"You know I'm going to kill you, don't you?" I asked.
"I know you're going to try." The prospect didn't seem to disturb him.
I had nothing to do for a while. The King sits out most of Act Four. On the stage, Gloucester was having his eyes gouged out. Cornwall would soon meet his Maker. Time to start laying my plans.
Believe it or not, I was hopeful.
Toby was in Izzy's lap, but refused to be cradled. With someone he likes, Toby is capable of sprawling over your hand and arm, limp as a noodle, completely trusting you not to let him fall. Or he can be a shameless beggar, licking your face, wagging his tail, angling for a handout.
Not now. He sat stiffly, looking from Izzy's face then over to me. He was saying, "Why don't you ditch this jerk?" When Izzy's hand moved in Toby's fur, the little lip curled slightly and the tips of his teeth showed. He was far too well-bred to bite the hand of a guest, but clearly he'd like to. With Toby and Izzy, it was hate at first sight.
I don't think Comfort hated Toby. I don't think he viewed Toby as a feeling thing at all. Anyone can tell a dog lover. A dog lover can't keep his hands off a dog. Put one in his lap and he will stroke, scratch, laugh when his face is licked, sometimes coo and gibber like a fool. Comfort held Toby like he would hold a pillow.
"I was wondering if we could talk," I said.
"It would be out of character to plead for your life."
"Not plead. But maybe we could bargain."
He laughed. "Money doesn't tempt me, and you don't have any. What else do you have to offer?"
"I wondered if we could talk about the frog."
He was silent for a while, his eyes narrowing.
"I'd meant to ask you about that," he said. It was as if he was looking for a trap of some kind, and I didn't get it.
"Ask what?"
He shrugged. "What frog?"
"What..." It seemed we weren't communicating. I opened my hand, where the evil little netsuke had been resting. The tiny frog still crouched on the skull, his eyes still unsurprised at all they saw. It felt warm and alive. Ivory is a very sensual surface. I could hardly keep my thumb from caressing it.
I started to toss it toward him and a palm-sized, deadly-looking black pistol materialized in Comfort's free hand. I'm sure it hadn't been there before, and I'm sure it hadn't been up his sleeve, but where it came from and how he got it without apparent movement will have to remain a Charonese secret. He was very fast.
So I carefully set it on the arm of his chair. He looked at it, made the gun vanish (how did he do that?), and gingerly picked it up. He stroked the frog with his thumb, then set it back down.
"Very pretty," he said. Pretty is not the word I would have used, but I'm not Charonese. "What does it have to do with me?"
Here the script calls for the protagonist to sit for a moment in stunned silence as all his assumptions come crashing down. After the long pause I told him how I'd come by the frog.
"Well, she never reported it to us," he said, with a slight smile. "If she had, we would have come for it, taken it from you, and broken both your arms. You'd have been repaired and on your way in a few hours."
"But—"
"We were called in by the governor of Boondock. You do remember visiting Boondock, don't you? Certainly you remember the young lady you met there. I saw her picture, and I certainly wouldn't have forgotten."
"But she was—"
"Nineteen, and engaged to a banker's son. Boondock is an independent city-state within the Outer Federation. It was established by a religious cult about a century ago. They have some unusual customs there, one of which is legally mandated obedience to one's parents until the age of majority, which they say is twenty-five years."
"I didn't—"
"As in so many other places, ignorance is no excuse. I'm sure your producer handed out a booklet before your arrival, concerning local customs; they always do. And like most passengers, you threw it away along with the booklet the shipping line gave you concerning emergency evacuation procedures. But you really should have read it, Sparky. Your brief affair with the girl upset a lot of political plans concerning an upcoming arranged marriage. Family honor demanded reparations.
"We Charonese are the only broad authority beyond Pluto. We're the only ones with enough discipline to maintain strict standards over such a vast region. Each enclave has its own rules and its own enforcers, but when someone flees a jurisdiction, as you did, we are called in. We work only by contract, and the governor's policy with us sets out prescribed remedies for different situations. First, we guaranteed to hunt you down. As I'm sure you have learned from your researches, we always get our man."
"Hunt me down and kill me," I said.
"Hunt you down. The governor was a bit cheap, though, and didn't pay for death in this instance. I'm not sure we would have written such a policy, anyway. We tend to operate more on an eye-for-an-eye basis. Almost Biblical, you might say."
"Biblical."
"Exactly. Since there was no way for us to take your virginity and ruin your marriage prospects, of course, we would have used other methods. The usual penalty would be three days of pain, followed by a year's incarceration."
"So you never intended to kill me."
"I blame myself, really," he said. "I assumed you knew that, back on the Britannic. I assumed too much. I expected resistance—three days of pain is certainly memorable to a non-Charonese, and something you surely would try to avoid—but I wasn't prepared for the tenacity of your assault.
"Of course, things are different now...."
"You do me wrong to take me out of the grave," I said. "Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald me like molten lead."
Things were indeed different now. If, in some ways, my last scenes of madness were not acting at all, then how to judge the end of the fourth act, when Lear is returned to sanity, temperance, even a sort of tranquillity in the arms of his faithful daughter Cordelia, while within me, poor actor, raged all the tempests of folly?
Considering all that, it might have been my greatest moment on the stage. No one would ever know just how great.
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, and we play it at cross purposes.
My one and only chance of escape was coming, and I did not feel up to it. I wanted to lie down with Lear, return to my comfortable grave.
But did it matter? What would have been different if I had given Comfort more time to speak, back there in my tiny cabin aboard the Britannic? Or if he hadn't been so unnaturally quick? The tanglenet was supposed to have immobilized him, then I could have listened to what he had to say.
Three days of pain. A year at what I had to assume would be very hard labor and solitary confinement. Would I have surrendered, knowing escape was, in the long run, impossible?
No.
It was as simple as that. I can't do jail time. I'd rather die. I'd rather spend the rest of my life on the run. I once did three days in jail, waiting for arraignment. Every time I went to sleep I found myself back in the airlock, facing the Daewoo Caterpillar. Awake, I spent all my time watching the walls, because every time I turned my back on one it began to move in on me. Very hard work, since you can't watch six walls at once. As soon as I made bail, I jumped, and have never regretted it.
So I would have fought the man from Charon. But I might not have tried so hard to kill him.
It didn't matter now. He'd explained it all to me, before my entrance. I had killed a Charonese. That simply was not allowed. The penalty was death, and a death that would be a long, long time coming.
"Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray, weep not. If you have poison for me I will drink it." I reached up and touched the tears on Cordelia's cheek. Real tears, not glycerine, as in rehearsal. I was so far gone in the part that I couldn't remember her real name.