"Suppose I asked you to trash your whole life till now in favour of a better one," he suggested. "Not better for you maybe, but better for what you and I are pleased to call the common good. A five-star unimpeachable cause, guaranteed to improve the lot of mankind or your money back in full. Bye-bye to the old Jonathan, enter the new blue improved product. Resettlement afterwards, a new identity, money, the usual. There's a lot of people I know might find that quite attractive. I'm not sure I mightn't, to be frank, except it wouldn't be fair on Mary. But who've you got to be fair to except yourself? Nobody, not so far as I know. You'll be feeding the rat three meals a day, hanging on by your fingernails in force-twelve gales, there's not a scrap of you won't be used, not an hour you won't be frightened stiff. And you'll be doing it for your country, same as your dad, whatever you thought of Ireland. Or Cyprus, for that matter. And you'll be doing it for Sophie, too. Tell him I need a receipt, will you? Benton. Lunch for two. What do I give? Another five? I won't ask you to sign for me, not like some. Let's move."
* * *
They were strolling beside the lake. The snow had disappeared. An afternoon sun shimmered on the steaming pathway. Teenaged drug addicts, huddled in costly overcoats, gazed at the disintegrating ice. Jonathan had thrust his hands into the pockets of his overcoat, and he was listening to Sophie congratulating him on his gentleness as a lover.
"My English husband was also very gentle," she was saying while she drew her fingers admiringly over his face. "I had preserved my virginity so jealously that it took him days to persuade me I was better off without it." Then a presentiment seized her, and she drew him against her for protection. "Just remember you have a future, Mr. Pine. Never again renounce it. Not for me or for anyone. Promise me."
So he had promised her. As we promise anything in love.
Burr was talking about justice. "When I get to run the world," he announced comfortably to the steaming lake, "I'm going to hold the Nuremberg Trials Part Two. I'm going to get all the arms dealers and shit scientists, and all the smooth salesmen who push the crazies one step further than they thought of going, because it's good for business, and all the lying politicians and the lawyers and accountants and bankers, and I'm going to put them in the dock to answer for their lives. And you know what they'll say? 'If we hadn't done it someone else would have.' And you know what I'll say? I'll say, 'Oh, I see. And if you hadn't raped the girl some other fellow would have raped her. And that's your justification for rape. Noted.' Then I'd napalm the lot of them. Fizz."
"What's Roper done?" Jonathan asked in a kind of angry frustration. "Apart from... Hamid, all that."
"It's what he's doing now that matters."
"If he stopped today. How bad is he? How bad's he been?"
He was remembering Roper's shoulder riding unconsciously against him. Pergola over the top, view of the sea at the end. He remembered Jed: Most beautiful place on earth.
"He plunders," said Burr.
"Where? Who?"
"Everywhere and everyone. If the deal is bent, our chum is in there cutting it, and getting Corkoran to sign for him. He's got his white operation, and that's Ironbrand: venture capital, hairy land deals, minerals, tractors, turbines, commodities, a couple of tankers, a bit of corporate raiding. Offices in the whitest part of Nassau, smart young men with short-back-and-sides, tapping at computers. That's the part that's in deep trouble, and that's the part you've read about."
"I'm afraid I haven't."
"Well, you should have done. His last year's results were bloody awful, and this year's will be worse. His shares are down to seventy from one sixty, and three months ago he took a bold position on platinum just in time to see it go through the floor. He's not seriously concerned; he's just desperate." He drew breath and began again. "And tucked underneath his Ironbrand umbrella he's got his little uglies. There's the five Caribbean classics ― money laundering, gold, emeralds, wood from the rain forests, arms and more arms. There's phony Pharmaceuticals, phony aid packages with bent health ministers and fake fertilisers with bent agricultural ministers." The anger in Burr's voice was like a slowly rising storm, and the more alarming because it didn't break. "But weapons are his first love. Toys, he calls them. If you're into power, there's nothing like toys to feed the habit. Don't ever believe that crap about just another commodity, service industry. Arms are a drug, and Roper's hooked. Trouble with arms is, everyone thought they were recession-proof, but they're not. Iran-Iraq was an arms dealers' charter, and they thought it would never end. Since then it's been downhill all the way. Too many manufacturers chasing too few wars. Too much loose hardware being dumped on the market. Too much peace about and not enough hard currency. Our Dicky did a bit of the Serbo-Croat thing, of course ― Croats via Athens, Serbs via Poland ― but the numbers weren't in his league and there were too many dogs in the hunt. Cuba's gone dead; so's South Africa ― they make their own. Ireland isn't worth a light, or he'd have done that too. Peru, he's got a thing going there, supplying the Shining Path boys. And he's been making a play for the Muslim insurgents in the southern Philippines, but the North Koreans are in there ahead of him and I've a suspicion he's going to get his nose bloodied again."
"Well, who lets him?" Jonathan asked aggressively. And when Burr for once was taken aback: "It's a hell of a lot to get away with, isn't it, with people like you breathing down his neck?"
For a moment longer Burr was stuck for a rejoinder. Exactly the same question, with its disgraceful answer, had been coursing in his own mind as he spoke: The River House lets him, he wanted to say. Whitehall lets him. Geoffrey Darker and his pals in Procurement Studies let him. Goodhew's master puts his telescope to both blind eyes and he lets him. If his toys are British, anyone will let him do anything he bloody likes. But his good luck delivered a distraction:
"Well, I'm damned!" he exclaimed, grasping Jonathan's arm. "Where's her father, then?"
Watched by her boyfriend, a girl of about seventeen was rolling up the leg of her jeans. Patches like wet insect bites covered her calf. She inserted the needle and didn't wince. But Burr winced for her, and his disgust sent him into himself for a while, so that they walked a distance in silence while Jonathan for a moment forgot Sophie and remembered instead Jed's endless baby-pink legs coming down Meister's ornamental staircase, and her smile as she just happened to catch his eye.
* * *
"So what is he?" Jonathan asked.
"I told you what he is. He's a bastard."
"What's his background? What makes him run?"
Burr shrugged. "Father a small-time auctioneer and valuer in the shires. Mother a pillar of the local church. One brother. Private schools the parents couldn't afford ― "
"Eton?"
"Why should he be?"
"It's that voice. No pronouns. No articles. The slur."
"I've only ever overheard him on the telephone. That'll do me fine. He's got one of those voices that make me vomit."
"Is Roper the elder or younger brother?"
"Younger."
"Did he go to university?"
"No. In too much of a hurry to screw up the world, most likely."
"Did his brother?"