03 City of the Snakes Page 10

  It isn’t difficult deciding where to start. As an Ayuamarcan, her name will have been wiped from all city records and nobody will remember her. The only place I might find a history of her is in Party Central, in the personal files of the original keeper of the Ayuamarca secrets.

  Ford Tasso isn’t surprised when I turn up demanding an audience, but he makes me wait almost an hour while he deals with more immediate problems. Somebody’s been hitting key members in the organization, business executives, generals in the Troops. The assassin strikes without warning and without fail. At first Tasso thought it was one of Davern’s men, but the Kluxers have also come under attack. Five of Davern’s closest aides have been killed, including his best friend, Dan Kerrin. It seems there’s a third player in town, stirring things up, but nobody has a clue who it is.

  Eventually I’m admitted. Tasso’s lying on a newly installed couch, an ice pack over his eyes, massaging the dead flesh of his right arm and shoulder. He looks fit for the grave. “I used to complain about the nursing home,” he groans as I take a seat. “Didn’t know how lucky I was. I’d give anything to go back.”

  “What’s stopping you? You’ve given it your best shot, but you’re old and lame. Nobody would blame you if you called it a day.”

  “I’d blame me,” he growls, removing the ice pack. “And less of the ‘old and lame’ shit.” His good eye is red and bleary. I doubt he’s slept more than a handful of hours since we last met. I don’t know what he’s running on. I guess he’s like the dinosaurs—too stupid to know when he should lie down and die. “I had Sines on the phone earlier, telling me what happened. Reckon he’s fucking with us?”

  “Not Sines,” I answer confidently.

  “Any idea who took the body and how?”

  “It could have been the villacs. They have the power to screw with people’s minds. They might have hijacked the body at the Skylight, then brainwashed Sines and the driver to believe it vanished mysteriously en route.”

  “Don’t see why they’d go to so much trouble,” Tasso growls, “but that’s better than anything I can think of. So, what next?”

  “What shape are the files in on the floors above?” I ask.

  “Better than they used to be. Dorak must have had some sort of system but he never revealed it to anybody. It was a nightmare when he died—shit everywhere. Raimi’s had people sifting through the mess, filing relevant articles together. They’re nowhere near finished, but if they can’t find what you’re looking for, they can maybe point you in the right direction. What are you after?”

  “The woman in the Skylight was Ama Situwa.”

  Tasso’s eye narrows. “The one on the Ayuamarca list?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought they were all dead.”

  “So did I. We were wrong, or it was someone made up to look like her. Either way, it’s time I learned some more about Miss Situwa. You said Raimi believed he was seeing Ayuamarcans before he disappeared. If I can find out where they—or the impostors—are coming from, it might lead me to your missing Cardinal.”

  Tasso nods thoughtfully. “The files are yours. Most of the Ayuamarca material has been lumped together. I can get a secretary to lead you to it.” He raises a warning finger. “There’s a lot of sensitive shit up there, Algiers. Don’t go looking where you ain’t meant to.”

  “Ford,” I grin, “don’t you trust me?”

  “Get the fuck out,” he snarls in reply.

  The Ayuamarca file is massive, more than a dozen oversized folders bulging with fact sheets, detectives’ reports, newspaper clippings, photographs, DVDs and Dorak’s own handwritten notes. All of the files have one thing in common—the people they relate to have no background histories, as befits creatures who were allegedly brought back from the dead.

  I never realized how many people Dorak supposedly created, or how many positions of authority they filled. Three mayors, two police chiefs, several senior judges, the presidents of some of the most influential banks and companies, many gang leaders. Whenever the former Cardinal couldn’t crack a rival legitimately, he invented an Ayuamarcan and sent him to his rival’s camp as an insider, with orders to cause maximum disruption.

  I could spend weeks examining these dusty ledgers and files, learning about the city and the men and women who shaped it over the course of the last half century. But I have a mystery to unravel. Some day, maybe, I’ll come back and browse. Right now there’s Ama Situwa to account for.

  Her file isn’t bulky—she only entered the fray a year before Dorak died—but it’s thorough. Height, weight, measurements, hair clippings, receipts, hundreds of photos—including several of her making love with Capac Raimi on the stairs of Party Central.

  That reminds me of something I’d forgotten. Ama Situwa was on the roof when Dorak made his fatal plunge. I was listening in on his final conversation with his successor, and from what I picked up, Situwa was Raimi’s true love. He condemned her to oblivion with the other Ayuamarcans by demanding Dorak leap to his death, but it wasn’t an easy decision. I can’t believe I hadn’t remembered that before. Maybe I’m starting to catch the forgetfulness bug at last. I might end up like everybody else if I’m not careful, no memories of Paucar Wami, Leonora Shankar or the others.

  I scour Situwa’s file for clues to where she or her look-alike might have chosen to hang out. The Ayuamarcan lived with her supposed father, Cafran Reed, but I’ve already had words with him. There were a few restaurants and bars she favored, so I jot down the names—I’ll visit them and flash Situwa’s photos around, in case she’s been back recently. I also take the names and addresses of her hairdresser, the beauty parlors she graced, shops she frequented and the gym where she kept in shape.

  Not many friends. Plenty of business acquaintances—Reed was grooming her to run his restaurant—but bosom buddies were scarce. A waitress at Cafran’s, Shelly Odone, was closest to her, but they were hardly blood sisters. They went for occasional meals together, hit the clubs every so often. Still, the real Situwa might have looked her up, so I copy down Odone’s address—noting in brackets that it’s probably changed after so many years—and pencil in the names of a few of her casual friends, on the off chance that one knows anything about her.

  And that’s it. I go through the file two more times but there’s nothing else to be gleaned. No sisters or daughters (if the woman I saw in the Skylight was a ringer, it’s possible she was a relative). No mention of the villacs. No links to criminal organizations.

  I lay the file aside and massage my eyelids. My eyesight’s as good as ever, but lately I’ve found my eyes pain me if I focus on small print too long. I’m getting old. I’ll have them seen to if the condition worsens. It shouldn’t pose much of a problem. Just change my green contacts for prescription lenses.

  My contacts… Paucar Wami…

  I lower my hand and glance around furtively. I’m alone in an office on the seventeenth floor, where the secretary left me once she’d carted in the files. Tasso warned me to stick to the facts pertinent to the case, but the opportunity to learn more about my father is too good to pass up. In particular, it would be interesting to find out the names of his other children. Apparently he sired many sons and daughters, in this city and farther abroad. He never told me their names, or how many there were, but I’m sure his master would have known.

  I check the names on all the files but Wami’s isn’t among them. I go through them again, looking inside each folder in case his is nestling inside another—no joy. Pressing a button, I summon the secretary, a plump and genial woman called Betsy. “Are these all of the Ayuamarca files?” I ask.

  “I think so.”

  “Could you check again? Or, better still, take me to where the files are kept, so I can look for myself?”

  She hesitates. “I think I should check with Mr. Tasso first.”

  I shrug. “If you want to bother him, go ahead. I can wait.”

  She frowns. “I know he’s busy… He did say you could
have unlimited access to the files… OK,” she decides. “But I won’t leave you alone.”

  “Perish the thought,” I smile and follow Betsy out of the office.

  We pass several other secretaries as we make our way to where the files are stored. They’re busy working on the pillars of paper that stretch to the ceiling in some places, dismantling the towers, making notes of what’s in each, carefully restacking or refiling them.

  “Is this a twenty-four-hour operation?” I ask.

  “Pretty much,” Betsy answers. “There are only twelve of us—Mr. Raimi says that twelve’s the most Jesus trusted, and what’s good enough for Christ is good enough for him.” She giggles at the soft blasphemy. “We work in groups of six, twelve-hour shifts, though we take long breaks.”

  “Do you work seven days a week?”

  “Alternate weekends off, and very long holidays.” We come to a rectangular gap, four feet across by eleven or twelve deep, between two six-foot-high pillars of paper. Betsy stops. “We keep the files here.”

  I walk into the gap, eyes peeled for an overlooked file, but there isn’t any. “Is this the only place they’re stored?”

  “There could be others elsewhere, but these are all we’ve found so far.”

  “Who stacked them?”

  “We all chipped in, but I did more than most. Mr. Raimi was very concerned about these files and he spent a lot of time up here, overseeing their transfer. As a senior secretary, I worked closely with him.”

  “Did he ask you to keep any files separate from the others?”

  “No.”

  “He didn’t take any himself, to stack elsewhere?”

  “No.” She blushes—lying.

  “Come on,” I smile. “You can tell me. I have the authority.”

  “Mr. Raimi might not like it if I—”

  “Betsy,” I interrupt. “The Cardinal’s missing. I’m trying to find him. If you don’t tell me, you’ll be hindering, not helping.”

  She sighs and nods. “There was one file he pulled.”

  “Paucar Wami’s?” I guess.

  “No—his own.”

  That’s disappointing, but it makes sense. A man in his position would want to keep his secrets hidden where only he’d have access to them.

  “But now that you mention it,” Betsy adds, “he also asked me to look for a file on Paucar Wami.” She leans in close and whispers, “He was a notorious serial killer. The things he’s supposed to have done…” She shivers.

  I hide a grin—if I wiped my cheeks clean, Betsy would be in for one hell of a shock—and ask if she found the Wami file. “No. We’ve searched high and low but we haven’t unearthed it yet. Mr. Raimi thinks it was stolen, though he never said who he suspected.”

  I have a strong hunch—the villacs. They mustn’t have wanted him learning about Wami and his heirs. So much for brushing up on “dear ol’ pappy’s” past and tracking down my brothers and sisters. Oh well, it’s a distraction I can do without. Better to stay focused on the case.

  “What are these other files?” I ask, gesturing to the towers of paper surrounding the barren rectangle.

  “The files on the left are unrelated,” Betsy says. “Those on the right and at the rear contain details of people mentioned in the Ayuamarca files—family, friends or business associates of the Ayuamarcans.”

  That’s interesting. I might learn more about Ama Situwa’s friends through these. Digging out my notebook, I reacquaint myself with the names I jotted down, then scan the indexed spines. “I could be at this a while,” I tell Betsy. “You can slip away if you want.”

  “No thank you,” she smiles. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, but I can’t.”

  I read up from the bottom of the second pillar on the right. The names are ordered alphabetically. I’m looking for a Sarah Ceccione, a sales rep friend of Situwa’s. I jump to the end of the B’s and begin on the C’s. “It looks like the one I want is near the top,” I mutter. “Could you get a ladder or…”

  I stumble to a halt, eyes settling on a name far more familiar than Sarah Ceccione’s. Heart beating fast, I grab the file by the edges and tug.

  “Hey!” Betsy pushes me away with unexpected strength. “You’ll bring the whole lot tumbling down.”

  “I don’t care,” I grunt, trying to get at the file.

  Betsy blocks me, a no-nonsense expression on her face. “I care,” she huffs. “I’ll have to tidy up after. Tell me which one you want and I’ll remove the others, nice and neat, and get it out for you without creating a mess.”

  My fingers twitch—I want it in my hands now—but it’s best to keep Betsy on my side. “That one,” I croak, pointing with a trembling finger. “The file marked BILL CASEY.”

  5

  detour

  The train clears the suburbs and enters the great beyond. I stare out of the window at an expanse of bare fields, then pull away from the glass and spend the rest of the journey gazing down at my lap. I guess I’ve grown agoraphobic from so many years spent hemmed in by the walls of the city. The last time I was this far out was five years ago, when I followed a couple of joyriders until they ran out of gas. They’d mowed down a four-year-old. I disabled the pair, drove to a nearby village, came back equipped with a hammer and nails, and crucified them. A quaint day in the country, Paucar Wami style.

  I’m on my way to meet Leo Casey, Bill’s younger brother. I never knew Bill had a brother—he always gave the impression that he was an only child. He had a sister too—Jane—but she’s deceased, along with his mother and father.

  Last night I locked myself into the office on the seventeenth floor of Party Central with the Bill Casey file. Wouldn’t allow myself to open it until my hands had stopped trembling. When I did, I found it wasn’t the gold mine I’d anticipated. It didn’t list Bill’s current whereabouts, or comment on whether or not he’d survived the explosion ten years earlier. The disappointment could have been crushing, but as Paucar Wami I’m immune to most emotions. It took a few minutes to snap into character, but once I had—by stroking the tattooed snakes on my cheeks over and over—I was able to settle down and assess the file for what it was, as opposed to what I’d wished it might be.

  The file hadn’t been updated in decades. It focused on Bill’s relationship with Paucar Wami and filled in some of the gaps I’ve long been puzzling over, concerning how Bill got mixed up with my father. If the details are correct, a teenaged Bill Casey crossed paths with Wami by chance as the serial killer was abducting a girl. Bill tried to kill him but failed. Instead of retaliating, Wami took an interest in the teenager and devised an ingenious method of torture. He sent Bill photos of people he intended to kill, and told him he could save them by performing some cynical, harmful task, such as breaking a blind violinist’s fingers, spiking baby food with glass, or bullying a mentally handicapped guy.

  The viciousness of the tasks increased in degrading stages. Bill performed some dreadful deeds—Wami even made him rape a girl—in his desperate desire to spare lives. He sought the help of the police, but the cop he went to—none other than Stuart Jordan, our current police commissioner—was one of The Cardinal’s pawns. When word reached the Great One, he made sure Bill’s pleas went unheeded. Wami was a vital cog in Dorak’s machine and he would have sacrificed a thousand like Bill Casey to protect his number-one assassin.

  The file didn’t tell how it ended. A page had been ripped out, and at the top of the next lay a single, perplexing, seemingly unconnected line. “Margaret Crowe is back safe with her family.” After that it skipped a few years, recommencing with the news that Bill had joined the police. The rest of the file followed his early career. I think it continued in another file, but I found no trace of that one.

  I ran “Margaret Crowe” through the computer, along with the dates, and came up with a high-profile media story of a nine-year-old who’d been kidnapped, tied up and held in darkness for a couple of days, then released without harm. I don’t know how that ties in with
Bill and the ordeal he underwent at the hands of Paucar Wami, but I’m on my way to find a man who might.

  Leo Casey’s led a troubled life, judging by the short entry at Party Central. In counseling of one kind or another since he was a teenager. He’s been arrested for shoplifting, for fighting, on drunk and disorderly charges several times, and he’s served two years for selling narcotics while on parole. He hasn’t had any run-ins with the law since then, but that has a lot to do with the fact that he’s spent most of that time in a rehabilitation clinic, St. Augustine’s, in a town called Curlap, 240 miles north of the city.

  There wasn’t a direct train to Curlap until Wednesday—I didn’t like the idea of driving—but the 11:14 on Monday goes to Shefferton, which is only twenty-two miles from the town. I booked my ticket over the Internet, went home to grab some sleep and pack a bag, and here I am, on my way north on a rare rural excursion.

  The train pulls into Shefferton on time. I disembark and take in the locale—a tiny town, sleepy, deserted-looking. I feel dizzy—I need the grime of a big city!—but I quell my sense of unease by concentrating on my mission.

  I hire a taxi from Shefferton to Curlap. The driver’s inquisitive—asks about my job and where I live—but I say little, grunt in answer to his questions, and sit on my fingers so they don’t creep to my scalp to scratch beneath my wig. It always itches in the heat, and today is set-your-hair-on-fire hot.

  The driver doesn’t know St. Augustine’s, but stops in Curlap and gets directions. I ask him to wait, even though I don’t know how long I’ll be. “Take all the time you like,” he smiles. “I’m the most patient man in the world when the meter’s running.”

  St. Augustine’s has the appearance of a children’s school. White walls, a blue, tiled roof, fairy-tale windows, picket fences, carefully maintained trees set far enough back from the building not to cause damage should they fall. There’s even a play area, partly visible from the front path, with swings and slides.