‘Thank you for coming. Sit down.’
The eel-faced Trevor Lugavoy stretched out his legs in an insolent manner as if to make it clear that he did not mind if he was here or somewhere else. It was the engaging Trevor Kovtun who spoke.
‘You want us to bring someone to Death’s attention?’ It was more playful but just as impudent as his companion’s outstretched legs.
‘In order to bring about certain prophecies in holy writ it’s necessary for you to martyr someone.’
They seemed distinctly put out by the idea, although not because of the crime involved.
‘We don’t chastise people before we kill them,’ said Trevor Kovtun.
‘Yes, we’re not common torturers,’ added Trevor Lugavoy.
Gil was not about to take any nonsense no matter what their reputation. ‘Fortunately for your fine sensibilities no chastising is necessary. You’ll be very well paid but let me remind you that you’ve had refuge at my say so on Redeemer territory for a good few years.’ The point did not need labouring.
‘Who then?’ asked Trevor Lugavoy.
‘Thomas Cale.’
That got their attention – the swagger of the outstretched legs, the insolence of their violent profession diminished satisfyingly enough.
‘And for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t want you to bring him to Death’s attention, whatever that means. I want him dead.’
Acknowledgements
My thanks to my editor Alex Clarke and his insightful and clever notes on the original manuscript.
‘Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire’
Gustav Mahler
There are many acts of righteous larceny throughout these three books, from Paradise Lost to a shampoo ad from the sixties, from Francis Bacon to a Millwall Football Club chant. Two of Bosco’s speeches in The Last Four Things, on the essential worthlessness of mankind and the lonely greatness of the hangman, are based on essays from the Catholic philosopher Joseph de Maistre.
There are a number of scenes indebted to the long-forgotten Mary Herbert, particularly Death To The French and The Unhappy Prince. Arthur Schopenhauer and La Rochefoucauld take their usual bow in the observations of IdrisPukke and Vipond. Much of the tactics and the idea behind the episode at Duffer’s Drift come from E. D. Swinton’s imaginative training manual of the Boer War, The Defence of Duffer’s Drift (out of print but available on the web). Lines and half-lines from the King James Bible are everywhere, the beautiful and the ugly. The practical usefulness to me of the Iliad and its descriptions of violence is straightforward. The web in general and YouTube in particular made it possible to use the shouts and cries of men in the middle of battle in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also enabled me to find footage of Saddam Hussein’s denunciations of his soon-to-be-dead rivals during the Ba’ath Party Assembly in 1979, here used during Bosco’s similar strategy at the Congress in Chartres.
The idea for the Klephts came from John Keegan’s brief but incisive discussion of these impressively unheroic Greek bandits on page ten of A History of Warfare. The details of the operation on Vague Henri follow closely the account by surgeon John Bradmore of his successful attempt to remove an arrow from the face of the fifteen-year-old Prince Henry (later Henry V) in 1403. Anyone who doubts the potential physical strength or tactical ability of adolescents should read an account of Henry’s youthful military campaigns and note that he took this hideous wound in the face early on in the Battle of Shrewsbury, fought ‘hand-to-hand’ for the rest of the day and then led a cavalry charge in the evening which had a major effect on the outcome.
The harrowing description of the starvation of the Folk that Cale forces Arbell to read aloud comes from A View of the Present State of Ireland by Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene. Spenser is not just responsible for the terrible brilliance of the description of famine, a brilliance that might be expected from someone generally considered to be one of the greatest of all English poets, but also for the view that a policy of genocide through starvation was the only solution to the problem of Ireland. Anyone who believes that it is not possible to write hideous ideas beautifully might like to read the full text. The assumption that someone as noxious as Hitler, a deeply talentless painter, could never by definition be a great artist has to confront this little-known work.
Cale’s idea for a concentration camp to isolate his opponents from the support of the native population was first carried out during the Boer War with the same, admittedly unintended, consequences.
Also thanks to Nick Lowndes of Penguin and Mark Handsley for their work on the preparation of the text. As always, Alexandra Hoffman and my agent, Anthony Goff. Anna Swan read the manuscript with the sharpest of eyes. I remain deeply grateful to Kate Burton (née Brotherhood) for placing this book in so many languages.