"Professor. I—"
"Please to hear me out, Mr. Richardson. I am not in your business, but I am not stupid and I have studied for fifty years the way men think and act ... causality, Mr.
dummy2
Richardson, causality!"
Richardson blinked. "You're losing me now."
"Then listen. You say David makes a big black mark, breaking a little rule that is no rule to him. And I say that I believe you—that David is in trouble. But not for the breaking of any kleinliche rule. He is in trouble because he is ripe for it
—he has been ripe for it for months, ever since he settled the Zoshchenko affair of yours."
Maybe not in the business, thought Richardson, carefully concealing his surprise, but too goddamn well-informed for comfort if he had had a finger in that pie. Indeed, if the Professor had aimed to impress him he could hardly have chosen a better name to do it with: the late comrade Zoshchenko was not buried under it, and the name he had used was not buried in the Dead Files either, but even deeper in the top secret Closed Active files of the department, like a bit of lethal radioactive waste. . . .
He thrust the memory into the back of his mind; there were more pressing matters now.
"Then you know what David's up to?" he murmured. "Thank the Lord somebody does!"
The bullethead shook in violent disagreement. "No, Mr.
Richardson—I indicated that it is no surprise to me that he is causing trouble. As to what kind of trouble, there I cannot help you."
Richardson stared at him for a moment thoughtfully. "I think dummy2
maybe you can, you know, Professor."
Freisler frowned, his eyes almost lost in the overhanging folds of skin; it was, thought Richardson, a face of absolutely outstanding ugliness, brutality even. And yet everything the man said, and the aura he threw off, contradicted his appearance: so might the Beast in the fairy tale have aged if no Beauty had ever arrived to turn him back into his true princely shape, lonely and gentle—and dangerous only when someone imputed his honour, as he had seemed to do now.
"I don't mean you're holding out on me," he said hurriedly.
"But tell me one thing first: what makes you think David's in trouble?"
The frown dissolved. "Not in trouble—I did not say that—but ready for it, Mr. Richardson. You see, I know the symptoms of his condition."
"His condition?"
"It is not infectious—do not fear!" There was the merest suggestion of a glint behind the glasses. "At least, not to such a person as yourself. It is the scholar's sickness—the good teacher's too. Are you not familiar with accidie?"
"Ace—?" Richardson goggled. "Accidie?"
"Accidie. It is the fourth cardinal sin."
"You're joking!"
"I never joke, Mr. Richardson," Freisler shook his head seriously. "It is regrettable, but I have no sense of humour.
So I do not joke and I am not joking now. So—you do not dummy2
know of accidie?"
"You can say that again."
"Again? I—Ach! Another of your little sayings! But I am being stupid. You are not an historian, as David is—or as he should have been. He knew!"
"You told him, then?"
"But of course! Friendship is for truth telling or it is nothing.
I told him of his sin and he agreed that I was right."
"So—" Richardson bottled his impatience with an effort: this was one hard lesson he had learnt these last three years, not to let the seconds stampede him when time was pressing "—
just what is this sin of his?"
Freisler beamed at him. "Sloth, Mr. Richardson. Sloth and sluggishness. It was a peculiarly monastic sin in the Middle Ages—it is I think a medieval word, accidie, and I do not know the true modern word for it in English."
"But David isn't slothful, Professor. He works like a ruddy beaver with his files and his reports. He eats 'em up by the dozen."
The old man's face fell. "No, then I have missed the right word . . . dégoût, the French would call it, perhaps. ... It is when one loses the interest in—and the desire to do—those things which one does habitually and does well. When some men do well it is for them fulfilment, but for others it is dust and ashes—and David is such a man."
"He's bored with his job, you mean?"
dummy2
"So! Except that 'bored' is too little a word."
"And when did you tell him all this?"
Freisler looked at him questioningly. "Pardon?"
"When did you tell him he'd got this—accidie?" Richardson pushed forward gently. "Was it when you had dinner down at his place?"
"Dinner?" For a moment Freisler seemed confused. "It was—
yes —it was then. . . . But you know about it?"
"Not enough. Not nearly enough. And not the right things yet
—I know you had roast beef and apple pie to follow."
The piggy eyes brightened again momentarily at the memory.
So far all Richardson knew of the crucial meal was a cook's view of it: the roast beef had been for the old German himself
—a fine big sirloin, with fiery-hot home-made horseradish sauce and Yorkshire pudding and roast potatoes and three vegetables, because it was heavy eating that he loved; and the apple pie with thick Devonshire cream was for Sir Laurie Deacon, because he had a famous sweet tooth and Mrs.
Clark's apple pies had taken prizes in shows from Steeple Horley to Guildford for twenty years; and the very Englishness of both dishes made them right for the oilman Ian Howard, just back from a year of tinned food and Arab delicacies in Saudi Arabia.
But that cook's view had not been unprofitable. For David Audley loved these apple pies as much as any man—and this one had been good enough to make Sir Laurie promise his dummy2
services free to Clarkie if she ever needed them, to the subsequent utter confusion and discomfort of the authorities.
Yet to Clarkie's chagrin David had left his pie to congeal while he listened with rapt attention to what was being said—
an event so unlooked-for that sharp-eared Clarkie was too disconcerted to eavesdrop into the actual conversation.
That had been the moment, though: something had happened between the cutting of the pie and the serving of the cheese to turn David from a taciturn sorehead into the schoolboy who kissed his wife publicly and outrageously in the middle of the kitchen and pinched Clarkie's backside as she bent over the washing-up.
Whatever it was it had been a cure for accidie, anyway.
And whatever it was Richardson was betting it had already brought one man to his death.
"Not the right things?" The Professor was staring at him now, alert. "You are meaning that I know of those right things, eh?"
"I hope so, yes." Richardson nodded. "What did you talk about over dinner?"
Freisler thought for a few seconds, then spread his hands.
"But —so many things we talked of. ... The food, the European Community—which you insist on calling the Common Market, the Industrial Relations Act—"
"What did David have to say?"
dummy2
"He did sot say much. That is, at first he did not say much—it was for that that I finally chided him."
"Go on."
"But I have told you. I spoke of his sin and he agreed. He said he was—" The wide brow crinkled with concentration "—
confined and —'cribbed' I think was the word he used. It must have a meaning other than that my students attribute to it, though."
"It does. 'Cabin'd, cribb'd and confin'd'-"
"Ach! A quotation. I see."
"From Macbeth, Act Three," murmured Richardson, gratified at the surprised lift of Freisler's eyebrows, which decided him not to add that he had once been conscripted into the play at school and knew every line of that act, in which he had featured prominently in ghastly pale green make-up as Banquo's Ghost. "I'm not just a pretty face, you know—but please go on."