IdrisPukke smiled and looked at Conn.
‘My dear boy,’ he began, winking at Conn so the others couldn’t see – a sign that he was on his side in conspiring against the other two.
‘If he touches me, I’ll cut his bloody head off,’ Conn said, interrupting IdrisPukke’s attempt to handle him.
IdrisPukke smiled again as the others sighed and grimaced in exasperation.
‘You’re not going to cut his head off because you’re not going to let him touch you.’
‘And what if he does?’
‘You stand up,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘look at him as if you’d seen more lovely things coming out of the back end of a dog and leave the room in silence. You say nothing.’
‘If that’s the best you can do, don’t let us keep you,’ said Vipond.
‘The King is a snob,’ replied IdrisPukke, ‘and, like all snobs, at heart he’s a worshipper. All his life he’s been looking for someone who looks down on him to adore. Conn looks like a young god – a young god with a bloodline that goes back as far as the great freeze. He’s wonderstruck.’
‘I can think of another word,’ said Conn.
‘Maybe that, too. But he wants you to treat him with contempt. He won’t dare touch you. Every time you look at him – and don’t look at him except once or twice a meeting – you pour every quintilla of your loathing and disgust into it.’
‘That won’t be hard.’
‘There you are, then.’
With this unexpected resolution, IdrisPukke chatted away about a dinner he’d been at the previous night and then Arbell eased Conn out of the door and the two brothers were left on their own.
‘I thought that went very well.’ It was not IdrisPukke talking in honeyed tones of self-congratulation but Vipond, whose scowl had vanished completely, to be replaced by a look of considerable satisfaction.
‘Do you think she caught on?’
‘Probably,’ replied Vipond. ‘But she’s a smart little miss. She won’t say anything.’
‘You’re wrong, by the way’ said IdrisPukke.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You said, “Every problem is an opportunity.”’ IdrisPukke walked over to the window to catch the last rays of the setting sun. ‘What I actually always say is, “Every opportunity is a problem.”’
Vague Henri was disturbed, but in an unusual a-fish-has-just-fallen-out-of-the-sky-in-front-of-you way. Two days earlier he had reached into his pocket to pay for a pack of cigarillos at Mr Sobranie’s Health Tobacco shop and discovered that his loose change was gone and had been replaced by a carrot. More precisely, a carrot that had been not very skilfully carved into the shape of an erect penis with the word ‘YOU’ cut into the testicles. Eventually he decided that he’d been the victim of some smart alec street lurcher. The question why a skilled thief would steal the loose change in his left pocket but not the wallet in his right, which had nearly thirty dollars in it, he put to the back of his mind. But now the oddly peculiar thing that he had put to the back of his mind couldn’t stay there any longer because it had happened again. This time he had discovered a hard-boiled egg, with the two staring eyes of a village idiot and a mouth with the tongue flapping to one side drawn on the shell. On the reverse of the egg was a statement:
VAGUE HENRI
TRUE
All through the night Vague Henri turned over in his brain what the significance of the two gibes might be and whether they were a threat or not. Then there was a knock at the door; he answered it, taking the precaution of hiding a long knife behind his back. But his visitor had the sense to stand well back.
‘So, it was you?’
‘Who else would it be?’ said Kleist. ‘Nobody else knows what a prick you are the way I do.’
Vague Henri was so pleased to see his old friend that the bollocking that followed for running off on his own when they were in the Scablands lasted barely five minutes before they were sitting down and smoking two cigarillos of Mr Sobranie’s Health Tobacco and drinking what remained of a bottle of hideous Swiss wine. Both of them, of course, had extraordinary events to speak of. ‘You first as you’ve sinned the most,’ said Vague Henri and was astonished as Kleist, without warning, began to weep uncontrollably. It was half an hour before Kleist had recovered enough to tell him what had happened. As he listened Vague Henri grew pale and then red with anger and disgust.
‘There, there,’ he said to the weeping boy, patting him on the shoulder because he didn’t know what else to do. ‘There, there.’
It’s not all the world that is a stage but each human soul: the cast list in each of our souls is long and varied and most of the characters queue in the wings and down the dark passages and into the basement, never to be auditioned for a part. Even for the ones who do make it onto the stage it’s only to carry a spear or announce the arrival of the King. In this expectant but likely to be disappointed line of inner selves waiting for the chance to strut out in the world we usually find our inner fool, our private liar, our unrevealed oaf and, next to him, our wisest, best self; our hero and then our coward, our cheat and saint and next to him our child, then next our brat, our thief, our slut, our man of principle, our glutton, our lunatic, our man of honour and our thug.
Called unexpectedly to the front of Vague Henri’s soul queue that night was a most dangerous character (for Vague Henri at any rate): the part in him that believed in justice and fair play.
Cale dealt with his past through being in a state of almost constant rage, Kleist by disdain for everything that might touch his heart, Vague Henri by being cheerful in the face of adversity. The strategies of the first two had failed (Cale had gone mad and Kleist had fallen in love) and now it was Vague Henri’s turn. The idea that one of them could have married and made another human being, an actual baby, pink, small and helpless, touched him with rage at the Redeemers so deep that the deaths of Kleist’s wife and son at their hands burnt like the sun. So he called on the maddest of all his cast of characters: the one who wanted life to be fair, who wanted those who had done harm to be punished and justice for all.
While an exhausted Kleist snored in miserable oblivion on the bed, Vague Henri smoked his way through the last snout of his Health Tobacco and worked on his spidery and ill-advised conspiracy. Demoted to the back of the line in Vague Henri’s inner cast list, his wiser self was calling to him: delay, fudge, avoid, put off as long as possible the moment when you must commit yourself and others to the business of death. But it was the voice of rage that had his ear.
If IdrisPukke had known what Vague Henri was planning he would have had a stroke – instead he was enjoying the absolute success of his plan to manipulate Conn in the matter of the King. With every disdainful look and every sigh of contempt Zog was only the more enthralled by Conn. He’d finally reached snob heaven: he’d met someone who was worthy to look down on him.
Swift though his rise had been, and along with it that of the Materazzi in general, even Conn’s most star-struck admirers were astonished at the announcement that the King was to make him commander of all the armies of Switzerland and Albania. This extraordinary and apparently foolish step, given the threat to their existence that faced the Swiss, was less opposed than it might have been because everyone had been expecting the job to go to Viscount Harwood, King Zog’s now former favourite, a man of no military experience or indeed talent of any kind. It was reliably said that, on learning of Conn’s preferment, Harwood retired to his bed and cried for a week. The more scurrilous rumours, probably untrue, whispered that his penis had shrunk to the size of an acorn. In light of this, Conn’s appointment was less absurd than it first appeared. He had changed a good deal since the ruinous shambles at Silbury Hill. He had come very close to a hideous death there and been forced to endure rescue by someone he’d once bullied and despised. Even IdrisPukke, who had burst into laughter on hearing the news of his appointment to such a ludicrously powerful position, began to realize after a few days of meetings with Conn and Vipond that defeat,
death and humiliation at Silbury had been the making of the young man. Here was someone who had been brought up to fight and who had learnt his bitter lessons early. In addition Conn, as Vipond had advised him to do, listened carefully to IdrisPukke and was clearly and genuinely impressed by the work he had done on the coming war with the Redeemers. Conn was not to know that much of the intelligence had been supplied by Thomas Cale.
‘But what if Cale comes back? How is Conn going to take to that?’ said IdrisPukke.
‘Does he know?’ asked Vipond.
‘Does he know what?’
‘The thing it would be better if he didn’t know.’
‘Probably not. If we’re thinking of the same thing.’
‘We are.’
‘Is he likely to come back – Cale, I mean?’ asked his brother.
‘Apparently not.’
It was an unhappy reply and it would have been even more unhappy if he could have seen the boy who he continued, to his surprise, to miss so much. The circles around Cale’s eyes were, if anything, darker – the skin ever whiter with exhaustion at the retching that afflicted him sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes for hours. Some days were better – there were even weeks when he thought perhaps it was lifting from him. But the attacks always returned eventually, greater or lesser according to their own devices and desires.
During one of these better weeks, Sister Wray said that she wanted to climb to the top of a nearby hill, both in search of the truth of the rumours that blue sage and orange neem grew at the top and because the view of the sea and mountains was said to be the best in Cyprus.
‘It may be a hill,’ said a breathless Cale, a few hundred feet into their climb, ‘but it feels like a mountain.’
It was as well they started early as Cale had to rest every few hundred yards. At their sixth stop he fell asleep for nearly an hour. Sister Wray went for a wander up and down through the dry scrub and crumbly earth. Even though there had been little rain in the last few months, everywhere, hidden amongst the scraggy burberry bushes and thistle trees, were the tiny pleasures of purple knapweed, rock roses, the tiny eggy flowers of thorowax.
When she got back Cale was awake, and looking pale and even more black around the eyes.
‘We’ll go back.’
‘I won’t make the top but we can go on a bit longer.’
‘Big cry-baby pansy,’ said Poll.
‘One day,’ replied Cale, his voice a whisper, ‘I’m going to unravel you and knit someone a new arsehole.’
Some fifteen hundred feet above them, and two hundred feet below the top of the hill, was a V-shaped rift cut into the hill by the winter rains. It was the easiest way up, and waiting for Cale and Sister Wray to pass through it were the Two Trevors and Kevin Meatyard. Kevin was all puppyish excitement but the Two Trevors were uneasy. They were too well aware that the iron law of unintended consequences seemed to apply even more sharply to the planned act of murder than to other enterprises. They always designed their assassinations as a story where the chain of events could be upset at any point by a trivial detail. They had failed to kill the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo because the carriage driver, a late replacement for the usual driver who’d cut his arm that morning while replacing a wheel as a precaution, had panicked over the hastily given instructions over where to go and taken a wrong turn, not once (the Two Trevors had taken this into account) but twice. Had they succeeded in killing the old buffer who knows what the consequences might have been – but they didn’t, so something else happened instead.
The return of the Two Trevors to Spanish Leeds had been something of a welcome anti-climax. Kitty seemed to believe their reassurances that while they could not reveal their client’s business they were not in any way a threat to Kitty’s interests (not true, as it happened, but neither realized that the other had a stake in Thomas Cale). Kitty guessed that the Redeemers were probably involved but while the political situation was so confused he didn’t want to antagonize them without good reason. He’d considered, of course, disappearing the Two Trevors into the rubbish tips at Oxyrinchus just to be on the safe side. But he now decided that being on the safe side meant letting them go – much to Cadbury’s irritation, given the trouble he’d been put to in order to bring them back. In addition to their lives, the Two Trevors had a lesser stroke of luck: they’d discovered where Cale had taken refuge when Lugavoy had his ear bent by Kevin Meatyard’s boastfulness. A delighted Kevin had discovered Thomas Cale’s reputation as some sort of flinty desperado and was determined to let everyone know that he’d given this celebrity hardcase any number of bloody good hidings. No one really believed him but Kevin’s appearance, as well as his violent boasting, made people nervous. If the human body was the best picture of the human soul, Kevin was clearly someone best avoided. Hence the complaints to Trevor Lugavoy from Kevin’s employer and hence their jammy discovery of Cale’s precise whereabouts. ‘I don’t like ridiculous good luck,’ said Trevor Kovtun, ‘it reminds me of preposterous bad luck.’
The three of them had arrived at Yoxhall, the town outside the Priory, just the day before Cale and Sister Wray’s trip up Biggin Hill. For a hundred years Yoxhall had been a spa town where the reasonably well-off came to take the waters and visit their relatives in the Priory, which had grown up there in the belief that the local hot spring was beneficial in the treatment of those suffering from ‘nerves’. It was out of season and easy to get lodgings with a view of the main gate of the Priory. It wasn’t possible to arrive at an exact plan until they’d thoroughly examined the site and laid out a strategy or two for escaping. While they were eating breakfast early that morning, an excited Kevin had rushed down from overlooking the gates to report that Cale, and some sort of strange nun he’d seen about the place a couple of times when he was incarcerated, were headed towards Biggin Hill. They followed, realizing that more suspicious good luck was offering them a golden opportunity even though the Two Trevors didn’t believe in golden opportunities. It was clear Cale and the nun were heading for the top but they kept stopping to rest so the three of them were able to get well ahead, even though they had to take a much steeper route to scrutinize the cut in the hillside that Kevin assured them would be an excellent place for an ambush. He turned out to be right – he was ugly and offensive but not stupid. In fact, when he wasn’t boasting or making people uneasy he was astute in a distastefully coarse way.
In addition to their dislike of unexpected good fortune, there was also the problem of the nun or whatever she was. It was more than just a professional reluctance to kill someone they hadn’t been paid to, but a moral uneasiness. The Trevors weren’t deluded enough to believe that everyone they killed had got what was coming to them, though it was usually true. Indeed it was probably always true. Why would anyone spend the huge amounts needed to hire the Two Trevors on someone who was innocent? But however ideal a place this was to slaughter Thomas Cale – who unquestionably deserved what was coming to him – there was no way they could leave either a witness or someone to raise the alarm. Therefore it was with peculiar mixed feelings that they watched as Cale and the nun turned back. There were no mixed feelings from Kevin Meatyard: he punched the ground with frustration and swore so loudly that Trevor Lugavoy told him to shut up or he’d be sorry. They waited an hour and then made their silent and bad-tempered way back down the hill.
The Trevors were not the only observers that day. Watching from a beautifully kept maison de maître at the bottom of Biggin Hill were Daniel Cadbury and Deidre Plunkett.
Their late arrival that morning in pursuit of the Two Trevors meant that it was only when Cale and Sister Wray returned, followed an hour later by the two men and their lumpy companion, that Cadbury realized he’d come close to failing to protect Cale. Either something had gone wrong or for some reason the Two Trevors were following Cale but were not intending to kill him. But what could they be up to if it wasn’t a killing?
Even though it was off-season for Yoxhall there was enough busi
ness from the families of the wealthy mad to keep things ticking over. Cadbury didn’t want to risk going into the town and stumbling into the Two Trevors so he decided to send Deidre instead. They had, of course, seen her briefly when he brought them back to Spanish Leeds but she’d been dressed in her usual sexless serge outfit. Something could be done about that.
Cadbury ordered the bumpkin who looked after the house to fetch a dressmaker.
‘You do have dressmakers?’
‘Oh yes, sir.’
‘Tell him to bring a selection of wigs. And keep your mouth shut, and tell the dressmaker to do the same.’ He gave the bumpkin two dollars, and five for the dressmaker.
‘Do you think five dollars was enough?’ he said to Deidre when the old man had left. He wasn’t interested in her opinion concerning the hush money, he was just trying to get her to talk. He needed to find out if she was aware that he had murdered her sister. The more time he spent with this woman, who was even more peculiar than the late Jennifer, the more it preyed on his mind. Deidre rarely said anything much. But whenever he asked her a direct question she would reply with some gnomic saying – or what seemed like one. Whatever she said was delivered with a faint smile and in a tone so laconic that it was hard not to think that she was mocking him. At times she seemed as silently knowing as a smug Buddha. But what was she wise and silently knowing about? Was she just biding her time?
‘Enough is as good as a feast to a wise man,’ she said, in reply to his question about the money. Was there a glint of scorn flickering in the depths of those flat and unresponsive eyes? And if so, what did it mean? Did she know and was waiting? That was the question. Did she know?
As there was nothing else to be done until the bumpkin reappeared, he tried to read. He brought out his new copy of The Melancholy Prince, the old one having fallen apart during a visit to Oxyrinchus to arrange for the removal of a corrupt official responsible for the city’s rubbish tips. He was corrupt in the sense that he was holding back on Kitty the Hare’s share of the profits, owed to him by virtue of the fact that it was Kitty the Hare who had paid the bribe to put him in charge. When he sadly decided to throw away his crumbling copy of The Melancholy Prince – so many memories – he was intrigued to see that his soon-to-be victim had rather cleverly divided the local bins into different ones for food, miscellaneous trash and paper. According to his contract with the city he was supposed to take the paper to Memphis, where he claimed it could be sold to offset the cost of disposal and hence explain why his bid for the contract was lower than that of his rivals. This was a lie. In fact he took the paper out into the nearby desert and buried it.