Dead Men's Boots (59 page)

“By the sixties,” Covington said, “I was in my eighth body, if you can believe that. We wore them out pretty quickly: The
psychic punishment is reflected in premature aging. Our numbers were up to two hundred, which is where they’ve stayed ever
since, and we’d already had the idea of moving out of organized crime into legitimate business—things that would make us just
as rich but at the same time lessen the chance of any police investigation finding us by accident.

“For me, it was getting… claustrophobic. I wasn’t enjoying the company of my peers much at all. And I’d been practicing meditation
techniques. I found that if I was really disciplined, I could maintain control of the body I was in more or less indefinitely,
without reinscription.

“I went to the States intending to take a good long holiday—to stay away from Mount Grace for as long as possible. But I needed
an excuse, and so I made up this bullshit story about making contact with the American mobs. Then to make it look like I was
doing that, I spent some time with the Chicago families. That’s how I met Myriam.

“I think I loved her because she was the opposite of everything I’d become. Okay, she was a killer; to that extent, we were
the same. But there was no calculation in anything she did. She was spontaneous, following her instincts all the time, whether
they were bad or good. Whereas at Mount Grace, calculation was our heart and soul. We’d become parts of a machine, and the
machine ground on. And she was vulnerable and damaged, where we were immortal and beyond all harm. I don’t know. I can’t psychoanalyze
myself. I was drawn to her. I wanted to help her. Probably the love came later, and it was never consummated. The closest
we came to having actual sex was me masturbating her once while we were at a drive-in movie. She cried when she came, cried
buckets. Like she couldn’t bear it. God, what had been done to her! She was still strong, but… broken. Broken way past mending.

“But like I said, this was a holiday. I came home and threw myself back into the day-to-day, life-to-life stuff. The Krays,
who were never part of our little clique, were arrested and carted off to Broadmoor, and we had the whole of the East End
to ourselves. Then I read about Myriam being caught and convicted, and I made up my mind right then to bring her in.”

“Are we up to the sins yet?” I asked.

He smiled humorlessly. “Almost. The rest of the committee was against it from the start. They could see all kinds of trouble
arising from having an actual psychopath in our club—and they were right, obviously. I saw most of the potential problems
myself, but I didn’t care. I was determined to try. I felt… responsible for her somehow. And I hoped against all the evidence
that in a new body, she might recover. Get over her madness and become what she was meant to be before all the rapes and the
beatings.

“It didn’t work. And yeah, now we’re up to the sins. I feel sorry, and I feel ashamed when I think of the men she murdered.
I never did acquire much of a taste for torture—and for personal reasons, I hate it when violence and sex get mixed up together.
It always makes me think of poor Ginny.

“But the harm was done. The committee was terrified that Myriam would draw unwanted attention. They even paid to have that
poor bastard Sumner—the hack writer—bumped off because he wrote a book about her. It got harder and harder to convince them
to give her another chance—and last year, when I suggested giving her a man’s body as a way of jolting her out of her old
behavior patterns, they told me it was the last time. That meeting got kind of heated. I told them they were pathetic little
echoes of what they’d been when they were alive, so scared of losing their creature comforts that they weren’t really living
at all anymore. They accused me of being too big for my boots, trying to run Mount Grace as though it were my personal empire.
They threatened to expel me, and I told them they couldn’t. Not anymore. I didn’t need them to keep my hold on this body,
and I could take another one anytime I wanted to, without their help. That was probably an unwise thing to say. When they
realized how strong I was, they broke with me completely. By that time, it came as something of a relief. Because by that
time I had something else eating at me. Worse even than Myriam.”

“Palance,” I guessed.

“Yeah,” Covington whispered. “Lionel.” He emptied the bottle in one final three-glug swallow.

“Who is he, Covington?”

“He’s my son.”

In the dead silence that followed this flat assertion, I did the math and failed to make it come out even close. Covington
read the calculation and the outcome in my face and made a sweeping gesture with his hand to head off any objection. “I didn’t
father him as Aaron Silver,” he said. “I was in one of the other bodies. I can’t even remember which one; they all merge together
now. They all ended up
looking
exactly the same after I’d been wearing them for a year or so, anyway.

“You see, Castor, once we’d gotten the mechanics of possession all worked out, the only problems we had left were the legal
ones. We had a lot of property that we had to pass on from one generation to the next—from one
body
to the next—and we wanted to do it in ways that didn’t look odd to someone looking in from outside. Some of us had trained
as lawyers, which meant that as far as contracts went, we could nail down any arrangement we liked. But it had to look right.
Right enough to keep anybody from wanting to look any deeper.

“So Seb Driscoll—the guy you met as Todd—he had a brilliant idea. We have kids. Doesn’t have to be a church-wedding, house-inthe-suburbs
kind of deal. We knock up some woman every now and then, so we’ve got biological children of our own. Because if you’ve got
a kid—certifiably, genetically yours—everything becomes really easy. When the time comes to take a new body, you leave everything
to the kid. You top yourself. You jump. Now
you’re
the kid, and you’ve got the fortune, and nobody is going to ask any questions. You just look like a mensch, like a stand-up
guy who saw his duty right at the end of his life and did it. End of story.” Covington stood up slowly and carefully. To judge
from the look on his face and the slight jerkiness in his movements, the booze was starting to kick in.

“So what went wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing.” His voice dripped with bitterness. “Except—human nature, maybe. You could forgive me for thinking I didn’t have
any by this time, couldn’t you? After all the things I’d done. All the mayhem, the killings, down through the years. Life
is cheap, right? But not your own. And your kids are a little bit of your own life growing in someone else.”

He didn’t seem to know what to do with himself now that he was up on his feet again. He tried pacing, but that didn’t seem
to work. He’d stop after every few steps as though trying to remember a specific sequence of movements and it kept escaping
from him, forcing him to break off and start again.

“There were problems with Lionel,” he said, staring at the floor. “We needed to make a certain land transfer at an awkward
time—when he was only two years old. We went ahead and did it because there wasn’t any other choice. Then the woman who was
Lionel’s mother started making difficulties—trying to spend our money—and Driscoll ordered a hit on her. But it was botched,
and she went public, and it wasn’t easy after that to get close to her. Or rather, it wasn’t easy in any of the regular ways.

“But Driscoll saw a way of squaring the circle. He possessed Lionel, and we got Lionel to kill her.”

In spite of everything I’d already seen and done that night, I felt an uncomfortable movement in my stomach. “His own mother?”

“Yeah. When he was three months past his second birthday. Cute, huh? That train set upstairs—I don’t know if you saw it—that
was what I sent him. Stupid gift for a two-year-old. He couldn’t even put the fucking track together. But it didn’t matter,
because he wouldn’t get to play with it.

“Driscoll thought it was funny. He’d worn a lot of bodies by that time, but he’d never tried wearing a kid. So he stayed there
for a few months. Made quite a joke out of it, turning up for the monthly inscription with a—with a sharp-tailored suit, and
looking at me out of my own son’s— Do you mind? I need some fresh air.”

He took aim with the bottle and hurled it against the picture window. The bottle shattered. The window fractured across but
stayed whole. Frustrated, Covington crossed to the bar, picked up a heavy glass ashtray, and slung it like a discus. That
did the job: It went pin-wheeling through the window, which shattered spectacularly, and impacted on the stone flags outside
in a fountain of shards that winked and sparkled briefly in the glare of one of the security lights. As though it hadn’t happened,
Covington turned to me again. His eyes were dry, but his cheeks were flushed, and a terrible strain twisted his mouth, making
his handsome face a thing you wanted to look away from.

“So anyway, that started a whole craze. Driscoll talked it up so much, everyone had to try. Between his second and tenth birthdays,
I’d estimate that Lionel had forty or fifty different passengers. And I let it happen. I stood by, and I—did nothing. Didn’t
think about it. Didn’t care. Told myself I didn’t care, anyway. Life is cheap, and the rest is—sentiment. Which is even cheaper.

“At ten Lionel was left to himself for a while. They lost interest. But it was too late by then. The cognitive centers in
the brain—I don’t know. I’ve heard it explained in four or five different ways. At the crucial points in his brain development,
he’d been—asleep. A prisoner in his own body, bludgeoned into eight years of unconsciousness. He was never going to be normal.
It turned out that you couldn’t put those years back.”

He took a deep, ragged breath. “So we had a hard choice,” he said. “Lionel was still the legal possessor of a lot of land—a
big chunk of our assets. He was a ward of the court, in my legal custody, but there’d be problems if I administered his property
as though it were mine. That would look like malfeasance. It was exactly what we wanted to avoid.

“We took the low road instead. Carried on possessing Lionel, carried on using him as our puppet, working on a strictly enforced
rota, because the novelty had worn off by this stage and nobody was very keen to go through puberty again. We kept up the
whole routine until he came of age. After that, he was as viable a suit to wear as anybody else, and it didn’t matter so much.
The job was done.

“But so was the damage. Now that it was too late, I could see—could really see for the first time—how monstrous a thing we
were doing. How big an obscenity we were.

“I couldn’t save Lionel. I’d even been part of what was done to him. What I could do was decide that there wouldn’t be any
more Lionels. That the operation would finally be shut down. And when they lost interest in him—when he got too old and they
let him go at last—I brought him here. I’ve tried to make him comfortable, at least. I was trying for happy, but most of the
time, comfortable is what we can manage. He doesn’t remember much, but he has nightmares, and he’s always confused. Always
a little bit panicky, as though he’s forgotten something important and something awful is about to happen and it’ll be his
fault.

“So you see, it wasn’t Myriam. They all think it was, and maybe for them, that was the real crisis. For me—the camel’s back
was already well and truly fucked. Whatever they let me do for Myriam, or tried to stop me from doing, I was done. I was all
done.”

He looked at me bleakly. “Another drink?”

“No.”

“No. Not for me, either, I guess. I can see the way you’re looking at me, Castor. I would have killed you for that once.”

“It’s your party, Aaron. It’s been your party all along.”

He nodded. “Yeah, it has. What time is it?”

“About five-thirty.”

“The next shift of nurses comes in at six. I need to make sure they all clock in. If someone doesn’t make it, I have to call
the service. After that, I’m yours. We’ll go where Myriam is. We’ll sort this out.”

“Fine.” I pulled myself wearily to my feet. Covington could have saved his effort. Breaking the window hadn’t done anything
to clear the air. I crossed to the bar, found the hammer wrapped in bubble plastic behind it, and hefted it onto my shoulder.
“I’ll wait for you in the car. Come on out whenever you’re ready.”

Retracing my steps through the maze, I came out onto the driveway and climbed into the car. The form-fitted leather was way
too comfortable, and I dozed off into uneasy dreams. John Gittings was in them; so was Gary Coldwood. When a hand on my shoulder—the
one that Todd had stabbed me in earlier that evening—woke me back into the world, cold sweat slicked my body from head to
foot.

It was Covington, and he was already in the passenger seat. “Nice car,” he said without much enthusiasm. “Did it belong to
the dead woman in the backseat?”

“Demon,” I corrected him. “Yeah, it’s hers. And the rumors of her death are usually exaggerated.”

“Whenever you’re ready, Castor.”

I turned the key in the ignition. I didn’t think I’d ever be ready. But even in the cold, damp, misty predawn after a night
of bloodletting and pain, you can always rely on Italian engineering. The Maserati started the first time, and I eased her
out through the gates.

    
Twenty-six