The Beating of His Wings

by Paul Hoffman

  There was a pause.

  ‘And the rest,’ said Cadbury.

  Yet another knife, a bolt, a punch (large), an axe (small), a mace (surprisingly not small) and finally a needle of the kind use to repair thick sails.

  ‘What’s the matter – nobody like you?’

  ‘No,’ said Kleist.

  ‘But we don’t care,’ added Vague Henri.

  Cadbury knew that there must be more, even though he was surprised how much there already was. But he had covered himself and he could not bring himself to send the two boys naked into the chamber. It was not often that Cadbury felt dread, except on his own behalf, but he was feeling it now. His bad conscience called out to him, angry and mocking. You’ve no right to be having a conscience now, you hypocrite, after all the evil you’ve had a finger in. Kitty’s door opened and his steward emerged.

  ‘They must come in now,’ he said. Cadbury nodded to the two boys who were alarmed now, Vague Henri more than Kleist. They were gestured through by the steward, who closed the door after them. Usually, thought Cadbury, he would have entered with them but not this time. The steward looked at Cadbury, obviously uneasy. What did that mean? ‘My master says you can leave now.’

  The steward turned and walked away, his disquiet contained within the set of his shoulders and even the way he walked. To work for Kitty meant you had a considerable capacity for looking the other way when it came to evil-doing; but almost everyone has their standards, the line beyond which they will not go. Even in prison the murderer looks down on the common thief, the thief looks down on the rapist and all of them are disgusted by the nonce. It was all very well the steward hinting that something nasty was about to take place. But what could he do about it? Cadbury had been told to leave and so that’s what he did.

  Walking out into daylight felt like emerging into the sun after a year in the dark. But the dread at what was going to happen came with him too, and could be seen so plainly that on meeting Deidre Plunkett hurrying towards him, even she could see that he was in a state of intense anxiety.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m not well. We need to go home.’

  ‘I’ve just come from home.’

  ‘Then we’ll go back,’ he shouted, and pulled her to the other side of the street and away from Kitty the Hare’s house.

  Once the door closed behind them it would have made no difference if Kleist and Vague Henri had been carrying all of the weapons Cadbury had removed and twice as many like them besides. It took a few seconds to become accustomed to the gloom after the door was shut but anyway there was nothing to be done about the pair of small overstrungs pointed at them by one of the men Cadbury had been so disturbed by. The other man was holding two broom-handle-sized sticks with loops on the end of the kind used to catch wild dogs.

  ‘Turn around.’

  They did as they were told and with great deftness the loops were dropped over their necks and shoulders and pulled tight around their midriffs, binding their arms. It was not the first time that Kitty had admired the finesse of such large men. Neither of the boys said anything or tried to escape, something that also impressed Kitty.

  ‘We’re going to sit you down on these two stools,’ said one of the men. They pushed lightly on the wooden shafts holding the loops and eased the boys forward and onto the stools. Then they set the wooden shafts into two small slots in the floor. There was a loud CLICK! and the ends of the shafts were secured.

  ‘Tug away, if you like,’ mocked one of the men.

  ‘Mr Mach,’ cooed Kitty the Hare. ‘You’ll not behave rudely. These two boys are going to die here. Show them the respect due to that fact or be quiet.’

  Vague Henri and Kleist had been used to threats all their lives and they had seen them being carried out with great, even if pious, cruelty. They knew this wasn’t a threat. This thing was going to happen. Behind them the two men got on with their preparations, Mach with his nose somewhat out of joint at being corrected. It took them little effort. From their inside pockets both took out a length of strong wire, wrapped at either end around wooden handles about four inches long.

  ‘Why?’ cried out Vague Henri. The two men, more out of a sense of ritual than need, tested the robustness of the wood and the wire by pulling them apart twice. Satisfied, they moved to loop the twine around the boys’ necks.

  ‘Wait,’ Kitty murmured. ‘Since you’ve asked, you must want to make this last longer than it needs. I’ll tell you. Your stupid actions against the Redeemers have upset the balance of my peace. I have gone to trouble and expense to ensure that nothing happens – that this war is as drawn out and delayed as it suits me and my business for it to be drawn out and delayed. You’ve tried to begin a war that I do not want begun. Once a war starts all sorts of unpleasant things happen which means I don’t get paid. But a war that might or might not happen is utter bliss – 50,000 dollars a week in supplies. That’s why the great door opens for you. I cannot say it will be painless but it will be quick if you give in to it.’

  The two men stepped forward and circled the wire around their necks. ‘For God’s sake,’ whispered Kleist.

  ‘I know when they’ll come – the Redeemers!’ shouted Vague Henri. ‘I know to the day.’

  ‘Wait a little,’ said Kitty.

  ‘All right, I admit,’ Vague Henri was still able to lie well under dreadful circumstances, all his years of practice at deceiving the Redeemers coming to his aid, ‘not to the day, but to the week.’

  A pause. Kitty seemed convinced by the admission; after all, who wouldn’t exaggerate under such conditions?

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Before we tried to get into the camp I watched the place for nearly twenty hours. In that time, fifty carts arrived. Each cart carries half a ton, give or take. Thirty of the carts were just food. A commissariat tent takes five tons. There were over two hundred of them. That’s a thousand tons. The camp only has around two thousand men all told. That’s half a ton of food for every man.’

  ‘So the camp is a distribution point.’

  ‘No. Nothing beyond a couple of carts went out and none of them took food. Commissariat carts are different.’

  ‘Storage for the winter, then?’

  ‘You don’t build up stores before the summer. Most of it would rot in a tent. You don’t need a mass of stores to keep a camp in the summer. At this time of year you can live off the countryside – buying and commandeering.’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘They must be fuelling an attack. If they were staying where they were, they wouldn’t need a twentieth of such stores.’

  ‘Two thousand men aren’t going to advance on Switzerland.’

  ‘It would only take two weeks to bring in another forty thousand – but then they have to attack. No choice. Forty-odd thousand men eat at a rate of around thirty to fifty tons a day. They can’t stay in one place together in such numbers. Santos can’t bring them up in less than ten to fourteen days. And he can’t keep them there just eating up the stores. He’ll have to move in a week, two at the most.’

  ‘I’ve heard, you know, a great many plausible lies.’

  ‘They’re not lies.’

  ‘How do you know so much about bacon and flour?’

  ‘I’m not like Cale or Kleist. They were trained for the militant; I’m commissariat. Nobody fights without supplies – wood and water and meat and flour.’

  Kitty considered, a hideous pondering for the boys.

  ‘I’ll send for someone who has competence in all this. If he finds out this is all buncombe – which I suspect … I suspect it is – you’ll wish you’d kept your mouth shut because by now you’d be dead and your suffering would be over.’

  Ten minutes later, both of them shaking with terror, Vague Henri and Kleist were locked in a surprisingly comfortable room in the basement of the house.

  ‘Good lies,’ said Kleist, after a while. ‘Damned good lies.’

  PART THREE

 
; The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time, even two armed blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.

  Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (1979)

  15

  ‘So,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘you’re back.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘And what did you learn while you were away?’

  ‘That I must avoid pain and get as much happiness as I can.’

  IdrisPukke gasped with derision. ‘Ridiculous.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘I do indeed. Consider a healthy young person, every muscle and sinew strong and supple. Except for one thing – he has a toothache. Does he rejoice in his strength and take pleasure in the overwhelming multiform wonderfulness of his young body, even if only a tiny fraction of it is hurting? No, he does not. He thinks only of the dreadful pain in his tooth.’

  ‘All he needs to do is get his tooth pulled and then he’ll think he’s in heaven.’

  ‘You have fallen, rather too easily if I may say so, into my trap. Exactly. He feels absolutely the intense pleasure of the absence of suffering not the pleasure that all the other bits and pieces of his body give him.’

  ‘I’m sick to the back teeth of being miserable. I’ve had more than my portion. Look at me. You can’t say otherwise.’

  ‘Yes, I can. In this paradise that you’ve decided to believe in as your ultimate goal everything comes to you without much trouble and the turkeys fly around ready-roasted – but what would become of people even much less troublesome than you in such a happy place? Even the most pleasant-natured person would die of boredom or hang themselves or get into a fight and kill or be killed by someone who is even more driven to madness by the lack of struggle. Struggle has made us what we are and has suited us to the nature of things so that no other existence is possible. You might as well take a fish out of the sea and encourage it to fly.’

  ‘As usual you try to make out I’m saying something stupid so you can win the argument. I don’t expect a rose garden. God knows, just better than this – a bit less pain and a bit more beer and skittles.’

  ‘I understand you’ve had some hard rain in your life. All I can say is that you’re mistaken in thinking that more pleasure is the answer. The truth is, no matter what people think, pleasure has little hold over us. And if you disagree, consider the pleasure and pain of two animals, one being eaten by the other. The one doing the eating feels pleasure but that pleasure is soon forgotten as hunger, as it always does, returns. Consider in contrast the feelings of suffering of the animal being eaten – they are experiencing something of quite another order. Pain is not the opposite of pleasure – it is something altogether different.’

  ‘Have you been saving that up for my return?’

  ‘If you mean to ask me whether I just happened to have such thoughts as you just happened to say something more than usually stupid, of course not. I have thought very carefully about everything I have to say. Only inferior minds speak or write in order to discover what they think.’

  Their pleasant argument was interrupted by the noisy arrival of Cadbury, quarrelling with the guard outside and demanding to see Cale. Once inside he was to the point.

  ‘Do you think they’re still alive?’

  ‘Possibly. Probably not.’

  ‘Why’s he doing this?’ said IdrisPukke.

  ‘Kitty doesn’t take to people acting against his interests, especially if he’s been paying them. He has a lot to lose if this war starts now. “Don’t touch me” is his motto and he’ll do what’s needed to make it stick.’

  ‘It’s not two weeks since he went to so much trouble to save my life – now this.’

  ‘Your value has fallen,’ replied Cadbury. ‘He was not impressed by the account given of your fight with the late Trevors.’

  ‘Your account, you mean,’ said IdrisPukke.

  ‘Kitty the Hare pays my wages. I don’t owe Thomas Cale anything.’

  ‘So why are you here?’ asked Cale.

  ‘A question I’ve yet to answer to my own satisfaction. It can’t be redemption. Who could make amends in the eyes of God by saving you?’

  But Cale wasn’t listening.

  ‘If I need something to raise my price,’ he said at last, ‘what does Kitty want?’

  ‘Not money. He’s got money. Power – give him the power to protect what he already has.’

  ‘Meaning?’ said IdrisPukke.

  ‘What do you know that he doesn’t? Sorry – time I wasn’t here. Kitty’s going to want my head on a stick when he finds out what I’ve done.’

  He was at the door and almost gone.

  ‘How do I get in?’ asked Cale.

  Cadbury looked at him.

  ‘You don’t. You so much as knock on his front door too loudly and they’ll tab you in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.’

  ‘How many guards?’

  ‘Fifteen, give or take. But all the doors are iron plate – the wood on either side is just veneer. Every door would take a dozen men an hour to get through. But you won’t have an hour. He’s taken against those boys and he won’t give them up without a bung – and a bloody big one too.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Cale. ‘I owe you.’

  ‘You already owe me and look where that’s got me.’

  When Cadbury had gone, Cale sat down and looked at IdrisPukke for some time.

  ‘It wouldn’t matter,’ said IdrisPukke at last, ‘even if I did know something big enough, I couldn’t tell you if my life depended on it.’

  ‘I thought you cared for Henri.’

  ‘I care for Kleist as well, even if you don’t. I know what affection is. There are, I admit it, things I know. But I can’t put them in the hands of someone like Kitty, not if they were my own sons.’

  ‘That’s easy enough to say.’

  ‘I suppose it is. I can’t help you. I’m sorry.’

  Within fifteen minutes Cale was in his new lodgings in the Embassy of the Hanse and putting the crush on Riba’s husband.

  ‘I don’t have time to be ladylike about this: I saved your wife at the pretty certain cost of my own life. Now it’s time to settle up.’

  ‘Have you discussed this with Riba?’

  ‘No, but I will, if you like.’

  ‘I’m not just Riba’s husband. The lives of many thousands – more – depend on me.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘I’ll come with you and we’ll try to get your friends out together. My life is not the issue here.’

  Cale almost said something deeply offensive. ‘It wouldn’t matter if I had two hundred like you. I know force. Force isn’t going to do it. He wants what you know.’

  ‘I can’t.’ It was as agonized a refusal as Cale had ever heard. This was good.

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You don’t have to tell him what you really know, you just have to tell him what you might know.’

  ‘I’m being obtuse, I realize. Could you plod a little more?’

  Cale closed his eyes, his irritation plain.

  ‘You must have thought about all the different stuff you could do in the face of the threat from the Redeemers, right?’

  ‘Explored alternative responses?’

  ‘Yes. That. I don’t want to know what you’ve decided. Don’t tell me. I don’t care. I just want one of the choices you didn’t make, whatever it is, and all the detail written down.’

  A long pause.

  ‘I can’t write anything down. If it got out the Hanse could be ruined.’

  It was not easy for Cale to avoid picking up the handsome ornament on th
e table next to him and throwing it at the wall. His head hurt and he thought he was probably going to die in the next few hours.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he said, ‘Kitty the Hare could eat you up and spit you out and a dozen more like you. He’s not going to accept my word for anything. He knows I’m a lying little shit, all right?’

  ‘Putting a lie in writing is as bad as telling the truth. It will get out – and if it’s written down people will believe it. I can’t.’

  Now Cale’s head was throbbing as if it were expanding and contracting by a couple of inches with each breath.

  ‘What if I promise I’ll see it’s destroyed?’

  ‘How can you be certain?’

  ‘I’m giving you the word of someone who prevented your wife from being paunched while she was still alive – you ungrateful fuck.’ He looked at Wittenberg and decided he had nothing to lose. ‘And I’d have to tell Riba that you refused to help the three people who saved her life – even when one of them promised to keep you out of it.’

  ‘A particularly ugly threat, if I may say so – but I suppose you’re desperate.’

  ‘I’m an ugly sort of person.’

  ‘At any rate you are a very violent one.’

  ‘Luckily for your wife.’

  ‘But you’re very sick. Your skill in moving armies isn’t of much use if you’ve left those armies behind. Ugly or violent, you’re now ordinary. I can’t help you in this, no matter what my personal obligations are. Leave my house by midday tomorrow, if you wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Actually I do mind.’

  ‘Leave it anyway.’

  Cale went to his room, took out one of the small packets of Phedra and Morphine, tapped the tiny amount of white powder onto the back of his hand, put one finger to his left nostril, bent down and took a huge snort. He called out in pain; it was as if a packet of pins and needles had exploded in his head. The sensation took a minute to fade and once he had wiped the tears from his eyes he began to feel better. Then very much better. Then better than he had ever felt: sharp, clear and strong. On his way out he passed Riba. ‘You’ve been talking to Arthur,’ she said.