Vicious Circle

I made no comment, but she didn’t expect any. She turned over the root card at lower left: the page of swords, again inverted. “A message,” Pen interpreted. “News. All the page cards mean something dawning, something being announced. I think . . . because it’s upside down . . . a problem that doesn’t get solved, or that gets solved in the wrong way. Fix, if someone asks for your help with something, go in carefully. One step at a time.”

The bud card at lower right was old death himself, which as we all know doesn’t mean death at all. Pen started to make her speech about change and flux, and I made the “wrap it up” gesture that TV floor managers use. “It’s another bad combination,” she said stubbornly, refusing to be bullied. “The page of wands, and death. Forget what I said about being careful: you’re going to trip up and fall on your face. But it’s only the bud, it’s not the flower.”

The flower is the apex of the triangle. Pen turned it over, and we both looked at it. Justice. I never look at those scales without thinking of Hamlet. “Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” I don’t want justice: I want to cop a plea.

Pen gave me a look, and I shook my head—but the querent doesn’t get to have the last word, even if it’s only a gesture.

“Things will balance out,” she said. “Actions will have the consequences they were always going to have. For better or worse.”

“Which?” I asked. “Better, or worse?”

“We won’t know until it happens.”

“Christ, I hate these little bastards.”

She gave up on spirituality and got the whisky out. On some things, at least, we still see eye to eye.

Three

HARLESDEN IS LIKE KILBURN WITHOUT THE SCENIC beauty—the stamping ground of Jamaican gangsters with itchy trigger fingers, predatory minicab drivers whose cars are their offices, and a great nation of feral cats. Oh, and zombies: for some reason, those who’ve risen in the body seem to congregate in large numbers on the deserted streets of the soon-to-be-demolished Stonehouse Estate. It’s a setting that shows them off to very good advantage.

My office is in Craven Park Road, next to the Grambas Kebab House—or rather, my door is next to their door. The actual room where I conduct my meager and occasional business is on the first floor, directly over Grambas’s eternally bubbling deep fryers. On bad days I can see an intimation of hell in that image.

The sign over the door still says F. CASTOR ERADICATIONS, which these days is a pretty outrageous lie. I’m not quite as free and easy as I used to be about toasting ghosts: I can’t even remember the last time I did it, which on the whole is probably a good thing. But a man needs to have some stock in trade, and God didn’t give me the shoulders or the temperament for hard labor. So I’d finally taken a step that I’d been considering for a while now—and it looked like today would be the day that made it official.

At ten on a rain-sodden May morning, Grambas hadn’t even hefted the first doner yet. I knocked on his door and waited, wondering if he was awake. I got my answer when the window above and to the right of my head opened and a shiny bald head was thrust out of it. A pair of watery brown eyes stared down at me, taking their time to focus. To the waist, which mercifully was as far as I could see, Grambas was naked.

“Fuck,” he said thickly. “It never stops. Come back at noon, Castor.”

“Throw me down the keys,” I suggested. “I only need to get that package out of the lockup.”

He sighed heavily, nodded, and withdrew. The keys came flying out of the window a few moments later, and I almost went under the wheels of an ice cream van as I stepped backward to catch them. I went into the alley alongside the shop and let myself into the backyard through a door whose hinges were only held together by rust. The lockup, though, has a stout steel-reinforced door and three padlocks: Grambas knows his neighbors well, and though he forgives them their vices he doesn’t see a need to finance them.

I took the padlocks off and left them hanging open in their eye-bolts. It comes naturally to me to assess the professional credentials of any locks I encounter: I learned lock-picking from a master, and though the world has moved on into realms of electronic key-matching and double-redundant combination codes, I’m still okay with the bog-standard stuff that most people use. One of these three locks was generic, without even a manufacturer’s mark; the second was a venerable Squire, and the third was a sexy little beast from the Master Lock titanium series. Numbers one and two I could have handled without a key any day of the week, but for number three I’d have needed a very long run-up indeed. I’m not saying I couldn’t have done it, but there’d have had to be a damn good reason why I was trying.