‘What happened to your poor hands?’ said one of them, a wayward-looking redhead.
‘He fell off his horse,’ said Cale. ‘Drunk.’
‘Don’t listen to him,’ said Vague Henri. ‘I did it saving a small puppy from drowning.’
More giggles at this – a lovely sound, like running water.
For ten minutes he flirted with the girls, nibbling their fingers as they fed him so they told him off for biting, though not the girl with red hair who let him suck the thick white cream off her middle finger for much too long while her friends chattered like starlings and gasped delightedly at her shocking behaviour. Cale sat in the sun at the other end of the bench, looked at by two of the girls who wouldn’t have minded feeding him something more than cake if they’d only had the encouragement. Cale lapped it all up: the warm sun, the pretty girls and his friend’s pleasure. But it was as if it were a scene only to be observed, not in itself to do with him. He didn’t even notice the girls looking at him.
Eventually a responsible adult came and rounded the girls up and took them away.
‘We’re often here,’ they said. ‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’
‘Odd,’ said Vague Henri, ‘a couple of days ago it was the deep six and now it’s girls and cake.’
‘What’ll you remember best?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Pain and suffering or girls and cake? What’ll you remember best a year from now?’
‘What are you on about?’
‘IdrisPukke said pain was much more than pleasure – that you remembered it more. If you were a python eating a pig, it’d be a bit pleasurable for the python but mighty nasty for the pig. And that’s life, he said. So you should know, having had both in a week. Pain and suffering or girls and cake?’
‘Why just me?’ said Vague Henri. ‘Weren’t you shitting yourself before you killed Kitty?’
‘Me? Not me. I’m your swashbuckling hero-type person. I’m not afraid of anything.’
They both started giggling at this, not unlike the girls who’d been there a few minutes before and who knew nothing about pain and suffering – although, of course, you could never tell just by looking at someone.
‘Me? I’m for girls and cake,’ said Vague Henri. ‘You?’
‘Pain and suffering.’
They both started laughing again.
‘Sounds barn owl to me,’ said Vague Henri.
For the next few days they tried cheering up Kleist but he refused to be made any happier. Eventually Cale gave him tea from his daily supply of Chase-Devil given him by Sister Wray and hoped that would bring him round. It didn’t seem to do much other than make him feel sick.
A few days later Cale and Vague Henri went off to find the outdragger who’d picked up the pair from Kitty’s and taken them home.
‘My friend here wanted to thank you personally,’ said Cale when they tracked him down.
‘Thank you,’ said Vague Henri.
The man looked at him, not hostile but certainly not grateful.
Cale gave him the rest of the money he’d promised and another five dollars on top.
‘You’re welcome,’ said the outdragger to Vague Henri, clearly indifferent to what he thought one way or the other.
‘You probably saved our lives,’ said Vague Henri, awkward and irritated by the outdragger’s refusal to be grateful for his gratitude.
‘Fifteen dollars?’ said the outdragger. ‘Your lives aren’t worth much, are they?’
Vague Henri stared at him then gave him another ten dollars, all he had on him. He waited for some sign of appreciation but the outdragger made no acknowledgement beyond putting the money in a purse he took from his pocket. It was pulled tight by a cord from which hung a small iron gibbet dangling a tiny Hanged Redeemer. Antagonists of whatever kind did not approve of these holy gibbets. Everybody was suspicious of the Tinkers whose own version of the faith went back to before the great split.
‘Let me give you some advice,’ said Vague Henri, not at all awkward any more, ‘worth more than ten dollars. Put away the holy gibbet there and don’t bring it out until the conversion of the Masons.’ The Redeemers believed the Masons to be the most blasphemous of all religions and that their conversion would take place at the end of time.
Cale’s interest was elsewhere. ‘Tell me about your cart,’ he said, looking at the handcart Kleist and Vague Henri had been hauled away in.
For the first time since they’d arrived, Cale’s question seemed to inspire enthusiasm. The tinker was clearly proud of his barrow. The design, he said, was as old as the outdraggers themselves but he’d made many improvements over the years; and always, he pointed out resentfully, to the disapproval of other outdraggers.
‘They drop dead while they’re still young pushing the porky hulks of the Gorges that killed their fathers and their grandfathers before them. I made this cart from a pile of bamboo scaffolding I found in the dump. Got the idea for the springs from a bouncy horse I saw at a carnival. Cost me two dollars to get it made up.’ Cale and the outdragger talked about the cart and everything its lightness and mobility allowed him to do in the way of delivering heavier loads up steeper streets. Why? thought Vague Henri.
‘What a stink,’ said Vague Henri, as they walked away into the city.
‘You’ve got very swanky for someone whose idea of heaven used to be a nice juicy rat.’
‘What was that all about then, the cart?’
‘I’m interested in how things work. An ignorant man from ignorant people that outdragger – but clever. Interesting bloke.’
When they got back to their lodgings, an irritated IdrisPukke was waiting for them along with Cadbury and Deidre Plunkett who, with her scarlet lips and rouged cheeks, looked like nothing on God’s earth.
‘Punctuality is the politeness of kings,’ said IdrisPukke to Cale. ‘Let alone someone who was sold for sixpence.’
‘We were held up. Hello, Deidre. Are you well?’
‘Nothing shall be well with the wicked.’
There was a short silence.
‘Speaking of the wicked, Deidre,’ said Cadbury, ‘would you mind keeping an eye out for anyone behaving oddly?’ She left silently.
‘She’s lovely,’ said Vague Henri.
‘Hold your tongue, you little twerp,’ replied Cadbury. ‘We’ve come from Kitty the Hare’s office.’
Cale nodded.
‘IdrisPukke tells me you’re always complaining about your bad luck – but I have to say if you’d asked me what your chances were of getting out alive from your interview with Kitty I’d have said about as thin as a homeopathic soup made from the shadow of a pigeon that’d died of starvation.’
‘I don’t know what homeopathic means.’
‘In this instance, it means not worth the steam off a bucket of piss.’
‘I’ll try to remember – good word, homeopathic.’
‘I don’t have time for this,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘Whatever people thought of Kitty they underestimated him. His loan books are a maze with an exit in every treasury this side of the Great Wall of China. They didn’t know Kitty was behind them – I’ve counted more than twenty front men as it is. Most of them should have known better than to deal with someone like Kitty. My guess is that he was blackmailing them. But you never know with splendid financiers what they’ll do for even more money.’
‘I don’t complain about my bad luck,’ said Cale.
‘Yes, you do,’ replied IdrisPukke. ‘At any rate, a lot of people owe Kitty a lot of money. Now, thanks to you, we’ve inherited their obligations to pay up.’
‘What if they don’t want to? Kitty’s dead, after all.’
‘But, as Cadbury has pointed out, exacting payment from Kitty’s debtors is very much his line of work.’
‘What’s my share?’
‘We thought a tenth,’ said Cadbury.
‘He kills Kitty and you get nine-tenths? Seems the wrong way round to me,’ said Vague Henri.