Highlander - Donna Lettow [105]
MacLeod reached into a bin by the fireplace for fresh wood, glad to have a simple, mindless task like starting the fire to keep him occupied. “What, you’re my ethics professor now?” He pointed sternly with a piece of kindling. “You are the last person in the world to lecture me about ethics.”
“Humor me. What do you do?”
“I’d go after him.” MacLeod’s face was dark as he shoved the wood into the fireplace. “I’d make him pay with his own head.”
Methos was intrigued. “Really? Would you? Revenge, just for playing the Game?”
MacLeod stopped his work and turned on Methos. “Avram doesn’t play the Game,” he growled. “This was personal. ”
Methos kept his tone light. “Ah, ah, but we’re not talking about Avram, remember. One Immortal takes another Immortal’s head. That’s the Game. Reasons don’t matter. Motives don’t matter. ‘There Can Be Only One’—and it’s not going to be Marcus Constantine.”
The words ripped into MacLeod’s already painful wound. “You’re one heartless bastard, Methos.”
“Just realistic. So, do you go after his killer?” he pressed. “Maybe.“Fair enough. Now, say you have a friend, a mortal like that chef friend of yours, Maurice.” As Methos spoke, MacLeod returned to his fire, carefully arranging the kindling, setting it alight. “One day, Maurice picks up a gun and aces six people who complained about his bouillabaisse, and only you know it was him. at do you do? Turn him in to face mortal justice, or go after him yourself?” Methos looked at his watch and began making tick-tock tick-tock noises with his tongue. “Your answer, Contestant Number One?”
MacLeod laid down the bellows he’d been using to flame up the fire. “I can’t just turn Avram in to the police. Don’t you see, that’s just the kind of publicity he wants. My God, the Palestinians find out that the man who massacred dozens of their people works with the Israeli delegation … I don’t want to imagine the consequences.” MacLeod sat down heavily on the coffee table, the weight of the world pressing down on him.
“Point to you,” Methos said. “Now, for the bonus round: Say you do track down and kill Avram Mordecai. Do you honestly believe it will make a bit of difference in the grand scheme of things? Please remember to phrase your answer in the form of a question.”
MacLeod looked at him sourly. “Okay, how’s this: What the hell are you going on about?”
Methos finally sat up, feet on the floor, down to business. “There are three kinds of peace in the world, MacLeod. There’s the peace achieved by one side defeating and dominating the other—what Marcus would have called the Pax Romana. There’s peace negotiated by two sides each seeing the error of its ways and truly dedicated to what’s best for both sides—call it the Platonic ideal of peace, if you will—and if you give me a week, I might be able to find an example where that’s actually worked. Then there’s the brokered peace like your friend is working on, each side forced to give up something they can’t live without. You can see how well that solved that little problem in Korea half a century back. Face it, that’s not peace, it’s just the absence of war.”
“So you’re saying you don’t think these agreements are going to change anything.”
“No piece of paper is going to change what’s in people’s hearts. Their fears, their prejudices, their thousands of years of history. So, yes, I do think a year, or a decade, or a century from now, we’ll all be back here again.”
“But that doesn’t mean Avram doesn’t have to pay for murdering all those people.”
“True, but I don’t want you to go out there thinking that whacking one overzealous Hebrew is miraculously going to solve the crisis in the Middle East.” Methos looked at the floor by his feet, bent low to look under the coffee table, then ran a quick hand under the sofa pillows. “Don’t suppose you saw where that apple went?”
MacLeod tossed him another. “Whose side are you on, Methos?