The Naming of the Beasts

11

From Alexander the Great International Airport I went straight to downtown Skopje. The airport was a strip of tarmac and a Coke machine, but the city itself was pretty impressive. Sprawling along both sides of the Vardar River, and standing on the main drag from Belgrade to Athens, it’s always seen a fair bit of passing trade. Admittedly it’s also had its fair share – maybe slightly more – of wars, pogroms, earthquakes, corruption, industrial collapse and apocalyptic mismanagement, but it’s always managed to pick itself up, dust itself off and start all over again. Today it looks like any other medium-sized metropolis, with old and new buildings jostling each other for position on most streets, and a pall of smog closing down the middle distance.

From my hotel – a Holiday Inn on Pijade Street – I called Jovan Ditko’s lawyer, a guy named Anastasiadis, and left a message. I’d already called twice from London, had the receptionist take down my contact details with agonising thoroughness, then got no reply. If he didn’t call back this time, I’d grab a cab out to the prison by myself and take pot luck. They could only say no. Well, that and beat me with rubber truncheons; but with EU membership still pending, I was gambling they’d be wanting to keep their noses clean.

As it turned out, though, the phone rang less than ten minutes after I’d hung up.

‘Mr Castor?’ The man’s voice was rich and resonant, and held barely a trace of accent.

‘Yes,’ I confirmed.

‘Dragan Anastasiadis. I believe you wanted to see a client of mine.’

‘That’s right. Jovan Ditko.’

‘And you are interested in Jovan Ditko because . . . ?’

‘I’m a friend of his brother, Rafael.’

A sound like soughing wind came down the line. ‘Ordinarily,’ Mr Anastasiadis said, ‘this would be a difficult thing to arrange. Since you are a foreigner, I would have to submit your name to the prison authorities and wait for approval. But today it is relatively easy. If you take a cab to the prison gates, I will meet you there.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Thanks a lot.’ And then, before he could hang up, ‘Mr Anastasiadis?’

‘Dragan.’

‘Dragan. Why is today easier?’

‘Because Jovan’s last appeal failed this morning, Mr Castor. Tomorrow he will hang.’

All prisons I’ve ever been in have felt pretty much the same to me. They may be more or less grim, more or less grey, more or less tolerant of torture and the meticulous demolition of the human spirit, but the same pall of despair and abnegation hangs over them all, a psychic fog sublimed out of shipwrecked lives. For an exorcist, the genius loci is always a very real presence: after my first few minutes in Irdrizovo Prison – an innocuous cluster of low whitewashed buildings behind an endless chain-link fence, vaguely reminiscent of a high-security Butlins – there was a taste in my mouth like rancid tin and a throbbing pain behind my eyes.

Dragan Anastasiadis seemed oblivious to this miasmic atmosphere. A tall fat man dressed immaculately in a light blue linen suit and a cream shoestring tie, he had met me at the gates as promised, shaken my hand and offered heart-felt commiserations that I didn’t really need – I’d never even met Jovan Ditko – and shepherded me past the various guard posts with dispatch.

He kept up a courteous, consultative manner in front of the guards, talking about the mechanics of the appeals process and the hopes he’d entertained that the president might be persuaded to intercede with a stay of execution at the last moment. But when we were briefly alone, waiting in a bare anteroom for someone to escort us through to the maximum-security wing, he let the mask slip.

‘The truth, Mr Castor,’ he said, ‘is that this entire legal process was a farce. The death penalty in Macedonia is available only for treason and the most atrocious war crimes. The man Jovan killed was a colonel in the army, but the motive had nothing to do with war. It was about a woman. The prosecution did not even contest this. But to kill a colonel, apparently, is a war crime – even if you kill him because he is having sex with your fiancée. And even if there is no war.’

He shrugged lugubriously.

‘What about The Hague?’ I asked. ‘I know you’re not part of the EU structure yet, but even a theoretical ruling . . .’

I broke off because Anastasiadis was already shaking his head. ‘For that very reason,’ he said, ‘they turned us down. They can’t afford to prejudice future relations with the Macedonian state by interfering in their sovereign affairs before they have any legal right to. No, my route ran along well-worn channels, and it became clear quite early in the process that the verdict would always be guilty. And to be fair, Jovan is guilty, as far as that goes. It was a horrible murder, marked by extreme and shocking brutality. But the death sentence offends me in my soul. And for a man I have defended, the offence is double. It is a guilt I have to carry now – that I could not stop this. It is a dyspepsia of the soul that will not go away.’

The expression on his face made the comparison seem like a valid one: he looked like a man who’d eaten a big lunch very quickly, and was now finding to his dismay that it didn’t want to sit still where it had been put. I’ve got enough guilt of my own without going looking for extra helpings, but I felt sorry for Anastasiadis. The law is a poor fit for a man with a tender conscience.

The sound of keys turning in locks and of bolts slamming back brought us both to our feet. Our escort had arrived, in the form of two prison guards as heavily armoured as riot police. They talked to Dragan, ignoring me. Their language was quick-fire, full of Greek-sounding liquid labials. Dragan answered in the same language. He pointed to me, and one of the men nodded. Then they led the way back through the door by which they’d just entered, locking it again behind us, across a small bare cinder yard where a solitary ghost loitered, almost invisible in the sun of noonday, and into a concrete bunker only two storeys high.

The yard was pleasantly warm, but a wall of heat hit us as we entered the maximum-security wing. The guards must have felt it even more than we did inside their elaborate body armour, but they gave no sign of discomfort. Anastasiadis fanned himself gently with the back of his hand. The air smelled of sweat, urine, disinfectant and something greasy and insinuating that might have been pomade.

The space inside was open-plan: ground floor and first-floor gallery all of a piece, both with cells leading off a bare, bleak central space. The cells we passed were open-plan too, with bars for walls. Each held two men: two pallets, side by side rather than bunked one above the other, two chairs, a table, a slop bucket. Men played cards in monastic silence or lay on their pallets and read. A uniformed guard sat at one end of the structure on a plastic chair, lethargic and disengaged. He looked as though he wouldn’t have stirred himself for anything less than a full-scale riot.

We went up to the first floor via a circular staircase, blocked off at the bottom by a lockable grille. There was a second grille at the top, which another guard had to open before we could step out onto the landing. Up here, close to the ceiling of the low building, the smell of piss was pervasive, hanging heavy in the still, overheated air. The prisoners in these second-storey cells lay to a man on their pallet beds, as still as the dead, arguably more so. A suicide net was slung over the open space in the centre of the gallery; more bizarrely, so were a few clothes lines on which socks and T-shirts in subtly varied shades of institutional grey hung limply.

Anastasiadis led the way to the furthest cell on the right, then waited while one of the two guards unlocked the door. Both guards remained in place while we entered, locking us in and then standing to either side of the door like unlovely bookends.

Jovan Ditko was sitting on the floor of the cell, dressed only in vest and pants. His head was bowed, the slop bucket cradled between his spread legs. He’d vomited into it, and he looked as though he might be about to do so again. Anastasiadis looked back through the bars at the guards, pointed to the bucket and spoke to them again. They shook their heads, only very slightly out of synch. Anastasiadis shouted, his face flushing suddenly red. One of the guards shouted back, while the other turned his face aside as though the controversy embarrassed or upset him.

‘They will not empty the bucket,’ the lawyer said to me apologetically. ‘I reminded them that this is Jovan Ditko’s last night on Earth, but they say the buckets are only emptied on the morning shift.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, although the stench in the room was close to stomach-churning. I tuned it out with an effort of will. My preferred sense is hearing, so I focused on the sounds of the place: the sounds and the meta-sounds – the spirit music that plays in the background for me wherever I happen to be. Irdrizovo was a symphony in a minor key, bleak and formless and unresolved.

‘Jovan,’ I said gently.

He looked up at me and nodded, then ducked over the bucket again. It wasn’t really a greeting, just an acknowledgement that I was there. He had Rafi’s face but harder and heavier, a lot less handsome. A three-day growth of stubble darkened his chin, and his face glistened with sweat.

‘Do you speak English?’ I asked him.

He muttered something that I didn’t catch. Mister Anastasiadis translated at once. ‘He understands English, but he doesn’t speak it very well. He’ll answer you in Macedonian.’

‘Okay.’ I turned back to Jovan. ‘Thank you for seeing me. I know it’s the worst possible time, in a lot of ways, but I thought you might like some news of your brother, Rafael.’ I thought of my cover story and decided it might be useful to have something to show for this trip besides one less notch on my conscience. ‘And I’d like to talk to you about your memories of him,’ I added.

This time Jovan didn’t even look up. He just rattled off a quick response to Anastasiadis, who replied to him rather than to me. For a while they batted something around between the two of them. I suspected the three-way communication system was going to be a real pain in the arse.

‘He says it’s been years since he even saw Rafael,’ Anastasiadis said to me at last. ‘They argued, a long time ago. When their father died, Rafael did not even come to the funeral. There is nothing between them now.’

‘How long ago was that?’ I asked. ‘When their father died?’

Another quick exchange yielded the answer. ‘Three years ago.’

That was after Rafi’s botched necromancy and my botched exorcism had landed him with his demonic passenger. He was already locked up in the Stanger by then.

‘He didn’t know,’ I explained. ‘He was in a hospital and . . . not really in touch with the outside world.’ Not in touch with anything, I thought. Rafi’s life had become pretty surreal at that point. His time perception, his awareness of self, his ability to lay down new memories and to make sense of the world, all had to be compromised.

I tried to explain this to Jovan, but it was a tricky concept to get across and I hit the rocks almost immediately. ‘Rafi has a demon inside him,’ I said, and Jovan was off on a tirade, glaring up at me from the floor.

‘Yes,’ Anastasiadis said. ‘He has a demon. I have a demon. Everybody has a demon. It doesn’t change who you are. It doesn’t change your obligations. You have to be a man, don’t you? Whatever else you are.’

‘Yeah, but I’m not trying to be poetic,’ I said. ‘Rafi tried to do some magic, and he messed it up. There’s a demon stuck inside him like a . . .’ Having no clue what sort of referents Jovan would feel comfortable with, I groped for a non-technical simile. ‘. . . like a toad in a well. He’s been like that for years now. And for most of that time, he’s been locked up in a lunatic asylum. The demon controls his body, his actions. He’s not free to do what he wants to do.’

The lawyer was staring at me with an almost comically surprised expression, but Jovan emitted a snort that needed no translation. Clearly he didn’t think demonic possession was a good enough reason to miss your dad’s funeral.

‘Rafi wanted to tell you that he was sorry,’ I persisted. ‘Not specifically for that. For losing touch with you, I guess, and for any other bad blood there was between you. That’s why I came. To deliver that message. It seemed to be very important to him.’

In Jovan’s terse reply, Rafi’s name appeared twice.

‘The only thing that was ever important to Rafael,’ Anastasiadis translated, ‘was Rafael.’ Jovan was speaking again, with more animation, and the lawyer slipped into simultaneous translation. ‘He was always selfish. He cared nothing about the family, or anyone else besides himself. He always wanted to get out of here, and when he did he never looked back. Once or twice he’s written to me, but only to ask me to send his things on to him. His photos and his journals especially. I didn’t reply. If he wants those things so badly, he can come back – pardon me, he can fucking come back – and get them himself. Now, no more, please. No more of this. I have too little time left to make myself angry by thinking about Rafael.’

A silence followed this speech. Jovan seemed drained by it. His head lolled lower than ever over the foul, stinking bucket.

‘Is there anything I can get you while I’m here?’ I asked lamely. If nothing else it would be a way of keeping the dialogue open, but Jovan made a slashing gesture with his right hand.

‘Nothing,’ he muttered in English. ‘Give me nothing. And give him nothing, from me. No word.’

He lapsed into Macedonian again, and Anastasiadis laid a hand on my arm. ‘He wants us to leave,’ he said apologetically. ‘He says he won’t answer any more of your questions.’

‘The journals,’ I persisted. ‘Rafi’s journals. Do they still exist?’ I felt ashamed to ask, but I was thinking again about having something to show Jenna-Jane. More than that though, there was an outside chance – a tenuous thread of possibility – that the journals might throw up something we could actually use. I was a good salesman, obviously. I’d talked myself into believing there was some point in having come here.

‘Sepidye,’ Jovan growled. ‘They were burnt,’ Anastasiadis said. ‘Please, Mr Castor. We have to respect my client’s wishes.’

I offered my hand, but Jovan didn’t take it. No exchange of hostages, no using the last few hours of the present to ransom back some little piece of time past. Jovan Ditko was beyond that now. He was preparing himself for a drop much longer than the precisely measured fall from the gibbet.

I left him to it.

Back in the city I found a café – walking past three bars with increasing difficulty – and knocked back three tiny, deadly espressos. They were way too sweet, but so stiff with caffeine they made my nerves vibrate like a million tiny tuning forks. Then I trudged back to the hotel to collect my things.

But as I was packing – which consisted of throwing my washbag and my phone back into the rucksack I’d brought – there was a knock on the open door of my hotel room. I turned to see Anastasiadis standing on the threshold, looking slightly awkward and apologetic.

We’d parted company at the prison, after I’d thanked him for his help and offered him a translator’s fee (from the bountiful coffers of the MOU), which he’d refused. My first thought was that he’d changed his mind, and I reached into my pocket. He reached into his at the same time and produced a Yale key.

‘There is a house,’ he said without preamble. ‘It belonged to the parents, then to Jovan. Now, presumably, it belongs to Rafael. But I have no address for Rafael, and I understand that he is not to be found. Perhaps, Mr Castor, you will take the key and give it to Rafael the next time your paths cross.’

I hesitated. It seemed unlikely that anything of Rafi’s would still be in the house after all this time, or that it could be of any use to me if I found it. It might be worth the trip if his journals had survived, but Jovan had closed that avenue.

Anastasiadis was still holding out the key, and – in his other hand – a small rectangle of card. ‘The address,’ he said, as though I’d already agreed. ‘It would be worth your while, perhaps, to visit the place before you leave. If there are any valuables or keepsakes, they should be taken away now. The neighbourhood is not of the best, and empty houses in Skopje seldom escape the notice of squatters for long.’

He wore me down just by keeping his hands held out towards me. Or maybe I felt that this was one more duty I owed to Rafi, one more small expiation for the big fuckup that had taken his life away from him. I had just enough time, if I left at once, and if the house wasn’t too far from the airport.

I looked at the card. It was one of Mr Anastasiadis’s own business cards with the address of the Ditko house jotted down in a small, neat hand on the back. While I was still looking at it, a sheet of paper covered in closely typed paragraphs was thrust under my nose. The writing was presumably Macedonian, but it was all Greek to me.

‘You will sign?’ Anastasiadis asked hopefully.

‘What am I signing?’

‘For the key. A receipt. You understand, Mr Castor, with this my duties are finished. I have waited a long time for them to be finished. This would be a kindness to me.’

Despite what my dad had drummed into me about signing papers without reading them, or indeed signing anything presented to you by a man in a suit, I gave the lawyer my scribbled name. He smiled in what looked like genuine relief, folded the sheet again and tucked it into his shirt pocket.

‘I will take you to the house,’ he offered in a burst of warm fuzzy feeling. ‘And to the airport afterwards.’

‘Deal,’ I said.

As we drove through the narrow streets in Anastasiadis’s shiny silver Lexus, he filled me in on recent Macedonian history – recent meaning everything since the Byzantine empire went down the Swannee. The main theme was how Macedonia kept getting dragged into other people’s wars despite a national predisposition towards dancing, strong liquor and healthy pragmatism. First it was the Greeks who wouldn’t leave them alone, then the Ottomans. More recently, they’d managed to keep their heads down through the regional rough and tumbles of the early 1990s, only to get badly screwed by the Kosovan conflict. Even then, Anastasiadis said, they did their best to stay out of the scrum. They were victims of drive-by ethnic cleansing at one or two removes when a quarter of a million Albanian refugees fled across the border from Kosovo and stirred up the nationalist aspirations of Macedonia’s own Albanian minority. What ensued was nothing as vulgar as a civil war, the lawyer assured me. There were skirmishes, minor engagements, manoeuvring on both sides, and then instead of falling on each other like wolves the government and the Albanians signed an agreement not to be so hard-arsed in future. Anastasiadis seemed very proud of this outcome, seeing it as a mark of how civilised his people were. The Macedonian compromise: let’s not have a war, and say we did.

As the recitation went on, we were driving through narrower and narrower streets, until we reached a point where the rough-cast walls on either side almost clipped the Lexus’ wing mirrors. Now, as Mr Anastasiadis reached his low-key but impassioned conclusion, we turned – with about as much room for manoeuvre as an elephant has in a tanning bed – into an overgrown yard with high walls painted lemon yellow. Three of the walls were free-standing, while the fourth was the frontage of the Ditko house.

It was built on the same scale as the yard, which was one degree up from Lilliputian, and despite the paint, which made a bold and optimistic statement, it had clearly been allowed to fall almost into ruin in recent years. The pitched roof was sway-backed, like a spavined horse, and there were great pockmarks in the limed rough-cast, showing bare single-skin brickwork beneath. Weeds grew up between the slate-grey flagstones of the yard, almost to the height of a man, and one of the windows had a perfectly circular hole through it, starred all around with fracture lines, the hallmark of a local kid with a catapult and a relaxed attitude to other people’s property.

The place made a bleak enough impression, but when Mr Anastasiadis wound down the car window, between one breath and the next a sweet smell of honeysuckle flooded in on us. It was growing wild up the outer walls and the house’s frontage, annealing the decay by immersing it in its own opposite.

‘I will wait for you here,’ Anastasiadis informed me. ‘In this neighboorhood, it is best not to leave the car unattended.’

It was hard to argue with that. In front of this tumble-down cottage, the Lexus looked like news from nowhere – something not just from another world but from another age of humankind.

I got out and crossed to the door. It was painted black, the paint now blistered and flaking where the slo-mo blowtorch of entropy had played across it. At first glance there was no keyhole, but actually it was only the lock plate that was missing. A small, neat circle had been drilled into the wood, close enough to the jamb to be in shadow and not immediately noticeable. I had to jiggle the key around in the blind hole until it found its berth, but then as soon as the key was turned the door sprung open of its own accord, the warped wood pushing it away from the frame with a dry twang like the sound of an arrow hitting a target.

The door gave directly onto a small living room. It was filled with an immense profusion of things. There were six ill-assorted chairs, beautifully carved but from two different tribes, the ladder-backs facing the wheelbacks across a farm-house table piled high with old newspapers. Newspapers served as curtains too, taped across the two narrow windows. Out in the centre of the room, beyond the table, stood an ancient iron mangle. Boxes lined the walls, two and three and four high. A tall dresser held not plates and cups but more papers along with a meerschaum sculpture of a tram and a radio with a red plastic casing that had to be 1960s vintage. From the ceiling (why waste a surface just because it’s upside down?) a massive drying rack hung on four pulleys. Yet more sheets of newspaper had been folded neatly over its wooden runners to shield any clothes that might be hung there from dust or splinters. There were no clothes, but a great many electrical flexes had been slung over the rack in long, neat rows, all ending in the two-pronged European plug. They looked like dead snakes hung up to cure, lolling their forked tongues.

The room smelled of dust and lavender. A slender blade of sunlight bisected it neatly where one of the sheets of newsprint had been poorly fitted into the window frame. Thick motes swirled in its glow on sluggish thermoclines, showing the air to be as heavily freighted as the solid ground.

I picked up a pile of papers at random from the dresser: old letters, old bills, old articles laboriously cut out with short-bladed scissors from defunct periodicals. The Ditkos had bought a lot of newspapers and had put them to a lot of uses, but clearly they had read the news in them too, and set aside the items that seemed worthy of being remembered.

The boxes seemed mostly full of crockery and cutlery, although one that I opened contained books. Crabbed writing on the lid of each presumably recorded its contents. It looked as though the family had moved from a bigger place and had never finished unpacking, maybe because there just wasn’t enough room here to hold their things. Or maybe some of these boxes held the things that Rafi had asked his brother to send on to England after him. In any case, there was nothing that corresponded to Mr Anastasiadis’s phrase ‘valuables or keepsakes’.

A single door led to a back room, off which a narrow staircase opened. It was much darker here. I groped for a light switch, found one at last to the right of the doorway and flicked it on.

A bare hundred-watt bulb flared into life over my head. From all around the room, a hundred Rafis stared back at me.

‘Sonofabitch!’ I muttered involuntarily.

‘His photos and his journals,’ Jovan had said – and he’d sneered at Rafi’s obsessive self-regard. Judging from this evidence, he hadn’t been exaggerating.

Some of the photos were five by three or six by four, snapshots taken with an ordinary thirty-five-millimetre camera, but many of them had been blown up – the largest, poster size with the grainy stippling that comes from trying to squeeze too much detail out of a poorly resolved original.

They were all portrait shots, not family groups nor even whole-body studies. A relentless gallery of head-and-shoulders close-ups, the blurred backgrounds merging into one, the only variety coming from Rafi’s facial expressions and from the vagaries of the lighting.

It was unsettling to meet my friend’s gaze so many times at once in this sad, abandoned place.

I took a few steps further into the room, and something shattered under my foot. I looked down, startled: more photos, in glass-fronted frames. No, I realised, as I knelt to examine them more closely. These were actually photographs printed on glass rather than paper, in black and white, but backed with coloured card so that the lighter areas became islands of intense red or green or gold.

The one I’d shattered had a silver backing. The memory of Rafi’s silver-lined cell at the Stanger Care Home came forcefully into my mind, and then, although silver isn’t gold, the tune of that old vaudeville favourite ‘I’m only a Bird in a Gilded Cage’. Rafi had gone a long way from this cramped room to find an even smaller cage in London, but both rooms were spacious compared with the vaulted oubliette of his own skull, which was where he was really trapped.

I pulled myself out of this pointless reverie with an effort. I still had a plane to catch, and even to appease Mr Anastasiadis there was nothing here I wanted to take with me.

I went upstairs briefly. I found two tiny bedrooms, a double bed in one, two small singles in the other. There was no room for any other furniture. The double bed still had blankets strewn across it, so it looked as though it had been vacated only recently, but no sheets covered the bare, stained mattress.

I went into the other room, glanced perfunctorily around. Through the dust-smeared window – no curtains here, not even of newspaper – I could see the yard below and the laywer’s big, imposing car. Half a dozen or so of the neighboorhood children were watching it from the yard entrance, their faces mostly sullen and disapproving as though the vulgar display of wealth offended them on principle.

Turning from the window, I noticed a small fleck of bright red colour against the bleached grey of the floor-boards. There was something under the left-hand bed. I squatted down to look a little closer.

The something turned out to be the top-most of a pile of four or five small fat notebooks. I picked it up, flicked through the pages. Lines of tight Slavonic script in faded blue ink met my gaze.

Rafi’s journals? Jovan said he’d burned them, but perhaps he’d only wanted to. At the front, where the writer of a diary might be expected to write his name, there was indeed a short string of characters. Rafael Ditko? Maybe. I picked up the little stash of books, slipped them into my greatcoat’s capacious outer pockets and headed for the stairs. If they were Rafi’s journals they might be worth having. The better I knew Rafi, the deeper and stronger my sense of him became, the more likely it was that I could separate him from his demonic bunk-buddy – assuming I could get a translation done before Asmodeus cornered me in a dark alley and strangled me with my own intestines. It was still a long shot, but it was something. At least I could tell myself – and Jenna-Jane – that I wasn’t coming away completely empty-handed.

I retraced my steps, down the stairs and back through the room of photos. One I hadn’t seen before caught my attention, one of those where the image had been printed on glass. In this picture, Rafi seemed to be about twelve years old. He was standing on the broad stone steps of a large old building, and whatever he was wearing must have been of a very light colour, because the pale gold backing shone through most of it. Perhaps it stood out from the rest because Rafi was so young in it, while in most of the others he was either in his late teens or early twenties – a period at which his self-love seemed to have reached its pinnacle – or perhaps it was just that his smile was so radiant, his satisfaction with the world and his place in it so transcendantly perfect.

Whatever it was, I took the damn thing with me.

Mr Anastasiadis was very pleased to see me emerge from the house. The feral kids had doubled in number now, and they were eyeing the Lexus with a malevolent hunger. ‘The airport,’ the lawyer said without preamble. Then he said a whole lot more, loudly, in Macedonian, looking at me but obviously playing to the wider audience.

‘What was that?’ I asked, when we were both in the car and backing out of the yard. The kids parted reluctantly to let us through. One or two of them took a kick at the bodywork en passant. Anastasiadis winced at each dull clunk, as though he was feeling the blows himself.

‘I called you chief inspector,’ he said a little disgruntledly. ‘And I asked you how your investigation was coming along. I thought this might deter those little thugs from hurting my car. But sadly, Mr Castor, such a deterrent is still beyond the grasp of human science.’

His gaze fell on the photo, which I was holding in my lap. ‘This is all you took?’ he said. ‘Well, it is a nice moment to commemorate, I suppose.’

‘What moment?’ I asked him.

‘The first communion. This is Jovan or Rafael?’

‘Rafael,’ I said. ‘How do you know when it was taken?’

The lawyer shrugged. ‘The white robe,’ he said. ‘And the steps of Hagia Katerina. Every house in Skopje has a photo like this.’

It was funny and painful at the same time to think of Rafi taking communion. The wine and wafer would stick in his throat now, and make the demon bellow like a bull under the gelding knife. Was there a possibility there? I wondered briefly. Trick Asmodeus into swallowing the host or drinking communion wine? The answer was no, of course. I could hurt him easily enough, but tricks like that wouldn’t pull or push or blast him out of his human vessel, and he’d recuperate with terrifying speed. If there was a magic bullet, that wasn’t it.

We stopped at a red light, which didn’t seem to be in any hurry to change. I was a little worried about catching my flight now, but I took advantage of the delay to fish one of the books out of my pocket and show it to Anastasiadis.

‘I took these too,’ I told him. ‘I think they may be Rafi’s journals.’

He took it from me and flicked through it curiously.

‘His name is inside the cover,’ he acknowledged. ‘Rafael Cyril Ditko. Yes. This is a diary of some kind. Or at least each entry has a date attached to it.’

‘Do you know of any way I could get them translated?’ I asked.

Anastasiadis handed the book back to me, returning his attention to the road as we started moving again. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I use translators myself all the time, for deeds and contracts. If you were willing to leave the books with me, I could arrange to have it done.’

‘I need it done quickly.’

‘Then it will not be cheap. But still I can arrange it.’

I chewed on that one for a moment. Expense was no object for Jenna-Jane, but if I took her money to get the journals translated, I’d have to share the contents with her. Actually, that was an optimistic projection. More likely, Jenna-Jane would get first dibs and I’d be copied in on a need-to-know basis.

‘How much is it likely to be?’ I asked.

Anastasiadis made a one-handed but expansive gesture, suggesting very concisely how painful it was for him to have to ask for cash down for what was really a favour to a friend, and how distasteful he found monetary transactions in general. ‘Five hundred pounds sterling,’ he suggested. ‘One hundred for each book.’

Not an easy sum for me to scrape together right then. I considered. The diaries were still a long shot. Most likely they were full of the same sort of stuff that fills all adolescent boys’ diaries – wet dreams, football scores and cod philosophy. All the same, I decided to keep it in the family.

‘Do one of the books to start with,’ I said. ‘I’ll wire the hundred quid when I get back to England.’

‘Thank you. All the necessary details are on my card.’

We got to the airport with about twenty minutes left before check-in closed. Rolling to a halt in a no-stopping lane and cheerfully ignoring the soldiers on security duty at the kerbside, Anastasiadis got out of the car to say goodbye to me. I shook his hand and thanked him for all his help.

‘It was my very great pleasure,’ he assured me solemnly. ‘I did little enough for Jovan, when all is said and done. If I can help his brother, at no additional cost to myself because I am not after all a charity, this will please me. You will send that money, Mr Castor, yes?’

‘Consider it sent,’ I assured him.

‘Then in the expectation of its arrival, I will make a start on the translation.’

Since I had a few minutes’ leeway before I had to sprint for the gate, I decided to check in with the Führer-bunker and see how things were going there. I tried my mobile first, but it couldn’t find a service, so I had to use a payphone. That meant changing bills into coins – coins which were impossibly small and thin, as though metal was in short supply locally and they were making a little go a long way. Dropping a couple of dozen little silver wafers at random into the slot got me a dialling tone, and that got me the MOU switchboard. It didn’t get me Trudie Pax though, even though I asked for her. Instead – I suppose predictably – I was put directly through to Jenna-Jane.

‘Felix,’ she said brightly. ‘You’ve been much on my mind. Was the journey worth your while?’

‘Afraid not,’ I said bluntly. ‘Jovan and Rafi haven’t talked in years. He couldn’t tell me anything we don’t already know. Or maybe he just didn’t feel like talking, since he’s going to be executed tomorrow. I had a chance to visit the family house and go through some old stuff of Rafi’s, but I came up empty there too.’

‘Things that belonged to Ditko? Might there be a stronger focus than the fingernail for Pax to use in her divination?’

I thought of the photo. ‘Potentially,’ I said. ‘I’ve got something she can throw into the mix, anyway.’

‘So the time wasn’t totally wasted.’ J-J sounded irked all the same, as though she realised she’d been taken for a ride for once in her life and wasn’t enjoying the novelty. Abruptly, she switched tack. ‘When do you arrive back in London?’ she asked.

I glanced up at the departures board. It was easy to locate my flight, because there were only another three heading out that evening. ‘About midnight,’ I estimated.

‘Get a good night’s sleep. Gilbert has assembled his team for the Super-Self exorcism. He claims he has a full complement without your participation. I’d still like you to be there though. If things don’t go to plan, an additional exorcist might make a great deal of difference. Especially one of your experience. I’ve delayed the operation until tomorrow night for that reason.’

‘I’ll be there,’ I said.

‘Excellent. Before that though, I think another early meeting is in order. I’ve been unable to locate your Mr Moulson, despite having tracked down his previous three addresses. But we’ve been reviewing Pax’s maps, and we have a few insights to offer.’

‘With regard to what, Jenna-Jane?’

‘With regard to the issue of where Asmodeus might be found.’

The hairs on my neck pricked up like good little dogs at their master’s voice. ‘You’ve found him?’ I asked, trying to keep my tone neutral.

‘Not yet. But I may be able to direct your search. Tomorrow, Felix. Eight o’clock. Sleep tight.’

She hung up, leaving my mouth open on a question. I checked my watch. Time was really tight now, but it was a small airport and the gate was probably fairly close to the check-in. I hung up, fed the machine some more coins and dialled again.

The ringtone sounded half a dozen times, and I was about to give it up as a bad job when someone finally picked up.

‘Hello?’ Juliet said.

‘No rest for the wicked, babe,’ I told her.