The Beating of His Wings

by Paul Hoffman

  He is clever, then, at avoiding the implications of his delusions of grandeur: in the opinion of great and powerful men he is mighty enough to destroy all the world but this delusion is not his but theirs. When I asked him if he would do such a thing his reply was extremely foul-mouthed but to the effect that he would not. When I asked whether he had the ability to do such a thing he smiled – not pleasantly – and said he had been responsible for the deaths of ten thousand men killed in a single day, so it was only a question of how many thousands and how many days.

  After his recapture by the Redeemer Bosco, his role of Angel of Death to the world was explained to him in detail and he was put to work by his former mentor. This ‘Bosco’ (the new Pope is called Bosco but Thomas Cale clearly likes a big lie) is much hated by Cale although, since buying him for sixpence, training him and then elevating him to the power almost of a god, Bosco is paradoxically the source of all his excellence. When I pointed this out he claimed to know this already, though I could see I had scored a hit to his vanity (which is very great).

  He then detailed an endless series of battles, which all sounded the same to me, and in which he was, of course, always victorious. When I asked if, during all these successes, he had not suffered even a few setbacks he looked at me as if he would like to cut my throat and then laughed – but very oddly, more like a single bark, as if he could not contain something very far from high spirits or even mockery.

  These numerous triumphs led in turn to his being less watched over by Bosco than formerly. And after yet another great battle, in which he overcame the greatest of all opponents, he slipped away in the resulting chaos and ended up in Spanish Leeds, where he suffered the first of the brain attacks that brought him here. I witnessed one of these seizures and they are alarming to watch and clearly distressing to endure – his entire body is wracked by convulsions, as if he is trying to vomit but is unable to do so. He insists he has been sent here by friends of some power and influence in Spanish Leeds. Needless to say, of these important benefactors there is no sign. When I asked why they had not been to see him he explained – as if I were an idiot – that he had only just arrived in Cyprus and that the distance was too great for them to travel to see him regularly. This great distance was a deliberate choice in order to keep him safe. ‘From what?’ I asked. ‘From all those who want me dead,’ he replied.

  He told me that he had arrived with an attendant doctor and a letter for Mother Superior Allbright. Pressed, he told me that the doctor had returned to Spanish Leeds the next day but that he had spent several hours with the Mother Superior before his departure. Clearly Thomas Cale must have come from somewhere, and there might indeed have been some sort of attendant who arrived with him bearing a letter and who spoke with the Mother Superior prior to her stroke. The loss, as it were, of both letter and Mother Superior leaves this case somewhat in the Limbo in which unbaptized infants are said to wait out eternity. Given the violent nature of his imaginings (though not, to be fair, his behaviour) it seems wisest to place him in the protective ward until the letter can be found or the Mother Superior recovers enough to tell us more about him. As it stands, there is no one to whom I can even write to make enquiries about him. This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs and it is not the first time by a long chalk that records have gone missing. I will discuss the alleviation of his symptoms when the herbalist comes the day after tomorrow. As to his delusions of grandeur – in my opinion, treating those is the work of many years.

  Anna Calkins, Anomist

  For weeks Cale lay in bed, retching and sleeping, retching and sleeping. He became aware after a few days that the door at the end of the twenty-bed ward was locked at all times, but this was both something he was used to and, in the circumstances, hardly mattered: he was not in a fit state to go anywhere. The food was adequate, the care kindly enough. He did not like sleeping in the same room as other men once again but there were only nineteen of them and they all seemed to live in their own nightmares and were not concerned with him. He was able to stay quiet and endure.

  2

  The Two Trevors, Lugavoy and Kovtun, had spent a frustrating week in Spanish Leeds trying to discover a way of getting to Thomas Cale. They had been thwarted by the cautious nature of the enquiries forced on them in Kitty the Hare’s city (as it had now become). It didn’t do to upset Kitty and they didn’t want him to know what they were up to. Kitty liked a bung, and the amount of money he’d expect for allowing them to operate in his dominion was not something they were keen to pay: this was to be their last job and they had no intention of sharing the rewards with Kitty the Hare. Questions had to be discreet, which is not easy when fear is usually what you do, when threats are your legal tender. The two were considering more brutal methods when discretion finally paid off. They heard of a young seamstress in the town who had been encouraging a better class of client to come to her by boasting, truthfully, that she had made the elegant suit worn by Thomas Cale at his notoriously bad-tempered appearance at the royal banquet held in honour of Arbell Materazzi and her husband, Conn.

  Who knows what helpful information Cale might have let slip while he was having his inside leg measured? Tailors were almost as good a source of information as priests, and easier to manipulate – the tailors’ immortal souls were not at risk for blabbing a bit of dropped gossip; there was no such thing as the silence of the changing room. But the young seamstress was not as easily menaced as they’d hoped.

  ‘I don’t know anything about Thomas Cale, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. Go away.’

  This response meant that one of two things was going to happen. Trevor Kovtun had by now resigned himself to committing an atrocity of some kind, Kitty the Hare or not. He locked the shop door and brought down the shutter on the open window. The seamstress didn’t waste her time telling them to stop. They lowered their voices as they worked.

  ‘I’m fed up with what we have to do to this girl,’ said Trevor Lugavoy. This was both true and a way of frightening her. ‘I really do want this to be our last job.’

  ‘Don’t say that. If you say it’s our last then something will go wrong.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Lugavoy, ‘some supernatural power is listening and will thwart our presumption?’

  ‘It doesn’t do any harm to act as if there were a God sometimes. Don’t tempt providence.’

  Trevor Kovtun walked over to the seamstress, who had by now realized something dreadful had come into her life.

  ‘You seem to be a clever little thing – your own shop, a sharp tongue in your head.’

  ‘I’ll call the Badiel.’

  ‘Too late for that now, my dear. There are no Badiels in the world we’re about to take you to – no defenders or preservers, no one at all to watch over you. Here in the city you believed you were safe, by and large – but being an intelligent girl you must have known there were horrible things out there.’

  ‘We are those horrible things.’

  ‘Yes, we are. We are bad news.’

  ‘Very bad news.’

  ‘Will you hurt him?’ she said – looking for a way out.

  ‘We will kill him,’ said Trevor Kovtun. ‘But we’ve given our word to do it as quickly as we can. There will be no cruelty, just the death. You must make a decision about yourself – live or die.’

  But what decision was there?

  Later, on leaving the shop, Kovtun pointed out that even a year earlier they would have killed the girl in such an unspeakably vile way that any question of resistance to their investigations would have evaporated like the summer drizzle on the great salt flats of Utah.

  ‘But that was a year ago,’ said Trevor Lugavoy. ‘Besides, I’ve a feeling we’re running out of deaths. Best be thrifty. Cale should be our last ticket.’

  ‘You’ve been saying we should stop almost since we started twenty years ago.’

  ‘Now I mean it.’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t have said anything to me about finishing until we were
done – then we could just have finished. Now that you’ve made a thing about this being our last job you’ve turned it into an event, so. If you want to get God’s attention, tell him your plans.’

  ‘If there was a God who was interested in sticking his nose in, don’t you think he’d have put a stop to us by now? Either God intervenes in the lives of men or he doesn’t. There’s no halfway.’

  ‘How do you know? His ends might be mysterious.’

  They were experienced men and used to difficulties and they were not especially surprised to discover that Cale had gone somewhere else for reasons the girl was unclear about. But they had the name of Vague Henri, a good description of a boy with a scar on his face, and a convincing assurance that he’d know exactly where Cale had gone. Three days of hanging about followed, asking their unsuspicious questions and trying not to be conspicuous. In the end, patience was all that was required.

  Vague Henri liked people but not the kind of people who lived in palaces. It wasn’t that he hadn’t made an effort. At one banquet at which he’d accompanied IdrisPukke he’d been asked, with a polite lack of attention, how he’d come to be there. Thinking they were interested in his extraordinary experiences he told them, starting with his life in the Sanctuary. But the details of the strange privations of the place did not fascinate, they repelled. Only IdrisPukke overheard the chinless wonder who said, ‘My God, the people they’re letting in these days.’ But the next remark was heard by Vague Henri as well. He’d mentioned something about working in the kitchens in Memphis and some exquisite, intending to be overheard, drawled: ‘How banal!’ Vague Henri caught the tone of contempt but couldn’t be sure – he didn’t know what it meant, perhaps it was an expression of sympathy and he’d misunderstood. Deciding it was time to leave, IdrisPukke claimed he was feeling unwell.

  ‘What does barn owl mean?’ asked Vague Henri on the way home. IdrisPukke was reluctant to hurt his feelings but the boy needed to know what the score was with these people.

  ‘It means commonplace – beneath the interest of a cultured person. He was a drawler: it’s pronounced ban-al.’

  ‘He wasn’t being nice, then?’

  ‘No.’

  He didn’t say anything for a minute.

  ‘I prefer barn owl,’ he said at last. But it stung.

  Most of the time IdrisPukke was away on business for his brother and so Vague Henri was lonely. He now realized he wasn’t acceptable to Spanish Leeds society, not even its lower rungs (who were, if anything, even more snobbish than their betters), so several times a week he took a walk to the local beer cellars and sat in a corner, sometimes striking up a conversation but mostly just eating and drinking and listening to other people enjoying themselves. He was too used to wearing a cassock to be comfortable in anything else and, like Cale, had got the seamstress to run him up a couple in blue birdseye: twelve ounce, peaked lapel and felted pockets, straight, no bezel. He was quite the dandy. But in Spanish Leeds, a fifteen-year-old in a cassock with a fresh scar on his cheek was hard to miss. The Two Trevors watched Vague Henri from the other side of the snug as he enjoyed a pint of Mad Dog, a beer he marginally preferred to Go-By-The-Wall or Lift Leg.

  For the next two hours, to the irritation of the Two Trevors, he chatted away to various locals and was cornered for half an hour by an amiable drunk.

  ‘D’yew liked metalled cheese?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘D’yew like metalled cheese?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Vague Henri, after a pause. ‘Do I like melted cheese?’

  ‘Shwat I shed.’

  But he didn’t mind. There was something miraculous to him still about the talk, buzz and laughter, the ordinary good times being had by almost everyone except the occasional maudlin boozer or angry bladdered toper. At chucking-out he left with the others, the inebriated and the sober. The Two Trevors followed at a cautious distance.

  These experienced men were never careless, they were as prepared for the unexpected event as if one took place daily on the backs of their hands, but their position as they closed on Vague Henri was a little more hazardous than even these careful murderers had reckoned.

  Cale’s reputation as an epic desperado had not so much overshadowed Vague Henri’s as caught it in a general eclipse. To the Two Trevors he was dangerous, no doubt – they knew his background as a Redeemer acolyte and that you would have to be unusually hard-wearing to make it to the age of fifteen – but they were not, in truth, expecting a nasty surprise, even though nasty surprises were something they were used to.

  Be clear, two against one is hideous odds, particularly when it’s night and the Trevors are the two who want a word with you. But Vague Henri had already improved his chances: he knew he was being followed. They soon realized their mistake and stepped back into the shadows and called out to him.

  ‘Vague Henri, is it?’ said Trevor Lugavoy.

  Vague Henri turned, letting them see the knife in his right hand and that he was easing a heartless-looking knuckle-duster onto his left.

  ‘Never heard of him. Buzz off.’

  ‘We just want a word.’

  Vague Henri opened his mouth as if in joyous surprise and welcome. ‘Thank God,’ he said, ‘you’ve come with news of my brother, Jonathan.’ He moved forward. Had Lugavoy, who was ten yards in front of Kovtun, not been an assassin of a very superior kind he would have had Vague Henri’s knife buried in his chest. Unluckily for Vague Henri, Lugavoy instantly backed away, alarmed by the boy’s oddness as he stepped forward and struck out. The trick that had earned Vague Henri his nickname, the sudden incomprehensible question or answer intended to distract, had failed, if only just. Now they were alert and the balance in their favour once again.

  ‘We want to talk to Thomas Cale.’

  ‘Never heard of him, either.’

  Vague Henri backed away. The Two Trevors moved apart and then forward – Lugavoy would make the first jab, Kovtun the second. There would be no more than four.

  ‘Where is he, your friend?’

  ‘No idea what you’re talking about, mate.’

  ‘Just tell us and we’re on our way.’

  ‘Come a bit closer and I’ll whisper it in your ear.’

  They wouldn’t have killed him right away, of course. The knife driven in three inches deep just above the lowest rib would have taken the fight out of the boy long enough to get some answers. Never before in his life and only once afterwards was Vague Henri rescued – but tonight he was. In the almost silence of the trio’s scuffling manoeuvres there was a loud CLICK! from behind the two advancing men. All three knew the sound of the latch of an overstrung crossbow.

  ‘Hello, Trevors,’ said a cheerful voice from somewhere in the dark.

  There was a moment’s silence.

  ‘That you, Cadbury?’

  ‘Oh, indeed it is, Trevor.’

  ‘You wouldn’t shoot a man in the back.’

  ‘Oh, indeed I would.’

  But this wasn’t quite the rescue in the nick of time so loved by magsmen and yarn-spinners and their gullible audiences. In fact, Cadbury had no idea who the young person in the peculiar clothes was. For all he knew, he might entirely deserve the fate the Two Trevors were about to hand out to him – the people they were paid to murder usually did. He had not been watching over him but, only in a manner of speaking, the Two Trevors.

  They’d had a change of heart about Kitty after talking to the seamstress; it was no longer plausible to imagine he wouldn’t become aware of their presence. So they’d observed the proper form by paying him a visit and, while declining to say what their business was in Spanish Leeds, assured Kitty that it would not conflict with his own. As he pointed out to Cadbury later, who were these pair of murderers to know what did or did not conflict with Kitty the Hare’s multitude of concerns? Kitty invited them to stay as long as they wished. The Two Trevors replied that they would almost certainly be gone by the following Monday. The result was that, at considerable expense and some d
ifficulty, Cadbury had been keeping tabs on them, not the easiest of things to do. The reason he was here in person was that his watchful intelligencers had lost them for several hours and Cadbury had become nervous.