The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(56)
“Give me a moment,” she said, slipping them on. Her face turned toward Roth slowly, and her breathing stilled. She looked like a diva from the golden age of Hollywood.
After a moment, she nodded to herself. “Oh, you little scamp,” she murmured.
“What is it?”
She lowered her glasses, just enough to show me the burning molten-copper swirls of her eyes. Her real eyes.
“He’s marked by one of my kind,” she said. “That’s why he’s so afraid to die. He literally sold his soul.”
Twenty-Seven
She slid her glasses back up and took a few steadying breaths. When she removed them and slipped them back into her bag, her irises were back to sharp emerald green. The change came just in time, as our waitress walked up behind her chair.
“We’ll start with the sweet Thai chili prawns,” Caitlin said after a cursory glance at the menu. “He will have the medallions of filet Diane, and I’ll have the chicken marsala scaloppine. Wedge salads for both of us, please, and…a bottle of the Covey Run merlot, I think. Thank you.”
The waitress looked at me and blinked. I just shrugged at her. Caitlin’s Rules for Restaurants meant she ordered, you ate. I’d learned to live with it.
The waitress went off to put our order in, and I leaned closer to Caitlin.
“Literally sold his soul? Like, ‘Devil Went Down to Georgia,’ Robert Johnson at the crossroads—”
“Like Mephistopheles and your namesake, or the violinist Niccolò Paganini, or the Rolling Stones, yes, exactly.” She paused. “Forget I said that last one.”
“I didn’t think that was a thing people actually did.”
“Tell that to Robert Johnson. I’ve heard the man play—he’s really good. But you’re half-right. It’s extraordinarily uncommon for two reasons. Firstly, if someone is, let’s say, of a mindset where they’d be willing to buy their earthly desires with eternal damnation, they’re probably already in our pocket. So why bother? Secondly, that’s an awful lot of hard work. We’re not genies. Promise someone wealth and power, and we either have to come through, or the contract’s null and void. That sort of thing can keep a demon on the hook for decades.”
I craned my neck to watch Roth dig into his lamb, nodding to his buddies and chewing a big forkful of tender meat like it was his last meal on Earth.
“But Roth managed it,” I said.
“There is a sect, the Venerable Order of Bargainers. They’re very, very old school, Daniel. They predate our civil war, the formation of the courts, all of it, and there aren’t many of them still around. What they do is…it’s not about results or efficiency. It’s an art form, part of our cultural traditions. Everything they do—from the first approach, to weaving the deal, to following through on the hardest and most demanding conditions in order to keep a pact from unraveling—is measured in grace and style. I suppose they’re the closest thing we have to rock stars. Well…except for the actual rock stars.”
“It makes sense,” I said. “He’s got seller’s remorse, and he knows he’s headed for the express elevator downstairs when he dies. He hooks up with the boys from Ausar, hoping they can use their Garden research to make sure he doesn’t die, ever. Somewhere along the way Lauren comes to him, paying him off to set the federal task force on Nicky’s heels, and they start talking about common interests. Introductions happen all around, and it’s a match made in hell.”
The waitress brought over the bottle of merlot and our Thai chili prawns. The first bite had a perfect tang, leaving my tongue tingling. I took a sip of wine and thought things over.
“What Lauren’s doing is incredibly dangerous,” Caitlin said. “Roth wouldn’t take that kind of risk, not with his soul in the balance. So he’s funding the research and using his influence to grease the wheels in the hope that Lauren, newly minted nature goddess, will reward his loyalty with life eternal.”
I tried not to snort into my wineglass. “That’ll last about five minutes. Lauren’s never been big on rewarding loyalty.”
“We won’t convince him of that,” Caitlin said. She frowned, deep in thought.
I poked a prawn around the dish with my fork.
“What if we buy it back for him?”
Caitlin looked up. “His soul?”
“Sure. Why not? We get his contract annulled, he’s got no reason to fear death anymore and no reason to work with Lauren and company. We can turn him.”
“I doubt it. Remember, the Bargainers do what they do out of a sense of art and tradition. Rembrandt wouldn’t splatter paint on his masterpiece just because you waved a handful of cash at him. Still…I suppose it can’t hurt to ask. Wait here, I need to make a call.”
“Who are you calling?” I said.
“Emma. She can look up who holds Roth’s contract and where they are now. Hopefully not somewhere on the other side of the world.”
The answer, as it turned out, was a bit closer than that. It was half an hour north, in Reno.
It was tempting to think of Reno as a low-rent Vegas, the kind of place where washed-up croupiers went to die. The town had a flavor and a pulse of its own, though, and the San Francisco tourist crowd kept things jumping. We rolled past the cherry neon arch reading “Reno: The Biggest Little City in the World,” cruising for Fourth Street. The street itself—and the blues bar that bore the street’s name up on its red marquee.