I looked at Mr Cuff, and he said, “The fingernails and the hair might appear to be your traditional steps two and three, but they are in actual fact steps one and two, the first procedure being more like basic groundwork than part of the performance-work itself. Doing the fingernails and the hair tells you an immense quantity about the subject’s pain level, style of resistance, and aggression/passivity balance, and that information, sir, is your virtual Bible once you go past step four or five.”
“How many steps are there?” I asked.
“A novice would tell you fifteen,” said Mr Cuff. “A competent journeyman would say twenty. Men such as us know there to be at least a hundred, but in their various combinations and refinements they come out into the thousands. At the basic or kindergarten level, they are, after the first two: foot-soles; teeth; fingers and toes; tongue; nipples; rectum; genital area; electrification; general piercing; specific piercing; small amputation; damage to inner organs; eyes, minor; eyes, major; large amputation; local flaying; and so forth.”
At mention of “tongue”, Mr Clubb had shoved a spoonful of kedgeree into his mouth and scowled at the two paintings directly across from him. At “electrification”, he had thrust himself out of his chair and crossed behind me to scrutinize them more closely. While Mr Cuff continued my education, he twisted in his chair to observe his partner’s actions, and I did the same.
After “and so forth”, Mr Cuff fell silent. The two of us watched Mr Clubb moving back and forth in evident agitation between the two large paintings. He settled at last before a depiction of a regatta on the Grand Canal and took two deep breaths. Then he raised his spoon like a dagger and drove it into the painting to slice beneath a handsome ship, come up at its bow, and continue cutting until he had deleted the ship from the painting. “Now that, sir, is local flaying,” he said. He moved to the next picture, which gave a view of the Piazetta. In seconds he had sliced all the canvas from the frame. “And that, sir, is what is meant by general flaying.” He crumpled the canvas in his hands, threw it to the ground, and stamped on it.
“He is not quite himself,” said Mr Cuff.
“Oh, but I am, I am myself to an alarming degree, I am,” said Mr Clubb. He tromped back to the table and bent beneath it. Instead of the second folded towel I had anticipated, he produced his satchel and used it to sweep away the plates and serving dishes in front of him. He reached within and slapped down beside me the towel I had expected. “Open it,” he said. I unfolded the towel. “Are these not, to the last particular, what you requested, sir?”
It was, to the last particular, what I had requested. Marguerite had not thought to remove her wedding band before her assignation, and her… I cannot describe the other but to say that it lay like the egg perhaps of some small sandbird in the familiar palm. Another portion of my eventual enlightenment moved into place within me, and I thought: here we are, this is all of us, this crab and this egg. I bent over and vomited beside my chair. When I had finished, I grabbed the cognac bottle and swallowed greedily, twice. The liquor burned down my throat, struck my stomach like a branding iron, and rebounded. I leaned sideways and, with a dizzied spasm of throat and guts, expelled another reeking contribution to the mess on the carpet.
“It is a Roman conclusion to a meal, sir,” said Mr Cuff.
Mr Moncrieff opened the kitchen door and peeked in. He observed the mutilated paintings and the two objects nested in the striped towel and watched me wipe a string of vomit from my mouth. He withdrew for a moment and reappeared holding a tall can of ground coffee, wordlessly sprinkled its contents over the evidence of my distress, and vanished back into the kitchen. From even the depths of my wretchedness I marvelled at the perfection of this display of butler decorum.
I draped the toweling over the crab and the egg. “You are conscientious fellows,” I said.
“Conscientious to a fault, sir,” said Mr Cuff, not without a touch of kindness. “For a person in the normal way of living cannot begin to comprehend the actual meaning of that term, nor is he liable to understand the fierce requirements it puts on a man’s head. And so it comes about that persons in the normal way of living try to back out long after backing out is possible, even though we explain exactly what is going to happen at the very beginning. They listen, but they do not hear, and it’s the rare civilian who has the common sense to know that if you stand in a fire you must be burned. And if you turn the world upside-down, you’re standing on your head with everybody else.”
“Or,” said Mr Clubb, calming his own fires with another deep draught of cognac, “as the Golden Rule has it, what you do is sooner or later done back to you.”
Although I was still one who listened but could not hear, a tingle of premonition went up my spine. “Please go on with your report,” I said.
“The responses of the subject were all one could wish,” said Mr Clubb. “I could go so far as to say that her responses were a thing of beauty. A subject who can render you one magnificent scream after another while maintaining a basic self-possession and not breaking down is a subject highly attuned to her own pain, sir, and one to be cherished. You see, there comes a moment when they understand that they are changed for good, they have passed over the border into another realm from which there is no return, and some of them can’t handle it and turn, you might say, sir, to mush. With some it happens right at the foundation stage, a sad disappointment because thereafter all the rest of the work could be done by the crudest apprentice. It takes some at the nipples stage, and at the genital stage quite a few more. Most of them comprehend irreversibility during the piercings, and by the stage of small amputation ninety per cent have shown you what they are made of. The lady did not come to the point until we had begun the eye-work, and she passed with flying colors, sir. But it was then the male upped and put his foot in it.”
“And eye-work is delicate going,” said Mr Cuff. “Requiring two men, if you want it done even close to right. But I couldn’t have turned my back on the fellow for more than a minute and a half.”
“Less,” said Mr Clubb, “And him lying there in the corner meek as a baby. No fight left in him at all, you would have said. You would have said, that fellow there is not going to risk so much as opening his eyes until he’s made to do it.”
“But up he gets, without a rope on him, sir,” said Mr Cuff, “which you would have said was far beyond the powers of a fellow who had recently lost a hand.”
“Up he gets and on he comes,” said Mr Clubb. “In defiance of all of Nature’s mighty laws. Before I know what’s what, he has his good arm around Mr Cuff’s neck and is earnestly trying to snap that neck while beating Mr Cuff about the head with his stump, a situation which compels me to set aside the task at hand and take up a knife and ram it into his back and sides a fair old number of times. The next thing I know, he’s on me, and it’s up to Mr Cuff to peel him off and set him on the floor.”
“And then, you see, your concentration is gone,” said Mr Cuff. “After something like that, you might as well be starting all over again at the beginning. Imagine if you are playing a piano about as well as ever you did in your life, and along comes another piano with blood in its eye and jumps on your back. It was pitiful, that’s all I can say about it. But I got the fellow down and jabbed him here and there until he was still, and then I got the one item we count on as a sure-fire last resort for incapacitation.”
“What is that item?” I asked.
“Dental floss,” said Mr Clubb. “Dental floss cannot be overestimated as a particular in our line of work. It is the razor-wire of everyday life, and fishing-line cannot hold a candle to it, for fishing-line is dull, but dental floss is both dull and sharp. It has a hundred uses, and a book should be written on the subject.”