And Then There Was No One

by Gilbert Adair

  Slavorigin concluded thus: ‘For what was, I repeat, a middling massacre, on the human and urban scale alike, when compared with the genocides of Rwanda and Darfur, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and East Timor, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths in occupied Iraq itself, to have been exploited by such excrement as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and that pallid fall-guy Colin Powell, with the overt or tacit support of virtually the entire population of the United States, in order to justify the invasion of a secular country which could not conceivably have played a role in the jihadist attack on the World Trade Center – that was the true atrocity of September 11.’

  It was, in short, a polemic deliberately designed to stir up controversy. Nor did the argument, indefatigably inflammatory as it was, possess any real analytical depth or sophistication. And, probably to Slavorigin’s own disappointment, the furore he had so obviously sought quite failed to materialise in the British media. Aside from a rave review from a single diehard Slavoriginite, the book received mostly mixed and muted notices from the national press, the principal criticism being of the untethered bombast of its style. It did, however, become an instant bestseller, a rare distinction for such a ragbag of undisciplined musings, and the ‘Out of a Clear Blue Sky’ essay itself was reprinted in the London Review of Books.

  It was, instead, on the other side of the Atlantic that the scandal finally erupted.

  Slavorigin’s American publishers wouldn’t even touch the book. It was available on Amazon, however, and soon circulated as freely as if it had been published. Naturally, in view of its author’s reputation, it took no time for the first of what would turn into a cascade of newspaper articles to hit the stands. To begin with, and for the next several weeks, these articles did not much more than acknowledge its existence and the vague disquiet which had been occasioned by its British publication. Then there came a full-frontal assault from an influential neo-con monthly published out of Washington DC, followed by another, suspiciously similar piece in the Wall Street Journal. Then, as the rumpus gathered pace, and ordinary Joe Six-Packs were gradually made conscious of the blasphemous affront to that occurrence in their country’s history which more than any other since Lincoln’s assassination had been brushed by the sacred, even moderate rags began to editorialise on its implications for the special relationship between the USA and what Slavorigin scornfully referred to as the UKA. He was savaged by the tabloids. He was denounced, absurdly, as a Twin Towers ‘denier’. Why, there was even talk of a diplomatic incident. The American ambassador in London dispatched a note to 10 Downing Street ‘in protest at this unwarranted attack on the single most tragic event in the history of the United States by a writer who has been honored by the government of our nation’s oldest and closest ally’. (This, as it happens, was slightly misleading, Slavorigin having rejected the OBE which had been offered him.) The response of Her Majesty’s Government was that, while it too regretted the intemperance of the book in question, its author had committed no crime, none at least, save possibly that of libel, added a perfidious little parenthesis, for which he could be held to account in a British court of law, and his views, however offensive, were protected by the right of free speech, that same right, note well, which Slavorigin claimed had been irreversibly undermined by Blair and his yes-men.

  It was at this stage of the crisis, just as the original press coverage was petering out for want of a replenishment of new developments, that, like a spider, the Web started to spin its own web. Virtual rumours ricocheted round the blogosphere before converging on an exceptionally eccentric website, albeit one which received many more hits than most such eccentric websites. It was called For a Trans-World America and the man who apparently masterminded it, even though his identity was nowhere disclosed on the page itself, was that Howard Hughes-y individual, down to the very initials of his name, Hermann Hunt V, notorious for never venturing out of his Scottish baronial-style castle in suburban Dallas.

  HHV, as he was referred to by his mythologising cronies and toadies, was by no means the self-made billionaire his trumped-up legend made him out to be. His grandfather, Hermann Hunt III, had founded the Hunt fortune in Texan oil in the fifties, a fortune that his father, whom it occurred to no one ever to call HHIV, had neither squandered nor augmented when he died of a ruptured aneurysm at the age of forty-three. While still in his twenties, HHV, coerced by family pressure to forgo youthful ambitions of becoming a writer – with, so word had it, Ayn Rand as his model – began the process of transforming what was still, relatively speaking, a mom-and-pop business into a vast tentacular corporation by diversifying, first, into real estate, then into the liquor business, then agricultural equipment, then timber and forestry, then by a natural extension, the proprietorship of a myriad of ultra-reactionary publications.†† It was whispered meanwhile that an indeterminate number of shady organisations, all of them based in the West and South-West of the country’s hinterland, that ‘mainland of madness’, as Slavorigin had dubbed it, owed their inexplicable solvency to his generous financial backing.

  Spoken of in this context were several survivalist communes in the Anaconda Mountains of Montana. A white supremacist group which held covert recruiting sessions in a desert motel, the Clandestine Inn, located seventy miles or so from Reno, Nevada, and owned by a former Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan. The Neo-McCarthy Brotherhood, anti-Jewish, anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-Catholic, anti-French and, although one assumes just for old times’ sake, anti-Communist. The Knights of the White Camelia, a fraternity of Doomsday prophesiers whose mailing address was a shopping mall in Eugene, Oregon, and all of whose members, running their respective businesses on a pleasantly profitable day-by-day footing while in anticipation of the looming Rapture, belonged to divers Rotary Clubs and Chambers of Commerce. These and many, many others had benefited from HHV’s inexhaustible munificence.

  Then, suddenly, the website began twitching with a whole new set of instructions to the faithful. Nothing connected with HHV, however, was ever straightforward. If you sought to decipher them, you had to print out each of the site’s four pages, cut them up into two unequal halves, unequal in one and only one fashion (i.e. one fat oblong and one thin one, each oblong being parallel to one of the four sides of the rectangular page itself, and no two widths being identical), then paste them together again, but differently, like the four individually incomplete and independently meaningless segments of a pirate’s treasure chart. Once they had been successfully recombined, and it had all fallen into place, the very first change to catch the eye was an unexpected refinement of the site’s typeface, causing its name now to read For a Trans-World America. What was the point, you asked yourself for a moment, of those five ugly bold-type caps? But only for a moment. A moment later enlightenment irradiated the screen. F.A.T.W.A.

  The acronym was patently intended to remind impressionable bloggers of the Salman Rushdie affair, an affair which, for most of us, seems already to belong to a dim, nearly unknowable past when (in a narrative that Chesterton would not have repudiated) a significant fraction of the planet’s population had actually set off, by plane or by proxy, in pursuit of a single hapless human being. In a world in which terrorism itself has become globalised, we are all potential Salman Rushdies now, are we not, so who could be the object of this new personalised fatwa?

  It was of course Slavorigin – Slavorigin who had blasphemed against the American creed, who had lampooned its prophets (‘the so-called, pompously so-called, Founding Fathers whose fabled Constitution is about as relevant to the contemporary world as the Ten Commandments’) and spat upon its martyrs (the fallen of September 11).

  If the website’s cunning dynamics still made it impossible to know for sure who was calling the shots, even a technological duffer, blessed with a modicum of patience and luck, would have been able to work out what was at stake. All it required of the committed hacker was a diligent bout of clicking, copying and pasting. Then, assuming a few booby-traps had been sidestepped, the
screen would display a cute little rebus whose pictorial clues, including a popular coconut-filled chocolate bar (simple), the forementioned town of Eugene, Oregon (even simpler) and a movie by the director Sam Peckinpah (a bit trickier), would, when aligned in the correct order, end by generating the unequivocal message: ‘A bounty of one hundred million dollars for the head of Gustav Slavorigin’.

  One hundred million dollars! That put those stingy mad mullahs in their place. And yes, before long, through deepest cyberspace coursed the Chinese whisper that scores of claimants – at least one of them said, with a tremor of excitement, to be a woman – were boarding trains and planes, were heading for London, had already landed at Heathrow, on the first stage of the million-dollar crusade.

  What happened next everybody knows. Like Rushdie before him, Slavorigin instantly went into hiding. Withdrawing from circulation, from the social and literary circus of which he had been both cynosure and clown, he found himself escorted, in the weeks that followed, weeks that would drag into months, and months into years, from one safe house to another.

  During his long internal exile he was, however, neither idle nor suicidal. The despair he must initially have experienced – the more so as, to nobody’s surprise, the American government, taking its lead from the British, refused to intervene – began to be cushioned, after a rigorously cloistered first year, by an occasional dinner in town, at the Caprice or the Ivy, by a starry gala première at Covent Garden, the sole sign of his unannounced attendance being the proximity of two hefty minders wearing wraparound dark glasses night and day, pacing up and down outside restaurant or theatre rain and shine.

  Then, almost exactly two years into his ordeal, he completed another book, a shortish thriller (of sorts, naturally).

  How to describe A Reliable Narrator? Its opening chapter resembles the concluding chapter of a whodunit, one that just happens never actually to have been written. Thus the reader of Slavorigin’s book (I mean, the book which was written) cannot hope to comprehend the picturesque twists of this first-chapter denouement since, of the murder which has clearly taken place, the only detail to which he is made privy is the identity of the murderer, a murderer who has already been apprehended, charged, tried, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Or, rather, an alleged murderer. For, as the reader comes to realise, there has occurred a gross miscarriage of justice. The real murderer (A Reliable Narrator is written in the first person, as if we were inside this murderer’s head) has eluded the law, has, as they say, got away with it. But therein lies his dilemma. It transpires that the murder he committed was no more than a parenthesis, open then closed again, in an otherwise suffocatingly dingy existence. The protagonist was a nonentity before he committed it and, never having had the chance to bask in the limelight of guilt, never having enjoyed his fifteen minutes of infamy, he has become a nonentity all over again. Just imagine the agony of his frustration. To have destroyed a fellow creature, to have barehandedly squeezed the last breath out of ‘a whorehouse miscarriage, a lying, foul-mouthed, poo-flinging ape’, yet to gaze into his shaving mirror every morning and see gazing back at him the same old pre-murder loser – this becomes so insufferable to his self-esteem that he howls out his guilt to anybody who will listen to him. But nobody will. Nobody but the reader, of course, who alone knows.

  Hence the title. That first-person protagonist is no canonic unreliable narrator, such a tired old cliché of postmodernism now, but a perfectly reliable narrator, except that not a single soul is prepared to rely on him.

  A Reliable Narrator was published to a set of reviews, not only in Britain, that most writers would die for. Which is undoubtedly why its author was invited to Meiringen by the organisers of its first Sherlock Holmes Festival. (Why he agreed to go is another question.) And which is also when my own part in his story begins.

  * The ‘g’ of his surname, hard in Bulgarian, was eventually palatalised by the wear and tear of English usage.

  † It was dedicated to the Scottish (gay) poet Edwin Morgan, ‘my spectral mentor’.

  ‡ Plus, published by Granta, an unrewarding and most cruelly selective autobiographical fragment, A Biography of Myself – composed, significantly, in the third person – and a theatrical squib, Enter Godot, staged at the 1993 Edinburgh Festival but never revived.

  § ‘It is too often forgotten,’ read another passage, ‘that the cultural glory of the contemporary United States has always been its high, not its populist, art.’ And he singled out for praise the poets Stevens, Eliot, Pound, Frost, Marianne Moore, etc, and the novelists Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, Gaddis, etc, if less so the ‘much-overrated’ Fitzgerald.

  ¶ Even so, he regarded these as exceptions. The Hollywood movies which he truly adored, and which he dated meticulously as belonging to a three-decade Golden Age that stretched from 1929 to 1959, were almost all, so he tendentiously asserted, made by European immigrants, cultural and political refugees: i.e. Lubitsch, Lang, Hitchcock, Siodmak, Curtiz, Ulmer, Preminger, etc. And I recall how he enjoyed teasing his fellow film-buff students at Edinburgh with the (in fact, true) statement that he had never bothered to catch up with either Godfather I or II. ‘The Mafia as Borgias, no thanks!’ he would sneer. Or ‘Why should I go see a film in which Marlon Brando hams it up as a big dumb thug with cottonwool in his cheeks?’

  || The subject of the original had been a small earthquake in Chile.

  ** Emphasis mine. In the original the aside is rendered all the more provocative by the omission of italics.

  †† Trees and newspapers, after all, form two successive generations of the same dynasty, the latter being the literate offspring of the bluff, inarticulate former, like college-educated children of peasant stock.

  Chapter One

  It was while commuting homeward on the 11.03 from Moreton-in-Marsh to London Paddington one foggy Monday forenoon in early September that I received on my mobile phone the call that was to change everything. Since the previous December I had been renting a pretty weekend cottage in the Gloucestershire village of Blockley. The cottage, Waterside by name, sat sandwiched between my landlady’s grand house and a lively though apparently unlived-in little stream that could be depended on, in anything approaching a downpour, to overflow its timid banks. I would journey down to Moreton on Friday afternoons – on, by what was for me a delightful windfall of a coincidence, the 4.50 from Paddington (yes, really) – then make the same trip in reverse three days later. My train, in both directions, was invariably late, but seldom long enough to put me to serious inconvenience.*

  So there I was, snugly settled in a first-class compartment, reading, with a view to writing an eventual review for the Spectator, a fat, virtuosically executed novel by one of that new breed of American wunderkinder who, I would be lying if I denied it, are positively bloated with talent but who are also just too fucking pleased with themselves – its title, The Theory of Colonic Irrigation, should tell you all you need to know about the sort of thing it was. Since I was already aware that this was a book destined to be jettisoned as soon as my review had been delivered, I was in the process of pencilling some cramped, crabbed notes in the margins of its own pages when, at the Oxford stop, a single, rather extraordinary passenger boarded my nearly empty compartment. He stood for a minute in the doorway as though searching for a friendly or just a familiar face, then for a reason known only to himself sat down in the seat directly opposite mine.

  As long as we tarried in Oxford, I felt an obscure compulsion to keep both my eyes trained on the text in front of me and even forebore, for the duration, from dabbing at my smarting nose – I was on the mend from a protracted head cold – with the third of four paper napkins which I had filched for that purpose from the buffet-bar where I had earlier bought a cup of muddy coffee. (The first two snot-saturated napkins were stuffed away in the clammy depths of my jacket pocket.) At long last the train started to glide out of the station, a plummy Indian voice on the loudspeaker alerted the latest intake of passenge
rs to the sandwiches, pastries and light refreshments available to them, and even if I don’t recall having had the sensation, one I am especially prone to, of being spied upon by some unseen observer, I could no longer resist peeking at my fellow-traveller over the top of the novel, as thick and doughy as a wholemeal loaf, that I held in my hands.

  I was being spied upon. The man who had sat down opposite me had, I noted uneasily, a livid complexion, a shock of white hair, an unalluring black patch over his left eye which lent him the corny charisma of the Demon King in a provincial pantomime and an unpatched right eye which was staring straight at me. No milquetoast in an awkward situation, I immediately proceeded to stare back, to the point of insolence. As I did, I found myself qualifying my crude first impression. Swimming into sharper focus, he turned out to be less fleshily flamboyant than the description above must have made him sound. His complexion was of the wind-and-weatherbeaten type the English refer to as ‘ruddy’, his hair, if untidy enough, had nevertheless submitted to the recent attentions of a comb, his eyepatch was just an eyepatch. As he was also wearing a rough, fibrous three-piece suit with outsized trouser turn-ups and complicatedly laced-up hiking-boots, I had him pegged for some maverick Oxford classics don, although whether he was loved or feared by his, I guessed, handful of students was beyond my powers of impromptu on-the-spot speculation.

  None of which alters the fact that he was still staring at me. He had no reading matter of his own, none visible on his person, at any rate, no scuffed leather briefcase containing papers with which he might have whiled away the trip by consulting or marking. He had nothing to do, in short, but stare at me. Which he went on doing until it was no longer funny. Did he recognise me? Unlikely. One advantage, I thought grimly, of being only a semi-wellknown writer is that you can travel incognito on public transport. No, not grimly. No hackneyed adverbs, please. I thought, I just thought. Did he confuse me with David Hockney, to whom I bear a superficial resemblance (blond hair, prominent horn-rimmed glasses)? Since I knew I wasn’t going to be able to keep up for very much longer our ping-pong game of stare and counterstare, something would soon have to give.