Blood-Stained Kings by Tim Willocks

Author:Tim Willocks [Willocks, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55476-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

A LIFE IN MEDICINE had acquainted Grimes with the infinite variety of human suffering, most of it random and without discernible meaning. Even so, Lenna’s tale left him feeling numb. Faroe’s crime was so extreme that for any ordinary individual it would have been an act of psychosis. But Faroe had not been insane. He had been justified and informed within his deepest fiber by an entire subculture, by an entire history living still, which murdered black men for far smaller infractions than Wes Clay’s, and finally by his own line; a line that deserved to end.

Lenna sat on the sofa. The cramps seemed to have subsided. She was no longer crying and she seemed spent. There were things Grimes could have said but they would have been platitudes sucked empty by the scale of what she had suffered. His words would not have been to help her but to ease his own desire to be useful. He kept his mouth shut, and his tears inside, and let her finish.

Later, on the night that Lenna gave birth, Filmore Faroe found her unconscious body and took her back to Arcadia. When she came around he told her that “the baby of the nigger” had been killed. Throughout all the years that followed Faroe never gave any sign that he believed this not to be true. Lenna remained in a state of near catatonia—of total psychic collapse—for many months. Then the player of games, the burly essence—Clarence Jefferson—reappeared, secretly, before her and offered his irresistible gift.

Grimes could imagine his caramel voice, his bright and shameless eyes, the force of his logic, as he bore down on the traumatized woman and lured her in.

She could, Jefferson told her, win back Faroe’s heart. Yes indeed, for such a monstrous crime could leave even Faroe vulnerable to the weakness, the virus, of guilt. Jefferson knew Faroe better than Faroe knew himself; more than that, he understood the way of things human. Faroe had loved Lenna: and rare was the lover betrayed who did not, in the secret heart of his jealousy and shame, love his faithless one even more, and even as he hated her, Faroe would accept her contrite return, Jefferson promised her. If Lenna would have the revenge that would restore her to life, she had to trust him. Then, once she’d regained Faroe’s affection, whatever she wanted for his punishment, Clarence Jefferson would bring it to pass.

There was no doubt in Grimes’s mind that Jefferson had talked Fil-more Faroe into the fateful and murderous course that he’d taken with similarly unctuous words.

Grimes knew that most of what passed for evil in the world was in fact the product of stupidity and other human failings such as self-delusion, avarice and rage. Clarence Jefferson floated above such emotional and intellectual pitfalls. He had set himself the task of ripping aside the mask behind which, as he saw it, all of human life cowered in unforgivable ignorance of its true nature. The cosmos was amoral and cared nothing for its contents.

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