by Mike Carey
The tough-guy tone rang hollow. The two subjects with which Juliet was intimately familiar were sex and death: their declensions, and conjugations, and the inflexible metaphysics that governed them. Tactfully, though, she made no reply.
I tried to pull the conversation back onto less controversial topics. ‘They’ve still got their own fingerprints,’ I said, answering Juliet’s question. ‘So somehow it’s got to be their own flesh. If Les Lathwell was Aaron Silver, that means he was born well before the end of the nineteenth century. Died—’
‘1908,’ Nicky supplied, sullenly.
‘1908. So if he was still leaving fingerprints in the 1960s and 1970s, his body would have to have been spectacularly well embalmed.’
Juliet shook her head. ‘It doesn’t work in any case,’ she pointed out. ‘This other man – Les Lathwell – he had friends? Family?’
‘Two brothers, both dead,’ said Nicky. ‘A sister, who’s still alive.’
‘And there’s documentary evidence of his growing up?’
Nicky nodded slowly, seeing where she was going. ‘Sure. Lots of it. School photos. Home movies. All that kind of shit.’
‘Then how – and when – did Aaron Silver insinuate himself into Lathwell’s place?’
It was a more than reasonable question. Something was niggling at me – something that felt as though it might be part of the answer – but I couldn’t tease it out into the light.
‘Not plastic surgery,’ Nicky said. ‘They could do it now – fingerprints and all – but in the 1960s the technology wasn’t that advanced. Except on Mission Impossible. You know, that guy with all the masks.’
‘Flesh is plastic enough in any case,’ Juliet said, and I almost had it.
But then Nicky spoke again and I lost whatever connection my subconscious was trying to make. ‘I haven’t managed to find any Myriam Kale memorabilia,’ he said. ‘Turns out East End gangsters are easy compared to sexy American assassins-for-hire. A few things came up, but they all smelled like scams. I’m still looking. But since you’re going to where she lived, maybe you’ll pick something up along the way. In which case, throw it to me when you’re through with it and I’ll find it a new home.’
So Chesney’s Kale piece had come from some other source. I decided not to mention that: Nicky was touchy enough already without being told that someone else had outscored him. ‘I’ll do that, Nicky,’ I said blandly. ‘In the meantime, could you check something else out for me?’
‘Well, I’m always at your disposal since, obviously, I don’t have a fucking life,’ Nicky observed dryly, flicking a cold glance at Juliet.
‘Can you find out where all these guys are buried?’
‘Yeah, sure. That’s easy. Why, you want to put some flowers on their graves?’
‘I want to find out if there’s any connection here to John Gittings’s list of London cemeteries. If there’s a pattern – if they all ended up in the same place—’
‘Yeah, I get it, Castor. The thing about the flowers? Joke. Is your mobile tri-band?’
‘I don’t have the faintest idea. But the battery’s flat in any case.’
‘Fine.’ Nicky gave it up, getting to his feet and shoving the untouched wine away with a disgruntled air. ‘So you get yourself a stack of dimes and call me. I know you don’t travel much so I probably ought to make it clear that dimes are what Americans use for currency. Have a nice flight, the both of you. I’ll see you when I see you.’ He was about to walk away, but then turned and held out his hand, palm up. I almost shook it, misinterpreting the gesture, but he clicked his tongue impatiently. ‘The bullet casing. You go through the metal detector with that in your pocket, there could be all kinds of humorous misunderstandings.’
I gave it back to him. ‘Thanks for everything, Nicky.’
‘You’re more than welcome.’ There was something in his tone, in his face, that I couldn’t read. ‘You want to pay me back, then keep me in the loop. I want to see how this comes out. By the way, someone else knows you’re coming.’
He threw it out with carefully measured casualness, playing for the double take.
‘What? What do you mean, Nicky?’
‘When I got your names off the airport data system, there was a nice little tripwire set up there. I saw it because I was coming in on a machine-code level.’
‘A tripwire?’
‘Yeah. Like, a relay. So if your name came up on any flight, someone gets told.’
‘My name? Or Juliet’s?’
‘Just yours, Castor. Anyone wants to know a demon’s whereabouts, they just have to stick their nose into the wind.’
Nicky walked away without waiting for an answer. ‘I hurt his feelings?’ Juliet asked. She wasn’t contrite, she was just asking for the sake of information: something to add to her database of human foibles.
‘You shoved his face in his own mortality,’ I said. ‘Nobody likes that much.’
‘He’s already dead.’
‘Doesn’t make it any easier to live with.’
A few moments later, the tannoy told us that our flight was ready to board at Gate 17. I just about had time to finish my whisky. Nicky’s wine remained on the table behind us, untouched.
In the departure lounge, Juliet stood at the window and watched the planes taking off. She seemed fascinated, and it made her oblivious to the covetous stares she was collecting from the male passengers sitting around her. I hadn’t thought about it much, but this was her first flight.
Joining her at the window, I told her about some of the side effects she could expect to encounter. She wasn’t troubled about the changes in pressure and what they might do to her ears. ‘I’ll adjust,’ was all she said. She seemed to be looking forward to the experience.
We boarded at the tail end of the line because Juliet preferred not to join the crush until the last moment. Our seats were just forward of the toilets at the very back of the cabin, in what would once have been the smoking seats – and explaining the concept of smoking seats to Juliet took us all the way through the safety lecture. She was amused at the fences and barricades that humans had built around their pleasures: but then she was amused at the whole concept of deferred gratification. Demons, she said, tended to work more in terms of reaching out and grabbing.
‘Well, any time you feel the urge,’ I gallantly didn’t say.
She took an almost child-like interest in the take-off, swapping seats with me so that she could look out of the window and remaining thoroughly engrossed right up until we were in the air.
But after that her mood changed. She seemed to withdraw into herself, somehow, her expression becoming cold and remote. I checked out the in-flight movies, none of which looked particularly exciting, and then looked around again: Juliet had her head bowed and her eyes closed, and her hands were clasped – very tightly, it looked to me – in her lap.
‘You okay?’ I murmured.
‘I’ll be fine,’ Juliet answered tersely.
I left her to it while the cabin staff came around with complimentary beverages. I opted for coffee, bearing in mind the risks of deep-vein thrombosis, but hedged my bets to the extent of asking for a brandy to spike it with. Juliet just shook her head when the stewardess asked her if she wanted a drink: she didn’t even look up. Was she nauseous? Could demons get travel sickness?
I waited a while to see if she’d come out of it by herself: I didn’t want to irritate her by seeming too solicitous. But when we’d been in the air for half an hour, her expression had become a rigid mask of suppressed suffering. Juliet isn’t capable of going pale, because she’s already pale enough to make most albinos look ruddily healthy, but something had happened to her complexion, too: it was as though the radiant white of her skin was losing some of its intensity, some of its definition.
As tactfully and neutrally as I could, I showed her the sick-bag and explained its function.
‘I’m not sick,’ she said, her voice low and harsh.
‘Okay,’ I
allowed. ‘But you’re not your usual cheeky, chirpy self. What’s the matter?’
She shook her head, but only half an inch in either direction so the movement was barely visible. ‘I don’t know.’
I wasn’t going to press it any further, bearing in mind how fiercely Juliet defends her privacy, but she spoke again after a pause of almost a minute. ‘I feel – stretched,’ she muttered. ‘Strained. As though – part of me is still down there. On the ground.’
I could hear the tension in her voice and see it in the set of her shoulders. The whole of her body was clenched tight, like a fist: the nails of her latticed fingers were digging into the backs of her hands.
‘Maybe it’s a kind of travel sickness that only demons get,’ I suggested tentatively. ‘If it is, you’ll probably get over it soon: it’s just your body adjusting to the weird input – the cabin pressure and the motion of the plane.’
‘Yes,’ Juliet growled. ‘Most likely.’
But she didn’t get better. She got worse. Two hours out, I saw a sheen of sweat on her forehead, and I could hear her breathing. Both were alarming signs, because for all her scary sexiness Juliet wears human flesh at a jaunty angle. She’s not human, so a human body is only ever a disguise for her, or a craftily designed lure like an anglerfish’s light. She doesn’t have to breathe or sweat if she doesn’t want to. There are, of course, times when she wants to do both – but this seemed to be involuntary.
A little while later, when I looked at her again out of the corner of my eye, trying not to make a big deal out of it, she’d either fallen asleep or passed out. At any rate, she’d slumped over sideways in her seat, her head sliding over until it almost rested against my shoulder. Then as I watched it tilted the rest of the way, smoothly and inexorably.
She didn’t respond when I whispered her name, and her sharp, sweet scent – the smell that more than anything else defined her in my mind – was gone. She smelled of nothing except a faint, inorganic sourness: an almost chemical odour.
What was going on here? I turned over some possibilities in my mind. Maybe it was because demons were chthonic powers, linked in some way to the earth itself – as though, in addition to the biosphere everyone knows about, there’s another meta-biosphere which includes the fauna of Hell. Maybe demons were like the children of Gaea in Greek mythology, who were invincible as long as they were standing on terra firma, but weak as kittens if you could manage to lever their feet off the ground.
Or maybe this was something completely different: an anti-demonic casting that we were flying into, like the wards and stay-nots that people put up over their doors to stop the dead from crossing the threshold. Maybe the whole of the USA had wards on it, and they were already operating even this far out and this far up.
Either way, there might be something I could do about it. I started to whistle under my breath, so faintly that it was barely voiced and wouldn’t carry beyond the row of seats we were in. The tune was Juliet: the sequence of notes and cadences that represented her in my mind. No summoning, no binding, and certainly no banishing – just the bare description. Perhaps it might work as a kind of anti-exorcism: give her immune system a little boost and help her to fight back against whatever was happening to her.
She slept through the whole flight. When the stewardess came round with our meals, I ate one-handed so as not to disturb Juliet. It was an odd and unsettling experience. Normally any part of me touching any part of Juliet would have been so agonisingly arousing that I wouldn’t have been able to think about anything else. After a few seconds I’d have been physically shaking. Now, though, it was as though something inside her had switched itself off: as though she was only a lifelike model of Juliet, and if I tapped her skin she’d ring hollow.
For the second half of the flight I dozed too – fitfully and intermittently, waking every so often to check the flight-progress screen on the back of the seat in front of me and discover that we’d inched forward another couple of hundred miles. Juliet didn’t stir, but her chest rose and fell arrhythmically. I let her be, figuring that she was probably better off asleep than awake. Even the changes in pressure as we started to descend didn’t wake her.
But as soon as we hit the runway at Birmingham her eyes snapped open.
Then she leaned forward in her seat and dry-heaved for a good long time.
16
The Birmingham in Alabama took its name and inspiration from the one back in England, but as soon as we walked out of the terminal into the heavy, humid, soupy, sledgehammer air I knew that comparison was going to turn out to be fanciful.
Nicky had taken care of car hire with his usual near-mystical thoroughness, so that all I had to do at the Hertz desk was wave my passport. We found our car, a trim little Chevrolet Cobalt in a fetching red livery, parked only a hundred yards or so from the airport entrance. For most of those hundred yards, though, Juliet was leaning her weight on my arm and walking like a frail octogenarian. I felt a little light-headed myself: it was mid-afternoon here, the hot air thick and heavy with the day’s freight of sweat and tears.
Inside the car, Juliet slumped back in the passenger seat with her eyes closed.
‘Is there anything I can do?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said, her voice faint. ‘I started to feel better as soon as I was back on the ground. But – it’s taking me a while to get my strength back.’
‘You think it’s something to do with flying, then?’ I asked.
She nodded slowly. ‘It must be. It’s not something I’d heard of before. But then, your species only left the ground very recently. Perhaps – I’m the first of the powers to try it out.’
‘What about demons with big leathery bat wings?’
Juliet smiled one of the least convincing smiles I’ve ever seen. ‘They fly low,’ she muttered.
‘You want to find a motel and lie down for a while?’
That got a faint rise out of her, at least. ‘What a great idea. And you’d watch over me while I slept?’
‘Like a mother hen.’
‘Just drive, Castor. I’ll be fine.’
Brokenshire is south-west of Birmingham, out towards Tuscaloosa. We found our way out of a maze of crisscrossing sliproads onto Interstate 59, and headed down through the heart of the city. The skyline of Birmingham’s financial district floated off my left shoulder on a haze of dawn mist, the inaccessible towers of a distant Camelot: nearer at hand we drove past derelict factories with eyeless windows and weeds growing taller than man-height across the endless deserted aprons of their parking lots. Most cities have at least two faces: I was seeing both the Magic City and the ashes from which it periodically gets to be reborn. I was aware that neither was the truth, but they were all the truth I was going to find out this time.
South of Birmingham was Bessemer, but I wasn’t really aware of where the one ended and the other began. After a couple of hours’ driving, with Juliet awake but silent and unmoving beside me, we turned off the interstate and then off the state highway onto the back roads, rapidly exchanging cityscape for something a lot more rural and homespun. The houses we were passing now were made of wood, with big front porches. Some of them were pretty grand, the porches extending to two storeys with burnished banister rails gleaming in the slanted morning sun: others were cramped bungalows whose porches seemed to serve the same function as garages do in England, piled up with all the detritus of living that never gets either used or thrown away. In a yard, a huge black dog tethered to a post barked at us and ran around in crazy circles as we passed. A man who looked like the male half of Grant Wood’s American Gothic couple stood with a pair of secateurs in his hands and – although he had a lot more self-possession than the dog – he too kept us in sight until he faded into the distance in the rear-view mirror.
Tiny townships alternated with vast stretches of open farmland and the occasional patch of forest. There was a lot less traffic on the roads here, so I was able to give the Cobalt her head. I was also able to positively
identify the car that was following us. I’d been nearly certain it was there back when I was lane-hopping in Birmingham: certainly someone way back behind us had been zigging when we zigged and zagging when we zagged. But the press of traffic in the city and the need to keep my eyes on the road in an unfamiliar car had meant that I never got a decent look at it. Now I could see that it was a big dark grey van with an ugly matt-black bull-bar, the driver and any passengers invisible behind tinted windows.
It kept pace with us as we drove on south and west. It kept a long way back, but then it could afford to: there was no traffic besides the two of us, and the turn-offs were five miles apart.
Brokenshire is a town of twenty-eight thousand, situated in a valley close to a railhead serving a now-defunct copper mine. Literally and figuratively, it’s the end of the line. Where Birmingham mixed affluence and entropy in roughly equal measure, Brokenshire just looked as though it had quietly sailed past its sell-by date without anyone caring enough to mark the occasion. On the map a small creek runs through it, but there was no sign of it as we drove in towards the town square past post-war houses as small as egg boxes, many of them burnished with the variegated silver and red of half-rusted aluminium siding. I guess at some point in the town’s history the creek got covered over. Probably just as well: if we’d had to drive across running water, there would have been logistical problems for Juliet. In fact, in her current weakened state there was probably no way she could have done it.
We parked up in the town square, in front of a prim granite courthouse like something out of Gone With the Wind, and got out to look around. The car got some looks, and so did we. Juliet’s mojo was slowly starting to come back, which meant that the unsubtle aura of sexual promise hung over her again like an invisible bridal gown. We ignored the hungry stares and did a slow, ambling tour of the downtown area that took us all of half an hour.
Unsurprisingly, maybe, Myriam Kale had been turned into something of a local industry. The town’s bookshop had turned its whole window display over to books about great American gangsters, with a – presumably secondhand – copy of Paul Sumner’s out-of-print biography as its centrepiece. It was the same edition as mine: maybe there’d only ever been the one. Beside it was a reproduced photo: the photo of Kale and Jackie Cerone in the nightclub, which Sumner had included in his book. It brought home to me how small a pool of facts and images about Kale was being recycled.