Kitty considered, a hideous pondering for the boys.
‘I’ll send for someone who has competence in all this. If he finds out this is all buncombe – which I suspect … I suspect it is – you’ll wish you’d kept your mouth shut because by now you’d be dead and your suffering would be over.’
Ten minutes later, both of them shaking with terror, Vague Henri and Kleist were locked in a surprisingly comfortable room in the basement of the house.
‘Good lies,’ said Kleist, after a while. ‘Damned good lies.’
PART THREE
The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time, even two armed blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room
.
Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (1979)
15
‘So,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘you’re back.’
‘I am.’
‘And what did you learn while you were away?’
‘That I must avoid pain and get as much happiness as I can.’
IdrisPukke gasped with derision. ‘Ridiculous.’
‘So you say.’
‘I do indeed. Consider a healthy young person, every muscle and sinew strong and supple. Except for one thing – he has a toothache. Does he rejoice in his strength and take pleasure in the overwhelming multiform wonderfulness of his young body, even if only a tiny fraction of it is hurting? No, he does not. He thinks only of the dreadful pain in his tooth.’
‘All he needs to do is get his tooth pulled and then he’ll think he’s in heaven.’
‘You have fallen, rather too easily if I may say so, into my trap. Exactly. He feels absolutely the intense pleasure of the absence of suffering not the pleasure that all the other bits and pieces of his body give him.’
‘I’m sick to the back teeth of being miserable. I’ve had more than my portion. Look at me. You can’t say otherwise.’
‘Yes, I can. In this paradise that you’ve decided to believe in as your ultimate goal everything comes to you without much trouble and the turkeys fly around ready-roasted – but what would become of people even much less troublesome than you in such a happy place? Even the most pleasant-natured person would die of boredom or hang themselves or get into a fight and kill or be killed by someone who is even more driven to madness by the lack of struggle. Struggle has made us what we are and has suited us to the nature of things so that no other existence is possible. You might as well take a fish out of the sea and encourage it to fly.’
‘As usual you try to make out I’m saying something stupid so you can win the argument. I don’t expect a rose garden. God knows, just better than this – a bit less pain and a bit more beer and skittles.’
‘I understand you’ve had some hard rain in your life. All I can say is that you’re mistaken in thinking that more pleasure is the answer. The truth is, no matter what people think, pleasure has little hold over us. And if you disagree, consider the pleasure and pain of two animals, one being eaten by the other. The one doing the eating feels pleasure but that pleasure is soon forgotten as hunger, as it always does, returns. Consider in contrast the feelings of suffering of the animal being eaten – they are experiencing something of quite another order. Pain is not the opposite of pleasure – it is something altogether different.’
‘Have you been saving that up for my return?’
‘If you mean to ask me whether I just happened to have such thoughts as you just happened to say something more than usually stupid, of course not. I have thought very carefully about everything I have to say. Only inferior minds speak or write in order to discover what they think.’
Their pleasant argument was interrupted by the noisy arrival of Cadbury, quarrelling with the guard outside and demanding to see Cale. Once inside he was to the point.
‘Do you think they’re still alive?’
‘Possibly. Probably not.’
‘Why’s he doing this?’ said IdrisPukke.
‘Kitty doesn’t take to people acting against his interests, especially if he’s been paying them. He has a lot to lose if this war starts now. “Don’t touch me” is his motto and he’ll do what’s needed to make it stick.’
‘It’s not two weeks since he went to so much trouble to save my life – now this.’
‘Your value has fallen,’ replied Cadbury. ‘He was not impressed by the account given of your fight with the late Trevors.’
‘Your account, you mean,’ said IdrisPukke.
‘Kitty the Hare pays my wages. I don’t owe Thomas Cale anything.’
‘So why are you here?’ asked Cale.
‘A question I’ve yet to answer to my own satisfaction. It can’t be redemption. Who could make amends in the eyes of God by saving you?’
But Cale wasn’t listening.
‘If I need something to raise my price,’ he said at last, ‘what does Kitty want?’
‘Not money. He’s got money. Power – give him the power to protect what he already has.’
‘Meaning?’ said IdrisPukke.
‘What do you know that he doesn’t? Sorry – time I wasn’t here. Kitty’s going to want my head on a stick when he finds out what I’ve done.’
He was at the door and almost gone.
‘How do I get in?’ asked Cale.
Cadbury looked at him.
‘You don’t. You so much as knock on his front door too loudly and they’ll tab you in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.’
‘How many guards?’
‘Fifteen, give or take. But all the doors are iron plate – the wood on either side is just veneer. Every door would take a dozen men an hour to get through. But you won’t have an hour. He’s taken against those boys and he won’t give them up without a bung – and a bloody big one too.’
‘Thanks,’ said Cale. ‘I owe you.’
‘You already owe me and look where that’s got me.’
When Cadbury had gone, Cale sat down and looked at IdrisPukke for some time.
‘It wouldn’t matter,’ said IdrisPukke at last, ‘even if I did know something big enough, I couldn’t tell you if my life depended on it.’
‘I thought you cared for Henri.’
‘I care for Kleist as well, even if you don’t. I know what affection is. There are, I admit it, things I know. But I can’t put them in the hands of someone like Kitty, not if they were my own sons.’
‘That’s easy enough to say.’
‘I suppose it is. I can’t help you. I’m sorry.’
Within fifteen minutes Cale was in his new lodgings in the Embassy of the Hanse and putting the crush on Riba’s husband.
‘I don’t have time to be ladylike about this: I saved your wife at the pretty certain cost of my own life. Now it’s time to settle up.’
‘Have you discussed this with Riba?’
‘No, but I will, if you like.’
‘I’m not just Riba’s husband. The lives of many thousands – more – depend on me.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘I’ll come with you and we’ll try to get your friends out together. My life is not the issue here.’
Cale almost said something deeply offensive. ‘It wouldn’t matter if I had two hundred like you. I know force. Force isn’t going to do it. He wants what you know.’
‘I can’t.’ It was as agonized a refusal as Cale had ever heard. This was good.
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You don’t have to tell him what you really know, you just have to tell him what you might know.’