Vicious Circle Read online

  “But after a while I found out I could do a lot more than that. Instead of just guessing the cards that people were holding, I started to see people as cards—as hands of cards. Live or dead, didn’t matter, there was a particular hand of cards that stood for that person in my mind. That’s how I bind ghosts—I deal out the right hand of cards, and then I shuffle it back into the deck. Bang. They’re gone.

  “Like I said, with me everything was a means to an end. I burned ghosts for money, sure—just like I gambled for money. And sometimes if I found a ghost that was still fresh and more or less together, I’d sweat it for what it had left behind when it died that might still be around for me to pick up. Like, what were the numbers on your bank accounts, and is there a little stash of money at home that you salted away against a rainy day and that your missus doesn’t know about?”

  He looked at me hard, which was probably how I was looking at him. “There wasn’t anyone I’d have spared in those days,” he said. “Man, woman, or child, I didn’t give a fuck. I did it for the cash, because I went through a lot of cash, and I did it for the hell of it. Because I could.”

  He seemed to expect an answer—maybe outrage or accusation—but after going over this ground with Nicky there wasn’t much he could say that would have surprised me. I shrugged. “Okay,” I said, “you were a bad man. Maybe the worst. Let’s take that as read.”

  Peace gave a bitter laugh, shook his head. “Give me a break, Castor. I wasn’t the worst, not by a million sodding miles. Maybe I kidded myself that I was, but I was a fucking babe in arms compared to some of the people I met.

  “Anyway. I went on my travels, didn’t I? With the forty-five medium regiment first, and then on my tod. Wanted to see the world. Hadn’t even turned twenty and Watford was too hot to hold me. I did Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East. Rolled on from place to place with a few bits of kit in a rucksack, living off the people I met up with and doing whatever paid. Worked as a mercenary after I left the army—not for long, though. I found I wasn’t quite dirty enough for that game. Then I got in with some gangster types and ran drugs for them for a while, mostly as a mule, occasionally selling.

  “That was how I ended up in Ouagadougou. I was making a delivery, and I got rolled. Guy says he’s already paid, then when I refuse to hand over he gets a bunch of his mates to beat the crap out of me. So I end up on the street, penniless, and having to keep my head down because the blokes who hired me won’t be interested in hearing how I lost the shit—they’ll just want their money, which I can’t give them because I haven’t got it.

  “Could’ve been worse, though. Burkina Faso was the edge of the bloody world in those days—the final frontier. They’d just kicked that crooked bastard Sankara out and nobody knew from one day to the next whether there was going to be another coup or a civil war or what, so people were in the mood to take stupid risks, spend their money now before it stopped being worth anything, and generally let their hair down. My kind of place, in some ways, if you leave aside the fact that everyone was shit-poor and you could get your throat cut if you flashed a dollar bill.

  “Ouagadougou was the capital city, but you wouldn’t know it. A few blocks of swanky buildings in the center, and then you turn a corner and you’re in among the shitty little shanties again. Very strange.

  “One night I was in a bar and these three drunken fucks started in on a white woman who was sitting by herself. There was something a bit odd about her: she was very fancily dressed, even for the main drag, and this was the boondocks. Cocktail dress, lots of makeup although she didn’t need it. Hair up, and a necklace that was probably worth a couple of years’ wages around there. These guys tried to pick her up, and she told them to sod off, so they got nasty.

  “I stood up, walked over to help. They weren’t nearly as tough as they thought they were, and anyone could see that this woman was very well-heeled: very easy on the eye, too: tall, built, lots of class. Eyes a little cold, maybe, and blue-eyed blondes have never been my thing when all’s said and done, but still—I thought if I got in good with this piece of goods, that was another door opening. Might at least get a bed for the night and my leg over, maybe get a lot more.

  “But she didn’t need my help, as it transpired. Before I ever got to the table, she’d told one of these gents to keep his paws to himself, and he’d responded—being the humorous type—by grabbing hold of her breasts. His mates are roaring with laughter and he’s soaking it up, loving it. For about three seconds, give or take. Then the lady took a gun out of her handbag and blew a hole in his throat.”

  He’d fallen into a slightly dreamy inflection, his eyes unfocused as he stared into a different darkness, a different night a decade and a half gone. Then he pulled himself together and snapped out of it, shaking his head in somber wonder.

  “That was your mother, Abbie,” he said, looking up at the faint shade of his daughter almost with apology. “That was Mel.”

  Seventeen

  THERE WAS ANOTHER LONG SILENCE. PEACE ISSUED A SHUDdering breath that seemed to hurt a lot on its way out. Dead Abbie stared down at him, her eyes dark wells of sorrow and concern.

  “Maybe you’d better save the rest of this story for later,” I suggested.

  He shook his head sharply, just once. “It’s weighing on my mind,” he muttered. “I think I’ll feel happier once I’ve got it out.” He was still looking at Abbie. “Sweetheart,” he said, “I’m going to have to send you to sleep for the next part. There’s some stuff that . . . that I wouldn’t want . . .”

  He tailed off into silence, but Abbie was already nodding. “Don’t make it too long,” she said, her voice sounding as though it was coming from a long way away. “I want to be here with you. In case anything happens.”

  Peace shifted his weight so he could reach under the blanket. Tension and pain crossed his face in ripples, and his movements were slow and clumsy, but when he drew his hand out again he was holding a deck of cards, tied around with an elastic band. He flicked the band off with his index finger, one-handed, and put the deck down on the floor beside his head.

  “This might take a while,” he muttered.

  I watched him in fascination. So many exorcists use rhythm to do what they do, it’s always a bit of a jolt to see someone who bases their technique on some other kind of patterning. I’d never seen anyone use playing cards before.

  Peace started to sort through them, still using only his left hand. It seemed to be a regular deck, except that the cards were marked—heavily marked, with different-colored inks and even with paint in a couple of places. There were scribbled words and phrases on most of the cards, along with occasional lines and crosses striking out some of the pips. The face of the queen of hearts had just been ripped out, leaving a roughly circular hole in the card that you could have put the tip of your little finger through.

  But it was the three of spades that Peace found and put at the top of the deck—faceup, at first, but then he turned it and tapped it and glared at it hard. When he turned it over again, it was the ace. And Abbie blinked out like a streetlight at sunup.

  Peace pocketed the deck again, or at least put it back underneath the blanket.

  “Now Mel,” he said, matter-of-factly, “Mel is really bad. Deep down, bred-in-the-bone bad. I’d never met anyone like her before. I have since, but like I said, I was still more of a kid than anything back then. I mean, I thought I was the last word until I met her.” He grinned, or maybe he was just showing his teeth. “Bitch has got that whole femme fatale thing going for her. Most men love a really bad girl. At least until she’s bad to them.”

  I might have argued with that once. Now it just made me think of Juliet, and I said nothing.

  “These guys backed off sharpish. The man she’d shot wasn’t dead, amazingly. He had his hands clutched to his throat, trying to stop the blood or at least slow it down, but he still seemed to be able to breathe so I suppose she must have missed his trachea or whatever it’s called. But his feet started to slip and slide and he was obviously about to fall down, so his two mates took a hand each and
they dragged him off toward the door. They threw a couple of curses at Mel, but all the fight had gone out of them.

  “That was when I noticed that the barman had a copper’s nightstick in his hand: not a PC Plod effort, one of the big sidewinders that takes no fucking prisoners. He’d fished it up from some little cubbyhole under the bar, and he was walking up behind Mel with this thing under his shoulder ready to swing it up and over and crack her head open.

  “I picked up a beer bottle and let fly. Caught him in the mouth and almost floored him. Then Mel turned around and saw him and she got the drop on him with the gun before he could get his feet under him again and use the stick. She stood up, pressed the gun to the side of his head, and told him to kneel down. She took the stick away from him with her left hand, still holding the gun right up against his temple.

  “ ‘You were going to hit me with this?’ she said to him. ‘Because your friends tried to rape me and I wouldn’t play along?’ He was babbling something, saying he was sorry or that he didn’t want any trouble or whatever. Mel shook her head. No excuses. No mercy.

  “She lifted the gun up, away from his skull, and she wagged it in his face like a schoolmistress wagging her finger. Then she brought her other arm back, just about halfway, and swung it down again. Smacked him in the mouth, really hard, with the nightstick. Crack.” Peace gestured vividly. “Blood and teeth everywhere. He went down, crying like a baby, clutching his face and rolling away from her across the floor. But she’d had her fun now. She tossed the stick back behind the bar and turned to me as though she’d only just noticed me. ‘We’d better get out of here,’ she said. ‘The police are likely to take his side.’

  “But she didn’t leave right away. She looked down at the barman again, moaning and whimpering at her feet. She seemed to like that. She gave him a measured kick in the balls, pivoting on her heel so that she was more sort of stamping on him with her heel. I suppose she wouldn’t have got much force otherwise, with open-toed shoes.

  “Then she led the way, and I followed.”

  “Was that the night that Abbie was conceived?” I asked, breaking another reflective silence.

  Peace shook his head, pulling himself out of the vivid past into the painful present with difficulty. “No. We did spend that night together, but Abbie—that came later. That all came later.

  “Mel was staying at the Independence, and she took me back there even though the doorman looked like he were sucking a mouthful of lemons when he saw how I was dressed.

  “She was incredible in bed: a little bit scary, even. Not just uninhibited but totally off the fucking leash. She was into bondage—degradation, submission, slave-and-master shit—and she had some games I’d never come up with in my wildest dreams. She was into drugs, too, and we were as high as Kiliman-sodding-jaro as we fucked. I’m not likely to forget that night in a hurry. I wish I could, in a lot of ways.

  “I stayed with her for a couple of weeks. Fifteen days, actually, and some odd hours. And I found out a fair bit more about the weird shit she was into. It didn’t stop with sex games. In fact, I think the weird sex was a side effect of the other stuff.”

  “ ‘The other stuff’?” I thought I knew what he meant, I just wanted to check, because it sounded like we might be getting to the point at last.

  “Black magic. She was a necromancer. And when she found out I could do the binding and loosing stuff, she couldn’t get enough of me. She used to make me raise up ghosts and bring them to watch while we were . . . you know. While we were in bed, or wherever else she chose to do it. She was a natural sensitive, so she could always see them. It used to send her right over the top—infallibly. The kind of orgasms that go into legend.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, rubbed them hard with the balls of his hands. His head had fallen back onto the makeshift pillow again, and he looked even paler and more exhausted than before.

  “It all got a bit intense,” he sighed, with what sounded to me like exquisite understatement. “I mean, it was fun. Most of the time. But she was a bit rich for my blood, all things considered, and I didn’t like some of the people she hung out with. There was this one guy especially who used to give me the creeps. Big blond bruiser with these weird violet eyes. His name was Anton, Anton Fanke . . .”

  He stopped, seeing my reaction to the name. For a moment, a flicker of suspicion crossed his face. “You know him?” he demanded.

  “No,” I said. “But I’ve heard of him. Recently. A friend of mine was looking for information on you, and his name came up.”

  “Yeah,” Peace agreed, grimly. “I’m not surprised. Fanke was something really big and special in the circles Mel moved in. Carried himself like he knew it, too. Fucking arrogant son of a bitch. Charming enough, but you know that sort of charm where it’s just another way of fucking you up the arse? Like what matters is being on top the whole time, and if he can’t do it one way he’ll do it another. You don’t want to be there when the charm offensive stops, because you know it’s going to be bloody.

  “But there was no way past it. Being around Mel meant being around Fanke, too. I thought she was screwing him, too, at first, but I don’t think his vices were that close to normal: he was her priest, not her boyfriend, and that was a lot harder to deal with. After two weeks I’d had just about enough.”

  Peace looked up again and met my gaze, again inviting or defying me to judge him. “So bearing in mind what I’ve already told you about my MO,” he said, with a sarcastic smile, “what do you think I did next?”

  I shrugged, took a gulp of my coffee while I gave that one what little thought it deserved. The stuff was half-cold now, but the liquor still had a little bit of a kick to it. “You woke up before she did,” I said, “and you cleaned her out. Took that necklace you mentioned, and whatever money you could get your hands on, and did a runner.”

  Peace nodded. “Got it in one,” he acknowledged, his tone a little bleak. “She had almost two thousand dollars, and the jewelry was worth that much again even to one of the fences down on Banfora Street. I took her stash, too. Swiped the lot and scarpered, thinking what a nasty, clever little bastard I am. I get the girl and I get the money, just like James Bond.

  “I went back to the scummy little flophouse where I was staying, and turned in for a bit more sleep. I’d never got much of that in Mel’s bed. The next thing I know, the police are smashing the door in and I’m under arrest for drug trafficking.

  “I never did figure out the ins and outs of that one. Most likely it was coincidence—or the gents I’d been working for getting their own back in a slightly subtler way than I’d have given them credit for. Maybe they’d been watching for me to go back home again, and this was a trap they would have sprung earlier if I hadn’t been otherwise engaged. But at the time, it made me wonder. It was so pat: like, I burned her, and I got burned back, twice as bad.

  “The cops took all the cash I had on me, so I had nothing left to bribe the judge with. They sent me down for two years. Could have been worse: if I’d been a local lad, I’d probably have been swinging on the end of a rope.

  “Didn’t matter much in the end, in any case. Mel came down and bought me out before I’d done a week of that time. Probably just as well, because I was already in trouble. The only white boy on the yard, and too stupid to stay out of fights. I’d taken at least one beating every day I was there, and by the time she came to get me I could barely walk.”

  “Everyone needs a guardian angel,” I observed, downing the last of the tepid coffee.

  Peace laughed. “Yeah. Everyone does. God forbid you should ever end up with mine.”

  “You need another drink?” I asked him, because he’d gone quiet again, his face reflecting a parade of mostly unpleasant memories.

  “No more booze?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t bother. Where was I?”

  “You’d just played your get-out-of-jail-free card.”

  “Not free, Castor. Nothing like free. I’d already hit the eject button on Mel once, and she wasn’t going to let me do it again. Or maybe it was Fanke who set
it up, I don’t know. Anyway, the way it worked, it wasn’t exactly like I got a pardon or anything: it was more like they had me on lease, and Mel made it clear that they could send me back if I didn’t mind my manners and say my prayers at bedtime.