Heavenly Pleasures (15 page)

We distributed the bread between all the trays for different restaurants and Megan honked merrily as she gunned her rickshaw engine.

‘He really likes being here,’ she assured me. ‘He’ll be back.’

I hoped she was right. And I could still do the day’s baking by myself, which was cheering in a way. I had stacked the shop racks before Goss arrived to open the place to the public.

‘Where’s Jason?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said grimly, and she didn’t ask any more.

I was just resolving to fire the little bastard as soon as I saw him again when Daniel came walking down Calico Alley, with Chas Li at his side. He was carrying something, a mannequin, perhaps, with legs that dangled and a head that lolled.

But it wasn’t a mannequin. It was Jason. Daniel put him down on the Mouse Police’s stack of flour sacks. He was filthy and moaning.

‘What’s happened to him?’ I asked.

‘Too big a hit,’ said Daniel. ‘Often happens when they go back for a taste. They take the same amount that they took before and their system won’t tolerate it. He’s been narcanned on the spot. Should come out of it soon. We found him in a skip behind the market.’

‘I found him,’ corrected Chas. ‘But I don’t understand. I swear he never meant to get back on the gear.’

‘If you look at his arm,’ said Daniel, ‘you will see the fresh puncture mark amongst all those old tracks.’

Chas stuck to his opinion.‘Yeah, but he came to help me unpack. And he did. I sold all my shirts before anyone noticed I was there and we took off for some food. Some of the guys he used to know were at the food van and Jason bought them all a hamburger. They talked for a while then he said he had to get back and I thought he left. But one of the losers said something about him, that people had been looking for him, and I got worried so I went searching for him this morning when I had another load to collect. I heard him in that skip. He was groaning. And then Daniel came with the Soup Run and I made him look inside.’

‘And I got an ambulance and they gave him narcan. Then I brought him here because I don’t want him in hospital.’

‘Jason?’ I asked, shaking him not very gently by the shoulder. ‘Jason?’

His eyes opened a slit and then closed again. He smelt like he had indeed spent the night in a garbage skip. Daniel was looking like a dark angel who finds his charges very obstinately bent on their own destruction.

‘He’ll be thirsty,’ he said. ‘Get some water, Corinna, will you? Thanks for coming along, Chas.’

‘No probs,’ said Chas. ‘I’ll just go and see how my brother Kep is doing. Then I need to get back …’

‘Of course,’ said Daniel. Chas went. He stopped at the door.

‘Don’t be too mad with him,’ he said to me. ‘He didn’t mean to, I’ll swear.’

‘All right,’ I said, and Chas went out, borrowing a muffin on the way.

Jason moaned. I was not feeling sympathetic. But heroin addicts will be heroin addicts and he did seem to be in distress. I knelt down and raised his head on my arm.

‘Drink some water,’ I said. He drank. I held him until he was steady enough to sit up and take the cup.

‘Look at his wrists,’ said Daniel abruptly. I looked. They had red rings around them, darkening even as I looked.

I was so angry with Jason that I could barely speak. ‘He’s bruised all over, to judge from what I can see.’

Daniel said, ‘Excuse me,’ and caught me by the wrist. ‘Struggle,’ he said, and I struggled as he tried to lay my arm out flat, endeavouring to straighten my elbow. When he let me go I had red marks on my wrist and forearm in identical places to my narcanned apprentice. I stared at them.

‘Jesus, Daniel, do you mean someone did this to him?’ My fury with Jason needed another place to go and it had found one. ‘Someone held him down and injected him with heroin?’

‘At least two someones,’ Daniel answered. ‘Jason’s agile and strong and wary. It would have needed two of them.’

‘And you will help me kill them?’ I asked politely.

‘With pleasure,’ he grinned mirthlessly, showing white teeth.

‘How much is this going to set him back?’ I asked. ‘Will he go straight back to what he was?’

‘No telling,’ Daniel answered. Jason drank the rest of the water and found his voice.

‘Sorry,’ he said abjectly, and began to cry. ‘Sorry, Corinna.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said, patting his hair into which squashed plums had infiltrated. ‘It wasn’t your fault, Jason.’

‘Went there to big-note myself,’ he mumbled. ‘Show the guys that I could make it. Then they caught me. Two of them. The Twins, Daniel, it was the Twins. And they shot me full of gear and asked me questions, and I told them, I told them all they wanted to know. Oh, shit,’ said Jason, and burst into painful weeping which racked his thin body like convulsions.

I let him cry for a few minutes.

‘Right, into my bath,’ I ordered. ‘Breakfast at Cafe Delicious. Stuff those clothes into the washer.’

‘You aren’t going to sack me?’ he asked pathetically, squinting out of his one good eye. There were streaks of dead fruit on his face.

‘No,’ I said. He dragged me close to hear a dark secret.

‘I liked it,’ he whispered. ‘I liked it. It felt good.’

‘Of course it did,’ I said. ‘That’s why you ended up an addict in the first place. That doesn’t mean that you are an addict now, does it? Come along, there’s bread to sell. Daniel, can you help Jason? Hot water and the antiseptic soap will make some of those bruises better and there’s betadine and the bruise ointment in my bathroom. Bustle along, gentlemen, time’s a-wasting.’

For some reason, Daniel hugged me. I went into the bakery and explained what had happened to Goss, who was shocked.

‘Have you seen any hulking big middle-aged men with moustaches around?’ I asked her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Moustaches are gross.’

That seemed to dispose of moustaches as a secondary sexual attractant.

‘If you do, come and tell me right away. Daniel is looking after Jason and then we have to go to the prison again, though I hope it will be for the last time, God have mercy on us, as Sister Mary would say. Can you manage the shop? I’ve sent out all the stuff with the carrier. And have you got a big cross and another clunky silver pendant I can borrow?’

‘I can manage,’ she said. ‘I just sell bread until there isn’t any left and then I shut up shop. I can even do the banking, now. Is Jason going to be all right?’

‘I don’t know. As soon as he can tell us a coherent story, we’ll call Lepidoptera and he can tell it to her. And the persons who did this to him are going to be really sorry.’

‘You go, Corinna!’ Goss encouraged me. ‘I didn’t like Jason to start with but he sort of grows on you. Like I’ll get you the stuff,’ she said, and went out. Goss and Kylie buy jewellery as some people buy drugs—relentlessly. When Goss came back with a silver cross which would have repelled both vampires and werewolves—a sort of all purpose talisman—I hung it round my neck, along with a heavy Aquarius symbol which I tucked into my shirt.Then Iwent upstairs to find out how the patient was doing.

Splashing announced that Daniel had inserted Jason into a hot bath. I could smell Dettol. I expected that it would sting but the splashing did not subside. Daniel came out, rolling down his sleeves.

‘He’s filthy in a way which words cannot properly describe,’ he told me. ‘His clothes are in the washer even as we speak and I think we may have to shoot his sneakers before they go out and cause untold harm.’

‘Agreed,’ I said.

‘And as for his state of mind, he just now told me that he was starving hungry, and I consider that a hopeful sign.’

‘Good. Get him dried and dressed in his baker’s clothes, and feed him a trucker’s special. Then leave him in the bakery. Goss will look after him. She’s actually sorry that he’s hurt, which is more than I would have expected of Goss. I’ve got to practise my Darren speech.’

‘I wish I knew what you and the respected Sir John Holt had in mind,’ he said quizzically.

‘Sorry. How was your chess game?’

‘It’s a wonderful game, the Immortal, as you saw,’ he told me. ‘We had excellent Chinese food which Jon cooked, and next week we are going to play the Evergreen game. Jon, like you, doesn’t play chess.Then it was lucky that I was the heavy on the Soup Run last night, because that brought me to the Vic market just in time for Chas to grab me and make me lift the lid off that skip.’

‘Meroe would say that it was Meant,’ I said.

‘Probably was,’ he agreed.

We parted. Me to the bakery, he to continue with Jason’s ablutions. The morning had been full of incident and it wasn’t nine o’clock yet. Mrs Dawson came in, a picture in a dark peach jumper and dark brown trousers. Why hadn’t I guessed that she was a society hostess? Mostly because I had never met one before. Now I came to look at her, I could easily imagine her in a tailored gown, making the invited artists comfortable, listening to everyone, intercepting quarrels before they began, even arranging the food and drinks and making sure that vegetarians were catered for and that the cook remembered that Mrs Ambassador Thing was allergic to peanuts. She was born to run a large establishment. Perhaps she had indeed just got tired of it. Her children were grown and gone and her husband was dead. And everyone, without exception, gets sick of artists eventually.

I supplied her with a blueberry muffin and a loaf of rye.

‘A fine morning, Corinna,’ she said.

‘So it is,’ I lied. I hadn’t even looked at the morning. She patted my hand decisively.

‘You should always notice what sort of morning it is, Corinna,’ she told me. ‘We only get a certain number of mornings.’

That was true enough. Goss and I supplied the early morning crowd. People still bought my muffins, though they wouldn’t know until they bit into them that Jason hadn’t made them. Then, I feared, they would know. I heard Jason and Daniel go out the back door to Cafe Delicious. A good solid meal inside the boy would make him feel much better. Poor Jason. He had told them everything they asked when they had raped his veins with that needle full of chemical joy. What had they asked? What did they want to know which Jason might be expected to know?

I was getting angry again. I checked the washer. It was groaning. I saw its point. Had they got Jason’s keys? He only had the keys to the bakery door and in any case it could not be opened if I shot the bolts. They couldn’t copy them because they were security keys which needed the permission of the keyholder—what was I saying? These were people who didn’t ask for permission. They took.

No, here was Jason’s wallet, his keys and … what did I have here? It was a small tinfoil package. I scrabbled it open. It contained maybe a saltspoon full of white powder. The bastards. They had reawakened an addiction, and they meant him to find this in his pocket, an unbearable temptation. I dropped the foil into a plastic bag and put it in my desk, turning the key in the lock. Letty White needed to see this. And Jason didn’t.

Of course, he could have bought it for himself, or some of his loser friends might have given it to him. In any case, it was staying out of his reach. The Twins would keep for the present.

I gathered my big thick book, bound in black leather, and checked that my script was still inside. I was gambling that Darren the God Boy was Latin illiterate, and also that he really wasn’t possessed, because I don’t believe in possession except as a plot device. And not in the kind of book which I customarily read. I hoped I was right.

Jason came back into the bakery. He was clean and shiny and fully fed and he launched himself at me and gave me one of his lightning, throttling hugs.

‘Thanks,’ he said. I hugged him. I could still feel all his ribs. It was going to take more than the heroic efforts of Cafe Delicious to make Jason look like Robby Coltrane any time soon. He was vibrating a little, not badly enough to call it a tremor.

‘You all right to be left?’ I asked. ‘Daniel and I need to go to MAP. To disenchant Darren the God Boy.’

‘I’m all right,’ he mumbled.

‘Help Goss,’ I instructed, and we went out into the alley, where Sister Mary’s small blue indestructible Mazda squatted like a heap of old wreckage waiting for the tow truck.

It was terrifying, driving with Sister Mary. She steered mostly by faith, which was also all that was holding the car together—with perhaps some rubber cement and a few bits of wire.

‘I always worry that the car will find out I’m a Jew and divine protection will be withdrawn,’ Daniel said as we scooted around a corner.

‘Not to worry,’ Sister Mary sang out over the crunching of the gears. ‘This is an ecumenical vehicle!’

‘Falls to pieces in every religion,’ I said, reaching for the panic strap. It broke off in my hand.

I was still staring at it as we pulled up outside MAP and got out. Daniel rewired one of the doors, which had fallen off its hinges when he unwisely tried to open it. Sister Mary consulted Halloran, who was waiting at the door.

‘All set?’ she asked.

‘This had better work,’ he said, leading us through the security checks.

‘It will,’ she said. ‘I have perfect faith in the Lord and Corinna. In that order.’

More than I did, but I kept my doubts to myself. Sister Mary had the two bottles I had asked her to bring and I had my script and my bible. Thus equipped, we went forth to do battle with the devil.

‘They’ve had him to the hospital for tests,’ said Halloran as we walked along the Kafka corridor. ‘Nothing at all wrong, they say, no brain malfunction, no epilepsy.’

‘The malfunction is in his nasty little mind,’ Sister Mary said, ‘not in his soul. Is he still being a snake?’

‘Yes.’ Halloran led us into a larger room, which had a video screen and another
NO SMOKING sign approximately the size of Texas. Perversely, as soon as I saw that sign I longed for a cigarette. I was still addicted to nicotine; ought I to throw nasturtiums at poor Jason? I gave up smoking, he could give up heroin.

There was a table in the middle of the room. It was of lightweight plastic, presumably so it would not cause damage if someone threw it. I put down the book, the bottles of water and the silver cross.