The Last Four Things by Paul Hoffman Read Free Book Online

the Materazzi with its utterly unexpected and magnificent consequences. He was now very much in the ascendant over Parsi and Gant and he had proved to his followers, beyond any shadow of a scruple or doubt, that God had blessed his daring and dangerous plan and that Cale was indeed God’s instrument. Work, and very serious work, remained to be done. Neither Gant nor Parsi were to be underestimatedand realizing the threat from Bosco they had joined together to oppose him. The Antagonist purge had eventually been brought
to an end by their concerted efforts and they were on the move against Bosco and at any price.
    That night Bosco lay on his bed, brooding over the many plans he had set in motion to destroy his rivals and bring about the end of the world. Exhilaration and worry kept him awake. What, after all, could shock the soul so intensely as the decision to bring everything to an end – the terrible vertigo of commitment to the ultimate solution of evil itself ? His wariness was more ordinary but not less important. Bosco was not foolish enough to countenance grand ideas without knowing he needed the wit and competence to carry them out and, of course, the luck. Then there was the wariness and exhilaration he felt about Cale. Everything he had ever hoped for from this boy had come true and more than that. And yet he was puzzled that God had given everything his vision had promised and pressed down into the barrel yet there were still traces of something inadequate about him: pointless anger and resentment not turned into a proper righteousness. He
comforted himself before he fell asleep that he had not intended Cale to be made manifest to the world for another ten years at least. If it hadn’t been for that lunatic Picarbo and his ghastly experiments, things would have been very different. Soon after a short fulmination he stopped indulging his bad temper and comforted himself with one of his oldest dictums, ‘a plan is a baby in a cradle – it bears little resemblance to the man’.
    Early the next morning he waited in the Square of Martyrs’ Blood, expectant and impatient, for one of his most carefully laid plans to reach its maturity. The great gates creaked open and three hundred Redeemers marched intothe Sanctuary. It would be hard to describe them as the cream of the military wing of the priesthood because cream would give entirely the wrong sense of something smooth and richly soft. They were as forbidding a collection as perhaps had ever stood together in one place – only great care and patience over nearly ten years had won them to Bosco’s cause, it being no easy thing to bend the inflexible and reason with the fanatical. Hardest of all had been to preserve the flickers of daring and imaginative violence that brought them to his attention in the first place. These were Redeemers who had shown a talent for unlikely innovation, along with their more conventional talent for cruelty, brutality
and the willingness to obey. They would be Cale’s most direct servants. Cale would train them, each of them in turn train one hundred others and each of them again one hundred more. Now that he had Cale and the men in front of him he had the origins of the end of everything.
    Bosco might still lack his rivals’ power base in Chartres but he had a great variety of followers of different kinds, many unknown to one another. Some were fanatical in their devotion, true believers in his plan to change the world for ever, most had no idea of his final intentions but regarded him as more zealous in matters of faith than Parsi and Gant. Others were more lukewarm still: he was someone powerful who might yet become more powerful. Probably he would be eclipsed by the Pope’s death, peace be upon him, but you never knew. Through this ugly rainbow of alliances he had spread the word about Cale by revealing the heroism of his part in saving the Pope from the malice not only of the Antagonists