I reversed the chair so that I could rest my arms on the back of it as I sat. ‘That’s probably where the dream came from,’ I said, indicating her body with a nod of my head. ‘You’re cross-dressing again, you dirty mare.’
Rosie was still grinning: my visit seemed to have really cheered her up. Or maybe it was the bellowing alarms and what she’d seen of the fight at the door. After seven years in this place, she relished anything that was a break from routine. ‘I like the boys best,’ she confided to me. ‘I stroke them, sometimes, to see if I can make their manhoods stand.’ She sighed wistfully. ‘But it’s like trying to tickle yourself with your own fingers: it never quite works, somehow.’
‘I wish I’d met you when you had a body, Rosie.’
‘So do I, my love, so do I. There was treasure there, and I’d have given you a charter to keep all you found.’
‘Rosie, I set the alarms off so I could have a quick word with you. Jenna-Jane was trying to keep me out.’
‘The noisome bitch!’
‘Couldn’t have put it better myself. And the clock is ticking: when she twigs that it was me, which will be in about half a minute, she’s going to be in here with all guns blazing.’
‘You’d better be brief, then, Felix.’
‘I will. I’m looking for another friend of yours – Dennis Peace.’
She frowned. ‘Ah, Dennis,’ she said. ‘The wildest of my boys. He’ll do himself a mischief some day, if he hasn’t already.’
‘When was he here last, Rosie?’
‘A few days ago. Sunday, perhaps, or Monday. He told me that it might be a long while before I saw him again, but that I wasn’t to worry. He had things to do. Debts, he said, that had to be paid, and some of them were bad ones that had to be paid with blood rather than with money. But he knew what he was doing, and he was safe.’
‘Safe where?’
Rosie looked at me strangely, out of the young man’s eyes. ‘What’s your interest in knowing, Fix? You’re not one of those he needs to pay out, are you? I’d hate for the two of you to fight.’
‘I’m not looking to fight him,’ I assured her. ‘But I do need to talk to him. I’m in almost as much trouble as he is, and my trouble is tied up with his in a lot of complicated ways. Maybe we can help each other. Maybe we’ll just swap information and go our separate ways.’
She was silent for a long time. ‘I don’t know where he is,’ she said at last, and my heart sank. Then she held up a finger as if she was asking me to wait. ‘Not in so many words. But he said—’
There was a loud bang from behind me. Turning my head, I saw Jenna-Jane and three guards standing just inside the doorway. ‘Remove him,’ Jenna-Jane snapped, and the guards squared their shoulders as they advanced on me. There was no point in making a fight of it: they were big enough and burly enough to have folded me down like a deckchair.
Rosie brought her mouth up close to my ear. ‘He said he was staying with Mister Steiner,’ she whispered quickly, just as their hands clamped down on my shoulders and hauled me backwards off the chair. They spun me round to face JJ, who was staring at me with an expression of baffled sadness.
‘You’ve really disappointed me, Felix,’ she told me.
‘J-J,’ I said, ‘you’re only saying that to make me feel good.’
One of the guards punched me in the stomach to show willing, and as I doubled up on a painful whoof of air, Jenna-Jane chided him as gently as she’d chided me. ‘No violence,’ she said. ‘This is a place of civilised discourse. Just show him out, and bring me the tapes from this session when they’re changed. I want to know what they were talking about. I’m sorry you were disturbed, Rosie.’
‘It was all rather exciting,’ said Rosie. ‘Come again soon, Fix.’
‘I’m afraid Mister Castor isn’t in our good books any more. It’s not likely he’ll be back.’
‘Count on it, Rosie,’ I wheezed.
The guards gave me a bit more civilised discourse on the way to the front door, but nothing that would leave any marks.
As I walked, a little shakily, back to the car I played Rosie’s words over in my mind. Staying with Mister Steiner. Since Peckham Steiner was dead and buried, while the guy I’d briefly got acquainted with on board the Collective was definitely alive, that left one intriguing possibility, for which I’d need Nicky’s help.
And maybe – you’ll have to pardon the expression – I could kill two birds with one stone.
15
‘What do I look like?’ Nicky demanded, throwing out his arms indignantly. ‘A fucking flophouse? Beds for all, extra blankets on request?’
‘It’ll just be for a day or two, Nicky. Maybe less than that. She could just wake up of her own accord, any time, and walk out of here.’
‘Take your demon slut somewhere else, Castor. You already fucked my life up more than enough for one week.’
We were in the main auditorium of the cinema, where Nicky keeps the pump and the generator for his air-conditioning rig. I’ve never been able to work out the intricacies of his power-swapping and volt-laundering, but somehow he manages to keep about a thousand cubic metres at a well-chilled four degrees Celsius without making a needle tremble anywhere in the whole national grid. I think there’s a hamster in a wheel somewhere, running its little heart out.
But tonight there was some kind of a hiccup somewhere in the system, and Nicky was on his back underneath the pump mechanism tending to its innards with a spanner and an oxyacetylene torch. The torch looked like a frilled lizard, because Nicky had fitted a reflective collar to its neck to minimise the heat splashing back against his body as he worked. He was fresh from Imelda’s healing hands, but still – a degree or two here and there, it all added up in the end in terms of life expectancy. Life-afterdeath expectancy, I should say.
I tried a different tack. ‘Look, she can probably afford to pay you. Let’s say a hundred a night. I’ll get her to settle up as soon as she’s awake.’
‘Yeah? Be cheaper to dangle me off a footbridge by my entrails, wouldn’t it? You forget, I did your research for you on this: I know more about how dangerous Ajulutsikael is than you do. Pass me that masking tape.’
I kicked it across the floor to within reach of his hand. He fished it up without thanks.
‘A hundred and fifty a night,’ I suggested.
‘You’re not getting it, are you, Castor? I don’t trust her and I don’t want her around. I take my physical safety pretty seriously. You think I want some psychotic demon whore waking up grouchy in my guest bedroom?’
‘Do you even have a guest bedroom, Nicky?’
‘Nope. Good point.’
‘Maybe she could pay you in information.’
‘About what, Castor?’
Inspiration sailed past me like a dust mote in the frigid air, and I caught it on the fly. ‘About what comes next,’ I said. It was grotesquely manipulative, but I was getting a little tired of the way people kept saying no to me.
Nicky rolled out from under the pump to stare at me with a mixture of definite interest and deep suspicion. ‘What was that?’
I blew out my cheek and shrugged. ‘Well, I mean to say, you’re good at postponing the inevitable, Nicky – nobody better – but you’re gonna drop off the edge sooner or later. Wouldn’t you like to know where you’re likely to fetch up?’
He found a roll of kitchen towel, hauled off a length and started to wipe his soot-stained fingers on it. He kept his eyes on what he was doing, knowing that his poker face isn’t all that great. ‘I’d still be scared she’d rip my balls off and wear them as earrings,’ he said sourly.
‘Do you have a storeroom with a good strong door and a padlock?’
‘Yeah. So?’
‘So she doesn’t need to eat or drink, or use the bathroom. You could just lock her up until I get back.’