‘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 realise 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 favour: 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 offence.’
By now, that additional sensory channel I’ve got which 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 realised that that was what I was dealing with, I dropped my gaze 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 favours 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 non-committal.
It was at this point that Po re-entered 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 any more. Do you think any assurances they’ve given you will still hold after that? Do you think they’ll keep you as a pet?’
Zucker 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 millimetre 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 on a pensive expression. 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, jamming what was in it directly into Po’s face.