Take Sabina – whom Marta based loosely on herself, but not entirely – for example. Take your average fiery bomb-making student waiting to do his worst. Take Alpha and Beta and certain others who for reasons of security must remain nameless. Take Mickie with his Silent Opposition and his Conspiracy That Nobody Can Put His Finger On, which in my personal judgment was an idea of pure genius except that sooner rather than later I’m going to have to put my finger on it in a manner that will satisfy all parties, owing to Andy’s highly remorseless pressure. Take the People Who Live the Other Side of the Bridge and the Real Heart of Panama that nobody can find except Mickie and a few students with a stethoscope. Take Marco who wouldn’t say yes until I’d had his wife speak to him severely about the new deep freeze she wanted and the second car and getting their kid into the Einstein which I just may be able to arrange for them if Marco comes through on certain other fronts and maybe she ought to have another word with him in that regard?
All fluence. Loose threads, plucked from the air, woven and cut to measure.
So you build up your subsources and do their listening for them, and their worrying, and you research for them and read for them and listen to Marta about them, and you put them in the right places at the right times and generally set them off to their best advantage with all their ideals and problems and little ways, the same as I do in the shop. And you pay them, which is only proper. Part cash in their pockets and the rest put aside for a rainy day so that they don’t flash it around and make themselves look silly and conspicuous and expose themselves to the full rigour of the Law. The only trouble being that my subsources can’t have the cash in their pockets because they don’t know they’ve earned it and some don’t have the pockets as such, so I have to have it in mine. But that’s only fair when you think about it because they haven’t earned it, have they? I have. So I take the cash. Or Andy banks it for me in his widows and orphans. And the subsources are none the wiser, which is what Benny would have called a bloodless con. And What’s life, if it isn’t invention? Starting with inventing yourself.
Prisoners, it is well known, have their own morality. Such was Pendel’s.
And having duly flailed himself and exonerated himself, he was at peace, except that the black cat was still glowering at him and the peace he felt was of the armed variety, a constructive outrage stronger and more lucid than any he had known in a lifetime peppered with injustices. He felt it in his hands, the way they tingled and muscled up. In his back, mostly across his shoulders. In his hips and heels as he strode about the house and shop. Thus exalted, he was able to clench his fists and hammer on the wooden walls of the prisoner’s dock that always mentally surrounded him and roar out his innocence, or innocence as near as made no odds:
Because I’ll tell you something else, Your Honour, while we’re about it, if you’ll wipe that Top Sheep’s smile off your face: it takes two to tango. And Mr Andrew Osnard of Her Majesty’s celestial whatnot tangos. I can feel it. Whether he can feel it is another matter, but I think he can. Sometimes people don’t know they’re doing things. But Andy’s egging me on. He’s making more of me than what I am, counting everything twice and pretending it’s only the once, plus he’s bent because I know bent, and London’s worse than he is.
It was at this point in his deliberations that Pendel stopped addressing his Maker, His Honour or himself, and glared ahead of him at the wall of his workroom where he happened to be cutting yet another life-improving suit for Mickie Abraxas, the one that would win him back his wife. After so many of them, Pendel could have cut it with his eyes shut. But his eyes were wide open and so was his mouth. He seemed to be straining for oxygen, though his workroom, thanks to its high windows, had an adequate supply. He had been playing Mozart but Mozart was no longer his mood. With one hand he blindly switched him off. With the other he laid down his shears, but his gaze didn’t flinch. It remained mooning at the same spot on the wall which, unlike other walls he had known, was painted neither millstone grey nor slime green but a soothing shade of gardenia that he and his decorator had taken pains to achieve.