‘And you wonder why no one wants to sit next to him?’
‘I don’t wonder at all. And yet for all that hatred he is all greatness, all power. Remove the executioner from the world and in an instant order yields to chaos; kindness and fellowship and good works are defenceless before the wicked opportunism of the malicious and the cruel, the apostate and blasphemer who would rob each man of an eternal life of bliss. Tell me he is not a hero and a saint.’
They stared at each other for a moment.
‘I want Hooke.’
‘I explained that will not be possible.’
‘You must make it possible. The Folk have new weapons. They didn’t get them from under a stone. I need Hooke.’
‘Everything is vulnerable. To defy the Pontiff on this would be the excuse they need to send the Congregation of the Office for the Propagation of the Faith.’
‘Gant is the Pertius of the Congregation, is that right?’
‘The Peritus,’ corrected Bosco. ‘A pertius is the piece of skin left over after a circumcision.’
‘Oh.’
‘Your point?’
‘Will Gant come with the Congregation?’
‘Nothing would keep him from the chance to take control of the Sanctuary.’
‘Could he have you made an Act of Faith?’
‘The wish is father to that thought, my dear. The answer is no. But I could be removed from the Carmelengo and all my power would go with it.’
‘If I succeed on the veldt, will that be enough to stop them?’
‘No. The failures there are wounding to our pride and a delight to the Antagonist in the East, but the Folk are a nuisance even to them. Where you have one Folk Antagonist you have a fanatic. Where you have two, you have a schism. Even if they defeat us on the veldt and we withdraw, they’ll soon start squabbling amongst themselves.’
Cale said nothing for a moment. ‘There’s no problem,’ he said, finally.
‘How so?’
‘Give them what they want, Hooke’s death, and then they’ll have no excuse for coming here.’
‘I take it,’ said Bosco, after a moment, ‘you don’t mean what you appear to mean.’
‘No. I want Hooke and I mean to have him.’
Outside Model, who had been assigned to him as messenger boy, was anxiously waiting, having heard Bosco’s slightly raised voice speaking without apparent reply for so long. Was Cale in trouble? When his boss came outside he didn’t speak for a few minutes but shook his head as if he were trying to clear a thick fog out from between his ears.
‘Can I get you something, boss?’
Cale looked at him.
‘Yes. Go and get me another breakfast then take it back to my room and eat it for me.’
‘My name is Thomas Cale and I hold you in the palm of my hand.’
As he stood in front of some two hundred abject Purgators under a number of cloudy layers of many kinds of mixed emotions (take anger, self-pity, fear, despair, grief, more anger, hate, loss, love and so on) he was enjoying the curious pleasure of standing in front of so many Redeemers who, despite the joyful pomposity of his proclamations, actually were in the palm of his hand. Who could blame him? Who would not enjoy the idea of moulding them as if they were newborn babies? All this power and not even the slightest worry about being fair or generous or kind. In ecclesiastical law they were already dead – it was just that the actual deed of execution (a matter of minor technical importance) had not been carried out. He could do whatever he wanted to them. He felt not a licence for revenge but a great opportunity to satisfy his curiosity. What if you could do anything you wanted and it would be all right?
‘I am going to tell you to do a great many things you’ve never done before. If you disobey, you’ll be punished. If you disobey silently, you’ll be punished. If you complain, you’ll be punished. If you fail, you’ll be punished. If I feel like it, you’ll be punished. But there will be one thing and one thing only for which there will be no punishment. If you fail to learn to think for yourselves you will be returned to this square for immediate execution of sentence.’
Then he started to walk out of the square. He noticed one of the Purgators just at the edge of his eye and recognized him as Redeemer Avery Humboldt, someone he knew of old. The expression on his face was one of utter disdain, contempt and loathing. As he passed Humboldt, Cale lashed out with all his great power to the Redeemer’s head. He went down as if his strings had been cut and, without more than the slightest break in his stride, Cale walked on and out of the square. In fact, Cale had been quite wrong about the expression on Humboldt’s face. It was not one of disdain or contempt or loathing. The apparently dismissive sneer was simply due to damage to the nerves on the left side of his face which had caused it to droop and which resulted from a beating he had taken from two of the guards who had overheard and taken exception to his opinion that the Maid of Blackbird Leys was a well-meaning woman and should not be subject to the horrors of an Act of Faith. On the other hand, Cale’s error certainly made a point not lost on the remaining Purgators.
It was a peculiarity of the Redeemers that while they believed any number of fantastical notions they had little or no imagination. And this was true even of so intelligent a man as Bosco. Quite capable of believing seven impossible things before breakfast, so long as they involved miracles, bizarre divine punishments, the preserved gallstones or foreskins of martyrs, he was puzzled by Cale’s elaborate plan for removing Guido Hooke from prison.
‘I can just send in some guards and remove him.’
‘But what happens when there’s an investigation by the Office for the Propagation of the Faith and they find out that before he mysteriously died he was in perfect health and was for no good reason removed from his cell against all protocol and convention?’
Bosco, being a passionate and conventional believer in his youth, had come late to lying. Now he invented plausible lies, sure enough, but the things he said were not deeply interrogated because by the time he started deceiving his fellow Redeemers he was very powerful. He had suspicious enemies but there was only so much pressure they could bring to bear, only a short rope on which to hang awkward questions. Cale, Vague Henri and Kleist on the other hand had been deceiving, cheating and lying to people who could subject them to anything they liked if they had the slightest suspicion of any wrong doing, wrong thinking or wrong feeling. A guilty look was evidence of sin, just as an expression of innocence was a proof of the disgusting sin of pride. The result was that they all, perpetual liars, had learnt to be untruthful in the same way that they had learned to walk – unsteady at first but quickly so fluent they did not even have to think about it. A powerless liar has to know what they’re doing in order not to be found out. A lie had to be alive and be so like the truth that the one hundred errors that bad liars make to give themselves away even to the stupid are never given air to breathe. Number one in this respect was that you never break any routine – once you discover even a small change in the way things are always done, even the dimmest interrogator starts to smell a rat.