'They wanted more violence in their lives?'

'More violence and cruelty, more drama and rage.' Penrose clenched his huge fists and drummed them on the table, sending the coffee cups into a frenzy. 'But how to satisfy them? Today we shun the psychopathic, the dark side of the sun and those shadows that burn the ground. Sadism, cruelty and the dream of pain belong to our primate ancestors. When they surface in a damaged adolescent with a taste for strangling cats we lock him away for good. The run-down chief executives with their hives and depression were sane and civilized men. Maroon them on a desert island after a plane crash and they'd be the first to perish. Any perverse elements in their lives would have to be applied externally, like a vitamin shot or an antibiotic.'

'Or a small dose of madness?'

'Let's say, a carefully metered measure of psychopathy. Nothing too criminal or deranged. More like an adventure-training course, or a game of touch rugby.'

'Shins will be barked, eyes blacked…'

'But no bones broken.' Penrose nodded approvingly. 'I wish you'd been with me, Paul. You obviously have a feel for this sort of thing. Still, I needed to test the theory, and start rolling this very odd-shaped ball. I could hardly sit at my desk in the clinic and tell some depressed CEO that he'd cure his insomnia by vandalizing a few Mercs in the Palais des Festivals car park. Then a senior manager with Hoechst showed me the way. He'd been out of sorts for months and suffered from attacks of dermatitis, even thought of transferring back to the head office in Düsseldorf.'

'And what saved him? I think I can guess.'

'Good. He saw a woman tourist in Cannes being mugged by an Arab youth, and went to her rescue. While she called the police he gave the fellow a good beating, kicked him so hard that he broke two bones in his right foot. He came in a week later to have the cast removed, and I asked him about the dermatitis. It had gone. He felt buoyant and confident again. Not a trace of depression.'

'He knew why?'

'Absolutely. Whenever he felt the blues coming on he would take one of the security men into La Bocca and provoke an incident with a passing immigrant. It worked a treat. He coopted a couple of close colleagues and they too cheered up. I asked if I could keep a professional eye on the exercise. Soon we had an active therapy group with a dozen senior executives. At weekends they'd start brawls in Maghrebian bars, trash any Arab cars that looked unroadworthy, rough up a Russian pimp or two. The health benefits were remarkable. Bandaged fists and plastered shins on Monday mornings, but clear, confident heads.'

'Tough on the Arabs, though.'

'True. But on the whole the immigrant community benefits. Eden-Olympia is a scrupulous equal-opportunities employer, with no racial bias. We hire a disproportionate number of north Africans as gardeners and road sweepers. The immigrant population gains from the clearer heads of the people who do the hiring.'

'A tricky balance to weigh. I assume the therapeutic system began to expand.'

'I was surprised by how quickly. Vigilante actions, incidents of deliberate road rage, thefts from immigrant markets, tangles with the Russian mafiosi. Other therapy groups spread out into the fringes of drug-dealing and prostitution, burglaries and warehouse robberies. A picked group of security men were paid foot soldiers, earning generous bonuses we deducted from the arts and recreations budget. The benefits were astounding. Immune levels rose through the ceiling, within three months there wasn't a trace of insomnia or depression, not a hint of respiratory infections. Corporate profits and equity values began to climb again. The treatment worked.'

'No side effects?'

'A few.' Penrose watched me as he spoke, curious to see how I reacted, and clearly pleased that I had not leapt from my chair in outrage. He spoke matter-of-factly, like an architect setting out the pros and cons of an experimental sewerage system. 'There's a risk element, but it's acceptable. Eden-Olympia has a lot of clout with the local authorities. In many ways we're carrying out tasks the police would do anyway, and we free them for other duties. The sex side can be troubling. A few prostitutes have needed remedial surgery. Your friend Alain Delage is a little too free with his fists. There's a remarkable need for punitive violence hidden away in the senior executive mind.'

'And sex tends to release it?'

'It's meant to, for sound biological reasons. Sex is such a quick route to the psychopathic, the shortest of short cuts to the perverse. We aren't running an adventure playground, but a forcing house designed to expand the psychopathic possibilities of the executive imagination. It needs to be carefully monitored. Sadomasochism, excretory sex-play, body-piercing and wife-pandering can easily veer off into something nasty. It's surprising how many prostitutes object to rape, even of the most stylized kind.'

'Unimaginative of them.'

'Who knows?' Penrose shrugged generously at the world and its curious ways. 'A few times I've had to step in and redirect the therapy. On the whole, though, it's worked well. Almost every senior executive at Eden-Olympia is now involved in the programme, even if only at the margins.'

'And David Greenwood was aware of all this?'

'To a large extent. He and I discussed it with Professor Kalman. The department heads at the clinic are in the know. They can see the benefits, and on the whole David approved. The drug rehab centre in Mandelieu was plagued by smalltime gangsters trying to muscle in on the methadone supply. It was a big help to him when the therapy groups came down from Eden-Olympia and drove them out. The more aggressive road attacks bothered him, but he knew that the violence against the local prostitutes was a special kind of rehabilitation, a form of shock treatment that would send them back to their factory jobs.'

Penrose turned from me, a hand raised to catch a ray of sunlight over his head. He glanced at the opaque mirror behind him, as if waiting for an audience's response. His exposition had been almost playful, testing me with his callous asides. But he was clearly proud of his dubious achievement and its insane logic, a therapeutic breakthrough that would never be awarded the gold medals of the leading medical societies. This lonely commitment to his radical vision gave him an almost bearlike dignity.

'The murders on May 28,' I said. 'Were they part of David's therapy programme?'

'Paul… that's the great mystery of Eden-Olympia. In his deranged way, David was a minor prophet, guiding us into the future. Meaningless violence may be the true poetry of the new millennium. Perhaps only gratuitous madness can define who we are.'

'At the cost of breaking the law? Your senior executives at Eden-Olympia are committing enough crimes to get themselves locked away for the rest of their lives.'

'That's true, on a literal level. Remember that these criminal activities have helped them to rediscover themselves. An atrophied moral sensibility is alive again. Some of my patients even feel guilty, a revelation to them…'

I listened to a car alarm sounding in the avenue, and imagined the French police bursting in to arrest us. 'Guilt? Isn't that a design error? It only needs one CEO to go to the authorities and your therapy programme will be over. Curing a few cases of insomnia will count for nothing.'

'Not just a few. But I agree with you.' Penrose stared over my head, weighing the objection in his mind. 'So far people have been intelligent enough to see the point. They grasp the value of…'

'Beating up an out-of-work Arab? Some labourer with a wife and four children living in a tin shack at a bidonville?'

'Paul…' Pained by my crude questions, Penrose reached out a hand to settle me, like a minister with a restive congregation. 'Sit back and think things through. The twentieth century was an heroic enterprise, but it left us in the dark, feeling our way towards a locked door. Here at Eden-Olympia there's a chink of light, a thin and fierce glow…'