Alexander Powderham, fortyish, handsome, bohemian, limped his way up Cuba Street. Having been crippled from infantile paralysis, his left leg was supported by a steel brace. He was also dependent on canes, of which he had an impressive collection. On this occasion he was using a cane intricately carved by Aroha Raharuhi, his longtime lover.

The air was unseasonably warm for mid-September Wellington, which heightened the smell rising from the mounds of horse ordure left from the morning’s military parade. Outside the Duchess Tea Rooms, Alexander paused and rested on his good leg while he adjusted his tailored jacket, smoothing down the Irish linen, delighting in its texture and colour of golden flax. He adjusted his silk tie, cream coloured with charcoal flecks, loosening the knot at the undone top button to ensure that rakish look of casual elegance. The white cotton shirt had also been crafted for him by the clothiers Munster & Munster who, through four years of war, had survived patriotic vandalism by hanging a sign across their shop windows, WE ARE NOT HUNS. WE SUPPORT KING AND COUNTRY. Alexander’s chocolate brown, wide-brimmed hat with a duck’s feather poking from the green woven band was also foppishly avant-garde.

With deference he tapped the brim of his hat as Miss Hortensia Rutherford approached. She was obviously rushed but she stopped and said in that cadent voice of the well-educated: “Oh, Alexander, I’m so looking forward to our book group. I’m riveted by Crime and Punishment. It’s so psychological. And atonement and redemption! And that brat Raskolnikov! Fyodor Dostoyevsky! Just those names take me to Saint Petersburg.” Her eyes looked startled, but it was merely excitement. “My inner mind, Alexander. I feel I’m delving into something…so…deeply profound…philosophical, this novel…this novel…”

“Petrograd doesn’t have the same caché, does it?” said Alexander, smiling. “I can’t wait to hear what you have to say at the book group. And what you think about the murder of the two sisters.”

“The murders! Oh, I’m so late for class. Adieu, Alexander, adieu. I don’t know how to say it in Russian.” She waved as she rushed off in the direction of Wellington Girls’ College, her schoolteacher’s satchel swinging, her maroon skirts flapping around her red boots.

Standing outside the Duchess Tea Rooms watching Hortensia Rutherford turn the corner, he saw with the usual poignancy that she was the sort of woman he would have married had he been normal. He closed his eyes to the street, to Wellington, to the morning’s news of the latest batch of troops being dispatched to the trenches of Europe. Her red boots and maroon skirts swayed behind his lids, but he saw with that familiar stabbing notion that Miss Rutherford was an alien world to him, no matter how eloquent her voice, her social standing, her caring, her desirability. She spun in a galaxy far removed from his and his mind went dark, then darker, as the distance between the two of them expanded into its vast and discordant orbit.

“Imagine, a world with Miss Rutherford as Mrs. Powderham,” he thought as he flew through the darkness. But that was an abstraction too great to conjure, too removed at his age, at forty, given his proclivity. All he saw emerging from that void was Hortensia Rutherford unfolding a red sun umbrella in his back garden with the high trees soughing, the sunlight slanting on her as in a painting, her head back, laughing. It was also more a nightmare than a happy vision, the sort where he yelled out, and from which Aroha would wake him saying: “It’s only the dreams speaking.”

Alexander Powderham opened his eyes. Instead of seeing a laughing Miss Rutherford, he saw his own reflection in the window of the Duchess Tea Rooms and he knew immediately what he was: a Wellington character, a dandy, a cripple in a too fashionable linen outfit with a too fashionable fop’s hat. With that same hurtful punch he recalled an acquaintance telling him after an argument: “All the trappings and pretences of a Gothic rake, but without the requisite masculinity.”

Throughout his reveries he had been gazing into the tearoom’s window, oblivious to those looking out. Coming to, he saw the eyes of three women staring at him, puzzled and fascinated, as if at a spy, one of those creatures that was infiltrating the country sniffing out military secrets and sowing mayhem. Germans, Austrians, Hapsburgs, Red Russians, anarchists, socialists, war shirkers, pacifists; the press was constantly reminding the populace to be vigilant of such unpatriotic malignancy. With a rush of fright, Alexander saw these women assessing him against that list, this creature so very different from their menfolk. Seeing their eyes scouring him, his mind went racing down a dangerous tributary, swift and swollen, in which he was bobbing up and down and close to drowning with all sorts of thoughts during his last moments alive. Arriving from another direction, also bobbing up and down in similarly swift and swollen waters, were the five Finks, the Silesian family who had been hounded out of the premises next door to his bookshop.

“I should have done more for the unfortunate Finks,” he thought, turning his back on the staring eyes inside the Duchess Tea Rooms. “I could have saved the Finks. The Ministers know me, I could have pleaded the Finks’ innocence.” But he hadn’t. The dark green river was moving swiftly, taking the five Finks with it. Their boarding house had been shuttered, the façade vandalised. He could see the five Finks standing with a clutch of bags and cases. Little Ursula was crying something in German and in her guttural English Mrs. Fink was yelling: “But we are Jews, Silesians, not Germans!” And all Mr. Fink could do was utter: “We thought we would be safe in Wellington.” It was a long list of people Alexander had known and admired and who were now exiled as dangerous aliens to Somes Island in Wellington Harbour. Each of them was reprimanding him for his silence. What had he done to save them? Nothing. His own judgment was swift. The jury in his mind banged down their gavel and shouted: “Alexander Powderham! Guilty!” The thoughts left him unable to move up Cuba Street. All he could do to look normal was to check the watch on his gold chain and look about as if he were innocently waiting on someone for morning tea in the Duchess Tea Rooms.

“This war. This war. And I’m as mad as that insane Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment,” he thought as he looked about him.

The street was busy with the remnants of well-wishers who had come to cheer as their boys had set off for Europe. Hundreds of reinforcements had marched and waved their way through Wellington, the horses clip-clopping with the hierarchy astride them. He could sense them in the streets, those men at this moment being fed into the hulls of troop ships: farmers, clerks, haberdashers, teachers, fishermen – all sweating after their long march in the sun as they neared the point of embarkation, their vessels with belching funnels waiting to transport them to the trenches in faraway places with names like Somme and Flanders and Ypres and Passchendaele. He leapt forward a few weeks, months, a year, to when these patriots joyfully waving at the doomed file would receive a telegram from over there informing regretfully that so and so was missing in action, had died of sickness or had been killed, buried in Belgium.

“My poor head,” he thought. “Poor civilisation. I’m not Raskolnikov yet, surely?” He had deliberately not come into town until the military parade was over, for to witness these men marching off to be sacrificed for a king and country who cared nothing for the person, their sanctity as a human, was too distressing. The smell of horse manure and the thought of those gorgeous men being blown apart was driving him to limp back up the hills to Tinakori Road and the sanctity of his home and be there in case the conscription authorities came again to harass Aroha.

Behind the window of the Duchess Tea Rooms, he witnessed those ladies socialising after waving off the troops and the irony, the hypocrisy, the smugness, sickened him. They were the symbols, in fact the actuality, of everything that was ill about this Dominion at the bottom of the world whose women folk had just cheered away their men for sacrifice to a king seemingly senseless to destruction. He wanted to clutch his head, to throw his hat into the gutter, to scream at them all. Instead, he smiled at the elderly woman whose hunchbacked husband delivered the coal, and she nodded deferentially, the wicker basket over her arm filled with vegetables. A newspaper boy shouted from across the street, his voice alive with excitement as if war were his invention: “Prime Minister’s ship leaves Honolulu. In Auckland in two weeks. Russian Revolution chaos!”

Alexander thought the better of going home. His bookshop was just up the street and he knew that Aroha could look after himself if the conscription bureaucrats visited as they had threatened to. He turned and saw that the women in the Duchess Tea Rooms were well into their conversation, their heads close together, their teacups poised. He envisaged them as frozen in time at that exact moment in September 1918 on the day that more men had marched off to fight for something pointless. With none of the beauty with which the poem was usually associated, he saw them as fixed into the eternity of a Wellington tea room as were the ancients trapped in John Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn. He stared at the matriarchs in their frilly outfits, one of whom wore a hat covered in violets. Even the leaves were green and lifelike, so that it appeared as if she had dug a patch from her garden, stuck it on her head, and come to wave at the troops before tea and cakes and gossip. He had to shake his head to clear the visions of Grecian urns and ossified matrons and violet smothered hats. A dog barked, a man shouted, an accordion wheezed and simpered.

“Oh, my God, I’m as mad as Raskolnikov,” he thought. As he continued up Cuba Street and approached the corner of Ghuznee Street, he heard cranking up for her crusade the arched and preachy voice of Mrs. Sybil Meatyard, the denizen of the New Zealand Women’s Anti-German League.

“Bugger,” he thought. “It’s the Meatyards.” The impulse to take his carved cane and knock Mr. Cecil Meatyard on his head and do the same to his buffoon of a wife, the shrill and odious Sybil, was overwhelming. One knock on her head, one knock on his, and they and their dour Protestant association would be gone forever from the streets of Wellington. It was a fantasy he had often entertained as much to rid the streets of their noisy public stirrings as to eliminate their hatreds.

“Raskolnikov’s theory was right,” he thought as he leaned on his cane and looked at Sybil Meatyard. “The benefits of killing a nasty and useless human for the betterment of mankind is indeed a justified murder.” The thought of having to pass those ardent Protestants on the corner where they had taken up position to voice their tireless tirades against war shirkers, socialists and the godless was almost too much to bear. A gust of wind came rushing off the harbour, right up Cuba Street, as if to purposefully stir the stenches and mix them all up and carry with them the voices of the two proselytisers.

“Bugger, bugger. How much hatred must I carry for these pathetic Meatyards? It’s disproportionate, surely?” It was a strain to his thinking to have to acknowledge that his Wellington in which he had always lived, watching it grow from a colonial trifle into a city of considerable standing, one he had tried his best to inculcate with books and culture, was now supporting this demeaning and ideologically driven crusade to harass men like Aroha and him, the so-called misfits and war shirkers.

Alexander looked at the Victorian façade across the street and met the gaze of innumerable gargoyles positioned to support its bulky ledges, their pop-out eyes looking back at him. From an open window, an imposing woman with a high pile of hair stood and gazed down imperiously, her presence reminding him of someone he had seen but could not recall.

Mrs. Sybil Meatyard had a vocabulary of disdain. Some months back, upon seeing Alexander in the crowd, she had shouted: “It’s the Oscar Wilde types we must abhor. Effeminates are the biggest war shirkers given their diseased minds!” In her tartan knit hat with its large black pom-poms she had stood on a soapbox outside the Wellington Public Library castigating and taunting him, playing on her fiddle of popularity all the tunes of discord and division. Pointing at him directly, invoking the spectre of Oscar Wilde, she had made the crowd laugh and look around at her victim. Her sarcasm had been infectious. A man in a dowdy bowler hat shouted: “Send Pansies to the Front. Give them a good whipping! Yes to universal conscription, no to war shirkers!”

With the wind had come the dust, which blew around in clouds. From some distance Alexander stood with his handkerchief held against his mouth and nostrils and observed these ideologues as they shouted at the Wellingtonians. Amongst the thirty or forty onlookers was a tall man in uniform with a row of war medals across his chest. The man’s squinty eyes, in an otherwise distinguished face, looked about as if, Alexander surmised, he was a lizard searching for its victim, its long sticky tongue about to dart out. The military man raised his arm with a motion that would have silenced his men, and he shouted: “No special exemptions for coal miners and wharfies. No war shirkers. No exceptions. Equal conscription!”

Sybil Meatyard rewarded him with a wave of her placard depicting a white feather, the symbol of cowardice and raised her arms in a benediction. At the beginning of the War, Alexander had been presented in the street with a real white feather by a young woman with a posh voice. Standing up as straight as he could, he had said: “Should cripples be made to run across minefields too?” There were insignia that men could wear to show that they had legitimate exemptions to conscription, but both he and Aroha had refused to wear them: “My leg and my attitude are my exemption medals,” he’d declared.

“There’s no compulsory conscription for Māori,” had been Aroha’s response to the suggestion to wear an exemption medal by their friend Jamey who had volunteered and whose legs had been blown off in the Somme. He had died within minutes, crying, according to his commander, who had written to his parents in Auckland. The thought of Jamey suffering in a French field in winter made Alexander want to weep, for none of this seemed possible. It was as if this war were an invention by some great ugly Gothic monster with the brains of a gargoyle. From history books Alexander understood that war was an alarming lesson from which to learn. However, this real thing was catastrophically empirical and four years of it had swelled his lamentations and neuroses. What had not yet been committed to the history books, was that the majority of New Zealanders supported this conflagration: “Like sheep being herded to the abattoirs,” he thought as he stood absorbing the scene before him. “With vicious little Protestant Meatyards yapping at our hooves.”

A woman in a black dress and a red hat walked by with a woman in a red dress and a black hat and the latter said to her companion: “I can’t understand the price of butter. Or jam. And as for meat, it’s ludicrous.”

“It’s too exhausting to be so human,” Alexander thought. “To turn off the brain for a day would be delicious.” He sighed, for even in this remote Dominion there were the distractions of war where once there had been the trivia of daily life. That trail of discordant thought disintegrated and assembled into visions of dear Jamey dancing to an opera playing on his gramophone and he thought: “Jamey’s parents never replied to my long letter of condolence. They must have known I’m a Pansy.”

Another newspaper boy touting for another paper shouted: “Americans push hard at Huns. Forty-seven Kiwi deaths.” An elderly man fished in his trouser pockets for change, and with a big smile the paper boy handed him the paper. The same women in the same combination of black and red outfits returned. Pausing in front of Alexander, the one in the red hat said to her companion: “It’s all war profiteering. The farmers get subsidies, and the townsfolk suffer.” Alexander wondered if he were confused between irony and incredulity, or if there were even a word for what this all represented in a world where millions were dying and people here were simply living in the shadow of its catastrophe and talking about the price rises in butter and meat and shouting about Oscar Wilde.

“This is like the descriptions of Saint Petersburg in Crime and Punishment in the eighteen-sixties, and I’m as mad as Raskolnikov,” he thought. But he was pulled from his reverie to the shouting at the soapboxes. Cecil Meatyard was gesticulating as if he were someone noble and distinguished. His beard was in the style of King George V. Alexander noticed that Meatyard sported two flashy rings on each hand, an unusual affectation for a man in any position, noble or otherwise.

The female Meatyard was extolling the virtues of equal conscription. She had pounced on the handsome military man’s argument and he beamed at his promotion. Alexander noted that despite having a mind of patriotic rubbish, the military man was very handsome and, enviably, had two strong legs.

In the bottom drawer under the socks and underpants in his bedroom, Alexander had hidden an antique silver pistol that his father had bought in Rome when on tour in the 1870s and with which Alexander would shoot Australian parrots that screeched in the back garden. Alexander had a clear vision of that handsome, desperate Russian student and murderer Raskolnikov pointing the pistol at Cecil Meatyard and pulling the trigger. “Just like the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo by the Serbian student,” he thought. “Shot dead with his wife Sophie, the Duchess of Hohenberg. Oh, nineteen-fourteen seems so long ago. Yes, bullets for Cecil and this faux duchess on her soapbox. Do it for me Raskolnikov, murder them.”

A dog barked and growled and a woman in front of Alexander shrieked, the commotion extracting Alexander from his visions of assassinations. The gargoyles stared down at him when he looked up and the woman in the window with the pile of hair shook her head in disbelief and whooshed away phantom-like. He thought: “That was Duchess Sophie Hohenberg. Soon there’ll be revolution here too.” He shook his head to clear the visions which had elaborated into a Gothic novel with pistols and crazed women. The barking dog slunk off, its tail stiffly between its legs. The woman in front of him was poking into her velvet hat a pin that had been handed out embedded with “Support the War Effort.”

“Why more sacrifice?” Alexander asked himself. “I have to do something just as Raskolnikov did. It’s as Pavlov said, we respond to repeated messages. Sybil Meatyard is driving me to revenge.”

The crowd was getting angry, and spilled into the road so that motorcars could not pass.

“She’s a one, isn’t she mate?” said a voice next to Alexander. “You got a smoke for me mate?” the voice continued, close to Alexander’s ear.

“What?” asked Alexander, looking up, the sun in his eyes.

“She’s a one? Who is she, that old bag screaming?” the man said.

“I wouldn’t question her out loud,” replied Alexander. “You’ll get done for sedition.”

“Sedition? They wouldn’t bloody dare after my sacrifices, the bastards. Can’t touch me. Got that smoke mate?”

The man was tall, broad shouldered, sinewy, with dry blonde hair. Given what he had said he was obviously a returned soldier, and his left arm was missing, the jacket sleeve pinned up over where the appendage had been. He stood as if this inspection was to be expected, enjoyed even. Alexander noted that the suit was fashionable and good quality. Despite his working-class voice, he had an oddly polished look, as if he were not quite one thing or the other. Alexander took a cigarette tin from his jacket pocket. On the cover was a cartoon of an Ottoman character wearing a fez.

“You’ve got Turkish cigarettes, mate. That’s sedition, isn’t it?” His voice had changed from working class to someone higher up the social ladder, a senior clerk, a schoolteacher.

“A tin evidence of sedition?” asked Alexander.

“Nah,” the man said. “Just that I smoked them in Turkey. I thought they’d stopped enemy goods.” He stared into Alexander’s eyes and smiled, the tiny lines crisscrossing around his eyes.

“It’s an Ottoman tin from before they were banned,” said Alexander. “I place my local cigarettes in it for pretence. Sedition can be fashionable.” It was a dangerous thing even to be flippant to a stranger, but he enjoyed it for that, especially to this man with the eyes of a lynx. And a lynx, Alexander knew, wouldn’t be a part of the establishment. The military man was a member of the hierarchy, his looks betrayed him. But this man was a one-armed rake, the sort who’d say: “Mate, I’d do anything for a fiver.” Alexander shivered and exhaled his smoke through half pursed lips.

Thirty years earlier, Alexander’s father had brought back from France a set of postcards which unfolded accordion-like, each card displaying a person with the series encapsulated as: les Parisiens. Le Parisien number three in the exotic series was blowing smoke inhaled from a green cigarette in an ivory holder. His slicked back pomaded hair, his tweaked eyebrows, his Gallic nose, the slightly rouged cheeks and haughty air were what Alexander had studied for decades. As he looked at the man with the cropped blonde hair the colour of summer hay, Alexander saw himself as a type, le homme de Wellington. He had waited decades to enact the pose of le Parisien in front of a rake like this one-armed blonde of dubious background, and the thrill flushed through him.

The man sniggered. “You need to come to your senses, mate,” he said. “They don’t like sedition, not even little bits. What about that pacifist Parliament bloke they jailed, and those pacifist ones they sent off to the Front and crucified?”

“They literally crucified them,” uttered Alexander, reverentially, lowering his voice, aware of his surroundings. There would be supporters of the New Zealand Women’s Anti-German League around, those hunters of spies and seekers of sedition. The previous week three women enjoying an evening picnic in the Karori hills had been accused of sending signals with their picnic lamps to German military boats in Wellington Harbour, causing official hysteria that even the Minister of Defence had admonished the papers for so much as reporting.

“Where are you from?” asked Alexander, tempted as he said it, to add “mate”.

“I’m not from around here, but I keep myself to myself, mate, if you know what I mean?” An inflection in his voice hinted at something.

“Boer?” Alexander wondered, although he had only heard soldiers returned from South Africa mimicking it. He surmised it was not Australian, for it wasn’t harsh enough. With further alarm, he recalled that the press had repeatedly warned the citizenry about this very sort of situation: foreigners with accents infiltrating crowds; Germans posing as Kiwis. He looked into the man’s eyes but what he saw was lust, not treachery or sedition.

“Cat got your tongue?” the man asked with an insouciant smile, which showed white, even teeth. “Worried about being crucified?” He hadn’t been wearing a hat, which was unusual for a man, but he pulled a cap out of his back pocket as he looked at Alexander, his blue eyes shifty and squinting. With a flick of his one hand he fitted his smart fabric cap to his head and patted it down. In a voice that really might have been Boer, he said softly: “Secrets mate? Secrets? You gonna tell ya Mac?”

“I do like your cap. Is it from somewhere exotic?” Alexander said, using the sort of voice le Parisien might have used had he spoken English. The man’s grin loosened into a smile and creased his tanned, angular face.

“Keen, aren’t ya?” he said quietly, his eyes darting about, and giggled at his question. “My name’s Mac. For now, anyway, mate.”

“There’s no one like this man in Crime and Punishment,” thought Alexander. “Perhaps Svidrigailov.” Svidrigailov was the sensualist and murderer, a true lecher, a rapist, the one character Dostoyevsky required his audience to view with repulsion, if not hatred. Alexander again sized up the man, but no, this one-armed man had nothing Russian about him, let alone anything repulsive. He was too much of another type: “More a rogue off a whaling ship,” Alexander thought. “More Herman Melville than Fyodor Dostoyevsky.” He straightened himself up and shook his gammy leg to get the blood running and prepared to limp off from this stranger who was surely a crook of some sort. “I don’t want to get caught in a web with a disreputable whaler or blackmailing sodomite,” he thought, with the images of jail doors clanging and a bewigged judge with owl eyes pronouncing sentence upon him for licentious behaviour.

“I haven’t read the Russian sounding one, but Moby Dick was true to the word, all those whales expertly described, I loved it,” said the man.

Alexander was startled at this unexpected literary knowledge. And what popped into his head was that beautiful moment when he had met Aroha in the Botanic Garden when reading Moby Dick. His heart beat with the excitement at the symbolic coincidence and everything that this man had just imparted. “Moby Dick”, he said, “we could drink to that.”

“Keen, though, aren’t ya mate?” said Mac.

“Keen? Me? My dear, not in the least,” said Alexander in a coquette’s voice, dropping his cigarette and stubbing it with his good foot before saying: “Good day, sir. I’m off.”

The crowd had dissipated and across the road Sybil Meatyard was chatting to the military man and a woman in a blue hat and a green coat.

“But wait, mate,” said the man. “I’d genuinely like to talk to you about things.” His eyes said that with real meaning. His mouth puckered and spread into an endearing smile. “Don’t cast me off, mate, like everyone does. You know what it’s like, I can tell that. We’re both…different.” Alexander was poised to take his first step. His good foot was forward, his lame one behind, but he paused. He looked to his right and saw Sybil Meatyard, the military man and the woman in the blue hat looking at them, their faces all-knowing as they stared at the obvious misfits.

The military man was simply a staring shape, his arms stiff by his sides, his blonde moustache shining. It was as if he were at a military tribunal set up to determine if a man was a genuine pacifist or simply an Oscar Wilde. Or if a man was a disingenuous war shirker claiming an abiding commitment to pacifism through Christianity and who, under questioning, couldn’t recall the name of a certain psalm or explain a religious reference. “Jail” was written over each of the three staring tribunal members’ faces. And in the eyes of the military man and Mrs. Meatyard particularly was the accusation of “Oscar Wilde”. As his eyes met those of the military man, Alexander thought: “His tongue will dart out and get us.”

“Don’t go that way,” Mac said. “Turn around, don’t look at them. Follow me. I know you like books. Talk to me about that Russian one you tried to trick me with, like we’re mates discussing about something normal.” His voice was polished, as if through elocution.

The man with one arm and the man with a bad leg. It had all the essence of a parable, very Old Testament, and Alexander sniggered at the equation. The unusual heat, the edge of sedition, the enticing stranger; each element combined and rushed through him in a thrilling moment that pulled him from the tedium. He said: “Since you like books so much, you should read the Russians. They’re finally being translated. Have you ever heard of Crime and Punishment?”

“That’s my bloody motto, mate,” the man said. “It’d be yours too if you’d been through what I have.” He stopped. A scruffy dog came running along, its tail up, and it too stopped, sniffed around a lamppost, lifted its crooked leg and urinated.

“So public, isn’t it?” said Alexander, thinking of how Anton Pavlov might interpret this canine action. “So strange that animals have no shame the way we do, as humans.”

The man said in a voice that was plain angry, with no pretence at accents: “You didn’t get stuck on a beach at Gallipoli being shot at by Mohammedans. You’d know about human shame if you had, mate. Dogs are saints in comparison. My mates got mowed down, shot through the head by bloody Ottomans, so don’t talk to me about shame.” All that bravado and bonhomie, the mateship and innuendo, had evaporated. He was just a man with one arm and no hope, with bombs exploding in his head. The blue eyes had become duller. The dog, a mangy, orangey creature, ran off with a limp, leaving its urine to dribble across the footpath.

The man put his hand on Alexander’s shoulder and dug in with his fingers. “Mate, you’ll never understand what it is to see a man being cut up, his guts falling out of his stomach.”

“My God,” Alexander said. “We were the first nation to export frozen carcasses in ships to Europe. Look what that led to, mass exportation of men to slaughter. Sheep, all of us, cows. Their name is Meatyard, they do this.”

“Baaaaaa! Baaaaaa!” the man said. “Moooooo!”

“You don’t have a home, do you?” said Alexander.

“No mate. I followed you up Cuba, watching you all the while. I knew you were the type I needed.”