Dead Men's Boots (34 page)

The flight I’d booked was going out of Heathrow at a few minutes past noon. I checked in with hand luggage at a little after
ten and went to wait for Juliet in the grotesquely named Tap & Spile bar.

She was already there, waiting for me. So was Nicky, dressed in black from head to foot and wearing shades indoors like some
vampire wannabe. He gave me a sardonic wave. He had a full glass of red wine in front of him, and Juliet had an empty one.
She also had a UK passport in her hands. That was a relief. Nicky hadn’t been sure he could cobble something together at such
short notice and have it pass muster.

“Another?” I asked Juliet, pointing at her empty glass.

She shook her head. “It reminds me of blood,” she said.

“Is that a bad thing?”

“I’m about to spend ten hours in a confined space with three hundred people, Castor. You tell me.”

I let that one go and went to the bar, where I ordered a whiskey and water for myself. I took it over to the table and sat
down between them.

Nicky nodded at a folded sheet of paper sitting on the table. “Names and addresses,” he said. “Juliet’s got one, too, in case
you get separated.”

I unfolded the sheet. “Fair enough. Who’s on here?”

He waved vaguely. “Anyone I could find who might remember Myriam Kale or have anything interesting to say about her,” he said.
“I’ve given you the address of the Seaforth farm—where she lived until she got married—but there’s no phone number I can find,
so my guess is nobody’s living there now. There’s a maternal uncle—Billy Myers. You’ve got his last address. And I called
through to the local paper, the
Brokenshire Picayune
.”

“The what?” I winced at my first taste of the lousy blended Scotch.

“
Picayune.
Means trivial or everyday. Great name for a newspaper, huh? ‘It doesn’t matter a tinker’s fuck, but you read it here first.’
Anyway, the editor’s a guy named Gale Mallisham. I told him you were digging for information about Kale and might have some
to trade.”

“And he said?”

“ ‘Fuck. Another one? Why won’t anyone let her lie in her fucking grave?’ ”

“Thanks for priming the pump there, Nicky.”

“Don’t mention it.” He put his wineglass underneath his nose and inhaled deeply, eyes closed. Since he died, that’s been Nicky’s
most sensual pleasure. I let him spin it out as long as he wanted to. Juliet was following all this with a detached, almost
bored look, but I knew she was taking everything in. You don’t get to be as old as she is by letting your attention wander.

When Nicky put the glass down, I shot him an expectant look. By way of answer he sat back in his chair and made himself comfortable.

“The stuff in the box,” I prompted.

“Sure.” He was still in no hurry. “I notice Johnny boy’s gopher is dead.”

“Meaning Vince Chesney?” I frowned. “Yeah, he is. How’d you know?”

Nicky looked smug. “Two and two, Castor,” he said. “The baggies that Gittings’s souvenirs were packed in had a name label
printed on them—some animal pathology outfit called Nexus. And this morning Nexus was all over the news on account of having
lost one of its employees last night in an inexplicable bloodbath at their premises in Victoria. Some security guard got to
join the choir invisible, too. No witnesses, no leads, at least when I hacked the Police National Computer at four a.m. Juliet
tells me you were there.”

“Yeah. I was there.” I glanced at Juliet, who shrugged. I hadn’t told her it was a big secret, but I’d still have liked the
right of veto on telling Nicky about it.

“It was a loup-garou, right?”

“Right. Nicky, have you got something for me or not? Because twenty questions was never my game.”

He gave me a languid grin, stubbornly determined not to pick up the pace. “I know your game, Castor. It’s blind man’s buff.”
I opened my mouth to curse him out, and he raised a hand, forestalling me. “Okay, don’t start on me. I’m just in an expansive
mood, that’s all. I like days when I throw out the questions and the answers bounce right back.”

“So you’re saying…?”

“I went through the stuff on the disk and cross-checked it myself in a couple of places. It was mostly bullshit—your man measured
everything he could touch a ruler to, whether it mattered or not—but if you want a smoking pistol, then I think you got one.”

“Go on.” I could tell by his lingering smile that he had a bombshell to drop, or he thought he did. He reached into his pocket
and handed me one of the evidence bags. I remembered the object inside the bag pretty well, because it stood out from the
mostly innocuous stuff in Chesney’s treasure chest like a dildo in a nun’s bootlocker.

“The bullet,” I said, resigning myself to the role of straight man.

“Bullet
casing
, actually. It’s from a ten-millimeter auto round, and according to your now deceased doggy pathologist, it was fired out
of a Smith and Wesson 1076. Got a lovely clear print on it, too—Les Lathwell’s. You know, the East End gangster? The one they
called the Krays’ heir apparent?”

“To be honest,” I said, “I’m a little hazy on social history. I know the name, but—”

“Kind of an entrepreneur in the violence and intimidation line. He went to America to learn from the greats. Came home and
built his own little mafia on the Mile End Road. You should read about this stuff; it’s inspirational. Anyway, I went online
and did some rooting around—that’s why I hacked the PNC—and the print checks out A-one at Lloyd’s. I’m no expert, but I think
the ballistics do, too. And that’s where things get interesting.”

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“Lathwell died in 1979. The ten-millimeter round didn’t even get introduced until 1983, in a Swedish hand pistol that kicked
like an unlimbered cannon and broke people’s arms if they weren’t expecting it. It didn’t get popular—and I use that word
in heavy quotes—until the FBI picked it up in eighty-eight. In other words, Lathwell couldn’t have fired that round, or loaded
it into a gun, because he died before the gun ever came off the assembly line. So there’s your Rod Serling moment. Enjoy.”

He indulged in another deep snort of the wine breath, drawing it out for maximum dramatic impact. He got the timing just about
right, because I was struggling to fit that spiky fact into what I already knew—which was possible only because I knew jack
shit. Looked at from one angle, though, it made a queasy kind of sense.

“You think Lathwell rose in the flesh, then?” Juliet asked, voicing my thoughts. “As a zombie?”

Nicky put down his glass, basking in our undivided attention. “Could be. Or maybe someone flayed his fingertips and wore them
for a joke. There are a couple of other tidbits like that in the notes on the disk. Anachronisms, I mean. My favorite is a
letter from Tony Lambrianou to his brother, Chris. You know the hearse that carried Lambrianou’s body had a message from Chris,
in the middle of a wreath the size of Canary Wharf? It said, ‘See you on the other side.’ Well, this letter is dated about
six months later, and it’s exactly three words long: ‘I made it.’ Sick joke or mystical revelation. You decide.”

He leaned forward, more animated. “Okay, that’s what’s on the disk, so that’s what your dead pal Chesney told your dead pal
Johnny G. But I’ll give you something else for free, and this is part of the Nicky Heath service. You get this because I’m
obsessive and because I’m dead—in other words, because I’m a stubborn bastard who doesn’t need to sleep ever, if he’s got
something on his mind. Look at this—and look at this.”

I was expecting him to give me some more of the evidence bags, but instead, he held out two badly photocopied fingerprint
charts—copies of copies of copies. I scanned them as carefully as I could, trying to compare them through the smudges and
smears.

Juliet looked over my shoulder. Her pattern recognition skills were evidently a lot faster than mine. “They’re the same,”
she said. “Or almost the same. The differences are very few and very small. Is that the point?”

“Yeah, that’s the point. But here’s the kicker. The one on the right is Les Lathwell again. The one on the left, which is
different by about three ridges and one friction artifact, is Aaron Silver, who was the great-granddad of all East End psychopaths.
There’s about eighty years between them, and they’re meant to be two different guys. Only they’re not. They’re the same guy
twice.”

I gave a long, low whistle. Nicky was right. This was a smoking pistol in anyone’s book. In fact, it was a whole roomful of
smoking machine guns. Something that John had said when I met him in that bad dream came back into my mind.

Who wants to get you?

The same ones as before. Always the same ones, again and again and again.

“They’re coming back,” I summarized. “All the East End bad boys. All the biggest bastards.”

“But how are they coming back?” Juliet demanded, dragging me back to the incontrovertible facts and rubbing my nose in them.
“Ghosts can possess animals, but they pay the price. They lose their own humanity a little at a time—become more like the
flesh they inhabit. In the long term, the human consciousness becomes completely submerged in the animal, diluted to the point
where it’s really not there anymore. As for the revenants—the zombies—their bodies seldom last longer than a year, two at
most. And the loss of function is progressive. Inevitable. When they begin to fall apart, there’s nothing that can keep them
together.”

The silence after she finished speaking was somewhat tense. She looked at Nicky, saw him staring at her with a grim deadpan.
“I’m sorry if that was tactless,” she added. “I’m talking in general terms.”

“Sure,” said Nicky tightly. “I appreciate that. Present company excepted, right?”

Juliet raised an exquisite eyebrow. “No, obviously you’re subject to the same—”

“Shut the fuck up. Please.” Nicky’s voice was an intense snarl; he’d drawn in a large breath beforehand for exactly that purpose.
“I’m giving you information here, not asking for a prognosis. You just— Don’t talk, okay? Don’t talk about things you know
fuckall about.”

The tough-guy tone rang hollow. The two subjects with which Juliet was intimately familiar were sex and death: their declensions,
and conjugations, and the inflexible metaphysics that governed them. Tactfully, though, she made no reply.

I tried to pull the conversation back to less controversial topics. “They’ve still got their own fingerprints,” I said, answering
Juliet’s question. “So somehow it’s got to be their own flesh. If Les Lathwell was Aaron Silver, that means he was born well
before the end of the nineteenth century. Died—”

“Nineteen oh eight,” Nicky supplied sullenly.

“Nineteen oh eight. So if he was still leaving fingerprints in the sixties and seventies, his body would have been spectacularly
well embalmed.”

Juliet shook her head. “It doesn’t work, in any case,” she pointed out. “This other man—Les Lathwell—he had friends? Family?”

“Two brothers, both dead,” said Nicky. “A sister who’s still alive.”

“And there’s documentary evidence of his growing up?”

Nicky nodded slowly, seeing where she was going. “Sure. Lots of it. School photos. Home movies. All that kind of shit.”

“Then how—and when—did Aaron Silver insinuate himself into Lathwell’s place?”

It was a more than reasonable question. Something was niggling at me, something that felt as though it might be part of the
answer, but I couldn’t tease it out into the light.

“Not plastic surgery,” Nicky said. “They could do it now, fingerprints and all, but in the sixties the technology wasn’t that
advanced. Except on
Mission Impossible.
You know, that guy with all the masks.”

“Flesh is plastic enough, in any case,” Juliet said, and I almost had it.

But then Nicky spoke again, and I lost whatever connection my subconscious was trying to make. “I haven’t managed to find
any Myriam Kale memorabilia,” he said. “Turns out East End gangsters are easy compared to sexy American assassins for hire.
A few things came up, but they all smelled like scams. I’m still looking. But since you’re going to where she lived, maybe
you’ll pick something up along the way. In which case, throw it to me when you’re through with it, and I’ll find it a new
home.”

So Chesney’s Kale piece had come from some other source. I decided not to mention that. Nicky was touchy enough already without
being told that someone else had outscored him. “I’ll do that, Nicky,” I said, blandly. “In the meantime, could you check
something else out for me?”

“I’m always at your disposal, since, obviously, I don’t have a fucking life,” Nicky observed dryly, flicking a cold glance
at Juliet.

“Can you find out where all these guys are buried?”

“Yeah, sure. That’s easy. Why, you want to put some flowers on their graves?”

“I want to find out if there’s any connection here to John Gittings’s list of London cemeteries. If there’s a pattern—if they
all ended up in the same place—”

“Yeah, I get it, Castor. The thing about the flowers? Joke. Is your mobile triband?”