The Beating of His Wings Read Free Page B

in your head.’
    ‘I’ll call the Badiel.’
    ‘Too late for that now, my dear. There are no Badiels in the world we’re about to take you to – no defenders or preservers, no one at all to watch over you. Here in the city you believed you were safe, by and large – but being an intelligent girl you must have known there were horrible things out there.’
    ‘We
are
those horrible things.’
    ‘Yes, we are. We are bad news.’
    ‘Very bad news.’
    ‘Will you hurt him?’ she said – looking for a way out.
    ‘We will kill him,’ said Trevor Kovtun. ‘But we’ve given our word to do it as quickly as we can. There will be no cruelty, just the death. You must make a decision about yourself – live or die.’
    But what decision was there?
    Later, on leaving the shop, Kovtun pointed out that even a year earlier they would have killed the girl in such an unspeakably vile way that any question of resistance to their investigations would have evaporated like the summer drizzle on the great salt flats of Utah.
    ‘But that was a year ago,’ said Trevor Lugavoy. ‘Besides, I’ve a feeling we’re running out of deaths. Best be thrifty. Cale should be our last ticket.’
    ‘You’ve been saying we should stop almost since we started twenty years ago.’
    ‘Now I mean it.’
    ‘Well, you shouldn’t have said anything to me about finishing until we were done – then we could just have finished. Now that you’ve made a thing about this being our last job you’ve turned it into an event, so. If you want to get God’s attention, tell him your plans.’
    ‘If there was a God who was interested in sticking his nose in, don’t you think he’d have put a stop to us by now? Either God intervenes in the lives of men or he doesn’t. There’s no halfway.’
    ‘How do you know? His ends might be mysterious.’
    They were experienced men and used to difficulties and they were not especially surprised to discover that Cale had gone somewhere else for reasons the girl was unclear about. But they had the name of Vague Henri, a good description of a boy with a scar on his face, and a convincing assurance that he’d know exactly where Cale had gone. Three days of hanging about followed, asking their unsuspicious questionsand trying not to be conspicuous. In the end, patience was all that was required.
    Vague Henri liked people but not the kind of people who lived in palaces. It wasn’t that he hadn’t made an effort. At one banquet at which he’d accompanied IdrisPukke he’d been asked, with a polite lack of attention, how he’d come to be there. Thinking they were interested in his extraordinary experiences he told them, starting with his life in the Sanctuary. But the details of the strange privations of the place did not fascinate, they repelled. Only IdrisPukke overheard the chinless wonder who said, ‘My God, the people they’re letting in these days.’ But the next remark was heard by Vague Henri as well. He’d mentioned something about working in the kitchens in Memphis and some exquisite, intending to be overheard, drawled: ‘
How banal!
’ Vague Henri caught the tone of contempt but couldn’t be sure – he didn’t know what it meant, perhaps it was an expression of sympathy and he’d misunderstood. Deciding it was time to leave, IdrisPukke claimed he was feeling unwell.
    ‘What does barn owl mean?’ asked Vague Henri on the way home. IdrisPukke was reluctant to hurt his feelings but the boy needed to know what the score was with these people.
    ‘It means commonplace – beneath the interest of a cultured person. He was a drawler: it’s pronounced
ban-al
.’
    ‘He wasn’t being nice, then?’
    ‘No.’
    He didn’t say anything for a minute.
    ‘I prefer barn owl,’ he said at last. But it stung.
    Most of the time IdrisPukke was away on business for his brother and so Vague Henri was lonely. He now realized he wasn’t acceptable to Spanish Leeds society, not even its lower rungs (who were,