His brain was buzzing with the screams inside the room, the cries of agony outside, and his lips throbbed with pins and needles as the power of the Phedra and Morphine began to lag. He stared at Kitty, still shrieking in the corner of the room. Outside the guards had gone silent, planning something.
It is a business full of difficulty, killing a living thing. Even with the means – the blunt object, the useful blade, the stillness induced by dread. Anything more awkward than the wringing of a chicken’s neck takes nerve and practice and familiarity. Cale considered the task ahead. Already his legs and his hands were shaking. Nothing in the room would help, it was more or less empty but for the bound red ledgers on the floor. And what was he dealing with? Kitty the Hare was frightened, to be sure, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous. Cale felt his artificial powder strength begin to drain away. Could he beat Kitty to death with his fists? And what was behind the veil?
The shoving on the other side of the door began again. He stepped forward and, bending down, grabbed Kitty and shifted him over. He fumbled for his neck and tried to hold it in the crook of his elbow. Kitty realized what he was going to do and began howling and screaming again, so high-pitched it hurt the ears, his feet scrabbling on the polished floor. Terror made him strong and he wrenched free and backed away, still screaming, to the far wall. Again the room-shaking battering from the guards crashing against the door. It was impossible to go on without seeing his face – Cale needed to see who or what was so vulnerable to being hurt. He tore off the peaked cap and bloody linen veil.
Disgust made him pull back, shocked at the ugliness of what he saw. The face and skull seemed to belong to two different creatures, one more deformed than the other. The right side of his head was distended along its entire length, as if the skin had been filled with stones. His right cheek was a mat of warty growths, his lips on one side swollen by three or four inches. But halfway along his mouth the lips narrowed and became quite normal, and with a recognizably human expression. On the left side of his head, above his ear, Kitty had grown the strands of hair more than twelve inches long and combed them over in an effort to hide a huge tumour. His left hand, too, was perfectly ordinary and rather delicate, his right was paw-like but huge, as if it had been cut and healed into three parts, each with the large and pointed nails from which Kitty got his name.
‘Pease! Pease!’ said Kitty. ‘Pease! Pease!’
But it was his eyes that got to Cale, deep brown and delicate as a girl’s, shining with fear and dread. Imagine what it is to beat a living thing to death with weakening hands and aching shoulders. The time it took, the crying out, the blood in Kitty’s throat choking him, the feet scrabbling on the floor. But the blows with his fist and elbow had to carry on no matter what. It must be done.
When it was over, Cale sat back on the floor. He did not feel horror and he did not feel pity. Kitty the Hare didn’t deserve to live; Kitty the Hare deserved to die. But then he, Thomas Cale, probably deserved to die as well for all the horrible things he’d done. But he wasn’t dead and Kitty was. For the moment at any rate.
During the killing of Kitty, the guards had been battering against the door. Now they’d stopped. Cale was soaked in sweat, now cooling, and not just from the effort of putting an end to Kitty. His lips were firing pins and needles ever faster, his head throbbing. ‘It’s midnight, Goldilocks,’ he said aloud, misremembering the story he’d heard Arbell telling her little nieces in Memphis.
He stood up and began opening the drawers in the great ebony desk. Nothing but papers, except for a brass paperweight and a bag of boiled sweets – humbugs. He ate a couple, splintering them in order to get the sugar into his body, then stepped next to the door and banged it three times with the paperweight. He thought he heard whispering.
‘Kitty the Hare. He’s dead,’ said Cale.
A silence, then, ‘Then you’re going to sing him to his rest, shit-bag.’
‘Why?’
‘Why the fuck do you think?’
‘Did you love Kitty? Was Kitty a father to you?’
‘Never you mind about what Kitty was. Prepare to not be.’
‘You want to kill the only friend you have in the world? Kitty’s dead and that means all his enemies, many and unkind, are going to disjoint his goods and services among them. Not including you – your share of the profits is going to be a six-foot by two-foot space in one of Kitty’s illegal rubbish tips in Oxyrinchus.’
Cale was sure he could hear muttering and arguing. This ought to be the easiest part. What he was telling them was true and it was obvious. The trouble was that riffraff had their loyalties and affections like everyone else. And they also were puffed up with the drama and action of the last fifteen minutes. There was going to be violent change one way or the other and Thomas Cale had caused it. If people could be trusted to act in their own best interests it would be a different world. He needed to let tempers cool.
‘Go and get Cadbury. Bring him here and then we’ll talk.’
Silence for a few moments.
‘Cadbury’s buggered off to Zurich.’
‘Anyway,’ shouted the man who’d taken the lead, ‘fuck Cadbury. You talk to us. Let us in.’
The request for Cadbury had backfired. What could he do, after all? He’d expected they’d have taken time to go and find him only to discover he was gone. Now all he’d done was annoyed whoever had taken control. He considered bluster. Dangerous. He chose bluster.
‘I’m Thomas Cale, I’ve just beaten Kitty the Hare to death with my bare hands. I killed Solomon Solomon in the Red Opera in two seconds and there are ten thousand Laconics rotting in the shadow of the Golan Heights, and I was the one who left them there.’ Though he felt dreadful and his situation was dire, declaring his glorious achievements aloud was exhilarating. It all was true, wasn’t it? he thought.
There was no reply.
‘Look. I’ve got nothing against any of you. You were doing what you were paid for. Kitty got his portion and that’s the way it is. You can either work for me, with all the money and whatever privileges Kitty gave you, and a bonus of two hundred dollars and no questions asked, or you can take your chances with General Butt-Naked and Lord Peanut Butter – I’m told that General Butt-Naked keeps his troops lively by stringing the intestines of those who disappoint him across the streets of the slums he controls.’
These lurid stories of Kitty’s rivals were, in fact, true. Even in Switzerland, a civilized place of trade with admirably clean streets where all was ordered, its people prosperous and law-abiding, there were parts of it that were the very bowels of darkness. A stone’s throw from generous streets and the generous souls who lived in them a savagery and a cruelty of a kind that was impossible to imagine except for the fact that it happened took place at all hours and within a short walk. Isn’t it the same with all cities everywhere, and in all times? The civilized and the inhumanly cruel are separated only by a short stroll.
After a few minutes’ more talking, Cale filibustering to draw out the time and let them calm down and see things as they were, he pushed back the desk just enough to give them purchase – no easy matter, his strength was fading in jabs and bursts. He went and sat down, casual, in Kitty’s chair and waited for his bodyguards to push back the heavy bookcase.
So they filed in, obviously wary but also subdued by the body in the middle of the floor. It was not death or blood that worried them – that was their calling, after all – but the sight of unstoppable power suddenly stopped. Kitty was myth – his reach ran everywhere. Now even in the gloom it wasn’t just that death had robbed him of power but that he was revealed as deformed, eaten and swollen by growths, distended and spoilt. What they had feared now revolted them and all the more intensely because of the intensity of that fear. Now their terror demeaned them.