“Strip off and put your clothes in there,” she said. “We’re going to have to burn them.”

“Justine, I—”

“We don’t have much time. Go take a shower, then get dressed in something you don’t like because we’ll have to burn that as well. And don’t track back through here when you’re clean. Go around through the lounge. Wait for me in the garage.”

“The garage?”

“They’re in there. We’re going to have to bury them somewhere, right?”

The three from last night. For a moment I stood watching her, full of love. It’s terrible the way someone intently doing a crossword or tying their shoelace or scrubbing a floor can ambush you with the whole weight of your tenderness. When she’d drunk from me I’d felt death very close. A huge soft darkness. Then her blood had come to me like a rope. And in spite of myself I’d grabbed it. Oh, hadn’t I just. That wretched moment when I realised I couldn’t stop, that she’d have to make me stop. And she had. It was a delight to me to know she’d had the strength and instinct to do that.

“Justine, angel, listen—”

“Look, we have to deal with this,” she said. “This. Now. Okay?”

It was very, very difficult not to pour out reassurance. My heart ached with the need to tell her she was wrong, she was worrying for nothing. But her force field made it plain: Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.

Very well. Let the practicalities do what practicalities could: provide a distraction until she was ready. It was why she’d begun the clean-up without me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“What for?”

“You saved my life.”

She didn’t look up. Her little breasts bobbed, prettily, as she scrubbed. Then she said: “Yeah, well, you did the same for me. Now will you for Christ’s sake hurry up?”

“Is this how it’s going to be now?” I asked her, desperate to put my arms around her.

“What?”

“You barking orders at me all the time?”

“Yes. Get out of here. Go shower.”

Under the jets (set to massage, striking my head and shoulders with a hail of soft bullets) I realised I’d had the dream again. (Coming back from death it’s light-years of void, void, void, but eventually the void morphs into the ocean of sleep, and sleep into the shore of waking.) The memory hit me like the smell of the sea: the deserted beach at twilight, someone walking behind me, the abandoned rowing boat. The terrible feeling of being on the edge of a profound and simple truth. And the maddening familiarity of He lied in every word circling my head like cartoon concussion birds when I woke.

Again, fear was very available, if I were only willing to turn and face it.

But I’m no coward when it comes to cowardice. I concentrated instead on soaping my genitals and wondering how long it would take me to pick up Talulla’s trail.

Vali’s trail.

28

“LOOK AT THE tattoos,” Justine said. “They’re Angels.”

We were in the garage, getting the bodies ready. The two women each had a black sigil above and to the right of the navel. The man had one on his right bicep.

“Angels?” I said.

Justine had seen these marks before. Angelic script. Revived by the Vatican’s marketing gurus and flashed in every ad. Apparently, while I’d been asleep, the Catholic Church had not only shed its have-your-cake-and-eat-it coyness about the supernatural (yes, the Devil exists, but please don’t embarrass us by asking us to go into detail) but had introduced the world to the fighting force it had been secretly training to deal with it, namely, the Militi Christi, the Soldiers of Christ. Known in the optimistic vernacular as “the Angels.”

“Well, it was only a matter of time,” I said. “What’s rather more worrying is how the fuck did they know where to find us?”

We had to take both cars, the guy squeezed into the Mitsubishi’s trunk, the two women (wrapped in the hall’s Persian runner) in the Jeep’s. Los Angeles’ twinkling darkness had seen all this before, many times. Bodies. Trunks. The innocent practicalities of murder.

Justine was full of glamorous energy. Her new nature flashed and glimmered. All her years of wondering. I could feel the delight. A smile kept coming. She kept suppressing it. But also kept coming moments of residual disbelief that made her go briefly blank, the system trying to reboot past its astonishment at the new software.

We drove inland on the 10. Desert. Sky rich with stars. Murder someone in England or Luxembourg and sooner or later a jogger or dog-walker stumbles on the buried remains. Small countries keep the moral world at your shoulder. The American desert spaces, it’s different. You bury a body, the empty land shrugs and says, Fine with me, Jack.

Six miles east of Joshua Tree there’s a road south that runs for a mile and comes to nothing, just peters out into sand and scrub. Not far enough from civilisation, but there wouldn’t be enough night to get back safe if we went on. Thanks to the new blood, The Lash gratified for the second night in a row, a saguaro cactus stood with its head and three big outstretched arms each lined up with a bristling star. A gesture. One of the infinite number of gestures. Through The Lash’s mischievous grace the shape said absurd balance. The balance you needed to accept the insistent meaningfulness and meaninglessness of things.

We worked in silence under the mighty constellations. Strength came back to me, gently, through the digging. The bodies were forlorn and pathetic. There was no connection with them. We hadn’t drunk from them. Nothing of them had passed to us. They were strangers. I thought (and felt Justine thinking the same) of the people they must have had in their lives who loved them. People to whom their details were precious. It was ugly, to have killed them with no memorial trace in our blood.

We got home an hour from dawn. Obviously there was an argument for not going back to Las Rosas at all, but it didn’t hold. If they knew about that place there was no reason they wouldn’t know about any of the others within a couple of hundred miles, and none of those had a vault to compare. They’d have to find the vault, for starters (it’s hidden) and if they did find it nothing short of demolition explosives would get them in. All, if it were to take place in the next fourteen hours, in broad Californian daylight. I doubted even the messengers of God had the requisite madness or chutzpah for that.