‘He wanted to wind it up. Marriage and having kids made me more of a fighter. I need to be out here, laying my skinny ass on the line so they can live like they ought to. But it made Boathwaite soft. Marriage for him meant sitting in his garden with his wife and daughter, eating ice cream.’
For a second, Eben seemed to hear a voice in his head accusing him of cruelty — some echo of his conscience stirring — and he flashed angrily at it. ‘I don’t say I like it, but I do it, and I go home, and my wife don’t know, and nor will my kids. I do it so they won’t have to. It’s not a choice between good and bad. It’s a choice between what is and what might be.
‘It’s easy to look smart, less easy to do good. You can only live in the world you find yourself in. These prisoners are fed because of me. There’s cities with a future across the water because of what I’ve done.’
That seemed to satisfy his conscience. I remembered his changeable moods. Suddenly, he was reflective.
‘You wonder: where does the time go? It seems like suddenly you’re old and the years are driving on. Merciless.
‘I can’t pretend the world we have is a match for what was. We live very simple. Don’t get the wrong idea from the planes.
‘There’s things we don’t know any more. Things we don’t have. Things we can’t make. Our settler parents, what they did was easy. But out of the chaos they left us, I’m trying to make something. It’s an awful duty, you know, taking care of the future. Who on earth thought it would fall to me?’
‘Don’t be so bashful,’ I told him. ‘I can’t think of anybody better. This world has your handprints all over it.’
So far I had heard him out in silence. All that ancient history between us meant nothing to me. I knew thousands of people had stories worse than his.
But he wasn’t dumb. He could hear the hatred in my voice.
‘I never laid a finger on you, Makepeace,’ he said. ‘I’ve done some ugly things — I’m the first to own it. But I’m innocent of that.’ He fixed me with the blown bulbs of his eyes. ‘It wasn’t me. But I don’t blame you for believing it was, because the truth is uglier than you can imagine.’
Suddenly my old tired body ached from all its rough usage and I wished I had something stronger than soup to drink.
‘Remember Rudi Velazquez?’ Eben went on. ‘About five years ago, he showed up in Alaska and looked me up at my office. I hadn’t heard from him for years, but I recognized his name and I had him shown in. There were a few niceties, this and that, how’s so and so, you know how it is, but I’m a busy fellow so I asked him what was his reason for wanting to see me. He told me he was sick. I’d known that as soon as I’d heard his voice. It was old and papery, and shaking his hand was like holding a fistful of sticks. Now as it happens, I know a good doctor in Barrow, and I was pleased it was this, because generally speaking what people want is to borrow money from me, or for me to find me work for them. I’d told him I’d be happy to help and was ready to have him seen out, when he said it wasn’t that he was after and he’d like to have word with me in private.
‘Now that’s something I rarely do. I’m still pretty quick and I’d back myself against any man in a grapple, but without my sight I’m at a disadvantage. I have to be careful how I do business. So I had him patted down again and sent my bodyguards out of the room.
‘There was a long silence. I told him I was pressed for time. Still nothing. Finally he blurted it out. He said he wanted me to forgive him. He said I’d taken the blame for something he’d done. I told him not to mind it, the past never weighed on me that heavy in any case and besides, I couldn’t imagine Rudi doing anything so bad it could stir his conscience.’
I knew otherwise but I said nothing.
‘Rudi said this thing had been preying on his mind. He was keen for me to know in detail and whether I forgave him or not, that was up to me. Confession’s a powerful thing.
‘He said it was him that had broken into the Hatfield residence that night with a gang of men he’d hired down by the old fire-house. He’d had to pay them half up front to get a deal, and they were drunk when he went to meet them. He had a bad feeling about it, but he went ahead anyway. The men were out of control. He lost a grip on things as son as they got to the house. You know the rest.
‘I told him it was your forgiveness that he needed, but for my part, I could see his remorse was genuine and it wasn’t up to me to judge him.
‘He seemed pretty happy with that answer and left soon afterwards. It didn’t rest so easy there with me, though. It didn’t feel quite right. I knew Rudi once, and it didn’t sound like the kind of thing he would do. We have all had to adapt, but for Rudi to break in and steal? It got to bothering me so much that I had some of my men follow him.
‘They said he was living with some distant relative of his in a street full of crippled houses that were sliding into their own foundations. He spent most of each day in bed in this wonky room, not a straight angle left in it, coughing up into a bucket.
‘So finally I went to see him. I said, “Rudi, something’s bothering me about the story you told. And don’t for a second think that I don’t forgive you, because I do — and in a way I ought to thank you, for if they’d never run me out of town, perhaps I would never have made it here like I have” — and I thought to myself, maybe it would have been me in this crooked room, preparing to die. “But what’s bothering me is this: I just don’t believe that you, on your own, would have decided to rob James Hatfield.”
‘And he said, in his rattling voice, “I didn’t.”
‘“If that’s the case, why did you do it?”
‘“Someone sent me,” he said.
‘“And who was that?” I asked.
‘“James Hatfield.”
‘For a moment, I thought I’d misheard or the consumption had reached his brain. But then, just after, it was like a big light going on in my head.
‘What do lawyers say?’ Eben went on. ‘Cui bono? We got fit up. Your father was running out of friends. Turning the other cheek sounded grand, but it wasn’t practical. He knew that — but how could he climb down from his mountain top and say he’d changed his mind? A man as rigid as him.
‘A wiser man would have known how to move with the times. He could have thrown his hands up and said: “I was wrong. This thing’s out of control. Mike Callard has the right idea. We need to arm ourselves and protect what we have here.” But the thing about your old man is he had no humility. He had to be right, even when he was wrong.
‘And what made it galling for him was my father, a newcomer to the town, who’d depended on your father’s charity, winning over all those wavering souls. Your father must have wrestled with himself, seeing the corner he was in. Yes, he had an uncomfortable choice to make.
‘Rudi said your father came to him and laid things out. He told him he needed a provocation. Rudi was supposed to break into your house with a gang of men, rough the place up a bit. No one was to be harmed, just smash up this and that. Enough for him to blame us for it, run us out of town and use it to excuse a change of heart on carrying arms. I can almost hear your father’s voice saying it: “Why even Simon Peter raised his sword to defend our Lord!”
‘Rudi didn’t want paying himself. He was doing it out of respect for your old man. Your father had given him a little money as wages for the men, but he didn’t take any. He was very particular that I know that. It was never meant to go as far as it did. Things got out of hand. That’s the tragedy. Rudi said your father couldn’t live with it and the remorse killed him.