by Adam Roberts
‘As it happens there is,’ he said. ‘Your other option is military service.’
‘I have no military training,’ I said. ‘Before my beheading I was a poet, and I lived a life according to aesthetic and religious parameters. I have never been violent to a single person, never in my life. Though active, as the muscles on my body attest, I created these solely by gymnasium exercise. Not, for instance, by boxing or—’
‘Training is provided as part of military service.’
‘Am I to understand, by what you say,’ I asked cautiously, ‘that you wish to press me into military service?’
‘Press,’ said Bonnard, lingering on the word, ‘is no legal term. No, Jon Cavala. Of course I know you for a poet. I have read your poetry.’
He said this in so disdainful a voice that my writerly pride was smarted, and I could not help saying: ‘It is designed to be sung, rather than read.’
He ignored this. ‘You were a wealthy man.’
This seemed to me a non sequitur. ‘I was,’ I said. ‘But my wealth was my family’s, not my own. It has now been removed from me. I have no money except some poor coins in my wallet, and even that has been taken away.’
‘It will be returned to you upon your release, at whatever date that might be. I ask after your wealth because, in my experience, it is those who were formerly wealthy who are the most ignorant about the usual fates of the headless. Poor people will likely meet and know at least some headless individuals. The rich not so.’
‘You are saying that I am an ignorant man.’
‘I say that you are relatively ignorant of the paths taken by many headless. Otherwise you would know that enlisting in the military is a common choice for headless of both genders.’
‘I discussed this very possibility with my fellow headless,’ I said primly. ‘Upon our journey here, to Cainon. A journey completed, as you know, upon foot, since we lacked the money to travel any other way.’
‘And in your discussions of this possibility,’ said Bonnard, ‘had you decided to follow this path?’
‘Not I.’
‘You had alternate plans?’
‘None of any precision. I hoped, I think, to take work here in Cainon.’
‘Not in Doué?’
If I had still possessed a face I would have blushed. I could feel the skin of my chest warming. ‘We all three resolved to leave that city, since it had been the location of our crimes. We did not wish to’ - and I paused as I spoke this sentence - ‘embarrass our victims, or the families of our victims, with our presence.’
‘How strange then,’ said Bonnard, ‘that you have come to the very city to which your victim has removed herself?’
I am ashamed to say that, at this point, I lied to the chevaler. ‘I was not aware that the Benets lived in this city.’
‘Indeed ?’
‘I mean,’ I said, compounding my lie, ‘I knew that Bernardise’s family owned estates in the north of the country. But I did not know exactly where.’ Then, feeling the lie too transparent, I sought to plaster over it with more lies, although of course by doing so I merely made the lie more patent. ‘I believed that she planned to continue living in Doué. I sought only to avoid her company.’
‘I do not believe you,’ said the policeman.
My heart was scuttling now as if trying to knock through my ribs and flee the scene. It was ashamed at my mendacity. There is no sensation so uncomfortable as being discovered in a lie. ‘I am sorry that you do not,’ I said.
‘My belief is that you came to Cainon specifically to be near the young Chère, Bernardise Benet.’
‘I cannot help what you believe,’ I said.
‘It is a common thing amongst rapists, this yearning to revisit their victims.’
I flinched. I was sweating. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘use that revolting word with care. If you have read the accounts of my case, then you must know—’
‘Please, let us have no cant here,’ he said. ‘I have many decades experience with criminals of your type. They divide, I may say with authority, into three sorts. The first, and most dangerous, is the type who knows what he has done, and relishes in it, for he specifically wishes hurt and death upon all people, and all women in particular. He makes no excuse for his action because he knows that there is no excuse. You do not belong in this type.’
‘I am glad you say so.’
‘The second type is bad, but not as bad. He does make excuse for his action, but his excuse is that women deserve such treatment, that they are prostitutes or criminals themselves, they “asked for it”, they had it coming. This sort of criminal believes, or he tries to make himself believe, that violence is the proper way of dealing with women.’
‘I do not see how they differ from the first type you mention.’
‘Oh, the first type does not bother itself with justifications of any kind. But then there is the third type, the Romantic criminal. He is self-deluding, and in a way the most dangerous and pitiable type, for he does not even realise that he has committed a crime. Instead he folds the violence into an invented category of his own, passion, and he constructs an elaborate personal mythology in which it is better to be passionate than law-abiding or devout, in which to indulge in sexual congress is equivalent to love, and moreover that this base, self-gratifying love is the supreme virtue.’
‘There may be a fourth type,’ I said, ‘of which you do not speak. It is those who were accused, and perhaps even convicted, of rape, yet who accepted the charge only to save their lovers from suffering at the hands of the law.’
‘A very romantic notion,’ said Bonnard. ‘But not a very convincing one. In my many decades as a policeman, and with experience of scores of rapists who have claimed this as their justification, I have - genuinely, truly - only encountered this type once. And I am not talking about my acquaintance with yourself, Sieur Cavala.’ He smiled coldly. ‘But I am forgetting,’ he said, although clearly he had done no such thing, ‘that you prefer to deny yourself the honorific, believing yourself unworthy of it. An acutely romantic affectation, Jon Cavala.’
I sat very still. ‘You wish me to enlist?’
‘It is useful to a policeman, such as myself,’ he said, settling himself back in his chair with the air of somebody happy to have guaranteed somebody’s complete attention. ‘It is useful to establish for himself such leverages and bargaining items as he may, for dealing with such circumstances as present themselves as possible threats to the law. In this case, Jon Cavala, I do not especially blame you for attempting to catch a glimpse of, or perhaps even wishing to meet and talk to, your victim. Do not misunderstand me. I do blame you for your crime, for which I consider beheading barely punishment enough. But yours is a common enough psychological profile, a post-traumatic transference of emotional urgency and yearning onto the object of your previous desire. But although I understand your motivations I cannot permit them to come to pass. The law does not allow me simply to expel any headless from the city, much as I might welcome such powers. But the law does allow me to hold you for trial on this matter of the stolen eye stalk, for as long as it may take to arrange the trial. And, after that, to hold you on whatever other infraction you commit.’
‘I will commit none,’ I said proudly, but even as I spoke I remembered that I had resolved to commit murder and perjury. But that, I told myself, was in the cause of a greater justice.
‘That will prove harder than you think, given my very exact understanding of the law. But why should you put yourself through this difficulty and privation? Take another path. Enlist in the army.’
‘I could promise to leave the city,’ I said, thinking of the necessity of keeping my liberty to the extent of locating Mark Pol.
‘I would not trust your promise. Nor could I enforce such a promise in a court, should you elect to stay. No, the choice is starker than that. You must enlist, or you must return to the cells.’
‘Your zeal in persecuting me,’ I said, ‘though energetic, is misplac
ed.’
‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘Were my zeal truly energetic, it would result in your execution. I regret I am unable to ensure that. But perhaps, if you join the army, you will be sent into a combat zone and killed.’
‘How charitable!’ I said.
‘Do you deserve charity?’ He asked this thoughtfully, as if it were more than a rhetorical question. ‘When we consider what you have done once, and most possibly twice?’
‘You cannot really believe I assaulted Siuzan Delage!’ I cried. ‘I did not - indeed I am innocent of this crime!’
‘So you have asserted twice before.’
‘My words carry no weight with you.’
‘They do not.’
‘Surely you can see, given the many years of wisdom of which you have just been speaking - surely you can see that Mark Pol Treherne presents a far graver danger to others than I?’
‘Surely I can see this?’ Bonnard shook his head slowly. ‘Indeed not. Certainly Sieur Treherne is proud, after the manner of the petty-proud; and he is vain; and he is quarrelsome. But he is not, I think, capable of very great evil, or premeditated harm.’
‘You do not know him as do I,’ I said.
‘You do not know him at all,’ he retorted.
I struggled, inwardly, to find a way of communicating to this strict and literalist policeman the fact that I would gladly confess to the assault upon Siuzan Delage if only Mark Pol were prevented from harming others. Force him to enlist in the army, and I would go to my death happily to save Siuzan! But honest haggling over this matter was out of the question.
I could see no way out. ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I agree to enlist.’
‘Wise,’ said Bonnard, getting to his feet.
‘What now?’
‘Collect your belongings from the captain, in the adjacent room,’ he said.
‘And the charge of theft?’
‘The value of the stolen object, being less than one totale, falls at the discretion of the presiding officer in charge of the case. I shall advise Sieur Treherne to litigate under civil legislation to recover the item, or its value plus legal costs. Which is to say, I shall so advise him if and when he applies to me. Which I do not expect him to do any time soon.’
‘I am free to go?’
‘You are free to go into the military.’ He walked round the bar and smoothly out of the room. Those, indeed, were the last words he spoke to me at that time.
Somewhat disoriented, I came through into the central space and tried to identify which of the several policemen there was the captain from whom I might collect my belongings.
In so far as I had a plan, it was to search for Mark Pol, to kill him, and thereafter to return to the police building. I assumed that there would be enough time in between my discharge from the station and my supposed enlistment in the military - which I by no means intended to follow through - in order to accomplish this.
But I had not reckoned on the rapidity with which the police can funnel convicted men and women into the army. I asked two policemen before discovering which was the captain, and after a second DNA test to confirm my identity I was given my wallet back, and also a small blue plastic object with a plastic knuckle at one end, like a fingerbone from a plastic robot. It took me a moment to realise what this was.
‘This does not belong to me,’ I told the captain.
His was a large, wide, long face, very flat on the front, although the skull was rounded and indeed rather knobbled behind. His eyes were like cuts in a drumskin, pulled tight over cheekbones large as knees; and his lips - according to my unreliable vision software - were a purply colour, almost black, set in lemon-coloured skin. His eyes, black as blackberries, peered at me from between their tight lids. He looked at his datascreen. ‘My instructions are that it is to be given to you,’ he said.
‘But it does not belong to me.’
Again the captain consulted the datascreen. ‘There is a note, personally inserted by Chevaler Bonnard,’ he said, ‘that insists you be given the item.’
‘And if I refuse to take it?’
The captain stared at me, saying nothing, and I picked up the eye stalk and placed it in my pocket. ‘Goodbye,’ I said.
‘They will be here soon,’ the captain said. ‘Perhaps you would like to sit down until they arrive?’
‘My understanding,’ I said, ‘having just come from an interview with Chevaler Bonnard himself, is that I am free to go.’
‘The file, on this very datascreen, states,’ said the captain in a dogged voice, ‘that you are to enlist in the military.’
‘Such was my agreement with the chevaler,’ I concurred. ‘I fully intend to enlist at the earliest opportunity.’
‘Then you will be pleased to hear that they will soon be here.’
‘By earliest opportunity,’ I clarified, ‘I meant tomorrow morning.’
The captain unhooked his chiller and rested it on the desk between us, leaving his right thumb draped over the shaft of it.
I sat down. Ten minutes later (I counted off every minute by the large oval clock over the main entrance) two individuals, a man and a woman, both headed, both in the dark blue military uniform of the Pluse Defence League, stepped smartly in. My opportunity for escape, if ever it had existed, was now gone.
PART TWO
Of Revenge
One
During my induction into the military I was concerned with only one thing: to escape from the compound in Cainon. I planned to discover whatever place Mark Pol had gone to, to go there and kill him, and afterwards to return to the police building where I could confess and save Siuzan’s head. This was the means by which I would atone for my failings: for my craven failure to confess when Bonnard gave me that opportunity. For failing to protect Siuzan from Mark Pol on the journey itself. For lusting after her in my own mind, to my very great shame. Blood would atone; I would take Mark Pol’s and give my own.
I hope I do not shock you with the violence of my ambition. It is true that I planned a murder, but I did it without venom, without heat, as a purely judicial killing. Your good opinion is important to me, and so I hope you understand my motivations. Nobody should be prepared to kill, I believe, unless they are at once prepared also to die. The one life must balance the other. Nobody should kill with hatred in their hearts. Now this was a principle which, though I believe it true, made my decision difficult; because, of course, I had no love for Mark Pol. But my thoughts were not on personal revenge; they were on the necessity of this murder, and the countless women I would save in the future from his depredations.
There is another consideration. My thoughts were in truth focused on practical, rather than ethical, matters. I needed to provide myself with enough time before enlisting in the army to achieve my goal. I needed to find Mark Pol, and then execute him in some manner although I had no gun or knife. I pondered these matters, and thinking about them left me with no time to consider the rightness or wrongness of my aim.
I walked meekly enough behind the two PDL officers, through the main entrance of the police building, down the ramp, and to a waiting military van - its wheels, though narrow, as tall as the chassis and angled slightly at an upwards taper.
It was a bright morning. I had lost track of time inside the police cell. The sky was blue.
‘Where do we go?’ I asked.
The man replied: ‘You must address me as “Superior”.’
‘My apologies, Superior. I have no previous experience of the army . . .’
‘I am not interested in your experience,’ said the man abruptly.
I climbed into the back of the van, and sat myself meekly down. The two PDL officers sat, one on either side of me. My thoughts chiefly turned upon the possibility of escape, of slipping away. I wondered how long I would be able to absent myself before being noticed. In this my lack of experience of the military life was a handicap; for I was vague as to how security would be enforced at camp.
The truck rolled into
motion. ‘Superior,’ I said, addressing myself to the man. ‘Should I address you by your name, or will “Superior” by itself suffice?’
‘There is no need for names,’ he responded curtly.
‘Very well, Superior. Thank you, Superior. Superior - I have a question.’
He sighed briefly, an aggressive noise. ‘What?’
The woman interjected, ‘You’d be better to lose this habit of questioning, ’ she said. ‘There’s no place for that in the military.’
‘Nevertheless, Superior,’ I said. ‘Am I to sleep in the camp tonight?’
For a while it seemed as if he would not reply. Then he said, in an impatient voice, ‘The army is your home now,’ and turned his face away.
