Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

The Oriflamme is the exorcists’ hang-out par excellence, in case you hadn’t guessed that already: or at least it was in its first incarnation. Back then, it stood in the centre of a roundabout on Castlebar Hill – a building that had formerly been a museum and then had gone through various changes of ownership before settling into the hands of the famous Peckham Steiner, a father figure for all London exorcists, so long as you had a drunk, abusive father who was only on nodding terms with sanity.

Steiner then made a gift of the place to his good friend Bill Bryant, better known by the semi-affectionate nickname of ‘Bourbon’. It was a very long way from anywhere, but it had a kind of dank, heavy atmosphere of its own and a reputation as the place to be seen if you were looking to make a name for yourself in the trade, so it limped along from year to year in spite of the lousy location. But then, about three years ago, somebody burned it to the ground. It was a firebomb attack, mercifully when the place was closed, and it did the job nicely. The barman’s cat survived, but apart from that they didn’t save so much as an ashtray.

Nicky has a whole bunch of theories about who did it and why, and every so often he tries to tell me some of them. I usually manage to get clear before he reaches the part where Satanists are taking over the government, but sometimes it’s a close call.

Meanwhile, in one of those ironies that dog our profession, the Oriflamme rose from the dead – or at least the name did. A guy named McPhail, who as far as I know had never had anything to do with the place on Castlebar Hill, had his own vision of a place that would sort of be the exorcists’ version of a gentlemen’s club – with a bar, a lounge, poste restante facilities, a place where you could crash if you were just in the city for a couple of days, baths, the whole works.

McPhail didn’t have any premises – or collateral – but he did have the kind of can-do attitude that you usually associate with serial killers and corrupt politicians. He stole the name from Bourbon Bryant (who threatened to sue but didn’t have the money for a cab to the courthouse, let alone a lawyer) and set up shop in Soho Square. The rumour was that he was squatting rather than paying for a lease, and I could believe it: rents are so high in Soho these days, even the homeless guys sleeping in doorways are paying a grand a month.

I walked on up the steps, having passed muster as a warm body with no passengers, and went in through a door that was as thickly decorated with wards and sigils as a wedding car is with ribbons and old tin cans. That took me straight into a large bar area that had probably had more atmosphere back when it was a rent office or whatever. Lighting was provided by a dozen or so bounce spotlights at floor level around the edges of the room, pointed up at the ceiling: a nice idea, but spoiled by the fact that most of the people in the room were standing or sitting close to the spots and blocking off most of the light: huge shadows came and went on the ceiling, and light levels rose and fell from one second to the next as people shifted in their seats or stood up to get the next round in.

The bar itself was a rough barricade of packing cases with tarpaulins over them, off in one corner of the room. They were serving beer by the bottle, wine and spirits by the unmeasured slug – enough in itself to get the place closed down if anyone from Customs and Excise stopped in for a quick one. Of course, most revenue men have a very faint pulse in the first place, so they probably wouldn’t have got past the bouncers.

The clientele were colourfully mixed. I spotted half a dozen people I vaguely knew in the seething mass at the bar, and a few more sitting in quiet corners in intense têteà-têtes with strangers who could have been clients, partners or paid informers. I was looking for someone specific, though, and I saw him at last leaning against a pillar on the far side of the room, alone. Bourbon Bill himself, the owner of the original Oriflamme that had died in the flames and been reborn as this un-phoenix-like shit-hole. He was wearing a leather jacket over a red shirt and black denims that looked as though they might date from the American Civil War; Doc Martens of a similar vintage graced his feet. He was nursing a nearly empty shot glass while taking occasional slugs from a hip flask in his inside pocket. I swung around by way of the bar, picked up two large shots of whiskey, and came up on him from behind.

I pushed one of the glasses into his free hand, clinked the other one against it. ‘Cheers, Bill,’ I said, as he looked around.

‘Felix Castor.’ He sounded surprised. ‘Unexpected privilege. You don’t seem to get out much these days.’ He raised the glass and downed it in one. He drank whiskey like other men drink water, and as far as I know he only used water for brushing his teeth. He could have gone through a half-bottle tonight already, depending on how early he’d started, but there was no indication at all in his voice nor in the way he was standing. His fondness for booze wasn’t a great asset in a bar-owner – former bar-owner, I should say – but his incomparable ability to deal with it definitely was. More than one man who’d tried to drink him under the table had been carried away on top of it.

‘I get out as much as I ever did, Bourbon,’ I said. ‘I just don’t like to get drunk in the company of ghost-hunters. It feels like I’m still on the clock, somehow.’

‘That’s your rep, Fix.’ He grinned, but it didn’t last. His face settled back down into its habitual dour lines: he was someone whom life had kicked in the balls, and he still wore the expression that comes after the initial pain of impact has subsided. He’d always had a basset-hound kind of face: now it was more deeply seamed than ever, and his complexion matched his crest of wood-ash hair. ‘You used to come out to the real Oriflamme, though, time was. Couple of nights a week, if I remember rightly.’

I nodded. ‘Then I got myself an office. Biggest mistake I ever made.’

‘I hear you, brother.’ Bourbon laughed ruefully and shook his head. ‘Biggest mistake for me was going up to Scotland for my brother’s wedding. Came back to a pile of cinders and a bill from the fire brigade. Three years on and I still don’t have a blind clue who did it.’

‘Any progress on that front?’

‘Not recently. Had a lead a couple of months back, might come to something. Most likely not. I’m patient. Got a sort of a Zen mentality, these days. You know, flowing with the water.’

‘That’s not Zen. That’s Tao.’

‘Whatever. I don’t let stuff get to me. But when I find those motherless bastards, I’m going to take their effing teeth out with pliers.’ Bourbon’s expression changed and became suddenly more animated in a slightly unhealthy way. ‘Why are you asking, anyway? Did you hear something? I’m offering a reward for information, you know.’

‘If I hear anything, I’ll pass it on,’ I assured him hastily. ‘Bugger the reward. No, I came down here looking for someone else. Maybe you can point him out to me, if he’s here.’

‘Shoot.’

‘Dennis Peace.’

‘Yeah, I know Peace.’ That was why I’d gone straight over to Bourbon when I’d seen he was here: he knew everybody. ‘Seems like he’s flavour of the month all of a sudden. You want to do some business with him?’

‘Not exactly, no.’

‘Then what?’

‘I need to contact him on behalf of a client. He may have taken something that doesn’t belong to him.’

‘Hah.’ Bourbon didn’t look altogether surprised about this mission statement. ‘Well, maybe so. Wouldn’t be the first time, I’ve got to admit. He was always a bit of a wild boy. I remember him coming into the bar one night and talking about knife fights. I called him on one story because it sounded like he was talking shite. So he rolled up his shirt and showed me his scars. Jesus fucking wept! He looked like Boris Karloff had chopped him up and stitched him back together again.’