'Our own psychopathy?'

'Whether we like it or not. The twentieth century ended with its dreams in ruins. The notion of the community as a voluntary association of enlightened citizens has died for ever. We realize how suffocatingly humane we've become, dedicated to moderation and the middle way. The suburbanization of the soul has overrun our planet like the plague.'

'Sanity and reason are unworthy of us?'

'No. But a vast illusion, built from mirrors that lie. Today we scarcely know our neighbours, shun most forms of civic involvement and happily leave the running of society to a caste of political technicians. People find all the togetherness they need in the airport boarding lounge and the department-store lift. They pay lip service to community values but prefer to be alone.'

'Isn't that odd, for a social animal?'

'Only in some ways. Homo sapiens is a reformed hunter-killer of depraved appetites, which once helped him to survive. He was partly rehabilitated in an open prison called the first agricultural societies, and now finds himself on parole in the polite suburbs of the city state. The deviant impulses coded into his central nervous system have been switched off. He can no longer harm himself or anyone else. But nature sensibly endowed him with a taste for cruelty and an intense curiosity about pain and death. Without them, he's trapped in the afternoon shopping malls of a limitless mediocrity. We need to revive him, give him back the killing eye and the dreams of death. Together they helped him to dominate this planet.'

'So psychopathy is freedom, psychopathy is fun?'

'A natty slogan, Paul, but it does contain a certain fiery truth.'

Penrose beamed at me, openly pleased with my progress. 'We're creatures of the treadmill: monotony and convention rule everything. In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom. Our latent psychopathy is the last nature reserve, a place of refuge for the endangered mind. Of course, I'm talking about a carefully metered violence, microdoses of madness like the minute traces of strychnine in a nerve tonic. In effect, a voluntary and elective psychopathy, as you can see in any boxing ring or ice-hockey rink. You've served in the armed forces, Paul. You know that recruits are deliberately brutalized – the drill sergeant's boot and the punishment run give back to young men a taste for pain that generations of socialized behaviour have bred out of them.'

'The toy poodle becomes a wolf again?'

'But only when it wants to. Remember your childhood – like all of us you stole from the local supermarket. It was deeply exciting, and enlarged your moral sense of yourself. But you were sensible, and kept it down to one or two afternoons a week. The same rules apply to society at large. I'm not advocating an insane free-for-all. A voluntary and sensible psychopathy is the only way we can impose a shared moral order.'

'And if we do nothing?'

'Danger will rush up to us and put a knife to our throat. Look at the century that lies ahead – an upholstered desert, but a wasteland all the same. An absence of faith, except for a vague belief in an unknown deity, like the sponsor of a public-service broadcast. Wherever there's a vacuum, the wrong kind of politics creep in. Fascism was a virtual psychopathology that served deep unconscious needs. Years of bourgeois conditioning had produced a Europe suffocating in work, commerce and conformity. Its people needed to break out, to invent the hatreds that could liberate them, and they found an Austrian misfit only too happy to do the job. Here at Eden-Olympia we're setting out the blueprint for an infinitely more enlightened community. A controlled psychopathy is a way of resocializing people and tribalizing them into mutually supportive groups.'

'Like divisions of the Waffen-SS? At the Cardin Foundation there was real violence. People might have been killed.'

'It was more choreographed than you think. Violence is spectacular and exciting, but sex has always been the main hunting ground of psychopathy. A perverse sexual act can liberate the visionary self in even the dullest soul. The consumer society hungers for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that will keep us "buying"? Psychopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the arts, sciences and industries of the world. Your passing infatuation with that child in the Rue Valentin might spark off some vital new development in aviation…'

Penrose stood up, kicked the fur stole out of his way and began to stroll around the room, almost dismissing me with a flourish.

Scenting the sunlight, he opened a window and filled his lungs.

He had been saving little Natasha to the last, warning me from any rush to judgement. After inspecting himself in the mirror, he turned to stare down at me. The warring elements in his face, the ready smile and steely eyes, gave me the sense that several personalities were jostling for space in his large skull.

'Paul, you can tell me – are you going to the police?'

'Probably. I need to think about it.'

'I've been completely frank. I've held back nothing.'

'The Cannes police wouldn't understand a word. If they did, they'd probably agree with you.'

Penrose chuckled over this. 'Still… the Cardin Foundation robbery. Are you going to report it?'

'Not for a day or two. I'll tell you when I do.'

'Good. I need to know. There are large issues here.'

'Involving a great many powerful people. Don't worry, it would be easy to arrange a ratissage for an Englishman who's overstayed his welcome. An old Jaguar with fading brakes, the high corniche road, an empty bottle of cognac in the wreckage… at least I'd have cured some chief executive's migraine.'

'Paul…' Penrose seemed disappointed in me. 'This isn't a regime of gangsters.'

'Gangsters and psychopaths? Surely that's the prospectus you've been setting out? What I still can't grasp is where David Greenwood fits into all this.'

I waited for Penrose to reply, but he stood with his back to the sun, arms limply at his sides, his large chest deflating. As I watched his uneasy grimaces, the heavy knuckles that cuffed his nose, I realized that he was hoping for my approval. He needed me to understand him, and the brave gamble he had taken for the sake of Eden-Olympia. In some way he had failed David Greenwood, and he was now doing his best to avoid failing me.

Then he noticed me standing by the coffee table and rallied himself. Smiling affably, he strolled up to me and held my shoulders. He steered me towards the Alice mirror, as if we were about to step together into its glassy deeps. He swerved away at the last moment and pushed me to the door, laughing soundlessly to himself.

'Paul, sit by the pool and give it some thought.' Before propelling me into the avenue, he whispered fiercely: 'Think, Paul. Think like a psychopath…'