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.