Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  Well, anytime you feel the urge, I gallantly didn’t say.

  She took an almost childlike interest in the takeoff, swapping seats with me so she could look out 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 shook her head when the stewardess asked if she wanted a drink; she didn’t even look up. Was she nauseated? Could demons get travel sickness?

  I waited awhile 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 wasn’t capable of going pale, because she was 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 cheeky, chirpy self. What’s the matter?”

  She shook her head, but only a 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 defended 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 sideways in her seat, her head sliding over until it almost rested against my shoulder. 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 odor.

  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 that 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 U.S.A. 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 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, to give her immune system a boost and help her fight against whatever was happening to her.

  She slept through the whole flight. When the stewardess came around 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 agonizingly 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 if something inside her had switched itself off, as if she were 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 discovering 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 she was 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.

  Sixteen

  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 would turn out to be fanciful.

  Nicky had taken care of car hire with his usual near-mystical thoroughness, so 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 light-headed myself. It was midafternoon here, the air hot 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 left the ground only 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’d 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 southwest of Birmingham, out toward 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 dere
lict 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 got to be reborn. I was aware that neither was the truth, but they were all the truth I was going to find this time out.

  South of Birmingham was Bessemer, but I wasn’t really aware 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 were made of wood, with big front porches. Some of them were pretty grand, the porches extending to two stories with burnished banister rails gleaming in the slanted morning sun; others were cramped bungalows whose porches seemed to serve the same function as garages in England, piled up with all the detritus of living that never gets used or thrown away. In one 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 rearview mirror.

  Tiny townships alternated with vast, 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 when I was lane-hopping in Birmingham. Certainly someone way behind us had been zigging when we zigged and zagging when we zagged. But the press of traffic 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 gray van with an ugly matte-black bull bar, the driver and any passengers invisible behind tinted windows.

  It kept pace with us as we drove south and east. It kept a long way back, but then it could afford to. There was no traffic besides the two of us, and the turnoffs 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 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 I saw no sign of it as we drove toward the town square past postwar houses as small as egg boxes, many of them burnished with the variegated silver and red of half-rusted aluminum siding. I guessed 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, she probably couldn’t 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 scratched, dust-streaked 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, Myriam Kale had been turned into something of a local industry. The town’s bookshop had given 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 centerpiece. It was the same edition as mine; maybe there was only ever 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.

  A sign in the bookshop window advertised maps of the Kale Walk, taking in the street on which her first married home still stood, her grade school out in nearby Gantts Quarry, the old Seaforth farm where she’d grown up. There was also a museum of local history, which turned out to be 90 percent Kale to 10 percent prizewinning pigs. No insights there, either; just the familiar photos, the familiar truncated history.

  “I think we’re ready for something harder, don’t you?” I said to Juliet.

  “Do you mean hard information, Castor,” she asked mildly, scanning one of the photos with narrowed eyes, “or hard alcohol?”

  “Neither.” I headed for the door. “It was sexual banter. But the nice man at the desk says the offices of the Picayune are on the next block. And since we’re expected…”

  In fact, it was barely fifty yards to the modest two-story brownstone building that bore the Picayune’s masthead in German black letter type over the door. It looked like the kind of newspaper office that might have had a preteen Mark Twain as a copyboy. The bare lobby smelled of dust and very faintly of fish. That turned out to be because they had an office cat, lean and calico, and I flinched in spite of myself—recent memories sparking inside my head—as it uncurled itself from a mat beside the open door that led through into the newsroom. It rubbed itself against my leg, refusing to take offense, then looked up at Juliet and let out a long, yowling cry. Juliet mewed back, and the cat turned tail and fled.

  “You talk to cats?” I asked her.

  “Only when they talk to me,” she answered shortly.

  She let me lead the way into the newsroom. It was a tiny space with only two desks but lots and lots of shelves and filing cabinets. The shelves were full of box files, the desks were groaning with papers, and I was willing to bet the filing cabinets were stuffed to bursting, too. The good news about the paperless office hadn’t penetrated as far as Brokenshire yet.

  They had computers, though, and the only thing in the room that looked like a journalist was hammering away at one with a lot of superfluous violence. He was a heavyset black guy in his shirtsleeves, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair. As he raised his head to look at us, his face was as rucked up as a bulldog’s. “What can I do for you people?” he snapped, as if he didn’t want to know but was working from a script he had to follow. He had much less of an accent than Hattie or the guy in the museum. I wondered whether that was because he’d come here from someplace else and hadn’t quite blended in to the local idiolect, or if it was a relic of a college education in another state.

  “My name’s Castor,” I said, “and this is Juliet Salazar. I think Nicky Heath wrote to you and asked if it would be okay for us to pay you a call.”

  He frowned, trying to place the name. “Nicky Heath?” Then it came to him, and his face sort of unfolded, some of the seams disappearing as his eyebrows went up and back. “Oh, wait. Dead man with a dot-co-dot-uk suffix?”

  “Yeah, that’d be him.”

  He got to his feet and thrust out a hand. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Gale Mallisham. Pleased to meet you. A lot of people walk in here in the mistaken belief that their lives qualify as news. I find it’s a mistake to let such people get a head start.”

  I took the hand and shook it, and I got the usual instant telegraphic flash of information about his mood, which was calm and only mildly curious. I got my fingers crushed, too, because he had a fierce grip.

  He gestured us to sit down, realized there was only one chair on our side of the desk, and went off to steal one from the other, empty desk. “The dead man said you were in a position to offer me a quid pro quo. He was deliberately vague about what you were offering, though.”

  “Well,” I said cautiously, “he probably told you that we’re chasing information about Myriam Kale. And yeah, we’ve got some to trade. Recent information, if you take my drift. Something that might make a story.”

  He wheeled the other chair back across to us, and Juliet took it with a smile and a nod. Gale Mallisham caught the smile full in the face and didn’t stagger, so it was clear that Ju
liet wasn’t back to anything like full proof yet, but his eyes stayed on her as he walked back around to his own side of the desk. Even without her lethally addictive pheromones, Juliet is beautiful enough to make people walk into furniture and not feel the pain.

  “Something that might make a story,” he repeated, swiveling his gaze back to me. “And would that be a Paul Sumner story, by any chance?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meet me halfway, Mr. Castor. I won’t be coy with you if you’re direct and honest with me.”

  I sighed and nodded. “Yeah,” I admitted, “it’s that kind of story. Kale reaching out from beyond the grave to claim another victim.”

  Mallisham sat back, resting his hands on his stomach with the fingers intertwined and steepled. “We don’t cover stories of that type,” he said. “Not as a rule, anyway. You’ve got an uphill struggle now, but I’m still listening.”

  I told him in stripped-down form about the murder of Alastair Barnard, then about the events of the past few days, touching not only on the testimony of Joseph Onugeta but also on John Gittings’s weird collection of gangster memorabilia and what Nicky had sieved out of it. Mallisham listened in complete silence, except when he wanted a detail repeated or clarified. About halfway through, he found a notebook and a pencil in the clutter on his desk. He looked at me for permission, waving the pencil in the air, and I nodded, not breaking stride. After that, he scribbled notes while I talked.

  When I’d finished, he set down the pencil and massaged his wrist. “Shorthand hurts more and more as I get older,” he grunted. He looked at what he’d written, reading it over silently with his lips moving slightly as though he were reciting the words to himself under his breath. “Quite a story,” he said when he’d finished. His tone was dry.