Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

Chesney looked a little sick, because he could see in my face that I’d never seen any of the stuff in his bran tub in my life. He was counting up the cost of lost opportunities. I would have sympathized, but time is money, and right then I was all about the bottom line.

  “Yeah,” he said lugubriously. “The ace of spades was from a deck that Ronnie Kray used to play poker in his cell in Parkhurst. Some minor villain named Alan Stalky got him to sign it and then took it instead of the winnings. That’s worth a fortune. George Cornell used the paperweight in a fight—broke some bloke’s head open with it—and the pen is the one that Tony Lambrianou signed his confession with. It’s still got his blood on it, allegedly because the police beat the living shit out of him before they let him sign. The crown piece belonged to Aaron Silver…”

  He carried on talking through the contents of the baggies one by one, but I was only half listening because the names he’d already mentioned had made something groan on the dangerously overstacked shelves of my memory. Cornell. Lambrianou. Lathwell. Silver. Every single one of those names had turned up in the lists in John Gittings’s notebook. If Kray had been there, too, I’d have made the connection. It occurred to me to wonder where the hell John had been getting the money. If these things were as valuable as Chesney said they were, they ought to have been way out of the reach of someone living on an exorcist’s earnings.

  “So what?” I said, wrenching my attention back to the present. “John was picking this stuff up on the fan-boy circuit?”

  “He had a dealer. A zombie guy.”

  Yeah, of course he did. Nicky, you cagey bugger, I thought, we are going to have some very harsh words. “Right. And he was passing it all on to you so that you could—?” My mouth had outrun my brain, but Chesney had mentioned data, and the fact that we were in a pathology lab—even if it was one where most of the corpses on the slab were named Fido—was a big clue. “You ran tests on them,” I finished ungrammatically. “What kind of tests, Vince?”

  “The whole works,” Chesney said with a touch of professional pride. He tried to take the box back from me, but it was a try that expected to fail, and I made sure it did by putting my full weight down on my right hand, the one resting on the box lid. He straightened up and pretended not to notice. “Fingerprinting. A fuck lot of that. Hematocrit when he could get something with a bloodstain on it. And DNA. I can do DNA. Okay, I’m working with puppies right now, but that’s just for the work experience. I trained in human pathology, and I’m gonna do real forensic work as soon as I’m out of this shithole. John’s nineteenth-century time-warp ‘criminals are gorillas’ thing may have been piped shite, but from where I was standing, it was good practice.”

  “And good pocket money,” I guessed.

  Chesney bridled. “Hey, look, he came to me. I was doing him a—”

  “—a favor. Absolutely. Why do you keep talking about criminal physiognomy, Vince? Is that what John said this was about? Recapitulation theory? I can’t see that kite getting very far off the ground.”

  “Me, neither.” Chesney was still stiffly on his dignity. I’d hurt him where his professional ethics pinched the tightest. “But the customer’s always right, and John had this thing, you know?”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “A Cesare Lombroso reductionist taxonomic criminal-anthropology kind of thing.”

  “Go on.”

  He glanced toward the box with longing, bereaved eyes. “He was making up a big database,” he said. “Criminals, yeah? Killers especially. He wanted to measure them every way they could be measured. I did the tests and passed all the stuff on to him, and that was that. I didn’t have to clap hands and believe in fairies.”

  “Fairies in this case being—?”

  “Oh, Christ, you know the song. The idea that there’s a criminal type. That by pooling data from a thousand people who’ve already done bad things, you’ll be able to predict the next rapist or serial killer before he or she cuts loose. It’s not just bullshit, it’s the bullshit that the century before last left out for the binmen.”

  I tapped the box. “Sounds pretty thin. The disk in here, that’s all the data you put together for John before he died?”

  Chesney nodded, but by now he wanted rid of me. A nod wasn’t enough.

  “All of it?” I pursued. “All the test results for all the ‘items’?”

  “It’s all there.” He was indignant, seeing his nest egg about to waltz out through the door and knowing there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

  I straightened up. “Thanks for your help, Vince,” I said. “If there’s anything on the disk that a layman can’t get his head around, would you rather I called you here or someplace else?”

  “Don’t call me at all,” Chesney said, in something of a sulk. “I don’t owe you anything, man. I didn’t even need to give you the disk. That’s my intellectual property.”

  “True,” I conceded. “But let me put it another way. If there’s a fine point of interpretation and I want a steer, should I come to you or to your boss?”

  “Fuck!” Chesney waved his arms wildly. “I wish I’d never gotten involved with any of this crap. It’s not like the money was any good.”

  I cut him a small amount of slack, because it’s generally easier to lead a horse to water than to hold it under for the time it takes to drown it. “There could be some more money on the table at some point,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “You can call me on my mobile,” he said, very slightly mollified. “The number you got from John, yeah? I’ll get back to you when no one’s listening over my shoulder.”

  “Okay.” I hefted the box. “Thanks for your help, Vince. John’s smiling down on you from heaven, if that’s any help.”

  I made my own way out, leaving him cursing me under his breath. Smeet was coming back up the stairs as I went down. She eyed the box curiously. “Dead dog,” I said, and kept on going.

  John’s own private Idaho, Chesney had said. Yeah, maybe it was, but I could have wished he hadn’t reminded me of that song. The B-52s warbling about the awful surprise in the bottomless pool tied in too neatly with the dream I’d had the night before.

  I felt like I was following the trail that had led John to that final encounter with the business end of his own shotgun. And I wondered for the first time where the gun had come from.

  Another souvenir, maybe.

  Twelve

  NICKY WAS KIND OF SURPRISED TO SEE ME AGAIN. I WAS surprised, too, walking into the formerly empty shell of the old Gaumont to find a team of six men resurfacing walls and putting the seating back in. Nicky was supervising loudly and officiously, ignoring the plaster dust in the air because he didn’t have to breathe it. He turned and saw me and threw out his hands as I approached, as though I were going to frisk him.

  “What?” he said. “Castor, it’s only been four fucking hours. I didn’t even look at your stuff yet. I’ll call you if I’ve got any bones to toss to you, okay?”

  By way of answer, I lifted the lid of the wooden box, which I had tucked underneath my arm like Henry the Eighth’s head, and showed him its contents. He couldn’t blanch: Zombies have a natural pallor that makes albinos look like dedicated sun-bed addicts. But he did look a little sick.

  “How about we go gnaw on a few together?” I suggested.

  Nicky nodded slowly and put out his hand to touch the box lid, pushing it down so that it covered the objects inside from view. He turned to look over his shoulder at his task force. “The rest of the stalls seats are over there, guys,” he said, pointing. “If they’re not all in purple plush, do alternate purple and blue. Or make a star pattern or something. But tasteful—I don’t want to end up with something that looks ongepotchket.”

  We went up to the projection booth, our footsteps echoing on bare concrete. This was Nicky’s inner sanctum, cluttered with whatever he was obsessing on at any given time and the rich and varied detritus of previous obsessions. It was generally pretty hard to move
in there, but today it looked worse than ever because he’d moved a lot of stuff up here from downstairs, out of the way of the builders. Once we were inside, Nicky closed a steel door like the door of a vault and turned to face me, looking stern and pissed off. I guessed he’d decided that attack was the best form of defense.

  “I’ve got to maintain a professional relationship with those guys,” he said, pointing at the floor. “They’re working for me. And it’s kind of hard to get past their touchingly naive assumption that zombies are shambling retards who can be ripped off with total fucking impunity. So another time, Castor, you want to have something out with me, you do it in private, okay? Entre fucking nous. Now what’s this about? And for the record, before you start, you don’t have any beef with me. I didn’t lie to you. I just didn’t talk to you about other people’s business.”

  I might have made a snappy comeback—in fact, I normally would have felt obliged to—but I was looking over Nicky’s shoulder and was momentarily distracted by the colossal seventy-millimeter projector sitting behind him, in a position previously occupied by his stinking hydroponics vats.

  “You’re reopening this place as a cinema?” I asked, amazed.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Is that a trick question, Nicky? How about because you hate people?”

  Nicky shrugged. “Yeah, I do. The live ones are too warm, and the dead ones are mostly falling apart and bleeding self-pity out of the joins. Fuck them all, is my motto.”

  “So opening a cinema—that’s facing your fears with a vengeance, wouldn’t you say?”

  Nicky looked peeved. “I didn’t say I was afraid of them, Castor. Just that I hate their guts. I also didn’t say that when this baby is up and running, anyone else is getting in to see the show. It’s gonna be for an audience of one. Cinema Paradiso. Me and the dark and the black-and-white dream machine.”

  I still couldn’t get my head around the idea, and I put the bollocking that I was about to give Nicky on the back burner while I tried. “What about making a small footprint?” I demanded. “You’ll have to order prints of movies. Get on distribution databases. Deal with shipping companies.” Staying inconspicuous had been Nicky’s highest priority from way back before he died. The world is a web, he said, and every time you touch one of the strands of the web, you tell the spiders where you are. When he accessed the Internet, he did it through a string of proxy servers as long as the Great Wall of China—and like China, he treated information as though it were both a weapon and a shield. You couldn’t get a fix on Nicky; you couldn’t find him in any search. Even his electricity was hand-pumped from deep artesian wells rather than coming straight out of the national grid. He was the closest thing I’d ever met to an invisible man, and his paranoia was a thing of beautiful, terrible purity.

  So this had to be not the real Nicky but some kind of lifelike—or rather, deathlike—facsimile.

  “The small footprint is still a good working goal,” Nicky said almost off-handedly. “But think about it for a second, Castor. I kept a small footprint for years, and it didn’t stop this place from being torn apart by Fanke and his fucking satanists. I’m working on a different strategy now.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is my business. When it turns out to be yours, I’ll tell you about it.”

  “Okay.” I gave it up. The most likely diagnosis, as far as I could see, was that being winkled out of his shell by a crazed mob had made Nicky’s psychosis metastasize into a new form. And he was right. I’d find out about it somewhere down the line, so there was no point in worrying about it now.

  I threw the box down on top of what looked like a baby’s changing table and strolled past Nicky into the room. He backpedaled, keeping pace with me and staying in between me and his nice, shiny new projector. Evidently, it was a look-don’t-touch kind of deal.

  “So let’s get down to business,” I suggested. “I asked you what you were doing for John Gittings, and you came out with all that client-privilege palaver. Then I asked you to find me a curio that used to belong to a dead killer, and you almost jumped out of your dry-cured skin. I noticed it at the time, but I didn’t know what it meant. Now I do. It was because John had been asking you to do the same thing on a bigger scale—death row souvenirs by the bucketload—and you thought I might be playing some kind of mind-fuck on you. Trying to make you give yourself away.”

  Nicky spread his hands in a “there you have it” gesture. “And I don’t know what in our previous relationship could have caused me to have so little trust in you,” he said sardonically.

  “It’s not about trust.” I put my hand on the curve of the projector’s lens turret, and Nicky swatted it away. “It’s about not making me run around in circles when life’s short enough already. Was there some reason to keep me in the dark about John’s hobby? Was there anyone whose interests could have been harmed in any way at all by you leveling with me?”

  “Not my call,” Nicky deadpanned, wiping the turret with his shirt cuff where my hand had touched it. “His widow, maybe? His kids? Fuck do I know? First do no harm, is my motto.”

  “Since when, Nicky?”

  “Since now.”

  “Right. Or maybe you had the same idea Chesney had. That if nobody got to find out about this shit, you could have a garage sale in due course and pocket the profit.”

  “Chesney?”

  “Never mind.”

  I’d been looking at the projector. I didn’t know enough about these things to tell if it was high-end or low-end, state-of-the-art or shoddy; I was just looking, like a prospective buyer in a secondhand car dealership. Now I looked at Nicky instead. “Sit down,” I said.

  “I’m happy standing.”

  “No,” I explained patiently. “This isn’t ‘Sit down and make yourself comfortable.’ This is ‘Sit down or I’ll have to sit you down, and then you might break.’” There was an office chair on rollers within reach of my outstretched arm. I snagged it and rolled it across to him. It took him a moment or two to decide, but when I actually took a step toward him, he sat down hurriedly.

  “This is bullshit, Castor,” he said angrily. “And you wouldn’t pull it on someone who was still alive.”

  I wheeled the chair back over to the changing table where I’d dumped John’s box. I opened the lid again, took out Vince Chesney’s disk, and thrust it into Nicky’s hands. “You’re going to look this over for me,” I said.

  “Yeah? Why am I going to do that?”

  “Because I’m asking you. Nicely, so far.”

  Nicky turned the disk over in his hands, examining it with a remote, bored expression.

  “You know Cesare Lombroso?” I asked him.

  “Sure. I golf with him.”

  “Nineteenth-century anthropologist.”

  “Yeah.” Nicky nodded. “That’s the guy. Starting to smell pretty fierce now. And his elbow gives on the backswing.”

  “He came up with this idea about criminal physiognomy,” I said. “He called it recapitulation, and it made him the poster boy for the early eugenics movement.”

  He dumped the disk back in the box. “Eugenics? That was Annie Lennox and Dave—”

  Moving quickly, I slammed the box lid down on his hand, trapping it. He yelled, but not in pain: His nerves were closed for business, so pain wasn’t a feature of the landscape for him anymore. But that had made him obsessively careful about organic damage, since he knew he didn’t have the advantage of the early-warning system that the living take so much for granted. He also didn’t have self-repair: no white corpuscles, no platelets, no cell division. So where anyone still warm would have tried to snatch his hand back out of the box, Nicky froze up stiller than a startled possum.

  “Castor, enough with this stupid fucking schoolboy shit!” he shouted. Shouting meant inflating his lungs fully and emptying them again—again, not easy for a dead man—and that meant a few moments of total silence after he was done.

  I went on as though I hadn’t
been interrupted. “Recapitulation,” I said. “It’s a bankrupt concept, but it seemed sexy enough until Darwin drove a stampede of finches and Galápagos turtles through it.”

  “What the fuck are you—”

  “The idea, Nicky, is this.” I leaned a little more weight on the box lid, and his free hand clenched as though he were considering punching me; but that’s a good way to break a knuckle, so I knew he wouldn’t. “Babies in the womb, so the story goes, run through all the previous stages of evolution before finally reaching full human form. It’s like Mother Nature has to scroll down through every template in the book before she can get to the human one, because that’s the one that’s most fully evolved. It’s bullshit, like I said, but are you with me so far?”

  “Let go of my fucking hand, Castor!”

  “But Lombroso thought there were glitches in the program. Sometimes babies get stuck on one of the more primitive forms, he said, and instead of being born fully human, they’re born with apelike features that really belong much earlier on in the series.

  “See, he’d taken a good look around, and he’d noticed how many hardened criminals have thick, heavy brow ridges like orangutans, or abnormally long fingers like gorillas, and he had this lightbulb moment. Criminals are the way they are because they’re throwbacks to our nonhuman ancestry. And once you know that, you can spot them up front and run intercept. You don’t even have to wait for them to commit a crime.” I nodded at the box. “That’s what John said he was doing with this stuff, if anyone asked. But that was just his cover story, and I’m hoping you might have some idea what it was covering. See, I know this isn’t really about your Hippocratic Oath, Nicky. It’s about protecting the bottom line. And part of that is not giving away for free any information that I might be persuaded to pay for later. So you want paying, fine, you come up with a starting price, and then we’ll haggle. But time is fucking money, and right now I’m hypersensitive to people who waste any of mine because someone tried to kill me the other night by dropping me down a lift shaft. So this is personal, and it’s at the top of my things-to-do list. Is that understood?”