Vicious Circle

“She’s in love with you,” I told her.

“What?”

“Well, in lust, I mean. She’s got a bad dose of that stuff you dish out, anyway, and being as how she’s both devout and straight she doesn’t have any idea how to handle it. You mean to say you didn’t notice how she looks at you?”

“I tune that information out,” Juliet said, but she looked a little disconcerted. “You’re not asking me to feel—whatever it’s called—guilt about this, are you?”

“No.” It was my turn to be impatient. “But think about it. She might not have gotten herself into this if she hadn’t been wandering around in a moon-eyed daydream thinking improper thoughts about you. I just didn’t feel happy about leaving her in there.”

“Her emotions are no business of yours—or of mine.”

“Fine. I’m not asking you to feel guilty. I’m just saying that I feel a little bit responsible for her myself.”

Juliet didn’t say anything to this, which was a pretty fair indication that I’d given her some food for thought. She’s taking this business of trying to be human very seriously. She still finds an awful lot of it completely unfathomable, but she is keen to get the details right and she does have the whole of eternity to work in.

“Look,” I said, “I’ve got an idea that might get the both of us what we want. Let me show you something.”

I stepped past her, pulled the door open, and went back out into the corridor. She followed me as I retraced my steps to the warehouse, and I showed her the open elevator shaft.

“No use to me,” I said. “But I thought maybe you could . . .”

“Yes,” said Juliet. “I could. But why should I?”

“You want to look for your demon, and you don’t want to be watching your back all the time in case these nutcases stick a knife in it—especially not when the siege might turn into a firefight at any moment. So it makes sense if we clean up first and look around afterwards.”

“Just tell me what you want me to do, Castor.”

“You take the high road, and I’ll take the low road. While they’re watching me, you sneak up behind them and take them out with your usual mixture of elegance and brutality. Then we’ll look around and see what we can see.”

I was really impressed with my own performance: my voice didn’t shake in the slightest. You’d have thought I waded into the middle of riots every day of the week—whereas, in fact, since my student days ended I’ve more or less kicked the habit.

I’d expected more opposition from Juliet, but she made a one-handed gesture that suggested she was sick of the subject. She shucked her coat and let it fall to the ground. Roses opening. “All right,” she said. “I’ll climb the lift shaft. And you’ll—?”

“I’ll use the escalator. I want to stop in at Top Man.”

I walked away before she could change her mind, still trying not to think about roses.

The other end of the corridor opened directly onto the main concourse, which was looking as though a hurricane had hit it while it was pulling itself together after an earthquake. The floor was a carpet of broken glass from storefront windows, in which display dummies lay sprawled like placeholders for the dead. Someone had trodden down hard on the head of one of them, shattering it into powdery shards. For some reason I thought of Abbie’s porcelain doll, and shuddered in a kind of premonitory unease. Dress rails that had been used as battering rams lay half-in and half-out of the window frames they’d shattered, and up against one wall a gutted till leaked copper coins like congealed blood. This didn’t look like looting, though. Not that looters have any higher standards of respect for the retail environment, but the crunching debris under my feet included wristwatches and shiny gold bracelets from a jeweler’s carousel that I’d already had to step over. At some point, the sheer fun of destruction had taken over from any purely mercenary considerations here. That told me a little bit more about what I was dealing with—in fact, at that precise moment, more than I wanted to know.

The escalators were right out in the center of the lower piazza, which meant that as I approached them I had plenty of time to look up at the galleries on the second and third floors. The second floor seemed to be deserted, but up on the top level three men were struggling with a fourth in what I took at first to be a good-natured scrum. Then I realized that I’d misread the situation: it only seemed friendly because three of the men were laughing. The fourth wasn’t making any sound at all, because they’d gagged him before slipping the noose around his neck. Now they were tying the other end of the rope around the railings; it wasn’t hard to guess what the next item on the agenda was.