Dead Men's Boots (28 page)

“Not my call,” Nicky deadpanned, wiping the turret with his shirt cuff where my hand had touched it. “His widow, maybe? His
kids? Fuck do I know? First do no harm, is my motto.”

“Since when, Nicky?”

“Since now.”

“Right. Or maybe you had the same idea Chesney had. That if nobody got to find out about this shit, you could have a garage
sale in due course and pocket the profit.”

“Chesney?”

“Never mind.”

I’d been looking at the projector. I didn’t know enough about these things to tell if it was high-end or low-end, state-of-the-art
or shoddy; I was just looking, like a prospective buyer in a secondhand car dealership. Now I looked at Nicky instead. “Sit
down,” I said.

“I’m happy standing.”

“No,” I explained patiently. “This isn’t ‘Sit down and make yourself comfortable.’ This is ‘Sit down or I’ll have to sit you
down, and then you might break.’” There was an office chair on rollers within reach of my outstretched arm. I snagged it and
rolled it across to him. It took him a moment or two to decide, but when I actually took a step toward him, he sat down hurriedly.

“This is bullshit, Castor,” he said angrily. “And you wouldn’t pull it on someone who was still alive.”

I wheeled the chair back over to the changing table where I’d dumped John’s box. I opened the lid again, took out Vince Chesney’s
disk, and thrust it into Nicky’s hands. “You’re going to look this over for me,” I said.

“Yeah? Why am I going to do that?”

“Because I’m asking you. Nicely, so far.”

Nicky turned the disk over in his hands, examining it with a remote, bored expression.

“You know Cesare Lombroso?” I asked him.

“Sure. I golf with him.”

“Nineteenth-century anthropologist.”

“Yeah.” Nicky nodded. “That’s the guy. Starting to smell pretty fierce now. And his elbow gives on the backswing.”

“He came up with this idea about criminal physiognomy,” I said. “He called it recapitulation, and it made him the poster boy
for the early eugenics movement.”

He dumped the disk back in the box. “Eugenics? That was Annie Lennox and Dave—”

Moving quickly, I slammed the box lid down on his hand, trapping it. He yelled, but not in pain: His nerves were closed for
business, so pain wasn’t a feature of the landscape for him anymore. But that had made him obsessively careful about organic
damage, since he knew he didn’t have the advantage of the early-warning system that the living take so much for granted. He
also didn’t have self-repair: no white corpuscles, no platelets, no cell division. So where anyone still warm would have tried
to snatch his hand back out of the box, Nicky froze up stiller than a startled possum.

“Castor, enough with this stupid fucking schoolboy shit!” he shouted. Shouting meant inflating his lungs fully and emptying
them again—again, not easy for a dead man—and that meant a few moments of total silence after he was done.

I went on as though I hadn’t been interrupted. “Recapitulation,” I said. “It’s a bankrupt concept, but it seemed sexy enough
until Darwin drove a stampede of finches and Galápagos turtles through it.”

“What the fuck are you—”

“The idea, Nicky, is this.” I leaned a little more weight on the box lid, and his free hand clenched as though he were considering
punching me; but that’s a good way to break a knuckle, so I knew he wouldn’t. “Babies in the womb, so the story goes, run
through all the previous stages of evolution before finally reaching full human form. It’s like Mother Nature has to scroll
down through every template in the book before she can get to the human one, because that’s the one that’s most fully evolved.
It’s bullshit, like I said, but are you with me so far?”

“Let go of my fucking hand, Castor!”

“But Lombroso thought there were glitches in the program. Sometimes babies get stuck on one of the more primitive forms, he
said, and instead of being born fully human, they’re born with apelike features that really belong much earlier on in the
series.

“See, he’d taken a good look around, and he’d noticed how many hardened criminals have thick, heavy brow ridges like orangutans,
or abnormally long fingers like gorillas, and he had this lightbulb moment. Criminals are the way they are because they’re
throwbacks to our nonhuman ancestry. And once you know that, you can spot them up front and run intercept. You don’t even
have to wait for them to commit a crime.” I nodded at the box. “That’s what John said he was doing with this stuff, if anyone
asked. But that was just his cover story, and I’m hoping you might have some idea what it was covering. See, I know this isn’t
really about your Hippocratic Oath, Nicky. It’s about protecting the bottom line. And part of that is not giving away for
free any information that I might be persuaded to pay for later. So you want paying, fine, you come up with a starting price,
and then we’ll haggle. But time is fucking money, and right now I’m hypersensitive to people who waste any of mine because
someone tried to kill me the other night by dropping me down a lift shaft. So this is personal, and it’s at the top of my
things-to-do list. Is that understood?”

“Yes!”

“Yes what?”

“Yes, it’s fucking understood. Open the box, you frigging arsehole!”

I took my weight off the lid, and he retrieved his hand, checking it for damage in a frigid, resentful silence. There wasn’t
any. I’d been careful.

“He started collecting around the end of October,” Nicky muttered sullenly. “And he was throwing money around like it had
a use-by date on it. It wasn’t just me—he had a whole team of us working on commission, buying everything we could pick up.”

“Anything that had belonged to a killer?”

“Belonged to. Been used by. Been touched by. You see the bullet? One of my coolest finds. Les Lathwell loaded that into a
gun that he carried to the Barclays bank massacre in sixty-nine. It was used in evidence when the case came to trial. That
bumped the price up. It cost three grand, if I remember rightly.”

“Cost you or cost John?” I asked, to keep things clear.

“The dealer asked for two five,” Nicky conceded. “I took my cut. That was understood. Hey, I don’t normally do this stuff.
It was a personal favor because John wanted to work through proxies.”

“You’re a friend in need, Nicky.”

“That’s the Samaritans, Castor. I work on margin.”

“Tony Lambrianou. Ronnie Kray. George Cornell. Les Lathwell. Aaron Silver.” I counted off the names on my fingers. “They’re
all there in John’s notebook. What else have they got in common, Nicky?”

He grimaced as if he found the question hard to swallow. “We didn’t name a price yet,” he said.

“Put it on the slate.”

“Not what you said. You said I could name a—”

I opened the box lid wide, and the hinges gave a creak that was surprisingly eloquent and persuasive.

“They’re all from the East End,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender, or maybe just to keep them well away from the
box. “That was the brief, right? Lambrianou and Lathwell were in the Kray gang. Cornell worked for Charlie Richardson and
was murdered by the Krays. That leaves Aaron Silver as the odd one out.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a couple of generations earlier. Prewar, even. He was a mad rat-bastard Jewish immigrant who came over from
Poland and tried to get work as a tailor. But his needlework sucked, and he couldn’t get a start-up. So he had a brainwave
one day and started going around all the other tailors, taking voluntary contributions for the Brick Lane Fire Service. You
pay up front, they don’t burn your house down.”

“It’s not exactly the Krays.”

“You’re wrong. He was the ur-Krays. The Krays before the Krays, the great precursor. Protection was where he got his foot
in the door. Pretty soon it was prostitution, gambling, the tail end of the opium business—you name it. Silver wasn’t his
real name, by the way. He was born Aaron Berg, but he went by Aaron Silver so his family wouldn’t be ashamed. Nice boy. Loved
his mother.”

I nodded, turning over these dusty old facts in my mind. I’d been wondering ever since I met Chesney whether any of this might
turn out to be connected in some way with Jan’s theory of a vengeful Myriam Kale wandering around London forty years after
her death, but it seemed not. An American contract killer would still sit oddly with a bunch of East End gangsters. “You did
your homework,” I said to Nicky.

He looked at me and pulled his lower eyelid down with the tip of his middle finger—an unsettling gesture when a zombie does
it, because the eye is desiccated, and it’s not that firm in its socket to start with. “Only way to avoid getting ripped off
is to know your stuff,” Nicky told me. “John the Git was hungry for anything to do with those East End bad boys. Big premiums
for stuff that hadn’t changed hands too many times since, and for stuff that they’d owned as kids.”

That explained the lead soldier and the toy car. But it still didn’t give me even the beginning of a clue as to what John
had been looking for. I only knew—with absolute certainty—that the Lombroso stuff was a smokescreen. John had dropped out
of university without finishing his degree, just as I had, but while my discipline was English, his was biology. And what
little I knew about Lombroso came from a late-night drunken conversation in which John had told me at length what an utter
wanker Lombroso had been.

“So what was he looking for?” I asked Nicky.

“Why don’t you tell me?” There was a sneer lurking behind the words. Nicky pushed the box away and stood up.

I said, “He had some animal pathologist running tests on these things. Checking them for fingerprints; for blood and DNA in
the few cases where that was possible; probably for a lot of other things, too.”

“Then I guess he was looking for correlations. For patterns in the data.”

“Like?”

“Like I’ll have to look over the disk myself and get back to you. It’s way past time we named that price, Castor.”

“So name it.”

“Five hundred. Plus I get to keep what’s in the box.”

“Jesus!” I did my best to sound appalled. “You just told me one item in there is worth three grand, Nicky. Why the hell should
I let you pocket the whole lot?”

He threw his arms in the air. “Because it’s no skin off you,” he said.

“The five hundred is. I’m not going to clear that myself. Carla isn’t paying me, and the Myriam Kale thing is pretty much
on spec.”

“Okay, say two hundred,” he conceded magnanimously. “And the stuff in the box.”

“Two hundred is fine. You sell off the stuff in the box and split the proceeds fifty-fifty with Carla Gittings.”

“Agreed.”

“But everything stays here until I tell you it’s okay to sell it. I still don’t know where we’re going with this. I’d hate
to come back here looking for something in particular and find you’ve already hocked it on eBay.”

“Fair enough,” Nicky said. “Better than fair. I’m on the case, Castor, in spite of the shit you just pulled. And as a token
of good faith, so you know I’m on the level, I’ll tell you something for free.”

“Yeah?” I asked. “What’s that, Nicky?”

“You were stiffed. There should be at least thirty or forty other things in the box.”

I blinked. “You’re sure?”

“Am I sure? I can give you the fucking inventory if you want me to. It’s a lot of the choicest stuff that’s missing, too—lots
of Kray memorabilia. Including a pair of leather bondage pants that I bought from a priest in Flitwick, Bedfordshire. Long,
sordid story. And that’s only the items I got for John. There’s a lot more that he bought through other people or picked up
himself.”

Son of a bitch. So that was why Vince Chesney had caved so fast. He’d given me the bargain-basement stuff and kept the top
drawer for himself.

“I’ll get you the rest, too,” I promised. “In the meantime, work through whatever the fuck is on that disk and give me a précis.
Anything at all you think looks interesting. I’m completely in the dark on this, Nicky. A single candle might be all I need.”

“Sure, sure.” He herded me toward the door, anxious to be rid of me now that the deal was sealed. But when I was halfway down
the stairs, he called out to me. I stopped, and he came down to meet me, fishing in the pocket of his jeans. “Here,” he said.
He handed me the key, which I’d forgotten I’d given to him. “I almost forgot. Left luggage lockers, Victoria Station.”

A hundred yards from where John and Vince Chesney had had their meets. Yeah, it figured. “Thanks,” I said.

“You’re welcome. I await your lavish apology.”

“It’s coming,” I said. “Sooner or later. This makes it sooner.” I tucked the key away in one of the many hidden pockets of
my coat. “What’s your first screening going to be, Nicky?”

“That Friedkin movie.” He snapped his fingers, pretending to consult his memory. “The one where the exorcist gets thrown through
the window and bleeds out on the pavement. I’ll do it as a double bill with
Day of the Dead
. You know me. I love a happy ending.”

“Call me,” I said.

He nodded. “A single candle. Sure. Just don’t leave the gas on, Castor. Naked flames are dangerous things to have around.
Hey, is your mobile turned off?”

“No,” I said, knee-jerk, without checking. “Why?”

“Because I’m turning into your fucking answering service. That cop friend of yours called to say he might have something juicy
for you in a day or so. And I do not appreciate you giving him my number.”

“And?”

“And Pen Bruckner rang three times since I got back from seeing you this morning. Wants to know where you are. She said you
were due in court or something.”