Shawn and I had a recent discussion about capital punishment that spilled over from an online forum we both participate in. The conversation continued over IM, and Shawn posted it on his blog.

In the spirit of eavesdropping, here’s a passage I read yesterday in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana that seems relevant. We find our hero, Mr. Wormold, vacuum-cleaner salesman and reluctant MI6 spy, engaged in a game of checkers with Captain Segura, a Havana police boss who has been looking into Wormold’s affairs. Wormold took the MI6 job to pay for his daughter Milly’s expensive hobbies. His reports are fiction, based on Shakespeare and vacuum cleaner parts. London thinks they’re true. Harm has befallen a person who doesn’t know Wormold listed him as a contact. Segura is in love with Milly:

‘There are unimportant pieces in any game,’ said Captain Segura. ‘Like this one here. I take it and you don’t mind losing it. Dr Hasselbacher is, of course, very good at crosswords.’
‘What have crosswords to do with it?’
‘A man like that makes a good cryptographer. Somebody once showed me a cable of yours with its interpretation, or rather they let me discover it. Perhaps they thought I would run you out of Cuba.’ He laughed. ‘Milly’s father. They little knew.’
‘What was it about?’
‘You claimed to have recruited Engineer Cifuentes. Of course that was absurd. I know him well. Perhaps they shot at him to make the cable sound more convincing. Perhaps they wrote it because they wanted to get rid of you. Or perhaps they are more credulous than I am.’
‘What an extraordinary story.’ He moved a piece. ‘How are you so certain that Cifuentes is not my agent?’
‘By the way you play checkers, Mr Wormold, and because I interrogated Cifuentes.’
‘Did you torture him?’
Captain Segura laughed. ‘No. He doesn’t belong to the torturable class.’
‘I didn’t know there were class-distinctions in torture.’
‘Dear Mr Wormold, surely you realize there are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement.’
‘There’s torture and torture. When they broke up Dr Hasselbacher’s laboratory they were torturing … ?’
‘One can never tell what amateurs may do. The police had no concern in that. Dr Hasselbacher does not belong to the torturable class.’
‘Who does?’
‘The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with émigrés from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal. You see, I was right to make that king, and now I shall huff you for the last time.’
‘You always win, don’t you? That’s an interesting theory of yours.’
‘One reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they don’t recognize class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong people. So too of course did Hitler and shocked the world. Nobody cares what goes on in our prisons, or in the prisons of Lisbon and Caracas, but Hitler was too promiscuous. It was rather as though in your country a chauffeur had slept with a peeress.’
‘We’re not shocked by that any longer.’
‘It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.’

There’s a digression about Segura’s fondness for Milly, and Wormold’s new staff. These extra employees are working for MI6. Wormold says that Lopez, formerly his sole employee, wasn’t reliable. Then:

‘Ah, Lopez. Another of your agents.’ Captain Segura laughed. ‘Or so it was reported to me.’
‘Yes. He supplies me with secret information about the police-department.’
‘Be careful, Mr Wormold. He is one of the torturable.’ They both laughed, drinking daiquiries. It is easy to laugh at the idea of torture on a sunny day.