‘A woman named Janine Hunter,’ I said. ‘Her old man’s up on a murder charge and she—’
The tip of the knife dipped, then flicked across my cheek. Something warm and wet spilled down over my face, and I was tasting my own blood.
‘Janine,’ Todd said. ‘Yes. We know about Janine.’ He sounded so detached that I thought he might be on the verge of wandering away and finding something better to do with his time. ‘She works reasonably well as a cover story. Full marks for effort there. But what I want to know, obviously, is who told you about us. About Mount Grace, and Lionel Palance, and the whole operation. The way we come back. We saw it happen with Gittings, and then we saw it again with you. A little bit of fumbling around, just for effect, and then you go right to where the answers are. Because someone’s driving from the back seat. That’s the name I need, Mister Castor. Confession is going to be good for your soul. And for – let’s say – your left eye.’ To add emphasis to the words, he held the knife in front of my eyes and showed me my own blood on the blade. ‘Then your right, after a very short interval for reflection.’
So the truth wouldn’t do, I thought: I’d have to fall back on bullshit.
‘I don’t know his name for sure,’ I said. ‘We only talked over the phone.’
‘Then how did he pay you? I’ve checked your bank account, and there’s even less action going on there than there seems to be in your sex life.’
It’s meant to be harder to lie to someone if you’re making eye contact with them. I made myself stare Todd straight in the face, just so he didn’t run away with any ideas about my reliability as an informant.
‘He’ll kill me,’ I said.
Todd shook his head. ‘No,’ he reassured me. ‘He won’t. I’ll kill you, as soon as I’ve got all the details straight. So don’t worry about him. Worry about me, and about how messy this will get if you start being coy. What does he look like, our man? Details. As many as you can give me.’
I bowed my head as if I was giving in to the inevitable. ‘Tall,’ I said. ‘Taller than me. About my age, maybe a little older. Wore a suit even more expensive than yours. Had a beard. Not full – trimmed. A guy who cares about his appearance.’
‘Eyes?’
‘Didn’t notice?’
‘Hair?’
‘Blond.’
I could only see the lower half of Todd’s body from this position, but even so he couldn’t mask a slight stiffening in his posture – a coming to attention. Either he hadn’t been expecting that, or it had just confirmed his worst fears.
‘Build?’ he said. He was trying to sound as bored and disengaged as he had before, but it rang false now. Interesting. It would be nice to live long enough to find out what that meant.
‘He was heavy-set,’ I said. ‘A bit of a brawler. But an upper-class brawler, obviously. None of your street trash.’
‘Look at me,’ Todd snapped. I raised my head again. Todd pointed the knife at my left eye. ‘I was there when you-’ he started to say, but then he obviously had second thoughts. ‘Accent?’ he demanded brusquely.
‘Like yours. Cultured, you know, but only the one coat of paint. Something else showing through.’
‘Is that right?’ He smiled the way a shark smiles. ‘You saw through me, did you, Castor? Right, right. You’re way too sharp for the likes of me.’
The knife snaked in a second time, and I yelled in pain and fear. But when Todd straightened again, I was still seeing out of both eyes. It was my ear he’d cut, the knife blade coming away on a rising trajectory as though he’d drawn a tick. Cheekbone: check. Ear: check.
‘What did you call him?’ he asked, in the same conversational tone. ‘You must’ve had some moniker for him, this cultured prizefighter?’
My mind was full of dancing devils, for some reason. ‘Louie,’ I said, thinking of Louie Cypher in the movie Angel Heart. What a crock of shit that was. You sort of hope that if the devil’s into wordplay he’ll show a little more class. ‘Louie . . . Rourke.’
‘And how did he contact you?’
I shrugged, trying not to let my relief show on my face. If he’d swallow Louie Rourke without blinking, there was hope for me yet. ‘I told you – by phone. He said he wanted to hire me to do an exorcism. A really big one. He said it might be dangerous, but nothing a good ghostbreaker wouldn’t be able to handle. The money would be good – really good – and he’d give me all the information I needed to pull it off safely.’
Todd wiped the blade of the knife on his own palm and inspected the smear of blood it left there. Then he looked at me again.
‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘You just bought yourself another five minutes of life. Tell me about that. About how this . . . Rourke prepped you. What he already knew about us.’
‘Why do you care?’ I demanded. A dangerous light flared behind Todd’s eyes. It was a calculated risk: I needed a few seconds to think through the moves I’d made along the way and to scrape together an answer that might convince him. Well, I got the few seconds, but it’s like they say: there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Todd swung the knife a little more recklessly, and blood poured down from my forehead into my eyes. There are a lot of blood vessels in your forehead, and they bleed promiscuously: my eyes were glued shut in an instant. Todd opened them again with his thumbs on my eyelids. I blinked through the blood, up into his wide eyes.
‘I care, you fucking imbecile, because it’s him I want to get my hands on,’ he snarled. ‘Not you. What the fuck do you matter? You’re dead already. You tell me enough to get my hands on this guy who’s calling himself Rourke and you get to die a little bit cleaner, that’s all. That’s what your life has come down to, Castor. You should probably have been a watchmaker.’
‘All right,’ I muttered thickly. ‘All right, just don’t hurt me any more.’
It was kind of an embarrassing line, but it did the job. Todd sat himself back down again on the edge of the desk and waved his interrogation tool expansively.
‘Then talk,’ he suggested.
‘He – he told me about the inscription,’ I said, and I saw Todd’s shoulders stiffen as he tried to avoid giving anything away on his face. Over-finessed, you bastard. Hunter had said three days. I did the mental arithmetic. ‘It’s tonight, isn’t it? He said it was going to be tonight.’
Todd didn’t bother to answer. ‘Go on.’
‘He told me there were about two hundred of you,’ I said, quoting the figure that Moloch had given me. ‘And that the operation had been going on for a good few years now. Since –’ I tried to elide over the slight hesitation so Todd wouldn’t notice it ‘– Aaron Silver’s time. He said Silver was the founder member.’
‘Did he?’
I kept my stare locked with his. ‘Well, was he wrong?’
‘The man with the knife asks the questions, Castor. Keep talking until I tell you to stop.’
‘He knew about Silver and Les Lathwell being the same man. I guess that’s what he meant, you know? That the guy had always been there, overseeing the whole operation.’ Todd’s lips curled back in a sneer: he didn’t like that form of words at all. Something else occurred to me: hadn’t Nicky told me that Silver’s real name was Berg? And Les Lathwell had been out in America in the 1960s, learning the gangster game from the Chicago mobs: and from Berg to Bergson wasn’t a big jump at all. I chanced my arm. ‘It was Silver – I mean, Les Lathwell – who brought Myriam Kale in, wasn’t it? So there he is, taking the lead again. Actively recruiting for the cause. I bet a real psycho killer was a real feather in your caps.’
Todd flared up, raising the knife in his clenched fist but then thinking better of it and giving me an openhanded smack across the face instead. ‘Are you really that fucking stupid?’ he demanded. ‘Or are you trying to make me kill you before you talk? Kale was a goddamned disaster, right from the start. I told him: she’s sick in the head. For the rest of us, killing’s just a means to an end. For her it’s an addiction. A disease. She’s never gonna stop, and she’s always gonna draw the wrong kind of attention to herself. She’s the last thing in the world we want. Someone who shits in the nest because she doesn’t know any better and you can’t teach her any better. Fucking – madwoman!’