BELOW THEM at the Bavarian lakeside the merry-go-round is still belching out its honky-tonk and the Silesian matador is still crooning about amor. Now and then a surface-to-air rocket bursts ineffectually among the stars, and the surrounding mountains tremble to its red and gold. But there is no answering fire, no plume of black smoke as an enemy plane comes plunging to earth. Whoever they are shooting at has air supremacy. A terrorist for Karen is someone who has a bomb but no airplane, Mundy hears Judith say in his ear. It’s been a long time since he has let Judith into his life, but with a whiskey in his hand and an attic ceiling over his head and Sasha’s crooked back not ten feet from him, it’s hard to control the memories swirling around.
It’s Christmas evening in Berlin, he decides, except that no carols play, no church candles flicker on piles of stolen books. And Sasha is cooking, instead of a chunk of bullet-hard venison, Mundy’s favorite Wiener schnitzel from the shopping bag that he nursed so carefully up the spiral staircase. The attic apartment has rafters and bare brick walls and skylights, but that’s as far as the similarity goes. A modern kitchen of ceramic tile and brushed steel fills one corner of the room. An arched window looks onto the mountains.
“Do you own this place, Sasha?”
When did Sasha ever own anything? But as with any two friends reunited after more than a decade, their conversation has yet to rise above small talk.
“No, Teddy. It has been obtained for us by certain friends of mine.”
For us, Mundy notes.
“That was considerate of them.”
“They are considerate people.”
“And rich.”
“You are correct, actually. They are capitalists who are on the side of the oppressed.”
“Are they the same people who own that smart Audi?”
“It is a car they have provided.”
“Well, hang on to them. We need them.”
“Thank you, Teddy, I intend to.”
“Are they also the people who told you where to find me?”
“It is possible.”
Mundy is hearing Sasha’s words, but what he is listening to is his voice. It is as intense as it ever was and as vigorous. But what it can never conceal is its excitement, which is what Mundy is hearing in it now. It’s the voice that bounced back from whichever genius he had been talking to last, to announce that they are about to reveal the social genesis of human knowledge. It’s Banquo’s voice when he stepped out of the shadows of a Weimar cellar and ordered me to pay close attention and keep my comments to a minimum.
“So you are a contented man, Teddy,” he is saying briskly, while he busies himself at the stove. “You have a family, a car, and you are selling bullshit to the masses. Have you as usual married the lady of your choice?”
“I’m working on it.”
“And you are not homesick for Heidelberg?”
“Why should I be?”
“You ran an English-language school there until six months ago, I believe.”
“It was the last of a long line.” How the hell does he know this stuff?
“What went wrong?”
“What always went wrong. Grand opening. Flyers mailed to all the big firms. Full-page ads. Send us your tired and weary executives. Only problem was, the more students we had, the more money we lost. Didn’t somebody tell you?”
“You had a dishonest partner, I believe. Egon.”
“That’s right. Egon. Well done. Let’s hear about you, Sasha. Where are you living? Who’ve you got? What are you doing and who to? And why the hell have you and your friends been spying on me? I thought we’d given all that up.”
A lift of the eyebrows and a pursing of the lips as Sasha selects one half of the question and pretends he hasn’t heard the other. “Thank you, Teddy, I am fully extended, I would say. My luck appears to have changed for the better.”
“About time then. Itinerant radical lecturer in the hellholes of the world can’t have been a laugh a minute. What’s extending you?”
Another no-answer.
The table is laid for two. Fancy paper napkins. A bottle of burgundy on an arty wooden coaster. Sasha lights the candles. His hand is shaking the way he says it shook when it carried Mundy’s visa application to the Professor more than twenty years ago. The sight triggers a rush of protective tenderness in Mundy that he has sworn not to feel. He has sworn it in his mind to Zara, to Mustafa and to himself, and to the better life all three of them are leading. In a minute he will tell Sasha exactly that. If this is another of your great visions that we’re about to share, Sasha, the answer is no, no and no, in that order, he will say. After that they can have a natter about old times, shake hands and go their separate ways.
“I propose that we drink sparingly, Teddy, if that is acceptable to you. It is possible we have a long night ahead of us,” says Sasha.
The Wiener schnitzel, predictably, is undercooked. In his excitement, Sasha has not waited for the fat to heat.
“But you received my letters, Teddy? Even if you failed to answer them.”
“Indeed yes.”
“All of them?”
“I presume so.”
“Did you read them?”
“Naturally.”
“My newspaper articles also?”
“Stirring stuff. Admired them.”
“But you still weren’t moved to reply.”
“It seems not.”
“Is this because we were not friends when we parted in Bad Godesberg?”
“Oh, we were probably friends. Just a bit tired. Spying takes the stuffing out of you, I always say,” Mundy replies, and gives a bark of laughter because Sasha doesn’t always recognize a joke, and anyway it’s not a very good one.
“I drink to you, Teddy. I salute you in these wonderful, terrible times.”
“And to you, old boy.”
“All these years, all over the world, wherever I was, teaching or being thrown out, or locked up, you have been my secret confessor. Without you—there were places, times—I could have believed that the struggle was hopeless.”
“So you wrote. Very kind of you. Not at all necessary,” Mundy replies gruffly.
“And you enjoyed the recent little war, I hope?”
“Every minute. Couldn’t get enough of it.”
“The most necessary in history, the most moral and Christian—and the most unequal?”
“It made me sick,” says Mundy.
“And still does, I hear.”
“Yes. Still does.”
So this is what he’s come about, thinks Mundy. He knows I’ve been loosing off about the war and wants to enroll me in some campaign. Well, if he’s wondering what got into me, join the club. I was asleep. Shelved. Yesterday’s spy boring the ears off the English-Spokens at the Linderhof on an overdraft. My white cliffs of Dover lost in the fog, when suddenly —
Suddenly he’s as mad as a hornet, pasting the walls of Zara’s flat with press clippings, telephoning people he hardly knows, fuming at the television set, besieging our beloved British newspapers with letters they don’t bloody read, let alone print.
So what had happened to him that hadn’t happened before?
He’d weathered Thatcher and the Falklands. He’d watched British schoolchildren display the Churchillian spirit, bawl “Rule Britannia!” at hastily commissioned cruise liners and decrepit naval destroyers with the mothballs still rattling inside them sailing away to free the Falklands. He’d been ordered by our Leaderene to rejoice at the sinking of the Belgrano. He’d nearly vomited. He was case-hardened.
As a tender schoolboy, aged nine, he had shared the Major’s delirium at the sight of our gallant British forces liberating the imperiled Suez Canal—only to see it remain firmly in the hands of its rightful owners, and to discover that the government, then as now, had lied in its teeth about its reasons for taking us to war.
The lies and hypocrisies of politicians are nothing new to him. They never were. So why now? Why leap on his soapbox and rant uselessly against the same things that have been going on since the first politician on earth lisped his first hypocrisy, lied, wrapped himself in the flag, put on God’s armor and said he never said it in the first place?
It’s old man’s impatience coming on early. It’s anger at seeing the show come round again one too many times.
It’s the knowledge that the wise fools of history have turned us over once too often, and he’s damned if they’ll do it again.
It’s the discovery, in his sixth decade, that half a century after the death of empire, the dismally ill-managed country he’d done a little of this and that for is being marched off to quell the natives on the strength of a bunch of lies, in order to please a renegade hyperpower that thinks it can treat the rest of the world as its fiefdom.
And which nations are Ted Mundy’s most vociferous allies when he airs these futile opinions to anybody civil enough to listen to him?
The beastly Germans.
The perfidious French.
The barbaric Russians.
Three nations who have the guts and good sense to say no, and may they long continue.
In his shining bright anger Mundy redux writes to Kate his ex-wife—now, for her sins, tipped for high office in the next government. Perhaps he’s not as diplomatic as he should be, but he was married to the woman, for heaven’s sake, we have a child in common. Her four-line typed reply, signed in her absence, advises him that she has taken note of his position.
Well, it’s a hell of a long time since she did that.
Mundy redux next appeals to his son, Jake, after several false starts now in his final year at Bristol, urging him to get his fellow students onto the streets, put up barricades, boycott lectures, occupy the vice chancellor’s lodgings. But Jake relates better to Philip these days, and has little time for menopausal offshore fathers who haven’t got e-mail. A handwritten reply is beyond his powers.
So Mundy redux marches, the way he used to march with Ilse, or with Sasha in Berlin, but with a conviction he never felt before because convictions until now were essentially what he borrowed from other people. It is a little surprising, of course, that the beastly Germans should bother to demonstrate against a war that their government condemns but, bless them, they do. Perhaps they know better than most just how easy it is to seduce a gullible electorate.
And Mundy redux marches with them, and Zara and Mustafa come, and so do their friends, and so do the ghosts of Rani, Ahmed, Omar and Ali, and the Kreuzberg cricket club. Mustafa’s school marches and Mundy redux marches with the school.
The mosque marches and the police march alongside, and it’s a new thing for Mundy redux to meet policemen who don’t want war any more than the marchers do. After the march he goes with Mustafa and Zara to the mosque, and after the mosque they sit sadly over coffee in a corner of Zara’s kebab house with the enlightened young imam who preaches the value of study as opposed to dangerous ideology.
It’s about becoming real after too many years of pretending, Mundy decides. It’s about putting the brakes on human self-deception, starting with my own.
“Your little prime minister is not the American president’s poodle, he is his blind dog, I hear,” Sasha is saying, as if he has been looking in on Mundy’s thoughts. “Supported by Britain’s servile corporate media, he has given spurious respectability to American imperialism. Some even say that it was you British who led the dance.”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” says Mundy, sitting upright as he recalls something he has read somewhere, probably in the Süddeutsche, and repeated.
“And since the so-called coalition, by making an unprovoked attack on Iraq, has already broken half the rules in the international law books, and intends by its continued occupation of Iraq to break the other half, should we not be insisting that the principal instigators be forced to account for themselves before the International Courts of Justice in The Hague?”
“Good idea,” Mundy agrees dully. If not exactly his own, it’s certainly one he has lifted, and used to stunning effect.
“Despite the fact, of course, that America has unilaterally declared itself immune from the jurisdiction of such courts.”
“Despite it.” He has made the same point to a packed meeting at the Poltergeist just two weeks ago, after something he heard on the BBC World Service.
And suddenly that does it for Mundy. He’s had enough and not just of this evening. He’s sick to death of sly games. He doesn’t know what Sasha’s up to, but he knows he doesn’t like it nor the superior grin that goes with it. And he’s about to say some of this and perhaps all of it when Sasha barges in ahead of him. Their faces are very close and lit by the Christmas candles from the Berlin attic. Sasha has grasped him by the forearm. The dark eyes, for all their pain and desperation, radiate an almost pathetic enthusiasm.
“Teddy.”
“What the hell is it?”
“I have only one question for you. I already know the answer but I must hear it from you personally, I have promised. Are you ready?”
“I doubt it.”
“Do you believe your own rhetoric? Or is all your huffing and puffing some kind of self-protection? You are an Englishman here in Germany. Perhaps you feel you must strike an attitude, speak louder than you feel? It would be understandable. I don’t criticize you, but I’m asking you.”
“For Christ’s sake, Sasha! You wear the beret. You drag me out here. You smirk at me like Mata Hari. You throw my own words in my face. Now will you kindly lay your egg and tell me what the fuck is going on?”
“Teddy, please answer me. I bring unbelievable hope. For both of us. An opportunity so great you cannot imagine. For you, immediate release from your material worries. Your role as teacher restored, your love of the multicultural community made real. For me—a platform greater than I ever dreamed of. And nothing less than a hand in the making of a new world. I think you are going to sleep.”
“No, Sasha. Just listening without looking at you. Sometimes it’s a better way.”
“This is a war of lies. Do you agree? Our politicians lie to the press, they see their lies printed and call them public opinion.”
“Are these your words or something I stole?”
“They are the words of a great man. Do you agree with them? Yes or no.”
“All right: Yes.”
“By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed. Then we have a war. This war. These are also his words. Do you agree with them? Please, Teddy! Yes or no?”
“Yes again. So what?”
“The process is incremental. As more lies become necessary, more wars are needed to justify them. Do you still agree?”
With the anger rising inside him Mundy waits with seeming impassivity for the next salvo.
“The easiest and cheapest trick for any leader is to take his country to war on false pretenses. Anyone who does that should be hounded out of office for all time. Am I being too strident for you, Teddy, or do you agree with this sentiment also?”
Mundy finally explodes. “Yes, yes, yes. All right? I agree with my rhetoric, your rhetoric and your latest guru’s rhetoric. Unfortunately, as we have learned to our cost, rhetoric doesn’t stop wars. So goodnight and thank you, and let me go home.”
“Teddy. Twenty miles from here sits a man who has pledged his life and fortune to the Arms Race for Truth. That expression also is his own. To listen to him is to be inspired. Nothing you hear will alarm you, nothing will be to your peril or your disadvantage. It is possible he will make a proposal to you. An amazing, unique, completely electrifying proposal. If you accept it, and he accepts you, you will come away with your life immeasurably enriched, spiritually and materially. You will enjoy a renaissance as never before. If no agreement is achieved, I have given him my word that his secret will be safe with you.” The grip on Mundy’s forearm tightens. “Do you want me to flatter you, Teddy? Is that what you are waiting for? Do you want me to woo you the way our beloved Professor wooed you? Hours of foreplay over expensive meals? Those times are over too.”
Mundy feels older than he wants to feel. Please, he thinks. We’ve been here. We’ve done this stuff. At our age there are no new games anymore. “What’s his name?” he asks wearily.
“He has many names.”
“One will do fine.”
“He is a philosopher, a philanthropist, a recluse and a genius.”
“And a spy,” Mundy suggests. “He comes and listens to me at the Poltergeist and he tells you what I said.”
Nothing can prick Sasha’s enthusiasm. “Teddy, he is not a spy. He is a man of huge wealth and power. Information is brought to him as a tribute. I mentioned your name to him, he said nothing. A week later he summoned me. ‘Your Teddy is at the Linderhof, spouting bullshit to English tourists. He has a Muslim wife and a good heart. First you will establish whether he is as sympathetic as he claims. If he is, you will explain to him the principle. Then you will bring him to me.’”
The principle, Mundy repeats to himself. There will be no war, but in the pursuit of principle not a stone will be left standing. “Since when have you been attracted to rich and powerful men?” he asks.
“Since I met him.”
“How? What happened? Did he jump out of a cake?”
Impatient of Mundy’s skepticism, Sasha releases his arm. “At a Middle Eastern university. Which one is unclear to me and he will not reveal it. Perhaps it was Aden. I was in Aden for a year. Maybe Dubai or Yemen, or Damascus. Or further east in Penang, where the authorities promised to break my legs if I wasn’t gone by morning. He tells me only that he slipped into the Aula before the doors closed, that he sat at the back and was profoundly moved by my words. He left before questions but immediately ordered his people to obtain a copy of my lecture.”
“And what was the subject of this lecture?” Mundy wants to suggest the social genesis of knowledge, but a merciful instinct restrains him.
“It was the enslavement of the global proletariat by corporate-military alliances,” Sasha declares with pride. “It was the inseparability of industrial and colonialist expansion.”
“I’d break your legs for that one. How did He of Many Names make his money?”
“Disgracefully. He is fond of quoting Balzac. ‘Behind every great fortune lies one great crime.’ Balzac was talking bullshit, he assures me. It requires many crimes. Dimitri has committed all of them.”
“So that’s his name. Or one of them. Dimitri.”
“For tonight, for us, it is his name.”
“Dimitri who?”
“Mr. Dimitri.”
“From Russia? Greece? Where else do Dimitris come from? Albania?”
“Teddy, you are being irrelevant. This man is a citizen of the entire world.”
“We all are. Which bit of it?”
“Would it impress you if I told you he had as many passports as Mr. Arnold?”
“Answer my question, Sasha. How did he make his bloody money? Arms dealing? Drugs? White slaving? Or something really bad?”
“You are charging through open doors, Teddy. I exclude nothing. Neither does Dimitri.”
“So this is penance. Guilt money. He’s fucked up the globe, and now he’s going to rebuild it. Don’t tell me: He’s an American.”
“It is not penance, Teddy, it is not guilt, and so far as I know he is not American. It is reform. We do not have to be Lutherans to believe that men can be reformed. At the time he chanced to hear me speak, he was a pilgrim in search of faith, as you and I have been. He questioned everything and believed in nothing. He was an intellectual animal, brilliant, bitter and uneducated. He had read many books in order to inform himself, but he had not yet defined his role in the world.”
“But you were the boy. You showed him the light,” says Mundy roughly and, resting his head in his hand, closes his eyes for a bit of quiet, and realizes that his body is gently shaking from head to toe.
But Sasha allows him no quiet. In his zeal, he is unrelenting. “Why are you so cynical, Teddy? Have you never stood in a bus queue and overheard ten words that expressed something in your heart that you didn’t know was there? It was my good luck to speak the ten words. He could have heard them anywhere. Today he knows that. Already at the time I spoke them, they were being spoken in the streets of Seattle, and Washington, D.C., and Genoa. Wherever the octopus of corporate imperialism is attacked, the same words are being spoken.”
Mundy remembers something he once wrote to Judith about having no firm ground. He has none now. This is Weimar all over again. I’m an abstraction, talking to another about a third.
“So Mr. Dimitri heard you,” he says patiently, in the tone of somebody reconstructing a crime. “He stood in your bus queue. And he was knocked out by your eloquence. As we all are. So now let me ask you again. How did you meet him? When did he become flesh and blood for you? Or are you not allowed to say?”
“He sent an emissary. Exactly as he sent me to talk to you today.”
“When? Where? Whom did he send?”
“Teddy, we are not in the White Hotel.”
“And we’re not deceiving anyone either. That’s over. We can talk like human beings.”
“I was in Vienna.”
“What for?”
“A conference.”
“Of?”
“Internationalists and libertarians.”
“And?”
“A woman approached me.”
“Anyone we know?”
“She was a stranger to me. She evinced a familiarity with my work, and asked whether I would be willing to meet an illustrious friend of hers, a man of distinction who shunned the limelight.”
“So she didn’t have a name either.”
“Kolbach. Maria Kolbach.”
“Age?”
“It is not relevant. She was not desirable. Perhaps forty-five.”
“From?”
“It was not revealed. She had a Viennese accent.”
“Working for whom?”
“Maybe Dimitri. It is not known.”
“Was she part of the conference?”
“She did not say so, and her name was not on the list of delegates or organizers.”
“Well, at least you looked. Was she Fräulein or Frau?”
“It was not revealed.”
“Did she give you her card?”
“No. And I did not request it.”
“Show you her driving license?”
“Teddy, I think you are actually full of shit.”
“Do you know where she lives, if she lives anywhere? Did you look her up in the Vienna telephone directory? Why are we dealing with a bunch of fucking ghosts?” He catches sight of Sasha’s crestfallen expression, and reins himself in. “All right. She accosts you. She pops the question. And you say, yes, Frau or Fräulein Kolbach, I would like to meet your illustrious friend. Then what happened?”
“I was received in a substantial villa in one of the best quarters of Vienna, the name of which I am not at liberty to reveal. Nor may I reveal the burden of the discussion.”
“She took you there, presumably.”
“A car was waiting outside the conference hall. A chauffeur drove us. It was the end of the conference. There were no further engagements. When we arrived at the villa she rang the bell, presented me to a secretary and removed herself. After a short wait I was admitted to a large room, occupied only by Dimitri. ‘Sasha,’ he says to me, ‘I am a man of great and illicit wealth, I am an artist of the unobserved life, also your devoted disciple. I have a mission of immense importance to offer you, but if the knowledge is too great for you to bear alone, kindly inform me immediately and leave.’ I asked him: Is the mission legitimate? He replied, It is more than legitimate, it is essential to the benefit of all mankind. I then made him a vow of secrecy. In return, over several hours, he described to me the nature of his vision.”
“Which was —?”
Sasha the great double agent has disappeared. In his place sits the credulous and impassioned dreamer of the Berlin attic.
“It was a vision for which I personally and my savior and friend Ted Mundy are perfectly equipped in all respects. It was a vision that could have been deliberately crafted to accommodate our every need.”
“And that’s all you’re telling me.”
“The rest you must hear from Dimitri himself. In Vienna, he asked me whether, after all that I had endured, I still had faith in life.”
“And you of course said yes.”
“With conviction. And now that I have heard him describe his vision, with passion.”
Mundy has risen from the table and with his back to Sasha is standing at a wide window. Far below him glow the last embers of the fair. The lake is black and still, the mountains beyond it shadows on a clouded sky.
“When did you last see him?”
“In Paris.”
“In another villa?”
“An apartment. It was so big I wished for a bicycle to go to the bathroom.”
“And before that?”
“Only Vienna.”
“So how do you communicate? Leave each other notes under rocks?” Sasha declines to reply to such a facetious question, so Mundy asks another. “Does he know we worked together?”
“He knows that in Berlin you were a radical who was beaten by fascists as he too in his time has been beaten by fascists. He knows you sacrificed yourself for a comrade.”
“How about you?”
“Please?”
“Does he know you did a little of this and that for Mr. Arnold?”
“He is aware that all my life I have fought the tyranny wherever I have found it, with whatever weapons were available to me. Teddy!”
Now it is Sasha’s turn to be exasperated. Leaping to his feet he has hobbled down the room to join Mundy at the window, and is staring up at him, holding out his hands in angry supplication. “Fuck this, actually, Teddy! Do you not understand how I have spoken for you? When Dimitri asked me whether I knew of other good men or women from my past, people of integrity, of like mind, courage and sound sense—who did I first think of, but Teddy? When he described to me, in glowing words, how together we may help to change the world—it was you, it was nobody but you, that I saw marching at my side!” He pulls back, lets his hands flop and waits for Mundy to speak, but Mundy is still staring at the black lake and the shadows of the mountains behind it. “We are indivisible, Teddy. That is my conviction. We have endured together. Now we can triumph together. Dimitri is offering us everything you need: money, a purpose, a fulfillment of your life. What have you to lose by hearing him?”
Oh, nothing much, thinks Mundy. Zara, Mustafa, my happiness, my debts.
“Go back to Munich, Teddy,” Sasha suggests scathingly. “Better to be afraid of the unknown and do nothing. Then you will be safe.”
“What happens if I listen to him and say no?”
“I have assured him that, like myself, you are an honorable man, capable of keeping a secret. He will have offered you a kingdom. You will have declined it, but will not speak of it.”
Only the detail matters, Mundy is reflecting. Sasha does the grand thoughts, I do the little ones. That’s how we get along. So let’s think of getting Zara’s teeth fixed, and buying Mustafa the computer he’s pining for. He might even teach me to send e-mails to Jake.
“Snake oil,” he says suddenly in English, and breaks out laughing, only to find Sasha scowling at him. “Snake oil,” he repeats, now in German. “It’s what confidence tricksters sell to gullible people. It’s what I sold to the Professor, come to think of it.”
“So?”
“So maybe it’s time I bought a little. Who’s driving?”
Not daring to reply, Sasha takes a breath, squeezes his eyes shut, opens them and hobbles eagerly back across the room. At the telephone, tapping out a number from memory, he pulls back his shoulders, Party-style, as a prelude to addressing authority.
“At the lodge in one hour!” he reports, and rings off.
“Will I pass like this?” Mundy inquires facetiously, indicating his workaday clothes.
A stranger to irony as so often, Sasha gives Mundy a quick up-and-down. His eye settles on the velcro Union Jack stuck to the handkerchief pocket of his elderly sports coat. Mundy tears it off and shoves it in his pocket.
Driving a car takes up all Sasha’s attention. He is an eager schoolchild, straining upward, eyes just making it over the steering wheel as he hammers his horn or flashes his lights at whatever offends him.
He also knows the way, which is fortunate because within minutes of leaving the lay-by Mundy the topographical cretin has as usual lost all sense of direction. At first he reckons they are heading south, but soon they are following a skimpy, twisting path at the foot of great mountains. The moon that had earlier deserted them is back at full strength, lighting meadows and making white rivers of the roads. They enter forest and bump down a pitted alley of fir trees. Deer stare into their headlights, zigzag ahead of them into the blackness of the trees. An owl with a snow-white underbelly glides over the hood.
They make a right turn, start to climb and after ten minutes reach a clearing stacked with felled logs. Mundy remembers the forest clearing outside Prague on the day Sasha told him about his father the Stasi spy. They mount a concrete ramp and enter a barn big enough to house a zeppelin. Half a dozen smart cars, German and Austrian, are parked in an orderly row as if for sale. Set apart from them stands a black Jeep. Sasha pulls up beside it.
It’s a new Jeep, a big American one with a lot of chrome and lights. A scrawny, middle-aged woman in a headscarf sits motionless in the driving seat. It crosses Mundy’s mind that she could be the same woman in the Sherpa coat who was fumbling for her door key when he climbed the spiral staircase three hours ago, but for Sasha’s sake he dismisses the idea. There is no greeting. Sasha clambers out of the Audi and beckons to Mundy to do the same. The woman continues to glower ahead of her through the windshield of the Jeep. Mundy calls good evening to her but she ignores him.
“Where are we going?” he asks.
“We have another short journey to make, Teddy. Our friend prefers the hospitality of Austria. It is irrelevant.”
“I haven’t got my passport.”
“A passport will not be necessary. The border here is anyway a technicality.”
I am an artist of the unobserved life.
Sasha hauls himself into the Jeep. Mundy climbs after him. Without putting on her lights, the woman drives out of the barn and down the ramp. She is wearing leather gloves. So was the woman on the staircase. She switches off the engine, listens for something, doesn’t hear it, apparently. Then with headlights blazing she plunges the Jeep into the blackness of the mountain and at a giddy speed begins the climb.
The wooded hill is a wall of death and she is mad to attempt it. Mundy clutches the grab handle in front of him. The trees are too close together. She can’t possibly squeeze the Jeep between them. The path is too steep, she’s going too fast! Nobody can hold this speed, but she can. She can do all of it. The Edinburgh academicians would be proud of her. Her gloved hand whips the lever through the low gears and the Jeep doesn’t falter.
They have scaled the wall. By the half-moon Mundy sees four valleys stretched below him like the spokes of a white wheel. She weaves the Jeep between rocks strewn over a wide grass plateau. They are on tarmac, descending a gentle slope towards a large converted farmhouse surrounded by barns and cottages. Smoke is coming out of the chimney of the main house. There are geraniums in the window boxes. The woman hauls on the hand brake, slams her door open and strides off. Two fit young men in anoraks step forward to receive them.
In Estelle Road, thinks Mundy, I opened the door to a couple of kids like these, and they turned out to be Mormon missionaries from Missouri wanting to save my soul. Well, I didn’t believe them then, and I don’t believe them now.
The room where they are made to wait is long and timbered and smells of resin and honey. It has flowered sofas and a coffee table strewn with brand-new art magazines. Mundy sits and tries to interest himself in an article on the postmodernists in architecture while Sasha prowls. It’s like taking Mustafa to the nice Turkish doctor, he thinks, watching him: in a minute he’s going to tell me he feels all right now, and he’d like to go home.
“Been here before, Sasha?” Mundy asks conversationally.
Sasha puts his hands over his ears. “No,” he hisses.
“Just Vienna and Paris then?”
“Teddy, please. It is not appropriate.”
Mundy is reminded of a truth he has learned about people constantly at war with authority: they’re also in love with it. An aseptic blonde in a business suit is standing in the doorway.
“Mr. Mundy?”
“The same,” he agrees cheerfully, clambering to his feet because he’s in the presence of a lady.
“Richard would like to speak with you, please. Will you come this way?”
“Richard? Who’s Richard?”
“Richard handles the paperwork, Mr. Mundy.”
“What paperwork’s that?” He wants to hear her more, place her voice.
“It’s no big deal, sir. Richard will explain it to you, I’m sure.”
Vassar with a German accent, he decides. Air hostess courtesy. One more question, sir, I’ll break your fucking neck. He glances at Sasha in case he’s proposing to come along too, but he has his back to both of them and is examining a print of peasants in Tyrolean dress. The Vassar blonde leads him down a corridor lined with antlers and up a narrow back staircase. On the walls, muskets and racks of pewter plates. An old pine door stands ajar. She knocks, pushes it open and steps aside for Mundy to brush past her. I’m in a movie, he’s thinking, as their hips graze each other: James Bond visits the ogre’s castle. In a minute she’s going to inject me with a truth drug.
“And your name?” he asks.
“Janet, sir.”
“I’m Ted.”
Richard is blond too, and just as clean. His hair is cropped short. He has body-built shoulders, wears a blue blazer and an airline steward’s blue tie. He sits in a square wooden room scarcely larger than a sauna, at a small red desk. His handshake is practiced and wholesome and he is an athlete of some kind. Perhaps the girl is too. There is no telephone on the desk, no computer or other temptation. There is one buff file and it is closed. Nobody has written FILE on it. Richard sets his fingertips either side of it as if he is about to levitate.
“May I call you Ted, please? Some Brits, they are so formal!”
“Not this one, I assure you, Richard!” He has placed Richard’s accent too: Scandinavian declamatory, every sentence a complaint.
“Ted. It is Mr. Dimitri’s policy to pay an appearance fee to all his potential employees, whether or not the interview has a successful outcome. The fee is one thousand dollars cash, payable on signature of a contract of service for one day. Is this acceptable to you, Ted?”
Confused as always when he is offered money, Mundy lets out one of his embarrassed barks and shoves his wrist against his mouth. “I suppose I might force myself,” he concedes. And barks again.
“The contract is short, Ted. The key element here is confidentiality,” says Richard, who has clearly learned his lines to perfection. “Under its terms, you are forbidden to disclose the content of your discussion with Mr. Dimitri and his staff. That means also the fact that such discussions took place at all. Okay? You can go along with this condition? Take a good look, please. Don’t sign till you have read. In life, we say, this is an axiom.”
Do we really? Well, well. In life, no less. Plain, high-quality paper, no address, the date. Three paragraphs of electronic type. Something called the New Planet Foundation is about to own Ted Mundy for a day. In exchange Mundy will undertake not to talk, write, or by any means describe, relate, impart, disclose or otherwise divulge—and any other stupid verb that lawyers who are always arseholes can think of to turn an honest sentiment into an unintelligible piece of junk—whatever may or may not have passed between them in the ogre’s castle.
Mundy signs, they shake hands again. Richard’s is dry and hard. When he has shaken Mundy’s hand for long enough, he reaches inside his blazer and produces a yellow envelope, sealed. Not from a drawer, note well, not from a safe, not from a cash box but from his pocket, next to his heart. And he doesn’t even want a receipt for it.
Richard opens the door, they shake hands once more for the cameras, except that, as far as Mundy knows, there aren’t any. Two more anoraks are waiting in the corridor. White faces, black anoraks, dead faces. Offcuts of the Mormon guards.
“Sir, Mr. Dimitri will see you now,” says one of them.
Two blazers guard a pair of richly carved doors, but these blazers, unlike Richard’s, are green. Somebody’s really thought about wardrobe, Mundy thinks. One pats him down while the other fills a shallow basket with the prisoner’s embarrassing possessions: a battered pewter hip flask, a velcro Union Jack, a dog-eared copy of the Süddeutsche, a mildewed cellphone, a pocketful of collection money in assorted currencies taken at the Linderhof departure door, a bunch of keys to his apartment, a thousand-dollar envelope.
The carved doors fly open, Mundy steps forward and waits for his first sight of the billionaire philosopher, philanthropist, recluse and genius who has pledged his life and fortune to Sasha and the Arms Race for Truth. But all he sees is a roly-poly fellow in a baggy tracksuit and trainers, wading down the room at him while two men in suits look on from the sidelines.
“Mr. Mundy, sir, I have had it said to me that your views on recent events in the world coincide remarkably with Sasha’s and my own.” If Mundy is expected to answer, he needn’t worry: Dimitri gives him no time. He has grabbed him by the left biceps and is wheeling him from point to point around the room.
“This is Sven, this is Angelo,” he declares, dismissing the suits rather than introducing them. “They pick the flyshit out of the pepper for me. Detail bores me these days, Mr. Mundy. Like Sasha I’m a man of the broad brush. That war on Iraq was illegitimate, Mr. Mundy. It was a criminal and immoral conspiracy. No provocation, no link with Al Qaeda, no weapons of Armageddon. Tales of complicity between Saddam and Osama were self-serving bullshit. It was an old colonial oil war dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty, and it was launched by a clique of war-hungry Judeo-Christian geopolitical fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America’s post-9/11 psychopathy.”
Mundy again wonders whether he is supposed to add anything to this, and again Dimitri relieves him of the choice. His voice is as violent as his gestures: a rasping, pounding mongrel of a voice even in repose. In Mundy’s imagination it is sired in the Levant, trained in the Balkans and finished off in the Bronx. Or so he tells himself as he strives to keep his mental distance from it—now Greek, now Arab, now American-Jewish, now all of them thrown together in a pilfered, semiliterate English cocktail that has never mixed. Does Dimitri have a mother tongue? Mundy doubts it. There is a fellow orphan in Dimitri, Mundy can feel it: a docklands kid, a knife child, an inventor of his own rules.
“All it takes for a war like that to start, Sasha tells me, is for a few good men to do nothing. Well, they did nothing. Whether they’re good men, that’s another thing. The Democratic opposition did fuck-all. Stay home, sing patriotic songs till it’s safe to come out, was their policy. Jesus Christ, what kind of opposition is that? What kind of moral courage? Do I go too fast for you, Mr. Mundy? People tell me I give them no time to think. You want time to think?”
“Oh, I can manage, thanks.”
“I believe you can. You have an intelligent head, a good eye, I like you. Iran is next in line, Syria, Korea, take your pick. Forgive me, I am failing as a host. I was forgetting the vital role played by your British prime minister, without whom there might have been no war.” A quick turn as they pursue their Palais Glide. “Mr. Mundy will take tea, Angelo. He’s married to a Turk, he should drink apple tea or coffee, but he takes a strong Indian tea with cow’s milk in it and a bowl of brown cane sugar on the side. The Turks had an honorable role in this war, Mr. Mundy. You should be proud of your lady, as you surely are.”
“Thank you.”
Turn again.
“My pleasure. Turkey’s Islamist government refused to assist the American aggressor, and their military for once restrained their customary impulse to beat the shit out of the Kurds.” A half step, and thank God we’re moving towards the sofa because Mundy’s head is swimming, he has the sensation of taking part in three conversations at once, yet he’s scarcely uttered a word. “A man has to inform himself, Mr. Mundy. And I do that, as you will notice. The world is knee-deep in lies. Time the lambs ate the lion. Sit down, please, sir. Here on my right side. I have a bad left ear. Some arsehole put a meat hook in it a while back, and all it gives me is the sound of the sea. Well, I don’t like the fucking sea. I sailed it seven years, then I bought the ship and went ashore and bought some more ships, and I never went to sea again.”
In sideways glances, Mundy has managed to assemble an image of his host to go with the voice. He is seventy if a day. He has a wide, rolling body and a bald, liver-spotted head with crisscross lines on it and deep creases between the cushions of his face. He has a child’s sweet blue eyes, very liquid, and the quicker he talks the quicker they move. Mustafa has a windup toy that does the same and perhaps that’s why Mundy is finding it hard to take Dimitri seriously. He has the feeling of sitting too close to the stage, and seeing the cracks in Dimitri’s makeup, and the pins in his wig, and the wires when he spreads his wings.
Angelo has brought Mundy’s tea, and for Dimitri a glass of soy milk. Mundy and Dimitri are turned sidesaddle to one another on the long sofa, like a television host and his guest. Sven roosts on a tall-backed leather chair outside their line of sight. On his lap he clutches a notebook to take minutes. The notebook is brand-new. The pen is a streamlined black-and-gold affair, pride of the executive classes. Like Angelo, who prefers the fringes, Sven is gaunt and severe. Dimitri likes men about him who are thin.
“So who are you, Mr. Mundy?” Dimitri demands.
He is leaning back in the cushions, his stubby hands linked over his stomach. His sneakers are turned inward to avoid giving unintentional offense. Perhaps, like Mundy, he has learned his manners in the East. “You’re a Pakistani-English-born gentleman who played student anarchist in Berlin,” he is intoning. “You’re a lover of the German soul who sold Shakespeare for the Queen and you’re shacked up with a Turkish Muslim. So who the fuck are you?—Bakunin, Gandhi, King Richard or Saladin?”
“Ted Mundy, tour guide,” Mundy replies, and laughs. Dimitri laughs with him, and claps him on the shoulder then kneads it, which Mundy could do without, but never mind, they’re such good pals.
“Every war is worse than the last one, Mr. Mundy. But this war is the worst I ever saw if we’re talking about lies, which I am. Lies happen to be something of a speciality of mine. Maybe because I told so many in my time, they piss me off. Makes no difference the Cold War’s over. Makes no difference we’re globalized, multinational or what the hell. Soon as the tom-toms sound and the politicians roll out their lies, it’s bows and arrows and the flag and round-the-clock television for all loyal citizens. It’s three cheers for the big bangs and who gives a fuck about casualties as long as they’re the other guy’s?”
He seems not to need to breathe between sentences.
“And don’t give me that horseshit about Old Europe,” he warns, though Mundy has not opened his mouth. “We’re looking at the oldest America in the book. Puritan zealots butchering savages in the name of the Lord—how do you get older than that? It was genocide then, it’s genocide today, but whoever owns the truth owns the game.”
Mundy considers speaking up for the largest antiwar demonstrations the world has ever seen, but it is clear by now that interrupting Dimitri is not part of the interview. Dimitri’s voice, whatever his peaceful intentions, rules by force. It neither rises nor falls. It could advise you of the Second Coming or the imminent extinction of the human race, and you would question it at your peril.
“March, you get sore feet. Protest, you get a bad throat and a policeman’s boot in your teeth. Anybody who nails the lies is a radical malcontent. Or he’s an Islamist anti-Semite. Or he’s both. And if you’re worried about the future, please don’t be, because there’s a new war just around the corner, and you won’t have to bother about a thing, just switch on the TV and enjoy another virtual war brought to your screens courtesy of your favorite feel-good junta and its corporate parasites.” There is no pause, but one thick hand opens and offers the question: “So what the fuck do we do, Mr. Mundy? How do we make it impossible for your country, or America, or any damn country, to take the world to war on the strength of a bunch of cooked-up lies that in the cold light of day look about as plausible as the pixies in your fucking garden? How do we get to protect your children and my grandchildren from being suckered into war? I am speaking, Mr. Mundy, of the corporate state and its monopoly of information. I am speaking of its armlock on the objective truth. And I am wondering how the fuck we turn back the tide. Would you be at all interested in that? Of course you would”—answering before Mundy can—“and so would I. And so would every sane citizen of the world. I ask you again: What the fuck do we do to bring sanity and reason back into the political arena, if it was ever there in the first place?”
Mundy is whisked fleetingly to the Republican Club, where similar discussions raged nightly, and with similar epithets. Now, as then, no easy answer springs to mind. But that is not entirely because he is bereft of words. It is more because he feels he has landed in the middle of a play where everybody knows the plot except himself.
“Do we need a new electorate? The fuck we do. It’s not the people’s fault they can’t see straight. Nobody gives them a chance. ‘Look this way, don’t look that way. Look that way, and you’re an uncitizen, an antipatriot, a schmuck.’ Do we need new politicians? Sure we do, but it’s the electorate that has to find them. You and me, we can’t do that. And how the hell can the electorate do its job when the politicians refuse to step up to the discussion? The electorate is screwed before it gets into the polling booths. If it ever does.”
For a moment Dimitri allows it to seem that he is as short of solutions as Mundy is. But it is quickly apparent he is only making a dramatic pause before ascending to a higher plane. In theater, we call it a beat. To herald it, Dimitri has pointed a stubby finger at Mundy’s face, and is looking straight down its sights into Mundy’s eyes.
“I am speaking, Mr. Mundy—I am speaking of something even more important to the development of Western society than the ballot box. I am speaking of the deliberate corruption of young minds at their most formative stage. Of the lies that are forced on them from the cradle onwards by corporate or state manipulation, if there’s a difference anymore between the two, which I begin to doubt. I am speaking of the encroachment of corporate power on every university campus in the first, second and third worlds. I am speaking of educational colonization by means of corporate investment at faculty level, conditional upon the observation of untrue nostrums that are advantageous to the corporate investor, and deleterious for the poor fuck of a student.”
You’re great, Mundy wants to tell him. You get the part. Now put your finger back in its holster.
“I am speaking of the deliberate curtailment of free thought in our society, Mr. Mundy, and how we may address it. I am an urchin, Mr. Mundy. Born one, stayed one. My intellectual processes are untutored. Scholars would laugh at me. Nevertheless I have acquired many books on this subject.” So Sasha said, Mundy is thinking. “I have in mind such thinkers as the Canadian Naomi Klein, India’s Arundhati Roy, who pleads for a different way of seeing, your British George Monbiot and Mark Curtis, Australia’s John Pilger, America’s Noam Chomsky, the American Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, and the Franco-American Susan George of World Social Forum at Porto Alegre. You have read all of these fine writers, Mr. Mundy?”
“Nearly all.” And nearly all Adorno, nearly all Horkheimer and nearly all Marcuse, Mundy thinks, recalling a similar interrogation in Berlin a few lifetimes ago. I love them all, but I can’t remember a word any of them said.
“From their varying perspectives, each of these eminent writers tells me the same story. The corporate octopus is stifling the natural growth of humanity. It spreads tyranny, poverty and economic serfdom. It defies the simplest laws of ecology. Warfare is the extension of corporate power by other means. Each thrives off the other and the recent war proves the point in spades. Does this urgent message cut any ice with you, Mr. Mundy, or am I conducting a dialogue with myself?”
“It rings a lot of bells, actually,” Mundy politely assures him.
Dimitri is evidently approaching the summit of his oration, as he has no doubt approached it many times before. His face darkens, his voice lifts, as he leans confidingly towards his audience.
“How do these corporations achieve their stranglehold on our society? When they’re not shooting, they’re buying. They buy good minds, and tie them to their wagon wheels. They buy students wet from their mothers, and castrate their thought processes. They create false orthodoxies and impose censorship under the sham of political correctness. They build university facilities, dictate university courses, overpromote the professors who kiss ass, and they bully the shit out of heretics. Their one aim is to perpetuate the insane concept of limitless expansion on a limited planet, with permanent conflict as its desired outcome. And their product is the zero-educated robot known otherwise as the corporate executive.”
He has reached the summit and is starting down the hill.
“Mr. Mundy, twenty years from now there will not be a place of learning in the Western Hemisphere that hasn’t sold its soul to corporate bigotry. There will be only one permitted opinion in every subject from the Garden of Eden to pink stripes in toothpaste. There won’t be a contrary voice that’s worth a whore’s embrace unless somebody turns the river round and gets it flowing in the opposite direction. Well, I am one of those somebodies, and so is Sasha, and I am inviting you to be another.”
The mention of Sasha rouses Mundy from his trance. Where on earth is he? Is he still working on that print of Tyrolean peasants, or has he graduated to postmodern architecture? Dimitri has taken to the floor. Other men of power, when describing their plan to redesign mankind, might fling their arms about, but Dimitri is a master of the economic gesture. His walk is measured, hands clasped behind his dock laborer’s back. Only occasionally does he release an arm to make the short, emphatic point.
The purpose of his great plan is to create corporation-free academic zones.
It is to foster seminaries of unbought opinion, Mr. Mundy, open to students of any age, nationality and discipline who are interested in reinventing human incentive in the twenty-first century.
It is to establish nothing less than a rational marketplace of free opinion, where the true causes of war, and the means of preventing it, can be aired.
And finally his plan acquires a name—not several names, like its author, but one resounding name to echo down the ages: the Counter-University, no less, a global venture, Mr. Mundy, as multinational and elusive as the corporations it seeks to counter, untainted by vested, religious, state or corporate interest, and financed by Dimitri’s own immense, larcenous resources.
“The Counter-University has no dogma,” he declares, swinging round on one heel to address Mundy down the room. “We offer no doctrinal front for our corporate adversaries to piss on. Like them, we shall be offshore and responsible to nobody. We shall use stealth. We shall be intellectual guerrillas. We shall install ourselves wherever the enemy is encamped, and subvert him from within. Think your own fine University of Oxford. Imagine a student of science. He walks out of the bio lab. He comes a couple of hundred yards down the road. It’s been a long day. He sees our sign, THE COUNTER-UNIVERSITY. He’s had his head up some corporate test tube all day. He walks in, sits down, listens. ‘They’re inviting me, as an individual, to live up to my duties as a responsible citizen of an endangered globe? What the fuck’s happening to me?’ he says to himself in perplexity. ‘These guys are off the wall. This is not what my corporation sponsors me for. I’m not paid to have a conscience, I’m paid to find new ways to fuck up the planet.’ Then he listens a little longer, and he begins to get the idea. ‘Hey. I’m somebody after all. Maybe I don’t have to prove what a big guy I am by fucking up the planet. Maybe I should reconsider my relationship with it, love it even.’ Know what he does then? He takes our card. And he goes home. And he visits a certain website we have discreetly recommended to him. This website will further awaken the sense of discovery in him. Soon he will see himself as a pioneer of disrespectful thinking. He will have a dozen such websites, each one of them a stepping-stone to spiritual freedom. Websites for our Counter-University. Websites for our Counter-Libraries. Websites for scurrilous but informed debate among our ever-growing army of renegades.”
He stops dead, turns, tilts his body so that Mundy has to meet his gaze. I’ve got it, Mundy thinks. You’re Erich von Stroheim in Sunset Boulevard.
“It sucks, okay, Mr. Mundy? An old crackpot with money coming out of his ass thinks he can redesign the world.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well, say something. You’re making me nervous.”
Mundy finally manages to: “Where do I come in?”
“You were until recently the joint owner of a language school in Heidelberg, I believe, Mr. Mundy?”
Sven speaking. Sven who picks flyshit out of pepper. Behind Sven sits Angelo, arms folded in the shadows. Exhausted by his performance, Dimitri has collapsed onto the sofa.
“Guilty,” Mundy agrees.
“And the purpose of the school was to teach advanced English to business professionals?”
“Correct,” says Mundy, thinking that Sven speaks exactly like one of his best pupils.
“And this school is now closed, sir? Pending legal proceedings?”
“It is quiescent. It is, at present, an ex-school,” Mundy says blithely, but his wit, if such it is, finds no acknowledgment in Sven’s unyielding eyes.
“But you are still co-owner, together with your former partner, Egon?”
“Technically, maybe I am. Practically I’m sole owner by default. Along with the bank, six mortgage companies and sundry creditors.”
“Sir, how would you describe the status of the school building, please, at this moment in time?” Sven opens a folder that looks as though it knows more about Mundy’s affairs than Mundy does. Moment in time, I’m not sure about, thinks Mundy the pedant. How about just at this moment, or even plain now?
“Boarded up and padlocked, basically,” he replies. “Can’t be used, can’t be rented, can’t be sold.”
“You have seen it recently, the school, sir?”
“I tend to keep my head down. Lots of writs still flying about. I drove past it a month ago and the garden was a jungle.”
“What is the capacity of the school, please?”
“In numbers? Teachers? What do you mean?”
“How many persons may be seated at one time in the main room?”
“Sixty, probably. That would be the old library. Sixty-five at a pinch. We didn’t work that way. Well, we did for the odd lecture. It was small classes in small rooms. Three teachers—me, Egon and one other—six to a class, maximum.”
“And in income terms? Cash? What were you taking, if I may inquire, sir?”
Mundy pulls a face. Cash is not his best subject. “That was Egon’s side of the house. Top of my head, reckoned in teaching hours, twenty-five euros a pop, per hour per student, three teachers working on demand—it was made-to-measure stuff, mind you, six in the morning some of it—grab ’em on their way to work —”
“Sure,” says Sven, bringing him down to earth.
“Say three, three and a half grand a day if we’re lucky.”
Dimitri comes suddenly alive again. “Your students, they came from where, Mr. Mundy?”
“Wherever we could get them. We targeted the young managerial class. Some from the university but mostly local business. Heidelberg’s the high-tech capital of Germany. Biochem, IT, software, media, print technology, you name it. We’ve got a whole satellite town down the road that does nothing else. And the university to back it up.”
“I heard people of all nations.”
“You heard right. French, German, Italian, Chinese, Spanish, Turkish, Thai, Lebanese, Saudis and black Africans, the whole caboosh, male and female. And a lot of Greeks.”
But if Mundy is fishing for Dimitri’s nationality, he’s wasting his time.
“So the money came from all over the world,” Sven suggests, as Dimitri again lapses into silence.
“Just not enough of it.”
“Did any go out, sir?”
“Too much.”
“All over the world?”
“Only with Egon. Otherwise we just paid ourselves and the bills.”
“Did you work weekends in this school, sir?”
“Saturdays all day and Sunday evenings.”
“So the students came and went all days, all hours? Foreigners of all kinds? In and out?”
“In our heyday.”
“How long was your heyday?”
“A couple of years. Till Egon got greedy.”
“You had lights in the windows all night long? Nobody was surprised?”
“Only till midnight.”
“Who says?”
“The police.”
“What the hell do the police know about anything?” Dimitri cuts in sharply from the sofa.
“They’re authorities on peace and quiet. It’s a residential area.”
“Did you have, like, school terms?” Sven resumes. “Like ‘this is vacation time, this is term time’?”
Thank you for explaining what a school term is, Mundy thinks. “In theory we were open all year. In practice we followed the established pattern. High summer was no good because pupils wanted to go on holiday, Easter and Christmas the same.”
Dimitri sits suddenly upright like a man who needs to hear no more of this. He slaps his hands on his thighs. “Okay, Mr. Mundy. Now you listen to me and listen hard, because here it is.”
Mundy is listening hard. He is listening, watching and marveling. Nobody could ask more of his powers of concentration.
“I want your school, Mr. Mundy. I want it back in business, up and running, chairs, desks, library, all appropriate equipment. If the furniture’s been sold, buy new. I want it looking and talking like it was before it went belly-up, but better. You know what is a mystery ship?”
“No.”
“I saw the movie. A crappy cargo ship like a tanker is rusted to hell. It’s a sitting duck on the horizon for the German submarine. All of a sudden the crappy cargo ship hoists the British ensign, drops its side and has like a sixty-pounder stashed in its guts. It shoots the shit out of the submarine and the Nazis all drown. That’s what your little language school is going to do on the day the Counter-University hoists its flag and tells the corporations they are no longer running the fucking world their way. “Give me a date, Mr. Mundy. If St. Nicholas came through with a bag of gold tomorrow, how soon would you be able to open for business?”
“It would have to be a pretty big bag.”
“I heard three hundred thousand dollars.”
“It depends how much interest they calculate. Over how far back.”
“You’re a Muslim. You shouldn’t talk interest. It’s against your religion.”
“I’m not a Muslim. I’m just learning the ropes.” Why do I bother to say this?
“Three-fifty?”
“I wasn’t able to pay the staff for the last three months. If I’m ever going to show my face in Heidelberg again I’d have to pay them first.”
“You’re a hard bargainer. So it’s half a million. When d’you open?”
“You said for business.”
“I said when.”
“Technically, as soon as we’ve cleaned the place up. We might be lucky and get a few walk-ins, we might not. To be functioning in any way that makes sense—September. Mid.”
“So we open early and we open small, why not? If we open big, they’ll get us thrown off the campus. Open small and look busy, two cities only, and they’ll think we’re not worth the hassle. We open in Heidelberg and the Sorbonne and fan out from there. Do you have signs on the door?”
“Brass plates. Did have.”
“If they’re there, clean them up. If they’ve gone, make new. It’s business as usual, the same old crap. September, when we bring in the big lecturers, we’ll drop our side and start shooting. Sven, see he takes an ad somewhere. ‘Mr. Edward Mundy will resume his former post as principal of his school with effect from whenever.’” The baby-blue eyes hold Mundy in some kind of painful, almost pitying stare. “You don’t look right to me, Mr. Mundy. Why aren’t you waving your bowler hat in the air? Are you depressed or something that a guy you don’t even have to fuck is getting you out of hock for half a million bucks?”
Being told to change your expression is never easy, but Mundy does his best. The sense of dislocation he experienced moments earlier has returned. His thoughts are the same as Dimitri’s: Why am I not rejoicing?
“Where does Sasha come in?” he says, which is all he can think of to ask.
“The Counter-University will have a fine lecture circuit. My people in Paris are in the process of assembling a stable of incorruptible academics, men and women who regard orthodoxy as the curse of free thought. I intend that Sasha assist in this process, and be one of the lecturers. He’s a fine mind, a fine man, I heard him and I believe in him. He will have the title of director of studies. In Heidelberg, he will supervise the creation of your library, advise you on your future academic schedule and assist you in the recruitment of human resources.”
Dimitri stands up with a speed and decisiveness that brings both Sven and Angelo leaping to their feet. Mundy unwinds himself from the sofa and stands too. It’s like my first time in the mosque, he thinks. When they stand, I stand. When they kneel down and put their heads on the rush matting, I kneel down too and hope someone’s listening.
“Mr. Mundy, we have done our business. Sven will discuss your administrative concerns with you. Angelo will take care of your remuneration. Richard upstairs has a short contract for you to sign. You will receive no copy of your contract, you will receive no confirmation in writing of anything we have agreed here tonight.”
Grappling with Dimitri’s iron grasp, Mundy again fancies he is reading a hidden signal in the moist, unblinking gaze. You came here, you wanted it and now you’ve got it, it seems to be saying. You have nobody to blame but yourself. A side door opens, Dimitri is gone. Mundy hears no departing footstep, no thunderous applause as the final curtain falls. One of the blazers is standing at Mundy’s elbow, waiting to give him back his toys.
The blond woman in the business suit once more leads the way. The same anoraks watch from the shadows. Richard upstairs is sitting at his desk as before. Is he made of wax? No, he smiles. Has he been waiting up here all evening in his nice new blazer and tie, hands prespread either side of the leather folder that opens from the center like a double window?
The blond woman departs. They are alone again, two fellows across a desk. Secrets may be traded, except that Mundy is keeping his secrets to himself:
I believe none of it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
I am in a madhouse, but half the world is run by madmen and nobody complains.
If mad kings, mad presidents and mad prime ministers can wear the mask of sanity and still function, why not a mad billionaire?
In the battle between hope and skepticism that is being fought inside me, it is increasingly clear I stand to gain everything and lose nothing.
If the Counter-University turns out to be somebody’s sick dream, I remain what I was before I walked through the door: poor but happy.
If against all odds the dream comes true, I’ll be able to look my creditors in the eye, reopen the school, move us all up to Heidelberg, put Zara through nursing college and Mustafa into a good school and sing The Mikado every morning in my bath.
So how often does that little possibility present itself? we ask ourselves. Did it ever? No. Will it ever again? No.
And if I need another reason for saying yes, which I don’t, there’s Sasha, my one-man chaos theory.
Why I should feel responsible for him is a question to be answered in another life. But I do. A happy Sasha is a joy to me, and a wretched Sasha is a rock on my conscience.
The contract is six pages long and by the time Mundy reaches the end of it he has forgotten the beginning. However, a few stray points have lodged in his head, and in case they haven’t, Richard is sitting across the desk to count them off on his athletic fingers:
“The house will be legally yours, Ted, unencumbered from the day you complete your first full year of tuition. Your basic outgoings, Ted, that’s heat, light, local taxes, house maintenance, will be carried by one of Mr. Dimitri’s many foundations. For this purpose we will create a cash float, payable in advance, accounted for retrospectively every quarter. Here are your bank details as we presently have them. Kindly check and confirm they are correct. Vacations we leave to your discretion, but Mr. Dimitri is adamant that all of his employees enjoy their full allocation of leisure. Do you have further questions? Now’s your chance, Ted. Any later is too late.”
Mundy signs. The pen is the same model as Sven’s. He initials each page bottom right. Richard folds the signed contract and feeds it into the pocket where he kept the thousand dollars cash. Mundy stands. Richard stands. They do some more handshaking.
“Allow five working days for the money to come through, Ted,” Richard advises, just like the advertisements.
“The whole sum?” Mundy asks.
“Why not, Ted?” says Richard with a smile of spiritual mystification. “It’s only money. What’s money beside a great ideal?”