DEDICATION TO
THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER
Mr JOHN PRESCOTT, M.P.
MY DEAR SIR,
A recent tale of mine has, I am told, found favour in the Regional Studies departments of certain British universities, as being sufficiently short and sufficiently exciting for students of the subject who have little leisure to read. My friends in those uneasy regions have asked for more. So I have printed this story, written in the smooth days before the Iraq war, and even before Kosovo, in the hope that it may enable an honest person here and there to forget for an hour the too urgent realities, I have put your name on it, because among the many tastes which we share one is a liking for precipitous yarns.
NP
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PREFACE BY THE EDITOR
WE WERE STAYING at Cley, six of us, for New Year, when Nolan told us this story. We had been up all night drinking, and at dawn we wandered out on the marshes, and afterwards were blown home by a wind which threatened to root the house and its wind-blown woods from their precarious lodgment on the hill. A huge meal, lunch and dinner in one, kept us busy till the last of the day, and we settled in for another evening of booze and fags.
Conversation, I remember, was generally focused on Alan’s photos of women he’d persuaded to pose naked, who grinned at us from the 8×6 prints he passed round. We began to tell stories. Then Phil Redman, who was killed the next year on the M25, told us some weird things about his doings in New Guinea, where he tried to climb Carstensz and lived for six months in mud. Alan said he couldn’t abide mud, anything was better than a country where your boots rotted. He was to get enough of it in the next winter during the Stansted Airport situation. You know how one tale leads to another, and soon the whole place hummed with odd recollections, for the five of us had been a good deal about the world. All except Nolan, the man who afterwards wrote All men are cunts, all women are pricks: the politics of gendered ambition, and, some say, will get to be a visiting Professor of Cultural Politics in time. I don’t suppose at the time he had ever been farther from home than Firenze, but he liked hearing about the ends of the earth.
Alan had just finished a fairly dull yarn about his experiences on a British Council fact-finding trip near Lake Chad, and Nolan got up to find a drink.
“Lucky bastards,” he said. “You’ve had all the fun you can squeeze out of life. Me? I’ve had my nose to the grindstone ever since I left school.”
I said something about him earning a mint in marketing consultancy.
“Right. Mind you,” he went on, “I once played a major part in a rather exciting business without ever once leaving my London office. And the strange part was that the one who went out looking for adventure only saw a bit of the big picture, whereas I saw it all and pulled the strings like some weird puppet-master.”
Then he told us this story. The version I recount is one he wrote down afterwards, when he had checked his PalmTop for some of the more obscure details.
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CHAPTER I
IT ALL STARTED one afternoon early in April when I came out of the House of Commons with Don Wink. I had just been putting some feelers out on behalf of a client in the film industry. My parents had had the foresight to send me to a fee-paying school, so by the time I left I knew enough to bullshit my way into a high-paid career, and I’d also managed to cultivate a fair few contacts now resident in the arts and media. I was virtually unemployable by the time I left university—I’d left with a 2:2 in English and Media Studies—so imagine my surprise when an old friend, now a big cheese in the New Labour government, asked me if I wanted to work in a high-profile role in the arts. I discovered later that he’d done it for a bet, counting on netting a cool grand when I failed to see the first month out.
This was in the days before Don followed generations of Winks into governorships of various publicly funded arts bodies, and that afternoon he was in a foul temper. Out of doors it was a fine spring morning; Parliament Square was bright and a light wind was blowing up from the river. Inside a tedious debate was winding down, and the token proletarian member had been trying to get up the Speaker’s nose.
The contrast between the frowsy Commons and the cheerful outside world would have touched even the soul of a New Labour press officer. Don sniffed the air in the Press Bar like a monitor lizard.
“I’m totally fucking fucked,” he yawned and sipped his Stella. “What a mug I am to be wasting my time here in the Lobby! I could be raking in a tidy sum with my immaculate connections. Britain really is the fucking limit. Take those arseholes on the back benches! And that moth-eaten old museum downstairs is little better.”
“It’s the Mother of Parliaments,” I observed.
“Cross between a monkey-house and a porno cinema,” said Don. “I’ve got to get out of this place. I fancy a crack at the art market.”
I didn’t see him for a couple of days, and then one morning he rang me up and summoned me to lunch. I went, knowing exactly what I’d find. Don was off next day to shag teenagers in the Philippines, or something equally unconscientious.
He was a good contact but was generally a proper nuisance. Although he could work like a junior doctor when the mood took him, he never stuck at anything for very long. It wasn’t unusual that in the same week he would lobby the Secretary of State about banning land-mines, write at length to the papers about funding foreign guerillas, forget to pay his staff, and get into the semi-final of the European bob sleigh championships. I waited daily to see him start a new religious sect.
That night, as I recall, he had a mixed bag of guests. A lifestyle magazine editor was there, a gentle unmarried fellow for whom Don professed public scorn and private affection; a round-the-world yachtsman; a former British special forces officer; Burrow, a comedian and writer—whom Don called Shallow for no other reason than he enjoyed sex with virtually anyone—myself, and Windsor of BBC fame. Our host was in tremendous form, taking the piss out of everybody, and sending Shallow into fits of giggles. The two lived virtually next-door in Yorkshire, but on TV they abused each other for a laugh.
Don enlarged on the misfits of civilisation. He reckoned that none of us, except perhaps the magazine editor and Windsor, were in our proper jobs. He said the yachtsman would be more suited to running an escort agency, and he suggested that the special forces geezer should have been a hospital porter. He was kind enough to allocate me to some War Studies lecturing post, merely because I had a taste for military history. Don’s perception did not go very deep. He told Burrow he should have been a muezzin.
“You’d have made a terrific job of it, Shallow. You’re a fucking disgrace as a comedian.” When questioned about himself he kept mum.
“I doubt if I’m much good at any kind of work,” he confessed, “except to butter up friends and business acquaintances. Anyhow I’m getting out of this shit-hole. I’m off to chill-out and find myself.”
Someone asked him where he was going, and was told “Albania, probably, to peddle soft drugs and distribute humanitarian aid to the mentally handicapped. Then I’ll come back and ream the art world.”
Nobody took Don seriously, so his guests didn’t take the trouble to bid him the kind of farewell a long voyage demanded. But when the others had gone, and we were sitting at the table on the first floor, he went quiet. Portentously quiet. He wrinkled his brows and dropped his jaw in the way he had when he wanted to get his own way.
“I’ve been a bit rash and got somewhat out of my depth,” he said, “and I want you to know about it. No one else knows, and I want someone behind me who can find my tracks if things go peary.”
I braced myself for some tiresome practical joke. But I was surprised when he asked me if I remembered Guy Miller. I remembered Miller very well. He was at Oxford with me, but he was no friend of mine, though for about two years Don and he had been pretty close. He had had a prodigious reputation for cleverness with everybody but the college authorities, and used to spend his vacations doing mad things in South East Asia and India, and writing about them in lifestyle magazines, even getting a piece in Granta.
He was absolutely stinking rich—his mother ran a charity telemarketing business—and did pretty much what he wanted to do. He became a bit of a celebrity after Oxford. He’d traveled around Kashmir and Afghanistan in the early eighties, and had written an acclaimed book about his various run-ins with the Mujaheddin and the CIA. Then he married a cousin of Don’s, who happened to be the only person that ever managed to coax affection out of me, and settled down in London. I did not go to their house, and soon I found that very few of his friends saw much of him either. His travels and magazine articles suddenly stopped, and I put it down to the rigours of domesticity.
Apparently I was wrong.
“Guy Miller,” said Don, “is stirring up a right fucking mess.”
I asked what kind of mess, and Don said he didn’t know.
“That’s the trouble. You remember what a card he used to be, always into something. Well, he’s been trying to behave like a respectable citizen recently, but God knows what he’s been up to. I visit him at Notting Hill a lot, and since last year he’s been getting stranger.”
When asked what kind of strangeness, I was only told that Miller had got into art a bit too obsessively.
“He’s got a ‘creative laboratory’ at the back of the house where he works away half the night. And the bunch of creeps you meet there! Every kind of scumbag boho-lifestyle wannabe you could imagine: Japanese intellectuals, mumbling trust-fund beatniks from the U.S., fat German eurocrat offspring. Several times I’ve wandered in only to cut dead their rapid conversation. They’ve all got an odd secretive air about them, and Guy’s started acting just like them. He wouldn’t answer a simple question or look you straight in the eyes. Theresa saw it too, and she often mentioned it to me.”
I said I saw nothing abnormal with this kind of behaviour in a wealthy young urbanite interested in art.
“Maybe you’re right,” said Don grimly. “Anyhow, he’s fucked off.”
“What. . .” I began, but was cut short.
“Bolted without a word. He told Theresa he’d be home for lunch yesterday, but he never came back. His arty mates knew nothing about him. We found he had stuffed some things into a ruck-sack and gone out by the back through the mews. Theresa was in a terrible state and sent for me, and I biked all over the place yesterday afternoon like a wolf on viagra. He’d drawn out a stash from the bank, but I couldn’t find any trace of where he’d disappeared to.”
“I was just about to tell the police this morning when Joachim Wenger, one of the boho creatives, rang me up and said he had found a card in the trouser pocket of the suit that Guy had worn the night before he left. It had a name on it something like Coreality, and it struck me that they might know something about the current sleaze allegations concerning the Chinese funding of conceptual art. Well, I went round there, and the long and short of it was that a chap there said he had seen Miller two days before with a letter from some spook from the British Council. Unfortunately, the bloke in question jetted off to New York next day, but the guys at Coreality told me one thing which helped to clear things up a bit. It seemed that the letter had been one of those things that the British Council and arts funding bodies give to their special friends. The Coreality people gathered from something they’d heard floating about that Guy was collecting info on art and sexual awkwardness from the Caucusus to the Far East.” Don paused to let his news sink in.
“Well, that was good enough for me. I’m off tomorrow to track him down.”
“But why shouldn’t he go East if he wants?” I said feebly.
“You don’t understand,” said Don with a smug grin. “You don’t know Guy like I do. He’s got in with a right weird bunch, and there’s no telling what shit he’s into. He’s perfectly capable of starting an uprising in Azerbaijan or somewhere merely to see how it feels like to be a revolutionary. That’s the craic with the old postmodernism. Anyhow, I won’t have Theresa fucked by his half-baked bollocks. I am going to haul the little bleeder back, even if I have to pretend he’s a dangerous paedophile attempting to escape international justice.”
I’ve forgotten what I said in reply. I couldn’t see the reason for the hero stuff. Miller didn’t interest me in the slightest, and the idea of Don as a defender of family values made me want to shit. I thought he was paranoid to say the least, and would probably end up making a tit of himself.
“It’s just another art scam,” I said. “He never could behave like any ordinary public schoolboy. What could he be into that’s so bad? Has he got money worries?”
“No. Rich as Murdoch,” said Don.
“A bird?”
“No chance, given a choice he prefers chasing boys.”
“Pissed-off dealer?”
“Don’t reckon so. He might be a bit light on his feet, but he’s pretty tasty, and anyhow, he’s got an account with Coutts & Co.”
“Then I give up. Whatever he’s got himself into, it looks as if he’s got you well hooked. I reckon you should take a break. Let’s face it, right now you’re a pain in the arse to your friends and a complete disgrace to honourable reportage. But for fuck’s sake cut out the spook act, they’ll see you coming a mile off, wherever you end up.”
Next morning Don turned up to see me in my office. The thought of travel always got him going. He was really buzzing, and had forgotten his anger at Miller’s bolting in gratitude for his excuse for foreign travel. He talked of carting him off to Belarus when he had found him, to investigate gun-running in the Russian Federation. Then they’d write it up as a two-parter in the Sunday Times and secure a TV deal—sure-fire awards territory.
I remember it as if it were yesterday. It was a hot May morning, and the sun which came through the dirty window in my Shoreditch loft apartment lit up the dust and disorder of my working space. I was pretty busy at the time, and my table and the surrounding floor was stacked high with research papers, project plan acetates and C-list invites. Don picked up one file and began to read it. It was all the info about the woman who’d been convicted of murdering her boyfriend who had been trying to drive her insane. My job was to get her face all over the place. He tossed it down and looked at me pityingly.
“I don’t understand why this involves the back end of the Caucusus.”
“Poor sod!” he said. “Having to waste your life on such a load of shit. Guy may be a total wanker, but he’s got to be smarter than you are, hasn’t he? Don’t you wish you were coming along?”
The weird thing was that I did. I remember the moment because it was one of the few on which I have had a pang of dissatisfaction with the path I subsequently chose. As Don’s footsteps grew faint on the stairs I suddenly felt as if something was missing, as if I was being left out. Missing out gets you every time, even when you know that what you’re missing out on is a load of toss.
Don went off at 11 on the Gatwick Express from Victoria, and my work was pretty much ruined for the day. I felt restless, and not only because of Don’s swift exit. My thoughts kept turning to the Miller; chiefly to Theresa, that fine woman yoked to a perverse egoist. I have never suffered much from imagination, but I suddenly began to feel a curious interest in the business, an unwilling interest, for I came to regret my off-hand scepticism of the previous night.
And it was more than idle interest. I had a sort of precognition that I was going to be mixed up in the affair more than I wanted.
I told myself warily that the life of an industrious low-ranking politician could have no connection with the meanderings of two upper class aesthetes in the former Soviet Union. But, try as I might, I could not get rid of a growing obsession. That night it followed me into my dreams, and I saw myself standing grim-faced with a ceremonial Sikh dagger coercing Don and Miller in a Chechnian military intelligence HQ which faded away into a Hoxton bar.
Next afternoon I found my steps wending in the direction of Bishopsgate. I lived at the time in French Place, and I told myself I would be none the worse for a walk around the urban clearway before supper. I’d considered calling in on Theresa Miller. Although I had only met her twice since her wedding day, we were once close friends.
I found her alone, without any company, despite her predicament, a perplexed and saddened woman with hopeful eyes. Those eyes questioned me as to how much I knew. I told her presently that I had seen Don and was aware of his errand. I added that she could count on me if it all went Pete Tong.
She hadn’t changed much. Still on the chatty side and shy. But she told me nothing. Guy was wrapped up in his business and tended to be very forgetful. She reckoned that the Middle Eastern journey was all a terrible mistake. He probably meant to tell her about his departure, then, having imagined it done, proceeded on to other matters. He would phone, or e-mail, she said, if it was humanly possible. But her roseate eyes betrayed her optimism. I sensed domestic troubles. She either knew or feared something. I suspected the latter, for her demeanour was more apprehensive than enlightened.
I didn’t stay long, and, as I walked home, I had a nasty feeling that I had intruded upon her private grief. Also I was increasingly certain that there was a crisis brewing, and that Don had more grounds for his imminent journey than I had given him credit for. I let my mind drift back to gather recollections of Miller, but all I could find was an impression of a talented, restless being, who had been too fond of the by-ways of life for my sober tastes. There was nothing particularly twisted in him, not, at least, in relation to several million other metropolitan dwellers, but there was definitely a streak of perversity. I remember consoling myself with the thought that, though he might give his wife a nervous breakdown, he’d never intentionally break her heart.
I decided to let the others do their thing, and to keep a look out for them. But I could not get rid of the feeling that I might soon have reason to get proactive on someone’s ass.
CHAPTER II
A FORTNIGHT LATER — on the 21st of May, to be precise — I did a thing I never do if I can help it and went south of the river to meet with an influential client. He’d been involved in an ordinary road traffic accident, and, as the solicitors for the company were good friends of mine and their client had a public profile he wished to protect, I took the case to earn a few quid on the side. There was the usual dull conflict of evidence in the Horsferry Road Magistrates Court.
An empty taxi cab, proceeding slowly on the correct side of the road, indicating with lights and florid hand signals at bends in the road, had been run into by a private motor which had pushed its way out from a side street. The taxi had been written off, while its driver had suffered a dislocated shoulder. And a female passenger had a miscarriage that her solicitors were putting down to the driver at fault. The potentially damaging feature of the case was that the other driver hadn’t stopped to investigate the damage, but had made himself scarce, and the Met had, incredibly, tracked him down. The car turned out to be the property of a Mr Ashley Medina, a semi-retired business analyst, who lived in a large Georgian town house in Blackheath, and at the time of the accident it had been driven by his financial consultant. The cab company brought an action for damages against its owner.
The financial consultant, Darius Noakes by name, was the only witness for the defence. He was a tall man, with a very long, thin face, and a jaw that receded. The upper and lower parts of his face seemed ill-made and hardly fitted together. He apologised profusely on behalf of his employer, who was abroad. Apparently, on the morning in question—the 8th of May—he had received instructions from Medina to take a message to a passenger due to leave on a European flight from Heathrow, and had been putting his foot down in heavy traffic when he hit the taxi. He was not aware that he’d caused any damage, thinking he’d only slightly grazed the other car. He pleaded guilty.
It was a pretty common case, but Noakes was by no means a commonplace witness. He was very unlike the conventional financial consultant, much more like one of those successful IT consultants whose intense faces you see in newspaper advertisements for consultancy firms called Arxis, Timeoz, or Nonetheless. His tiny eyes were alive with intelligence, and there were lines of ruthlessness around his mouth, indicating a person often called upon to make urgent decisions. His story was simplicity itself, and he answered my questions with an air of total frankness, which meant he was talking bollocks. The plane he had to meet was the 1535 flight from Heathrow to Prague, the plane by which Don had been due to travel. The passenger he had to see was an American, Ted Szvwcz. His employer, Medina, was in Italy, but would soon be returning to London.
The case was over in 20 minutes, but it was something unique in my professional experience. In my line of work I have to mix with some repellent specimens, but I took a most intense and unreasoning dislike to that efficient financial consultant. I briefed him rudely with my proposals for damage limitation, was answered with bland courtesy and hopelessly snubbed. In the end I lost my temper, to the surprise of Medina’s highly paid lawyer. All the way back I was angry and pissed off with myself for endangering a lucrative job. Half way home I realised that the accident had happened on the day that Don left London. The coincidence flickered across my mind; there couldn’t be any substantive connection between the two events.
That afternoon I wasted some time Googling Medina and his business interests. His name occurred in asides in a couple of business news sites, but otherwise, nothing. A contact from the City advised me that he lived in a near-mansion called the Pink Lodge. But on the face of it he had no identity other than as a former player in corporate affairs. My irritation with the hired hand had made me inquisitive about his boss.
Have you ever noticed that, when you hear a name that strikes you, you seem to be constantly hearing it for a while afterwards? Once I took on a brief in which one of the parties was called Cnut, a name I had never met before except in history books, but I ran across two other Cnuts before I’d finished. Anyhow, the day after the Blackheath visit I had moved on to fixing the press for a TV comedian who’d been found shagging two underage girls on a campsite near Poole. It was a tricky business, and I won’t bother you with the nastier details. It involved a number of consultations with my contacts in the CPS, events promoters, marketing gurus, and the Sunday papers. They produced their facts and figures, and for a time my office was regularly filled with classy-looking birds talking arcane jargon. And yes, I did take advantage of their visits to initiate sexual encounters: namely, two blow-jobs, a swift shag on my glass desk and a gloriously postmodern rear-end shunt with the sort checking out urgent e-mail remotely on an attractive new PowerBook with an AirPort connection, and me calling a client on the mobile.
I wanted to get the best free legal advice I could, and they were very frank in letting me know the score. During one of these meetings I discovered that Miller was one of the most valued clients of a particular marketing firm. With his wealth and background he was bound to be a good deal both in the galleries, and the City. Like most of my kind I find it difficult to exist socially without knowing the background of my acquaintances, and I thoroughly enjoy prying into Miller’s private affairs.
Eventually, curiosity got the better of me and I approached a man, recommended to me by the laptop girl, who she advised might be able to give me the low-down on his financial arrangements. He seemed to have been buying international futures and securities on a massive scale. I was indiscrete enough to ask if Mr Miller had been at it for long, and was told that he had begun to buy heavily some six months earlier.
“Mr Miller,” whispered the broker, “is very closely connected in his financial operations with another esteemed client of ours, Mr Ashley Medina. They are both attracted by this form of investment.”
At the time I scarcely registered the name, but after supper that evening I began to speculate about the connection between them. I had found out the name of one of Guy’s mysterious new friends.
It was not a mind-blowing discovery. The legal share deals of a semi-retired business analyst did not suggest anything too dodgy, but I began to wonder if Guy’s state of mind, which Don had commented upon, might not be connected with financial worries. I couldn’t believe that the huge Miller fortunes had been depleted, or that he’d disappeared to avoid his creditors, but he might have got entangled in some shady city business which he couldn’t get his head around. I couldn’t believe that Medina was a bystander in all this; his financial consultant looked too sussed. It was possible he was blackmailing Miller, and that the oddball artist had done a bunk to escape ruin.
But I had no grounds for any possible accusation, and no idea what Guy might have got up to in his bohemian past. The guesses which flitted through my brain were too crazy to consider seriously. I had only the flimsiest basis for conjecture. Medina and Miller were friends; Don had gone off in quest of Miller; Medina’s financial consultant had broken the law in order, for some reason or other, to see the departure of the plane by which Don had traveled. I remember laughing at myself for my paranoia, and reflecting that, if Don could see into my brain, he would turn a deaf ear in the future to my frequent suggestions that he was mental.
I couldn’t get it out of my mind, and I called again that week on Theresa. She’d had no contact from her husband, and only a couple of calls from Don, giving a Moscow address. However, Guy was always making himself scarce; the art world prized unpredictable behaviour. She was used to inventing plausible tales to account for her husband’s unscheduled absences, and all the while anxiety and dread were gnawing at her heart. I asked her if she had ever met a man called Medina, but she denied all knowledge. Furthermore, she knew nothing of Guy’s business dealings, but at my suggestion she met with his personal advisor at the bank, and I heard from her next day that his accounts were in the pink. It was no financial crisis that had sent him packing.
A few days later some interesting information drifted my way. At the time I used to do some work on the side for various newspapers, passing on celebrity gossip and the like. By way of return I occasionally picked up tips that put me onto new clients. It was thankless work, but it was supposed to be good for an ambitious PR person. By this tedious channel I received the first hint of another of Guy’s friends.
As part of a deal for making public a popular singer-songwriter’s history of baby animal abuse, I was sent an e-mail attachment dealing with the arrest of an suspected eco-spy at Cambridge. At the time there was a sort of global epidemic of roving activists who got themselves into compromising situations, and severely pissed off the Home Office and the Ministry of Defence. This case was distinguished from the usual rubbish by the public profile of the accused.
Generally, your terrorist is an underachiever in everyday life, who attempts to promote their ideological standpoint by initiating violent situations. But this specimen was a professor of a famous European university, a TV celebrity with wide appeal across diverse cultures, an attractive presence, who had dined with international security bosses and done the conga with eurocrats’ daughters at the taxpayers’ expense.
I’ve forgotten the substance of the case, or why it was sent me; in any case it doesn’t matter, because he was acquitted. What interested me at the time were the character witnesses. He had live video links round the clock. People were queuing up to get him off the hook. One was from Miller to his wife’s employer; and when he was arrested one well-wisher announced that he would bear the whole costs of the defence himself. That gentleman was a Mr Andrew Lumley, described in the e-mail sent me as a rich bachelor, a patron of the arts, and a board member of several heritage funding boards.
Until a few weeks before I had known nothing of Miller’s friends, and here were three bits of information dropping in on me unsolicited, just when my interest had been awakened. I was hooked. Everyone in PR and marketing believes they’ve got the makings of sleuth or intelligence gatherer. I was on the look-out for Guy’s friends, and I reckoned that if he knew the eco-spy and the eco-spy knew Lumley, the odds were that Miller and Lumley knew each other. I tracked down Lumley by using my newspaper contacts to access to a news database. Turns out he lived in Deptford, belonged to half a dozen arts organisations, and had a country house in Hampshire.
I tucked the name away in my mind, and for a few days afterwards asked everyone I met if he knew the famous arts philanthropist of Deptford. I had no luck till the following Saturday, when, dining a client at a riverside restaurant in Clapham, I bumped into Cloke, the art critic.
I have always been a bit of a connoisseur. At the start of my career I used to try to impress prospective fucks by buying expensive early-modernist drawings and prints, but at the time in question my interest lay mainly in prison art, and I’d collected some really valuable pieces. Prison art is a thing few people collect seriously, but the few who do are apt to be monomaniacs. Whenever a sizeable collection comes onto the market it commands high prices but generally not more than half a dozen buyers emerge. Prison art buffs all know each other, and they’re less cut-throat in their methods than most collectors. Cloke was the keenest I’d ever met, and he would discourse for hours on the ‘feel’ of a good papier maché life mask sculpture, and the respective merits of biro and felt tip.
That day he was full of excitement. He babbled through luncheon about the Whitemoor sale, which he had attended the week before. There had been a pair of magnificent ashtrays, with a unique cunt design, which had roused his enthusiasm. Toilet roll holders and naive paintings had flown out of the sale-room, and Cloke could quote their prices exactly, but the ashtrays possessed him, and he was furious that the nation had not acquired them. It seemed that he had been to the V & A, the British Museum, the British Council and the Government art collection, and he thought he might yet persuade the authorities to offer hard cash for them if the purchaser would re-sell. They had been bought by a Cork Street dealer for a well-known private collector, one Andrew Lumley. I pricked up my ears and asked about him.
Cloke said he was a rich old queer who brooded over a handful of covenanted gifts holding various parts of his vast collection, the rest of his things he locked up in his underground strongroom and never let the public get a look at them, despite his tax-exempt status. He suspected that a lot of the best items at recent sales had found their way to his dungeon, and that meant that they were put on ice for good. I asked if he knew him. No, he told me, but he had once or twice been allowed to look at his things for books he had been writing. He had never seen the man, for he always bought through agents, but he had heard of people who knew him.
“It is the usual bollocks,” he said. “He’ll fill half a dozen houses with priceless art treasures, and then snuff it, and the whole lot will be sold at auction and the best things carried off to the Far East or America.”
There was a bright side, however. Lumley apparently might be willing to re-sell the ashtrays if he got a fair offer, so Cloke had been informed by Latrin, and that very afternoon he was going to give them the once over. He asked me to come with him, and, having nothing better to do, I accepted.
Cloke’s car was waiting for us at the door of the offices. They were closed, it was after three. I did not hear his directions to the driver, and we had been on the road ten minutes or so before I discovered that we had crossed the river and were traversing South London. I had expected to find the things in Latrin’s shop, but to my delight I was told that Lumley had taken delivery of them at once.
“He keeps very few of his things in the corporate headquarters except his books,” I was told. “But he has a house at Blackheath which is stuffed with cultural artefacts from cellar to solar panels.”
“What is its name?” I asked with a sudden suspicion.
“The Pink Lodge,” said Cloke.
“But that belongs to a man called Medina,” I said.
“I can’t help that. The things in it belong to Lumley, all right. I should know, I’ve been there three times with an invite.”
Cloke got little out of me for the rest of the ride. Here was excellent corroborative evidence of what I had allowed myself to suspect. Medina was a friend of Miller; Lumley was a friend of Miller; Lumley was obviously a friend of Medina, and he might be Medina himself, for the retired business analyst, as I figured him, would not be above an innocent impersonation. Anyhow, if I could find one or the other, I might learn something about Guy’s recent doings. I sincerely hoped that the owner might be at home that afternoon when we inspected his treasure horde, for so far I had found no one who could provide me with an in to that mysterious old bachelor of aesthetic tastes.
We reached the Pink Lodge about half-past three. It was one of those small, square, late-Georgian mansions which you see all around London. Once it was a country house among fields, now only a villa in a pretentious garden. I looked to see the super-financial consultant Noakes, but the door was opened by a female who inspected Cloke’s business card and grudgingly allowed us to enter.
My companion had not exaggerated when he described the place as full of treasures. It was more like a heritage cocoon than a civilised dwelling. The hall was crowded with Japanese armour and lacquer cabinets. One room was lined from floor to ceiling with expensive-looking paintings, mostly seventeenth-century Dutch, and had enough Chippendale chairs to seat a public enquiry into the dark side of the Met. Cloke fancied having a prowl round, but we were hurried onward by the woman to a back room housing the objects we’d come to see. The ashtrays had only been half-unpacked, and in a trice Cloke was investigating them with a screw-in eyeglass, purring to himself like a contented guinea pig.
The housekeeper stood on guard by the door, Cloke was absorbed, and after the first inspection of the treasures I had time to look around. It was an untidy little room, full of Chinese and Mycenaean grave goods in dusty glass cabinets, and in the corners stood piles of amphora, rugs, ornaments.
Medina, I reflected, must be an easy-going fellow, entirely oblivious to his own personal space, if he allowed his friend to turn his house into an art dump. I began to doubt the existence of the retired business analyst. The house was definitely Lumley’s. Why did he choose to pass under another name during his occasional visits south of the river? His motive might be innocent enough, but somehow I didn’t think so. His financial consultant had looked much too clued up.
With my foot I turned over the lid of one of the packing cases that had held high-priced Wedgwood china. It was covered with a litter of cotton wool, shavings and polystyrene chips, and below it lay a crumpled piece of paper. I looked again, and saw it was a hard copy of an e-mail. Clearly somebody had opened the cases and had left it on the top of one, from where it had dropped to the floor, and been covered by the lid when it was discarded.
I reckon I’m as ethical as anyone else, but right then I just had to read that message. I felt the gimlet eye of the housekeeper on me, so I got crafty. I took out my cigarette case as if to get a smoke, and clumsily shook its contents amongst the packing debris. Then on my knees I began to pick the ready-rolled joints up, turning over the litter till the object was exposed. It was in Mandarin, and I read it quite clearly. It had been sent from Singapore, but the message appeared to be a cipher. These were the words: ‘Wo míngnián Bokhare Saronov’. I finished collecting the spliffs, and turned the lid over again on the e-mail, so that its owner, if he decided he wanted it, could find it easily.
As we drove back, Cloke became absorbed in meditation on the prison-made ashtrays, and I was forming a decision about events. A curious feeling of inevitability came over me. I had collected by accident a few odd, disparate pieces of information, and here by the most amazing chance of all was the connecting link. I knew I had no evidence that would have convinced the most credulous jury. Medina knew Miller; it was probable that Lumley did too. Lumley knew Medina, possibly was the same person. Somebody in Medina’s house got an e-mail in which a trip to Ingushetia was indicated. It didn’t sound much. Yet I was absolutely convinced, with the queer subconscious certitude of the human mind, that Miller was now or would soon be in Ingushetia, and that Medina/Lumley knew of his present location and was deeply connected with his journey.
That night after dinner I rang up Theresa Miller. She’d had a call from Don, he’d had no luck. Nobody in Moscow had seen or heard of any stray Englishman remotely like Guy; and Don, after playing an undercover operative for roughly three weeks, was going spare and spoke of packing it in. I told her to send him an e-mail in her own name: ‘Go to Ingushetia. Have info you’ll meet him there’. She promised to send the message immediately, and asked no further questions. She was a trooper.
CHAPTER III
UP UNTIL NOW I’d been an onlooker, from here on I had the feeling it was going to get messy. That e-mail was the beginning of my active part in this caper. Aside from a lot of sitting around in my flat waiting for the phone to ring, there was one event outside London. That was the real beginning of my story.
One Thursday I decided to take a weekend off work and worry, but before I left London I went to Portman Square. I found Theresa Miller in a right state. You must remember that Don and I had always reckoned that Guy’s Lucan had been due to some mad scheme of his own which might get him in the shit. We thought that he’d got mixed up with a dodgy bunch, and was probably going to end up in the boot of a Lada in some dead-end Baltic seaport. I’d long ago junked the idea of blackmail, and convinced myself that Lumley/Medina were his partners. The same notion had probably been in his wife’s mind. But now she’d found something that changed everything.
She had ransacked his papers in the hope of finding a clue to the affair that had taken him abroad, but there was nothing but business letters, notes of investments, and such-like. He seemed to have burned most of his papers in the queer laboratory at the back of the house. But, stuffed into the pocket of a laptop case on a glass desk in the office, where he scarcely ever wrote, she had found a CD-R containing a document that seemed to be the rough draft of a letter, and it was addressed to her. I give it as it was written; the apotheoses are transcriptions of blank spaces in the manuscript:
You must have thought me mad, or worse, to treat you as I have done. But there was a reason, which some day I hope to able to tell you. As soon as you get this note I want you prepare to come out to me at . . . You will travel by . . . and arrive at . . . I attach a letter which I want you to hand in deepest confidence to Laney, the solicitor. He will make all arrangements about your journey, and he’ll sort out the supplies of hard currency I need. My darling, you must leave as secretly as I did, and tell nobody anything, not even that I am alive—that’s the most important part. I don’t want to frighten you, but I’m on the edge here, and with your help I might just escape.
That was all—obviously the draft of a letter which he intended to post to her from some foreign place. But can you imagine a note more calculated to severely piss a woman off? It didn’t bother me too much at first. Miller was always too vague to get into any real trouble, and he was certainly not predisposed to danger. Yet it was clear that he had scarpered that day in May under the pressure of some terrible fear.
The whole business had begun to stink. Theresa wanted me to go to Scotland Yard, but I managed to put her off the scent. I have the utmost esteem for the Met, but at this stage I didn’t want any publicity I couldn’t control. This might be something too delicate for the police to handle, and I thought it better to wait it out.
I did a lot of thinking about the Miller business the first day or two of my trip, but the air and the swift motion helped me to forget it. Me and Susan my PA had a fortnight of superb weather, and sailed all day through a glistening green country under the hazy blue heavens of June. Soon I fell into the blissful state of physical and mental ease which such a life induces. Hard physical labour, such as rambling, keeps the nerves on the alert and the mind active, but coasting all day in a smooth car through a heavenly landscape mesmerises both brain and body.
We ran up the Thames valley, explored the Cotswolds, and turned south through Somerset till we reached the fringes of Exmoor. I stayed a day or two at a little inn high up in the moor, and spent the time tramping the endless ridges of hill or scrambling in the arbutus thickets where the moor falls in steeps to the sea. We returned by Dartmoor and the south coast, meeting with our first rain in Dorset, and sweeping into sunlight again on Salisbury Plain. The time came when only two days remained to me.
I wanted to be in London by Monday p.m., and to make sure it happened I made a long day of it on the Sunday. It was the long day which brought our pride to a fall. The car had run so well that I resolved to push on and sleep in a friend’s house near Farnham. It was about half-past eight, and we were having a job finding our way around the narrow roads near Wolmer Forest, when, as we turned a sharp corner, we rammed the arse end of an HGV. Susan slammed on the anchors but the collision sent the butt-end of something through our windscreen, burst the tyre of the nearside front wheel, and totaling the steering-column. Neither of us was badly hurt, but Susan got a long scratch on her cheek from broken glass, and I had a bruised shoulder.
The HGV driver showed little sympathy and reluctantly gave his details for insurance purposes. Seeing as how the car was a write-off I intended to call the AA to tow the wreck to Farnham. Unfortunately, my mobile’s battery was flat so I had no choice but to send Susan off to search for a public phone. She borrowed a bicycle somehow and went off to arrange for the vehicle’s collection, while I kicked back listening to a CD of Ibiza Club Classics.
I didn’t like the idea of spending the June night beside my car, and the thought of my friend’s house near Farnham looked more and more inviting. I might have walked there, but I did not know the way, and I found that my shoulder was giving me gyp, so I resolved to see if I could get a lift from a local. The south of England is now so densely populated by Londoners that even in the sticks you find decent restaurants among the dismal farm produce outlets, rustic-looking developments and executive holiday lets. In short, there’s always someone revving up to escape to the city.
I walked along the unmarked road in the sweet-scented June dusk. At first it was bounded by a high gorse hedge, then came patches of open heath, and then woods. After the woods I discovered some railings that led me to an entrance gate. Just beyond the gate was a gift shop. I rapped on the door until someone answered. I asked where I was and was told the name of the place—Brazen Oaks. I asked anyone was at home, and the pompous shop-keeper advised me that he was only a franchisee to a thriving heritage business, how should he know?
The house, as seen in the half-light of a June evening, was a long white-washed building of two storeys. It was covered with creepers and roses, and the odour of flowers was mingled with the faintest tang of wood-smoke, pleasant to a hungry traveler in the late hours. I pulled an old-fashioned bell, and the door was opened by a fractious young woman.
I offered my platinum card and informed her that I was a businessman from London who had been involved in a non-fatal RTA. Would it be possible for someone to help me get to an urgent appointment near Farnham? I was asked in, and lay back in an original LeCourbusier chair in the hall.
In a few minutes the house-keeper appeared, a grim old cow whom at any other time I would have totally ignored. But she had some good news for me. There was no one who could help me out right then, but they had a decent room available at a discount rate. That was better than nothing. The thought occurred to me that Susan could look after the car, and I’d pick her up in the morning.
I gratefully accepted the offer as my shoulder was getting stiff, and the old dear showed me up an oak staircase to a very well-furnished bedroom with a bathroom en suite. I had a bath using the Radox the housekeeper had thoughtfully provided, and afterwards got stuck into the mini-bar. Feeling refreshed I went downstairs and entered a room from which I caught a glow of light.
It was a vast library, the most remarkable I’ve seen outside London. The room was long and entirely lined with books, except over the fireplace, where a large Stubbings hung. The books were in glass cases, eighteenth century I guessed. Surprisingly, I saw a table laid for dinner in a corner. The light I had glimpsed came from the shaded candlesticks on it. At first I thought the place was empty, but as I crossed the room a figure rose from a deep chair by the hearth.
“Good evening, Mr Nolan,” a voice boomed. “I am pleased to have the pleasure of your company.”
He switched on the lights, and I was astonished to see an old man—not at all what I had expected from his voice. I was 24 at the time, and counted as old anyone over 40, but I reckoned the old geezer to be well on into his 60s. He was about my size, but his shoulders were hunched, as if from study. His face was clean-shaven and extraordinarily delicate. He had a sort of inbred mouth and a very long and pointed chin. His hair was silver, brushed low on the forehead like Hollywood Romans, and he wore tinted glasses. It turns out the old man was the owner of the ancient pile, now converted into a rural heritage centre and hotel, and lived in extensive apartments there. And probably claimed the tax back on the business expense of living in his own house. Nice one.
Dinner was a light meal of grilled goat’s cheese, superb pan-fried mullet, followed by fresh loganberries. We drank some very tasty Royer and some excellent Madeira. The young woman waited on us, and, as we talked of the weather and the Hampshire roads, I kept trying to guess my host’s profession. He was not a lawyer, for he was too engaged. I thought he might be a retired Oxford don, or an ex-Crown servant, or perhaps some official of the Museums Service.
Afterwards we relaxed in armchairs, and he gave me a Cuban cigar. We talked about many things, but mainly books and politics. The old man showed no interest in partisan issues, but was extremely curious about art, defence and security matters, and appeared to be something of an amateur strategist and cultural critic. I sensed an occasional correspondent to The Times at moments of national importance.
We got into foreign affairs and he really got going, his knowledge was immense and wide-ranging. Indeed he was so into it that I began to suspect that he was actually a retired diplomat. Around that time there was some local difficulty between the US and Europe over import-export arrangements, and he outlined for me with remarkable clarity the weakness of the protectionist US trade lobby. I had recently finished working for a client with a big East European intellectual property deal, and I asked him a question about their likely status. He gave me chapter and verse.
The fire had been lit before we finished dinner, and soon it began to flare and light the figure of my companion, who sat in a deep arm-chair. He had taken off his tinted glasses, and as I rose to get another glass of brandy I saw his eyes looking abstractedly before him.
Somehow his eyes reminded me of Miller. Guy always had a sort of restless light in his, like stained glass windows; an obscure intelligence which was both attractive and unnerving. My host had this in spades. His eyes were paler than any I had ever seen in a human head—pale, bright, and strangely wild. But, whereas Miller’s eyes had only given the impression of reckless youth, this man’s gave the impression of wisdom, power and endless vitality.
All my theories vanished, for I could not believe that my host had ever followed any profession. If he had, he would have been at the head of it, and the world would have been familiar with his features. I began to wonder if my recollection was not playing me false, and I was in the presence of some great man whom I ought to recognise.
As I dived into the recesses of my memory I heard his voice asking if I were not a lawyer and mine replying, “No, I could have been a barrister, but I decided to go where the money was and get into marketing and publicity.” He asked me why.
“It was the easiest way to make a living,” I slurred. “I am useless at repetitive tasks, but I love sorting through facts and attending meetings. I’m not stupid, but I haven’t got any new ideas, I don’t want to be a politician, and I can’t abide hard work. I am a fairly ordinary, middle-class English person with a Desmond, this is the kind of work people like me do. We like the buzz, the feeling that, if we’re not exactly the architects of the social sphere, we are the social cement of a civilised community.”
In his soft voice he repeated my words. “Perhaps, in a sense, you are right. But what you call ‘civilisation’ needs more than a marketing concept to hold it together. You see, people generally are not equally willing to accept PR spin as some kind of divine law.”
“Of course, there are other means to get an idea across,” I said. “Tame journos, police, diplomacy, paid snitches.”
He stopped me dead.
“Yes, that is the real cement that holds it all together. Did you ever reflect, Mr Nolan, how precarious is the tenure of the civilisation about which we boast?”
“I always thought it was pretty much a foregone conclusion,” I opined, “we’re basically fucked, so why not enjoy the ride? Anyhow, nothing will really happen to us—all the action’s going on in the world’s hell holes, it’s very unlikely to come back to us.”
He laughed.
“That’s the fashionable view, but, believe me, you are entirely wrong. Think for more than a moment, and you will find that the foundations of liberal democracies underwritten by capitalism are sand. You imagine that a wall as dense as depleted uranium separates civilisation from barbarism. I am here to give you a wake-up call. The division is nothing more than a thread, a hair, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a nudge there, and we usher in a return to an age of public cesspits and hangings, music hall ballads, harps, lutes, and inadequate feminine hygiene.”
It was the kind of hypothetical, juvenile speculation that women suspect grown men habitually indulge in after a couple of pints. I looked at my host to see if he was giving anything away, and at the moment a log flared up again. His face was perfectly serious. His wild eyes were watching me intently.
“Take one little instance,” he said. “This world is built on the proliferation of capital, we’ve built up a massive system of credit. Without efficient banking, reliable forms of exchange and stable currencies the whole of our life would stop. But credit only exists because behind it there is a notional value upheld by mutual agreement. This £50 note is worthless paper unless the pound maintains some value in the world currency markets. Forgive this elementary discussion, but the point is important. We used to have a gold standard, because gold was sufficiently rare, and because it could easily be turned into coins, a portable form of money. Economists have long since accepted that the world can be run equally well on a pure credit basis, with no precious metal currency behind it. This amazing situation has overcome practically impossible odds. The whole of the world’s stupidity has apparently been converted to a single economic faith to make it work.
“Now, suppose something happened to make such a standard of value useless. Suppose something like the dream of the alchemists came true, and all things were readily transmutable. Suppose the belief in notional exchange value crumbles, superceded by some more effective system that privileges the satisfactory fulfilment of human desire! Such a chemical transmutation has already become a possibility with metals, if you are aware of recent scientific developments. And, my friend, in the same way as gold and silver have long since lost their intrinsic value, art is dead and belief is dying. If belief fails, the whole edifice of our commerce will collapse. Credit, and creativity, its correlative, will become meaningless, because they will be untranslatable. We would be back to an age of barter, for it is hard to see what other standard of value could replace overnight a global system of belief. The whole of Western civilisation, all its industries, services and commerce, would collapse. Once more, like my distant ancestors I would plant carrots and beans for a living, press cheeses, knit jumpers from wool shorn from my own herd of sheep, and exchange all that for services in kind from my neighbours. I should produce simple decorative objects to adorn my even simpler dwelling. There would be no art, no defence industry. We should have a simple life with a vengeance; not the self-conscious simplicity dreamed of since the Enlightenment, but the compulsory simplicity of humanity without a choice.”
I was not greatly impressed by the illustration. I couldn’t tell if he was for it or against it.
“Of course there are many faultlines in Western liberal democracies,” I said, “as Professor Alan Sinfield, formerly of the University of Sussex, maintains. And the fissure of any of them could bring about massive social change. But those are strongly defended by partisan interests.”
“Not so strongly as either you or the Silver Fox in Daisy Dukes think. Consider how delicate the civilisation machine is becoming. As life grows more complex, the machinery grows more intricate and therefore more vulnerable. Do you imagine that government organisations or partisan interests can control this situation? Such partisan interests have become so infinitely numerous that each in itself is frail. In the Dark Ages you had one great power—the terror of God and the Church—now you have a multiplicity of small factors, all delicate and fickle, and made strong only by our tacit agreement not to question them.”
“You forget one thing,” I said, “the fact that people will do whatever it takes to keep the machine going. That is what I meant when I mentioned paid snitches.”
He got up from his chair and walked up and down the floor, a curious dusky figure lit by occasional spurts of flame from the hearth.
“You have put your finger on the one thing that matters. ‘Civilisation’—capital, creativity, and all the rest—is a conspiracy. What’s the point of having police in this country when virtually every criminal can find a sanctuary across the Channel, and when organised crime works beyond boundaries. How would the other component parts of the criminal justice system function if society as a whole refused to recognise its power? Modern life is the silent agreement of socially mobile individuals in keeping up pretences. And it will succeed until the day comes when a better situation persuades people to switch allegiances.”
I do not think that I have ever listened to a more pointless conversation. But although his subject was pedestrian—you can hear the same thing from any group of half-baked tossers in a pub—it was the way he said it that made me pay attention. The room was almost dark, but the man’s meaning seemed to take shape and bulk in the gloom. Though I could scarcely see him, I knew those weird pale eyes were looking at me. I wanted more light brought to bear, but did not know where to look for a switch. It was all so eerie that I began to wonder if the old gent was a mentalist. In any case, I was tired of his banal speculations.
“Well, there’s no point splitting hairs,” I said. “But isn’t it in everyone’s interest that this conspiracy is maintained?”
He dropped into his chair again.
“I wonder,” he said slowly. “Have we really got the best minds on the case? Take policy making, for instance. When all’s said and done, we’re ruled by amateurs and second-rate theatricals. The methods of our Government Departments would surely reduce any private firm to bankruptcy. The methods of Parliament would disgrace any Parish Council. Our ruling elite pretends to buy in expert knowledge, but they merely employ their star-struck acquaintances, and if they get good advice, 10–1 they won’t have the brains to use it. Why would people of genius choose to sell their ideas to our insipid leaders?” He rested.
“They say information is power, but a tiny electronic device might wreck air forces and navies. A new chemical or biological combination could upset every rule of war. It’s the same with business. One or two minor changes might reduce Britain’s economy to the level of Ecuador’s, or finally give China, or India, the key to the world’s wealth. And yet we never so much as dream that these things could happen. We confuse our fragile world with the whole universe.”
I’ve always been lippy, but this fellow was a real operator!
“Yoiks! That’s heavy duty. But surely,” I said, “the first thing a scientist does is to make his discovery public. I’d want the honour and glory, and everyone wants money, don’t they? So eventually, scientific discoveries become part of the world’s knowledge, and everything is readjusted to meet it. It happened with electricity, it happened with microcircuits, superconductors, advanced telemetry. Take the marvellous Dyson vacuum cleaner. You call ‘civilisation’ a machine, but human culture is far more flexible. It’s a living network.”
“That might be true if new knowledge really became global property. But does it? Every now and then I catch a news report telling me that some eminent scientist has made a great discovery, or that some artist or novelist has taken ‘creativity’ to new heights. They read papers before the Academy, they talk to the style press, there are leading articles on it, Tomorrow’s World does a feature, his photo is splashed across Sunday magazine covers. That kind of person is not the danger. He’s a part of the machine, a part of the conspiracy. It is the men who remain outside it that are the ones to watch, the discovery artists who choose not to use their knowledge till they can use it with full effect. Believe me, the most powerful minds remain outside the system of civilisation.”
Then his voice wavered.
“You may hear people say that submarines did away with battleships, that air power has overthrown the effectiveness of armoured divisions, that stealth aircraft have annulled air defence systems, that a Hirst or Emin has reconfigured art in its entirety. That’s what defence analysts and media pundits say. But do you imagine that the massive, clumsy submarine or the balsa wood and glue stealth bomber is really the last word of science?”
“No doubt they have already become obsolete and, even as we speak technology has moved to another level.”
He shook his head.
“I see you’ve thought about such matters. Even now the knowledge which facilitates innovations in weaponry has progressed far beyond the capacity of any nation to defend itself. As we speak, unpublished poets have decoded the mysteries of time travel; fine artists have revealed the truth of the form and spectrum behind the mask of illusive reality. And the same might be said for industrial technologies. You see only the productions of second-rate inventors who are in a hurry to get wealth and fame. True knowledge—deadly information—is kept a dark secret. But, believe me, my friend, it is there.”
He paused for a second, and I saw the faint outline of the hairs on his nose lit by his cigar against the background of the dark. Then he quoted me one or two examples, slowly, as if in some doubt about the wisdom of telling a stranger. These cases startled me. They were of different kinds—a natural disaster, a sudden difference of opinions between two nation states, a new art movement threatening the basis on which cultural values are calculated, a blight on a vital cash crop, a border war, an outbreak of ebola. I will not repeat them. I do not think I believed in them then, and I’ve come to discount them completely since. He was a misanthropist fantasist. But they were pretty scary, as told in that quiet voice in that sombre room on that dark June night. If he was right, these things could not have been the work of the environment or accidents, but of some unpronounceable art. The nameless brains he spoke of, working silently in the background like movie animators, now and then showed their power by some cataclysmic revelation. I tried not to believe him, but, as he piled up example on example, showing with precision and clarity the steps in the game, I had no words to protest. At last I found my voice.
“What you describe is an anarchist’s wet dream—a totally omniscient force controlling global events, and yet it remains invisible? What’s the motivation of these sick individuals?”
He laughed. “Even if I knew, why would I tell you? I am just a humble researcher, and in my studies I occasionally stumble across curious items of information. But my remit does not allow me to investigate motives. I only know of the existence of ubiquitous extra-social intelligences. Let us say that they distrust the global money machine. They may be idealists who desire to make a new world, or they may simply be artists enjoying the pursuit of truth and beauty for its own sake. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that it took both kinds of individuals to bring about results, for the latter develop information and knowledge into implicit understanding, and the former have the will to use that understanding to pursue the dream.”
I drifted off for a moment and recalled a business trip to Frankfurt. One afternoon I was sitting among hoards of publishers in a coffee shop beside a busy road. I was breakfasting after a morning spent looking after the interests of a TV celebrity who had just published a ghost-written novel. I had picked up a German bird on the way, a small woman who said she was a Professor of Literature. We shared an overpriced sandwich. She was a fluent, but quaint, English-speaker, and she was, I remember, interested in postmodern literary theory, especially the branch which dealt with performativity applied to gender relations and urban identities. She bored me senseless about the various ways in which gendered resistance is apparent in the Romanian porn industry. In the end I was forced to ditch her and ended up masturbating while watching Roots dubbed into German.
“The pity,” he droned on, “is that reformists know nothing, and those who know something are too idle to reform. Some day there will come an alchemical marriage of information and subjectivity, and then the world will become freed from the constraints of value.”
“You draw a vivid picture,” I croaked. “But if these covert, extra-social brains are so potent, why do they manage only piecemeal changes to the world? Even the most dull-witted police officer with the machinery of a progressive liberal democratic capitalist state behind him will just laugh at most experiments in divergent living.”
“True,” he said, “and ‘civilisation’ will win until its enemies learn from it the importance of the individual machine mind in nature. The compact must endure until there is a counter-compact. Consider the foolishness of what we call eco-consciousness or anarchy. A few paranoid survivalists on a Texas ranch defy the US government, and in a week they are barbecued by federal agents. Half a dozen half-baked situationists in 1970s England conspire to reveal the spectacle of capitalist society and are hunted down by the combined police and intelligence forces of Britain. All world Governments and their not very intelligent police forces join hands, and shazam! there is an end to all the conspirators. Why? Because ‘civilisation’ knows how to use the powers it has, while the immense potentiality of romanticized ‘resistance’ dissipates in vapour. Capitalism wins because it is a worldwide league; its enemies fail because they are stupidly parochial, despite any internationalist posturing. But supposing…”
Again he stopped and rose from his chair. He found a switch and flooded the room with light. I glanced up blinking to see my host smiling down on me, a rosy-faced old man smelling faintly of perfume. He had put his tinted glasses back on.
“Forgive me,” he said, “for leaving you in darkness while I bored you with my gloomy notions. An ancient recluse is apt to forget how to treat a guest.”
He handed the cigar box to me, and pointed to a table where whisky and a selection of mineral waters had been set out. I shifted my head, sending the antimacassar sliding uncomfortably down my neck and around my shoulders.
“I want to hear the end of your tale,” I said. “You were saying…?”
“I said, supposing a truly oppositional tendency comprising individuals schooled in collectivism learned from capitalism and became international. And I don’t mean the hoards of self-publishing individuals who call themselves Psychic Autonomy, The Nieces of Fourier, and similar tosh. I mean if the intellectual opposition to global capitalism—scientists, artists, poets, and so on—were itself internationalised. Suppose that the links in the chain of global capitalism were neutralised by other links in a far more potent chain. The earth is seething with incoherent power and unorganised opposition. Have you ever reflected on China? There you have millions of lively minds stifled by statism. They have no direction, no driving power, so the sum of their efforts is futile. The US throws their government a billion or two on loan now and then, and they dutifully respond by consuming more foreign imports.”
“It all sounds fine,” I said, “but all you’re doing is replacing capitalism with an exclusive form of political organisation. If you really wanted to rework immobile, backward civilisation your way, surely you’d need more than a few egotistical Goodwinites.”
“I do not envisage destruction,” he whispered. “Let’s call it a scrambling of the formulae, the confusion of signs, perhaps even credoclasm. Neither a Mao, nor a Stalin, nor a crew of Utopians, is necessary in the scheme I propose. All that is needed is some direction, which men of far less charisma than a totalitarian ideologue could provide. In a word, one envisages a self-perpetuating network of executive sufficiency, borne of raw creativity, and then an age of collective miracles will begin.”
I rose from my seat, it was 4.20 am and I’d had enough of this doom talk. My host was grinning, and I think that smile was the thing I really disliked about him. Some might have called his spiel all to Nietzschean. But it was not. His notions wouldn’t have seemed out of place in any management consultancy training programme. As he led me into the hall he apologised for indulging his extreme imagination.
“As a PR and marketing consultant, you should welcome the scenario. If there’s any truth in what I say, you’ve got a bigger job on your hands than you think. Look at the brief! You are not promoting some clean, compact, user-friendly product, you’re currently pushing an expensive, ugly, dangerous, anti-ergonomic nightmare. That should encourage your professional pride… “
I would normally have slept like an old cat, for dawn had already come, and I’d got a long day’s drive ahead. But that late-night Armageddon seminar had put the wind up me, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I’ve only reproduced a very rough outline of my host’s arguments, but no words of mine could do justice to his eerie persuasiveness. There was a kind of magnetism in his creative-individualist take on Taylor and Althusser, a sense of vast power and energy, which seemed to give weight to the tritest platitudes. I had a horrible feeling he was trying to fascinate me, to prepare the ground for some scheme, to recruit me.
Again and again I told myself it was all bollocks, the florid dream of a visionary or mental case, but again and again I came back to some detail he’d told me which had an air of reality. The old man was a fantasist with the uncommon gift of realism.
I flung open my bedroom window and let in the soft air of the June morning and breathed the scents from clover and pines and sweet grass. In the face of inevitable world disaster it was nice to just sniff the breeze.
But always that phrase of his, ‘executive sufficiency, borne of raw creativity’, kept recurring. You know how twisted your thoughts get during a wakeful night, and long before I fell asleep I had worked myself up into a comprehensive hatred of that bland and smiling old theorist. Suddenly it occurred to me that I didn’t know his name, and that set me off on another train of thought.
I got up at 7:30, dressed, and went downstairs. I heard the sound of a car on the gravel of the drive, and was pleased to see that Susan had arrived. I wanted to get as far away from Brazen Oaks as soon as possible. The grim housekeeper didn’t flinch when I told her I was leaving. Breakfast would be ready in twenty minutes: Mr Lumley always had his breakfast at eight o’clock.
“Andrew Lumley?” I yelped.
“Yes, Andrew Lumley.”
So that was his name. I sat down at a glass-top desk in the hall and did a very stupid thing. I wrote a note beginning, ‘Dear Mr Lumley,’ thanking him for his hospitality and explaining why I’d left so early. I said that I needed to be in London by midday for an urgent business meeting. Then I added a PS: ‘Strange we should meet anonymously. My old friend of mine Guy Miller used to speak of you.’
Breakfastless, I joined Susan in the car, and soon we were swinging down from the uplands into the shallow vale of the Wey. My thoughts were diverted from my new silver Jaguar XK8 and from the midsummer beauties of the Surrey downs. I was busy number crunching. If Miller’s friend, who knew about his going to Ingushetia, was the person I’d been searching for, I reckoned there were going to be some pretty dark moments ahead. If we got that far.
CHAPTER IV
MY first thought, as I drove back to London, was that I was on my own. Whatever needed doing, I had to do it myself. I had no evidence to back up my suspicions. Miller had made the acquaintance of some weird old bastard who collected art, probably bought under an alias from an address in South London, and he created florid visions about the end of global capitalism through thrifty scientism and cultural diversions. Even I had to admit that my story looked like shit. If I went to the police, they’d laug. Then have me followed.
I am as sober and practical as the next PR consultant. Even though I had no material evidence, I was absolutely convinced I was right. I could just feel that Miller’s story was true, the sequence was burnt into my synapses: his first business meeting with Lumley; their burgeoning friendship; his initiation into secret and forbidden matters; his revolt against individualist banalities; the realisation that he could simply be through creativity; the understanding that he could break free from his past by making art objects; that that Lumley had him where he wanted him; and finally, the mad flight from the tentacles of terror.
I also knew why Miller had gone where he had. He knew the Caucasus like his own back garden, and in the post-Soviet mess of semi-autonomous Islamist and Marxist gangster mini-states he hoped to get invisible quick. Later on he’d probably let his wife know where he was, then she could join him if she wanted. Either way he’d have to spend the rest of his life in exile. It must have been some bad secret to drive such a young, talented, rich person to total anonymity.
I hoped he’d left no trail, because Lumley was on his case. I re-read the e-mail I’d picked up from the floor of the Pink Lodge in Blackheath, and I resolved to make it as hard for Lumley as possible. It was almost certain that one of Lumley’s goons had already been tasked to cover Ingushetia, maybe the snide financial consultant I had met in Court. The e-mail was dated 27th May. It was now the 15th of June. Ingushetia would be well boxed off by now.
If I could find out any more, I promised myself I’d warn Don. I surmised that Miller was probably gone from his base-camp, but a few inquiries through the right channels might soon open up a trail. It might even be possible to make contact through the Russians. Whatever, Lumley was mine.
Suddenly, I realised how stupid I’d been. The note I’d written to Lumley that morning had blown it. I couldn’t help myself, networking was like breathing to me. Lumley knew I was Miller’s friend, and that I knew that he was also a friend of Miller. If my suspicions were correct, knowing Lumley was not something anyone was likely to admit to, and that could only mean that I was someone Guy trusted. Lumley would guess that I knew of his sudden departure, and why he’d gone, and soon he’d have me sussed. Presuming I was under covert surveillance anything I discovered could also get back to the old man.
I’d put myself in harm’s way. I was facing an organisation far beyond anything I could match. My first feeling was that I was completely isolated, my second was one of hopeless insignificance. How could I fight a secret, global, psycho-mundane terror organisation on my own?
At that time I had a friend who worked for the acquisitions section of the Tate Modern. I regularly met him in a table-dancing club in East London. I can’t give his name, he’s since gone on to figure heavily in government PR, and what he did to help me out wasn’t exactly within the remit of a discreet civil servant. Occasionally I helped him out when he needed to place a story, and we got close enough to go partying every now and then. For the sake of my narrative I’ll call him Lennie Ives. He was a serious-looking bloke, about 5’ 4″, a bit younger than me, well-read, cunning, and very ambitious, but he was a total nutter after a few pints. I’d have a definite advantage if I could get him to help me. I got into London about 11am, and went straight to Lennie’s office, I found him in the multimedia suite off the main admin space, face as red as a smacked arse, fresh from a walking holiday in the Pyrenees. I asked him if he’d got a spare 5 minutes, he said that was OK.
“You know Don Wink?” I asked. He nodded.
“And Guy Miller?”
“The name’s familiar.”
“Well, here goes. It looks like Don has gone out to find Guy Miller in Ingushetia. If he has, that’ll be a relief, because Guy’s got big trouble on his tail. I can’t tell you what’s up, but can you help me out?”
Lennie thought for a bit.
“Why not? I’ve got a contact in the British Council who can contact a bloke I know in the consulate there. The police there are a right fucking shower, but any travelers—especially Europeans—are generally targeted by kidnappers and/or Russian intelligence. I’ve heard that we’ve got people there who will usually help us out for the right size bung. And if they won’t do the business there’s always another way round. I can sort it for you now, but we might have to wait a day or so for an answer.”
“One more thing,” I said. “Miller’s pretty well travelled in those parts. And Don’s up for anything. If someone really wanted to get lost, where would they go? You were there in the early 90s, you know the geography as well as anyone.”
Lennie promised to check that out. But he suggested that from Ingushetia, the only potential routes went south. East and north lay Siberia; west was the Transcaspian desert; but to the south the Hissar range by Pamirski Post to Gilgit and Kashmir, or you might follow up the Oxus and enter the north of Afghanistan, or you might go by Merv into north-eastern Persia. Forgive me, but I hate the name ‘Iran’, it is so ordinary-sounding and apologetic. The first he thought the likeliest route if a man wanted to travel fast. I suggested watching the Indian roads, and I left feeling a bit better.
When people say, ‘this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,’ I always think of geopolitics. The hard choices and tough decisions of premiers and presidents tend to translate to torture and poverty. The situation right now in the Caucasus was pretty nasty, due to it being hurt in a number of ways by a number of players. Each republic, or autonomous region, was getting squeezed like a pornstars’ knob. This patch of land is no more linguistically or ethnically complex than anywhere else, its just geopolitics, that’s all.
After seeing Lennie I went back to Shoreditch, cancelled some meetings, and vegged-out watching DVDs. It felt like something bad was about to happen, but I suppose that was only natural. If this had been a one-off PR job, I’d have made up some excuse to cancel. But I carried on. Don and Theresa were nice enough, and Miller seemed OK too, but I really hated Lumley. He’d really wound me up.
Later that evening I was checking everything I had to try and work out my next move. I needed to get more information about my opponents. In PR this would have been easy, just pretend to headhunt a mug punter and squeeze them dry. It was clear that Lumley would be harder to suss. But I thought I had a fighting chance with the super-financial consultant, if we could track him down. As it goes, we got him in double-quick time.
I still couldn’t work out how or why an art world hanger-on was involved in dangerous and portentous international business. That wasn’t my problem. Anyway, I was used to working with other people’s stories. And they never made sense to me. Nevertheless, and almost unbelievably, clues to my main business kept rolling in during the day like unwanted rubbish mailshots, and I got yet another from this boring appointment. I suppose the world is full of clues to everything that exists, and if your mind’s focused, you’ll recognise the right ones and take advantage of what you’d otherwise miss.
Next day I had a big meeting with yet another MP who’d been found with his hand in the pocket of a multinational corporation. My PA was on a sickie, so I had to take notes myself. Luckily I’d just bought a super-fast new Apple Powerbook, so I’d record the meeting on my new Sony mini-DV camera and send it live back to the office and get the lazy bitch to transcribe it later. The superb new Motorola processor certainly beat my old Sony Viao hands down. But I’d not be averse to using that brand again.
By the end of the afternoon I’d sorted the embezzling creep, and had already found a journo who’d push my client’s side of things. He was a fifties-ish, drink-sodden hack from one of the dailies. He would be a valuable asset if he could stay sober, but I doubted whether he’d be able to handle much more than an initial splash. His name was Ashdown, and he spoke with a strong generic northern accent. But what caught my attention was his face. His jaw looked as if it had been made in two pieces which did not fit properly, and he had shiny, protruding eyeballs. The first time I saw him I knew I recognised him.
He was still in his office when I called to see him, and I told his colleagues I was after free publicity for a new girl-group. They left soon afterwards. A few minutes later he was lapping up the gravy like a puppy.
He was a pathetic tosser with a big mouth. Before long I learned all about the squalid details of his ongoing misfortunes. He was the son of a disgraced art teacher from Sunderland, and drifted through half a dozen low-grade jobs till he’d landed in a job on a local paper in Coventry. He ended up in the national press after faking a story about an sex-case MP who liked young teenagers. The woman had been sentenced to 18 months, but topped herself by jumping under a District Line train. Despite his unsavoury past, he was fairly straight. He had nothing to lose, he had no pride and the CSA were on his ass. After a dram of Laphroaig, he began to boast about his brother’s connections with the intelligence community. They’d generally treated him badly; he was too clever for them; but there was always a mixture of admiration and complaint.
I wanted to know all about his brother’s intelligence links. And Ashdown couldn’t keep his mouth shut. It was hard to work out the facts from his constant spew of words. The brother was once a successful designer, had flirted with politics, and used to invent things. He’d put Ashdown on to a story about South East Asian corruption, from which he had made a nice little stash, but lost it in West End casinos. He was OK, but he was a busy man, and he never parted with cash money. Besides, he didn’t like to push it. I gathered that the brother was not a pushover.
I asked him what his sibling was doing right now.
“Fuck knows,” Ashdown spluttered, “I wish I knew. I’m right up shit street at the moment, but I’m keeping my nose clean. I tell you now, this job of yours won’t keep me in bog roll, let alone scotch.” He twirled his heavy whisky glass in his fingers. “My brother’s a man of mystery, he often travels abroad on business. I never know his current address, I have to write to a Central London box number. I only know he paints and makes prints. I remember he once let something drop about selling a series of detailed etchings on the theme of place. Not in London, though, probably somewhere foreign. He rung a couple of weeks ago, he reckoned he was going to be out of the country for a few months. And I’m near enough facing eviction. Selfish bastard. He can spare the lolly.”
“Know what?” I said, “I reckon I’ve met your bro. Does he look like you at all?”
“Well, there is a strong family resemblance, but he’s taller, slimmer, doesn’t wear specs, he’s got all his own teeth, and he’s not bald. Obviously, with his money he’s had a healthier lifestyle, hasn’t he?”
“Do you know if he ever uses another name? I don’t think the geezer I met called himself Ashdown.”
The hack went red.
“It’s highly unlikely my brother would use an alias, is it? He’s done nothing to disgrace the family name.”
To calm the old guy down I told him I’d got it all wrong. He was okay. Underneath the bullshit he was an innocent bloke, the sort of person that cunning bastards get to do their dirty work for them. But the family resemblance was there all right. Ashdown was the dead ringer for Noakes, the Blackheath super-financial consultant. Admittedly, without the brains, style, charm, or the professional integrity or effectiveness.
He finally gave me the box address he used to write to his brother. I was not surprised to find that it belonged to a firm of financial advisors for whom I’d been doing some work when I had first heard Medina’s name.
I phoned my contact there, and told him a plausible story and asked if he was in touch with Mr Medina’s assistants—if he could forward letters and e-mails. He put me on hold, and came back with the news that he regularly forwarded letters for Noakes, and someone called Ashdown who was a financial analyst or business consultant. Noakes had gone abroad to join Medina, he didn’t know where. But he told me to write to the Pink Lodge in the first instance. So Noakes’s real name was Ashdown, and it was Noakes who had gone to Ingushetia.
Immediately, I rang Fentress at Scotland Yard and got an appointment. Fentress was a special forces non-com before joining the met—I read that somewhere—and now he commanded SO23 at the Yard. I was going to ask him for information which he had no intention of giving me, but I’d known him for ages, so if he was going to leak stuff, it might as well be me as some other PR hack.
My first question was whether he had ever heard of a secret organisation known as Executive Sufficiency. He laughed out loud.
“We’ve got hundreds of dodgy names on file,” he purred. “Everything from the Lodge of the Green Flame Ascendant to Cuntlickers Anonymous. Snappy names and pseudo-corporate ID are the chief hobby of your under-employed radical. It’s all bollocks. Obviously, anyone on a mission is hardly going to print a newsletter, invent a logo and put stickers up on the tube. Al-Qaeda doesn’t advertise. In the more desperate cases there’ll be no numbers, addresses, e-mail accounts, anything. Nothing we can use to recreate a trail. But I’ll get someone to check for you, if you’re serious. Might be something filed away somewhere about your Executive Sufficiency.”
When I asked a second question his tone changed.
“Ashdown! Ashdown! Ashdown! Ashdown! Ashdown! Why do I know that name? Yes! That’s it! There was an Ashdown we had dealings with a dozen years ago when I used to work with the North-East Regional Crime lot. He was a local council cultural officer who was running an dodgy credit management racket on the back of a alternative practice and cultural diversity workshop, and they wouldn’t prosecute because of the potential for a political backlash. He knew it, and played the system like Pele. Oh yeah! He was a right fucking shower. I once saw him at a public meeting in Sunderland, and I can picture his face—sneering eyes, tiny mouth, smug as a European porn-millionaire. He fucked off out of England years back. That is, we haven’t heard a dicky bird for years, but I can let you have a look at his photograph.”
Fentress search his database and found the photo. It was a covert shot of a man of about 30, with Sweeney sideburns and a grifter tash. The eyes, the ill-fitting jaw, and the criminal brow reminded me of Noakes, Ashdown’s brother.
Fentress said he’d help me out, and for the first time in ages I got home in time to see the woman in the flat opposite shave her mons pubis. She performed every day, but I got to view it all too infrequently. Now I knew who’d gone to Ingushetia, and I had some stuff on him. A financial player was exactly what Lumley needed out there. Somewhere in the Caucasus the ex-workshop leader was in search of Miller. And as a deal-closer, Noakes wouldn’t be squeamish when it came to settling up.
I grabbed a pre-cooked Thai Green Curry from Marks and Sparks, and on the way home I had a feeling that I was being followed. At that time I was pretty surveillance-aware, I’d done a personal protection course some months previously—you don’t always know who you’re dealing with in my game. It was a bright summer evening, and Bishopsgate was rammed with cars, buses, dispatch-riders and pedestrians. I stopped twice, once outside the Polo Cafe and once at the corner of Fleur de Lys Street, and retraced my steps back through Spitalfields to Brick Lane for a bit. Each time I just knew that someone a hundred metres behind had done the same. This was strange, because the security experts Lennie contacted told us that if we were ever followed by pros we’d most likely never know; that if a top outfit had us eyeballed, they’d probably use multiple operators working in relays, behind, in front, in parallel, cars, bikes, whatever. We were told that pros don’t duck into doorways. Given that I was most likely the potential victim of a street robbery, my instinct was to front up whoever he was, but obviously in a crowd I couldn’t do anything, so I let it go and used the Brick Lane complex to lose the tail.
The rest of the evening I spent in my flat, reading the expensive business intelligence abstracts I paid a mint for but hardly ever looked at and trying not to think about Central Asia. About ten I was rung up on the telephone by Lennie. He had had his answer from Ingushetia. Miller had left on June 2nd on the main road through the Hissar range. Don had arrived on June 10th, and on the 12th had set off with two local yokels on the same route. Using a 4×4 he should have overtaken Miller by the 15th at the latest.
Although Don was a political nonentity he knew lots of very clever, useful people. The following day espionage escalated. I usually walked down to London Bridge, but as I had nothing urgent on that morning, I drifted around to see if anything strange happened. There seemed to be nobody on Shoreditch High Street as I exited my flat, but I’d not walked more that 22 paces before I saw a shape exit from the alley near The Old Axe, while another two moved across the garage forecourt. It may have been only my imagination, but I was convinced that these were my watchers.
I reckoned that if I got the Tube at Bethnal Green Station I could keep control of the situation. If these people were any good they’d surely have someone waiting there, but at least I knew my revised itinerary, that put me a step ahead. I’ve got a gift for observing irrelevant details, and I happened to notice that a carriage in the train which left Bethnal Green stopped exactly opposite the exit at Aldgate, and by hurrying up the passage you could just catch the lift that served an earlier train, and thus reach the street before anyone else.
I did this okay, got the lift, reached the street, and took a seat in a burger restaurant, from which I could watch the exit of passengers from the stairs. If I was missed below, my tracker would run up the stairs rather than wait for the lift. As I’d feared, a red-faced, out-of-breath bloke appeared, scanned the street, then turned back to the lift to watch the emerging passengers.
I walked back to my office, and just about made it through the day, my mind was really messed up. There was no way out. I was powerless. There was no chance of forgetting the stress by working. The only thing I could do was wait, and hope for a one-in-a-thousand chance. For the first time since I first got my hands on a bird I felt out of my depth. Don Wink was used to extreme sports. Me? I’m more of an urban specimen, a city dweller, a lover of the quiet life, after a hard day shafting the press.
Later on that evening Lennie found an hour to have a meeting with me. We knew Don had teamed up with Guy Miller, but other stuff had to be arranged in Ingushetia. I decided to spill my guts. It was a big relief. He didn’t laugh at me, in fact, he was dead serious. He advised me that through his British Council contact he could warn former Soviet security about Saronov the henchman and the snide financial consultant. Luckily, we had pictures of Noakes or Ashdown, or whatever he was calling himself. Someone with his background wouldn’t be hard to locate.
Lennie buzzed another e-mail to his connection. Once again we checked out the possible routes. Anyone traveling there would soon discover that the roads followed the valleys, but with a bit of local knowledge there were no doubt many short-cuts through the hills.
I left the bar near Lennie’s office around seven and, jotting a note in my Palm V, banged into Andrew Lumley. I was pretty cool, considering the situation. He was wearing standard grey urban, but expensive. He looked like an old guy with a lot of money
“Mr Nolan. A coincidence, perhaps?”
I apologised for chipping off early three days earlier and joked that I was waiting for the coming of the twilight of civilization as my finance people were getting a bit serious.
He looked me straight in the eyes.
“So you haven’t forgotten our talk? You see, I’ve already given you a new insight into your career.”
“Yeah! Great hospitality, great advice, timely warnings…”
He was wearing tinted wraparounds, and he stared enigmatically into my face.
“I am just about to make a call in Portman Square,” he said, “will you join me. So, you know my young acquaintance, Miller?”
Still looking at my Palm V, I explained that we had been at UEA together and that we hung out with the same crowd.
“A brilliant conceptual artist, of course,” said Lumley. “Has he mentioned me at all?”
“Yes, he told me about your massive collection.”
I figured that if Lumley really knew Guy he’d spring me, because Guy wouldn’t have crossed the road for a free glimpse of the lost treasure of Atlantis.
“Mmm, I’ve picked up some nice things over the years. If you would like to view them please do. Although I don’t imagine you have the time for art. I had imagined you would have abhorred the dead weight of art. Certainly, Miller is no collector. He’s more into life than art. A world traveler, the Mungo Parks or Richard Burton of our times. No, not the deceased actor who mapped the entire naked flesh of Elizabeth Taylor.”
We stopped outside a house in Portman Place, and he let go of my arm.
“My friend,” he whispered, “a word to the wise. You are a good friend of Miller, but don’t even think about following him. Take some more good advice and keep out of his life. You will do him no good, and you may find yourself in some considerable danger as a result. As a successful PR person, I know you’ve got the sense to drop a cold lead. Just let it go. Remember, there are places in the world where gentle warnings are out of fashion.”
He took off his shades and his bright eyes looked deadly. Before I could reply he was gone.
That evening I ran through some stuff relating to a whistle-blowing spook’s attempt to divert attention from his control mania. Perhaps the intelligence services would be better off employing conspiracy theorists; they’d be far more likely to knuckle down to some proper work. I drifted off to sleep thinking about how potentially fucked I was.
Critical theory provides a very useful way to analyse networks of human relationships (i.e. cultural production and consumption), but it is limited. Analyses of ideologies and contexts only work in retrospect. That is because through the Marxist kaleidoscope history is viewed as a process unfolding over time. There is little room for simultaneity, either in respect of similar people doing different things, or coming to different conclusions from the same experiences. As such, traditional critical theory works very well in decoding the languages of past cultures. But what of the future? Although aware, through Bourdieu, of the role contingency plays in the everyday lives of individuals and groups, materialism applied to culture has relatively little to say about contingency.
Contingency emerges as a corollary ofactivity that ideologies cannot contain. But although it is produced through human interactions, even through botched interactions, interpellations, or decisions to refrain from interacting — even absence counts as interaction, for we are social beings — contingency may also become apparent through non-human interventions. The fact that a car runs someone over is a product of social relations mediated by capital, to the extent that the driver was in a position to be able to acquire the means to drive, and the victim was in that particular place in the pursuit of their everyday livelihood, but the extent to which mechanical error, deliberate intent, suicide, intoxification, slippery dogshit, glaring sunlight, or other factors were involved, calls for a recognition of a variety of predictable but practically unknowable factors. Or the whole globe could get smashed by a giant meteor. Contingency is generally avoided by modern materialists, due to its habit of becoming real metaphysical. So how can critical theory help if it’s actually about apportioning proximate causes and historical blame?
If critical theory works so effectively for the past, how about the future? Marx knew all about the future; he knew it only got further away the more you looked at it.
As Stalin knew, analysis of context must be widened to include rumours, superstitions, suspicions, contingencies based on past situations, the possibility of different contingencies, or external agencies (if not their actuality), cynicism, disbelief, comedic possibilities, symbolic inversions of reality, transpositions, creative fictions, political and economic models and forecasts, extrapolations from source materials, as well as historical, social and cultural matters. From a widened context, one that allows the investigation of supplementary factors to the economy of the analysis of cultural activities, relative impossibilities — the inverse of critically analysed ideology and context — can be seen to emerge from these meta- and para-structures. But, again, as Stalin also knew, nothing’s impossible if you can think it.
Impossible outcomes should properly be called implausibilities, not because they can’t happen, but because their realisation inverts both causality and phenomenology and therefore they ’shouldn’t’ be believable by critical theorists, because they stem from ahistorical readings of ideological and cultural conditions.
Implausibility is a process that both depends on and creates fictions. It also negates and elides the apparent political necessity for pro-active security and intelligence services, and their other, or at least demystifies their practices sufficiently to enable a tentative revelation of their primarily fictional mode of forecasting and assessing potential security threats.
Practicalities: take a situation, historicize it — including realising old and new fictions about it, past and present — fictionalise it or invert it so as to form a narrative structure significantly different from the original. Then extrapolate from this new model, looking for social, economic, comedic, fictive, and fantastic products. Any results may either be taken as a fictional reading of the situation or inverted or transposed again in order to create a political or social reality.
I began to realise how fucked I potentially was.
CHAPTER V
THAT CHANCE encounter with Lumley gave me bad dreams. Eventually, even a sophisticated PR expert will get the picture if he’s kicked enough. It wasn’t just that Don was my friend and I was trying to smarm my way into shagging Miller’s wife that urged me on. Not only was I being bullied, I was being side-lined, and that I really hated. But I needed a partner to keep me this side of sane, and Don’s friend, Burrow occurred to me. Who could be more level-headed in a crisis than a comedy writer? So that night I hunted him down in the Groucho. He’d been having a row with a table full of Oxbridge comics and was not a happy man.
“I’ve got the right fucking hump with you lot,” he howled. I won’t try to reproduce Burrow’s accent. He spoke Derbyshire, with a touch of the drawl of Norfolk. “They fucking ruined the best dialogue the Beeb’s heard for a decade. I was workin’ on it for days. I was doin’ a little scenario based on how Oxbridge-educated creeps use pleb accents and dialects, and the audiences can’t get enough of it. Late night TV-pundits avoid the issue of power relations in stuff like this by focusing on the metaphysics of comedy—that some things are somehow just funny. Like, it’s just funny that people are systematically murdering their next-door neighbours because their culture’s not quite the same? Well, that’s probably funny to the person that did it, afterwards, getting fucking pissed. The ones doing the laughing are the geezer who had his assault rifle rammed up his ex-girlfriend’s dad’s arse, while his mate fucked some old dear before torching her in her granny flat in Bosnia. Bollocks. It’s a lot less fucking funny if someone’s replaying your fucking life in your face and getting the mortgage paid, while some other cunt’s teeth are falling out ‘cos he can’t afford the dentist, on the basis of some shared implicit understanding of the non-recognition of what ‘they’ really sound like, or even are.
“For fuck’s sake! And it’s nothing to do with popular culture ‘belonging’ anywhere, either, I’ve got a fucking degree too, I know more about interpellation, performativity and the transmission and transmutation of culture than all these cunting Eng Lit script editor knobheads. Novels? Mystery of art? The street? The country? Fuck! Politics of everyday life, mate. These things aren’t just available to be plucked, fully formed and hacked out in literature for a prize by an Oxbridge First first-jobber. Oh yeah? I’ll give you a fucking prize! Comeonthen!
“That cunt Self! And that mumbling rich kid, camera-on-his-seventh-birthday-naturally-gifted-let-him-express-himself-honey, Harmony Korine! I fucking… cut one’s throat and tie the other one to him…like the Romans! You think I’m being ‘naughty’ for the sake of it? Fuck you. I want to change minds, pal! Not sidle up to the prize givers. Oh yeah! Oxbridge graduate publishes first novel? What a fuckin’ surprise!
“Anyway, my script it starts off with ‘them’—yeah, your fuckin’ linguistic targets, knobhead—kidnapping Ali G and entertaining all ‘their’ mates over the course of a few days by mimicking everything he did, everything he said. Set in an abandoned pub in Waltham Forest. He’s stark naked except for one of those gangsta hairnet things…yeah, beanie. When he shits himself and cries, ‘they’ ‘do’ him to their friends, who love it! It’s the funniest, truest thing they’ve ever seen. Now, I reckon that’s really funny. But that cunt over there laughs because I said hedge-a-mony rather than hegg-e-mony. Who knows how the Greeks might have pronounced the fucking word anyway? It was only really developed as a meaningful term by a failed Italian communist using ‘difficult’ language to stymie his thick fascist jailers. Yeah! Come on! Tell me how Gramsci pronounced it, you fucking cunt!”
I finally got Burrow settled and drunk enough to listen.
“Tell me about Ashdown, you know, the ex-Union leader.”
When he recognised the name he really kicked off.
“Tories, public schools, grammar schools, social networks,” he shouted at the whole room, causing a pale TV-house-makeover presenter on the next sofa to make a dash for the exit. “You wouldn’t know ‘market forces’ from shite. Networks? Fucked the Unions up. Mind you, Unions’re nothing but finance companies these days, anyhow. Institutional disinformation at its best when they were on top though. If you want to know anything about Ashdown you can find it yourself—fucked if I’ll help you.”
Burrow was clearly not going to help me out unless I told him the score, so I told the whole story for the second time that day. I needn’t have worried He got himself wound up before I was half way through. He didn’t give a stuff about whether or not it was true, he hated cultural elitism more than capitalism and the notion of a highly-organised, highly-effective, elitist, misanthropist autonomist outfit using critical theory to back up a vanguardist programme made his flesh creep. Besides, he had a crush on Don Wink.
He told me the lot. Ashdown was a talented computer sciences graduate with an expensive career beckoning. Unusually, for an IT geek he had a political consciousness, and somehow got into trade union work, becoming treasurer of a branch of the AICTSNAMP. Burrow used to meet him at conferences, and was impressed with his ideas. He led the left wing of the movement, and had a way with quasi-scientific, semi-philosophic bullshit that invariably appeals to the minds of the half-baked. Parliament was on the cards, but he turned it down. Burrow reckoned he was more effective behind the scenes. But he wasn’t popular.
“Gobshite,” Burrow said, “He used to piss all over his members, and he was the rudest cunt I ever met.”
Eventually, external auditors discovered that he had speculated with union funds and lost a fortune. Burrow suspected that he had the money stashed abroad. Ashdown escaped prosecution and became a government advisor. He later left England; most people thought he had gone to the Far East.
“Wanker!” Burrow yelped, clenching and unclenching his tiny fist.
“If that’s the way it is, you’re in,” I said. “Come and stay round mine. Anything could happen, two men are better than one. I’m crapping myself and I need some back-up.”
Burrow said yes. I went with him to his place in Richmond, he packed a bag, and we returned to my drum. Thus began my flatshare with Burrow, one of the queerest periods of my life. He was a geezer outside, but different indoors. He was as romantic as a boy. He loved the whole situation. I don’t know why I went to him. In public he called Don a public school arsehole, and the previous month had described me in The Urban Bore as a ‘lifestyle prick’. At least he made me laugh.
The undercover stuff really wound him up, although I don’t think he was targeted half as much as me, but he reckoned he was. Within the space of a week he was guilty of ABH on a cafe owner, two mini-cab drivers, and a woman doing market research for a soft drinks company. In some respects he was a liability. Among other things, he suspected my cleaner, Kofi, a Cultural Studies student from Kesteven, who was totally disinterested in anything other than representations of Scottishness in recent African fiction.
“You’re not taking this seriously at all,” he bawled one evening. “What’s the point waiting to be garotted by hired goons? Let’s get out and fuck them up.”
Despite my opposition he declared his intention to mount personal 24-hour surveillance on Andew Lumley.
As a result of his new obsession his work for the BBC suffered. Producers were stood up all over town. But he never spotted Lumley once. The only incident of worth noting was the time he was arrested for stalking foreign language students in Camden.
One night on my way home from the office I saw a late special in the Evening Standard mentioning the arrest of a London comedian. I found Burrow at the flat when I arrived there. He had found somebody he thought was Lumley. The man had ducked into a massage‘n’tanning salon near Leicester Square tube, leaving a mini-cab waiting outside, and Burrow had questioned the driver. The driver told him to fuck off, and Burrow dragged him out and chinned him. Burrow was arrested and bailed to appear at the Magistrates Court later in the week.
I had a word.
“You’re playing right into Lumley’s hands,” I explained, “We’ve got to fade until the time is right.”
He nodded and I nearly shat myself when he handed me the Glock 9mm automatic he had bought in a pub in Poplar. I promised to let him have a go when it all came on top. Meanwhile, I’d already made my will and sorted out my affairs in case of sudden death. All I could do was wait.
One night I bumped into Fentress in the Wow!Wow! Club, the top people’s joint. He had some news regarding Executive Sufficiency. He had come across it in an e-mail from an Italian colleague, in which the writer summarised his inquiry into a weird global conspiracy.
I forget the details, but it had something to do with the former Yugoslavia and a Turkish psychogeographical outfit. Fentress’s correspondent said that in some intercepted electronic communications constant references were found to something called “More Sufficiency”, evidently the leading group of the network of individuals. And the word “Sufficiency” had appeared elsewhere: in a poetic manifesto of a green activist who shot himself in Barcelona; in the political-mystical graffiti of many European cities; in the activities of a Far Eastern corporate finance boss who disappeared following the collapse of the economies of three countries in the region; in the bizarre testament of a Professor of Cultural Geography at a US University who, at the age of thirty-six, committed suicide after penning a cryptic open letter to his fellow citizens.
Fentress’s correspondent’s analysis was that Executive Sufficiency was the cover name of the most effective secret organisation the world had ever known. He further understood that an English connection was the nexus of the whole thing.
“You have known me for some time, Fentress,” I said, “I’m fairly discreet. I’m this close to uncovering the secret of Executive Sufficiency. If you get an urgent message from me, promise you’ll act immediately, however strange it seems. You’ll have to take me on trust, I’ve got good information on this.”
He just looked at me.
“Alright. I’ll sort out a response asap.”
Next day I had news from Lennie. Noakes and the man called Saronov had been identified. If you are making inquiries about anybody it is fairly easy to find those who are seeking for the same person and the Russian security forces, in tracking Don and Miller, had easily come across two men who were following the same trail. Those two had gone by Samarkand, evidently intending to strike into the hills by a shorter route than the main road from Ingushetia. The stalkers had become the stalked.
CHAPTER VI
THE NEXT DAY I worked late and it was nearly six before I got home. Fentress phoned me earlier saying he wanted to meet up. He suggested a spot of dinner at a fried chicken restaurant in Brixton. I agreed, and left a message at the flat for Burrow, telling him I was eating out. He asked me where I was going. I told him, but kept mum about who I was dining with. I wondered vaguely why Fentress might have chosen such an out-of-the-way spot, but at the end of the day his job was all about keeping a low profile.
The fried chicken restaurant was situated on a quiet-ish street with a few white goods outlets, a shoe repair establishment and a couple of launderettes. The restaurant took some finding as there was no signboard, but I tracked it down after just a couple of trips up and down Brixton Hill.
I nodded to the assistant who ignored me, the place was full of people queuing for food. A single speaker was belting out some grime from behind the counter. The customers were a mixed bunch, more bohemian than you might expect for a place like that. A dozen or more pairs of eyes checked me out as I walked in. I guessed that the place was being patronised by a crowd slumming it in a newly fashionable yuppie ghetto. The manager, a Namibian student called Tony, introduced himself.
“Are you waiting for someone,” he nodded, “there is a private room booked.”
A greasy staircase without a bannister ran along the right side of the serving area. I followed the manager up it and he ushered me into a strip-lit bedsit with two sofas, a coffee table and a bed.
“Mr Fentress says to wait,” said the manager. “He’s sometimes late. Wait please.”
It looked filthy, and though the night was hot, the window was shut and the curtains drawn. I pulled back the curtains, and to my surprise saw that the windows were nailed shut.
“Can you open them?” I said, “it’s murder in here.”
The manager glanced at the window.
“I’ll send someone,” he said. The door shut with an odd click.
I was dog tired, so I stretched out on one of the sofas. The coffee table was full with six bottles of lager and a selection of snacks, so I helped myself. No one arrived to sort the windows out, and the heat was making me thirsty, so I opened another beer and was just about to drink it, when my eye caught something in a corner of the room. It was a mid-Victorian ‘what-not’, upon which stood a photograph in a wooden frame. It showed a man of about twenty-five with sideburns, wearing a fez-style party hat. It was Ashdown.
There was still no sign of anyone to open the window, so I decided to wait for Fentress downstairs. But the door was locked. The handle wouldn’t turn. I noticed that the door was a heavily constructed fire door with a single hinge, totally out of place with the rest of the restaurant decor.
My first thought was to jump up and down on the floor, or smash the window, thereby attracting the attention of the customers below. I was scared. This was a trap. Someone must have faked Fentress’s voice on the phone. I forced myself to be calm. Nothing could happen to me in a room not 30 feet from a public space. I had only to shout to get help. But it wouldn’t do my career any good to be found screaming and crying in a shabby bedsit above a seedy fast food joint south of the river. So I sat and waited. I drained the first bottle of lager and immediately opened another. All of a sudden the door swung open like a door, and a man stepped in. I knew him. But then he was not easy to forget.
“Good evening, Phil,” I said, “fancy a lager?”
About a year earlier, I had represented a major sports personality. I hated sport, but you’ve got to be flexible. It was a really bizarre job. Phil Caution, a professional boxer, was trying to win the public over to his point of view. He’d been accused of shagging an underage girl, but that was only because she was gifted to him by her own father in thanks for a well-placed bet on a Caution fight. He was pissed at the time and the bird’s old man said she was 20. Anyhow, I sorted the press for him and the jury found him not guilty. Phil expressed his appreciation of my efforts by offering to severely punish any person I care to name who might have offended me recently. I declined, and his manager settled the bill in due course. I was glad to see the back of both of them.
He stumbled into the room under the weight of a massive kit bag, a huge man, reputed to have started out on the cobbles for very big drinks. All of a sudden he recognised me.
“Fucking hell, it’s the PR poof,” he mumbled. I pointed to the table full of lager.
‘Don’t mind if I do, up yer pipe!” He swallowed the beer in one gulp and immediately opened another.
“Have one yourself, it’ll cheer you up.”
“Mr Caution,” I said, “how’re you doing?” The suspense over, I was in control once more.
“Not too shabby. Never out of work.”
“What brings you here?”
“A little job. Some geezer wants you taken out of the picture for a bit and I’m your minder. Lucky for you its me. Anyway, if you fuck me over I’ll fucking do you.”
“I appreciate the thought,” I said. “But where are we going?”
“I dunno. Some lock-up near Plaistow. There’s a motor waitin’ out back.”
“What if I don’t want to go to Plaistow?”
“Too fucking bad,” he gurgled. “Nice suit.”
“Mmm,” I said. “But there’s a restaurant full of people down there. All I have to do is scream and they’ll dial 999.”
“Them lot downstairs are all paid up. And anyway, you’ll have to go on the waiting list for the filth round here. I though you was a geezer, the way you handled the tabloids for me. But you’re soft as shit. Now get out”
Caution took another bottle from the table and necked it before pushing me out of the door.
“Phil,” I said, “I once helped you out. If I hadn’t squared the press you’d probably be doing porridge right now instead of a free man drinking premium lager from the bottle. And given the current moral climate, you’d be doing bird in the nonce wing. I stuck my neck out for you. I didn’t think you were the kind of bloke to forget a favour.”
“No chance of that,” said he. “Phil Caution never forgets his friends.”
“Well, are you going to fuck me over, the man who saved your retirement panto career?”
He was obviously having trouble with the ethics of violence. Then he had another slurp of lager.
“If I let you go, the fellas I work for would cut my bollocks off and stuff them up my arse, before pulling my liver out and making me eat it, as soon as look at me. Besides if I was to piss off and leave you there’d always be another cunt who’d do the job. There’s a significant lack of transferable skills in the boxing and security game. Basically, you’re fucked anyway. If you come with me at least you’re not going to get tortured, drugged, or fucked up the arse. They only want to keep you quiet for a bit.”
“You’re afraid of them, then,” I said.
“Too fucking right I’m afraid. So would you be.” He shivered like a child.
Just then I heard a voice shouting my name:
“Nolan! Nolan! Nolan? Nolan!”
There was no mistaking that harsh racket. By some miracle Burrow had managed to follow me and was causing murders downstairs.
“I’m up here,” I yelled. “Up the stairs and along the corridor to the left. Let me out of here!” I looked at Phil.
“That’s it,” I said. “You’re too late. You’re going to have to go back and tell your boss you’ve failed. I don’t fancy your chances.”
He was swaying wildly, and he suddenly fell over.
“You reckon you’ve done me? Fucking joker!”
His voice was thickening like batter pudding, and then he wheezed.
“What the fucking hell’s wrong?” he gasped. “I’m getting fainter…”
Three bottles of 5% lager wouldn’t normally have bothered Phil. He was drugged.
“They’ve drugged the lager,” I yelped. “They put it there for me to drink it and go to sleep, so that I wouldn’t try and talk you out of kidnapping me and driving me over to Plaistow in the boot of your car, and handcuffing me to a rusting motorbike in a lock-up.”
You can insult people, slag off their mum, try to embarrass them with tales of their adolescent tomfoolery and they’ll bear it, but touch the invisible sore spot and they’ll kick off. Apparently, for Phil, it was being drugged like a careless American college girl, but by mistake, that did the business. He squared his shoulders and roared like a Broadland bittern.
“Drugged? Fuck!” he wailed. “What cunt done it?”
“The men what shut me in here. Burst that door and we’ll do them, Phil.”
He got up off the carpet, turned toward the locked door and threw his massive bulk against it until the frame cracked, but the lock and hinges held. I could see he was getting spaced, his limbs were loosening, but his feral anger held just long enough for another try. This time the hinges tore apart and the whole lot fell out into the passage in a cloud of splinters and dust and broken plaster. Caution lay on top of the wreckage, a working class Ozymandias. I picked up the two unopened bottles of beer, intending to use them as weapons, and stepped over his body. There was a little Gujurati fellow in checked chef’s trousers in the corridor, with a puffa jacket on instead of a white coat. He had a knife, but he never had a chance to use it. My lager bottle cracked his head open and he dropped.
There were men coming upstairs, so I jumped down on top of them. I think there were three. My rapid descent crushed them into a heap at the foot of the stairs. We rolled around for a bit and my head bumped violently on the parquet. I got up expecting more trouble, but my enemies were disappearing up the staircase. Burrow was giving me unnecessary heart massage, but no bones were broken. Two policemen were pushing their way in from the street. Burrow was breathing heavily and I caught his arm and whispered in his ear.
“We’ve got to get out of this shit hole now. There’s no way we can square these cops. If anything gets in the papers were dead.”
“OK,” said Burrow. We sprinted round the corner and hopped in a hire car.
I immediately called Fentress on my mobile and left an urgent message. I was taking no chances. Executive Sufficiency, or whatever it called itself, had declared war on me.
I just wanted to get away. I could not understand the reason of this sudden attack. Lumley must have known long ago about my connection with the Ingushetia business. My visits to Lennie alone were enough proof. But he must have found out something new, or else there had been some wild scenes in the Caucasus that I knew nothing about.
I won’t forget that drive home in a hurry. It was a beautiful July twilight. The streets were full of the usual crowds, transvestites in thin frocks, traffic wardens in shirtsleeves, and all the big bass sounds of a London summer. You would have thought it was the safest place on earth in that cab. But I was glad we were mobile, and I was glad of Burrow’s company. I am certain I’d never have made it home again without his help that night.
There was no sign of trouble till we got onto the A3 going north over the river. Then I became aware that there were cars trying skillfully to edge us into the kerb, but the driver noticed it happening and butted his way back to the central line. I couldn’t make out the faces of the drivers who were hassling us, but I’m sure at least one of them was a women.
This happened twice, and I got wary, but we were nearly stuffed before we reached Islington. There was a big building covered in scaffolding, and just as we passed it there was a car came on our nearside trying to forces us into a side road. Suddenly I shouted at the driver to floor it, and luckily he realised the danger. There looked like there was another car down that side turning, but I could see nothing in the dusk.
Burrow and I breathed shallow until we arrived at my place, but I did not feel safe till even when we were inside the flat with the door bolted and the full intruder alarm system activated. We had a couple of Talliskers each, and I stretched myself out in an armchair.
“Thanks,” I said. “How did you find me?”
The explanation was simple. I had mentioned the restaurant in my telephone message. He said he found the it empty, except for a manager who was clearly drunk and denied all knowledge of me. Then he chose to make certain by shouting my name out, and, having heard my answer, he chinned the manager, and was presently assaulted by several youths armed with kitchen implements. He used one of the restaurant tables as a battering ram and left three of them for dead.
“I haven’t enjoyed anything so much since I was a kid, I used to follow punk bands around the country,” he informed me. “There was always trouble. I was beginning to think your Executive Sufficiency was a load of shit…!”
Not being as stupid as Burrow, I was totally confused, I couldn’t make out this sudden attempt to silence me by any means necessary. Either they knew more than I thought they did, or I knew far too little for my own good, or else….
“It’s alright for you