The bar was in a building at the end of a small, deserted street. The side door opened to a narrow room, barely space for five or six tables. When it was full, it probably felt crowded, but there was no one else there at the moment. Kim indicated we should sit at the bar, where, on each end, there was a globe containing a fat white candle. In each globe, the flame stood straight up, barely a flicker, for a long time, then began a frantic dance, responding to a puff of air that swirled in the glass but nowhere else. Otherwise, the place was pitch-dark.
“Pain, Inspector. The question left hanging from this afternoon concerned pain.”
“Is that the essence of your world?” I don’t like it so dark when I’m talking to someone I don’t know and have reason to think doesn’t have my best interests at heart.
“I’m not sure you are concentrating. Are you? What are you looking around for?”
“A light switch.”
“This isn’t a game. I have a lot to accomplish, and only so much time to get it all done. An hour ago, I learned that the time is even shorter than I’d thought. You can imagine that I’m getting impatient, and when I get impatient I feel the urge to peel off some of the veneer of civilization.”
In other words, he was under a lot of pressure and wasn’t getting much help in solving his problem. “So the problem isn’t really pain, after all. We’re back to the question of time, that and these mysterious tasks of yours. Go ahead and get them done, why don’t you? By all means, do what you have to do. Work eighteen hours a day. Skip dinners with your girlfriend in the red dress. Just leave me out of it. Whoever put my name in front of you must have pulled the wrong file. It happens.”
The major signaled the bartender. “Two large drinks.”
The bartender nodded and went somewhere into the darkness.
“Large.” It seemed to me that he could at least have asked what I wanted to drink. “That is now an acceptable order, I take it. No need to worry with content, only size. Sign of the times?”
Kim patted my knee. “Get real, Inspector. We’re about to have a conversation, a true exchange of ideas. No more fencing, no more banter. We’re going to talk of pain and suffering on a large scale. Let me say at the outset, I honestly believe it would be good to avoid that if possible. If not, if it proves impossible, well, it won’t be the first time.”
When the drinks arrived, we moved to a table, deeper into the gloom. Other people’s eyes adjust to the dark; mine don’t. There was a young inspector in our office years ago with eyes like a cat. The darker it was, the better he could see. He would sit in the dark reading files all night long. If we were on surveillance, he could spot a suspect moving in the blackest night. It made the rest of us look bad. No one was sorry to see him assigned to another office.
“Obviously,” I said, “neither the pain nor the suffering is to be yours.”
A woman appeared, a shadow emerging from the emptiness of space, and handed the major a piece of paper. He moved back to the bar where there was at least a little light to read by, wrote something quickly across the top, and held it up for the woman to take away. She didn’t move until he looked at her and nodded.
“I have enough suffering of my own, Inspector. You might not think so.” He stared in the direction of the vanished woman. “Pain and suffering,” he laughed. The room echoed with the sounds of a five-hundred-year-old gingko tree losing a limb in a storm. “Sign of the times.”
“Overall, though, we aren’t focused on your suffering.”
“No, we aren’t. Disappointed?”
“Then it must be mine.”
The major sat down again and raised his glass. “Not yours exactly. Not in so many words. Let’s put it in broader terms. Let’s be grand in our vision, lofty in our ideals. Nation, race, family, individual-when one is in pain, all suffer, isn’t that the theory?”
“Theories are junk.” I picked up my glass. “To better times.”
The major shrugged, but in the dark I couldn’t be sure of the face. “To whatever comes next.”
We drank in silence and sat awhile in contemplation. With barely enough light to see your own glass in a bar, there isn’t much else to do. I was not inclined to say anything more. The man was baiting me. He was trying to ratchet up my interest. I took another sip of the large drink. It was gin, but I drank it anyway. The flame in the far globe flared enough so at last I could see the major’s face. He was staring at me, not in a friendly way, but at least it wasn’t a mean, practiced stare. I made a note to myself to start a file on stares. Laughter wasn’t of much use. All it did was point to more pain. A typology of stares might be more instructive. Something to do with the eyes, I guessed. Maybe we were seeing the impact of all the light flooding the city, light that, for some reason, couldn’t find its way into this bar.
“Things will change,” Kim said at last.
“They do, sometimes.”
“From what I’ve seen, that hasn’t been the case here in the North for quite a while.”
“Let’s leave that discussion for another time. Purely for the sake of argument, we’ll posit that things will change. And next you’re going to tell me, that means for the better.”
“You’re doubtful?”
“Oh, not at all.”
“Then what?”
“Loss, my dear major. Loss.”
The light from the globe was giving out, but I could see that his face was appropriately puzzled.
“Now, truly, I am disappointed,” I said. “In another minute you will tell me that we have nothing to lose but our chains. Yet freed we will become what?”
He waved a hand in front of his face. “And you, you’re about to rattle on about the joys of the collective. Spare me, please, Inspector.”
“Freed we will be what?” I asked again. This was something I’d thought about on the mountaintop, watching shadows climb out of the little valley and then fall back. “Smarter? Richer? And, in the end, why do you care what is best for us? Is it your business? Do you really care at all?”
At this the major shook his head. “Apparently, not only is it my business; it is my unhappy fate. To make you happy, all right, I’ll admit it. No, I don’t care what happens to you, because of everything you and your friends have done-or allowed to be done-to this place for the past fifty years. You can all hang as far as I am concerned. I’d spring the trapdoor myself, but I have no choice in the matter. I am here to deliver you into freedom, and that is exactly what I am going to do.”
“I know you were bound for Paris. A pity you didn’t go.”