The Butt (32 page)

‘A reward?’

‘You’ve got it: a reward, a reparation payment that I can help you to give, if you help me.’

And Tom, who no longer had any power to resist this outrageous proposition, understood that, by default, he had already come round and round again, and round once more, until he was all dried out, the last desiccated guest in the roach motel.

‘Schweinsaxe?’ Von Sasser asked Adams, holding up a pair of serving tongs with a whole pig’s trotter wedged in them.

‘Thanks, Erich,’ the Consul replied. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

Von Sasser deposited the truncated foot on a plastic bowl, then ladled thick brown gravy on top. The Tayswengo waitresses in their starch-stiff dirndls were still loitering by the kitchen door, but this evening the neuro-anthropologist had elected to serve the food himself.

Tom supposed this was partly to promote an atmosphere of cosy domesticity, but also because – with some sensitivity – Von Sasser didn’t want to draw attention to Prentice. After all, if the Tayswengo had refused to serve him, he might have made a scene. At the very least, it would’ve looked as if a ‘Nil by mouth’ sign had been hung from his scrawny neck. In the event, when it was his turn, Von Sasser simply passed over Prentice in silence, and dished up for the next person at the table.

When Tom’s turn came, Von Sasser neglected him as well. For a moment, Tom thought to protest, but then his volunteer status came back to him, and he appreciated that a full stomach wasn’t something he wanted to have on his first outing to an operating room.

Prentice wasn’t remotely discomfited by his fast. He helped himself to the bottle of Hock, and sat smoking and chatting, more animated than he had been at any time since his arrival at Ralladayo. He discussed, quite openly, the two mixed-race children he had ‘fathered’: one in the Tontines, and one who had recently been transferred here, to the orphanage.

Was it only Tom who could see the parentheses around ‘fathered’? It can’t be, he thought, because without them Prentice’s remarks were psychopathically unabashed. ‘I’ve made a decision,’ he was now telling Gloria. ‘No matter what the consequences are for my marriage, I’m going to tell my lady wife the entire truth.’

Gloria nodded sympathetically, then said, ‘That’s good, Brian.’

‘I’ve made the first reparations to two of the ladies involved, so I’ve got to jolly well do right by the third as well.’

‘That’s excellent, Brian.’

‘Yes, honesty is the best policy and all that sort of thing. I – I’m not terribly articulate, you know, but it did something to me – seeing the kiddies. I’ve never thought of myself as a fatherly sort of chap, but it stirred me up, and I want to – if I’m allowed, that is – try and, sort of, look after them.’

It stretched the bounds of Tom’s credulity that Gloria Swai-Phillips – who had cared for the results of Prentice’s paedophilia – could sit there encouraging this grotesque fantasizing. Yet he found himself sitting and listening to it, and, perhaps by his very passivity alone, encouraging him as well.

Walking back to the settlement, Tom had been so unsteady on his feet that Von Sasser had to hold him up. Never the less, with his head already swimming, Tom still couldn’t prevent himself from taking shots of schnapps from the bottle that had thoughtfully been left beside his empty plate. The oily aftertaste of the spirit was curiously moreish.

With no food of his own to eat, Tom was at leisure to examine each of his dining companions in turn, and analyse what they were saying with the benefit of his new background knowledge. With his, ah . . . harkening to his master’s inner voice, and his slavish espousal of Von Sasser’s made-up folkways, there was no doubt that Adams had had the ‘oppo’. Tom deduced that Vishtar Loman must have had it too. Gloria? No – she didn’t need it, she was one of life’s self-appointed Head Girl scouts, ever ready to boss a troop, whether of baboons or bankers. If her corpus callosum had been cut, Tom thought ruefully, the only spirit voices Gloria would hear would be those of sullen inner-children refusing to respond to her remorseless questioning.

As for her cousin, who had joined them at table, he was definitely one of the neuro-anthropologist’s less successful outcomes. This evening, Jethro Swai-Phillips was part-way between his two impairments: he could move his crabbed right hand – although he accidentally dabbed it in the gravy – but couldn’t prevent himself from intermittently slurring: ‘Heesh the ma-an!’

Tom speculated: had Jethro had his oppo recently? Or was his violated brain mysteriously reacting to the enviroment itself? Back in Vance, Jethro had been such a vivid character – decisive, self-possessed, the courtroom colossus of the Tropics. Yet, Tom now understood, the lawyer had always been serving this other, far more heavyweight client.

Was this why Martha had reacted so vehmently to him? Tom shook his muzzy head, desperate to gain purchase. But it was no good; he’d never be able to get a grip on the conundrum of his wife’s intentions; the well-oiled links of the chains that dragged effects behind her causes simply slid through his hands.

What was it Jethro had said, sitting under his hunting prints in his office at the top of the Metro-Center? That it didn’t matter a damn if Tom began smoking again – that the entire apparatus of prohibition was solely a product of race politics?

Tonight, the dense tobacco smoke alone identified the chalet as the command centre of the insurgency. Long pennants of it furled and unfurled in the warm draughts. A particularly thick standard of pipe smoke was draped behind Von Sasser’s chair, and now, rallying to it, the neuro-anthropologist addressed his staff, who, with the exception of Tom and Prentice, were working their way through big wedges of Black Forest Gateau, slathered with cream.

‘You cannot conceive’, the rhetorician of Ralladayo began, ‘of a cannibal sending back his enemy pie simply to avoid a statutory fine or a short term of imprisonment, any more than a Parsee would forgo the excarnation of his mum, or an Inuit his hunt for the narwhal’s tusk – but this, yeah, is precisely what the Anglos have done.

‘I’m not saying, yeah . . .’ But he was saying, and saying, and bloody saying some more, his sharp words cutting into Tom’s very flesh, his bloody convictions splattering the lapels of Tom’s crumpled, sky-blue suit. ‘. . . I’m not saying that what we do here isn’t similar – that’s bloody obvious! We come from the same bloody tradition. But see, when me and Vishtar do an oppo, yeah, we’re not simply imposing our idea of the good, we’re turning people into living, breathing, walking-bloody-instruments – instruments that can hear a voice right inside their heads telling them, loud and clear, what they should actually bloody do!

‘Y’see’ – relighting his hideous pipe, Von Sasser dribbled smoke – ‘you’ve gotta fight fire with bloody fire.’

But Tom Brodzinski didn’t see this at all. What he did see – and what he cleaved to, even now – was that the best thing he had done in years – perhaps in his entire life – had been to give up smoking. He felt much better, despite his current weakened state; indeed, if he hadn’t quit, Tom felt sure he would now be seriously ill – what with the stress and the fatigue, and the sheer monotony of listening, for hour after hour, to this insane man lecture his lobotomized confrères.

Tom thrashed in smoky whirlpools, struggling to stay afloat on the wreckage of his reasoning, but it was no use – he shouldn’t have had that last schnapps, and so he submerged into unconsciousness . . .

. . . And popped back up to be dashed with song spray:

This golden realm of unutterable promise . . .

We give it to you, O Lord, our country,

We give . . . it . . . to . . . you-ooo . . . !

The lamps had long since been lit and now burned down low. The paraffin fumes were choking, the tobacco smoke was stale, and the meat was already putrefying between the gaping teeth from which these words spewed. They were all standing to attention behind their chairs. Prentice even had his hand on his heart. His angular Adam’s apple bobbed as he sang, stretching the smooth healthy skin of his neck.

They finished the anthem. There were tears in Gloria’s eyes, and Von Sasser’s, the latter said: ‘There she blows! Poor bugger’s had a skinful of grog, you better get him to his swag, Brian, yeah.’

Tommy Junior stuck Tom’s feet in his mouth and slobbered on them: a suck of incestuous satisfaction. His father’s head burned with shame. Then the boy pinched Tom’s legs, hard, and flipped him. Tom flew, end over end over end, yet never reached the end of the dusty corridor; while up ahead the woman that was Martha, that was Atalaya, that was Gloria – that was all of them – turned and turned and turned the corner, avoiding him for an eternity, her words floating back, over and over, to her rejected spouse: ‘I’m scared, honey. I’m scared . . .’

As they walked towards the dispensary, he prattled away: ‘Have you ever noticed, old chap, how the water here goes down the plughole the other way? Y’know, anti-clockwise. I’m not good at expressing myself at all, but it did occur to me that this was a sort of meta-thingy.’

‘Metaphor.’

There was barely enough current in Tom’s brain for the connections to be made – but then they were. At high speed the entire narrative spooled through the viewfinder of his awareness, and the depth and complexity of the set-up, and the shallowness and simplicity of his own responses, stunned him with blow after blow.

Adams – who’d known so very much about Tom without even having to ask, right down to the fact that he drank Seven and Sevens – had been omniscient in the break-fast room at the Mimosa – and then there was Swai-Phillips, who had already known that Tom had met with the Consul. The indifference and then hostility of the junior embassy attaché – who had been got to long before Tom called.

Then, once things were up and running, they had a legman keeping an eye on Tom’s every move. First there were tails from behind – Squolly’s men – and then they were replaced by a better tail, one who worked from the front and was able to anticipate which way he’d go before Tom knew himself.

The man who knew what the inside of the courtroom was like – even knew that it had good airconditioning; the man the car-rental clerk knew the name of without having to be told; the man who’d slipped it to the clerk in the Goods Shed Store that the rifles weren’t for Tom; the man who was never marked by the makkata in Vance to begin with, and whose thigh was checked by other makkatas along the way, purely to confirm that he was the plant. Yes, the man whose case was being handled on a no-win-no-fee basis, and who performed brilliantly as an instrument to be played upon by the wills of others.