Pulling the wings off an.., p.1
Pulling the Wings Off Angels, page 1
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He’s just another bully, when he pushes folks around
He’s a bigger, badder bully; I don’t want him in my town
—Leslie Fish
“First,” said Florio the gangster, “I’m going to cut off your nose and make you eat it. Then I’m going to cut off your ears and make you eat them. Then I’m going to gouge out your eyes and make you eat them. Then I’m going to cut off your balls, fry them in a bit of your own fat, and make you eat them. Unless—”
“Yes?”
Florio is about forty, fair-haired, stocky, just under medium height. If he says something, he means it; that’s his gimmick, in a world where everybody’s got to have one to stand out from the crowd. Florio keeps his promises, like God. Personally, though, I think the reason for Florio’s outstanding success in his profession is his imagination, which is vivid, lurid, and just quirky enough to make you piss yourself, as I’d just done.
“Unless,” Florio said, with a smile, “you do a job for me.”
“Consider it done,” I said quickly. “Really. I mean it.”
His goons had nailed me to a door. Other gangsters tie people up. Florio has big dome-headed roofing nails hammered through the web of your palms, taking care to miss the major veins. The religious imagery is quite deliberate; under that rough exterior, Florio is a devout templegoer, well versed in the scriptures.
“That’s the ticket,” Florio said, and nodded to one of the goons, who passed him a claw hammer. It’s the only way to get a nail out of a door, but it means they had to use my wrist as a fulcrum. I think I may have screamed, but Florio and his people were very kind and pretended not to notice.
(In case you’re wondering, I owed Florio a quarter of a million staurata. That’s an awful lot of money; enough to pay for a warship, or keep a regiment in the field for three months, or build a large temple; the annual tax revenue of the entire Mesoge is eighty thousand staurata. Moral: Never play cards with notorious underground figures. If you do, and you get dealt a hand with four aces, fold immediately.)
“Get some bandages and a basin of warm water,” Florio said, “and some of that plantain extract. There’s bound to be a scar,” he told me, “but in your line of work that’s probably no bad thing. What’s the technical term? Stigmata?”
I managed a feeble grin. Actually, believe it or not, some of my fellow seminary students pay money to have the same thing done, albeit in a rather more humane fashion. Anything to get an edge in the cutthroat world of ecclesiastical preferment.
“Thanks,” I said.
“All part of the service.” Florio nodded to his pet doctor, who started fussing about with swabs and tweezers. He always has a qualified medic around on these occasions, to tell the goons where the nerves and arteries are, with the proper medical names for them. That’s class, if you ask me. “Now then, this job you’re going to do.”
I’d reached the point where the dead chill was starting to thaw into pain and nausea, so my voice wobbled a bit. “Fire away,” I said.
“I want you,” Florio said, “to get me an angel.”
Oh for crying out loud.
* * *
This nonsense about my family. It’s got to stop.
There are two versions of it; the one everybody seems to know, and the truth. If I tell you both, you can choose between them. Piece of cake.
There’s absolutely nothing to say about my family on my father’s side until you go right back to the original Maenomai met’Auzen. He was one of the fifty companions who followed Scaevola to Issecuivo, crossing the vast ocean to look for a country nobody really believed in. After Scaevola found and conquered the New World, Maenomai was given a province to govern. As luck would have it (they drew lots) it wasn’t one of the really valuable ones. It had gold mines, but they were mostly worked out, and Maenomai spent what little he was able to grind out of them trying to improve the agriculture on his new estates and plantations, because all the peasants were poor as rats, and prosperous tenants can afford to pay higher rents than starving ones. That didn’t work very well; he tried to introduce Old World crops and livestock, and of course they shrivelled away and died in the blistering heat, so he had to let the natives go back to doing what they’d always done. He ruled his share of the empire for twenty years, ending up with rather less than he’d started with when he and the others crowded round an old hat to see who’d get what; then he sold the lot to his surviving partners and went home. He was still fabulously rich, by Western standards, and everyone agreed it wasn’t bad going for the fourth son of a minor country squire. His descendants gradually reverted to type, whittling down Maenomai’s inconceivable wealth by means of bad luck and bad management until they were once again obscure provincial gentry; at which point, my father married my mother, for her money.
Which brings us to my grandfather, on my mother’s side. Everything is, of course, always about him. He died before I was born so the following is all hearsay, rumour, and legend. For example, there are no surviving records to verify his claim that he was born in prison, or that his mother got pregnant by one of the warders to save her neck from the noose. Fair enough. Paper costs money and so does clerks’ time; people like that don’t tend to get written about. If that part of the story is true, he grew up in the slate quarries—son of a serial offender, three guesses how he was going to turn out, no point letting him go since he’d only find his way back into custody sooner or later.
According to family legend he had a blissfully happy childhood—the only kid in the camp, spoiled and cossetted by five hundred convicts and a hundred guards, entirely unaware that his surroundings were in any way unusual. His mother was dead by the time he was ten, but it hardly seemed to matter to a boy with six hundred devoted aunts and uncles. He went to work on the slate as soon as he was old enough to push a cart—the guards made him a little toy one out of scraps of packing cases—and since nobody ever got round to telling him that quarrying slate isn’t supposed to be fun, he spent all day doing what he loved best, without boring aunts and uncles or stupid lessons getting in the way. Everybody saved a few bits and pieces from their rations for the poor orphan boy and he worked from sunrise to sunset, pushing carts and then swinging a pick, so by the time he was fourteen he was enormous; nearly six feet tall and still growing, broad as an ox and strong as a bear. At which point, one of the guards took it into his head to teach the kid how to box.
He turned out to be good; so good that the guards pooled their savings, bought him a free pardon from the provincial governor (awkward, since he’d done nothing to pardon, but I imagine they found a way round that) and sold him on indentures to one of the leading trainers in Auxentia City.
The indentures were for ten years, but the trainer let him off after eight. He was a good boxer, but not quite good enough; he stopped a stiff left to the side of the head in a routine exhibition match at a country fair somewhere, and that was the end of him as a professional fighter.
The punch left him blind in one eye and generally flaky, but he was still fit, agile, and enormously strong, so he gravitated from fighting to general showman stuff, tumbling and trapezes and the high wire, until his balance went, and he had a bad fall, after which he quit performing and moved over to the management side. Everybody in the troupe liked him, and he turned out to be very good at business. He realised that what audiences wanted was a bit of sophistication with their spectacle; little stories to frame the action, like they had in the arenas in the big cities. He started making up little plays. They went down well, so he hired a couple of proper writers, and before long he’d turned the tumblers into a touring theatrical company, specialising in nautical melodrama, which was just starting to get big at that time. At the age of thirty-one he moved to Choris Seautou and took the lease of a large but rundown theatre on the unfashionable side of the river. He called it the Palace of Joy, soon shortened to the Palace; and now you know precisely who I’m talking about and what happened next.
His big break came when he hit on the idea of doing a deal with the City Prefect (who just happened to be seeing a lot of one of his leading ladies at the time) whereby convicted criminals were executed onstage at the Palace as part of the play, rather than on a gibbet in the prison yard where nobody could see. He got his house authors to rework all the classics to include execution scenes, sorted out some foolproof security protocols to make sure none of the criminals could escape or make an embarrassing fuss, and announced a series of special gala matinees; advance booking only, with a range of ticket prices to suit all pockets, from two staurata for a box to twelve trachy for standing room in the pit, nine trachy for the upper gallery. After a slightly tentative start he was soon playing to capacity houses, and the only problem was getting enough talent to satisfy the demand. Soon he was shipping in conv
That required him to become respectable, but that wasn’t a problem. He built the Gallery of Illustration on a prime site right in the centre of Choris, and before long it was the hottest ticket in town. He’d always been moderate in his tastes and inclined to a quiet, frugal lifestyle, and he got his writers to work up appropriate small talk for him to use whenever he met people of quality. Pretty soon he didn’t need any of that. Everyone says he was one of Nature’s gentlemen, the proverbial diamond in the rough. Natural good manners, a pleasant, open disposition and a net worth estimated at two million staurata made him welcome in the highest circles of society, and at age forty-two he married his second wife, my grandmother, poor as a rat but first cousin to an earl. They were, by all accounts, ideally suited and devoted to each other, and he never looked at another woman until the day he died.
In short, the fairy-tale rags-to-riches success story, and every trachy he ever made was earned fair and square without hurting anyone or grinding the faces of the poor. All he did was give people what they wanted, with the useful knack of knowing what they wanted before they knew they wanted it. Some nitpickers said nasty things about the public executions, but the majority of right-thinking people held that Justice must not only be done but be seen to be done, and two thousand paying customers seeing it done every night, with musical accompaniment and fireworks to follow—what could be more edifying than that?
Born scum, died a gentleman, and wherever he went and whoever he was introduced to, everybody was always pleased to know him, even dukes and princes. It only goes to show that you can make it in our society provided you’ve truly got what it takes. In which case, there can’t be much wrong with the way things are, now can there?
Anyhow, that’s where the money came from, and at least some of it is still there, despite my father’s best efforts to get rid of it. He sold the theatres and the various other sidelines, because gentlemen don’t do trade, and he bought land; huge estates in Chaerea and the Mesoge, just before some fool made peace with Blemmya and the market got flooded with cheap Blemmyan corn. But that was all right, because land is land, they aren’t making any more of it, and if it doesn’t produce enough income to pay the bills you can always mortgage it. To pay off the mortgages he married my mother, which cost him twelve thousand acres and a copper mine by way of dowry, but worth it because a fleet of grain freighters came with her, just right for the grain run to Blemmya, except that shortly after that some fool started the Second Blemmyan War and that was the end of the overseas grain trade; so my father swapped the freighters for vineyards in Mavalis and a munitions factory with government contracts, which paid handsomely until some fool ended the war and everyone was suddenly wallowing in cheap, high-quality Blemmyan claret. My father and my mother didn’t see eye to eye a lot of the time. I think they mostly argued about business.
None of which really matters; except perhaps to explain why I felt the need to make a lot of money when I should have been cramming for my theology finals, and why I thought I had the sort of luck it takes to pull off a big score, and probably why it didn’t work out. It also introduces the theme of inheritance, which you’re going to hear an awful lot about as we go on. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Anyway, that’s the true story. I expect you know the other version, so I won’t bother with it.
* * *
“It’s all bullshit,” I said. “It’s just a myth. There never was any angel.”
Florio looked very sad. “Pity,” he said. “I like you, even though you cheat at cards. But if you’re right then there’s no force on Earth that can save you. Have you ever tried nose? They say it tastes a bit like chicken.”
One of his goons handed him a knife. “I’ll get the money,” I screamed. “I promise.”
“A quarter of a million?” He smiled at me. “I don’t think so. If you’d had any way of raising large sums of money, you’d never have tried to cheat me in the first place. You must have been really desperate to try that.”
No, not really. I thought I could get away with it. “My father,” I said. “He’ll pay.”
He shook his head. “He hasn’t got a quarter of a million. Well, strictly speaking he has, but he’d need to sell a lot of land and nobody’s buying it since the war, so by the time he’s paid off the mortgages he’d be getting pennies on the stauraton, and that’s assuming he can find a buyer. That’s the trouble with old money, you think you’re loaded and then when pitch comes to shove you find out you’re as poor as dogshit. It’s a real shame your father sold the theatres. I’d have taken the Palace and the Gallery like a shot. I’ve always fancied being in show business.”
I’d been examining the knife. It was really close to my face, so I had a splendid opportunity to see how very sharp it was; a coarse stone followed by a fine one, then honed on the rim of a glass. The point, no pun intended, about a knife is that the work it does is irreversible. Once a bit’s cut off, you can’t stick or stitch it back. I don’t know about you, but personally I think irreversible things should be avoided at any cost. It’s a matter of principle.
Which led me on to the question of faith. I didn’t believe in the angel, but Florio presumably did; like I said, he’s very devout. His faith could buy me time, and time changes things. Without faith, I’d run out of time, the greatest irreversible of them all. Faith, of course, is just another way of saying opinion. In my opinion there aren’t any angels because there’s no God; but a lot of people, the majority in fact, believe in the Invincible Sun and all His heavenly hosts, angels and ministers of grace and all the rest of it. Who’s to say my opinion’s worth more than theirs, just because it happens to be true? That would be unspeakably arrogant.
“Fine,” I said. “You win.”
Florio laughed and nodded; the knife disappeared as though it had never existed. “Of course I do,” he said. “I always win at everything. Hadn’t you noticed?”
* * *
Always: a hardworking word, never out of fashion. I was always intended for the Church from the moment I was born. If I’d been a girl, I’d have been married into Trade, for money, but I was a boy, so that meant God. A bit like my grandfather, really; he was a criminal from the moment the umbilical cord was cut, because of heredity. By the same token, third sons of the met’Auzen are destined for the priesthood, and we generally end up as abbots of minor houses or bishops of the less prestigious dioceses. It means God provides for us, thereby reducing the load on the family finances, and we pray for the family souls, so that angle is covered.
I believed in the Invincible Sun when I was a kid. After all, there He was, up in the sky, so bright He hurt your eyes. It was only when I went to the seminary and started studying to become a priest that I stopped. There’s nothing quite like the scriptures for killing faith stone dead. Actually reading them and thinking about what they said evaporated my belief like spit on a hot stove. I can’t say I was sorry. Up till then, my life had been constrained and restricted by all sorts of rules, most of them arbitrary and quite unreasonable; thou shalt not steal, for crying out loud, thou shalt not commit adultery, where’s the fun in that? Once they’d dissipated into the mist, I realised I could do what I liked. Provided I managed to keep out of jail, there was nothing to stop me having a whale of a time. I rather liked the sound of that.
Meanwhile I carried on with my studies. In fact, I began to apply myself to them as never before. Being a priest means all sorts of good things; tenure for life, exemption from secular courts and laws, not to mention being forbidden to marry, which means you can share your bed with whomever you like instead of having some lumpen heiress inflicted on you by your family. In order to enjoy yourself properly, of course, you need money. Being a priest would see to that in due course, but in the meantime, I had to make do with temporal resources, namely a less than generous allowance from my father.
