Doctor Criminale

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘Bon,’ said Villeneuve, ‘And now, Mam’selle Bruckner, may I take just a moment of your excellent time? Tomorrow morn­ing, would you kindly visit my office? I have been reading your papers on this certain fraud matter, you know? Evidently you have conducted investigations with your customary astuteness.’ Thank you,’ said Cosima. ‘There are just one or two small problems,’ said Villeneuve, ‘These matters are serious, but we must not allow anything to threaten our relations with our good Eastern European friends, who cry out so loudly to join us one day soon.’ ‘I understand, Monsieur Villeneuve,’ said Cosima Bruckner. ‘Well, I must keep the Romanian President waiting no longer,’ said Villeneuve, ‘Enchanté, Monsieur Jay. Ten o’clock tomorrow, Mam’selle Bruckner.’

  We walked out into the floodlit Grand’ Place; Cosima waved for a taxi. ‘And what do you think to my boss?’ she asked. ‘Quite an idealist,’ I said. ‘If you think Caligula was an idealist, Machiavelli an idealist,’ said Cosima, This man wants the whole world in his hands. When he talks of the Great Super-Europe, you can know there is something in it for him.’ ‘You mean a role in history?’ I asked. ‘Or perhaps a roll in the bank,’ said Cosima. A taxi came over; we got in the back, and Cosima said something to the driver. Then she said: ‘So you didn’t see who was with him at his table?’ The Romanian President?’ I asked. ‘Maybe,’ said Cosima, ‘But also someone else you know a little better. Professor Monza.’ The Prince of Announcements?’ I asked, surprised, ‘What was he doing there?’ ‘Evidently he knows my boss,’ said Cosima, as we drove out of the brightly lit Grand’ Place, ‘I tell you, Villeneuve is not what he seems.’ ‘You’re not saying the Deputy-President of the European Community is a part of it, surely,’ I said. ‘A part of what?’ asked Cosima Bruckner.

  *

  This perhaps explains why, twenty minutes later, as I ascended an elevator to the top of some expensive apartment block, evidently on one of Brussels’s better residential districts, I was in a somewhat confused state of mind. I was bewildered by what Cosima had told me: how much of it was true? All of it? Some of it? None of it? Exposure to the ambitions of Super-Europe seemed to have given her an extraordinary taste for scandal. The events of the entire evening had moved far too fast’for me. I was in the state I think scientists call redundancy: an excess of messages and signals, a superfluity of mixed information. It didn’t help that I’d drunk quite a litreage of the best champagne, finest Sauvignon and most pungent Armagnac modern European viticulture could offer, that my own small unit of Ildiko’s possible billions had come close to being uncovered, that even the Berlaymont seemed a part of it now.

  This is very nice,’ I observed, looking round the elevator, carpeted not only on its floor but its walls and ceiling. This is very nice too, where are we?’ I asked, as we stepped from the elevator into a large, plant-filled lobby. A fire extinguisher I leaned against for support while Cosima felt for keys fell off the wall, for some reason. ‘Please be quiet,’ said Cosima, ‘My neighbours are very bourgeois.’ ‘Your neighbours?’ I asked, This is your apartment?’ ‘Please, this is no place to discuss deeds of property,’ said Cosima, unlocking some door. ‘It’s really kind to bring me back to your apartment at this time of night,’ I said. Another door opened nearby and someone stared furiously out. ‘Come inside, you do not know who is listening,’ said Cosima. As I’ve said, it was curious how, when Cosima instructed, one always obeyed.

  The apartment we entered was large and fine, with a wonder­ful view of the lighted domes of Brussels, but it was also clear that Cosima led a somewhat ascetic existence. The living-room was lined with bookless bookshelves and random prints. There was a wide sofa, a coffee-table stacked with files. The kitchenette was filled with compact, colourless German appliances, the bedroom had one large mattress laid across the floor. ‘Excuse me, this is not so tidy for you,’ said Cosima, shifting files and papers, ‘I did not really expect if to expect you.’ ‘The Prince of Announcements?’ I asked. ‘Bitte?’ ‘Monza was really in the restaurant?’ ‘You didn’t see?’ asked Cosima, removing a vacuum cleaner from a very tidy broom cupboard, ‘Monza is a friend of Villeneuve, and Codicil is a friend of Monza. I suppose they are all masons together, something like that.’

  She began hoovering the apartment furiously. ‘So what does it mean?’ I called, ‘Look, there’s no need to start doing housework now.’ ‘It means when I go to his office on floor thirteen tomorrow, he will wave my report and say it is fine,’ cried Cosima, bitterly, ‘However we must not stain the destiny of the New Europe, ruin our Ostpolitik. And so the destiny of the New Europe will be the same as the destiny of the Old Europe, I think, don’t you?’ ‘Turn that off,’ I said. ‘The files I have worked on for two years will disappear,’ shouted Cosima, ‘Codicil will be released and go back to Vienna to his students.’ ‘If he can find them,’ I said. ‘Lift up your feet, please,’ said Cosima, ‘And so it will go on, and on. The old men will remain, in new hats. The young ones will learn the same lesson. The nomenklatura will live on forever. Lift up your feet again.’

  ‘Cosima, turn that off,’ I said. ‘And I will get a nice congratu­lation for my investigations, and they will move me elsewhere,’ said Cosima, ‘Maybe the Beef Mountain, where I can do less harm. Well, I tell you this, I hate the Beef Mountain. I shit on the Beef Mountain.’ ‘Cosima, calm down,’ I said, holding her ‘Look, the place is fine, I’ve never seen a cleaner apartment. Why all this?’ ‘Because if we are going to bed together I like my place to be really nice for you,’ said Cosima. ‘What did you say?’ I asked, ‘Turn it off, Cosima.’ ‘I said, I like my place to be really nice for you,’ said Cosima, switching off the machine. ‘The conditional clause,’ I said. ‘Our bed together?’ asked Cosima ‘Maybe you don’t like to. There is the sofa also, I will tidy it for you.’

  ‘Come here a minute, Cosima,’ I said, ‘Do you mean you’d like to?’ ‘Didn’t you know it all the time?’ ‘I told you,’ I said, ‘I don’t know anything.’ ‘But that is why I really followed you at Barolo,’ said Cosima. ‘No, that was Criminale,’ I said. Then I was not interested in Criminale,’ said Cosima, ‘It was Monza. Because he was a friend of Villeneuve. I followed Criminale because you did. And because you lied about your newspaper and because I liked to be with you. But all the time you were with the Hungarian agent, except on the night of the storm. I checked on her, of course. You know she went to Cano to meet Codicil?’ ‘She did? Why?’ I asked. ‘He wanted her to help him to those accounts,’ said Cosima. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Perhaps you’re right. Our stories have more in common than I realized.’ ‘Please, I tidy the bedroom,’ said Cosima. The bedroom,’ I said, ‘looks great as it is.’

  As far as what then did or did not happen during the rest of my visit to Brussels, I am, as it happens, prepared to say nothing at all. My reasons are roughly as follows. Not much later, I hap­pened to be lying on a mattress in a stripped, bare, uncurtained, perfectly tidy bedroom somewhere above the bright illuminated domes of Brussels. A bathroom door opened close by; in a shaft of light stood Cosima Bruckner, shower-wet where before she had been dry, unveiled where before she had been veiled. Her dark hair was up; there was a gold chain round her neck; she came and stood splendid, shy, in front of me. ‘Francis,’ she said, looking down at me, ‘Do you realize there are at least four hundred and fifty unidentified Stasi agents still working in the Western governments?’ ‘Don’t say a thing, Cosima,’ I said, ‘Just come here.’ ‘You really promise me something?’ asked Cosima. ‘I’m sure I do,’ I said. ‘If anything happens in this room, you will say nothing to anyone?’ asked Cosima, ‘It is between us only?’ ‘Definitely,’ I said, ‘This meeting does not take place.’

  As a result of that promise, no more of this scene (and who says it occurred anyway?) can be reported. In any case, the fact is that most sex in stories is only for the children anyway. Adults know perfectly well what happens in such cases, when anything happens at all. There is ordinariness, and something exceptional. There is
talk, there is silence. There is pleasure, there is disap­pointment. There is attachment, there is separateness. There is self, and loss of it. There is thought, there is rest. There is being, there is nothingness. There is the room here, the bigger world out there. There is growing up, and staying the same. These are issues the philosophers usually discuss for us, or they did when we had any. And if they have trouble with such matters, why should I or anyone else do better? In any case, surely, even in this tolerant, permissive, late, liberal, over-investigated world of ours, we all have a right to occasional silence. And if there is Heidegger’s silence, and Criminale’s silence, who can object, for once, to Jay’s silence?

  So that’s really that. But there is one last item from my brief visit to Brussels that deserves a mention. The next morning, outside an expensive apartment block not unlike the one referred to earlier, you might have observed Cosima Bruckner, in her black trousers again, standing on the pavement as I was about to enter a taxi destined for Zaventem airport. ‘You will really write nothing?’ she was saying. ‘I don’t think I will,’ I said, ‘For me he’s still a great man. He’s the elephant, the others are just fleas. Appendixes, footnotes. And he’s suffered quite enough. Gertla’s after his reputation, the others have taken all his money.’ ‘You may be right about his reputation,’ said Cosima, ‘I think you don’t worry too much about his money. I am sure his rich girl-friend will not let Criminale starve.’

  I had just got into the back seat; I wound down the window. ‘You mean Miss Belli?’ I asked, ‘She’s rich and powerful as well as everything else?’ ‘Of course not Miss Belli,’ said Cosima, ‘She was just the assistant of the Prince of Announcements, there to get him to the bank.’ ‘But he ran away to Lausanne to be with her,’ I said. ‘No,’ said Cosima, ‘Don’t you know who was really waiting there at the Beau Rivage Palace?’ ‘No idea, Cosima,’ I said. ‘Mrs Valeria Magno,’ said Cosima, ‘She flew her jet down there and they went off to India together.’ The time was logged quite precisely,’ I said. ‘Of course,’ said Cosima, ‘I think they have been lovers for years.’ ‘You’re wonderful, Cosima,’ I said. She touched her lips to mine. ‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘Good luck with Villeneuve,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so,’ said Cosima, ‘I think I will have a different job soon. But do you still promise to call me if you ever find anything out?’ ‘Definitely,’ I said. Then the taxi pulled away and I set off for the airport, knowing at last I had not another thing to say on the whole strange affair of Bazlo Criminale.

  16

  That should have been the end of the story of Criminale . . .

  And that ought really to have been that – the end of the story of Bazlo Criminale. But of course if it were I should not have been writing this at all, and by the same token you would not have been reading it either. So what happened? Well, as it happens, just a few more small things, rather chaotic in nature, that did change the situation quite considerably. Soon after my Brussels trip, and in the confused and nonsensical midsummer of 1991, I moved over to work on the Sunday Times, a much more suitable home for those articles that connect everything up with everything else – art with money, sex with style, who’s in with what’s in – in which I was now beginning to specialize. Just a few weeks later there took place in Southern, Swabian Germany, the natural home for this sort of thing, a high-powered international seminar rather ambiguously entitled ‘The Death of Postmodernism: New Beginnings’. The event was to unfold at some small, upmarket archducal hunting lodge near Schlossburg, a spa town that was once the summer home of the Archdukes of Wurttemberg, in the days when Germany had been a series of federal principalities, or in other words an early European Community.

  This captured the eye of my style editor, a very smart-thinking girl from Oxford and Cardiff who was shocked to her cleavage to discover that a whole major movement in art style and culture had been born, had flourished, and had now apparently dropped dead while she’d been keeping her eye on the fringe events of the Edinburgh Festival and the sex-life of the Royals. She wandered over to my desk in my yet more open open-plan office to consult me about it. She had attended some party the night before where someone – I believe it was Richard Rogers yet again – had told her that Postmodernism, or Po-Mo as he called it, had been in for some time and she had Better get into it before it was entirely out. As a result, she had conceived the exciting notion of an entire Po-Mo supplement, and she wanted to know if an article on the Schlossburg Seminar would make suitable fodder.

  I glanced down the programme, and saw at once that it was an unmissable event. From all over Eastern Europe, writers, scholars and intellectuals, deprived for four decades of access to parody, pastiche, blank irony, narrative indeterminacy, new history, chaos theory, and late modern depthlessness, were being invited to make up the time-lag. Various far-sighted German industrial foundations, like Mercedes and Bosch, had put up the money to bring them to Schlossburg. Several of the great American postmodern writers, like John Barth and William Gass, Raymond Federman and Ihab Hassan, were to be hefted onto the virtual reality of transatlantic flights and brought in to lecture to them. Various leading European intellectuals and deconstructive thinkers would also come in to give lectures. One of these was none other than Professor Henri Mensonge, world-famous deconstructionist from the University of Paris XIII, famous for never making any personal appearances. Yet even Mensonge had consented to speak, on the topic of the Totally Deconstructed Self. It would be a remarkable occasion.

  So when my style editor asked if it was all worth an article, I quickly said yes. I should have known better; by now I was older, wiser, indeed cleaner, and above all, during my quest for Criminale, I had had a glut of foreign conferences. But sure enough, two days later, I found myself strapped in at twenty thousand feet, complimentary g-and-t in one hand, on Lufthansa to Stuttgart, the nearest point of access to Schlossburg, with two thousand words of sparkle to write on the topic of What Happened to Po-Mo. And it was then, only then, that I had time to look at the Schlossburg programme properly: then that I saw I had overlooked the name of one of the great intellectual figures who was flying in to give a single keynote lecture. It will not surprise you in the least – though it did me – to learn that this was Doctor Bazlo Criminale.

  I checked again; his name was definitely there. My heart sank; I had no wish, no wish at all, to meet the great man again. I was through and right out the other side of the quest for Bazlo Criminale. The evening (possibly more, but who knows?) I had spent with Cosima Bruckner in Brussels had finally settled the matter. Great hero he might be; moral disappointment he definitely was. He might have been more sinned against than sinning, but I knew now he had sinned too. He had betrayed himself and others; what’s more, in doing that he had somehow obscurely betrayed me. I had started out suspecting him; I had come round to admiring and valuing him; now I saw him as tainted again. Despite that, I had maintained my vow of silence. I wrote nothing about him, and I wished to write nothing now.

  Each day when I opened the newspapers I half-expected to find something; new revelations, sudden exposures – the papers were full of that kind of thing. But there was nothing, except for more of those glitzy and somehow old-fashioned articles about how famous he was for his fame. Vanity Fair showed him as guest of honour at some thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner for the world’s starving, held at the Westin Bonaventure in LA; beside him, cloven down to the midriff, was Valeria Magno. I knew it would only be a matter of time before the big news came. Perhaps the great and the good, the rich and the powerful, the publishers and the proprietors, had decided to spare him; but they themselves were going down, one by one. Still, there was nothing either about Otto Codicil; some manage to look after their own. But I wanted no responsibility, no encounter; sitting up there in Europe’s crowded airways, I began planning ways of foreshortening my visit and so avoiding him. Then I realized this would simply be another of those truly flying visits in which he specialized. He would be here today and gone tomorrow, if not the s
ame night. If, like Ildiko in Lausanne, I remained in the background while he was in the foreground, he would not, in his famed philosophical abstraction, even recognize me. Reassured, I shifted my mind to a far more difficult late modern problem: unpackaging the shrinkwrapped airline food on the tray in my lap.

  Soon I was landing at Stuttgart, city of Schiller and Hegel, Mercedes-Benz and Bosch. A strange foetid heatwave had fallen across Southern Germany all that summer, no doubt thanks to the universal atmospheric pollution that was beginning to cloud the entire world. Car fumes flickered in the urban air, sticky heat hung in the pedestrianized streets, clothes filled with sweat. Following my brief, I crossed the city through its great squares and well-stocked commercial passages, and found my way to the famous postmodern Staatsgalerie (britische Architekt), James Sterling’s sloping sandstone building, a tease of hidden entrances and shifted hierarchies. A Malaysian bride in white, gown thrown high above her thighs, sat astride a Henry Moore statue for her nuptial photographs. Inside, where I hovered for a while in front of the frantic moderns, Nolde and Kirschner, wealth and art sat easily side by side. I talked to a reverential guide who explained to me that everything in the building was the quotation of a quotation, the pastiche of a pastiche, and then I went outside to find a taxi to take me to Schlossburg.

  It was a long, expensive ride, out of the booming post-industrial city and out into the Swabian countryside, but I was on expenses. Economic-miracle-unified Germany looked as economic-miracle-unified Germany does: very neat. The streets of Stuttgart, old and new locked firmly together, were neat. The new towns spreading out endlessly over the hillsides were neat. The grey concrete shopping centres rising everywhere were neat. The wealthy, solid Swabian villas were neat. The well-tilled fields were neat. The long strips of vineyard that descended down the steep banks of the River Neckar were definitely neat. The Autobahns were neat (and packed); the cars were neat (and expensive); the people were neat (and well-dressed). When I got to the small town of Schlossburg, with its great baroque palace and its formal French gardens, all was neat. And when I reached the Gothic romantischer hunting lodge on a craggy hill in wild woods over a deep cleft of river, even that wilderness was neat too.