The Last Four Things

  ‘Brzica serves nothing but a desire for blood.’

  ‘Not so. Not fair. Like any other Redeemer he could have chosen to prepare acolytes for the defence of the faith. He could have learnt to sermonize on the love God bears all of mankind, poor as mankind is, poor as all his works are: his vision corrupt, his tastes disgusting, his body a vile traitor, everything about him humdrum and banal. Instead Brzica has chosen the most arduous vocation of them all: the torture and killing of his own kind. No one will eat with him, no one will pass the time of day or pray next to him. In the midst of this desolation of fear and loathing he must consign himself not to the ordinary pleasures of the human voice but the groans of the dying only. He arrives in the courtyard of the Act of Faith in front of an assembly of his fellows who see him only with dread. A heretic or blasphemer is tossed to him – he seizes him, stretches him, ties him to a wooden bar and lifts his arms. There is a horrible silence save only for the sound of bones cracking and the shrieks of the victim. He unties him. He stretches him out on the ground and drags a sharpened hook through his body from chest to pubic bone and pulls his entrails out before the screaming eyes, the mouth open like a furnace.’

  ‘And you wonder why no one wants to sit next to him?’

  ‘I don’t wonder at all. And yet for all that hatred he is all greatness, all power. Remove the executioner from the world and in an instant order yields to chaos; kindness and fellowship and good works are defenceless before the wicked opportunism of the malicious and the cruel, the apostate and blasphemer who would rob each man of an eternal life of bliss. Tell me he is not a hero and a saint.’

  They stared at each other for a moment.

  ‘I want Hooke.’

  ‘I explained that will not be possible.’

  ‘You must make it possible. The Folk have new weapons. They didn’t get them from under a stone. I need Hooke.’

  ‘Everything is vulnerable. To defy the Pontiff on this would be the excuse they need to send the Congregation of the Office for the Propagation of the Faith.’

  ‘Gant is the Pertius of the Congregation, is that right?’

  ‘The Peritus,’ corrected Bosco. ‘A pertius is the piece of skin left over after a circumcision.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Your point?’

  ‘Will Gant come with the Congregation?’

  ‘Nothing would keep him from the chance to take control of the Sanctuary.’

  ‘Could he have you made an Act of Faith?’

  ‘The wish is father to that thought, my dear. The answer is no. But I could be removed from the Carmelengo and all my power would go with it.’

  ‘If I succeed on the veldt, will that be enough to stop them?’

  ‘No. The failures there are wounding to our pride and a delight to the Antagonist in the East, but the Folk are a nuisance even to them. Where you have one Folk Antagonist you have a fanatic. Where you have two, you have a schism. Even if they defeat us on the veldt and we withdraw, they’ll soon start squabbling amongst themselves.’

  Cale said nothing for a moment. ‘There’s no problem,’ he said, finally.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Give them what they want, Hooke’s death, and then they’ll have no excuse for coming here.’

  ‘I take it,’ said Bosco, after a moment, ‘you don’t mean what you appear to mean.’

  ‘No. I want Hooke and I mean to have him.’

  Outside Model, who had been assigned to him as messenger boy, was anxiously waiting, having heard Bosco’s slightly raised voice speaking without apparent reply for so long. Was Cale in trouble? When his boss came outside he didn’t speak for a few minutes but shook his head as if he were trying to clear a thick fog out from between his ears.

  ‘Can I get you something, boss?’

  Cale looked at him.

  ‘Yes. Go and get me another breakfast then take it back to my room and eat it for me.’

  ‘My name is Thomas Cale and I hold you in the palm of my hand.’

  As he stood in front of some two hundred abject Purgators under a number of cloudy layers of many kinds of mixed emotions (take anger, self-pity, fear, despair, grief, more anger, hate, loss, love and so on) he was enjoying the curious pleasure of standing in front of so many Redeemers who, despite the joyful pomposity of his proclamations, actually were in the palm of his hand. Who could blame him? Who would not enjoy the idea of moulding them as if they were newborn babies? All this power and not even the slightest worry about being fair or generous or kind. In ecclesiastical law they were already dead – it was just that the actual deed of execution (a matter of minor technical importance) had not been carried out. He could do whatever he wanted to them. He felt not a licence for revenge but a great opportunity to satisfy his curiosity. What if you could do anything you wanted and it would be all right?

  ‘I am going to tell you to do a great many things you’ve never done before. If you disobey, you’ll be punished. If you disobey silently, you’ll be punished. If you complain, you’ll be punished. If you fail, you’ll be punished. If I feel like it, you’ll be punished. But there will be one thing and one thing only for which there will be no punishment. If you fail to learn to think for yourselves you will be returned to this square for immediate execution of sentence.’

  Then he started to walk out of the square. He noticed one of the Purgators just at the edge of his eye and recognized him as Redeemer Avery Humboldt, someone he knew of old. The expression on his face was one of utter disdain, contempt and loathing. As he passed Humboldt, Cale lashed out with all his great power to the Redeemer’s head. He went down as if his strings had been cut and, without more than the slightest break in his stride, Cale walked on and out of the square. In fact, Cale had been quite wrong about the expression on Humboldt’s face. It was not one of disdain or contempt or loathing. The apparently dismissive sneer was simply due to damage to the nerves on the left side of his face which had caused it to droop and which resulted from a beating he had taken from two of the guards who had overheard and taken exception to his opinion that the Maid of Blackbird Leys was a well-meaning woman and should not be subject to the horrors of an Act of Faith. On the other hand, Cale’s error certainly made a point not lost on the remaining Purgators.

  It was a peculiarity of the Redeemers that while they believed any number of fantastical notions they had little or no imagination. And this was true even of so intelligent a man as Bosco. Quite capable of believing seven impossible things before breakfast, so long as they involved miracles, bizarre divine punishments, the preserved gallstones or foreskins of martyrs, he was puzzled by Cale’s elaborate plan for removing Guido Hooke from prison.

  ‘I can just send in some guards and remove him.’

  ‘But what happens when there’s an investigation by the Office for the Propagation of the Faith and they find out that before he mysteriously died he was in perfect health and was for no good reason removed from his cell against all protocol and convention?’

  Bosco, being a passionate and conventional believer in his youth, had come late to lying. Now he invented plausible lies, sure enough, but the things he said were not deeply interrogated because by the time he started deceiving his fellow Redeemers he was very powerful. He had suspicious enemies but there was only so much pressure they could bring to bear, only a short rope on which to hang awkward questions. Cale, Vague Henri and Kleist on the other hand had been deceiving, cheating and lying to people who could subject them to anything they liked if they had the slightest suspicion of any wrong doing, wrong thinking or wrong feeling. A guilty look was evidence of sin, just as an expression of innocence was a proof of the disgusting sin of pride. The result was that they all, perpetual liars, had learnt to be untruthful in the same way that they had learned to walk – unsteady at first but quickly so fluent they did not even have to think about it. A powerless liar has to know what they’re doing in order not to be foun
d out. A lie had to be alive and be so like the truth that the one hundred errors that bad liars make to give themselves away even to the stupid are never given air to breathe. Number one in this respect was that you never break any routine – once you discover even a small change in the way things are always done, even the dimmest interrogator starts to smell a rat.

  ‘Only sickness will make your taking Hooke out of a condemned cell look right. If it comes to an ecclesiastical review where you must answer, you have to have a story. Work it through in your head so it’s as real as something that happened – more real. Send a doctor you can trust – is there one?’

  ‘There is.’

  ‘Get him to take Giant Scabious – it’ll make him sweat and go red in the face. The doctor can find it growing behind the Great Statue of the Hanged Redeemer.’

  Bosco was offended. He had allowed Cale to take to his bed on three occasions with such symptoms.

  ‘What do you expect,’ taunted Cale, ‘from the wrath of the Lord? By the next day all the guards will be worrying it’s jail fever. Then you can remove him for a good reason and you won’t have done anything out of the ordinary. You used to tell me that was a sin.’

  ‘Clearly I failed. As I hoped to do, remember that. God plants his great messengers in many places. Mostly they go mad for lack of a guide to tell them who they are and what they have to do.’

  That night the weekly check for signs of jail fever was made a day ahead of schedule. Guido Hooke was given a tincture of Scabious and took it without demur. Why suspect the Redeemers of poisoning him when they had such public and unpleasant plans for his death. By the next day he had the required fever, sweats and blisters. If they were not the symptoms of the much dreaded jail fever – dreaded because it could so easily spread to the wider community of Redeemers – they were still alarming enough to ensure the doctor was recalled by jailers who would never have the wit or courage to lie to the Office for the Propagation of the Faith. Part one of the lie was firmly embedded in the truth. Much fuss was made of taking Hooke from his cell and through the Purgators in order to provide as many witnesses to his obvious sickness as possible. His face was distinctive because of his moustache-less and abundant ginger beard. It gave him a hideous aspect but he had been told twenty years before by a malicious young woman that she found it especially suited him and he had for ever after continued to devote much time to maintaining it. Now ranting and delirious because the apothecary had tripled the dose in error, Hooke was taken to an isolated room where those suffering from jail fever were left to die without food or water. For once this was the kindest solution the Redeemers could offer. It was better to die reasonably quickly from a high fever exacerbated by lack of water than linger on into the hideous last stages of the disease. Within a few minutes, Cale arrived followed shortly after by Bosco and Gil who watched him trying to go about his deceptive business with some difficulty, given his raving state. Cale cut the ginger beard as close to the skin as possible leaving him with a pile of red hair that was both impressive and repellent.

  ‘Give it eyes and a tail and it’d look like a ginger rat.’

  Gil and Bosco then left but were back ten minutes later with a dead body of an age and weight similar to Hooke’s. Cale had certainly requested the body and in doing so suggested it come from the morgue. Whether the cadaver had truly and conveniently done so he did not ask – and Gil and Bosco did not tell.

  Cale had already stripped Hooke of his clothes and then did the same to the corpse. He then dressed the dead man in Hooke’s clothes and wrapped a large bandage, as was the custom for the dead, around his head and under his chin. He then stuffed the hair from the pile inside the bandage to give the impression that Hooke’s beard was squashed beneath. Bosco sniffed. If it was an ingenious idea it was not quite so impressive in execution.

  ‘It’s just a first go,’ said Cale. ‘Give me an hour and it’ll look a lot better. Besides – people see what they expect to see. When we burn him tomorrow we’ll keep the Redeemers well back.’

  ‘It’s an after-death execution,’ said Gil. ‘The Fatherhood will expect to see Brzica.’

  ‘Brzica’s not a problem.’

  With that Bosco signalled Gil to help Hooke to his feet.

  ‘Give us a kiss, gorgeous,’ said the delirious Hooke.

  ‘Where are you taking him?’

  ‘God,’ said Bosco, ‘fashioned hell for the inquisitive.’

  ‘Just a little one,’ said Hooke, and with that they dragged him out of the room and Cale went back to re-arranging the fur inside the dead man’s face bandage.

  Within twenty minutes Hooke was being settled in a new room, separated from the rest of the Sanctuary by two walls and being attended to by a fat nun in a wimple.

  In the room with the dead man, Cale began to arrange the appearance of the ginger beard that now looked almost orange against the dead white of the man’s face. He sang softly to himself as he worked.

  ‘Nobody likes us – we don’t care

  Nobody likes us – we don’t care

  Nobody likes us – we don’t care

  Nobody likes us – we don’t care.’

  ‘Tell the jailers that there is an alert about the Purgators and they must prepare them to be moved. Lock the place up with them inside for twenty-four hours. The Purgators and jailers are the only people who ever saw Hooke close up. Bring everyone to the post-mortem execution but keep them well back in case they catch the jail fever. Then get the burning over quickly.’

  ‘Why not burn him on the QT?’ said Gil. ‘It’s too risky doing it in front of so many.’

  ‘No, Cale is right. People will see what they expect to see. The Office for the Propagation of the Faith will expect us to make a show of the execution of such a notorious heretic. We’ll give them what they want.’

  Too clever by half, both of them, thought Gil. He regretted his disobedience and pride almost at once. There would be hours of praying, at least ten minutes ablating. Perhaps half an hour defuscalating. Why couldn’t he have bitten his tongue? Then he remembered he would have to do that as well.

  ‘Thank you, Redeemer,’ said Bosco, dismissing Gil. When he had left Bosco looked at Cale, his expression mocking and expectant.

  ‘You want to ask me something?’

  ‘Yes. What was Picarbo doing cutting up that girl?’

  ‘Ah. Extraordinary.’ He unlocked a small cupboard at the side of his desk, took out a bound folder and handed it over.

  ‘There are a great many pages in his room. It would take months, I’d say, to read them all. But this was his testament of sorts. Apparently.’

  ‘So you knew nothing about it?’

  ‘Me? No.’

  ‘How was that possible?’

  ‘You think I’m lying to you?’ He seemed surprised. ‘Clearly I have in the past been willing to keep the truth from you, sir.’ The title was genuinely respectful yet also genuinely mocking. ‘But I don’t recall ever lying directly to you. I suppose I would have if it had been necessary. But I’m not lying now.’

  ‘He kept women. He kept them in rooms big enough for a small palace. How is that possible?’

  ‘All Redeemers must still seem alike to you. All are all-powerful. But only with acolytes, not with each other. There are many divisions and hierarchies. Lines there are that cannot be crossed. Picarbo ruled these areas. No arbitrary king had more power. It was not done to ask questions of one another. To have the power to control knowledge of something in a world where everyone knows everything in common, this is the most jealously guarded power a Redeemer can have. Like a bunch of keys, it is a sign of worthiness before God.’

  ‘Others must have known.’

  ‘Indeed they did. Twelve of them knew and had read the document here.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘Now you’re being provocative.’

  ‘The nuns?’

&n
bsp; ‘A Redeemer can always be replaced; someone who can cook and iron a vestment in a way acceptable to God cannot. Besides they knew nothing about Picarbo’s intentions. It is a matter of considerable debate, theologically speaking, whether women have souls or not. I’m inclined to think not. In which case they are not entirely responsible for themselves.’

  ‘And the girls?’

  ‘Ah yes. The answer is that there is no answer. Because the sisters have always been sealed off, it’s been surprisingly easy to keep these young people a secret. Picarbo clearly found it so. I’ve things to deal with. Take your time.’

  And with that he left and Cale started to read the manifesto that had changed his life and beggared an empire.

  7

  It was dawn and the twites were singing raucously in the trees. The beautiful arias and choruses they sang before the sun went down were now replaced with an appalling racket that sounded like men with out-of-tune whistles having a fist-fight in the branches of the trees.

  Despite the noise, the girl, Daisy, was sleeping deeply in his arms. Kleist had slept in the same room with hundreds of boys and they looked to him even uglier when they were asleep than when they were not. She looked beautiful, something that was not quite the case when she was awake. A deeply pleasant feeling swept through him as he looked at her, like the feeling in his chest after a large swig of brandy or gin.

  He was both in awe and mistrustful of women. Who is not? But until recently even ignorance could not have described his lack of understanding, which is to say he had none. Now his experience was significant in parts but both partial and peculiar. His hostility to Riba, the girl whose rescue by Cale was the inadvertent cause of all his woes, was based on the numerous occasions when, through no fault of hers, she had nearly got him killed; his second source of experience was of the aristocratic beauties of Memphis, who regarded all men, and especially him, as beneath contempt; and finally the whores of Kitty Town, whose misery or coldness had eventually put him off going there at all.