Dead Men's Boots (27 page)

Chesney looked a little sick, because he could see in my face that I’d never seen any of the stuff in his bran tub in my life.
He was counting up the cost of lost opportunities. I would have sympathized, but time is money, and right then I was all about
the bottom line.

“Yeah,” he said lugubriously. “The ace of spades was from a deck that Ronnie Kray used to play poker in his cell in Parkhurst.
Some minor villain named Alan Stalky got him to sign it and then took it instead of the winnings. That’s worth a fortune.
George Cornell used the paperweight in a fight—broke some bloke’s head open with it—and the pen is the one that Tony Lambrianou
signed his confession with. It’s still got his blood on it, allegedly because the police beat the living shit out of him before
they let him sign. The crown piece belonged to Aaron Silver…”

He carried on talking through the contents of the baggies one by one, but I was only half listening because the names he’d
already mentioned had made something groan on the dangerously overstacked shelves of my memory. Cornell. Lambrianou. Lathwell.
Silver. Every single one of those names had turned up in the lists in John Gittings’s notebook. If Kray had been there, too,
I’d have made the connection. It occurred to me to wonder where the hell John had been getting the money. If these things
were as valuable as Chesney said they were, they ought to have been way out of the reach of someone living on an exorcist’s
earnings.

“So what?” I said, wrenching my attention back to the present. “John was picking this stuff up on the fan-boy circuit?”

“He had a dealer. A zombie guy.”

Yeah, of course he did. Nicky, you cagey bugger, I thought, we are going to have some very harsh words. “Right. And he was
passing it all on to you so that you could—?” My mouth had outrun my brain, but Chesney had mentioned data, and the fact that
we were in a pathology lab—even if it was one where most of the corpses on the slab were named Fido—was a big clue. “You ran
tests on them,” I finished ungrammatically. “What kind of tests, Vince?”

“The whole works,” Chesney said with a touch of professional pride. He tried to take the box back from me, but it was a try
that expected to fail, and I made sure it did by putting my full weight down on my right hand, the one resting on the box
lid. He straightened up and pretended not to notice. “Fingerprinting. A fuck lot of that. Hematocrit when he could get something
with a bloodstain on it. And DNA. I can do DNA. Okay, I’m working with puppies right now, but that’s just for the work experience.
I trained in human pathology, and I’m gonna do real forensic work as soon as I’m out of this shithole. John’s nineteenth-century
time-warp ‘criminals are gorillas’ thing may have been piped shite, but from where I was standing, it was good practice.”

“And good pocket money,” I guessed.

Chesney bridled. “Hey, look, he came to me. I was doing him a—”

“—a favor. Absolutely. Why do you keep talking about criminal physiognomy, Vince? Is that what John said this was about? Recapitulation
theory? I can’t see that kite getting very far off the ground.”

“Me, neither.” Chesney was still stiffly on his dignity. I’d hurt him where his professional ethics pinched the tightest.
“But the customer’s always right, and John had this thing, you know?”

“What kind of thing?”

“A Cesare Lombroso reductionist taxonomic criminal-anthropology kind of thing.”

“Go on.”

He glanced toward the box with longing, bereaved eyes. “He was making up a big database,” he said. “Criminals, yeah? Killers
especially. He wanted to measure them every way they could be measured. I did the tests and passed all the stuff on to him,
and that was that. I didn’t have to clap hands and believe in fairies.”

“Fairies in this case being—?”

“Oh, Christ, you know the song. The idea that there’s a criminal type. That by pooling data from a thousand people who’ve
already done bad things, you’ll be able to predict the next rapist or serial killer before he or she cuts loose. It’s not
just bullshit, it’s the bullshit that the century before last left out for the binmen.”

I tapped the box. “Sounds pretty thin. The disk in here, that’s all the data you put together for John before he died?”

Chesney nodded, but by now he wanted rid of me. A nod wasn’t enough.

“All of it?” I pursued. “All the test results for all the ‘items’?”

“It’s all there.” He was indignant, seeing his nest egg about to waltz out through the door and knowing there wasn’t a thing
he could do about it.

I straightened up. “Thanks for your help, Vince,” I said. “If there’s anything on the disk that a layman can’t get his head
around, would you rather I called you here or someplace else?”

“Don’t call me at all,” Chesney said, in something of a sulk. “I don’t owe you anything, man. I didn’t even need to give you
the disk. That’s my intellectual property.”

“True,” I conceded. “But let me put it another way. If there’s a fine point of interpretation and I want a steer, should I
come to you or to your boss?”

“Fuck!” Chesney waved his arms wildly. “I wish I’d never gotten involved with any of this crap. It’s not like the money was
any good.”

I cut him a small amount of slack, because it’s generally easier to lead a horse to water than to hold it under for the time
it takes to drown it. “There could be some more money on the table at some point,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“You can call me on my mobile,” he said, very slightly mollified. “The number you got from John, yeah? I’ll get back to you
when no one’s listening over my shoulder.”

“Okay.” I hefted the box. “Thanks for your help, Vince. John’s smiling down on you from heaven, if that’s any help.”

I made my own way out, leaving him cursing me under his breath. Smeet was coming back up the stairs as I went down. She eyed
the box curiously. “Dead dog,” I said, and kept on going.

John’s own private Idaho,
Chesney had said. Yeah, maybe it was, but I could have wished he hadn’t reminded me of that song. The B-52s warbling about
the awful surprise in the bottomless pool tied in too neatly with the dream I’d had the night before.

I felt like I was following the trail that had led John to that final encounter with the business end of his own shotgun.
And I wondered for the first time where the gun had come from.

Another souvenir, maybe.

    
Twelve

N
ICKY WAS KIND OF SURPRISED TO SEE ME AGAIN. I WAS surprised, too, walking into the formerly empty shell of the old Gaumont
to find a team of six men resurfacing walls and putting the seating back in. Nicky was supervising loudly and officiously,
ignoring the plaster dust in the air because he didn’t have to breathe it. He turned and saw me and threw out his hands as
I approached, as though I were going to frisk him.

“What?” he said. “Castor, it’s only been four fucking hours. I didn’t even look at your stuff yet. I’ll call you if I’ve got
any bones to toss to you, okay?”

By way of answer, I lifted the lid of the wooden box, which I had tucked underneath my arm like Henry the Eighth’s head, and
showed him its contents. He couldn’t blanch: Zombies have a natural pallor that makes albinos look like dedicated sun-bed
addicts. But he did look a little sick.

“How about we go gnaw on a few together?” I suggested.

Nicky nodded slowly and put out his hand to touch the box lid, pushing it down so that it covered the objects inside from
view. He turned to look over his shoulder at his task force. “The rest of the stalls seats are over there, guys,” he said,
pointing. “If they’re not all in purple plush, do alternate purple and blue. Or make a star pattern or something. But tasteful—I
don’t want to end up with something that looks
ongepotchket
.”

We went up to the projection booth, our footsteps echoing on bare concrete. This was Nicky’s inner sanctum, cluttered with
whatever he was obsessing on at any given time and the rich and varied detritus of previous obsessions. It was generally pretty
hard to move in there, but today it looked worse than ever because he’d moved a lot of stuff up here from downstairs, out
of the way of the builders. Once we were inside, Nicky closed a steel door like the door of a vault and turned to face me,
looking stern and pissed off. I guessed he’d decided that attack was the best form of defense.

“I’ve got to maintain a professional relationship with those guys,” he said, pointing at the floor. “They’re working for me.
And it’s kind of hard to get past their touchingly naive assumption that zombies are shambling retards who can be ripped off
with total fucking impunity. So another time, Castor, you want to have something out with me, you do it in private, okay?
Entre fucking nous. Now what’s this about? And for the record, before you start, you don’t have any beef with me. I didn’t
lie to you. I just didn’t talk to you about other people’s business.”

I might have made a snappy comeback—in fact, I normally would have felt obliged to—but I was looking over Nicky’s shoulder
and was momentarily distracted by the colossal seventy-millimeter projector sitting behind him, in a position previously occupied
by his stinking hydroponics vats.

“You’re reopening this place as a cinema?” I asked, amazed.

“Sure. Why not?”

“Is that a trick question, Nicky? How about because you hate people?”

Nicky shrugged. “Yeah, I do. The live ones are too warm, and the dead ones are mostly falling apart and bleeding self-pity
out of the joins. Fuck them all, is my motto.”

“So opening a cinema—that’s facing your fears with a vengeance, wouldn’t you say?”

Nicky looked peeved. “I didn’t say I was afraid of them, Castor. Just that I hate their guts. I also didn’t say that when
this baby is up and running, anyone else is getting in to see the show. It’s gonna be for an audience of one. Cinema Paradiso.
Me and the dark and the black-and-white dream machine.”

I still couldn’t get my head around the idea, and I put the bollocking that I was about to give Nicky on the back burner while
I tried. “What about making a small footprint?” I demanded. “You’ll have to order prints of movies. Get on distribution databases.
Deal with shipping companies.” Staying inconspicuous had been Nicky’s highest priority from way back before he died. The world
is a web, he said, and every time you touch one of the strands of the web, you tell the spiders where you are. When he accessed
the Internet, he did it through a string of proxy servers as long as the Great Wall of China—and like China, he treated information
as though it were both a weapon and a shield. You couldn’t get a fix on Nicky; you couldn’t find him in any search. Even his
electricity was hand-pumped from deep artesian wells rather than coming straight out of the national grid. He was the closest
thing I’d ever met to an invisible man, and his paranoia was a thing of beautiful, terrible purity.

So this had to be not the real Nicky but some kind of lifelike—or rather, deathlike—facsimile.

“The small footprint is still a good working goal,” Nicky said almost off-handedly. “But think about it for a second, Castor.
I kept a small footprint for years, and it didn’t stop this place from being torn apart by Fanke and his fucking satanists.
I’m working on a different strategy now.”

“Which is?”

“Which is my business. When it turns out to be yours, I’ll tell you about it.”

“Okay.” I gave it up. The most likely diagnosis, as far as I could see, was that being winkled out of his shell by a crazed
mob had made Nicky’s psychosis metastasize into a new form. And he was right. I’d find out about it somewhere down the line,
so there was no point in worrying about it now.

I threw the box down on top of what looked like a baby’s changing table and strolled past Nicky into the room. He backpedaled,
keeping pace with me and staying in between me and his nice, shiny new projector. Evidently, it was a look-don’t-touch kind
of deal.

“So let’s get down to business,” I suggested. “I asked you what you were doing for John Gittings, and you came out with all
that client-privilege palaver. Then I asked you to find me a curio that used to belong to a dead killer, and you almost jumped
out of your dry-cured skin. I noticed it at the time, but I didn’t know what it meant. Now I do. It was because John had been
asking you to do the same thing on a bigger scale—death row souvenirs by the bucketload—and you thought I might be playing
some kind of mind-fuck on you. Trying to make you give yourself away.”

Nicky spread his hands in a “there you have it” gesture. “And I don’t know what in our previous relationship could have caused
me to have so little trust in you,” he said sardonically.

“It’s not about trust.” I put my hand on the curve of the projector’s lens turret, and Nicky swatted it away. “It’s about
not making me run around in circles when life’s short enough already. Was there some reason to keep me in the dark about John’s
hobby? Was there anyone whose interests could have been harmed in any way at all by you leveling with me?”