Vicious Circle Read online

  “The blade is hollow-ground,” she said. “That’s why it’s so thin and sharp—and also one of the reasons why it looks older than it is. A full hollow sacrifices everything to the one concern of getting the best edge. So it wears down fast, assuming it doesn’t break. The other reason it looks old is because it doesn’t have a bolster—most modern knives do.”

  “A bolster?”

  “The thickened part just above the handle.”

  “It wasn’t machine-milled, though,” I pointed out.

  She looked up and gave me a dry, quizzical stare. “What makes you think that?” she asked.

  I pointed. “When you turn it into the light, the reflections let you see the grind marks on the steel. They’re not evenly spaced.”

  She nodded like a schoolmistress, satisfied that I’d done as well as I could with my limited understanding. “That’s true,” she said. “Although some machine-milled blades are hand-finished afterwards, for a variety of reasons.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as persuading the buyer that he’s getting a handcrafted item.” I slapped my hand to my forehead, Homer Simpson style, and she smiled dryly. “Yes, it’s a dirty business. Stay out of it, dear heart, if you want to keep any illusions about human nature.” She ran her thumb along the edge of the blade, very carefully. “This could have been hand-milled, just about, although if it was then it was done by someone with a very good eye. Thickness, you see: not the slightest variation along the whole blade. Possible to achieve by hand, but a lot easier with an electric mill.

  “Now the wood . . .” She rubbed the handle appreciatively. “That’s nice. Very nice. Amboyna burl. Southeast Asian. You’d never guess to look at the living tree that the heartwood would have that red luster to it. The bark is as gray as I am.

  “But here’s the giveaway.” She tapped the design at the tang end of the blade—the delicate floral motif, which was the thing I was most interested in. “Machine-etched,” she said. “The electrolyte solution leaves a minute amount of staining on the steel, which gets worse over the course of a few years and then stabilizes unless there’s a fault in the steel itself or it wasn’t properly neutralized in the first place. In this case there’s a green sheen at the base of the major lines in the design—here. This was done with an industrial-standard etch-a-matic using copper and bronze electrolyte and a sodium-based neutralizer. It’s letting the side down, really, because overall this is a nice piece. But”—she laid it down on the counter, reversed it, and slid it across to me—“no more than fifty years old, in my opinion. And not worth as much now as it was when it was new.”

  I tapped the heel of the blade. “Have you ever seen this design before?” I asked her.

  She frowned. Possibly she registered that as being an unusual question to come from a tragically bereaved nephew. “No,” she admitted. “Not on a knife blade, in any event. I recognize the actual plant, of course.”

  “You do?” I was impressed. “Why?”

  “Because I deal in antiques, dear. There’s always at least some degree of stylization in floral motifs, so they’re easy to memorize. And they’re very useful in identification, so it’s worth the effort. This is belladonna—deadly nightshade, to give it its more poetic name. You can tell by the asymmetrical leaf pairs.”

  “Right, of course. Asymmetrical leaf pairs.”

  “With the flower coming out of the larger leaf. Look.”

  It was quite distinctive, now that she mentioned it. Pretty, too. “But does it mean anything?” I demanded, looking her in the face.

  She looked back at me, world-weary and a little disapproving. “You’re not a policeman, are you, young man? I positively despise policemen. Rabid little rodents, the lot of them.”

  “I’m not a policeman, Mrs. Caldessa.”

  “Just Caldessa will do, thank you very much. Very well. I’ll get my book.”

  The book was called Identifying Marks in Cutlery and Metalware, by Jackman and Pollard, it was dated 1976, and it was thicker than a telephone directory. Caldessa leafed through it with one hand, holding the knife in the other, and muttering to herself under her breath the whole time. There didn’t seem to be an index of any kind, although there were headings at the top of each page that consisted mainly of words like “inflorescence” and “lanceolate,” and numbers that might have been ranges of dates.

  Finally she tapped a particular design, glanced from the page to the knife and back again a great many times, and looked up to fix me with a gaze of frank puzzlement.

  “Tell me a little more about your uncle,” she suggested.

  I shrugged apologetically. “There is no uncle,” I admitted, telling her what she must already know. “I swiped that knife from a couple of guys who were trying to perform amateur surgery on me with it. Now I’d love to know who they were.”

  “Anathemata Curialis.”

  “Not deadly nightshade? I thought you said—”

  “No, no. The organization that uses this design. It’s called Anathemata Curialis. Did you get a good look at the men who were trying to kill you?”

  “They weren’t men,” I said, remembering the feline shape that had chased me across Soho Square and shuddering involuntarily.

  “That’s a very harsh judgment,” said Caldessa sternly. “I’m not a believer myself, but I respect the opinions of others. Most of the time. Unless they’re ridiculous, like female circumcision.”

  “Whoa. Wait a second. What are you telling me? That this is . . . ?”

  “A religious symbol. In effect, yes. If this knife actually belonged to the two men you mentioned, then they were Catholics. Jackman and Pollard, on whose opinion I have many times staked my reputation, identify the Anathemata Curialis as a wing of the Catholic Church.”

  She beckoned me around the counter so that she could show me the relevant entry in the book, but seeing it in black-and-white didn’t really help much. I couldn’t make any sense out of this no matter whether I was reading it across, down, or diagonally. The Catholic Church hated and feared the undead with the same passion and enthusiasm they’d once reserved for people who said the world was round. Among the very few things I could tell you for certain about those two loup-garous was that they weren’t faithful and committed adherents to the Roman communion.

  But pictures don’t lie. Or if they do, they don’t do it with such a straight face. I ran my eyes down the list. In among the names of Oxford colleges, regiments of defunct colonial armies, and arriviste aristos whose forebears had puckered up and gone down on long-dead kings, there was a single entry in italic type: “Anathemata Curialis, Catholic Order, disc. 1882.”

  “Disc?” I queried aloud.

  “Discontinued,” said Caldessa. “Nobody has made knives with that livery since 1882.”

  “Well, now we know something that Jackman and Pollard don’t know,” I mused grimly. Caldessa raised an eyebrow and nodded, conceding the point.

  Remembering my manners, I thanked her and asked her if I could pay her for her time, but she waved the suggestion away summarily. “I honestly doubt you could pitch your price high enough to avoid an implied insult, dear. I’m a luxury commodity. If you ever have anything of real value to sell, you know where I am. And in the meantime, you can take this tawdry little gewgaw out of my sight.”

  I put the knife back into its tube and went back out onto the street. It was the middle of the afternoon now, and the tourist crowd was thicker than it had been. Walking up toward Notting Hill Gate, I considered the logical next step—my older brother, Matthew—and tried to find reasons not to take it. If anyone could give me a labeled diagram of the innards of the Catholic hierarchy, it was him: he’s a priest, after all, and he loves his work. He’s a lot less fond of mine, though, and our conversations have a habit of disintegrating into name-calling before we even get past the small talk.

  Because I was thinking about Matthew, and because thinking about Matthew tends to trigger a whole lot of other, darker thoughts, I was more or less oblivious of my surroundings. So it was a while before I noticed I was being followed. I wasn’t even sure where the realization came
from: I just caught sight of a movement in my peripheral vision, and on some level almost below consciousness I turned up a pattern match. I had to fight the urge to turn around. Instead I crossed to a shop window and used it as a mirror—a hoary-whiskered trick that works one time out of three, tops.

  This time it half-worked: I saw a tall man in a heavy black overcoat about twenty yards behind me, there for a second as the crowds parted and then gone again. He had his shoulders hunched and his head down, so I couldn’t tell who he was, and the steep reverse angle of the window meant that in that split second he’d already moved outside of my field of vision.

  I stepped into the shop and took a quick look around. More or less the same range of goods as all the other shops I’d passed, at least to my untutored eye: horse brasses abounded, along with heavy wooden furniture that it would be generous to describe as distressed, old pub signs, and wrought-iron boot-scrapers. No other customers in there; the shop assistant, a guy in his twenties with the odd combination of a street-legal razor cut and a silk Nehru jacket, was reading Miller’s Price Guide for light relief. There was a smell of must and silence and churchlike tranquillity. Time for hoary dodge number two. I went up to the counter, and the assistant glanced up at me with a professional smile, friendly but brisk.

  “Is there a back door out of this place?” I asked.

  The smile faded to an affronted deadpan. “The workrooms aren’t open to customers, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m being followed.” I decided to elaborate, and I reached for a story that would press the right buttons for an up-market rag-and bone-man. “Loan shark muscle. They want to beat the shit out of me. I’d rather they didn’t do it at all, and you’d probably rather they didn’t do it in here. Please yourself, though.”

  The assistant looked both shaken and disgusted. Fixing me with a hard stare, he picked up his cellphone from behind the counter and gripped it tight as though it were the cure for all the world’s ills. “Yeah,” I agreed, “you could call the police. And while we’re waiting you can tell me what not to bleed on.”

  The workrooms were impressive, and they had a potent smell compounded of beeswax and shellac, but I didn’t have time to take the guided tour. The assistant led the way, glancing back at me every other step to make sure I was still there. We went along a corridor lined with wooden crates into a room dominated by a single massive workbench, chairs, and occasional tables hanging on racks above it like some torture chamber for sinful furniture. Then through there into a storeroom stacked with cans of varnish, bales of wire wool, plate-size tubs of Brasso.

  At the far end of the storeroom there was a door that he had to unlock with a key from his pocket, and then unbolt at top and bottom. He threw it open and held it for me, glaring at me as though this might still be some kind of fiendish trick. I examined the pass-not ward on the lintel of the back door as I stepped through it: hazel. “This is out of date,” I told him, flicking it with the tip of my index finger. “It’s almost June. If you don’t want poltergeists, get a sprig of myrtle.”

  He didn’t answer. The door slammed shut behind me and I was alone in an alley wide enough to take a delivery van. Not much cover, and it obviously opened right back out onto the street again. Still, we’d see what we’d see.

  I went cautiously to the corner and looked out. There were enough people walking past in both directions so that unless anyone was looking for me to emerge at exactly that point they’d take a while to notice me. So I had the luxury of being able to look up and down the length of the street without having to watch my back at the same time.

  Nobody lurking around the doorway of the shop I’d gone into. Nobody browsing the windows of the shops to either side of it. I looked across to the other side of the street, bearing in mind that if this guy was any good he’d have chosen a place where a casual glance wouldn’t pick him out.

  A casual glance didn’t, but on the second sweep, bingo, there he was. Just opposite the shop I’d gone into, there was a stand selling roasted nuts—the kind of thing that American tourists get their picture taken with, mistaking it for part of London’s rich cultural heritage because it involves both bland food and a cheeky, cheerful Cockney. The man in the black coat had positioned himself close to the back of the stand where he’d be hidden from two sides, and from the other two would most likely look like someone patiently waiting to have his nuts roasted. He was a quarter onto me, so I was mostly seeing the back of his neck and I still couldn’t tell whether I’d ever met him before.

  Just then, as I was staring at him and willing him to turn around, my phone started to squirm in my pocket like a living thing. There was no noise: I’d set it on vibrate a while ago when for some reason silence had been an issue, and now I kept losing my way in the menus when I tried to turn it back. But noise or no, it came out of nowhere and it made me start. And it was as though that minute movement alerted my stalker even though his eyes were elsewhere. His head jerked up and around, abruptly, triangulating on some cue that beat the hell out of me, and then his body swiveled, too, so that he was facing in my exact direction.

  It was eerie and unsettling. So was the face, now that I got a good look at it, because it was Zucker.

  Son of a bitch. These guys were tailing me around London with insolent ease. I could understand it if I were wearing a sandwich board like the deranged vegetarian who used to hang out at Oxford Circus (LESS LUST THROUGH LESS PROTEIN) but inconspicuous is my middle name and I pride myself on the hair-trigger accuracy of my professional radar. Did they have the office staked out? Or the Collective? Where had I picked them up, and how had they gotten this close to me twice—or three times, counting the Oriflamme—without me spotting them?

  It was a conundrum for a quieter moment. Right now, Zucker was staring directly at me across the width of the street, and even with the surging throng turning this into a game of peep-o there was no way he hadn’t seen me. I turned my back on him and fled.

  When you’re playing follow-the-leader in what the military would call a broken ground situation, the leader has all the advantages so long as he keeps his nerve. Weaving in and out of the crowd with my head down, I kept moving fast until I reached another alley, then broke free and sprinted the full length of it, coming out in Brunswick Gardens. The crowds were thicker here if anything, because there was a street market on and the road had been closed to traffic. Tinny music from someone’s wooferless boombox scraped along the air along with scents of almond essence and vanilla pods. The stalls, selling mainly antiques and collectables but also T-shirts, sweets, spices, and bootleg DVDs, crowded the curbs on either side and gave passers-by a lose-lose choice between the narrow, obstacle-strewn pavement and the heaving, shop-or-drop chaos in the center of the road.

  Perfect.

  I threaded my way between two stalls, crossed the street, and continued on the other side. Then fifty yards farther on I crossed back, legs bent at the knee to keep my head down, squeezing myself skillfully through the mob wherever a gap presented itself, and carried on down to the corner, where Kensington Church Street picks up again after the dogleg. Here I inserted myself back into the more orderly crowd of antique-hunters. Okay, I’d gotten turned around 180 degrees, and I’d have to go home by a different route, but I reckoned that no one on God’s earth could have kept me in sight through that maneuver.

  So it was kind of a bitter blow when I got onto an eastbound train at High Street Ken and saw, walking down the steps on the other side of the barriers, that now familiar black coat and slouching, head-down gait. The train was idling, doors open, waiting for a signal to change or for some other, more arcane London Underground augury. Packed in between a whole bunch of other straphangers and their interesting collection of armpits, all I could do was stand and watch. The man slid his ticket through the machine and the barriers opened. He walked on past me without looking up, and without any sense of urgency that I could see. Then, just like on the street, he looked up—first left and then right, finally locking eyes with me just as the doors hissed shut.

>   Our eyes met. He might have been angry, or embarrassed, or nonplussed, but he wasn’t any of those things. He just smiled, baring teeth that seemed to include a few too many canines. I smiled back, sardonically: then the doors slid open again and the smile slid off my face like lumpy custard.