Dead Men's Boots (58 page)

I got out of the car and walked across the stone flags to the door. I still didn’t see a soul, and dead silence met me in
the hallway. I wandered from room to room, expecting an ambush at first and looking behind every door, but you can’t keep
those hair-trigger reflexes honed forever. After a while it became more of a tense stroll.

I found Covington in Lionel Palance’s bedroom. He was sitting in a steel-framed chair next to Palance’s bed, reading the old
man a bedtime story—and it wasn’t
Noddy
. I guess he must have put his foot down about that. I walked into the room, making as little noise as I could, and stood
behind him while he read. He did the voices pretty convincingly.

“ ‘What have you been doing, Taffy?’ said Tegumai. He had mended his spear and was carefully waving it to and fro.

“ ‘It’s a little berangement of my own, Daddy dear,’ said Taffy. ‘If you won’t ask me questions, you’ll know all about it
in a little time, and you’ll be surprised. You don’t know how surprised you’ll be, Daddy! Promise you’ll be surprised.’

“ ‘Very well,’ said Tegumai, and went on fishing.”

Covington glanced across at his audience of one. Palance was already asleep, his chest rising and falling without sound.

Covington closed the book and put it on the bedside table in the midst of all the medicines. His movements were a little jerky,
so one or two of them fell off onto the floor. He picked them up and put them back in their places. He leaned forward, kissed
Palance on the forehead without waking him, and then straightened again, squaring his shoulders as though for some ordeal.

“Castor,” he said, turning for the first time to acknowledge me. He looked impossibly tired. “How did it go?”

“Pretty well, Aaron, all things considered.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that if you went to Mount Grace right now, you’d find it looking like a morgue.”

“Well—good. That’s good. At least I presume it’s good. And you and your—team all came out of it okay?”

I made a palm-wobbling so-so gesture. “We had one fatality. Fortunately.”

He stood, looked calmly into my eyes. “And now you’ve come for me.”

“Pretty much.”

“Fancy a whiskey?”

“Pretty much.”

He led the way down the stairs to the same room we’d used the night before. It felt like another lifetime. He picked up the
Springbank, but I put my hand on his arm and shook my head. “Something rougher,” I said. “Please. Rotgut, if you’ve got any.”

He found some blended Scotch with a name I didn’t recognize, held it up for my approval. I nodded.

“ ‘Bartender, give me two fingers of red-eye,’ ” he quoted. He mimed the ancient joke, poking his fingers toward but not into
my eyes. I didn’t laugh. I wasn’t in the mood, somehow.

He set out two glasses, poured a generous measure into one. Then he looked at the bottle, thought better of it, and took that,
leaving the other glass empty on the bar. “Shall we sit down?” he asked, gesturing.

“Whatever.” I followed him across to the leather three piece. He sprawled on the sofa, and I took one of the chairs. He chinked
the bottle to my glass and then took a deep swallow of the whiskey. He didn’t even shudder, although God knew it wasn’t smooth.

“You called me Aaron,” he observed, running his tongue across his lips.

“You’d prefer I called you Peter?”

He thought about that. “No, not really,” he admitted. “Actually—in a strange way—there’s a rightness to it. I made up Silver
for myself, but Aaron was the name I was born with. What goes around, comes around. How did you know?”

I let my eyebrows rise and fall. “You weren’t particularly trying to hide.”

He acknowledged the point with a shrug. “Still. John Gittings never saw through me. Or did he? Was my name in his notes?”

“No.” I swirled the whiskey in the glass, watching the filaments roll in the liquor like the ghosts of worms. I thought back,
trying to get the sequence straight in my own mind because the conviction had crept over me by slow degrees; there hadn’t
been any one moment when the lightbulb had lit up above my head. “John didn’t work it out. But the letter you sent him was
a part of it, I suppose. You told him to take backup, and you told me the same thing when I came to see you. I guess that
struck a chord. What was with the spelling, by the way? Just your instinct for camouflage kicking in?”

Covington made a slightly rueful face. “I can’t spell,” he said. “There’s probably a name for this now—or there will be soon.
Aaron Silver leaned English late in life, and he never got his head around the orthography. Now I find that every new body
I live in has the same limitations as the original. It’s possible to change, but it’s hard. And it doesn’t last. Old habits
keep reasserting themselves. The past is—more present than the now. It’s easier for me to write like that than it is to look
up the correct spellings. Was that all? Just that one coincidence? Me saying the same thing to you that I wrote to Gittings?”

“No.”

“Then—”

“You really want me to run through all the loose change you were dropping?”

“If you don’t mind, yes. I still find it hard to believe that I’ve developed a death wish after working so hard for so long
to stay alive. Indulge me.”

I delved into my scattered thoughts again. “I was actually looking for you,” I said. “Or at least—not for you, specifically,
but for someone behind the scenes who was making things happen. You had to be there. Someone hired John and gave him a small
fortune to spend on those death-row trinkets. Someone told him about the setup at Mount Grace but for some reason let him
grope around in the dark for weeks on end, checking out cemeteries rather than just giving him the address. Someone playing
games, in other words. Feeding him crumbs to keep him moving, but not wanting to show his hand. Maybe because if John went
directly to Mount Grace, all your dead friends would know who sent him.”

Covington smiled coldly—maybe at the word “friends.” “Go on.”

“Jan Hunter had a mysterious benefactor, too—someone who called her up claiming to be Paul Sumner, but Paul Sumner was already
dead. You again, I’m guessing, trying to keep the momentum going in spite of John’s death—and maybe also looking for a way
to stop Doug Hunter from going down for a murder he didn’t commit. Strings were being pulled all the way down the line. Did
you summon Moloch, too?” Covington nodded without speaking. “Yeah, I thought so. Big coincidence otherwise—that a demon with
those dietary needs happened to be raised from hell where he’d catch the scent of the Mount Grace permanent floating barbecue.
But there weren’t any coincidences operating here. It was all part of the master plan.” I took a long swig on the whiskey.
It burned pleasantly in my mouth.

“So that was the main thing,” I said. “The strings. You don’t get all those strings without someone to pull on them. How did
I know it was you? Just lots of little things. Your real name—Aaron Silver’s real name, I mean—was Berg, and the name you
gave to Ruth Kale was Bergson.” He opened his mouth to speak, and I anticipated his objection. “No, you’re right. I wouldn’t
have picked up on that if I didn’t already know. It was the Paragon, Silver. You let yourself get seen by two people there.”

He looked surprised. “I know. But I had my collar drawn up, and I was moving fast. I didn’t think either of them got a good
look at me.”

“They didn’t. But their different descriptions got me thinking. The desk clerk, Merrill—he said you were an old man. But Onugeta
jostled against you in the hallway and felt how solidly muscled you were; he knew you had to be a young, fit guy. So why would
Merrill think you were old?”

“I don’t know, Castor. Why would he?”

I pointed at his head. “Your snow-white locks. You walked past his desk with your head down and your collar up, and all he
saw of you was your hair. And I dunno, maybe there’s something about how you walk: another echo. Something that goes with
being a century and a half old. Either way, the paradox got my mind working. And once it was working, I saw that the little
question—who was that masked man?—was the same as the big question. Why were you there at all? Why did you take the hammer
away with you? Locking the stable door after the horse had bolted, even though Doug Hunter—with Myriam Kale inside him—was
going to be arrested anyway.”

Covington shook his head slowly. “You really thought this through, didn’t you? Why did I?”

“Because flesh is clay. When a human soul possesses an animal body, it bends it as far as it can into a human shape. Sometimes
the animal soul pushes back, and you can get some really interesting—not to say nasty—results as the seesaw tips. The same
thing happens to you and your friends, doesn’t it? The longer you stay inside a body that isn’t yours, the more it adjusts
to having you there. The more it slides into the shape and form you remember having in your old body. That’s why you’re snow-white
blond as Peter Covington, and why you were snow-white blond as Les Lathwell—because Aaron Silver’s soul remembered having
snow-white hair. And that hammer, gripped in Doug Hunter’s hand as Myriam Kale came bubbling up out of his soul and into the
driver’s seat—”

“—had Myriam Kale’s fingerprints on it. Right. The hammer is behind the bar, by the way. I assume you’ll be wanting to take
it with you when you go. And it won’t make any difference to me or to Mimi after tonight. Can I refresh your drink, Castor?”

I looked at my empty glass. “Probably better not,” I said. “I need a clear head if I’m going to play you out.”

“You don’t need to worry. I won’t make it hard for you. But I’m in the mood to confess before I die. I’ve got a favor to ask
you, too. Have another drink with me.”

Fuck it. Why not? It was his house and his booze. I held out the glass, and he filled it from the bottle he’d been drinking
from. Well, alcohol is meant to be a good disinfectant.

“How long has it been since your last confession?” I asked him.

He laughed. “A hundred and some years. And I’m Jewish, not Catholic. Born Jewish, anyway. Religion never meant very much to
me, which is why I had myself burned rather than buried. I didn’t believe in the bodily resurrection. All my life I just did
what I had to do to get by, and that never seemed to leave much room for thinking about God. The last time I went to shul
was on my bar mitzvah. Three years after that, I killed my first man. Probably the one thing had as much to do with growing
up as the other did.”

Suddenly, the prospect of hearing all this seemed a lot less attractive. “So you were a bad man,” I said. “We can take that
as read, if you like. Move on to the atonement and the absolution.”

“I’ve been handling the atonement in my own sweet way, Castor. And for your information, I haven’t started telling you my
sins yet. I don’t think any of the men I killed back when I was Aaron Silver had any reason to complain. They would have done
the same to me if I’d given them an opening. One of them did in the end. Henry Meyer-Lindeman got the drop on me in a whorehouse
in Streatham. Actually on the job. Shot me and shot a lady by the name of Ginny Tester under me. We both died instantly.”

“And in your end was your beginning.”

Covington grimaced. “Not right away. It was a shock, waking after my own death and finding that I was trapped in Mount Grace.
Tied to my own ashes. You never really are, of course. The trap consists of your own habits. Your own ways of thinking. But
it felt real. It felt as though I’d be spending eternity on that one little plot of ground, and eternity would be a long time
passing.

“But a year later, Stephen Kesel died, and he felt the same way about burial that I did. And four years after, it was Rudolf
Gough’s turn. And that was critical mass. There was an old janitor who used to live on the site. We took him one night while
he was asleep—the three of us working together. Then we took turns to ride him. We were back in business.

“The first thing I did was to visit Meyer-Lindeman and pay him back with interest. I liked Ginny Tester a lot; she deserved
better than to die in that undignified way. Steve and Rudy had similar visits to make—good ones and bad ones.

“But we realized pretty quickly that this went beyond dealing with unfinished business. We also figured out that it wasn’t
possible for one of us to betray the others. Steve tried to take off on his own, but he came limping back three days later.
The janitor was fighting back, and it took the three of us to whip him into line again.

“So there we were. We were immortal, but only so long as we stuck together. An immortality collective. Till death us do part,
only it never could, whether we wanted it to or not.

“All the rules and refinements came over the next twenty years or so—the years of throwing things against the wall to see
whether they stuck. Experimentation and refinement. We discovered that the ashes made everything ten times easier, and they
made the possession stick longer. We discovered that night was better than day, particularly for the initial breaking in of
a new body, and that the dark of the moon was the best time of all. We turned it into a very streamlined process. Tried and
tested. It helped that nobody believed what we were doing was even possible. That meant nobody was on their guard.”

“What about Myriam Kale?” I asked. “Where does she come in?”

For a moment I thought Covington hadn’t heard me. He was looking up at the ceiling, his posture one of acute attention. “Did
you hear Lionel crying?” he demanded.

“I didn’t hear a thing.”

He relaxed a little. “Okay. Just the wind, I guess. I picked this room because it’s right under his. If he stirs, we’ll hear
him. You’ll notice I sent the nurses away, so I’m… on duty tonight. Myriam, right. Myriam was Yoko Ono. The femme fatale who
gets the blame for breaking up the band.”

He took another long swig of whiskey. He’d been drinking pretty regularly and pretty determinedly at every pause in the conversation,
and the bottle was mostly empty. He was nerving himself up for something, but I wondered whether he might already have missed
his stop.