The Last Four Things

  Outside, the jailer’s heart was beating like a girl’s who had just had her first kiss. He tried to calm himself and taking the list to a taper burning weakly on the wall examined it carefully. When he finished his eyes were bulging with fear and uncertainty. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. He was too afraid to ask for clarification from Bosco and too proud to consult his predecessor. He was right to think that he would have looked foolish and inept in the eyes of both. His promotion, after all, was yet to be confirmed. ‘Whatever you are,’ he had once overheard, ‘be decisive.’ This not very good advice, misunderstood in any case, had been lurking at the back of Redeemer Jailer Bergeron’s mind for many years awaiting the opportunity to betray him. At last its opportunity had come. How many of us are any different? How many of our worst or finest hours are rooted in some minor piece of nonsense that was stuck in our souls like a weed into a rocky cliff and flourished there against the odds? It forces its roots into a crack, the crack is widened, a sudden storm, the water invades the crack, the water freezes in the winter night and opens up the split. A stranger passes, his horse stumbles on the loosened rock and horse and rider are ejected into the dreadful chasm of the scarp. So Bergeron hurried to the cell of Petar Brzica and knocked with absolute conviction on his door.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The people on this list in the north wing are to be executed.’

  Brzica was not especially surprised given that so many prisoners from the north wing of the House had been put to death recently. He examined the list, calculating roughly what sort of task it was. ‘I thought,’ he said, more to make conversation than anything, ‘the executions were finished for now.’

  ‘Obviously not,’ came the bad-tempered reply. ‘Perhaps you’d like to go and see the Lord Redeemer Bosco and ask him yourself what he thinks he’s up to.’

  ‘Not my job,’ replied Brzica. ‘Ours is not to reason why. When?’

  ‘Now.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘I’ve just come from Redeemer Bosco’s presence.’

  This was compelling.

  ‘What’s the rush?’

  ‘That’s nothing to concern you. All you need to worry about is how quickly you can start and finish.’

  ‘How many exactly?’

  ‘Two hundred and ninety-nine.’

  Brzica considered, his lips moving in silent calculation.

  ‘I can start in two hours.’

  ‘How soon can you start if you get your finger out?’

  Again Brzica considered.

  ‘Two hours.’

  Bergeron sighed.

  ‘Then how long?’

  ‘Once the rotunda gets going we can do one every two minutes. With breaks – eleven hours.’

  ‘And without breaks?’

  ‘Eleven hours.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Bergeron, in a tone that suggested he had concluded his negotiation successfully. ‘The rotunda in two hours.’

  Brzica was in fact working in the rotunda in less than an hour with his four assistants or topping coves. He had taken a look at his victims carefully. They were a tough-looking bunch. If they caught a sniff of what was happening there would be trouble. At the moment it was clear they were unaware – though not blissfully so. Not even men as ginty-looking as this could be so carefree in the face of death and the everlasting torment that waited. One thing bothered him a great deal. ‘Why,’ he said to the Redeemer on guard, ‘aren’t they locked in their cells? Why’s there no one but you to watch them?’

  His reply was convincing. ‘No idea.’

  If the guard was uncommunicative it was not just because he genuinely knew nothing, but also because no one wanted to talk to Brzica. Even the most thuggish Redeemers looked down on, indeed despised, him in the way executioners have always been despised. Nobody liked him but he didn’t care, or at least that was what he told himself. In fact he was sensitive about the way he was regarded. He liked being feared. He liked being seen as deadly and mysterious. He was aggrieved, however, by the disdain. It was uncalled for. It was unjust. He held himself aloof but his feelings were hurt by this lack of respect.

  He suffered in silence, not out of choice but because no one wanted to talk to him. Not even his assistants, two of whom had recently, and much to his irritation, tried to get themselves reassigned to ministering to lepers in Mogadishu. They would get theirs in due course for this disloyalty, but tonight required unity and harmonious skill.

  Problems still remained and he decided to walk along the ambulacrum to clear his head. Should they be bound first? No. The advantage of tied hands and hobbled legs needed to be offset against the clear worry this would give that something unpleasant was up. These were not the kind of men to go quietly and given the fact that for some reason they had been left with the doors to their cells open, a riot could easily result. It was better, he decided as he loped up the ambo, to keep them innocent and do it all so quickly they wouldn’t catch on until they were halfway to the next life. It required more deftness and a surer touch but then these he had in abundance.

  ‘Good night, Redeemer.’ It was Bosco walking past, mulling over Cale.

  ‘Good …’

  But Bosco was already gone.

  The Rotunda had been designed by Brzica’s predecessor – a Fancy Dan, in Brzica’s opinion – and had been constructed, in his professional opinion, more elaborately than was necessary. Keep it simple was his motto. He had replaced the Rotunda’s three-room system for mass executions – one about to be killed, one in the next room being prepared and the third the victim in waiting – and replaced it with something that relied more on the cooperation of the victim under the impression that something else was happening. The victim was told he was to have a brief introduction to the Prior of the Sanctuary. When he entered through the thick and soundproof door he would see the Prior kneeling to pray with his back to him and facing a Holy icon of the Hanged Redeemer. He and his two guards would kneel side by side, the latter a little closer perhaps than one would expect. The Prior would then stand up and turn around, the victim would look up, Brzica in his leather apron would grab his hair, the two guards hold his arms and then Brzica would draw the knife embedded in his glove across his throat. Already dying and in shock he would be dropped onto the false floor in front of him, this would be lowered by the guards, the dead or dying man would be pushed down the chute to be pulled away by the Redeemers in the room below, who would wash the false floor quickly and carefully and then the floor would be pushed and raised back into place. A quick check for signs of the struggle and then the guards would be up and leaving the room by a door further along the corridor. Outside the next victim would be patiently waiting with his two guards. He would see dimly in the shadows what he thought was his predecessor leaving through the exit door. Then the whole procedure would begin again.

  This went on throughout the night with only a single interruption. One of the victims, more alert than all the rest, sensed something was not quite right. As a tired hand grasped his hair and another his left hand he instinctively jerked free. Slipping and sliding and screaming as all four of his murderers grappled and tried to pin him down, screaming and fighting till they bundled him into the shaft, stamped on his hand, beat him about the head and finally pushed him through to be finished off by the Redeemers in the chambers below. Not even the thickest door could prevent the sound of such a dreadful struggle reaching the ears of the man waiting in the corridor outside. Brzica went out himself and stabbed the frightened Redeemer where he stood before he could raise a fuss. Other than that, everything passed as it should.

  The next morning at eleven, Redeemer Jailer Bergeron inspected the pile of lightly washed bodies laid out in the Rotunda Aftorium, waiting to be removed to Ginky’s Field under the cover of night. It was a sobering but impressive sight. Half an hour later he was standing in front of a slightly impatient Bosco, who was trying to work out the b
oring but complicated documents involving an argument over the delivery of a large consignment of spoiled cheese.

  ‘What is it?’ said Bosco, not looking up.

  ‘The executions have been carried out as you ordered, Redeemer.’

  Bosco looked up having lost, to his irritation, his train of thought over the claim and counter-claim concerning responsibility for the rotten cheese.

  ‘What?’

  A terrible dread flushed through Bergeron as if he had been hit by a winter spate.

  ‘The execution of the prisoners in the House of Special Purpose.’

  Bergeron’s voice was whisper thin. He took out the order sheet with the names and pointed to the last page. ‘There’s the cross you put at the end to confirm it.’

  Bosco took the paper from him without fuss. A horrible quiet settled over him. He looked at it for a moment. His precious gauleiters gone, every one.

  ‘The cross at the bottom,’ he said softly, ‘was to show that I’d read it.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Ah, indeed.’

  ‘I …’

  ‘Please don’t say anything. You’ve brought me a disaster this morning. Take me to see them.’

  In his room Cale was looking pointlessly out of the window, his mind hundreds of miles away. Behind him there was the clatter of an acolyte laying out his second meal of the day. If nothing else, eating, now that his food came from the nuns as it did for the other Redeemers, was one pleasure he still felt. Of a sort. The acolyte dropped one of the covers on the floor and it bounced noisily and rolled over near his feet. The nearness of the acolyte’s scrabble to pick it up made him look at the boy’s face for the first time. The boy, though he was at least Cale’s age, picked up the cover and looked back, but uncertainly.

  ‘I don’t know you,’ said Cale.

  ‘They brought me here ten days ago from Stuttgart.’ Cale had read about Stuttgart only a few days before in an almanac Bosco had given him that set out in the driest detail every armed and walled Redeemer citadel with a population above five thousand. It was five hundred pages long and there were ten volumes. According to Bosco, the Redeemer commonwealth was fragile. What was clear from even what he had read in the alamanac was that it was vast, bigger by far than he had ever imagined.

  ‘Why?’ asked Cale.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Model.’

  Cale went over to the table and sat down. There were scrambled eggs, toast, chicken legs, sausages, mushrooms and porridge. He started to help himself.

  ‘You’re Cale, aren’t you?’

  Cale ignored him. ‘They say you saved the Pope himself from nasty Antagonists.’

  Cale looked back at him for a moment then went back to eating. Model stared at him. He was hungry because acolytes were always hungry, just as for most of the year they were cold. But it did not occur to him that the food on the table, some of which he did not even recognize, might be shared with him. It was like a beautiful woman to an ugly man – he could appreciate the beauty but could not expect at all to participate in it. But, distracted as he was, Cale could not eat this well in front of another acolyte.

  ‘Sit down.’

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Yes, you could. Sit.’

  Model sat and Cale put a dish of fried potatoes in front of him. But there was, of course, a problem. Cale picked up the dish of fried potatoes and emptied all but one on his own plate. Flushed with desire and longing, Model’s face fell.

  ‘Look,’ said Cale. ‘You eat too much of this stuff and you’ll be yawning your guts up in five minutes. Believe me. What did you eat in Stuttgart?’

  ‘Porridge and bunge.’

  ‘Bunge?’

  ‘Sort of fat and nuts and stuff.’

  ‘We call it dead men’s feet.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Model.

  Cale removed the skin from a small piece of chicken and scraped away the delicious jelly that clung juicily to the underside. Then a smaller helping of just the white of an egg and a larger dollop of porridge but just a little bit, not too much.

  ‘See how that goes down.’

  Well was the answer, ecstatically wonderfully in a heavenly way it went down well. Not even in the depths of his anger and fury could Cale fail to take pleasure in the delight of Model as he ate the fried potato, the white of the egg, the porridge slipping down his parched and hungry throat as if it had come from the gardens of paradise, where it was said that there were lemonade springs and the rocks were made of candy.

  When Model finished he sat back and stared again at Cale.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome. Now go and lie down for five minutes and turn your face to the wall so you aren’t looking at me while I finish. You might feel a bit strange.’

  Model did as he was told and Cale finished his breakfast without giving him another thought. As he finished there was a knock at the door.

  ‘Go away,’ he said, signalling the alarmed Model to get up. There was another knock. He waited. ‘Come in.’ It was Bosco.

  Ten minutes later the two of them stood alone in the Aftorium looking silently at the two hundred and ninety-nine dead bodies, all that remained of Bosco’s ten years of planning for the means to bring the world to an end.

  ‘I wanted to show you this because there should be no secrets between us. I don’t want you to learn from my mistake because I did not make a mistake. I wish that I had, because then I could learn from it. But this error, shall we call it, is simply what it is. An event. There was a plan, a carefully arrived at and exactingly thought-out plan. What you need to learn here is that there is nothing to learn. That there are foolish men and that there are inexperienced men and that there are misunderstandings. This is the nature of things. You understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I will consider an alternative.’

  But for all his acceptance of the terrible carnage done to his years of irreplaceable planning (Bergeron had been replaced but to his astonished thankfulness not disembowelled or even punished) Bosco was white with shock.

  ‘Consider them for an hour. Then leave.’

  ‘I don’t need an hour,’ said Cale.

  ‘I think …’

  ‘I don’t need an hour.’

  Bosco moved his head, just a slight move. He turned to leave and Cale followed up the winding steps known as the Stairway to Heaven going up and, for reasons lost in time, Yummity’s Steps going down. They moved slowly up past the Rotunda, Bosco’s knees not being what they once were, and up into the Bourse, the hall that led off into the various departments of the House of Special Purpose.

  Towards the back of the Bourse a man, a Redeemer, stripped of his robes, was being led towards an open courtyard. He was wailing quietly, a drizzly sobbing like a tired and unhappy child. Cale watched as the three attending Redeemers ushered him forward. Cale watched them as if he might be a buzzard or one of the more thoughtful Falconidae.

  ‘Stop them.’

  ‘Pity is nothing of …’

  ‘Stop them and tell them to take him back to his cell.’

  Bosco walked over to the execution party as they stalled, trying to push the prisoner through the doorway and out into the bright sunshine of the courtyard.

  ‘Hold on a moment.’

  Ten minutes later Cale, followed by a wary Bosco, was walking silently through the cells where the Purgators, those whose sins of blasphemy, heresy, offences against the Holy Ghost and a long list of others, were kept while they waited for their fate to be decided, usually a very simple and uniform fate. Cale walked up and down carefully looking over the waiting prisoners – the terrified, the despairing, the bewildered, the fanatical and the clearly mad.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Two hundred and fifty six,’ said the jailer.

  ‘What’s in ther
e?’ said Cale, nodding towards a locked door. The jailer looked at Bosco and then back at Cale. Was this the promised Grimperson? He didn’t look like much.

  ‘Behind that door we keep those condemned to an Act of Faith.’

  Cale looked at the jailer.

  ‘Unlock the door and go away.’

  ‘Do as you’re told,’ said Bosco.

  He did so, face red with resentment. Cale pushed the door and it swung open easily. There were ten cells, five on each side of the corridor. Eight were Redeemers whose crimes required a public execution to encourage and support the morale of the witnessing faithful. Of the other two, one was a man, clearly not a priest because he had a beard and was dressed in civvies. The other was a woman.

  ‘The Maid of Blackbird Leys,’ said Bosco, when they returned to his rooms. ‘She has been prophesying blasphemies concerning the Hanged Redeemer.’

  ‘What sort of blasphemies?’

  ‘How can I repeat them?’ said Bosco. ‘They’re blasphemies.’

  ‘How was she charged then, at her trial?’

  ‘The case was heard in camera. Only a single judge was present when she repeated her claims and condemned herself.’

  ‘But the judge knows.’

  ‘Unfortunately, may peace be upon him, the judge died of a stroke immediately afterwards, clearly brought on by the Maid’s heresy.’

  ‘Bad luck.’

  ‘Luck had nothing to do with it. He has gone to a better place – or at least a place from which no traveller returns, nor anything the traveller might have learned before his departure. It’s all in the paperwork.’

  ‘And I can read it?’

  ‘You are not a person to be tainted, you are the anger of God made flesh. It doesn’t matter what you read, what you hear, you are the sea-green incorruptible.’

  Cale thought about this for a few moments.

  ‘And the beardy man?’

  ‘Guido Hooke.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He is a natural philosopher who claims that the moon is not perfectly round.’