Dead Men's Boots (51 page)

I didn’t bother to give him an answer, because he didn’t seem to need one. There was a photo of a beautiful if slightly austere-looking
brunette on his desk. I picked it up and inspected it thoughtfully. “So who
did
Mrs. Todd marry?” I asked.

“An ambulance chaser with a death wish.”

“Whereas you—?”

“I’m nobody you’ve heard of. The way I see it, if a criminal gets a name for himself, it’s because he’s stupid enough to get
noticed. But this isn’t a conversation we’re having here, Mr. Castor. It may look like one, but that’s only because it’s hard
to shake off the veneer of civilization. I’m a bit out of practice when it comes to actually hurting people. That was a conscious
decision on our part—switching over to legitimate enterprises as far as possible—but it’s got its drawbacks. You lose the
professional edge.” He leaned forward, putting the front legs of his chair back on the carpet, and stood up. “To tell you
the truth,” he said, coming around the desk, “back in Mile End, I always preferred a knife to a gun. So I’ll probably start
with a knife, if that’s all right with you. Just while I’m easing myself back in. You get more control that way, too. It would
annoy me if you bled to death or went into shock before you tell me what I need to know.”

Aha. So that was how it was. I tensed as he approached, looking for a window of opportunity into which I could shove a low
blow or a kick to the balls. But he stayed carefully out of my reach as he rummaged in his pocket. I expected his hand to
come out with a knife in it, but it didn’t. He was holding a sturdy, slightly scuffed pair of police handcuffs. That was worse
news, in a way.

“Pass your hands through the bars of the chairback,” Todd ordered me.

“Tell me what you need to know,” I temporized, meeting his cold, stern gaze. “Maybe we can do this the easy way.”

Todd shook his head. “The hard way is the way I know,” he said. “And I tend to rely on the product more if I’ve squeezed it
out myself, so to speak. Last time of asking, Mr. Castor.”

I hesitated. There were ways of slipping out of handcuffs, but it helped if the guy putting them on you was a bit of a dim
bulb. Play along or lose a kneecap? I made the call and did as I was told, not liking it much. Unfortunately, Todd was skilled
and careful. He pressed hard, closing the cuffs as far as the ratchets would let him, and even though I clenched my fists
and tensed the muscles of my forearms in the best traditions of Ian Fleming, I could feel that there was no leeway. I was
firmly attached to the chair, and the only ways out were springing the lock on the cuffs—possible only with a pick—or smashing
the chair to kindling. It didn’t seem that likely that Todd would sit still for either.

“Okay,” he said, straightening only after he’d tugged on each of my arms and satisfied himself that my hands didn’t have enough
free play to reach my coat or trouser pockets. He didn’t bother to search me. Probably he surmised, rightly, that there was
nothing I was carrying that could trump a .38.

He went back around the desk, opened the top drawer, and took out a very serious piece of ironmongery. The blade was only
four or five inches long, but it was curiously shaped, with a slight thickening an inch below the point and an asymmetrical
profile. The grip was of black polymerized rubber. This was a knife designed for lethal use in difficult circumstances: a
weapon of very intimate and individual destruction.

“You’ve come a long way from Mile End,” I said, for something to say.

“Oh, yes,” Todd agreed, testing the edge of the blade on the ball of his thumb. “But it’s an easy commute. You’re about to
find out how easy.”

“You think I was stupid enough to walk in here alone?”

“Well, you arrived alone, so yes. That’s exactly what I think. If I’m wrong, I may end up being seriously embarrassed. But
let’s look on the bright side: I’m not wrong, and that’s not going to happen.” He ambled back around to my side of the desk,
where he half sat, half leaned against it. The posture of a man settling in for the long haul. “So who are you working for?”
he asked.

I wasn’t interested in misdirection or strategy. I just wanted to find an answer that would keep me from getting carved up
for as long as possible. The longer I stalled, the better the chance that something might come up that I could use against
Todd. Okay, I was clutching at straws. I knew how bad the situation was, but hope—even pathetic, bargain-basement hope—springs
eternal.

“A woman named Janine Hunter,” I said. “Her old man’s up on a murder charge, and she—”

The tip of the knife dipped, flicked across my cheek. Something warm and wet spilled down over my face, and I was tasting
my own blood.

“Janine,” Todd said. “Yes. We know about Janine.” He sounded so detached, I thought he might be on the verge of wandering
away and finding something better to do with his time. “She works reasonably well as a cover story. Full marks for effort
there. But what I want to know, obviously, is who told you about us. About Mount Grace, and Lionel Palance, and the whole
operation. The way we come back. We saw it happen with Gittings, and then we saw it again with you. A little bit of fumbling
around for effect, and then you go right to where the answers are. Because someone’s driving from the backseat. That’s the
name I need, Mr. Castor. Confession is going to be good for your soul. And for—let’s say—your left eye.” To add emphasis to
the words, he held the knife in front of my eyes and showed me my own blood on the blade. “Then your right, after a very short
interval for reflection.”

So the truth wouldn’t do, I thought. I’d have to fall back on bullshit. “I don’t know his name,” I said. “We only talked over
the phone.”

“Then how did he pay you? I’ve checked your bank account. There’s even less action going on there than in your love life.
So there must have been a meeting. Describe him for me.”

It’s meant to be harder to lie to someone if you’re making eye contact with him. I made myself stare Todd straight in the
face, so he didn’t run away with any ideas about my reliability as an informant.

“He’ll kill me,” I said.

Todd shook his head. “No,” he reassured me. “He won’t. I’ll kill you as soon as I’ve got all the details straight. So don’t
worry about him. Worry about me and about how messy this will get if you start being coy. What does he look like, our man?
Details. As many as you can give me.”

I bowed my head as if I was giving in to the inevitable. “Tall,” I said. “Taller than me. About my age, maybe a little older.
Wore a suit even more expensive than yours. Had a beard. Not full—trimmed. A guy who cares about his appearance.”

“Eyes?”

“Didn’t notice.”

“Hair?”

“Blond.”

I could see only the lower half of Todd’s body from this position, but even so, he couldn’t mask a slight stiffening in his
posture—a coming to attention. Either he hadn’t been expecting that, or it had confirmed his worst fears.

“Build?” he said. He was trying to sound as bored and disengaged as he was before, but it rang false now. Interesting. It
would be nice to live long enough to find out what that meant.

“He was heavyset,” I said. “A bit of a brawler. But an upper-class brawler, obviously. None of your street trash.”

“Look at me,” Todd snapped. I raised my head again. Todd pointed the knife at my left eye. “I was there when you—” he started
to say, but then he obviously had second thoughts. “Accent?” he demanded brusquely.

“Like yours. Cultured, you know, but only the one coat of paint. Something else showing through.”

“Is that right?” He smiled the way a shark smiles. “You saw through me, did you, Castor? Right, right. You’re way too sharp
for the likes of me.”

The knife snaked in a second time, and I yelled in pain and fear. But when Todd straightened again, I was still seeing out
of both eyes. It was my ear he’d cut, the knife blade coming away on a rising trajectory as though he’d drawn a tick. Cheekbone:
check. Ear: check.

“What did you call him?” he asked in the same conversational tone. “This cultured prizefighter?”

My mind was full of dancing devils, for some reason. “Louie,” I said, thinking of Louis Cyphre in the movie
Angel Heart
. What a crock of shit that was. You sort of hope that if the devil’s into wordplay, he’ll show a little more class. “Louie…
Rourke.”

“And how did he contact you?”

I shrugged, trying not to let my relief show on my face. If he’d swallow Louie Rourke without blinking, there was hope for
me yet. “I told you—by phone. He said he wanted to hire me to do an exorcism. A really big one. He said it might be dangerous,
but nothing a good ghostbreaker wouldn’t be able to handle. The money would be good—really good—and he’d give me all the information
I needed to pull it off safely.”

Todd wiped the blade on his own palm, inspected the smear of blood it left there. Then he looked at me again. “Congratulations,”
he said. “You just bought yourself another five minutes of life. Tell me about that. About how this… Rourke prepped you. What
he already knew about us.”

“Why do you care?” I demanded. A dangerous light flared behind Todd’s eyes. It was a calculated risk. I needed a few seconds
to think through the moves I’d made along the way and to scrape together an answer that might convince him. Well, I got the
few seconds, but it was like they say: There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Todd swung the knife a little more recklessly,
and blood poured down from my forehead into my eyes. There are a lot of blood vessels in your forehead, and they bleed promiscuously.
My eyes were glued shut in an instant. Todd opened them again with his thumbs on my eyelids. I blinked through the blood,
up into his wide eyes.

“I care, you fucking imbecile, because it’s him I want to get my hands on,” he snarled. “Not you. What the fuck do you matter?
You’re dead already. You tell me enough to get my hands on this guy who’s calling himself Rourke, and you get to die a little
bit cleaner, that’s all. That’s what your life has come down to, Castor. You probably should have been a watchmaker.”

“All right,” I muttered thickly. “All right, just don’t hurt me anymore.”

It was kind of an embarrassing line, but it did the job. Todd sat back down on the edge of the desk and waved his interrogation
tool expansively. “Then talk,” he suggested.

“He—he told me about the inscription,” I said, and I saw Todd’s shoulders stiffen as he tried to avoid giving away anything
on his face. Overfinessed, you bastard. Hunter had said three days. I did the mental arithmetic. “It’s tonight, isn’t it?
He said it was going to be tonight.”

Todd didn’t bother to answer. “Go on.”

“He told me there were about two hundred of you,” I said, quoting the figure that Moloch had given me. “And that the operation
had been going on for a good few years now. Since”—I tried to elide over the slight hesitation so Todd wouldn’t notice it—“Aaron
Silver’s time. He said Silver was the founding member.”

“Did he?”

I kept my eyes on his. “Was he wrong?”

“The man with the knife asks the questions, Castor. Keep talking until I tell you to stop.”

“He knew about Silver and Les Lathwell being the same man. I guess that’s what he meant, you know? That the guy had always
been there, overseeing the whole operation.” Todd’s lips curled back in a sneer. He didn’t like that form of words at all.
Something else occurred to me: Hadn’t Nicky told me that Silver’s real name was Berg? Les Lathwell had been out in America
in the sixties, learning the gangster game from the Chicago Mobs, and from Berg to Bergson wasn’t a big jump at all. I chanced
my arm. “It was Silver—I mean Les Lathwell—who brought in Myriam Kale, wasn’t it? So there he is, taking the lead again. Actively
recruiting for the cause. I bet a real psycho killer was a feather in your caps.”

Todd raised the knife in his clenched fist but then thought better of it and gave me an openhanded smack across the face instead.
“Are you really that fucking stupid?” he demanded. “Or are you trying to make me kill you before you talk? Kale was a goddamn
disaster right from the start. I told him: She’s sick in the head. For the rest of us, killing’s a means to an end. For her,
it’s an addiction. A disease. She’s never gonna stop, and she’s always gonna draw the wrong kind of attention. She’s the last
thing in the world we want. Someone who shits in the nest because she doesn’t know any better and you can’t teach her any
better. Fucking—madwoman!”

Todd had been right about the veneer of civilization. Something earthy, East End, and broad was creeping into his accent as
his emotions got the better of him. I decided to encourage it. If he was angry, then he was off balance and not thinking straight,
and you never knew what kind of options might open themselves up.

“But it was Silver’s choice,” I said, “because it was his game. Mr. Rourke said if I could take Silver out, then everything
else would fall apart of its own accord.”

Todd laughed incredulously, shaking his head. “Take Silver out? Fuck, if I’d known that was on your agenda, I’d have waited
and let you take a shot. We’d do it ourselves, except he’s too cagey to give us an opening. Him and his American whore have
fucking ruined us. Made us visible again after we worked for years to cover our tracks. Live forever. Live like
kings
forever. Build up an empire, stronger and safer than anything we had when we were alive. That was what was in the prospectus—and
it was his own fucking prospectus! ‘We can own this city.’ And we do! We do own it! We take our cut, and we take our pleasure,
and nobody even knows—or if they find out, they die, and their wives and kids die, and their gardens are sown with fucking
salt. We’ve got it all. But you know what they say about love being blind. He wouldn’t listen to reason. From the moment he
met her, he was a changed man. Take Silver out?” He laughed again, but there was a bitter, choking sound in it. “You should
have fucking said.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “Kale was your weak spot all along. Every time you gave her a new body, she’d kill again…” Todd was nodding,
so I went on. All I was doing was what mediums do: using the stooge’s feedback to refine the guesswork, zeroing in on the
truth so it looks like you’ve known it all along. “The old psychosis showing itself again, every time. But you couldn’t just
stop. Couldn’t just leave her in the ground. Silver wouldn’t let you. So I guess Mr. Rourke was right about the pecking order.”