I was about to leave Nathan with his woes, but a few things clicked together in my mind before I got to the door, and I turned on the threshold. ‘Yeah?’ he asked.
‘The transcriptions. Fifty per cent of your time?’
He shrugged. ‘Give or take.’
‘Is the other fifty per cent Rosie Crucis?’
‘Give the man a cigar. Yeah. She gets an hour with either the professor or that McClennan guy twice a week. I tape the conversations and index them.’
‘You can keep the cigar,’ I told him, ‘but how about the combination for the keypad on her door? Rosie and me go back a long way. And it’s been a while since we got to talk.’
Nathan shook his head theatrically, as though to snap himself out of a trance. ‘Security, Castor. It’s called that because it’s meant to be secure.’
I took a long slow look around the cramped room. ‘You worried about losing your job?’ I asked.
Nathan laughed full-throatedly. ‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘You remember that battle you guys fought, against the French?’
‘Oh man. There’ve been so many . . .’
‘The one that mattered. The one where they kicked your asses all over the countryside and then moved into the big house.’
‘Hastings.’
‘Bingo. Add twenty, and that’s your magic number.’
‘Thanks, Nathan. You’re a mensch.’
His face lit up at the Yiddishism. ‘
A shaynem dank dir im pupik
, Castor. You’re welcome.’
I went down to street level and, after a couple of wrong turns, found Rosie’s door. I tapped the keys and the lock clicked. 1086. Jenna-Jane hadn’t had the Battle of Hastings in mind when she set that code; she was thinking of the Domesday Book. That was an enterprise after her own heart.
I opened the door and stepped inside. It was like walking into another world. Rosie’s quarters were schizophrenic in the extreme. The bed was a hospital bed, big and ugly, mounted on a hydraulic pillar for raising and lowering and adjusting of angles. And beside the bed there was a fearsome assemblage of machines with red LED readouts and old-fashioned pressure dials on their fascias. But elsewhere there was a sofa, table and chairs, a TV, cheap prints on the walls - evidence of a general effort to make this institutional space, which in reality was a prison cell, look a little like home.
Rosie was in bed, which is where she spends most of her time these days. It’s a side effect of the wards that J-J uses to keep her contained, and it’s worsened steadily over the years. She spends about half of every day asleep, and it never takes very much effort or emotion to exhaust her. The weird thing is that these symptoms persist and repeat themselves in every body she occupies.
Currently her fleshly tabernacle was male. A guy of about twenty stared back at me from the bed. He blinked a couple of times, and then a smile gradually suffused his features.
‘Felix!’ Like the exhaustion, Rosie’s deep sexy burr always sounded the same no matter whose body she had squatter’s rights in. ‘My darling! My sunbeam! Come and shine on me.’
‘Hello, Rosie,’ I said. ‘How’s your love life?’
‘Entirely . . . theoretical.’
I ambled over and sat down on the edge of the bed. She lifted her pale hand and rested it on mine. Maybe the guy was already pale when he got here, or maybe Rosie’s transformative magic was working on him, making him over subtly into her image.
The rules that govern the afterlife are unfathomable, but they seem to be pretty consistent. Whatever form you take in death, flesh or spirit, you don’t stick around for all that long. Twenty or thirty years is the average, fifty is already pushing it, and a century seems to mark the upper limit. For zombies the attrition is rapid, ruinous and irrevocable; for ghosts there’s a slower and more subtle disintegration as the ego - the glue that holds a human being together - atrophies and melts away.
Rosie is the anomaly. A dozen exorcists working in an insane daisy chain had raised her, pulling on the psychic threads attached to a box of Tudor artefacts that J-J had acquired from God knows where. We caught her in a web made out of our own guts and our own arrogance, and then we decanted her into a waiting body, the first of many. It was a feat that had never been repeated.
Technically what Rosie does - the way she manages to keep on going on the material plane - is spiritual possession. The bodies are those of willing volunteers - psychology and medical students, mostly, who house the old ghost for a week or a fortnight and then walk away clutching (by way of payment) the tapes and transcripts of what she’s said through their lips. The quick turnover means that Rosie’s sedentary lifestyle does no harm to her hosts, although some of them have claimed that they got flashbacks weeks or months later, spontaneous memories of events from Rosie’s life. I suspect that’s part of the draw. To a certain kind of mind, there’s something attractive about the idea of a cheap holiday in the Wars of the Roses.
Rosie is a strange woman. Her name is a joke, or a mask, and she’s never told anyone what name she went by back when she was alive. What I can tell you is that she’s playful, coquettish, filthy-minded and full of life - impressive in a lady who’s been dead for five centuries. She’s also garrulous. She likes to talk about her adventures, and that occasionally includes stories about where she’s been during the 500 years between her death and resurrection. She lies outrageously, contradicts herself without blushing, kids us all straight-faced and then laughs her leg off when we fall for it. And Jenna-Jane writes it all down and pores over it, looking for the needle of truth in the city-sized haystacks of Rosie’s magnificent bullshit.
I left the MOU mostly because of how Rosie was treated there. Because of the way she’d gone from honoured guest to precious resource to de facto prisoner. Jenna-Jane had started to obsess quite early on about undocumented access, and had started to control the comings and goings of Rosie’s visitors. Rosie was allowed out of the MOU only with an escort. The outings got more and more infrequent, until finally they stopped altogether.
I’d seen her just once since then, and that was the last time Asmodeus had tried to break free from his moorings in Rafi’s flesh. It had been more than a year ago now, but Rosie would never have been so indelicate as to tear me off a strip for not visiting - and I guess when you’ve clocked up more than half a millennium the odd year here or there isn’t worth arguing about.
‘It’s so sweet that you came,’ she whispered. ‘Unless it means . . . you’ve taken that bitch’s shilling again.’
‘I’ve missed you too,’ I said, dodging the question. ‘How are they treating you?’
The truth was that she didn’t look all that well. Again, the borrowed flesh thing makes it harder to tell, but given that the guy whose body she was borrowing was a healthy young volunteer, the listlessness and lethargy had to be coming from Rosie herself.
‘They keep me occupied, Fix,’ Rosie said, her lips quirking upwards very slightly. ‘Like an expensive pet. They do everything they can to make sure I’m happy.’
‘And are you?’
The half-smile disappeared. ‘No. Not very. The company isn’t as . . . select as once it was. I see . . . a great many dullards. A great many bullies. I endure. I let them come and go, and they leave no mark on me . . . or on the world, but still . . . it saddens me.’
‘Well, I’m going to be able to visit you for at least the next few weeks. Is there anything I can get you? Grapes? Booze? Porn? A newspaper?’
She seemed to consider this for a moment. ‘Nothing,’ she said solemnly. ‘Well, porn, perhaps. If it’s witty. But I’d rather you just talked to me. Tell me how the world works.’
I did, for about an hour or so, concentrating on the sort of things I knew she’d be interested in: politics, but only broad strokes and colourful intrigues; fads and fashions, the more extreme the better; stuff from my own life, luridly exaggerated. After a while she began to interrupt me with the occasional question, but they were questions I couldn’t answer. They bore on the big intangibles, the way London looked and felt these days. I did my best to describe the city as I saw it, but I’m no poet.
Finally Rosie gave a loud sigh, which I took to be a signal that I should shut up. ‘I can’t catch it,’ she lamented. ‘I can’t catch it, Felix.’
‘Can’t catch what, Rosie?’ I asked. Given my part in getting her into this mess, I figured the least I could do was play straight man to her.
‘It’s changing,’ she murmured. Her eyes were closed now, and her head was tilted to one side as if she was listening for something. ‘But so slowly. Like the light in a room when the sun comes up, or when it goes down. You don’t notice it until it’s happened.’
‘Are we still talking about London?’ I asked.
‘About the world.’ The silence that followed those three words lasted for so long I thought she’d gone to sleep, but when I stood up to leave she reached out and took my hand again. ‘Don’t get hurt,’ she said.
‘I never do,’ I said. ‘It all rolls off me, Rosie. You know that. It’s part of my ineffable charm.’
She ignored the invitation to banter. ‘It’s going to get hard to breathe,’ she said. ‘I really believe . . . yes . . . the changes will go on and on. Like water, rising over your head. Don’t drown, Fix. I’d be sad if you drowned. There’s a man here who hates you . . .’
‘Gil McClennan,’ I said. ‘It’s okay, Rosie. I had his number the first moment I saw him.’
She shook her head slowly, emphatically. ‘You think you . . .’ she began, but for some reason she didn’t finish the sentence. She shaped unspoken words with her mouth, but in the end only shook her head again. ‘Never mind,’ she sighed. ‘It all passes. It all passes. Perhaps you’ll be his . . . comeuppance, Fix. I know what a rogue you are. How hard to pin down. I hope you hurt him. I’d like to see that.’
She said it calmly enough, but I read some old pain in her face. It’s hard to hide your feelings when you’re relying on someone else’s muscles. I made a mental note to ask one of the others, most likely Sam, whether there was any bad blood he knew of between Gil McClennan and Rosie. Gil was her main link to the outside world now, in charge of selecting and briefing her volunteers - organising the meat train, as he put it - so he was in a position to do a lot of harm if he had a mind to. And he was a McClennan. That didn’t earn him the benefit of any doubts in my book.
‘Rosie,’ I said, ‘I need to move, but like I said, I’ll see you again soon. If Gil gives you any grief, you let me know.’
‘Assuredly, my knight in arms.’
‘Seriously. I’ll break his arm. I think Jenna-Jane would let me get away with that as long as he doesn’t take a sick day.’
I kissed her on the cheek, hoping the volunteer wouldn’t object to the liberty when he went through the tapes, and let myself out. She didn’t say goodbye; she was lying back with her eyes closed again, seemingly exhausted just by the conversation.
Walking back along the corridor, my head full of vague and unserviceable thoughts, I was hit full force by an atonal tidal wave of white noise, so suddenly and so painfully that it almost made me stagger. I hadn’t realised I’d gone the wrong way and was walking past the vault-like steel door that led down to the holding cells in the basement. I retraced my steps hurriedly, the cloying atmosphere of the place pressing in on me so that I felt like I was breathing through petrol-soaked rags.
My instinct was to get the hell out, but the mapping was still going on upstairs and I had to see how far they’d got. If Trudie Pax had a line on Asmodeus, I wanted to be the first to know. I went back up and found the room again. Trudie didn’t seem to have moved in the two hours I’d been gone: she was still standing at the table, the taut string linking her hand to the nail in the ceiling as she passed her hand over the map. Some things had changed though. The tables had been banked up at an angle somehow, their back legs precariously balanced on stacks of cardboard boxes, so that the centre of the composite map was only a few inches away from Trudie’s hand. She was holding a steel ruler, to the nether end of which a pencil had been attached with wads of Blu-Tack. This ramshackle apparatus allowed her to stab down onto the map and mark points on it. Victor Etheridge was scuttling around with a pencil and ruler of his own, joining the points up carefully with perfectly straight lines.
Trudie had her eyes closed, but I caught Etheridge’s gaze from the doorway. He held up his hand in the universal stop sign and shook his head vigorously: don’t interrupt.
I wished I could pretend I hadn’t seen his high sign, because I wanted more than anything right then to breeze on in and find out where those marks were falling: where the demon might have pitched his tent. But clearly Trudie was getting into her stride now, and Etheridge was feeling protective of her. Equally clearly, from a purely logical point of view it wasn’t going to be any damn use knowing where Asmodeus was hanging out until we had a weapon that would actually work on him. Trying to take comfort in that thought, I gave Etheridge a nod and a wave and retreated again.
But the logical point of view was a long bus ride from where my head was at. I was seething with restlessness, with the feeling that I had to be doing something right then and there even if it turned out later to be the wrong thing.
So I called Juliet. It seemed to make a crazy kind of sense.
9
‘A hundred pounds?’ Juliet repeated. She sounded suspicious.
‘Yeah,’ I confirmed.
‘Per day?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Plus expenses?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Shit, no. What expenses are there likely to be, anyway? All I’m asking you to do is to watch Pen’s house and make sure Asmodeus doesn’t get near it. Pen’s already got the place hot and jumping with stay-nots, so the chances are you won’t have anything to do in any case. But if the wards go down, I want there to be another line of defence. That’s you.’
Juliet sipped her coffee, which was black and thick and treacle-sweet. The waiter, who had a hangdog look and a ridiculous bandito moustache, hovered nearby with the pot, hoping she’d hold up her cup for a refill. That way he’d have an excuse to get in close enough for another lungful of essence-of-succubus.