The Last Four Things tlhogt-2

by Hoffman, Paul

  ‘Are you all right, son?’ But he did not have the strength to reply. Afterwards he could not remember how he made it back to his room, not even unlocking the door, only his lying on the bed gasping like a fish drowning on dry land. And then it came for him – the earthquake in his guts, a shaking and an avalanche of collapse and burst. His inside world gave way of flesh and soul together, hideous pain of tears and eruption. He rushed towards the jakes and retched and retched and nothing came but so violent it was as if his soul was trying to leave his bowels and belly while he was still alive. And so it went on for hour after hour. And then he went back to bed and wept but not like any child or man and nothing to do with release, and then when he thought, whatever thinking was, that bellowing in tearless pain would never stop, that was when he began to laugh over and over and for hours on end. And laughing was how Vague Henri found him just before dawn, still laughing, weeping and retching.

  31

  For a week they kept him in his room but he did not improve. He would sleep for twelve hours or more but wake more exhausted and black-eyed and white-lipped with weariness than when he went to sleep. There would be a pause for three hours during which he would lie on his side, knees bent, and then the retching would begin – a hideous sound more like some great animal trying to expel some poisonous thing it had eaten. After a few days the terrible laughter stopped – no relief to Cale, only to those who had to listen to it. Cale kept retching and such tears as he wept clearly gave him no ease or peace. Soon the tears stopped too. But he kept on retching though never being sick and even though he ate and hungrily enough. After that week it settled into a dreadful pattern: hours of sleep that gave no rest, eating hungrily, then the spasms lasting for an hour, then rest in silence, another attack, more food and then an exhausted sleep. Then the cycle would begin again.

  They brought doctors who prescribed noxious substances at enormous cost that Cale refused to take. Then finally, in desperation, they brought in John Bradmore at Vague Henri’s suggestion.

  He sat with Cale for an hour or two and tried him with some honey mixed with wine and opium, which seemed to make him calmer until, for the first time, he threw the lot up in one great spew all over the bedroom floor.

  Later IdrisPukke, Vipond and Vague Henri talked with Bradmore outside.

  ‘Other than to point out he’s horribly sick I can find nothing wrong. From what you say he gets neither worse nor better. If you can pay him I would try and fetch Robert of Salerno.’

  ‘Salerno is five hundred miles away.’

  ‘But the money is here. He treats the mad girls of the aristocracy and merchants of Spanish Leeds, God knows there are enough of them.’

  ‘He’s not a girl.’

  ‘Neither is he sick in any way that I can treat. Robert of Salerno is an irritation and a pest, full of himself, but he’s had good results with people who are sick in the head.’

  ‘Bradmore is right,’ said Robert of Salerno, the next day standing in the same corridor. ‘This is well outside his understanding. There’ll be no ingenious devices here.’

  ‘Thank you. The point?’

  Robert of Salerno with a hundred dollars of Kitty the Hare’s money in his pocket was not as easy to insult as was normally the case – normally it was very easy indeed.

  ‘Do you know where you can find the best picture of the human soul?’

  ‘I am sure you’ll tell me.’

  ‘For a hundred dollars I would tell anyone. The best picture of the human soul, Mr IdrisPukke, is the human body. The soul has its kidneys and its liver, its stomach, its arms and legs. And it has disease of every limb and organ too: there are different fevers of the soul as there are scarlet fevers of the body, yellow fevers; for every rash that degrades the skin there is one for the will, the soul has its hard abscesses and its weeping ones; there are many ulcers of the mind, cancers of the passions.’

  ‘We understand,’ said Vipond. ‘The boy?’

  ‘You know, I think, as well as I do what’s wrong with him. According to this young man’ – he gestured at Vague Henri – ‘you are familiar with his history. He’s been treated like a dog all his life, moiled, beaten, fed bad food by wicked men. He has seen and done horrible things.’

  ‘Why hasn’t it happened to me?’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘Who’s to say it won’t. I’ve been in cities where bubonic plague has carried away three quarters of the population and left the rest untouched. Who knows the answer to these things?’

  ‘A hundred dollars in pocket says that you should.’

  ‘As my old nurse used to say: “The doctor who can mend this boy isn’t born and his mother’s dead.” Your boy is like one of those mountain trees that’s grown up in the teeth of the wind. This is his shape and you can’t unbend him into another.’

  ‘So what are we to do now? Nothing?’

  Robert of Salerno sighed. ‘Treat him kindly and don’t allow anyone to give him any painful treatments. There are plenty who will offer to make him better by harsh means. Don’t allow it. They will open holes in his skull, keep him in vats of freezing water for a day or feed him drugs that would kill a horse. You would better show your love for him by drowning him in a bucket. I will write a letter to the Sisters of Mercy in Cyprus. People will tell you they are very strange, and they are, but they are good-natured. They help the mad by talk and kindness. They won’t make him any worse.’

  ‘How long do you think it will be before he gets better?’ said Vague Henri.

  Robert of Salerno looked at him and did not reply to the question. ‘Do you want me to make the arrangements?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vipond.

  Robert of Salerno bowed very slightly and was gone.

  At the same time some two hundred miles away in Upper Silesia, Kleist along with twenty-one men between the ages of eighteen and forty-two entered the coal town of Bytom, as grim a dump as any they had ever seen.

  ‘If this is Upper Silesia,’ said Tarleton, ‘what in God’s name is it like in Lower Silesia?’ No one said anything, let alone laughed. They were too full of hopeless hatred. They wanted revenge it was true, but they were crippled by shame and despair at what they had allowed to happen to their wives and children.

  They bought a week’s worth of supplies with the money they had left and stood in the damp main square and talked about what to do next. After half an hour they decided. Four of them wanted to go north and get as far from the Redeemers as the earth would carry them. The remaining twenty-two and Kleist decided to head for Spanish Leeds, where they’d heard, wrongly, an army was being assembled to fight the Redeemers. The four going north took their share of the supplies, shook hands and left. The twenty-two and Kleist went east.

  Two days after they’d left Bytom the widow Kleist, heavily pregnant and thinking herself to be the last survivor of an obscure clan from the Quantock Mountains, made her way though the same square heading for Spanish Leeds, where she hoped her child would be born a citizen of that town and country, where it was said widows were paid a pension by the state and that there was free milk for babies under three years of age.

  *

  It had taken Redeemer Gil some time to learn to take pleasure in his new power, even if he disapproved of himself for enjoying the vast desk with its ornate carvings of the various atrocities commited on the bodies of the faithful, or the speed and obsequiousness of the answer to his bell as he summoned and dismissed men who were often of great substance in Chartres but now demonstrated so obviously the necessity of pleasing him. There were pangs of guilt now and again as there always must be for a Redeemer, but they were less and less frequent, or if not less frequent then less and less sharp. Only a very few months ago Redeemer Warren, the man opposite him listening so gravely and so attentively, would have regarded him as an uncouth member of the Militant, not to be treated with contempt but certainly condescended to. Now he was staring at Gil and horribly thrilled at the responsibility involved in what he was being instructed to undert
ake.

  ‘You’re to bring only the most reticent and trusted into your confidence and few of them, but you are to say nothing of the true identity of the impostor who stole the papacy. They’re only to know that they’re searching out vile women we have reason to suspect might have disguised themselves as clergy. They are to root out the truth of this one way or the other. If it is not the case I must know it. As to the means by which that abomination made her way to Pope I want you to get to the bottom of how it was done. Was it a conspiracy or was this creature acting alone?’

  There was a knock at the door and Monsignor Chadwick entered and with a deferential nod to Warren walked over to Gil and whispered in his ear, ‘The Two Trevors.’ Gil said nothing but Chadwick left, sliding out of the room as if he were on wheels.

  ‘You must excuse me, Redeemer,’ Gil said to Warren. ‘You have questions but there are few answers. Consider what I’ve said and give me your thoughts in a day or two. You’re to say nothing of what you’ve heard until we talk again.’

  Warren stood up, walked to the door in a state of shock and was gone. A minute later there was another knock from a small door on the left of the room. Again it opened and again it was Chadwick. This time he stood aside to allow in two men. One looked like a whippet, the other not just handsome but engaging, his expression warm and good-humoured. Gil gestured them to come forward and for Chadwick to leave.

  ‘Thank you for coming. Sit down.’

  The eel-faced Trevor Lugavoy stretched out his legs in an insolent manner as if to make it clear that he did not mind if he was here or somewhere else. It was the engaging Trevor Kovtun who spoke.

  ‘You want us to bring someone to Death’s attention?’ It was more playful but just as impudent as his companion’s outstretched legs.

  ‘In order to bring about certain prophecies in holy writ it’s necessary for you to martyr someone.’

  They seemed distinctly put out by the idea, although not because of the crime involved.

  ‘We don’t chastise people before we kill them,’ said Trevor Kovtun.

  ‘Yes, we’re not common torturers,’ added Trevor Lugavoy.

  Gil was not about to take any nonsense no matter what their reputation. ‘Fortunately for your fine sensibilities no chastising is necessary. You’ll be very well paid but let me remind you that you’ve had refuge at my say so on Redeemer territory for a good few years.’ The point did not need labouring.

  ‘Who then?’ asked Trevor Lugavoy.

  ‘Thomas Cale.’

  That got their attention – the swagger of the outstretched legs, the insolence of their violent profession diminished satisfyingly enough.

  ‘And for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t want you to bring him to Death’s attention, whatever that means. I want him dead.’

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to my editor Alex Clarke and his insightful and clever notes on the original manuscript.

  ‘Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire’

  Gustav Mahler

  There are many acts of righteous larceny throughout these three books, from Paradise Lost to a shampoo ad from the sixties, from Francis Bacon to a Millwall Football Club chant. Two of Bosco’s speeches in The Last Four Things, on the essential worthlessness of mankind and the lonely greatness of the hangman, are based on essays from the Catholic philosopher Joseph de Maistre.

  There are a number of scenes indebted to the long-forgotten Mary Herbert, particularly Death To The French and The Unhappy Prince. Arthur Schopenhauer and La Rochefoucauld take their usual bow in the observations of IdrisPukke and Vipond. Much of the tactics and the idea behind the episode at Duffer’s Drift come from E. D. Swinton’s imaginative training manual of the Boer War, The Defence of Duffer’s Drift (out of print but available on the web). Lines and half-lines from the King James Bible are everywhere, the beautiful and the ugly. The practical usefulness to me of the Iliad and its descriptions of violence is straightforward. The web in general and YouTube in particular made it possible to use the shouts and cries of men in the middle of battle in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also enabled me to find footage of Saddam Hussein’s denunciations of his soon-to-be-dead rivals during the Ba’ath Party Assembly in 1979, here used during Bosco’s similar strategy at the Congress in Chartres.

  The idea for the Klephts came from John Keegan’s brief but incisive discussion of these impressively unheroic Greek bandits on page ten of A History of Warfare. The details of the operation on Vague Henri follow closely the account by surgeon John Bradmore of his successful attempt to remove an arrow from the face of the fifteen-year-old Prince Henry (later Henry V) in 1403. Anyone who doubts the potential physical strength or tactical ability of adolescents should read an account of Henry’s youthful military campaigns and note that he took this hideous wound in the face early on in the Battle of Shrewsbury, fought ‘hand-to-hand’ for the rest of the day and then led a cavalry charge in the evening which had a major effect on the outcome.

  The harrowing description of the starvation of the Folk that Cale forces Arbell to read aloud comes from A View of the Present State of Ireland by Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene. Spenser is not just responsible for the terrible brilliance of the description of famine, a brilliance that might be expected from someone generally considered to be one of the greatest of all English poets, but also for the view that a policy of genocide through starvation was the only solution to the problem of Ireland. Anyone who believes that it is not possible to write hideous ideas beautifully might like to read the full text. The assumption that someone as noxious as Hitler, a deeply talentless painter, could never by definition be a great artist has to confront this little-known work.

  Cale’s idea for a concentration camp to isolate his opponents from the support of the native population was first carried out during the Boer War with the same, admittedly unintended, consequences.

  Also thanks to Nick Lowndes of Penguin and Mark Handsley for their work on the preparation of the text. As always, Alexandra Hoffman and my agent, Anthony Goff. Anna Swan read the manuscript with the sharpest of eyes. I remain deeply grateful to Kate Burton (née Brotherhood) for placing this book in so many languages.

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