The Devil's Detective (18 page)

“Yes,” said Balthazar, but he did not sound contrite or convinced.

Rusting machinery lay in the house's front garden, collapsing slowly
into the earth and threading with weeds and dirt like the skeletons of long-dead beasts. Fool led the delegation along the path to the building's doorway. The door was closed, sticking when he pulled on it, and opened only after several hard yanks.

“Where?” asked Balthazar, stepping past Fool and into the house.

“I don't know,” said Fool. “The information wasn't that detailed. We search.” Fool walked past Balthazar, and Summer followed.

Inside, the house was in as poor shape as the outside suggested. Its walls bowed into the rooms and the floors were patchworks of holes and rotted wood. Fool went gingerly along the hallway, his shadow moving ahead of him, testing the floor with his advancing foot before settling his weight anywhere. Summer stayed close behind him as, farther back, the angels watched. The glow sweating from them, unnoticeable in Hell's sunlight, pulsed a pale bluewhite in the gloomy space, making Fool's shadow waver. The building was silent apart from the noises Fool and Summer made as they moved into its interior.

There were rooms and other corridors off the hallway to either side, near empty and filthy. In one a pile of old oilcloths was crumpled into the corner, covered in dust, and in another was the remains of a fire, a blackened circle scarred into the wooden boards and the smell of old smoke thick in the air. Fool went past them and carried on to the passage's end. It opened out into a large kitchen that smelled of burned food and mold and soured meat. A table stood in its middle, furred with dust and grease, and an old metal cooker thick with rust and soot was pushed up against the far wall. The shells of cupboards lined the walls, their doors and shelves long gone, their wooden bones warping into slow curves. The floor was bare wood, its carpet of dust and grime undisturbed.

On the other side of the kitchen another doorway yawned, and beyond it stairs led down. At their bottom something rippled and glittered in the angels' light as it came around Fool and fell into the space. Fool reached for the wall, found the cord that he knew would be there, and tugged on it. Sparks of light jumped in the cellar below them, gone as briefly as they arrived. He tugged again, and this time the sparks staggered to a sulphurous, greasy light as the gas lamps caught aflame.
Behind Fool, Adam clapped his hands delightedly and said, “Such ingenuity, even in Hell!”

“I'm surprised they work,” said Fool, “given how long this place looks to have been abandoned.”

“Perhaps God is assisting,” said Adam. Fool looked about him at the decay and said nothing.

The steps proved solid, thankfully, but the cellar was flooded, thick oily water swirling over the bottom risers and swallowing them. Crouched on the step closest to the water's surface, Summer and the angels to his back, Fool saw that the cellar ran under the entire length of the building. It was now a huge pool of gently undulating water whose surface danced with the orange and blue reflections of the lamplight. Most of the lamps lining the walls hadn't lit; some had rusted to flaking metal lumps, others were caked with dirt, their glass broken or missing. The air smelled of stagnant water and the sharp odor of gas.

The body was floating in the middle of the cellar.

At first, Fool didn't see it and then the way the water broke around it and over it gave it shape, made the humps into the curve of a back and the outstretched arms of a person drifting facedown. Fool stepped gingerly down another step, thinking of Solomon Water and the little things that lived in it, and hoped that none were here. The water lapped over his feet, cold, patches of oil on its surface breaking around his shoe, glimmering in rainbow constellations before fading. Another step, deeper into it now, the water coming to his knees, and then Balthazar stepped down next to him.

The water curled away from the angel, drawing back into two lips around him and pulling away to reveal a muddy floor that dried as Fool watched, its surface cracking and buckling into something solid. Balthazar stepped farther into the cellar and the water retreated farther, a pathway opening up between the bottom of the stairs and the body. As the separating water reached the corpse and peeled away from it, the body bobbed and then came to a gentle rest on the floor. The air filled with a crackling sound as the newly exposed mud dried to a crust.

“Does that help?” asked Balthazar.

“Yes,” said Fool. “Thank you.”

“Take it as my apology. They deserve dignity,” said Balthazar, “something which I may have forgotten earlier.”

“Yes,” replied Fool, “he does.”

“You know it to be a man?” asked Adam.

“No,” said Fool, peering at the pale dead thing. “I assumed it was because the others were men. Boys, really.”

“And you know this to be another link in that chain?”

“No,” said Fool again. “I assumed it because of the blue ribbon.”

“I see. And what do you do now?”

“I investigate,” said Fool, and went to the body.

It was another young man, and being in the water had bloated him and bleached his flesh down to a ghostly white. It had also cleaned his wounds, which made them somehow worse, showing them in clinical dark reds and purples against the pale skin. He had bruises across his chest and shoulders, as well as tears into his muscle across his thighs and belly, and his face was a mass of grazes and cuts. There were indentations on the back of his head and when Fool placed his hand above them, he thought they might be where the demon's fingers had pressed so hard they had ruptured skin and fractured bone. Most of the man's teeth were cracked or broken, and several had dirt ground into their fronts; more grit and earth were lodged in the man's gums and crushed up into his nostrils. Bent above the corpse, Fool had a sudden image of the man being held down, battered, his face forced through the foul water and into the earthen floor, the mud flowing up his nose, granules scouring his teeth and driving themselves into his flesh, the back of his head bowing, cracking under the pressure with a noise like snapping twigs.

“His clothes are here,” said Summer from behind Fool. Turning, he saw that she was pointing to the wall of water at her side in which he could just make out something colorful moving. Summer plunged a hand into the liquid and grasped the thing, pulling it out; it was a shirt made from different strips of material sewn clumsily together; the stitches were visible even from a distance, hanks of twine crossing and crisscrossing each other. It dripped in Summer's hand, making puddles on the newly dried floor. She drove her hand back into the water and this time came out with trousers, sodden black and torn almost in two.

“What happened?” asked Adam.

“They came here,” said Fool, “and the human was murdered. He was beaten and probably drowned, his clothes were torn off, and then he was left here to float like something worthless and old.” The rage was in him again, the
fury
, and he felt his hand drop to his weapon, but what would he shoot? He looked up, wondering if he might see some evidence of the soul's passing embossed into the ceiling above him, but there was nothing except a mess of dancing reflections and beams and dirt, just as chaotic and answerless as everything else around him.

“And you know this?” asked Adam.

“I'm guessing,” said Fool. “I'm always guessing; it's all we can do. We guess and sometimes we're right and most times we're wrong and it never matters anyway.”

“Nothing ever changes,” said Summer, and the
drip-drip-drip
of the water falling from the shirt in her hand was like the beat of a tune that Fool couldn't hear.

“And what will you do now?” asked Adam, apparently not hearing or choosing to ignore the anger in Fool's voice.

Perhaps he hears it but doesn't care
, thought Fool,
because he knows I have no choice but to answer him and serve him, little slave Fool that I am.
Out loud, he said, “Try to work out what happened. Try to find out who he was, where he was from.”

“How?”

“We'll send the body for Questioning,” said Fool, “and see if that turns anything up, although if it's like the others, I doubt it.”

“And is it like the others?”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“I don't know,” said Fool, but even as he said it, he realized that he did know. It wasn't conscious knowledge, not exactly, but something underneath, something turning and writhing, making itself known. There were safe assumptions here, safe enough at least to work with: that the dead man was a Genevieve, that he had been killed by something enormously powerful, that his soul was gone, that he had been taken not from the Houska but from somewhere outside it. On the journey home? And the anger in Fool, in his head, was forcing the assumptions into new shapes; they could ask the other Genevieves about the dead man, make
sketches, could see if he had been seen. The Bar-Igura might know him, or one of the other boardinghouse operators. This man had a name, had as much of a life as anyone in Hell had, and Fool could make his death less pointless if only he could find it.

He had a killer, and Fool would find it as well, he hoped.

“Forgive my questions, but we have nothing like your investigation in Heaven,” said Adam. “We have no need of it; there is no crime. I'm fascinated to see how you carry out your duties, what steps you take to apprehend the culprit.”

“We'll ask questions,” said Fool, ignoring the comment about apprehending the culprit. “We may uncover something useful. I'll look around, see if there are signs I can read. There's no way of knowing what we'll find. The Man may be able to help, although there are no plants down here that I can see, so I doubt it.” There weren't even mosses or lichens on the walls, and nothing in the water except dirt and oil.

“The Man?”

“The Man of Plants and Flowers,” said Fool. “He helps people, gives them information for a price. I don't know his real name. He likes to be entertained, so he helps me by telling me things that are useful, and I appear to amuse him by following his leads.” Fool did a little, bitter parody of a dance, shaking his hands in front of him and shuffling his legs like a puppet, and then stopped, ashamed. He felt helpless, dull with fury, stupid and sightless and a step behind everything.

“What can you tell from the body?” asked Adam, coming closer to the dead flesh.

“Not much,” said Fool. “He's young. He's dead.”

“This Man will want more entertainment than that, will he not?” asked Balthazar. What little compassion had been in his voice before had gone and he sounded bored. He was gazing about the cellar, looking out over the sundered water, and his glow was the red of distant fires. “Are all investigations like this? This slow?”

“Yes,” said Fool. “It's all slow, so slow we almost never catch the demons that do these things.”

“And it is always demons?” asked Adam. “Never humans killing humans?”

“Always,” said Fool. “It is always demons, never humans.”

“I suppose if humans could kill humans, you'd slaughter each other just to escape Hell,” said Balthazar.

“Yes,” said Fool, the weight of his gun heavy against his thigh, and he turned again to the body. Above them, he heard the sound of the porters arriving.

The porters trudged up the road, carrying the body between them. It was wrapped in tarpaulin, sagging down; trails of liquid spilled from the wraps of material and left shadows on the dusty road. Fool watched as the men walked back toward the Houska, their shapes dwindling into the hazy light and losing definition as they went. When he could no longer see them except for the weakest of impressions, he turned back to the house to find everyone looking at him expectantly.

“What do you do now?” asked Adam. The scribe and archive, behind Adam, stood with their heads bowed, waiting. Balthazar was apart from them, still looking at Fool, standing in the tangled growth to the house's side. The chalkis had returned to the building's roof and from above them came their noise, chirrups and squeals and the occasional clatter as they moved and hopped across the beams and tiles. What did he do now? Fool had no idea.

No
, he told himself,
I do
not
have no idea, that's how I used to be but now it's different, now I'm learning, I'm understanding this better. I have ideas.
He looked at the house and tried to remember—had the door been open when they arrived? No, it had been shut and they'd had to force it, pushing it back against the swelling planks of the hallway floor. Which meant what?
Think, Fool, think
, he urged himself,
so what?
It was important, but he couldn't work out why; why should it matter that the front door had been shut, that it clearly hadn't been opened for months or years, that it had protested its movement with a noise like a distant scream?

Because it meant that the man, and his murderer, had not gone into the house through the front door, and if not the front there must be another entry.

Fool left Adam and Summer and walked along the front of the house. Balthazar stepped out of his way as he reached the corner of the building and went around it. Here the foliage was thicker, more tangled, matted, and dark as the land fell away from the roadway. “Have you been here?” asked Fool, turning to Balthazar.

“You wish to ask me questions? Am I under investigation?” replied Balthazar, and his glow was rising again, red and rich and creeping from his flawless skin, his warrior soul calling itself to arms.

“No,” said Fool as patiently as he could, “but there are trampled plants here, and I need to know if you trampled them. If not, it's probable that this is where the thing that killed the Genevieve waited.”

The patch was a rough circle about five feet across, close to the side of the house. At night, something standing there would have been hard to see. Fool stood in the center of the patch, turning around slowly, ignoring the angels, ignoring Summer. He tried to see things from the demon's view: waiting for a lone Genevieve, stepping out from the shadows and plants, and snatching the young man from the street as he walked back toward his boardinghouse. He reached into his pocket and brushed his fingers against the feather, still thinking, still pushing his mind against the facts he had, trying to see them from new angles, to force them into new shapes.