Reggie Tang? Just barely north of nothing. He was a rising star of the kind that old dogs like me watch suspiciously and from a distance: rumored to be a very quick study, a bit on the quick-tempered side and very handy in a fight. His dad had been some sort of broker in Hong Kong before the handover; he was a Buddhist, or so I’d heard; and he was active on the gay scene. That was pretty much it. I’d only ever met him once, and the bulk of that had been a frank exchange of views: a shouting match, in other words, on the theme of how far any of the medieval grimoires could be said to be worth a rat’s arse when it came to defining the names and natures of demons. Reggie thought the Liber Juratus Honorii was the dog’s bollocks: I thought it was the most feeble-minded piece of crap I’d ever set eyes on. We didn’t get much further than the is-isn’t-is stage of the discussion, though, because we were both passing-out drunk. I was hoping he’d remember that evening fondly, or at least still have a vague idea of who I was. Otherwise the best I could hope for here was the cold shoulder.

I found the Collective exactly where Nicky had said it would be, at the end of a pier just down from the Artillery Museum—but getting on board turned out to be a bit more problematic because the only way to get onto the pier was through a locked gate with a nasty tangle of razor wire on top of it. I took a look at the lock. The keyhole was a very distinctive shape: an asterisk, more or less, with seven radiating lines that were all the same length and thickness except for the one going vertically downward from the center, which was both longer and slightly wider than the rest. It was a French design, and I was never likely to forget it once I’d met it because the company that made it was named Pollux—and Castor and Pollux are the twins that make up the constellation Gemini. More to the point, I could crack the thing in a minute flat.

But when I rummaged through the pockets of the trenchcoat, I came up empty. I’d transferred my whistle, obviously, and a couple of other bits and pieces that had survived my close encounter with the two loup-garous the night before, but I hadn’t remembered to take any of my lockpicks.

So all I could do was hammer on the gate and shout, and then wait until somebody heard me. It was a harsh blow to my professional pride.

Eventually, though, I got a response. There were approaching footsteps, and then the gate rattled as someone unlocked it from the far side. It swung open, and a face I didn’t know appeared in the gap.