The Beating of His Wings

by Paul Hoffman

  On the bandstand a dozen musicians played ‘I’ve Got a Luverly Bunch of Coconuts’, that spring’s most popular song. A group of girls of about the same age as the boys scolded Cale and took the cake away and began feeding the boy with the bandaged hands as if he was a baby. And he loved it.

  ‘What happened to your poor hands?’ said one of them, a wayward-looking redhead.

  ‘He fell off his horse,’ said Cale. ‘Drunk.’

  ‘Don’t listen to him,’ said Vague Henri. ‘I did it saving a small puppy from drowning.’

  More giggles at this – a lovely sound, like running water.

  For ten minutes he flirted with the girls, nibbling their fingers as they fed him so they told him off for biting, though not the girl with red hair who let him suck the thick white cream off her middle finger for much too long while her friends chattered like starlings and gasped delightedly at her shocking behaviour. Cale sat in the sun at the other end of the bench, looked at by two of the girls who wouldn’t have minded feeding him something more than cake if they’d only had the encouragement. Cale lapped it all up: the warm sun, the pretty girls and his friend’s pleasure. But it was as if it were a scene only to be observed, not in itself to do with him. He didn’t even notice the girls looking at him.

  Eventually a responsible adult came and rounded the girls up and took them away.

  ‘We’re often here,’ they said. ‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’

  ‘Odd,’ said Vague Henri, ‘a couple of days ago it was the deep six and now it’s girls and cake.’

  ‘What’ll you remember best?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Pain and suffering or girls and cake? What’ll you remember best a year from now?’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘IdrisPukke said pain was much more than pleasure – that you remembered it more. If you were a python eating a pig, it’d be a bit pleasurable for the python but mighty nasty for the pig. And that’s life, he said. So you should know, having had both in a week. Pain and suffering or girls and cake?’

  ‘Why just me?’ said Vague Henri. ‘Weren’t you shitting yourself before you killed Kitty?’

  ‘Me? Not me. I’m your swashbuckling hero-type person. I’m not afraid of anything.’

  They both started giggling at this, not unlike the girls who’d been there a few minutes before and who knew nothing about pain and suffering – although, of course, you could never tell just by looking at someone.

  ‘Me? I’m for girls and cake,’ said Vague Henri. ‘You?’

  ‘Pain and suffering.’

  They both started laughing again.

  ‘Sounds barn owl to me,’ said Vague Henri.

  For the next few days they tried cheering up Kleist but he refused to be made any happier. Eventually Cale gave him tea from his daily supply of Chase-Devil given him by Sister Wray and hoped that would bring him round. It didn’t seem to do much other than make him feel sick.

  A few days later Cale and Vague Henri went off to find the outdragger who’d picked up the pair from Kitty’s and taken them home.

  ‘My friend here wanted to thank you personally,’ said Cale when they tracked him down.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Vague Henri.

  The man looked at him, not hostile but certainly not grateful.

  Cale gave him the rest of the money he’d promised and another five dollars on top.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ said the outdragger to Vague Henri, clearly indifferent to what he thought one way or the other.

  ‘You probably saved our lives,’ said Vague Henri, awkward and irritated by the outdragger’s refusal to be grateful for his gratitude.

  ‘Fifteen dollars?’ said the outdragger. ‘Your lives aren’t worth much, are they?’

  Vague Henri stared at him then gave him another ten dollars, all he had on him. He waited for some sign of appreciation but the outdragger made no acknowledgement beyond putting the money in a purse he took from his pocket. It was pulled tight by a cord from which hung a small iron gibbet dangling a tiny Hanged Redeemer. Antagonists of whatever kind did not approve of these holy gibbets. Everybody was suspicious of the Tinkers whose own version of the faith went back to before the great split.

  ‘Let me give you some advice,’ said Vague Henri, not at all awkward any more, ‘worth more than ten dollars. Put away the holy gibbet there and don’t bring it out until the conversion of the Masons.’ The Redeemers believed the Masons to be the most blasphemous of all religions and that their conversion would take place at the end of time.

  Cale’s interest was elsewhere. ‘Tell me about your cart,’ he said, looking at the handcart Kleist and Vague Henri had been hauled away in.

  For the first time since they’d arrived, Cale’s question seemed to inspire enthusiasm. The tinker was clearly proud of his barrow. The design, he said, was as old as the outdraggers themselves but he’d made many improvements over the years; and always, he pointed out resentfully, to the disapproval of other outdraggers.

  ‘They drop dead while they’re still young pushing the porky hulks of the Gorges that killed their fathers and their grandfathers before them. I made this cart from a pile of bamboo scaffolding I found in the dump. Got the idea for the springs from a bouncy horse I saw at a carnival. Cost me two dollars to get it made up.’ Cale and the outdragger talked about the cart and everything its lightness and mobility allowed him to do in the way of delivering heavier loads up steeper streets. Why? thought Vague Henri.

  ‘What a stink,’ said Vague Henri, as they walked away into the city.

  ‘You’ve got very swanky for someone whose idea of heaven used to be a nice juicy rat.’

  ‘What was that all about then, the cart?’

  ‘I’m interested in how things work. An ignorant man from ignorant people that outdragger – but clever. Interesting bloke.’

  When they got back to their lodgings, an irritated IdrisPukke was waiting for them along with Cadbury and Deidre Plunkett who, with her scarlet lips and rouged cheeks, looked like nothing on God’s earth.

  ‘Punctuality is the politeness of kings,’ said IdrisPukke to Cale. ‘Let alone someone who was sold for sixpence.’

  ‘We were held up. Hello, Deidre. Are you well?’

  ‘Nothing shall be well with the wicked.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘Speaking of the wicked, Deidre,’ said Cadbury, ‘would you mind keeping an eye out for anyone behaving oddly?’ She left silently.

  ‘She’s lovely,’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘Hold your tongue, you little twerp,’ replied Cadbury. ‘We’ve come from Kitty the Hare’s office.’

  Cale nodded.

  ‘IdrisPukke tells me you’re always complaining about your bad luck – but I have to say if you’d asked me what your chances were of getting out alive from your interview with Kitty I’d have said about as thin as a homeopathic soup made from the shadow of a pigeon that’d died of starvation.’

  ‘I don’t know what homeopathic means.’

  ‘In this instance, it means not worth the steam off a bucket of piss.’

  ‘I’ll try to remember – good word, homeopathic.’

  ‘I don’t have time for this,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘Whatever people thought of Kitty they underestimated him. His loan books are a maze with an exit in every treasury this side of the Great Wall of China. They didn’t know Kitty was behind them – I’ve counted more than twenty front men as it is. Most of them should have known better than to deal with someone like Kitty. My guess is that he was blackmailing them. But you never know with splendid financiers what they’ll do for even more money.’

  ‘I don’t complain about my bad luck,’ said Cale.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ replied IdrisPukke. ‘At any rate, a lot of people owe Kitty a lot of money. Now, thanks to you, we’ve inherited their obligations to pay up.’

  ‘What if they don’t want to? Kitty’s dead, after all.’

  ‘But, as Cadbury has pointed out, ex
acting payment from Kitty’s debtors is very much his line of work.’

  ‘What’s my share?’

  ‘We thought a tenth,’ said Cadbury.

  ‘He kills Kitty and you get nine-tenths? Seems the wrong way round to me,’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘You know a lot do you, you ungrateful young pup, about running a criminal enterprise? You’re both, I’m sure, deeply knowledgeable about trading in options and futures in the collateralization of debt and what to do when an entire country threatens to default.’

  ‘No,’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘Then shut up.’ IdrisPukke turned to Cale. ‘Do you think I’d steal from you or do you a bad turn?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So we’re agreed. Ten per cent. You’ll be very rich if Cadbury is telling the truth, or half the truth.’

  ‘Now you’ve hurt my feelings,’ said Cadbury.

  ‘You know those boys Kitty had in Memphis? Did he bring them here?’

  ‘Nothing to do with me, that stuff.’

  ‘It is now. I want you to find them and let them go. Give them fifty dollars each.’

  ‘Fifty dollars for a rent boy?’

  Cadbury could see immediately that Cale was not in the mood to be disagreed with. ‘All right, I’ll see to it but it’ll come out of your share.’ But he couldn’t leave it. ‘You can’t do anything for them. Not now. This is what they’re used to. They’ll spend the money and end up with Peanut Butter or Butt-Naked. They’ll be worse off than they were with Kitty. Either leave them as they are or take care of them.’

  ‘Do I look like somebody’s mother? The four of us did all right. Riba’s practically the Queen of the Russians. And now the three of us are rich. Give them the money and let them go. Then it’s up to them.’

  On his way home, Cadbury thought about what Cale wanted. What he said about Riba was true enough. Cadbury had seen her looking gorgeous at some social thrash Kitty had sent him to, to have a word with some Fauntleroy or other who was late with his payments and who had important information Kitty wanted, much more important than the piffling three thousand that was owed. He’d seen Riba at high table. She was something to look at in her red gown, hair piled up like a loaf. But as to Cale and the others being all right, you just had to look at the state of them.

  18

  Vague Henri and Cale had made one further condition, of a kind: Cadbury had to kill the two men who had beaten the boys so badly. Cadbury was going to do this anyway because he’d been told they were looking for a chance to take over Kitty’s operation themselves, but it wouldn’t do any harm to let Cale think he’d conceded something.

  ‘It’ll have to be quick,’ he told the three boys. ‘I only torture people when I really need to know something: if you want them to suffer you must do it yourself.’

  Quick would be all right, they said.

  That night the two men were tied up and when they demanded to know what would happen to them Cadbury said, ‘You must die and not live.’ The next day, along with Kitty the Hare, their bodies were taken to be buried in the rubbish tips at Oxyrinchus.

  Meanwhile, in the civilized places a few hundred yards away, Vipond was in the ascendant. Now that he was in possession of Kitty’s red books, and the money secrets inside them, the doors that were once closed to him were now opening.

  Conn Materazzi, whose cold disdain for the King made him ever more agreeable in his admirer’s adoring eyes, was now in command of ten thousand household Switzers, soldiers of considerable skill and reputation. He was opposed in his rise by the Swiss chancellor, Bose Ikard, but not because of his youth and inexperience. In fact, such things were last of all on his mind: the alternative to Conn could only be drawn from the Swiss aristocracy, who may have been older but were generally not very bright and had considerably less military training than the young man. What alarmed Ikard was the influence this gave to Vipond and his no less dangerous half-brother. He feared any power moving into their hands because all that concerned them was what was good for the self-serving war-mongering Materazzi and not what was good for anyone else. Vipond would have understood his fears but would have pointed out that for the foreseeable future their mutual interests lay in opposing the Redeemers. But Ikard feared war more than anything while Vipond thought it was inevitable.

  In fact Bose Ikard and Vipond, and even IdrisPukke, were not so different, in that they were experienced enough to be suspicious of decisive action in war or anything else. Life had taught them to spin everything out until the last minute, then appear to agree to some major concession and then, when all seemed to be decided, find some way to spin things out again.

  ‘The trouble with decisive agreement, just as with decisive battles,’ lectured Vipond to Cale, ‘is that they decide things and logic dictates that there must be an extremely good chance of them being decided against you. When anyone talks to me about a decisive battle I’m inclined to have him locked up. They’re an easy solution and easy solutions are usually wrong. Assassinations, for example, never change history – not really.’

  ‘The Two Trevors tried to assassinate me at the Priory. It would have changed things if they had,’ said Cale.

  ‘You must take a more nuanced view. What would it have changed?’

  ‘Well, Kitty the Hare would still be alive and you wouldn’t have his money and his secrets.’

  ‘I don’t consider Kitty’s death to have been an assassination – by which I mean the pursuit of impersonal political ends by an act of personal violence. Kitty’s death was just common murder. If you want to make something of yourself you must stop slaughtering people, or at least stop slaughtering them for purely private reasons.’

  Cale was always reluctant not to have the last word with anyone, even Vipond – but his head ached and he was tired.

  ‘Leave the boy alone, he’s not well,’ said IdrisPukke.

  ‘What do you mean? The boy knows I’m only giving him the benefit of my experience.’ He smiled at Cale. ‘Pearls beyond price.’ Cale smiled back despite himself.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about a difficult matter: Conn Materazzi won’t have you on his staff.’

  A puzzled silence from Cale. ‘Never crossed my mind he would.’

  ‘His dislike of you is quite understandable,’ said Vipond. ‘Nearly everyone takes exception to you.’

  ‘He dislikes me even more since he was in my debt,’ said Cale, referring to his long regretted rescue of Conn from the crushed and gasping piles of the dead at Silbury Hill.

  ‘He’s grown up a good deal since then. Transformed, I’d say. But he won’t be doing with you at any price. We need you to be advising him and very badly. But he’s adamant against even my considerable temper when I don’t get my own way on something so important. Why?’

  ‘No idea. Ask him.’

  ‘I have.’

  Cale sat in silence.

  ‘Moving on,’ continued Vipond, after a moment. ‘On balance, we’ve decided not to tell anyone about the likelihood of the Redeemers beginning their attack through the Arnhemland desert.’

  ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘I believe you. But the problem is that if we warn the Axis and they do something about it by reinforcing the border next to the Maginot Line the Redeemers will have to re-think everything. If I understand you correctly,’ he did, this was merely flattery, ‘the Redeemers’ entire strategy for the war depends on a swift breakthrough there.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘If that entry is blocked, they’ll have to think again.’

  ‘Yes’

  ‘Would you say a long delay?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Perhaps another year if they must miss the summer and autumn. They won’t attack in the winter.’

  ‘They probably won’t.’

  ‘If you say so. But you agree that blocking Arnhemland now will probably delay the war for a year?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Well, we can’t afford that. By we I mean the Materaz
zi and you.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Bose Ikard is pouring plausible but false hope into the ear of the King. He’s saying that the Axis in general and the Swiss in particular are sealed up tight against Bosco, that either the mountains or the Maginot Line will keep him out. He’s telling him the lands the Redeemers have already taken may be considerable but that things are not as alarming as they appear. The territories they have conquered have nothing much in the way of resources worth having and so the trouble of occupying them with Redeemer forces will consume more Redeemer blood and treasure than they can possibly gain from occupying them.’

  ‘He has a point,’ said Cale.

  ‘Indeed he does – but our point is different. If we are to believe you, then Bosco will come because he must, now or later. But if it’s later then we will lose all credibility. It will appear that Ikard is correct – the Redeemers have taken land that’s more trouble than it’s worth and are barred by axis defences from taking any more. Bosco can’t go forward, he can only go back. If we warn them about the attack through Arnhemland it will stop Bosco and it will look as if Ikard is right and we are wrong. We’ll decline into a kind of nothing.’

  ‘So you’re going to let the Redeemers in.’

  ‘Exactly. You disagree?’

  ‘It sounds a bit clever dick to me. But you might be right. I’ll have to think about it.’

  ‘If you have a better idea let me know.’

  ‘I will.’

  But half an hour after he’d left, Cale was pretty sure Vipond was right. The question was what if the Redeemers weren’t held at the Mississippi? What if they crossed over and kept on coming? The mountains that protected them from anyone getting in would be the mountains that stopped anyone from getting out. The only exit was through the Schallenberg Pass and Bosco was ready to shut that tight as a cork in a bottle.

  That evening Vipond and IdrisPukke were trying to browbeat Arbell Materazzi in the same course.