Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

“A job I’m doing.”

“What kind of job?”

“The usual kind.”

Very pointedly, Nicky picked up the bottle of wine and examined the label. It was a ’97, and it wasn’t anything like cheap.

“Thought you’d given up that ghost-toasting shit,” he observed.

“I’m back.”

“Obviously.” The wine had mollified him, but only up to a point. “I’ll need another two of these,” he said. “And you mentioned some guy in Portobello Road who had Al Bowlly and Jimmy Reese together on some old Berliner hard rubber?”

I winced. “Yeah, I did say that, Nicky, but I’m not in the government, and Satan isn’t sexing up my share options just yet. The wine or the disk—not both.”

Nicky played hard to get. “Tell me what you’re looking for,” he said.

“A young woman. In her early twenties, most likely. Dark-haired. Possibly Russian or East European. The area around Euston Station. Murder or accident, could’ve been either, but violent. And sudden.”

“Time frame?”

“I don’t really know. Maybe summer. July or August.”

He snorted. “Congratulations, Fix. That’s probably the vaguest brief you’ve ever given me. Toss me a bone, here. Eye color? Complexion? Distinguishing marks?”

I thought about the blurry red veil that stood in for the ghost’s face. “That’s all I’ve got,” I said. And then, more to myself than to him, “Maybe . . . maybe her face was injured in some way.”

“The disk.”

“What?”

“I’ll go for the Berliner disk. But it better be fucking genuine. And it better be fucking Al Bowlly, not Keppard doing an Al Bowlly impression. I’ll know.”

“It’s the real thing,” I assured him. They were just names to me; my tastes run to classical, home-grown punk, and the raw end of alt dot country. I’ve got exactly enough savvy about jazz to know what to look for when I’m in need of a bribe.

“You know what your sin is, Fix?” Nicky asked me, already tapping some terms into a nameless metasearch engine that displayed in black on dark gray. “The particular thing you’ll go to Hell for?”

“Self-abuse?” I hazarded.

“Blasphemy. The last days are coming, and He writes it in the Heavens and on the Earth. The rising of the dead is a sign—I’m a sign, but you don’t want to read me. You don’t even want to accept that there’s a point to all this. A plan. You treat the Book of Revelation as if it’s a book of police mug shots. That’s why God turns His face from you. That’s why you’ll burn, in the end.”

“Right, Nicky,” I said, already walking away. “I’ll burn, and you’ll tan. For so it is written. Call me if you get anything.”

I think I was in a fairly somber mood as I walked back along Hoe Street. Something about Nicky’s tirade had brought another recent memory to the surface of my mind—Asmodeus, telling me that I was going to miss the boat because I wasn’t asking the right questions.

Everyone’s a fucking critic.

Suddenly I was dragged out of my profitless thoughts. Passing a shop, I caught my own reflection in the window, at an odd angle, and someone else was moving behind me—someone I thought for a moment that I recognized. But when I turned, she was nowhere in sight. It had looked like Rosa—the girl at Damjohn’s club, Kissing the Pink, for whom Damjohn had sent because he thought I’d like to admire her backside. Pretty unlikely that she’d be here, I had to admit, but the impression had been a really strong one all the same.

Visiting Nicky is dangerous. You can catch paranoia as easily as you can catch a cold.

By the time I got back into Central London, it was the gloomy, smoky dog-end of the afternoon. Thus runs the day away. I tried Gabe McClennan’s office again, but this time even the street door was locked.

Well then, that encounter was postponed—but not canceled. And I was left full of a restless impatience that had me striding down Charing Cross Road as though there was actually somewhere I needed to be. If it had been a few months before, I would have taken a cab over to Castlebar Hill—to the Oriflamme, which for exorcists in London is home away from home. But the Oriflamme had burned down a while back when some cocky youngblood had tried to demonstrate tantric pain control in the main bar and had set fire to himself and the curtains. There was talk of reopening elsewhere, but for the time being, it was just talk.

So I retired to a pub just off Leicester Square that used to be the Moon Under Water and was now something else, where I downed a pint of 6X and a whisky chaser to fuel my righteous wrath. Nothing was adding up here—and a job that should have been textbook-simple was developing the sort of baroque twiddles that I’d come to loathe and mistrust.

The ghost was recent. She’d lived and died in a world that already had factories, cars, and wristwatches. Okay, in theory, that could still have placed her at the turn of the century, but that wasn’t the impression I’d got. The interior trim of that car had looked very modern and very luxurious, and watches with stainless-steel bands probably didn’t even exist before the 1940s. So she didn’t come into the archive with the Russian collection. And so the thing that tied her to the building in Churchway was something different—something I’d missed in the general rush to judgment.

Of course, I didn’t really need to know who she was or who she had been—not to do the job I was being paid for. All I needed was enough of a psychic snapshot to form the basis of a cantrip, and after last night’s adventures, I already had that. So why wasn’t I breaking out the méthode champenoise round at Pen’s instead of brooding in a loud bar in Soho?

Because I was being played for an idiot—and I never did learn to take to that.

If Gabe McClennan had been at the archive, this ghost had a history that I wasn’t being told about. And if someone was scampering around the building after hours, it seemed a fair bet that they were there to keep tabs on me. Either that, or it was somebody conducting some kind of business that they didn’t want daylight to look upon. I chased my thoughts around in decreasing circles for a while before getting back to the point—which I’d been avoiding pretty strenuously.

I’d told Peele that I’d do the exorcism by the end of the week. That gave me two more days, not counting today. But I had a strong enough fix on the ghost now to weave a cantrip anytime I wanted to. The job was effectively done. I could go in tomorrow, whistle a few bars, and walk away with the rest of that grand in my pocket.

And I’d be alive and in one piece and able to do this only because the ghost had stepped in to stop me before I made that fatal misstep in the dark.

There’s a good reason why I don’t think too much about the after-life, and it’s not squeamishness. Or at least, it’s not the kind of squeamishness that would make you swerve aside from thinking about your brakes failing when you’re driving down a one-in-three cliff road—or shut off thoughts of sharks when you’re bathing in the sea off Bondi Beach.

It’s my job. Can I put it any simpler than that? It’s what I do. I send ghosts on to whatever comes next. Which means that if there’s a Heaven, say, then I’m doing a good thing, because I’m opening the door to their eternal reward. And on the other hand, if there’s no world after this one—nothing at all aside from the life we know—then I’m just erasing them. I’ve always had my own way of getting around the problem, which is by refusing to think of the ghosts themselves as human. If they’re just psychic recordings—the residues of strong emotions, left on play-and-repeat in the places where they were first experienced—then where’s the harm?