The Devil You Know

Nine

THERE WAS A CAR OUTSIDE ON THE STREET, WHICH I’d seen on my way in but hadn’t really registered. It was a squat, powerful BMW X5 in electric blue, with tinted windows and a showy, diamond-cut grille, so God knows I should have noticed it. I must have been wandering in and out of the afterlife, which isn’t exactly unusual for me.

It was still raining. Scrub had given me about a tenth of a second to grab my coat before herding me down the stairs. I wished to Christ he’d stop long enough to let me put the bastard thing on.

The big man threw open the BMW’s rear door and I climbed in, with a small assist from his mighty right arm. He climbed in after me, making even a car of this weight and build rock slightly on its wheelbase. There were two other men, both in the front of the car. The one in the passenger seat, who looked like he numbered weasels among his close relations, glanced round at me and gave me a nasty smile. The driver was a stolid blond with a face that looked a bit like Tom the cartoon cat’s face after it’s been hit with a frying pan. He peeled away from the curb with a flick of his hand on the wheel and the breathless sigh of German engineering.

They drove me back into town again, down through Stamford Hill and Dalston, then veering west through the back streets of Shoreditch—a meandering route that had us dipping down past Old Street only to swing back and cross it again, going north. Finally the car pulled up somewhere off Myddelton Square in Clerkenwell, in a street so narrow you could hardly get the doors all the way open.

I stepped out into the rain, now a heavy downpour, with another encouraging push from Scrub to get me moving. The weasel from the front passenger seat alighted, too, and the car drove off again as soon as our feet hit the ground.

We were standing in front of a club with blacked-out windows and a gaudy sign. KISSING THE PINK. The brickwork around the windows was painted dark blue, though, and there was a gilded eagle on a rock done in haut relief above the door—the universal secret sign of old Truman Hanbury pubs bought up on the dead-cat bounce and converted into strip joints—which, of course, was Clerkenwell’s boom industry these days.

I glanced up at Scrub, who caught my look and nodded brusquely. We went inside.

There was a foyer, of sorts. It was a corner room with walls slightly off the true, converging toward the street side. Polished bare boards bore the muddy paw prints of early-evening punters. A man sitting at a desk in a shallow recess off to the right glanced up as we walked in and then, seeing Scrub, ignored us completely. We passed through unmolested into the club.

It was bigger than it looked from the street, with a semicircular stage against one wall, a bar opposite, and a dozen or so circular tables in between. There were also booths around three of the walls, the lighting carefully arranged to leave them in shadow so that from inside them, you could see without being seen.

On the stage, a blonde woman who was more or less naked already was finding some tiny items of clothing she’d missed on an earlier pass and taking them off. A polished silver pole extending from stage to ceiling was her constant support and occasional stage property. A dozen or so guys in tailored suits, relaxing no doubt from a hard day in the City, and a half-dozen more, who looked like tourists, were staring at her gravity-defying breasts with a willing suspension of disbelief. Most were absorbed enough not to notice our passing, but a few who found themselves in or close to Scrub’s lumbering path drew their feet in hastily and then stared at me with a slight comic double take. I didn’t blame them—my torn shirt, now soaking wet, was sticking to my chest, and there was probably still a little blood on my face from where I’d bitten my tongue. I had the sartorial élan of Robinson Crusoe.

Scrub was still pushing, so I kept on moving. We walked right across to the far side of the room, to one of the booths that I now realized was occupied. A short, heavy-featured man who looked to be in his early fifties was sitting there alone, facing us, reading and scribbling in a ring-bound notebook. As far as I could tell in this light, his complexion was both florid and pockmarked. His eyebrows were the heaviest I’d ever seen, and his eyes were scrunched up and tamped down underneath them like two miniature worlds with Atlas’s hairy arse-cheeks sitting right on top of them. He was wearing a royal blue suit over a shirt in some kind of paisley design, and his tie was as wide and as bright as a centurion’s shield. Having been watching Man from U.N.C.L.E. repeats on cable TV recently, I was inescapably reminded of Mr. Waverly.

“So you’re an ass man?” he said to me, glancing up. The blunt words contrasted oddly with the smooth, cultured voice; it was a voice that ought to have been introducing guest speakers or proposing loyal toasts. But that suggests a certain po-faced solemnity, and this was also a voice that smiled at its own pretensions. There was the faintest hint of an accent in it—or rather, maybe, the complete absence of an accent that only comes with learning English from a book.

I just looked at the guy with a solemn frown—as though I was considering the philosophical implications of the question.

“I watched you as you were watching the act,” he said, his shoulders heaving as he chuckled throatily. “You prefer the steatopygous perspective, because that’s where your eyes kept going. Ergo, you’re an ass man. It’s always good to know.”

With these formalities now over and done with, the man turned to Scrub and the weasel, his hand flicking from one to the other in a brusque benediction. “Scrub, you stay with us. Arnold, you’re back on the door—and tell one of the ladies to come round and get Mr. Castor a drink, if you please. Saffron—or Rosa. Make it Rosa. She offers a rear view that Mr. Castor should find engaging.”

The weasel darted away while Scrub faded into the background—to the limited extent that a man the size of a forklift truck can do that. I stopped thinking about Mr. Waverly, and Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon loomed up to fill the gap. A squat, squashed-down Sydney Greenstreet. In paisley.

“I’m Lucasz Damjohn,” my host said. Luke-ash—not a name I’d ever heard before. “Please, Mr. Castor, you’re putting me at a disadvantage. Sit down.”

I dumped my coat, which I’d been carrying all this while, over the side wall of the booth and sat down opposite him. He nodded as if, along with my obedience, rightness and order had come back into the universe.

“Excellent,” he said. “Did I call you away from anything important, or were you merely relaxing after a hard day?”

“I run a twenty-four-hour service,” I said, which made him smile, very quickly on and then off.

“Yes, I’m sure. Since I started using Scrub as a messenger, everyone seems to run a twenty-four-hour service. And everyone makes house calls. I’m sorry if that was heavy-handed, but I’m not the kind of a man who finds it easy to wait. Quite the contrary. I belong to the lamentable breed who find that inactivity leads naturally to impatience and then to aggression. My formal education, you see, was never completed—and so I lack the inner resources that are necessary to make profitable use of idle time. I need stimulation, or boredom quickly sets in.” He threw me a glance full of speculative concern. “Is that the case with you, Felix? Do you feel that you’re getting enough stimulation in your life?”

Felix? I was Felix now? That came out of nowhere, and it threw me slightly, but with the massive form of Scrub still looming in my peripheral vision, I decided the better part of valor was to let it pass. “I’m not complaining,” I offered by way of nonanswer.

Damjohn nodded vigorously, as if I’d said something profound. “Well, indeed. Nobody is going to listen if you do, so where’s the profit in it? Where’s the profit?”

He stopped and looked up as a woman approached the table. Or a girl, maybe; she didn’t look much over seventeen, although presumably she’d have to have been to work in a place like this. Her face was beautiful: heart-shaped, dark-eyed, with lustrous chestnut-brown hair worn in a ponytail that extended down to the middle of her back. Her lips were sensuously full and glossily red, her skin pale except for a single overemphasized spot of blush on each cheek. Beautiful, like I said, but blank; the gaudy makeup only embellished the emptiness of her expression in the same way that the revealing costume emphasized how little she had in the way of breasts. Her eyes were dark with a natural darkness under the layers of mascara and eyeliner: more bleak than soulful, though. She didn’t look like she enjoyed her job much.

“Whisky and water, please, Rosa,” Damjohn said, flicking her a glance that was brief enough to count as subliminal. “And for yourself, Felix?”

“That sounds fine to me,” I said.

Rosa turned to go, but Damjohn reached out a hand and touched her wrist with the tip of his index finger, which was enough to make her stop and turn back again, looking expectantly at him as if she was waiting for further orders.

“This is a very important guest we have here,” he said with heavy jocularity. “Mr. Felix Castor. In case you’ve never heard of him, Rosa, he’s a big man in the ghost business. An exorcist, I mean. An inspector of specters.”

Rosa’s gaze flicked to me, her face as inscrutable as a death mask. Damjohn looked over at me, too, as though somehow he was making this ham-fisted joke for my benefit. I stayed deadpan. God knew, I didn’t want to give him any encouragement.

“When we’ve finished our little chat, Felix will go upstairs and give our premises a thorough examination,” Damjohn continued after a pause that seemed significant in a way I didn’t quite get. “Tell the girls to keep their backs to the wall, please. You see, Felix is an ass man.”

He lifted his finger from the back of Rosa’s hand, and she left without a backward glance. Damjohn returned his attention to me—although to be honest, it seemed as though he’d been watching me all the time.

“So, as you will have gathered, I need to have the place cleaned,” he said. “You can do that, I presume? Put down the vermin? Caulk and seal, so that nothing untoward pops its head up and scares the girls when they ought to be working?”

I played stupid for the hell of it—and because I always like the client to spell out exactly what it is he wants. “Do you mean cockroaches, or—”

“Please,” Damjohn said with an impatient horizontal slash of his stubby hand—an erasure mark hanging in the air between us. “I mean ghosts, Felix. Ghosts. I’m perfectly capable of stamping on cockroaches without instruction or assistance.”

“And what makes you think you’ve got a haunting, Mr. Damjohn?” I asked, bedside manner kicking in again hard.

He grimaced disapprovingly. The woman on stage slid down the pole into a precarious position, sitting back on her haunches with her legs spread wide, and the scattershot applause forced a momentary silence on us. “I don’t believe I told you what I thought,” Damjohn said when the clapping had died down again and the woman had departed. Incongruously, a wide-screen TV slid down from the ceiling over the center of the stage area, showing highlights from what looked to be a Manchester City game. “But women,” Damjohn mused, “have a very delicate sensibility. A curtain blows open or a pipe gurgles, and they think they’ve received a message from the other side.” He tapped the spine of his book, frowning momentarily as if he was pursuing that thought a little further. “For my own part, I’ve never knowingly received a message of that kind. But then, it would be a matter of complete indifference to me if I ever did. Certainly I don’t think a vengeful ghost would intimidate me at all. If some man had a grudge against me, it would be my personal preference to have him dead rather than alive, you understand? I’d see that more as a convenience than as anything else.” He looked at me again, solemn-eyed. Eyebrows like that could provide a lot of solemnity.

“A convenience,” I echoed cautiously. “Right.” I was missing a lot here, enough so I was beginning to feel irritated and hard-done-by. Rosa came back with the drinks and set them in front of us. I watched her with a certain curiosity, but this time she kept her gaze fixed on her tray and walked away briskly as soon as she was done. She did have a cute bum, despite her slim build. But she wasn’t even close to being my type. I don’t go much for the “imagine me in a school uniform” look.

I took a sip of the whisky. Single malt, and good single malt, at that. I wished I’d passed on the water.

“So you just want me to inspect the premises and see whether I can find any sign of ghost or poltergeist activity,” I summed up.

“Yes.”

“Because the girls don’t like it.”

“Again, yes.”

“Then how do they cope with Scrub?” I asked, hooking my thumb over my shoulder at the big man, who was standing behind me as impassively as one of the guards at Buck House.

Damjohn gave me a look of puzzled innocence. “Scrub? You think that Scrub is a ghost, Felix? He looks solid enough to me.”

He evidently wanted me to tell him what he already knew. “Scrub is a loup-garou,” I said. “They used to be called werewolves, although I doubt whether the animal part of Scrub is a wolf. It would have to be something the size of a bull.” I took another sip of the whisky. If the wardrobe that walked like a man decided to take offence at my tone, it would be a shame for this fine liquor to go to waste as well as my head getting broken. “You see, what happens is that a human ghost possesses an animal host, and then it sort of moves in and redecorates. The ghost reshapes the animal body according to its memories of its own original form. It sheds fur, shifts muscle tissue around . . . makes itself look more or less human again.

“It was a French scientist—Nicole David—who first nailed this, and that’s how come we use the French word for it. It’s sort of an open question how long the human shape can be maintained—depends on the strength of the ghost’s will, mainly—but the animal is always going to reassert itself whenever it can. Dark of the moon seems to be the time when the human side is weakest and the animal side is strongest. Hell of a thing. Once you’ve seen a loup-garou make the change, you never forget it. You can try, but you never forget it.”

Damjohn had been watching me keenly all the way through this speech, and I was about halfway into it before I realized that Scrub was a sort of audition piece—a hurdle for me to jump. Well, I’d jumped it, and now I sat back and waited to see what my prize was going to be.

Damjohn smiled and nodded, visibly pleased.

“That was very good,” he said. “Very good indeed. I know another man in your line of business, and he didn’t make that identification straight away—or without prompting. I can see that you’re a man of some intellect, Felix.”

“Thank you, Lucasz.”

What was sauce for the goose came near to choking the gander. Damjohn’s eyes, already screwed up almost invisibly small, disappeared for a moment in their own intricate folds as he digested this small touch of warmth and familiarity. But he bounced back again and didn’t stoop so low as to make a whole thing out of it. He changed the subject instead. “In terms of remuneration,” he said, “I can offer you an arrangement that I think you’ll find to your liking.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. When you’ve previously heard a precise sum, and then you hear the words “an arrangement,” or “sweet deal,” or for that matter “undying gratitude,” in my experience, any movement you’re making is in the wrong direction. “The sum of two hundred pounds was mentioned,” I pointed out.

“Of course it was. It was I who mentioned it. But if you wanted to factor in some time with Rosa or one of my other girls, then that could also be arranged. Pari passu.”

So Damjohn was a pimp as well as a club owner. He had very refined manners for a pimp—but then a pimp with a public-school accent could have ended up as a lawyer; you had to give him credit for his moral integrity. I saw what he was doing, though, and I didn’t like it.

“Pari passu?” I repeated, sitting back. “And pro bono publico? Very laudable. But given that we only just met, we should probably keep this on a cash-and-carry basis.”

Damjohn’s manner became a little less cordial, but on the credit side, he didn’t bitch-slap me. “As you wish. But you’ll do the job? Now? Tonight?”

There’s a time and a place for the lecture that I gave to Peele, about how slow and steady wins the race. This wasn’t it. I could take a look around, and I could lay down some wards if it turned out they were necessary. If he had a real problem on his hands, we’d have to renegotiate. I shrugged. “Well, now that I’m here . . .”

“Good. Scrub, take Mr. Castor upstairs.”

My audience was over. Damjohn gave me a slightly austere nod and returned to his figures. Scrub lumbered forward as I stood up, then waited at my shoulder as I drained the whisky in a sacrilegiously quick swallow. He led the way, off to the far right, where an unmarked door stood open in a corner of the room, left strategically unlit. Like the main door that led from the foyer into the club, this one, too, had its own Saint Peter: a slab-face Saint Peter in a rumpled tux. He gave Scrub a respectful nod and stood aside to let him pass through. I followed in his wake.

On the other side of the door there was a staircase, and at the top of the staircase there was another bar. Nobody was dancing up here, or at least not vertically and not anywhere I could see. About a dozen women in unfeasible underwear sat at the bar in small groups, talking in low voices. They all looked me over as I walked in, but seeing that I was with Scrub, they lost whatever interest they’d had in turning a trick and went back to their conversations.

“The members’ lounge,” Scrub rumbled.

Some old jokes rise from the dead often enough to arouse my professional concern, but there was nothing in Scrub’s imperturbable grimace to suggest that he saw the funny side of that phrase. I looked from him to the little clusters of working girls, then back again.

“How does Damjohn want me to do this?” I demanded. The thought of looking under the beds while these good ladies were earning their keep on top of them didn’t delight me.

“Check the knobs,” said Scrub.

Oh lord. I looked at him with pained interest, deciding that there had to be more.

He held his hand out in front of my face, fingers together, palm vertical—the “paper” position from rock/paper/scissors. “If the knob’s like that, the room’s empty. If it’s like this”—he rotated his hand through ninety degrees—“then there’s someone in there.”

“And what do I do with the occupied ones?”

“Miss them out,” rumbled Scrub. “Unless you want to look through the keyholes.”

I let that pass and started on my rounds. I’d been in three brothels in my life—one in Karachi (looking for beer), one on the Mile End Road (in my professional capacity), and the third in Nevada in a moment of weakness I regretted afterward and even during. All three had had a lot of things in common, and this one was cut from the same cloth. The rooms were all one degree more desolate even than hotel rooms. Each one just had the bed, the functional center of the room, a table with a few girly magazines strewn across it like holiday brochures (“you’re going to Brighton again this year, but would you like to see Paris, Rome, and the Algarve?”) and a small pedal bin with a thick plastic bag as a liner. There were no pictures on the walls and no ornaments on the bedside tables. No Gideon Bibles, either—this wasn’t the sort of place where either clients or employees let the distant prospect of salvation get in the way of the job in hand.

They were all clean, too. Not physically clean (although in fact they were that, too), but metaphysically clean. To tell the truth, I was a little spooked by it. It wasn’t just that there were no ghosts—a lot of places get away without being actively haunted. But any place that’s lived in ought to have a few psychic fingerprints on it: echoes of old emotions held in the stones or the air or the dust on the windowsill. This place had nothing. It felt like it had been scrubbed clean.

In other words, it didn’t need an exorcist because one had been through there already and done an immaculate job.

The rooms were on two floors, thirty-eight in all and twenty-one that were empty—still early, I suppose. I was as thorough as I know how to be. I even ventured into the bathrooms, which being the backstage area, so to speak, were a fair bit less polished than the bedrooms. But here too there was nothing to make my antennae quiver, unless the absence of anything suspicious is suspicious in its own right.

I reported back to Scrub. He was leaning against the bar at one end, and all of the whores had casually gravitated to the other end. It wasn’t just me who found the big man’s presence unsettling. When he saw me coming, he stood up, straightened his jacket with a shrug, and led the way back down the stairs.

“Felix!” Damjohn exclaimed, as if I’d been gone for hours and he’d started to get worried about me. He laid down his pen and closed his ledger, gesturing me once again to sit down facing him, but this time I didn’t bother.

“You’re spotless,” I told him. “Whiter than white. Under the circumstances, I’ll be happy to settle for half of what we agreed, since I didn’t have to do anything besides—”

He waved me silent.

“Nonsense,” he said. “Nonsense, Felix. I’m only too grateful you were able to come.” This was overlooking the fact that he’d sent Scrub along to make sure that I did. “Scrub, please take Mr. Castor through to the front desk and tell Arnold to pay him out of petty cash. Felix, a pleasure.”

He held out his hand, and reflexively I took it. That was a mistake.

FLASH. They’re all lined up on the concrete apron behind the factory’s loading bay. Men in green overalls, almost like those that doctors wear in the west, but darker; women in dirty smocks, their hair bound up in scarves. They all smell faintly of vinegar, because what the factory does, in the autumn months at least, is bottle pickles. The captain is happy and strokes my hair. He has to lean down, because even for my age, I’m small. “Which one is Bozin?” he murmurs, and I show him just by looking. He nods. Bozin evidently looks as the captain thinks he should. He gestures to the soldiers, who haul the man out of the line. A middle-age man like all the others, his face stolid and stupid. The captain puts away his pistol, which he has been waving, and borrows a rifle from one of the soldiers. Then he drives the butt of the rifle three times into that stupid, belligerent face while two of the soldiers hold Bozin upright. The blows are hard. The man’s nose is smashed, his teeth driven into his throat, one eye caved in. But when he falls to the ground, he isn’t yet dead. He’s still making liquid gurgling noises in his throat. The captain turns to me, makes a gesture that means “help yourself.” I kick Bozin in the balls.

FLASH. The woman, Mercedes, has become a point of pride with me, a badge that I wear when I go out at night. Her beauty, her sophistication, the expensive gloss that covers her like a sheath, these are the signs that I’m not a boy anymore. They say to everyone who sees us “Look at me and respect me.” Her very name is the name of a luxury car, a possession that screams out your status to the world. I’m sorry, sometimes, that I have to treat her with such cold contempt, but that’s the very heart of the matter. For me to win respect, I have to show that she needs and merits none. The more I belittle her, the greater I am. At first this is hard. But then one night we quarrel. She tries to leave me, and I beat her. That beating—the inflicting of terrible and unnecessary pain on someone who has brought me so much pleasure—is an annunciation. It’s so hard to stop.

FLASH. The houses that still stand are burning. I walk through the streets at my leisure, because no more shells will fall. I had property here, but nothing that I couldn’t afford to lose; I may even be compensated when the United Nations arrives with all its democratic fanfares and its bureaucratic paraphernalia. I contemplate a house that is about to fall, and I draw this moral. Yugoslavia itself was a house, precariously built and supported by only one beam. When that beam—Tito’s Communist party—was kicked away, it was inevitable that the boisterous children fighting and playing inside would bring the house down on their heads. Their heads, not mine. The house collapses in a shower of sparks and a billowing gust of ash and smoke that envelops me and blinds me for a moment. In the wreckage, a slender hand and arm, burned black—a child’s arm, perhaps, or the arm of a woman of slender build. Of course. That was what I was smelling. I wipe a smut of ash from my alpaca coat and am annoyed to find that it smears greasily rather than flaking off. This has become an uncivilized and tainted place. I walk on, but without hurry. There’s twelve hours yet before the plane leaves.

I jerked my hand away fast, my teeth coming together with an audible clack. That touch—that subliminal data-squirt of impressions—had taken less than a second.

Damjohn stared at me for a long, wordless moment. He knew from my face that something had just happened; he wasn’t sure what. He considered asking, weighing curiosity against the loss of authority he might suffer. I saw him make up his mind.

“I’m sure we’ll meet again,” he said at last, smiling a bland, meaningless smile. Just as he’d done before, he signaled that I was dismissed by lowering his eyes to his book. Scrub, who had missed the whole thing, was already lumbering back across the stage area toward the street door. A new blonde was dancing her way through a new set of lingerie, and the ranks of the mug punters had grown mighty.

Snatching up my coat, I crossed the room in Scrub’s broad wake. I had to fight against the bitter bile that was coming up in my throat. I kept it down. I wished I could do the same with the crawling tide of images and impressions that was still washing around inside my brain. I swore to myself that I was never coming here again, even if that hairy-eyed bastard sent the French Foreign Legion to pick me up.

The weasel man, Arnold, was now sitting at the desk in the foyer. Scrub muttered the words “Two ton” as he walked by, then took up his station on the pavement outside. I found it hard to believe that his presence would encourage the passing trade, although the club didn’t seem to be having any trouble in that regard. The rain had slackened off now, and the evening was once again fresh and blustery. Maybe that helped.

Arnold paid me out in fives and tens with silent, laborious concentration, his lips moving as he counted. I took it in silence and stuffed it into my back pocket. I’m not averse to dirty money, up to a point, but I wasn’t feeling very happy with myself right then. I came out onto the street, hoping but not expecting to see the BMW roll smoothly around the corner and pull up right in front of me. No such luck; there wasn’t the same urgency about getting me home as there had been about bringing me here. Scrub’s heavy hand fell on my shoulder.

I turned. He was looking down at me with a sort of ponderous calculation.

“You use music,” he pointed out, basso profundo.

I knew what he meant. “Yeah, I use music.”

“You play a little tune.”

“Right.”

He touched me lightly on the Adam’s apple with the tip of his forefinger.

“I could rip your throat out before you got to the second note.”

His point made, he lumbered back inside.

I headed off into the night, the chill wind cutting into me and a writhing nest of worms inside my head. I was restless, I was wet, and I was a long way from home. Okay, not geographically, maybe, but psychologically. The weird encounter with Damjohn had got to me and unsettled me—the contents of his head clinging to me like half-dried vomit. In pure self-defence, I pulled my thoughts around to the situation at the Bonnington. That didn’t make me any happier, but at least it exercised my mind in a different way.

I was down to the last knockings of the Russian collection, and if I came up blank, I’d have nothing to cover my embarrassment. Could I be wrong about the ghost being linked to those documents? I’d taken a few swipes with Occam’s razor, and that was what I’d ended up with, but that didn’t make it so. I really didn’t want to have to retreat and regroup with Peele and Alice breathing down my neck on either side.

There were still those last few boxes, though. It was possible that Sod’s Law was operating, and that the ghost’s anchor was just going to turn out to be one of the documents at the very bottom of the stack.

I shrugged into my coat, slid my hand into the pocket by reflex, and felt the spiky, angular mass of Alice’s keys.