Vicious Circle Read online

  Or maybe the next ricochet I caught would mulch my brains until they leaked out of my ears.

  I crossed to Carla’s table and sat down in the just-vacated chair. She was just getting up: she looked at me with a certain amount of surprise and not much pleasure. Close up, she was an even more impressive lady than she had been from across the bar. Not tall, but very solid; at a distance you could tell yourself that some of her bulk was fat, but from this range, I could see that she was made of something harder and less yielding. She looked to be about forty, and her slablike face under its layers of foundation makeup looked like a red brick wall. Her incongruously soft brown eyes were cordoned off like a crime scene with lines of mascara; the rest of her features had disowned them. She was altogether the wrong shape for a belly shirt, but that was what she was wearing nonetheless: the pixie skirt was another red herring, but I felt that the wrestler’s boots were an honest statement of intent.

  “I’m closed,” was all she said.

  I shrugged as if I was easy either way. “I’m not buying,” I said.

  “Then fuck off.” No rancor; nothing personal. But no give, either.

  “I’m just looking for someone you know. Dennis—”

  “I said fuck off.” She put a warning finger in my face. “I don’t know you.”

  “Well that’s true. My name’s Castor. Felix Castor. My friends call me Fix.” I held out a hand, which she didn’t even look at. Instead she just got up and made to walk around the table, past me toward the bar. Having a good deal more tenacity than sense, I jumped up, too, and stepped into her way. She really wasn’t tall, her head was only on a level with my fourth rib.

  She stopped. There was a silence, which started with her and then moved on out across the bar. Without turning around, I knew we’d just become a local center of attention.

  “Sport,” she said, in the same cold tone, “you really don’t want to do that.”

  “Maybe not,” I conceded. “I really do want to meet Dennis Peace, though. Maybe you could tell him I’m looking for him. Felix Castor. He can get my number from Bourbon Bryant, or leave a message for me here.”

  “You’d better move aside now,” was all Carla said.

  I moved aside. She glanced up at me once: a hard, unreadable look. Then she went on past me to the bar, and there was a collective breathing out in a number of different keys.

  Okay, so my intended charm offensive had fallen a little flat. Well, in terms of charm, anyway: I’d managed the offensive part well enough Never mind. Bourbon had given me some food for thought, and some leads to follow, enough to be going on with for now.

  * * *

  The rain was coming down again heavily, and the slick black asphalt of Soho Square reflected the fragmented glitter of a few car headlights like shooting stars in a clear sky. It wasn’t cold, though: in fact it felt good after the canned air of the cryptlike bar. I didn’t even turn up my coat collar as I walked.

  It was well after midnight now, and there weren’t many people around. Two heavyset guys—one of them very, very tall—were talking in murmurs at the edge of the pavement. They stepped to either side to let me pass in between them, one of them flicking a cigarette away over his shoulder.

  I’d left the car on the other side of the square, so the quickest way was right through the cramped little park area in the middle. I rounded the Tudor folly that used to be an ice cream stand and the farther gate came into view: it was closed, which wasn’t a good sign. A few more steps brought me level with it, and I gave it a tug. Nothing doing, they’d locked it for the night.

  I turned around, to find the two men I’d walked past moments before now heading straight toward me. “Gate’s locked,” I said mildly. I wasn’t looking for trouble, and I didn’t automatically assume that they were: true, they were still heading toward me even though they knew now that there was no through road. But maybe they were hard of hearing; there’s an innocent explanation for most things if you keep an open mind.

  “Good,” said the guy on the left, speaking from way back in his throat. He drew a knife from his belt in a smooth, practiced motion. The one on the right, the bigger of the two, who had eyebrows so thick they looked like bottle brushes, smacked his fist into his palm. Oh well, I only said most things: I guess this was the exception that proved the rule.

  They kept on coming. Over their shoulders I could see the street, which was empty in both directions: no help there. I braced myself to give them as much of a fight as I could—but they were both faster and slicker than I expected. They left the path and peeled off to either side of me, so that I couldn’t keep both of them in view at once. I backed away to avoid being sandwiched, but the locked gate was right behind me, and two steps was all the backing-up room I had. I kept darting my eyes back to the taller guy whenever he moved, because he looked like the business end of the partnership even though he hadn’t produced a weapon. That was all the opening the other guy needed: he did a standing jump, slamming into me hard, and knocking my feet from under me.

  I hit the gate with his shoulder still wedged against my chest, and he put all of his weight into it so that the breath hiccupped agonizingly out of my lungs. I slithered down onto the crazy paving in a dead slump, and they were both on me before I could get up. I twisted wildly, in the hope that the knife would get tangled up in the thick fabric of my coat or go in obliquely and miss all the many vital organs that nature sprinkles so liberally through our body cavities—but for some reason the blow didn’t come. I carried on thrashing, and the knife man almost fell over his colleague as we bucked and writhed together on the cold, wet stones.

  The knife man cursed, and some stuff that must have fallen out of his pockets or maybe out of mine clanged against the fence, then clattered away across the rain-slick stone. I jabbed an elbow into his throat, but without much force—and there was enough muscle there to stop the blow from being anything more than a minor irritant. He punched me in the mouth a couple of times just to get my attention, then once more for the sheer fun of the thing. After which the one with the eyebrows hauled me to my feet, unresisting, his massive fist clamped on my throat. As I came up, though, my hand closed on a stubby metal cylinder that had fallen between my arm and my body. I brought it with me.

  The big guy was even bigger than I’d realized. He lifted me clear of the ground, so that my own weight began to choke me even more effectively than his constricting fingers. His heavy-featured face leered into mine. He had a very wide mouth, with too many teeth in it.

  “Knock it off, Po. You’re killing him,” the knife man snapped. His voice was so deep and harsh, it sounded like he was spitting up razor blades.

  “I thought that was the idea,” the big guy rumbled. With my throat clamped shut, I couldn’t inhale: as the tall man’s breath passed over me in a hot, fetid wave, I was able to appreciate the upside of that position.

  “Bring him down here. I’ll tell you when to fucking kill him.”

  With a snarl, the taller man dropped his forearm an inch or so, letting my toes touch the ground.

  Frowning in concentration, the knife man judiciously adjusted the height of his colleague’s extended arm—a millimeter this way, a touch that—so that I’d be able to avoid choking myself so long as I didn’t actually try to move. It reminded me of a dentist adjusting his chair: I wished it hadn’t.

  I’m not one to judge a book by its cover, but he was an ugly son of a bitch. He didn’t exude the sheer, physical menace his heavily eyebrowed friend did, but there was something wrong with his face, with the proportions of it. The jaw was subtly too long, the eyes set too low. It was like a face that someone had gotten tired of halfway, screwed up, and thrown away. And then this guy had fished it out of the basket and reused it.

  “So now we talk,” he said at last, his voice the same broken-edged growl.

  “You . . . first . . . ,” I mumbled thickly. The bastard had split my lip.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Me first. My name’s Zucker. My friend here is Po. And I’ve got sad news for you, Castor. My friend is not your fri
end. My friend wants to bite your throat out.”

  “Sorry . . . to hear it,” I managed.

  “I’ll bet,” he hissed, his mouth up close to my ear. His breath had a sour stink to it, too. Why couldn’t I be intimidated by people with good personal hygiene?

  “You know why Po wants to hurt you?” Zucker asked me.

  “No idea . . . ,” I wheezed.

  “No,” he agreed. “You have no idea. Which is why I’m going to tell you. You’ve been hanging around with the wrong people. Whoring yourself out to any fucker that asks. Storing up trouble for yourself.”

  Ironically enough, it was around about then that I came to the conclusion that I had a chance. For some reason this fruitcake didn’t want to kill me—or at least, not until after he’d given me a stern lecture and maybe a spanking. If that reluctance made him hesitate at some point when he and his burly friend had the drop on me, then there was an outside chance that I might one day be in a position to look back on this and laugh.

  Either way, though, I couldn’t answer the charge in any detail while the hand of the taller man—Po?—was still crimping my windpipe. Zucker seemed to realize this: he tapped imperiously on Po’s wrist, and Po slackened his grip a little.

  “Well,” I said, swallowing with a wince of discomfort, “you tell me who the wrong people are, and maybe I can avoid them in future.” I slurred the words more than my already-thickening lip required, and I let some bloody drool come out with them; it was probably good if they thought I was more damaged than I was.

  “There’s something in your tone that sounds like sarcasm.” Zucker brandished the knife in front of my eyes. The edge of the blade had a two-tone sheen to it, suggesting hours of loving work with a strop and a wad of Scotch-Brite. I probably wouldn’t even feel it going in. “You can’t imagine how unhealthy sarcasm could be for you right now. You should be thinking in terms of humility, contrition, and open cooperation. We’re looking for nothing less.”

  I threw up my hands, palms out. “I’m just doing a job—like you,” I said. “Okay? No need for heavy threats.”

  “Like me?” The comparison seemed to sit badly with Zucker. “Like me? Say that again, and I’ll cut your tongue out.” I thought the anger might be a sadist’s window dressing, but the glint in his eyes was real enough. I’d touched a nerve, and he was ready to touch back. Good. That was another point in my favor: if he was angry, he was likely to be stupid and hasty and misread my move when I made it. Unfortunately, he was also likely to make good on his promise and cut my tongue out. I was treading a fine line.

  “Sorry,” I said, making my voice a servile mumble. “Sorry, mate. No offense.”

  By now, that additional sensory channel I’ve got that is more like hearing than anything else was jammed with deafening discords. These guys looked human enough, the eyebrows aside, but they were loup-garous: dead human souls that had invaded, possessed, and shaped animal bodies to the point where you couldn’t tell any longer what they’d originally been. Not until the dark of the moon, anyway—then all bets were off. When I realized that this was what I was dealing with, I dropped my eyes to the ground: some were-men respond to direct eye contact in the same way male silverback gorillas do. Come to think of it, Po could have been a gorilla at some point in his post mortem history. Maybe that was a touch exotic for central London, though: the risen dead tend to do their shopping locally.

  “Well maybe you’d like to show us exactly how sorry you are,” Zucker suggested sardonically. “Maybe you’d be interested in switching sides. How does that sound?”

  “Love to. Love to. Whose side am I on now, then? I mean, whose side was I on before I switched to yours? Because I jumped across as soon as you suggested it. Straight up. You tell me whose back you want me to stab, and I’m there. Just give it a name, okay?”

  Zucker hesitated. I knew why, too: when you’re the one with the other guy’s balls in your hand, so to speak, it goes against the grain to answer a direct question. It’s almost as though you’re giving away the advantage. He couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. “Examine your conscience,” he suggested, baring his teeth. “Who’s been asking you for favors lately?”

  Who indeed? Juliet. The Torringtons. The London Met. If this was what an embarrassment of riches felt like, I decided I could live without it: it was too sharp and pointy by half. But it would really help to know who I had to thank for this special attention, so I decided to push the issue just an inch or so further.

  “I’m hugely in demand,” I said. Po had unconsciously relaxed his grip by a fraction, so I was getting some of my breath back now. “You’ll have to give me a clue. You’re not working for a drug pusher, are you? Gent by the name of Pauley? No? Because my mate in Serious Crimes reckons I might be in line for what he called ‘the frighteners.’ Do you gents qualify as frighteners, or are you more in the line of softeners-up for the frighteners still to come? Sort of a John the Baptist deal, if you take my meaning?”

  They were looking at me in bewilderment. But then they gave it up and got down to business again. The edge of the knife touched my cheek in a way that was unpleasantly suggestive. While this was going on, though, I was turning over in my hand the object I’d palmed when they dragged me to my feet. Metallic, certainly, rounded, basically cylindrical but hollow at one end and with a tapering extension at the other. The goblet. I’d picked up the goblet I carry around with me for the very rare occasions when I’m tempted to try my hand at black magic.

  “We need information,” said Zucker. “And you need to convince us that we shouldn’t cut all sorts of pieces off you. So listen to me, okay? Just listen. We know how far they got, and we know why they stopped. Someone didn’t close the circle, right? A little bird flew the nest? But if there was even a partial breach, we could be knee-deep in each other’s entrails before the fucking day is out. Did they promise you immunity? If they did, they didn’t mean it. You’re not stupid enough to fall for that line, are you?”

  All of which made about as much sense to me as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  “Maybe I’m more naive than you think,” I said. It seemed safely noncommittal.

  It was at this point that Po reentered the conversation. “Let me eat one of his eyes,” he suggested.

  Zucker ignored this suggestion. “You think it might be possible to squeeze some advantage out of the situation,” he said. “Your sort always do. I can promise you, Castor, there’s no profit here for anyone. Just death, and then after that the things that are worse than death.”

  “You’re going to kill me and then rape me?”

  Po lifted his free hand over my head and balled it into a fist, but Zucker shook his head just once and the move stopped dead.

  “They’ll close the circle,” he growled, bringing his face up very close to mine, “and do the whole thing again from scratch. Things will get bad, then. Very bad, very quickly. And they won’t need you anymore. Do you think any assurances they’ve given you will still hold after that? Do you think they’ll keep you as a pet?”

  He put out a hand and pressed his index finger against my temple. His nail was as sharp and tapered as a claw, but he didn’t break the skin. With Po still gripping my throat I couldn’t pull away as the nail traced a path across my face until it rested on my left cheek, a millimeter away from my eye.

  “If you’ll work for us,” he said, with an absolute calm that was a lot more chilling than Po’s slightly crazed anger, “then there’s a point in keeping you alive. If you won’t, we’re wasting our time.”

  I put a pensive expression on. And underneath it, I really was thinking hard. What I was thinking was this: since I didn’t have the slightest idea what these two escaped lunatics were talking about, the likelihood that I could talk them into not ripping my head off and sucking out the juices with a straw was small. So the time had come to play my ace in the hole.

  “All right,” I muttered, dropping my gaze again. “All right. I admit it, they made me a good offer. Fuck, what would you have done?” As I said it, I threw out my hands in a mute appeal—and brought my right hand around on the rebound, ja
mming what was in it directly into Po’s face.