"Well, how about democracy, for example?"
"Democracy? A two-way choice between tough shit and not-quite-so-tough shit every four or five years if you're lucky?"
"That's not what democracy is! It's not just that; it's a free press —»
"And we have that, don't we?" Andy laughs. "Except the bits that are free aren't read very much and the bits that are most read aren't free. Let me quote you: "They're not newspapers, they're comics for the semi-literate; propaganda sheets controlled by foreign billionaires who just want to make as much money as technically possible and maintain a political environment conducive to that single aim.""
"All right, I stand by that, but it's still better than nothing."
"Oh, I know it is, Cameron," he says, sitting back and looking slightly shocked at being so misunderstood. "I know it is; and I know that what powerful people can get away with, they will get away with, and if the people they exploit let them, well, in a sense that serves them right. But don't you see?" He jabs himself in the chest. "That includes me!" He laughs. "I'm part of it, too; I'm a product of the system. I'm just another human being, a bit better off than most, a bit smarter than most, maybe a bit luckier than most, but just another part of the equation, another variable that society's thrown up. So I come along and I do what I can get away with, because it seems fit to me to do it, because I'm like a businessman, you see? I'm still a businessman; I'm addressing a need. I've seen a niche in the market unfilled and I'm filling it."
"Wait, wait; hold on," I say. "I'm not buying this crap about fulfilling a need anyway, but the point about the difference between your authority and everybody else's is that you're just you; you've made up all this… this rationale by yourself. The rest of us have had to come to some sort of agreement, a consensus; we're all trying to get along because that's the only way for people to exist together at all."
Andy smiles slowly. "Numbers make the difference, do they, Cameron? So when the two greatest nations on Earth — over half a billion people — were so scared of each other they were quite seriously prepared to blow up the world, they were right?" He shakes his head. "Cameron, I'd be prepared to bet that more people believe Elvis is still alive than subscribe to whatever flavour of secular humanism you currently think represents the One True Way for humanity. And besides, where has this consensus of yours brought us?"
He frowns and looks genuinely mystified.
"Come on, Cameron," he chides. "You know the evidence: the world already produces… we already produce enough food to feed every starving child on earth, but still a third of them go to bed hungry. And it is our fault; that starvation's caused by debtor countries having to abandon their indigenous foods to grow cash crops to keep the World Bank or the IMF or Barclays happy, or to service debts run up by murdering thugs who slaughtered their way into power and slaughtered their way through it, usually with the connivance and help of one part of the developed world or another.
"We could have something perfectly decent right now — not Utopia, but a fairly equitable world state where there was no malnutrition and no terminal diarrhoea and nobody died of silly wee diseases like measles — if we all really wanted it, if we weren't so greedy, so racist, so bigoted, so basically self-centred. Fucking hell, even that self-centredness is farcically stupid; we know smoking kills people but we still let the drug barons of BAT and Philip Morris and Imperial Tobacco kill their millions and make their billions; smart, educated people like us know smoking kills but we still smoke ourselves!"
"I've given up," I tell him defensively, though it's true I'm dying for a cigarette.
"Cameron," he says, laughing with a kind of desperation. "Don't you see? I'm agreeing with you; I listened to all your arguments over the years, and you're right: the twentieth century is our greatest work of art and we are what we've done… and look at it." He puts a hand through his hair, and sucks breath through his teeth. The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what we are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others."
He stares pointedly at me and his brows flex. I nod, reluctantly recognising something I wrote once.
"So," he says, "in that climate of culpability, that perversion of moral values, nothing, nothing I have done has been out of place or out of order or wrong."
I open my mouth to speak but he waves his hand, and with a faint sneer says, "I mean, what am I supposed to do, Cameron? Wait for the workers" revolution to make everything right? That's like Judgement Day; it never fucking comes. And I want justice now; I don't want these bastards dying a natural death." He takes a deep breath and looks at me quizzically. "So, how am I doing so far, Cameron? Do you think I'm mad, or what?"
I shake my head. "No, I don't think you're mad, Andy," I tell him. "You're just wrong."
He nods slowly at this, looking at the bullet he's turning over and over in his fingers.
"You're right about one thing," I tell him. "You are one of them. Maybe this spotting-a-niche-in-the-market stuff isn't so fatuous after all. But is a sick response to a sick system really the best we can do? You think you're fighting it but you're just joining in. They've poisoned you, man. They've taken the hope out of your soul and put some of their own greedy hate in its place."
""Soul", did you say, Cameron?" He smiles at me. "You getting religion?"
"No, I just mean the core of you, the essence of who you are; they've infected it with despair, and I'm sorry you can't see any better response than to kill people."
"Not even when they deserve it?"
"No; I still don't believe in capital punishment, Andy."
"Well, they do," he sighs. "And I suppose I do."
"And what about hope, do you believe in that?"
He looks disparaging. "What are you, Bill Clinton?" He shakes his head. "Oh, I know there's goodness in the world, too, Cameron, and compassion and a few fair laws; but they exist against a background of global barbarism, they float on an ocean of bloody horror that can tear apart any petty social construction of ours in an instant. That's the bottom line, that's the real framework we all operate within, even though most of us can't or won't recognise it, and so perpetuate it.
"We're all guilty, Cameron; some more than others, some a lot more than others, but don't tell me we aren't all guilty."
I resist the urge to say, Who's sounding religious now?
Instead I ask, "And what was William guilty of?"
Andy frowns and looks away. "Being everything he claimed to be," he says, sounding bitter for the first time. "William wasn't a personal score, like Halziel or Lingary: he was one of them, Cameron; he meant everything he ever said. I knew him better than you did, when it mattered, and he was quite serious about his ambitions. Buying a knighthood, for example; he'd been giving money to the Conservative party for the past ten years — he gave money to Labour, too, last year and this because he thought they were going to win the election — but he'd been putting respectable amounts into Tory coffers for a decade, as well as keeping an eye on how much the average successful businessman has to donate to ensure a knighthood. He once asked me which charity he'd be best advised to join, to provide the usual excuse; wanted one that didn't encourage scroungers.
"This was all long-term, but that was the way William thought. He was still determined to build a house on Eilean Dubh, and he even had a complicated scheme involving a front company and a threatened underground toxic-chemicals store in the area which, if it had worked, would have had grateful locals practically begging him to take the island. And a few times when he was drunk he talked about trading in Yvonne for a more up-market, user-friendly model, preferably one with her own title and a daddy in serious big business or the government. His non-ethical investment programme wasn't a joke, either; he pursued it, vigorously."