How To Make Friends With Demons Part 11

"Shall we see each other again?" she said.

"You want to?"

"I just said so, didn't I?"

"When?"

I wanted to say, In five minutes. Now. I wondered if the next night would be too soon. Then I remembered it was the Candlelight Club the next night. I felt a stab of irritation that I had to see Stinx and Jaz when I wanted to be with Yasmin. I hadn't even left her company and already I was prepared to ditch my good friends to be with her again. Where is the sense in that? "Thursday? Can you do Thursday?"

"Where?"

"Do we have to decide now? I'll call you."

"Okay."

She stood with her arms at her sides, looking at me without blinking. I leaned over to offer a farewell peck on her cheek, but in my clumsiness, or maybe our clumsiness, our lips grazed each other's. A dry-lipped kiss, a kiss on lips made cold by the chilly air. But I felt something pa.s.s between her lips and mine, a fine thing, like smoke but sweeter, like a promise but less precise.

And yet it wasn't even a kiss. If she was Ellis's spy, she was taking the game all the way.

A tugboat on the river hooted its pleasure or derision at us, I didn't know which. The light was fading fast as I watched her hail a pa.s.sing taxi and climb in. I already envied the cab driver her company.

Chapter 16.

Naturally I didn't say anything about all this to Stinx and Diamond Jaz when I met up with them in the Viaduct Tavern the following evening. I say "naturally," when in fact the Candlelight Club was formed, and ostensibly still met, as a talk-shop; a tool for charting the contours of our respective romantic lives. That is to say, Jaz persisted with his chronic treks through green valleys and glittering mountain peaks of a Shangri-La that always turned overnight into some wind-blasted icy creva.s.se of doom; Stinx adhered to the rolling hills and dark forests of his affair with Lucy; and I stalked the flat, arid planes, reporting on nothing but my intermittent communication with Fay and the children. I didn't want to tell them about Yasmin. Not yet anyway. I wanted to protect her, us, from the gallows laughter that characterized an evening with the Candlelight Club.

Stinx looked at me, wiping creamy Guinness foam from his upper lip. "Somethin' different about him," Stinx said to Jaz.

Jaz took a light swig from his bottle of designer lager and squinted at me. "You're right.

There is."

I glanced around the pub in a futile effort to dodge their attention. Wrong move. It only confirmed for them that they were onto something.

"Come on, my son. Out with it."

The Viaduct Tavern is definitely one of my personal favourites, not so busy in the evenings, and an original gin-palace. Dark mahogany carved wood made airy by gilt, silver mirrors and engraved gla.s.s. On the marble wall are huge paintings of three busty maidens representing Agriculture, Banking and the Arts. The Arts is wounded, bayoneted in the b.u.t.tock by a drunken solider during the First World War. The pub is built on the site of the old Newark hanging prison and the cellars are former prison cells for the cut-throats and sc.u.m of Victorian London.

And it has ghosts, of course. Loads of 'em. What with the vile prison conditions and the hangings and so on. Builders and cellarmen and plumbers are always complaining of someone unseen tapping them on the shoulder. Do I need to point out to you that ghosts and demons are not the same thing? Ghosts are the spirits of the dead, I guess. Not that I believe in them.

Demons, on the other hand, are the spirits of the living.

"There was a kind of spring in his step when he came in tonight," Jaz says.

"Just what I thought," says Stinx. "Springy. Bouncy.

Boing!"

Stinx was already flying when I got there, and Jaz was just winding him up higher and higher. I kept waiting for an opportunity, a lull in the conversation when I might ask about progress on the forgery. The fact that Stinx hadn't mentioned it himself wasn't a good sign. I found myself looking hard at the colour of his nose, to see if I could detect any extra burst capillaries or softened cartilage.

Boing!" went Jaz.

They did a decent claret in the Viaduct. I drained my gla.s.s. "My round," I said, and I got up to go to the bar.

When I returned with a tray of drinks, Stinx and Jaz were regarding me steadily, but had fallen into silence. They both blinked. I blinked back. A few more minutes went by in complete, blinking silence. I think it was the longest silence I could remember since we'd first met.

"Right," I said, "if that's how you're going to play it, I will tell you. But not until the big hand is on the ten, by which time I will have drunk at least a full bottle."

"He's back with Fay," said Stinx. "That's it!"

Jaz shook his head. He was the more perceptive of the two. "No, it's something else. I think he's got a new squeeze."

Despite my poker face, some microscopic tic, or a tremor from a tiny nerve in my jaw, or the stiffening of a single hair in my eyebrow betrayed me. Jaz leapt to his feet and clapped his hands in delight, kicking his stool over in the process.

"Nonsense," I barked, too quickly, giving myself away again. Jaz was dancing now: an infuriating little exhibition of a dance that used to be called the Twist, with his arms held tight at his sides. Stinx was staring hard at me, a man both amazed and deeply impressed.

Jaz righted his stool and fell back into it. "Come on, William: the evening is yours."

"It's nothing," I said. "Nothing." I told them about my lunch with Yasmin, and our walk along the Embankment.

I was tossing them the bare bones to chew on, but they weren't satisfied. "Where did you say you had lunch?" Stinx objected. "Plumbers?" Then how comes, how comes you're going down the Embankment. After lunch you should be going the other way. Right?"

"I had the afternoon off."

"You had the afternoon off?" said Jaz. "And she had the afternoon off? What time did you part company?"

"Christ, this is like a police interrogation!"

"Guilty!" Stinx roared. The pair of them were hooting at me, nearly falling off their stools. I didn't see what was quite so funny, but they were riffing on my discomfort. Then Stinx got serious. "Why you being so cagey?"

I darted a glance over my shoulder. No one was listening to us, but I lowered my voice anyway. "It's going nowhere."

"Nah nah nah," said Stinx, wagging a nicotine-stained finger at me. "Don't fall for it. He's just trying to deflect attention."

So I went back and told them the whole thing, which remarkably wasn't much more than what I'd already disclosed. I mentioned the parting kiss. They listened like it was all hard news.

Then they started to offer advice, as if they were suddenly and pa.s.sionately dedicated to getting me laid.

Naturally the idea had crossed my mind-of course it had. It had been over three years since I'd had s.e.x with anyone other than myself, and images of Yasmin naked had been rippling across the back of my retina with disconcerting variety. What I failed to tell them was that I didn't think that I needed any strategy or guile or cool or programme to make it happen. I hadn't admitted it to myself until that moment, but I felt that there was a shocking inevitability about it.

I might make two jumps to the side or one on the diagonal, but it made no difference: if I wanted it to happen, it was going to happen.

But it couldn't be allowed.

Jaz was on his feet again. The prospect of me breaking my three years of celibacy called for champagne, he said.

"Oh lord," Stinx protested, "we'll probably end up in that sticky club with the footballers and the tarts. Speaking of which, Jaz has another mark."

A "mark" was Stinx's word for a prospective buyer of one of our fake books.

"Oh?"

"Only I want to tell you this: someone was asking round the other day. Did I know William Heaney? Did I know Jaz Singh?"

"Really?" I wondered if this was also something to do with Ellis. And possibly Yasmin.

"Look, William, I might be being paranoid, but it didn't smell right. I can't say more than that."

I took a deep sip of the n.o.ble and beneficial juice. We'd never had the police sniffing around before, but we'd all agreed it would come one day. It had to. I could explain it through the law of demonology, but for the time being think of it as the police protecting you night and day. "What does Jaz say about it?"

"He says you decide."

I'd never thought of myself as the "leader" of our little enterprise, but I suppose I was. I coordinated the buyer and the product; I advanced the money for materials to Stinx; I negotiated the price and ultimately delivered the product. I guess I was the capo.

When Jaz returned with the fizz, I let him fill three gla.s.ses before I asked him, "When did you identify the customer?"

He twigged instantly what we'd been talking about. "A week ago. That is, I told him I'd put him in touch with you."

"And when did this enquiry come, Stinx?"

"Three days ago. Stranger."

I didn't like it. "It's too close. What do you know about the customer?"

"Not much," Jaz said. "He's another one of these public schoolboy types. Ex-military. Gay.

That's all."

"Does he have books?"

"No idea."

"You'll need to get inside his house, Jaz. Look at his bookshelves to see if he's for real."

"How will he do that?" Stinx wanted to know.

Jaz raised his gla.s.s. "Anyway, here's to the abolition of celibacy."

Well, guess what: we ended up in that b.l.o.o.d.y club again. I can never remember the name of the place because we always drink too much and my store of brain cells for the hour preceding entry therein and much of the two hours thereafter is washed away like writing in the sand. I worry about this. I worry about how much of my life is not available to me. I want total recall. I want the full set of records. I don't want to think that some sinister organization has stolen half of the files on my life like they did with the enquiry into the death of Princess Diana. I'm not expecting to present these records at the Pearly Gates, you understand: it's just that if I don't have all the evidence how can I judge myself?

Oh, b.u.g.g.e.r it, let's just call it the Red Club. I didn't mind. Jaz always insisted on covering the bill when we went there, and my funds had become seriously depleted after taking out the loan and making repayments at bank rates that would embarra.s.s a vampire. I needed to have a word before Stinx got too smashed.

"Has Lucy come back?" I asked him.

He wiped his nose, and shook his head.

"Stinx, listen. I need to know if there's any progress on Pride and Prejudice."

His answer was to down his gla.s.s of fizzing champagne in one go and wave a large hand through the air. "It's coming. It's coming." He looked round the club for more interesting company.

"Come on, mate. I want an answer."

He patted my shoulder. "Relax, it's nearly there." Then he waddled off to find himself another drink.

I didn't like this club any more than I had the last time I was there. Tara my neighbourhood good-time girl was on show, but the footballers were different. Tara cheerfully introduced me to one of them. He was a nice lad, but I thought he looked a bit too young to be out so late.

"Do you make a living from it?" I asked him.

"Of course he does," Tara giggled. "He plays football for England!"

"Marvellous," I said. "This is what we want. More young men playing for England." I tipped back my gla.s.s and looked round for a way out of the conversation.

Tara waved at some more people entering the club and the footballer touched my elbow.

"I've done something a bit stupid."

"What?"

He stepped round to my other side. The music was quite loud. He had to stand on tiptoe to speak in my ear. "I've got journos on my back. Paps. All that."

I had no idea what he was talking about. I put down my gla.s.s, left him standing and made my way downstairs to the Gents, where an elegant Nigerian was working for tips. I was splashing the enamel, as it were, when the footballer came in, seemingly having followed me. He slipped a banknote to the toilet attendant and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. The attendant cleared off quickly. I turned and washed my hands, and what with the toilet attendant out of commission, I had the indignity of reaching for my own paper towel.

"I've got to get 'em off my back,' the footballer said. "Tara reckons you're well connected.

There's a wedge in it for you."

"I can't help you," I said.

"I understand. I know all that. This is unofficial. Just between me and you. You're in government, right?"

"Government? What on Earth did she tell you? Haven't you got people at Chelsea to help you? Whatever it is you've done?"

"I don't play for Chelsea."

"No. Look, whatever Tara has told you, she's mistaken."

The young footballer grabbed my arm angrily. I looked at his hand on my arm and it was enough to make him back off. Then, to my astonishment, he turned to the washbasin and began to cry. He was just a boy. I'm not made of stone: I reached out a hand to try to console him but what I saw in the mirror made me leap back.

There was a demon hanging from him. And the demon looked desperately sad. I knew exactly what that meant.