Soldiers of Paradise (39 page)

“Pentecost,” he said.

“Yes, do you know him? Chrism gave special orders to have them rounded up, I don’t know why. Though if you know them, perhaps that explains it.”

“Yes. That explains it.”

“They were hung,” said the monk, sucking one finger.

Thanakar looked down at the floor. “There was a little girl …”

“Yes. That’s the point of the story. This captain saved her life. He was … What shall I say? Attracted to her. When he came to us, the girl was still living with him. We made him give her up. They did,” said the monk, jerking his head towards the far corner of the room. “They had him whipped. I had nothing to do with it. I hate that sort of thing. She had a birthmark.”

“I know.”

The monk looked at him distastefully. “Don’t tell me—you too?” he asked.

“Nothing like that.”

“I’m glad to hear it. It’s a filthy habit. Hard to break, too. He still visits her.”

“Nothing like that,” repeated Thanakar. “I knew her father.”

“That explains it. The captain is a very disgusting fellow, if you want to know.” Malabar Starbridge jumped up out of his chair. Hunching his shoulders to indicate secrecy, he pulled Thanakar to the window and pointed into the mass of men around the bonfire. “There he is,” he said, lowering his voice conspiratorially, though the man was thirty feet away.

“Which one?”

“That one.” A man stood away from the others. He wore the purple rosette of a child abuser on his uniform’s lapel. His eyebrows joined over his nose.

Since the day that he had killed the bishop’s liaison, on the plain below St. Serpentine’s, Doctor Thanakar had found it difficult to hate. He had felt no remorse. But it was as if the action of striking something foul had cracked the cavity in him where his hate was stored, and it had drained away. All his life he had hated so passionately, tenderly, articulately. All other feelings had been muffled and chaotic in comparison. Without hate, he had been left with an empty feeling, an anaesthesia for which he had been grateful in a way, for it had helped him to tolerate the death of friends. Now, watching the degenerate captain standing near the bonfire, warming his hands, he was resensitized. The man had a protruding lower lip. He would be easy to hate. And suddenly Thanakar was conscious of a new, pervasive, almost physical pain, like the pain of blood returning to a sleeping limb. Abu the Inebriate, he thought. He looked down at Charity Starbridge’s last letter. Goodbye, he thought.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” he said.

The monk looked away, twisting his face into a scowl. “Don’t mention it,” he muttered. “We’ve got to stick together, the old families. There’re not many of us left.”

“I wish I could repay you.”

“I need men,” said the monk, eyeing Thanakar’s leg. “Demiurge has fifteen hundred soldiers at the temple. He means to burn her. I wish him luck. She has powers he’s never seen. Even so, if it comes to fighting …”

Thanakar frowned. “Have you written to the colonel?”

“Aspe? What for? He’d be glad to see her burn.”

“No. She … means something to him. Just the way she looks. Some kind of symbol. Beauty in the heart of ugliness.” Outside the window, the pervert was picking his lip. It slid down over rotten teeth.

 

People broke into the clocktower in Durbar Square to ring the stroke of midnight: ten crashing strokes, and then a paean of joy. “Ten o’clock,” said the pervert. Like many of his kind, he was an unimaginative man and had not responded to questions or entreaties, not to violence or the threat of violence, not to scandal or the threat of scandal, but to the promise of a fee. Thanakar had promised him eleven dollars and put a spark into his sullen eye. Thanakar hated him for it. He had a long thin face.

They stood on the steps of a dismal building—half shrine, half labor exchange—looking out over the crowd. The pervert had taken him into the city’s stews, by rickshaw, until the ways got too thick, and then on foot. Thanakar felt vital and self-confident, full of hope and hate. His mood had changed in a few hours, and around him, too, the mood had changed. The streets still seethed with people, but it had stopped raining, and in the atmosphere there was a current of joy that had been absent earlier. Only a few people carried weapons or seemed inclined to need them. With the tolling of midnight and the start of the festival, people had forgotten, not their differences, but at least their animosity. The bishop’s shops were looted and burning along the major thoroughfares, but to Thanakar that was a pleasant sight. People had smiled to see him, reached out to touch him as he passed. Sustained by the example of the new saint, he had not turned away. Women yelled and pointed from upstairs windows.

Abandoning the rickshaw, they had gone on deeper into the city’s muddy heart. At midnight, in the bishop’s market, a crowd had gathered among the boarded stalls. A man stood on a barrel, gesticulating and shouting in a language so debased that Thanakar could only recognize one word in ten. Perhaps that wasn’t it, he thought guiltily. The man was far away from where they stood on the steps of the labor exchange, and his shouting was muddled in the noises of the crowd. Even so, thought Thanakar, Abu would have had no trouble understanding.

“What is he saying?” he asked. And again, “What is he saying?” The pervert had turned away down the steps, muttering something inaudible. “Wait,” said Thanakar. “I want to watch.”

The square was lit with torches and uneven fires from gutted buildings. The sky burned orange, as if traces still lingered from a malignant sunset. But as the shouting stopped and the people grew so still that Thanakar fancied he could hear them breathe, a new kind of light spread out humbly from among them. Men and women produced lumps of candles from underneath their ragged clothes. As they lit them, one from another, tentacles of light seemed to reach down the dark alleyways, and the center of the square seemed to burn up bright, the torches and the bonfires overwhelmed in a gentle golden radiance. There was no wind. People stood without talking, almost without moving. The candle flames burned straight and gentle, and then there was a slight commotion in the middle of the crowd as women unwrapped baskets of birds, red and white doves. They held them up and coaxed them into the air; having spent so long in blinded baskets, they seemed unwilling to go, and when they finally rose one by one into the dark, it was with no great rustling or flapping, but they went gently. Thanakar watched them, his heart full of a kind of happiness. Men pulled a banner to the top of a flagpole—the sun in splendor, gold silk on white. There was not a breath of air. The flag seemed to grasp the flagpole like a flaccid hand until the birds, curling up around it, fanned it with their wings, uncoiled it slightly on their living wind. Thanakar caught a glimpse of the design.

“They’re celebrating the new saint,” said the pervert. “Adventist pigs!” He stood picking his lips. Then he walked away without another word, down the concrete steps, hands in his pockets, and Thanakar had to run to catch him. It was difficult. His leg was hurting him. He had worked it mercilessly for days, and now his kneecap had dried out. The joint worked mechanically, without strength, and made a strange clicking noise. Hurrying down the steps, he almost fell. “Wait!” he commanded, but the shadow in front of him flickered up the street. Enraged, he hurried on, his kneecap clattering.

He paused to rest under the facade of a broken building. The sky burned redder here. The alleyway ran uphill to Beggar’s Medicine; ahead, the pervert stopped under a streetlamp and leaned against the pole.

For almost an hour the man mocked him, far ahead, out of sight, hurrying onward when Thanakar hurried to catch up, stopping when he stopped, exhausted. The streets were echoing and empty, and sometimes Thanakar would recognize the same configurations and realize that the man had led him in a circle, but still the doctor kept on, muttering imprecations and promising cold murder. In the end, the pervert waited for him under a row of houses, and his face, as Thanakar limped up, was so empty that the doctor found himself doubting any motive in him but stupidity. He sat down on the gutterstone to find his breath. The pervert leaned against a wall. He chewed gum and threw the wrapper into the mud.

There was life here. Men sold food from wheeled stalls under a cluster of acetylene lamps: messes of noodles and artificial cabbage, cakes of edible plastic developed by the bishop’s council. In a vacant lot, people lived under tarpaulins or in huts made of burlap and corrugated iron. People sat on plywood laid over the mud. Their bones showed, and they shivered in the warm air. Near Thanakar, some crippled women begged, their faces wrapped in white gauze. But most took no notice of him. Instead, they stared at the pervert with dull intensity, as if they were trying to remember why they found him interesting. He was an important man here with his black uniform, his cracked lips.

Across the road, another celebration had started. A barrel of gin had been broached in front of a dilapidated tavern, while the barkeep ladled out smoking dollops into cardboard cups under a red-and-white painted sign of doves copulating, their beaks twisted into leers. “Come, gentlemen,” he called. “It’s free tonight, in honor of the festival. Free tonight, while it lasts.” On the corner under the lamp, a man vomited into the gutter.

“That’s not a very good advertisement,” remarked Thanakar.

“He’s not a true devotee,” laughed the barman. “Now the saint, the saint could have drunk down this whole cask and still walked home. He once drank down a bottle in this very house and never even stopped for breath. If that’s not a miracle, I don’t know what is. These folks,” he gestured with his ladle down the road. “Weak stomachs. Can’t blame ’em.”

Thanakar got up and limped across the road. He reached his hand out for a cup. The barman poured him a huge portion, and with streaming eyes and burning tongue, he drank it down, in honor of the prince. He felt pollution coursing through his blood, and motioning to the barman to fill the cup again, he drank again to Abu the Undefiled. Dignity is the least important thing, he thought, drunkenness hitting him like a slap.

“Well done, sir,” said the barman. “I can tell you’re a gentleman. What’s your name?”

“Thanakar Starbridge.”

The barman cocked an eye. “My cousin,” said Thanakar, responding to the unasked question.

“Well then, God bless you, sir,” said the man, winking facetiously. “Pretty soon we’ll have all the nobs down here. You’re not with him, are you?” he asked, gesturing towards where the pervert stood picking his lips until they bled.

“Not in the sense you mean.”

“Stay away from him, sir. He’s a stinker.”

“He’s a scumbag,” agreed Thanakar companionably. But at that moment, as if to demonstrate their connection, the pervert took off again, and Thanakar put down his cup and followed. The pervert paused at the head of the street and climbed the steps of a house there. Thanakar climbed after him, his kneepan rattling.

It was a richly furnished house, of ill repute and bad smells, the kind the nose instinctively connects with vice. And even though Thanakar could identify only cigarettes and perfume as he stepped into the hall, the smell seemed to combine with the velvet upholstery and flowered carpets and unlock a host of dark associations as a key might unlock an armoire full of secrets. Furniture that elsewhere might have been considered sumptuous, here seemed tainted. Such elegance in such a place seemed to stink of softness and corruption, and brutal empty lives, and consciences so tender that they needed cosseting. Gilt chandeliers hung from high ceilings, blazing with light. There were no shadows anywhere. In a parlor off the hallway the pervert sat at ease in an armchair of carved wood and fat upholstery. In other parlors, poisonous well-dressed men talked in low voices or sipped pale wine.

A gong sounded as the street door closed, and a woman came into the hallway, a wineglass in her hand. She was plump and pretty, with a dress that lapped the carpet—an old-fashioned style and an autumn color that contrasted wistfully with the spring green walls. Thanakar took a few steps forward and he saw a quick sly look disturb her features, like an olive dropped into a cocktail, or a pebble dropped into a pool. His limp had gotten much worse that day. In the woman’s pretty face, he saw a question quickly asked and quickly answered, and afterwards her face resumed its placid surface. She smiled.

“Sweet to see you, dearie, I insist,” she said, in the accents and locutions of a previous generation. But the warmth of her welcome was interrupted by the pervert, who came to stand beside her. He whispered in her ear, and Thanakar could see a pebble of surprise dropped in before her face re-formed. She smiled again, but as she broke away from the pervert and came towards him Thanakar could see her hesitate, unsure of how to greet him or whether to offer him a glass of wine. They can’t be used to Starbridge customers, he thought.

The woman curtsied and reached her hand out for the doctor’s raincoat. “We are honored,” she murmured, making the gestures of respect. “You will find us … very clean.”

Behind her, the pervert sneered. “He’s not interested in that. Not this one. He wants to see her.” And to Thanakar, “She’s available for half an hour or an hour. Though I usually take four,” he added with a kind of bitterness.

“Hush, no need for that,” said the woman. “No need for that, I insist. I’m sure his lordship will be …” She broke off, smiling.

Nauseated suddenly by the smell of perfume and cigarettes, Thanakar turned away. He wiped his mouth along the back of his hand and inhaled the odors of his own skin, liberated by the moisture. “I won’t be long,” he said. “Be prepared to let me take her away. I am a rich man,” he said, moving his lip along his thumb towards the tattoo of the key which opened all doors. “Where is she?”

The pervert’s mouth gaped open. “Tricked, by God—hypocrite! Eleven dollars, my God,” he snarled, grabbing Thanakar by the forearm. “Starbridge scum, you can’t take her away from me.”

Instantly masked bouncers materialized on either side of him, as if conjured from the air. They pulled his hand away and forced his arm behind his back. “I’m a very rich man,” repeated Thanakar mercilessly, drunkenly.