Illywhacker

And when he said that he felt something click, like a vertebra shifting or a glass skylight cracking under strain. He felt a thing "go" and it made itself known as sharply as a rifle shot and it was there (smelling the sweet scent of some flowering tree whose name he did not know, hearing a nearby Fiat flatten its battery as it tried to start, become weaker and soon give no sound other than the almost mute click of the starter motor and the soft monosyllabic curse of the driver) it was then, while these other things circled his dull tight centre, like flies around something dead, that he felt the hate he had kept himself from knowing. The pain in his skin and in his joints did not go away but intensified, took up another notch, and he was possessed of an acute sensitivity to everything, even the pressure of his silk shirt where it brushed, lightly, against his hairless chest, and he was not sure that what he felt was pain or pleasure, whether he was happy or unhappy to see, at last, the family he had worked so dangerously to support for what they were – an ugly menagerie as evil as anything you might ever see, fleetingly, before your eyes in a bottle.

Then he had the idea.

He had had it before, this idea, and then forgotten it. It was one of those ideas that we find and forget, dig and bury, over and over again, and each time we forget that we have had the idea before. We unearth and bury them like sleepwalkers, frightened of the consequences and only the mud under our nails in the morning reminds us that we have let ourselves fool around with something dangerous.

"I'm going to fix you bastards right up."

He walked back to the pensione in a different style entirely, skipping impatiently at the corners. He was polite to the sleepy concierge. He went into his room and sat by the window for a long time. Rosa Carlobene tossed in her sleep. Hissao opened the window, and heard, from five storeys below, the lonely click of a whore's heels in the empty colonnade. His emotions were those of an assassin. He was small, as small as a grain of sand and also, at exactly the same time, very very large. He was pink and visceral, grey and metallic. He was nothing. He was everything.

He blamed us.

He blamed his foreign face. He blamed his mother for the fear or the opportunism that had changed his natural form. He blamed Leah Goldstein who had wished to see nothing worthwhile in him. He blamed her, particularly, for not understanding that you could enjoy the hotels, the wine, the travel, and at the same time care immensely about the little hearts that beat against your thigh.

Miss Self-righteous, Miss Grim. She would not listen to his plans for this parrot and could not see that Snr Totoro had been sincere, that he wished a breeding pair of golden-shouldered parrots and -he was a clever man, with a proven record – he would have returned parrots to Australia and they could, between them, have begun to build up a flock.

But Goldstein would not listen. No one would listen, and now the cretins would blame him for destroying the species he had set out to save.

He was all afire with blame.

He sat by the window and waited for the dawn, fidgeting in his chair. When the sky began to lighten- a cold hard yellow conquering a bluish grey – he took out his Mont Blanc pen and wrote a very sad and sentimental note for Rosa Carlobene. He placed this on her bedside table and then he took down his coat from its hanger, turned it inside out and lay it across the chair by the window. From his trouser pocket he took a small pearl-handled pocket knife which he now used to slit the lining of the coat. He retrieved the first children's python, very gently, stroked its head and then, in a quick flick, broke its neck.

He made a little noise, like a loud gulp for air.

Then he repeated the process.

He stood, for a moment, very still with a dead snake in his hand. Then he went to the window and threw the two of them out. When he walked out of the room he left his suitcase behind.

He smiled at the concierge and talked to her about the weather. He apologized for waking her in the night. When Rosa came looking for him later the concierge described him – your husband, a real Florentine, she said; such a gentleman.

But by then Hissao was on board the aeroplane to Tokyo where he met Mr Tacheuchi and Mr Mori, both customers. They travelled up to Tokyo, one from Yokohama, one from Mishima, and Hissao entertained them, first in the Ginza and later that grotesque palace of five hundred hostesses, the Mikado.

Did they sense in Hissao the cold fury, the lovelessness of the perfect warrior? Did they realize, that even while he laughed and insisted they take another Scotch, he was not thinking about them but the revenge he planned against his family?

Ah, he was his grandfather's grandson and unkindness was his strongest card. Mr Tacheuchi, a lecherous drunk, was able to put him in touch with the right people at Mitsubishi.