Dead Men's s Boots

‘Russian slang. It means great, cool, wonderful.’ He closed the book, and leaned slightly towards me so that he could slide it into his jeans pocket. I caught a strong whiff of aftershave, riding over a harsher but fainter chemical smell that I couldn’t have pinned a name on even if I’d wanted to. ‘What did you have in mind by way of remuneration?’

‘Let’s leave that open for now,’ I parried. ‘There’s something else I need, and it’s big.’

‘Yeah?’ Nicky’s offhand tone suggested that there weren’t many jobs in the whole wide world that counted as big for him.

‘So what’s that?’

‘I was wondering if you could pick something up for me,’ I said. ‘The kind of something that doesn’t change hands too often.’

‘Go on.’

‘Memorabilia.’

‘Relating to . . . ?’

‘A dead gangster. A killer, from way back.’

Nicky’s head swivelled round fast and he stared at me for a few moments in dead, perplexed silence. It seemed like something of an extreme reaction: okay, maybe this sounded pretty sleazy, but I knew him well enough to be sure he didn’t have any moral objections.

Still, something was bothering him sufficiently that he hadn’t been able to hide it.

‘I thought we had a “no bullshit” rule in place, Castor,’ he said, his tone unreadable.

‘You think this is bullshit, Nicky?’

‘Isn’t it? You give me Gittings’s book, you pump me about what I was doing for him, and now . . .’ He hesitated and shrugged, as though I ought to be able to join the dots for myself.

‘It’s not about John. It’s a different case.

’ I reached towards him with my hand, palm out in a gesture of reassurance, but didn’t actually touch him. He hates to be touched by th s tos he living because their skin is a germ factory where the assembly lines are always running. And since he hates to hang out with other zombies for aesthetic reasons it’s been a while since anyone got inside his personal space. ‘Pull it back, Nicky. I swear, I’m not trying to get you to compromise your one last professional ethic, even though I didn’t know you had one until now. ’

He didn’t answer, but he was still giving me the fish-eye, so I rolled straight on. ‘It may not be something you can help me with in any case. There was a gangster back in the 1960s named Myriam Seaforth Kale. I don’t know if you ever heard of her. She killed a dozen people, all of them men, then the FBI shot up a hotel to get hold of her and sent her to the chair.’

‘An American gangster,’ Nicky said, with careful emphasis.

‘Yeah.