The Devil You Know

Three

WHEN I FIRST MET RAFAEL DITKO, I WAS NEARING THE bottom of a spiral. I was nineteen, and I’d been in Oxford for less than a year—as a student, mechanically following a degree in English because it was my best subject at school and because my dad hadn’t sweated in shipyards and factories for forty years to see his children go on and do the same.

But despair and nihilism had been eating into me for years. The more I saw of the sad and futile dead, hovering at the edges of life like beggars at the door of a fancy restaurant, the grimmer and more hopeless the whole universe looked to me. If there was a God, my reasoning went, he was either a psychopath or a fuck-up—nobody you could respect would ever have created a universe where you got one chance to warm your hands at the fire, and then you spent the rest of eternity out in the cold. Even when I could manage to forget my sister Katie’s scared little ghost and the way I’d slammed the door in its face, life didn’t make enough sense for me to want to engage with it.

Ditko was twenty-two, an exchange student from Czechoslovakia, which was a rare thing back then (“then” being the hedonistic 1980s, the dawn of the new age of heroic capitalism). With his dark hair and dark eyes, he looked like the bastard son of an archangel and a temple dancer, and he poured scorn on the dreams of entrepreneurial apotheosis that afflicted most of his fellow students. A job in the Square Mile? Retirement at thirty? Fuck that. He was hurrying headlong into life and sex and death with a fervor that ruled out even that degree of calculation.

Rafi borrowed the self-worship of the Thatcher generation, tried it on, and turned it into something graceful and ironic. Yeah, he stole his mates’ girlfriends, smoked their grass, colonized their floors, and ram-raided their fridges, but he paid us all back by giving us tickets to the show. Nobody ever managed to hate him for it, not even the women he scooped up and sifted through like trinkets on a market stall. Not even Pen, for whom he was the first and (ultimately) the only one.

I wonder sometimes what his life would have been like if he’d never met me. Certainly he was already fascinated by the occult, but it was an academic thing back then, because he was too flippant and too sharp really to believe in anything. But in our drunken conversations about the dead—the ones who never leave and the ones who come back—that interest started to quicken into something else. Even as he tempered my bitter atheism with his own agnostic, indulgent gospel (suck it and see, hold your fire, look at the pretty pictures), he listened to my descriptions of London’s ghosts with an enthusiasm that was way too intense to be healthy. I was so stupid and self-absorbed back then I didn’t see it, but I was giving him something new to get hooked on.

I gave up on university just after the start of my second year and set out on the aimless but intense round-the-world ramble that would consume the next four years of my life—my where-do-you-go-after-nowhere tour. Rafi had provided the emotional fuel for that journey—had pointed me and aimed me and lit the blue touchpaper—and that meant, on a practical level, that I probably owed him my life. But I didn’t see him for another two years after I got back, and when I did, he’d changed. He’d turned into one of those guys who hang out in basement bookshops and pay ten times over the odds for Aleister Crowley’s laundry lists.

We had a pint or seven at the Angel, on St. Giles’s High Street, but for me, at least, it was a disturbing and dispiriting experience. What had drawn me to Rafi was that he had a handle on life that I was keen to get close to and if possible to imitate. Now all he wanted to talk about was death—as state, as destination, as source, as trout pond. He said he was learning how to be a necromancer. I told him that was bollocks; just because some of us could see and talk to the dead (I’d met five sensitives by then and heard about a handful more), that didn’t make death itself any less irrevocable. There was a line. Each of us would only get to cross it once, and we’d all be heading in the same direction. I’d never heard of anyone popping back to turn the gas off. I was talking bollocks, of course. But the zombies weren’t widely known about back then, and I’d never come across one.

In any case, Rafi didn’t listen. He was onto something, he said, and this something would make the things that I could do irrelevant overnight. “Quicker, even,” he repeated, snapping his fingers in my face with a wild grin. “As quick as that. Your round again, Fix.”

It was my round all seven times, and I drew some comfort from that afterward. In some respects, at least, Rafi hadn’t changed. He was still an elegant parasite who managed to make you feel you should be thanking him while he scrounged off you. Maybe the Ditko core was still intact under all this other bullshit. Maybe he’d ride it out and find yet another brand-new high.

The next time I saw him was in the spring of 2004. A phone call at midnight dragged me out to a studio flat in the Seven Sisters Road, where Rafi was sitting slumped and blank-eyed in a claw-foot bathtub with the taps running. His girlfriend, who was skinny and wasted, with the kind of wispy white hair that always reminds me of daffodil puffballs, had to top the bath off with a couple of packets of ice from the liquor store every ten minutes when the water started to boil.

“Rafi done a spell,” she said. “Something fucking big.” He’d summoned a ghost, but something had gone wrong, and instead of ending up in the circle, the loose spirit had gone into him. Then he’d started burning up.

I sat with him through that night, listening as he rambled and raged in what sounded like four different languages, trying to get a feel for the spirit that was sticking it to him. By about six a.m., we’d run out of ice, and I was scared that if I waited much longer, he’d just burn himself out. So I took out my whistle, cleared the girl out of the room, and started to play. That’s how I do it. The music is a cantrip, and if it works, it has the same effect on bodiless spirits as flypaper does on flies. The ghosts get wrapped up in it, and they can’t get free. Then, when the music stops, abracadabra, there’s nothing for them to hang on to—so they stop, too. When the last note fades, they’re just not there anymore.

If that sounds easy, put it down to the fact that I never did finish that English degree. In reality, it’s hard and slow, and it only works at all if I can get a real fix on the ghost in question. The clearer my mental image of it, the better the tune and the more reliable the effects.

In this case, the ghost had such a strong presence, it was almost like smoke coming off Rafi’s overheated skin. I thought I had it nailed. I put the whistle to my lips and blew a few notes on it, high and fast, to get things started.

It might just as well have been a gun—something big and heavy, like a .38 Trooper, say—pointed at Rafi’s head.

I sat on the silver-steel floor of the cell while the chill of the metal, never less than glacial, crawled slowly up my spine. A nurse shouted in the distance, something jovial and probably obscene, and a door slammed heavily.

Rafi’s black-on-black eyes closed and then opened again, keeping me pinned in their lazy, mad crosshairs. A smell of stale meat wafted off him, which I knew was because I’d just come from my office over Grambas’s kebab shop. One of the hallmarks of Asmodeus’s presence was that Rafi would start to smell of the last place you’d been, which was typical of the demon’s peekaboo bullshit.

“You’re going to die,” he said again, almost absently, turning over a couple of cards in his sprawling game of patience.

“You’re wrong,” I said, feeling a premature sense of relief. “A job did come my way tonight, but I already said no.”

“Of course you did,” the smashed-glass voice grated again, in open mockery. “You’re still in mourning for your old friend, aren’t you? You made a promise to yourself that you wouldn’t screw the pooch like that again. ‘First, do no harm’—which in your case means ‘Don’t do a blind fucking thing.’”

Rafi’s tongue snaked out and rasped around the edges of his mouth with a sound like newspapers being chased down the street by a strong wind. I suddenly realized that his lips were dry and cracked, flakes of desiccated skin hanging onto them in a light, irregular frosting. I should have noticed that before; it’s another of the signs I usually keep a watch for, and it confirmed what I’d already noted from Rafi’s smell. It meant I was definitely talking to Asmodeus now, and Rafi wasn’t going to surface again unless the demon allowed him to.

Slowly, absently, he tore a huge gash in his own forearm with his thumbnail. Blood welled up and spattered on the floor of the cell. I ignored it. Asmodeus does that kind of stuff for show, but he always makes good the damage afterward. He’s got a vested interest in keeping Rafi’s body in good working order.

“Too late to do much, anyway,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. “The big picture—that’s set now, more or less. And it’s not like you’re even asking the right questions . . .”

There was a silence. When he spoke again, it was in a different voice—almost liquid, with a fluting modulation that was insidious and unpleasant.

“So you said no. But here’s the thing, Castor. You’re gonna change your mind. I’m nearly certain about that. You see, time is different for my kind, by which I mean it’s slower. Feels to me like I’ve been stuck in here for a thousand years already. Got to do something to keep my edge, you understand? So I tune into things. Things that are on the edge of happening. Things that might might might just slop over the edge of the possible and soil the carpets of the real. I know what I’m talking about. After the final no there comes a yes, and you’ll be getting to that before the night is out. I mean, you’re so agonizingly predictable when it comes to your friends, well”—he ducked his head left, right, left—“I think it’s pretty obvious whose tune you’re gonna end up dancing to.”

I took the whistle out of my pocket and laid it on the floor next to me. Rafi—or the thing that lived inside him—eyed it with cold amusement.

“I don’t dance,” I said. “Don’t ask me.”

He laughed—not a nice sound at all.

“You all dance, Castor. Every bastard one of you. I never met a man, woman, or child yet who made a real fight out of it.” He stretched out his free arm, made his index and middle fingers into the barrel of a gun, aimed them at my feet. “Bang, bang, bang. If I wasn’t serving my time inside this heap of pulp and gristle, I could make you dance. But since I am . . . indisposed, someone else is going to take a shot at it. And this someone else—well, they’re too big for you.”

“You prefer ‘Oh Danny Boy’ or ‘Ye Banks and Braes’?” I asked him, my face set in a cold deadpan.

“Now that’s just crude,” he sniggered. “Give me ‘O Fortuna.’ I like music that sounds like the end of the fucking world. But anyway, coming back to the point—even though it’s not gonna get me anywhere—you should say no to this case, because you don’t have more than a cat in hell’s chance of coming out of it in one piece.”

“You know, I’m always flattered when you put it like that,” I told him. “I shouldn’t take the case? Lawyers and private detectives take cases. The people who use my services generally see me more in the light of a garbage disposal unit.”

Asmodeus dismissed this red herring with a slow, contemptuous shrug.

“Well, if you’ve got the balls to say no and stick to it, then that’s fine—you don’t have a problem. But that’s not where the smart money’s sitting, Castor. And when it comes to the study of human behavior, I’ve got a few years’ lead on you. I started watching when the entire human race only had two balls to share between them—and both of ’em were in my hand. Speaking of which, how’s Pen?”

The sudden shift of subject false-footed me—and he switched to Rafi’s own voice, too, to get as much impact out of it as he could.

“That’s none of your damn business,” I snapped back, which got me a supercilious grin.

“Everything that’s damned is my business,” he leered. “You ought to pick your words more carefully, Castor. Words are the birds that break cover and show your enemy where you’re hiding. Here. Get into practice.”

He picked up one of the cards and skimmed it across to me, so it fell facedown at my feet. I picked it up and turned it over, expecting the ace of spades or maybe the joker, but it was blank on the face side—the spare card they give you in some decks to stand in for the first one you lose.

“No, the smart money says you’re gonna fall for it,” Asmodeus said. “So I’m just telling you—you need to watch your back better than you’re doing. You’re too easy, Castor. You’ve got to kick up some dust once in a while so it’s harder to see where you’re going. Otherwise, you’ll get there and you’ll find a hanging party waiting for you.” His eyes narrowed to coal black slits. “You’re looking to play me back down into the basement right now. But one of these days, you’re gonna come around and play me right the fuck out of here. Set me free. Set little angel Rafael free, too. I mean, those are the rules, right? You break it, you fix it. But you’re no fucking use to me dead. So you got to do three things. Take the card when she gives it to you. Watch out for burning booze and wicked women. And don’t put your finger on the trigger until you know what you’re shooting at. Kiss, kiss.”

He kissed his fingers—the same two fingers that had previously been the gun—and pointed them at me again. I put the whistle to my lips and started to play, and after that, I went at it solidly for half an hour.

When I banged on the cell door for Paul to come and let me out, Rafi was sleeping. It was Rafi, now, and he’d probably tear up the zeds until morning, so there was no point in me hanging around. I took a glance at the wound on his arm just before I left. It was already healed, only a faint scar showing where it had been. Fucking demons. All mouth and trousers, most of the time.

But as I drove back to Pen’s house, Asmodeus’s words worked their way down into my brain like grit into a paper cut. So I was going to change my mind about Peele’s job offer? I didn’t think so. Right then I couldn’t think of anything that would turn me around. The whole business with Rafi was what had made me say my farewell to arms the best part of a year ago, and tonight had just served as a vivid reminder of what happened when I made a mistake. Like I needed reminding anyway. I live with it every fucking day.

But I still carried the tin whistle around with me. I still felt cold and exposed without it. And my pulse still slid up a gear or two when I heard a ghost story.

Grit in a paper cut, ground all the way down, where you couldn’t get it out again.

I backed the car into Pen’s overgrown driveway, crushing a few tough strands of bramble that had had the guts to put their heads back up since I’d left that afternoon. I got out and retrieved Rhona the rat’s cage from the backseat. She gave me a fairly unfriendly look; in her books, I was one of those guys who lead you on, take what they need, and then leave you hanging. All things considered, it was a fair cop.

The key fob played the first bar of “Für Elise” as I locked the car up. I hoped that Beethoven’s ghost was out there somewhere, making the night hideous for the managing director of Ford.

There was no sign of a light. I live at the top of the great, three-story pile, and Pen lives at the bottom of it, but it’s built into the side of a hill, so from this side, her rooms are underground. On the other side, they look out onto a garden that is ten feet below the level of the road. But I didn’t need to see a light; I knew she was in there, waiting for me.

The Peter’s Birthday Party Massacre seemed a long time ago now, and its sting had faded. But for Pen, it was still the big story of the day, and she’d be wanting to know how well I’d gone down. She’d also be wanting to count the pennies.

Well, I’d gone down like the Titanic, and the pennies were still in James Dodson’s wallet. Now I had to face the music—which was likely to be a lot more like “O Fortuna” than “Ye Banks and Braes.”

I let myself in and locked the door behind me. I bolted it, too, and I lifted up my hand to put a ward on it, which is still automatic with me even after living in Pen’s house for three years. But I remembered in time and turned away with a vague sense of coitus interruptus. She’s a priestess now; she does her own blessings.

But just as I put my foot on the top of the basement stairs, I saw that I was wrong about where Pen was. There was a light on in the kitchen, not visible from the street, and there were noises of purposeful, even slightly violent activity.

I walked on through. Pen was sitting at the kitchen table with her back to me, the bare bulb swinging gently over her head in the draft from the cracked window, and she didn’t look up. She was too absorbed in her work. She had her toolbox open on the table in front of her and the remains of a sprawled, broken necklace. I came a step or two closer and saw what she was doing. She was filing the beads from the necklace, laboriously and carefully. A saucer on her left-hand side was full of beads that she’d presumably already finished to her own satisfaction. There was also a bottle of Glen Discount and a glass.

“You can share,” she said, as if reading my mind. “I broke the other glass when I tried to scrub the turps smell off it.”

I was right behind her now. I picked up the glass, took a long sip of the whisky, and set it down again. While I was doing this, I looked more carefully at the necklace and saw that it was her rosary.

“Pen,” I said, because there was no way I couldn’t ask, “what are you doing?”

“I’m filing the beads down,” she answered, matter-of-factly.

“Because . . .”

“They were too big.” She looked up at me now, twisting her head around and squinting against the light. “You changed,” she said, sounding disappointed. “I hope you brought the suit back with you.”

“It’s in the car,” I said, putting Rhona’s cage down on the table. “Thanks for the loan.”

She pursed her lips and made kissing noises at Rhona, who sat up and scratched at the bars.

“Would you put her back in the harem?” Pen asked.

I was glad to. The alternative was to come clean about the party then and there, and every minute I could put that conversation off was one more minute of happiness. But the beads were still weighing on my mind, probably because I’d only just seen Rafi, and this looked so much like something that one of the inmates at the Stanger would do to while away the hours between ECT sessions.

“Too big for what?” I asked.

Pen didn’t answer. “Take Rhona downstairs,” she said. “I’ll be right behind you. I found something of yours, by the way—it’s on the mantelpiece next to the clock.”

As I walked down the stairs into Pen’s basement citadel, I heard something that made a sudden wave of unease crest inside me. It was “Enola Gay” by OMD. Pen often left her old vinyl playing on the turntable when she went out of the room, and the turntable was of the kind that goes back to the start of the record when it finishes. But if she was playing eighties stuff, that wasn’t a good sign.

The door to her sitting room was open. Edgar and Arthur watched me mournfully from their favorite perches—the top of the bookcase and a pallid bust of John Lennon, respectively—as I transferred Rhona from the carry cage to the big rat penthouse where she lived with her entourage of big, hunky guy rats who’d be happy to give her what I’d so signally failed to deliver.

I looked over at the mantelpiece. There was something leaning against Pen’s ludicrous antique carriage clock: a curled-up piece of glossy card, off-white on the side that was facing me. A photo. I crossed the room, picked it up, and turned it over.

I knew roughly what it was going to be—the music and Pen’s mood had filled in some of the blanks ahead of time. But it still hit me like a punch in the chest.

The back quad at St. Peter’s, Oxford—the one with the fountain that tends to run with things other than water. Night: a scene caught in the baleful eye of someone’s inadequate flashgun, so there was no background to speak of. Just Felix Castor, age nineteen, all chestnut curls and strained grin, trying hard to look like he wasn’t eight months out of a state comprehensive school. I was already affecting a long coat, but back then it was a poncy black Burberry—I hadn’t yet joined the pre-Revolution Russian army. And since the coat was made for someone a lot broader across the shoulders, I looked like five foot ten inches of sweet Fanny Adams.

To my left, Pen. Christ, she was beautiful. The photo didn’t exist that could do justice to the colors of her, the quickness and the life of her. In a feathered snood, a red sequined boob tube, and a slit black skirt (marking this as the morning after a party), and with her gaze cast so demurely to the ground, she looked like a hooker who’s just tossed it all in to become a nun but hasn’t told anyone yet. Her hand was raised to the heavens, index finger extended.

To my right, Rafi. He was wearing the black Nehru jacket and pants that were his trademark, and he was smiling the smile of a man who’s got a great secret in him. Herman Melville says that’s an easy trick, but then, he also thought Moby Dick was a whale.

Both Rafi and I were crouching down, each of us with one leg extended behind us, the other flexed at the knee. I remembered that night with a vividness that had never faded, and I knew the reason for the strange pose. We were on our marks, and Pen was about to say go.

“I found it in the garage,” Pen’s voice said from behind me. “After you moved all your magic stuff. It was lying on the floor.”

I turned to face her, feeling like I’d been caught out in something. An emotion, maybe—something unworthy and unspoken that made me ashamed. Pen had the saucer of beads in one hand, the maimed rosary in the other. She looked a little wistful.

“What’s the score?” I asked her, groping for something to say that wouldn’t relate to the photo. I indicated the saucer with a nod of the head.

“The score?” She chewed this over, setting the beads down on the arm of the sofa before sitting down heavily herself right next to them. She seemed to find the words a bit perplexing, unless that was just the whisky. The silence lengthened.

“The match was called,” she said at last, not quite managing the flippant tone she was aiming for. “Rain stopped play. Bloody hell, I wish I was rich. I wish you played the guitar, like Stoker.”

It was a standing joke that had started to lean over and fall down by this time. Mack Stoker—Mack the Axe, Mack Five—matriculated in the same year as us, and he dropped out of university, too, only he did it to become lead guitar with Stasis Leak, the thrash-metal band, and was so successful that he’d already been in rehab three times.

I managed a tired smile, which Pen didn’t return. She stared at me solemnly, then looked down at the saucer of beads, then back at me. “I worry about you, Fix,” she said. “I really do. I don’t want you to get hurt. I went to see Rafi last week, and he told me you were going to get yourself into trouble. In over your head.” After a moment’s silence, she went on, her voice a lot lower. “I wonder sometimes . . . if things could have turned out differently. For him. For all of us.”

“There’s no room for a tin whistle in a hardcore band,” I parried ineptly. But she was talking about the photo now, and her words took me back, unwillingly, to the memory I’d been avoiding.

It wasn’t just a party, it was a May Ball. Overprivileged kids playing at being decadent adults, but with none of the poise and probably not enough of the cynicism. Pen had Rafi on one arm, me on the other, all three of us aroused way past our safety limits by alcohol and close dancing and teenage hormones. Rafi, with his characteristic chutzpah, suggested a three-way. Pen smacked him down. She was a good Catholic girl, and she didn’t put it about. But she countersuggested. We could race across the quad and back to her. The first one to touch her . . .

“How did the party go?” Pen asked, bursting the bubble.

I stared down at her like a rabbit caught in headlights.

“Fine,” I lied. “It went fine. But the guy—Mr. Serious Crimes Squad—paid me by check. I’ll give you the money tomorrow.”

“Brilliant!” said Pen. “And I’ll show you what the beads are for. Also tomorrow. Fair exchange, Fix.”

“The motto of all good landlords in this world and the next,” I agreed.

“Thank God one of us is earning, anyway,” Pen muttered, grimacing around another swig of whisky. “If I don’t get some money in the bank, I’m going to lose this place.”

She said it lightly, but for Pen that was like saying “I’m going to lose an arm.” I knew damn well how much she loved the house. No, more than that—how much she needed it, because she was the third Bruckner woman to live there, and three was a magic number. The devotional stuff she did, the rituals and incantations—her bizarre post-Catholic version of wicca—they depended on 14 Lydgate Road. She couldn’t do them anywhere else.

“I thought the mortgage was paid,” I said, trying to match her off-the-cuff tone.

“The first one is,” she admitted. “There’ve been other loans since. The house is the collateral for all of them.”

Pen only likes to talk about her get-rich-quick schemes on the upswing. The fact that they always leave her poorer than she was when she started is a truth that she finds unpalatable.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“I need a couple of grand before the end of the month,” she sighed. “When the money starts to come in from the party bookings, I’ll be fine. But right now, every little bit helps.”

I know when I’m beaten. I kissed her goodnight, went upstairs to my own room, and threw myself down, exhausted, on the bed. Something in my trouser pocket dug into my thigh, so I arched my back, rummaged for it, drew it out into the light. It was a blank playing card.

After the final no, there comes a yes. And you’ll be getting to that before the night is out.

“You bastard,” I muttered.

I flicked the card away into the corner of the room. Turned out the light and went to sleep still dressed. The number of the Bonnington Archive was in the book, and I still had the envelope with Peele’s home number on it; but there was no point in calling anyone before the morning.