Vicious Circle Read online

  “Right.”

  He took a sip of his coffee, eyes cast down, looking like a man who was trying hard not to say anything.

  To fill the gap, I dug in my pocket for Zucker’s knife and put it down on the table between us.

  “You ever see anything like that before?” I asked him.

  Matt stared at the knife, and his eyes widened slightly. “That object belongs in your life, not in mine,” he said softly. Too softly; he never did learn to lie with his face as well as his voice.

  “Funny you should say that,” I mused. “Because the guy who tried to use it on me was definitely one of your crowd.”

  “A priest?” Matt’s tone was disdainful.

  “Yeah, in a way. Maybe. A functionary of your church.”

  “My church doesn’t employ armed men.”

  “It doesn’t? I suppose the crusaders were using your registered trademark without permission, then?”

  Matt sighed heavily. “The last crusade ended in the thirteenth century, Felix. I used the present tense.”

  I tapped the hilt of the knife. “This thing is present, Matty. And it makes me tense enough for both of us. Tell me about the Anathemata.”

  He was silent.

  “They’re trying to kill me,” I said. “It would help a lot if I knew why.”

  Another silence, but this time I went with instinct and let it stretch.

  “They don’t—kill—indiscriminately,” Matt said at last. “And they’re not agents of the church.”

  “Then why are they listed as a church organization?”

  “They’re not. Unless you were using an old book.”

  Again, I waited, and eventually, reluctantly, Matty filled the silence.

  “They’re a very old sect,” he said. “But their history is patchy. Under some popes they barely existed. At other times they were as powerful in their way as the Society of Jesus or the Inquisition. Their brief was to deal with those things that mother church considers abominations—anathema, in the Greek word. Anathemata is just the plural form. In recent times . . . over the past ten years or so . . . that had come to mean the risen dead.”

  A murky light, like bioluminesence in a bloated corpse, was starting to dawn.

  “What exactly does ‘deal with’ mean in this context?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Matty admitted. “I was never a member, though as a student of church history I was aware of their existence.”

  “Are you telling me there wasn’t any loose talk behind the confessionals on a Saturday night?”

  He frowned. “There were rumors, obviously. Contradictory, and based on nothing more than hearsay. Felix, the Catholic Church isn’t a vast, secret conspiracy, whatever you happen to think—in terms of freedom of information, it compares favorably to most governments.”

  “Set your bar a little higher,” I suggested sourly. “Matty, I’m not talking about the Little Sisters of Maria Assumpta—I’m talking about a group within your church that’s using werewolves to run their errands. Are they reaching out to our hairier brethren? Is ‘deal with’ a polite way of saying ‘recruit’? And they have daggers made to their own design, for fuck’s sake. You think they open a lot of mail? Cut a lot of cakes, what?”

  “I don’t know what they do,” Matty repeated patiently, refusing as always to lose his temper with me. “I will tell you, though, if you’re interested, why an up-to-date listing of church groups would leave the Anathemata out.”

  “Go on,” I said. I was distracted by the TV images over his shoulder. Broken windows, and policemen in riot gear charging forward in a solid line.

  “Because they were disbanded,” Matt said, with just an edge of smugness. “The new pope questioned their methods and their usefulness. He ordered the seniors of the order to stand down, after first reallocating their members to other groups and tasks. This was all quite recent—only a year ago.”

  “And did it take?” I asked pointedly. I glanced down at the knife. “Because that thing on the table was even more recent.”

  That reluctance came back. “The prelates of the order took issue with His Holiness. I gather that they argued . . .” He hesitated, and then didn’t seem to know how to start up again.

  “They argued . . . ?” I prompted.

  Matty nodded curtly. “Don’t try to browbeat me, Felix, please. I’m trying to word this in a way that doesn’t make it sound too sensational. They argued that the rising of the dead, and the appearance of infernal creatures as the shepherds of the dead, were an indication that the Last Days had begun. They felt—many of them felt—that their own dissolution would leave the field open to hell, and that they would be remiss in their spiritual duty if they accepted it.”

  He’d been looking at the knife. Now he looked up and met my gaze. He’d clearly reached the thing that he hadn’t wanted to say, and I was impressed by how well he swallowed the pill.

  “So they refused. En masse. And they were excommunicated.”

  I whistled, long and low. “That’s strong stuff,” I said.

  “Yes, Felix, that’s strong stuff. It put their souls and their bodies outside of the church’s communion and comfort. It denied them the possibility of a place in heaven.”

  “It left them with nothing to lose,” I summed up.

  Matty opened his mouth to speak, but I stopped him with a raised hand. “Matty, do you know where these people operate out of?”

  “No.”

  I considered that bare monosyllable. It seemed to me to be concealing at least a moderately sized multitude of sins.

  “Would you know how to contact them, if you had to?” I asked.

  Matt breathed out, long and hard, through his nose. “The Anathemata are historically linked to the Douglas Ignatieff Biblical Research Trust in Woolwich,” he said. “I say historically, because it’s been a long time since anyone in the movement published any papers or took part in religious debate. I doubt very much that the connection is an extant one.”

  “But would there be someone there who—?”

  I stopped dead, my brain finally catching up with my eyes, and leaned over to the right to get a better look at the TV on the wall behind him. It was showing a scene of chaos on the nighted streets of a city: running people, a yellowish flare of distant flames, and in the foreground the corner of some building, one wall of red brick, the other of glass with a huge hole in the middle of it like a jag-toothed mouth. The camera was handheld and the light wasn’t good, but it looked like an office block of some kind—low-rise, only three stories above a street of shopfronts.

  “Wait.” I got up and crossed to the set. “Can you turn up the volume?” I called out to the waiter. The resolution was still as clear as mud, but I could read the strap line at the bottom of the screen well enough: it said WHITE CITY SIEGE.

  The waiter looked a little indignant. “We keep it low so it doesn’t disturb the other diners.”

  “Yeah, I know. Just for a moment. It’s important.”

  He held out for a moment longer, but I kept staring at him implacably and he folded. He found a remote from somewhere and aimed it at the set: the whisper of sound became a just about audible mumble. “—are feared to be dead, although it’s obviously the hostages who are the immediate concern right now. The police have surrounded the Whiteleaf shopping precinct, and they’ve closed off Bloemfonten Road at both the north and south ends. Now they’re waiting to see if there are any demands. But since they don’t even know who they’re dealing with, or whether the motive is political or something else entirely, it’s far to early to say whether we can expect—”

  I lost the rest of the sentence, because I suddenly caught another glimpse of what I thought I’d seen before: a pale, familiar face in the ragged-edged hole in the glass—leaning out from some anonymous strip-lighted space, with two male faces behind her, one of them holding what looked to be a kitchen knife.

  It was Susan Book, the verger at St. Michael’s Church.

  I turned to Matty.

  “I need a car,” I said. “Did you drive here?”

  To my surprise, he reached into his pocket and handed me the
keys. He’d seen my face as I was staring at the screen, and I guess it didn’t leave him with any questions.

  “It’s a Honda Civic,” he said. “Dark blue. On Prince’s Avenue.”

  “Thanks.” I gave him a nod, grateful that he wasn’t wasting my time by asking for explanations. “For the loan, and for the information. Shall I bring the car back here or—?”

  “There’s a Carmelite convent over in Hadley Wood. You can leave it there. The sisters know me.”

  A predictable joke about the Biblical sense of that word died on my lips as I stared into his solemn, concerned face.

  “Or leave it somewhere else, if you have to,” he said. “Explain to me later, Felix. If there’s something important hanging on this, you’d better go.”

  I went.

  Ten

  IDROVE BACK UP COLNEY HATCH LANE LIKE A BAT OUT OF some part of hell where life was particularly cheap, took a hair-raising left onto the North Circular, and accelerated to eighty. That took me past the Stanger, and I thought fleetingly of the incredible change that Rafi had undergone.

  Why now? What had happened to trigger it? Were the forces that seemed to have driven so many Londoners over the edge into murderous insanity only one half of some cosmic seesaw that had also tipped Rafi back into his right mind? And was either end of the seesaw connected with the sudden interest that the Anathemata were taking in me? The link there was Peace. I was looking for him, and they were, too. So were they only following me to get to him, or was there some other reason why I couldn’t spit without hitting them? And given what Matty had said about their attitude to the undead, what were they doing handing out stake-out jobs to the likes of Po and Zucker in the first place?

  I pulled my attention back to the job at hand. Whatever was going down in White City, I needed some more information before I walked into it, that was for damned sure; otherwise what I didn’t know could end up hurting me quite a lot. I didn’t even know what I was going to do when I got there. I just had a feeling, maybe activated by seeing Susan Book in the middle of all the bad craziness, that this was somehow connected to what Nicky had described: the wave of murder and mayhem that had swept through West London on Saturday night. That part of the city was the epicenter of something very nasty, something subterranean, that broke the surface as a murder here and a rape there—and now as a riot. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a link.

  I turned on the radio, one-handed, and after a few wild stabs in the dark found the channel search button. Samples of pop, reggae, advertising jingles, and the occasional solemn BBC voice washed around my ears as I realized that I didn’t even know exactly where I was headed. Bloemfonten Road. I didn’t know at all, but the announcer on the TV news had said it had a north and a south end, so we were probably talking about either a turning off the Westway or one of the maze of streets around the stadium. I just had to hope that once I got close enough I could find my way by following the flames and the sirens.

  The road was reasonably clear at first, and I made good time—but the traffic was bound to start piling up once I got to Hanger Lane, and in any case there was a quicker route down through Willesden to Scrubs Lane. I realized as I turned off onto the Harrow Road that I was going to drive within a hundred yards or so of my office. Well, Pen was always telling me I should spend more time there.

  “—in what has rapidly turned into a siege situation.” Finally! The tone as much as the words told me that I’d found what I was looking for. I stopped the channel search, again with a fair bit of fumbling, and turned up the volume. I also switched on the back wipers and the hazard lights along the way, but this was no time to worry about fine details. A man’s voice, solemn but with an undertone of excitement, blared out of the speakers, the car’s crummy sound system giving him a tinny echo. “It’s thought that there could be as many as twenty people still inside the shopping center, but we don’t have any idea as yet how many of them are being held against their will, or even who their attackers are. The fires are mostly out now, and the immediate danger is passed, but these armed men and women have issued no demands and given no indication of what their agenda is. The earlier destruction seemed almost random, and from the sounds we can hear it’s still going on inside the center. Only five minutes ago, an exercise machine came flying through a window on the upper level and fell onto a police car parked on the street below. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, but it’s a very tense situation here and there’s little prospect of it being resolved anytime soon.”

  A sudden absence of street sounds in the background made it clear that we’d gone back to the studio, as a second voice, female this time but with the same titillated solemnity, took up the story—or rather, hijacked it away into rarefied realms of speculation about terrorist cells and soft economic targets. I tuned it out. This wasn’t about terrorism, I felt that in my guts: it was about Nicky’s bell-shaped curve. And send not to ask for whom the fucking bell tolls, because you’re not going to like the answer.

  My phone went off and I took it in case it was Pen, wanting to know where the hell I’d scooted off to in such a hurry. But it wasn’t.

  “Hey,” said Nicky. “Catch you at a bad moment?”

  The Civic was an automatic: I could manage with just the one hand, but I had enough to concentrate on without shooting the breeze with Nicky on top of it all.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Can I call you back?”

  “Sure. You watching TV?”

  “I was. Now I’m listening to the radio.”

  “Interesting times, eh? Call me when you’ve got a moment. But make it quick. This shit you need to hear. Actually don’t call me, because I’m going out to the Ice-Maker’s. You can meet me down there.”

  “Peckham? Nicky, it’s been a long day—”

  “Fine. Wait until tomorrow. It’s your call. But if I were you, I’d want this particular dish served hot.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I tossed the phone onto the seat beside me. I’d almost reached the Westway, which meant I had to be getting close to the action now. I slowed just a little as I came around the underpass, in case I ran into any of those police roadblocks. Nothing to see, but as I passed White City Stadium I caught sight of the flashing lights of the black-and-whites a couple of hundred yards up the road. Okay, “X” presumably marked the spot. I took the first left, then a right—past a closed-up nursery school whose deserted swings and climbing frames leaped into the bleaching glow of my headlights: in the harsh light they were divorced from their functions in a way that was frankly sinister, looking more or less like the contents of a torture chamber.

  I was counting off the distance roughly in my head, but long before I got to the next intersection I could see exactly what I was aiming for. Up ahead of me was a wall of red brick that was already familiar from the TV news bulletin: the giveaway, though, was the wide strip-sign hanging out over the road, which proclaimed WHITELEAF SHOPPING centre in an italic font with plenty of scrolling. Heavy coils of smoke hung above and around it, wearing out their welcome in the damp, still spring air.

  I turned off the lights and pulled over. Up ahead of me the street was packed with people: cops in uniform, ambulance crews, passers-by who’d stopped to watch the drama play itself out. I walked up, skirting the edges of the crowd as I looked for a way to move in a little closer without drawing unwelcome attention to myself. I didn’t have any definite plans past that point, except that I wanted to get inside the building and take a look for myself at what was going down in there. And that I wanted Susan the verger to get out of this intact, with all her doubts and hesitations. A modest enough goal, I thought. The police could sort out the rest of it: that was what they were paid for.

  But the crowd was a solid wedge, and even if I could get past them there was a police cordon all around this face of the building. To the right that cordon stretched all the way up the street back as far as I could see—probably all the way to the roadblock on the Westway. On the other side the houses came right up to the wall of the shopping center, the last one facing it at an oblique ang
le like a dinghy that had collided with an ocean liner and been knocked spinning. I was going to have to try elsewhere.