by Adam Roberts
‘What are you bleeding playing at?’ the Exterminator returned. ‘Get your hands off me, Gladys!’ he barked at the particular police constable who was trying to cuff him. The PC in question was not, of course, actually called Gladys. Rather “The Exterminator”, by referring to him by this patently female appellation, hoped to call into question his masculinity, and thereby insult him.
‘Ouch!’ he cried. ‘Watch it!’ He was hauled to his feet.
‘Bring him to the station,’ ordered Tash.
17
Meanwhile, back at the National Gallery, the three intrepid investigators effected an entrance by breaking a side window with a discarded shopping trolley. It took all three of them to lift the trolley, and several goes before they co-ordinated their actions well enough to break the glass, but they managed it in the end.
No alarm sounded. ‘Told you,’ said Teabag.
They made their way through darkened exhibition spaces, and down the spiral staircase to the little hallway with the Last Supper mural. The door to Jacques Sauna-Lurker’s office was open.
Sophie turned on the light, and the office was revealed to them in all its disarray. ‘Come along,’ Teabag urged, with a manic and rather alarming energy. ‘There’s got to be a clue here somewhere! Think cod. Think Jacques. Find something that the killer missed.’ He strode into the snowdrift of paper.
‘Do not worry, Sir Teabag,’ said Sophie, confidently. ‘We have with us Dr Robert Donglan, the premier anagrammatologist and clue-decipherer in the whole of London town. He can decipher any clue – can’t you, Robert?’ She looked intently at him.
‘Well,’ said Robert, nervously. He thought he detected a note of suspicion in Sophie’s seemingly laudatory words, as if she were probing him, trying to determine just how good he was at solving clues. ‘I mean, one doesn’t like to boast . . .’
‘Nonsense!’ boomed Teabag, with exhausting jollity. ‘Tell us the truth, man! Is Ms Nudivue’s characterisation of you accurate?’
‘Well I’m not sure about being able to decipher any clue,’ Robert demurred. ‘But, you know. One, ahem, does one’s best.’
‘He is professor of anagrammatology at the University of London,’ Sophie informed Teabag. ‘His modesty, though very English, is misleading.’
Robert looked at her, and his heart contracted with sheer love. She looked so beautiful, standing amongst the mess of paperwork, books knocked off shelves and upturned chairs; as if only mess could truly frame the neat pertness of her allure. When this crazy night was over, and the mystery cleared up, Robert thought to himself – then surely she would be prepared to go out with him? She was so committed to uncovering the great secret of this mysterious conspiracy; and if Robert could help her to that end, then surely she would be grateful to him . . . perhaps more than grateful . . .
But—
That terrible word! Small but obstructive, meaning as it does ‘except’ or ‘except for the fact’, or ‘on the contrary’, ‘on the other hand’, or even ‘with the exception of’, although that usage is less relevant here.
But, Robert thought, he had a secret of his own. A secret rooted in his past. And if Sophie were to stumble upon that secret, then could she do anything other than despise him? She thought him the greatest code-analyser in London, but . . .
As he stood in that office, Robert felt memory swimming up from those portions of his brain given over to the storage of memory, thoroughly italicising his thought processes . . .
18
The young Robert Donglan had been a typical schoolboy. Which is to say, he was almost entirely uninterested in his schooling. English was his best subject. A more precise way of stating that would be to say that English was his least awful subject – which is to say, although he was pretty awful at English he was considerably more awful at all the other subjects. His attention was continually wandering, as if on an endless pilgrimage to some ever-retreating intellectual destination. He spent a lot of time honing his ‘staring gormlessly out of windows’ skills.
His teachers despaired of him. He found it hard to take the conventional syllabus in. For many years he had believed that the noted Jacobean tragedy was indeed called Tis Pity She’s A Whore Stop Giggling At The Back Jenkins. He couldn’t remember the differences between the three Lawrences, the DH (Mr), the TE (Mr) and the Merry Xmas (Mr). It bothered him disproportionately that the name of the poet Keats did not rhyme with the name of the poet Yeats. He could not say for certain whether Joyce was a surname or a first name. Nevertheless, when the time came for him to go to university (and it is a matter of Government legislation in the UK that all schoolchildren must go to university whether they like it or not) English was his least worst option, and so off he went to study for an English degree.
‘Study for’ perhaps gives the wrong impression. If, by saying ‘study for’ I have given you the impression that Robert did any studying, or that he was in any positive sense ‘for’ the BA (Hons) English under the rubric of which he was notionally registered, then I’m afraid I have mislead you.
No: at university, Robert was an all-round scholar. By which I mean he was all round. He looked like one of those vast pale balloons that used to terrorise Patrick McGoohan on the beach at Port Meirion – same shape, same colour and, pretty much, the same consistency, only with a broad flat-topped head at one end. He spent his entire university career lying on a couch watching television, engaged in a marathon assault on the unofficial world record for ‘largest amount of pork scratchings consumed over a three year period.’
Eventually his university career came to an end, and he had to work out what to do next. He paid a visit to the university career’s officer.
‘Donglan, is it?’ said this individual, peering at his computer screen. ‘It says here that you got a 2:2.’
‘Does it?’ replied Robert, adopting an expression of puzzled concern.
‘Yes, not a very good grade, I’m afraid. That will restrict your employment opportunities.’
‘Well that’s a mistake,’ said Robert, with a reasonably convincing appearance of self-confidence. ‘It’s a typo. I’ve already been through this with the Registry. They said they’d already changed it on my official file. I’m rather annoyed to see that they haven’t yet.’
‘Oh!’ said the Careers Officer, pleasantly surprised. ‘Clerical errors do sometimes occur, of course. So what did you actually get?’
‘A first,’ said Robert. ‘A starred first, in fact.’
‘Congratulations! But,’ and the Careers Officer’s beaming face fell momentarily. ‘But then why does it say 2:2 on your computer record?’
‘It’s an interesting story actually,’ said Robert, smoothly. ‘According to the Chair of Examiners, with whom I’ve discussed the whole matter, it’s all down to a simple mishearing. There was a certain amount of celebration going on in the background, you see, high spirits and everything after the end of exams. People were drinking, dancing, singing songs; and one person - now, this is the crucial detail – had got hold of a ‘Mr Toad® Brand Comedy Horn’, and was blasting off with this from time to time. By unfortunate coincidence, this horn was sounded just as the Head of Department’s secretary was dictating the list of final grades to the Academic Administrator. She said “Robert Donglan, Starred First” and the toot-toot of the comedy horn drowned out the last two words, becoming thereby inadvertently transferred into my official record. It’s like,’ Robert continued, ‘the opening sequence of Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. Do you know it?’
‘No,’ said the Careers Officer. ‘Is it good?’
‘Terribly good. But more importantly, it is relevant to the present circumstance. If you could just correct the computer record from your terminal . . .’
The Careers Officer shrugged, but made the correction. ‘Well I must say,’ he said as he typed in the password and tapped at the cursor keys to overtype ‘starred 1st’ in the box which previously contained the legend ‘2:2’, ‘I must say this is excellent news. I wa
s going to suggest a career in retail. But with a starred first, all sorts of other possibilities are available to you. Have you considered a PhD?’
Robert gladly embraced the prospect of three further years lying on a couch watching television and consuming pork scratchings. Indeed, he toyed with the notion of shifting snack-allegiance to something more challenging: hand-cooked ‘sea-salt and balsamic vinegar’ deluxe crisps, for instance.
And that’s what he did. He began studying for a PhD in Modern Critical Theory. His supervisor was too busy jetting around the world to conferences on various exciting developments in the de-ontological metaphysics of the text to pay much attention to him. He registered for a thesis in ‘Zizekian libidinal economies in post-Althusserian textual aporia’, and then did nothing further until a few months before submission was due. Then, acting on a tip from a fellow and equally indolent PhD student, he generated his thesis by adopting the following practice: he went online and downloaded eighty-thousand words of German Philosophy in the original German. Then he put this text through an English spell-checker, randomly adopting the programme’s suggestions for English words and thereby producing a text full of words proximate to the German ones in spelling, although often radically different in meaning. Then he divided this block of challengingly-syntaxed text into twelve chapters, cut-and-pasted the titles of eleven Zizek and three Althusser monographs randomly through the whole. This took him one afternoon. Printing it out and getting it bound took another two days. Then he went back to his couch.
By the time of his PhD viva, Donglan himself had slimmed down considerably from his undergraduate days, the result of a fortuitous combination of (a) discovering that he didn’t like hand-cooked ‘sea-salt and balsamic vinegar’ deluxe crisps as much as he liked pork scratchings, and (b) the fact that he was too idle to get off the couch and go buy any of the latter. He bought a suit from Oxfam and responded to questions by nodding slowly and forming his eyebrows into ‘~~’ shapes, before repeating a portion of the question back at the questioner in a very slow voice, rounded off with a ‘yes, but we must not forget what Spinoza says regarding this’. The external examiner praised the dense, penetrating nature of Donglan’s engagement with poststructuralist thought.
It was also relatively easy for him to get a job. He applied for a post teaching the thought of Jacques Derrida and modern critical theory. His suggestion, at interview, that he base his teaching on ‘anagrammatology’ was the result of his feeble memory struggling to recall the title of the one Derrida book he had heard of. But the interview panel were very excited by this new development in Derridean thought, and gave him the job. Since then it had been a simple matter of the teacher’s Golden Strategy for masking ignorance: make the students do all the work.
But now! Now, for the first time in his life, Donglan was falling in love. Here was a beautiful woman, a no-nonsense, high-flying, power-dressing woman redolent of Frenchiness in all the best sense of that word . . . and she was interested in him! There was a chance! But—
But—
But – she believed him to be something he was not. She thought he actually possessed the finest critical brain in London. But he was a fraud! He had arrived at that position through no personal merit whatsoever. Could he keep up the pretence? Or would it be better to tell her the truth . . . to reveal all. But if he did so, would the love in her heart enable her to forgive him? Or would she spurn him as a spurnworthy thing? What should he do? Oh the dilemma! The terrible dilemma! It was more than a dilemma – a trilemma. Or a dilem-Pa. No, that’s a bit sexist, isn’t it. I’m going to stick with trilemma.
19
‘Here’s something!’ cried Teabag. Robert was yanked abruptly back from his reverie, and his italicised memories of the past. ‘I say, you two, I’ve found something!’
‘What?’ cried Sophie. ‘What do you have?’
‘Here . . . it’s a piece of paper with your name on it, Ms Nudivue.’
‘Let me see!’
But it was Robert, who happened to be closer to Teabag, who got first glimpse. ‘This is odd,’ he said, as Sophie waded through snowdriftlike paper to get to him. ‘It’s a print-out of a computer record. That’s your name, Sophie, and that’s your picture. But this describes you as a Computer Technician First Class in the Swiss-based multinational Geneticon. That can’t be right, can it?’
‘Another one of my undercover identities,’ Sophie explained. ‘I am convinced that Geneticon is deeply involved in the great mystery, one more high-tech front for the Conspiratus Opi Dei.’
‘And are they?’
‘My suspicions remain, although my actual investigations were inconclusive.’
‘Do you mean unconclusive?’ Robert asked.
‘Isn’t that the same thing?’
‘Non-conclusive?’ suggested Teabag, a sheaf of papers in his hands.
‘Or is it disconclusive?’ Robert suggested.
‘I worked there for six months before my cover was blown,’ said Sophie. ‘In that time I became more and more convinced that not only Geneticon, but all the world’s major computing industries are front organisations for the Conspiratus.’
‘By golly!’ exclaimed Teabag. ‘I knew it! Computers are the devil’s microwaves . . . but if the Conspiratus is truly the secret power behind all computing on this planet then the implications are terrifying . . .’
‘I agree,’ said Sophie. ‘Pretty much every home has a computer now; the majority of the globe is connected to the world wide web. Any organisation at the centre of that web would be in a position of almost unimaginable power . . .’
‘Deconclusive,’ Robert tried. ‘Anticonclusive. None of these sound right. I tell you what, perhaps we’re coming at this from the wrong angle. Perhaps the opposite of conclusive is something like “clusive”. What do you reckon? It might be one of those English words that exists but isn’t used too often, like delible or domitable. Or sipid. I mean, shouldn’t the opposite of insipid be sipid? Don’t you think?’
Sophie and Teabag were looking at him in a strange way.
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ he asked.
‘What,’ asked Sophie, ‘are you on about? We can’t hang about. We’ve got to find the clue that will lead us to the Mona Eda – and perhaps to the Holy Grail itself.’
‘Right,’ said Robert, stuffing the printout into his jacket pocket. ‘Clue, yes.’
‘It seems to me,’ said Teabag, dropping the papers in his hand to join the pile on the floor, ‘that the assassin has been through this office pretty thoroughly. I don’t think we’ll find anything in here to help us.’
‘If only,’ Sophie fretted, ‘if only we could decipher this strange rebus with the 9 and the seeing eye that Jacques wrote on the mural!’
She stepped out of the office and into the hallway to look again at the strange message scrawled on the hairdo of Christ. Teabag and Robert followed her out.
20
‘It’s handsome, ain’t it?’ observed Sir Herbert Teabag, taking in the whole of the reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper with a sweep of his hand. ‘I was admiring it last month, when I paid Jacques a visit. He said he’d had to stump up for it out of his own pocket, since the Gallery wouldn’t cover the cost of something nobody but the officer workers down here would see. But he didn’t mind. He said the Last Supper was his favourite Da Vinci picture, and that it gladdened his heart to see this perfect copy of it every day, coming into work.’
Sophie was examining the mural in detail by putting her face close to the wall. As she looked at the lower elements of the composition this necessitated her bending forward. Robert was prepared to admit that the image was very attractive; but refused to concede that it was in any way as attractive as the sight of Sophie bending forward.
‘D’you know what?’ said Teabag, scratching his head. ‘I asked him who’d he got in to do the painting . . . it’s such fine and detailed work, you see. Not your regular painter and decorator quality. But he wouldn’t t
ell me! Said it was a secret.’
‘Eh?’ said Sophie, standing up, to Robert’s chagrin. ‘What did you say? Did you say secret?’
‘Yes.’
‘But that’s fascinating . . . because there are a number of crucial differences between this reproduction and the original in Santa Maria della Grazie. Look at the table.’
They all looked at the table.
‘Loaves and fishes,’ said Robert. ‘That looks about right, doesn’t it?’
‘Well, for one thing the loaves and the fishes come from a different part of the New Testament,’ said Sophie. ‘That’s the feeding of the five thousand, in Mark, Chapter 8. Not the Last Supper. And for another thing, if my memory serves me, there’s only one fish in the original fresco, in the plate before Christ. I count nine fish on this table . . . and they’re all different sorts of fish. Herring, monkfish, carp, sardine, pirhana.’
She looked again at the symbols written in blood.
Robert put his face close to the wall to look at the fishes, but overbalanced and smacked the bridge of his nose against the plaster. It made a dull, squelchy but very audible thud. ‘Ow!’ he said, standing up. ‘Ah! Ow!’
‘I have it,’ cried Sophie.
‘You have?’ calloo-callayed a delighted Teabag.
‘It is so obvious! Not to an ordinary eye, of course; but to somebody trained in the ways of the oblique rebus.’ She turned to Robert. ‘Don’t you see? It’s the theta that gives it away:’9 Θ ?
‘Of course,’ said Robert, uncertainly, rubbing his nose. ‘Gives it away. Yes.’
‘You see - don’t you? Now that I’ve given you that hint?’
Robert decided at that very moment, as his nose tingled unpleasantly and the electric light shone off the mural, to level with Sophie: to tell her the truth. Perhaps she would respect his honesty. ‘Look, I think there’s been a general over-estimation of my abilities as a code-cracker,’ he said, rubbing his throbbing nose. ‘I wouldn’t so much as know what a theta was, not if it came up and thwacked me on the thigh.’