Dead Men's s Boots — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

He was trying to sound as bored and disengaged as he had before, but it rang false now. Interesting. It would be nice to live long enough to find out what that meant.

‘He was heavy-set,’ I said. ‘A bit of a brawler. But an upper-class brawler, obviously. None of your street trash.’

‘Look at me,’ Todd snapped. I raised my head again. Todd pointed the knife at my left eye. ‘I was there when you-’ he started to say, but then he obviously had second thoughts. ‘Accent?’ he demanded brusquely.

‘Like yours. Cultured, you know, but only the one coat of paint. Something else showing through.’

‘Is that right?’ He smiled the way a shark smiles. ‘You saw through me, did you, Castor? Right, right. You’re way too sharp for the liÓhar821kes of me.’

The knife snaked in a second time, and I yelled in pain and fear. But when Todd straightened again, I was still seeing out of both eyes. It was my ear he’d cut, the knife blade coming away on a rising trajectory as though he’d drawn a tick. Cheekbone: check. Ear: check.

‘What did you call him?’ he asked, in the same conversational tone. ‘You must’ve had some moniker for him, this cultured prizefighter?’

My mind was full of dancing devils, for some reason. ‘Louie,’ I said, thinking of Louie Cypher in the movie Angel Heart. What a crock of shit that was. You sort of hope that if the devil’s into wordplay he’ll show a little more class. ‘Louie . . . Rourke.’

‘And how did he contact you?’

I shrugged, trying not to let my relief show on my face. If he’d swallow Louie Rourke without blinking, there was hope for me yet. ‘I told you – by phone. He said he wanted to hire me to do an exorcism. A really big one. He said it might be dangerous, but nothing a good ghostbreaker wouldn’t be able to handle. The money would be good – really good – and he’d give me all the information I needed to pull it off safely.’

Todd wiped the blade of the knife on his own palm and inspected the smear of blood it left there. Then he looked at me again.

‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘You just bought yourself another five minutes of life. Tell me about that. About how this . . . Rourke prepped you. What he already knew about us.’

‘Why do you care?’ I demanded. A dangerous light flared behind Todd’s eyes. It was a calculated risk: I needed a few seconds to think through the moves I’d made along the way and to scrape together an answer that might convince him. Well, I got the few seconds, but it’s like they say: there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Todd swung the knife a little more recklessly, and blood poured down from my forehead into my eyes. There are a lot of blood vessels in your forehead, and they bleed promiscuously: my eyes were glued shut in an instant. Todd opened them again with his thumbs on my eyelids. I blinked through the blood, up into his wide eyes.

‘I care, you fucking imbecile, because it’s him I want to get my hands on,’ he snarled. ‘Not you. What the fuck do you matter? You’re dead already. You tell me enough to get my hands on this guy who’s calling himself Rourke and you get to die a little bit cleaner, that’s all. That’s what your life has come down to, Castor. You should probably have been a watchmaker.’

‘All right,’ I muttered thickly. ‘All right, just don’t hurt me any more.’

It was kind of an embarrassing line, but it did the job. Todd sat himself back down again on the edge of the desk and waved his interrogation tool expansively.

‘Then talk,’ he suggested.

‘He – he told me about the inscription,’ I said, and I saw Todd’s shoulders stiffen as he tried to avoid giving anything away on his face. Over-finessed, you bastard. Hunter had said three days. I did the mental arithmetic. ‘It’s tonight, isn’t it? He said it was going to be tonight.’

Todd didn’t bother to answer. ‘Go on.’

‘He told me there were about two hundred of you,’ I said, quoting the figure that Moloch had giveÓMolGo n me. ‘And that the operation had been going on for a good few years now. Since –’ I tried to elide over the slight hesitation so Todd wouldn’t notice it ‘– Aaron Silver’s time. He said Silver was the founder member.’

‘Did he?’

I kept my stare locked with his. ‘Well, was he wrong?’

‘The man with the knife asks the questions, Castor. Keep talking until I tell you to stop.’

‘He knew about Silver and Les Lathwell being the same man. I guess that’s what he meant, you know? That the guy had always been there, overseeing the whole operation.’ Todd’s lips curled back in a sneer: he didn’t like that form of words at all. Something else occurred to me: hadn’t Nicky told me that Silver’s real name was Berg? And Les Lathwell had been out in America in the 1960s, learning the gangster game from the Chicago mobs: and from Berg to Bergson wasn’t a big jump at all. I chanced my arm.