Dead Men's Boots (17 page)

We drove on through Stepney to Bow Common, and just after Mile End Station, we turned off the main drag, skirted the shapely
backside of Saint Clement’s, and drove in through the gates of the Mount Grace Crematorium. We had no choice, because the
bottom of Ropery Street was blocked off. The building site that Todd had mentioned extended on both sides of the road, and
oversize earthmovers prowled behind the plywood hoardings like wind-up dinosaurs in some mechanical equivalent of Jurassic
Park.

Mount Grace had a small frontage on the street, but the grounds were deceptively spacious. They opened in front of us as we
rounded the oxbow drive, lined on both sides with tall yews, and we got a glimpse of the formal gardens off to our left. They
were a pretty but slightly somber prospect dominated by funereal cypress trees and heavy, po-faced stone balustrades. Two
massive stone urns flanking an arched gateway with passionflowers trained up it on both sides marked the entrance to the garden
of remembrance. Kind of an odd choice, was my first thought; then I remembered someone telling me that the passion referred
to was the passion of Christ, so I guess it was all as per the party line. Death and resurrection: Pay now and live later.

The crematorium itself was pretty damn impressive, though. It was built in cream-colored stone, its main mass coming forward
to meet the drive while two wings extended toward the rear of the grounds on either side. It was crenellated, with scalloped
curves rather than straight ups and downs. The overall effect made it look as though the building had been assembled out of
jigsaw pieces.

I enjoyed it while I could. As I got closer, the presence of the dead announced itself first as a pressure, then as something
like a continuous bass throbbing at the limits of my perception. As I think I mentioned before, I hate cemeteries. Crematoria
are no better and no worse: They’re places where my death sense wakes up like a jumpy nerve in a tooth.

The cortege rolled onto the gravel drive, the hearse itself taking pole position in front of the crematorium’s massive oak
door. From this close up, I got an even better view of the architecture. There were ornate carved crowns over the windows,
and the remains of some very weathered bas-relief sculptures on the corners of the building—faceless caryatids supporting
the actual cornices on their bent backs, scarred and blackened by generations of rainwater to the point where you couldn’t
even guess what figures they’d been meant to represent. The four winds? The four elements? The Four Tops?

Our bearers had been traveling in the car behind. They got out first, opened the back of the hearse, and slid out the runners,
ready to move on Todd’s command. At the same time, a man who had been standing on the front steps of the crematorium came
down to greet us. From his appearance, I guessed that he wasn’t the clergyman Todd had mentioned. He was in his late twenties
or early thirties, with white-blond hair and a craggy, stolidly handsome face. He was built like a rugby forward, but he wore
a solemn, measured expression that made me wonder whether my first impressions had been wrong. Maybe he
had
taken holy orders, out in Beverly Hills. His slate-gray linen suit was as good as Todd’s, maybe better. The one I was wearing
came from Burton’s. I generally pick them up in the sales, when they’ll throw you in an extra pair of pants for free, so you’ll
appreciate that there are gaps in my sartorial education. Once you get past the thousand-quid mark, my eye’s not good enough
to make the fine distinctions.

We got out of the hearse. Todd and the newcomer locked eyes in a way that was definitely hostile: viscerally, bitterly hostile
and bleeding out of the pores despite the constraints of the situation.

“Maynard.” The blond man held out his hand, and Todd stared at it for a moment, nonplussed. Then, looking cornered and unhappy,
he took it, shook it in a single, staccato up-down movement, and let it go again.

“Mr. Covington,” Todd said. “I didn’t expect to see you here. It’s very good of you to come.” There was a slight thickening
in his voice. It had cost him an effort to get those words out.

The blond man shrugged easily. “I was in the neighborhood,” he said. “It seemed silly to pass the keys on to Fenwick or Digby
when I could just come and open up myself.”

There was a perceptible pause. “Yes,” said Todd. “I see. This is Mrs. Gittings, and this is Felix Castor. And—umm”—turning
to us—“this is Peter Covington.”

Covington gave me the briefest of nods and turned his attention to Carla. I could see she was impressed: There was a sudden
warmth that I could feel from where I was standing—a wave of easy benevolence that made the air around us ripple with a virtual
heat haze. “I was sorry to hear about your loss,” he said, and I think she believed him. Certainly, she let him take her hand
and squeeze it. He looked soulfully into her eyes, and for a long moment, she looked back. Like I said, Carla generally went
for older men, but when she finally took possession of her hand again, I thought I could detect a little reluctance on her
side, at least.

I was half hoping that Blondie would offer the same hand to me, for curiosity’s sake—he had a lot of poise for a guy ten years
my junior, and I would have been interested in reading him, but he just stepped back and indicated the doors with a gesture
that was almost a bow.

“I presume everything is ready inside,” he said. “I haven’t been able to check—I’ve got a lot to do elsewhere, and I’m running
late already. And I wouldn’t presume to join you for the actual ceremony. But my very best wishes to you all—and especially
to you, Mrs. Gittings. If there’s anything I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to call.” He took a card from his pocket
and gave it to her with a decorous flourish.

Carla took it without even looking at it. “Thank you,” she murmured throatily.

The personable young man swept us all with a frank, blue-eyed gaze, then with a final murmur of farewell to Todd, he headed
off toward a small, sleek black sports car parked at the other end of the drive. Todd watched him go, his attention taken
up to the exclusion of everything else around him.

“The owner?” I said as the bearers slid John’s coffin noisily onto the runners and drew the lawyer out of his reverie.

Todd looked surprised, then laughed with a slightly odd inflection. “No, Mr. Castor. The owner is a man named Lionel Palance.
He lives a long way from here, in Chingford Hatch, and he hardly ever leaves his house at all now. No, that was Peter Covington,
a man Mr. Palance employs as a sort of… personal assistant.” He rattled off these facts with a lawyer’s precision, as though
it mattered that I should get the details straight in my head. Then he seemed to recollect himself, and his tone became more
formal and solemn. “Mrs. Gittings, shall we go in?”

We crossed the drive, following behind the bearers. Carla was still holding Covington’s card because she’d left her handbag
inside the car. “Fix,” she said. “Would you… ?” I took the card and secreted it away in the well-worn leather wallet where
I keep my mostly useless credit cards.

The front doors of the crematorium opened onto a narrow entrance hall, almost long enough to count as a corridor, whose dark
woods and vaulted ceiling confirmed the impression of age I’d gotten outside. Four huge inlaid panels dominated the space,
two to either side of the door: a lion and an eagle to the left, an ox and a robed angel to the right. The symbols of the
four evangelists. The carpet was royal blue, scuffed pale in places by the passage of many feet.

Ahead of us was another door. Black-suited men, presumably also hired by Todd, stood on either side of it and nodded respectfully
to us as we passed. They looked like bouncers at a nightclub.

We walked into a large, high-ceilinged room that looked like any church hall anywhere, except for the dumbwaiter-like doors
at the far end and the slightly sinister platform placed in front of them—a platform whose surface was a plain of slick, frictionless
plastic rollers. I abreact to furnaces, probably because of having to take my dad his lunch a couple of times when he worked
behind the ovens in a bread factory. Places like this one always put me in mind of Satan’s locker room.

The bearers placed the coffin on the platform and stepped back, and at the same time a very short man in a black ecclesiastical
robe came out through a curtained doorway off to one side. Todd went forward and had a brief, murmured conversation with him,
presumably along the lines of “This is the action replay, but let’s dispense with the slow motion and get it over with.” The
man nodded briskly. He had a slender face with a very long, sharp nose that made me think of a fox or a wolf. I’d seen a Japanese
ivory once—a tiny figure, barely bigger than the top joint of my thumb—of a fox dressed as a priest, with a long robe and
a staff and a pious expression. Maybe it was unfair, because the nose must have been enough of a burden in itself, but this
young cleric brought the statuette vividly into my mind.

Todd had presumably mentioned that Carla didn’t want any prayers said, but the cleric clearly wasn’t happy to let the occasion
go by without ruminating on mortality just a little. Force of habit, I figured, although technically, he was wearing a surplice.

“In the midst of life,” he said, “we are in death.” Two cheers and a thump on the tub for Ecclesiastes. Sitting in the front
row, with Carla to my left and Todd to my right, I let my attention wander. Unfortunately, it wandered to the furnace doors,
where it found no comfort and shied away again pretty fast.

I was still feeling tired and rough, worse than I had when I woke up, if anything. The chill in the room was creeping into
me, and the half-floral, half-chemical smell was turning my stomach. It didn’t help that beyond the walls, the dead souls
were massed thickly, sounding to my overdeveloped senses like a swarm of desert locusts.

There was another soul here, too: stronger, or at any rate, closer. It hovered around our heads like an invisible cloud, making
the lights in the room seem a fraction dimmer. But a cloud suggests something dispersed and diffuse, and this presence was
localized. As my gaze panned across the room, it reached the coffin and stopped as if the coffin were a black hole pulling
light and matter and everything else in toward it.

The priest’s voice had taken on a hollow echo. There was an arrhythmical vibration rising behind it like a pulse, and the
vibration danced against the surface of my skin, wave after wave, as though looking for a way in.

Neither Carla nor Todd seemed to be aware of any of this. They were both watching the priest, whose lips were still moving,
although I was damned if I could hear a word he was saying. For a moment I wondered if I was just imagining the whole thing—if
the nightmare and the lack of sleep were just taking their toll—but then the feeling of general overall pressure narrowed
in on the front of my head and intensified into one of actual pain.

Todd slipped something into my hand, and I found myself staring down dully into a hip flask a little like my own, except this
one was slimmer and cased in black leather. Reflexively, I raised it to my lips and took a hit. The liquor was very potent
and very bitter, and it took a real effort not to gag. I passed the flask back to Todd, and he slid it away into some recess
of his suit where it didn’t spoil the hang.

The priest pressed a switch on the catafalque, and the coffin moved forward on its rollers. The waves of pressure in my skull
built to a new crescendo as John Gittings’s body trundled toward the double doors like a very short wagon train rolling over
black plastic prairie. The doors slid open on either side to receive him into the furnace beyond.

The pain was so intense that I actually gasped. It was as if John had thrown out an invisible grapnel, trying to keep a purchase
in this world, and one of the flukes had embedded itself in my skull.

Carla looked around at me in surprise. She put a hand on my arm, but I waved it away. I had to get out. As casually as I could,
I lurched to my feet and stepped out into the aisle. I was heading for the door, but suddenly, I wasn’t even sure which way
the door was. Instinctively, I walked away from the force that was pulling on me so hard—away from the coffin, half convinced
that I was dragging it along behind me like a sheet anchor. The sensation of weight, of resistance, was so palpable.

The doors loomed into my field of vision, and I took another step toward them. Carla was on her feet at my side, and Todd,
too. Hot air that must have been entirely imaginary billowed across my back. The hook bit deeper, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t
move at all now; couldn’t make myself walk forward, because a force as unanswerable as gravity was pulling me back toward
that hot mouth behind me, pulling me back and down into the dark.

Someone shouted a name, a single syllable. My name? Possibly. I wouldn’t have wanted to be categorical on that subject right
then, because I didn’t seem to have a name of my own, only a vague sense of a space that was me and a space that was everything
else. And the oven’s searing heat was making the space that was me shrink away like the film of breath you leave on a windowpane.

Then the doors ahead of me were thrown open, and something miraculously beautiful filled my sight. It was Juliet. Vivid, ineffable,
irreducible Juliet, a bookmark in the stodgy, samey script of the world that always let you find your place. I fell into her
arms like a drowning man, aware even through the sweltering ruck inside my head of her strength, the incredible ease with
which she took my weight. The last thing I saw as the red of the furnace rose before my eyes was her face staring down into
mine, a little surprised.

She said something too long and complicated for me to catch, but I was pretty sure that my name was in there somewhere.

Castor. Yeah, of course. I knew that.