by Will Self
Cubist irrealism: all glassy block-jaws and compound eyes that
then shatter in the rifle’s flash. The Butcher observes this – and
recognises a phenomenon he first witnessed at Langley three or four
years ago, when he and Colin were given a demonstration of the
Friends’ latest box of delights: operations coordinated and conducted
using pinpoint-accurate satellite locations to obtain audio-visual
take from multiple sources, so enabling real-time remote-control of
the man on the ground. A little revolted – but mostly fascinated,
the Butcher and the then Chief had watched on a monitor, which
was directly connected to a camera mounted on the operative’s body
armour, as he’d stalked along Beirut back alleys. The experience
had been uncanny: ducking beneath rusting fire escapes festooned
with laundry, scampering across cluttered courtyards, turning to
the right and the left, then sliding down and around a shattered
staircase, at the bottom of which the bed-head of some Mohammed
or other who’d crossed the Agency had been turned to … mush.
As he recalls, the SeeEyeAy man who made the kill was cracking
open a can of Mountain Dew as he told the shooter where to
aim … where to fire. To the player, whether he be a twelve-year-old
soldier of fortune in Hampstead or a middle-aged spook in Virginia,
the illusion remained the same: you appeared to be making
definite progress – moving forward, scoring points and so acquiring
additional powers. But the truth was you were completely and
Medievally static – as static as the warm body you’d abandoned,
slumped in a chair. It was the virtual world which revolved around
these digi-bodies, not vice versa: a turmoil of zeroes and ones,
forming and reforming an ever receding middle ground of mud-brick
walls, mosquito-infested puddles, corrugated-iron roofs and
unemployed young men. Oh, I dunno, Vron, the Butcher says,
tightening his arm in hers in a way he hopes she finds … affectionate?
Boys will be boys and all that jazz. When I was a boy, my brothers
and I were pretty damn blood-thirsty – constant diet of war films
and comics. Only diff’ was we had to use our imagination –
but does that really make it any better? Y’know … in my mind’s
eye, Vron, the butchery I carried out was a great deal more realistic
than this … Vron peers at the Butcher a little oddly – and he
knows she’s recollecting the story told about him at Oxford: how
during Freshers’ Week he’d joined his college’s vegetarian society
and invited its members to meet in his rooms, where he’d prepared a
colossal fry-up for them – lashings of rashers, chains of interlinked
sausages, slices of greasily gleaming black pudding and two or three
bulbous kidneys. The spectacle had caused them to … flee – pissing
themselves. The nickname subsequently bestowed on him was fairly
predictable … although, as they wheel round once more and clack
back across the parquet, he does wonder: Has Baldwin been
saying things to her? Saying – or merely twittering? They’ve entered
an aviary … full of Tories: a bright and overwhelmingly floral
room – floor and wall coverings both – furnished with large soft
sofas and chairs, and equipped with a baby grand upon which are
silver-framed photographs of family, friends and the more famous
politicos … he wishes were his friends. There are vases of late
daffodils and early irises poised on occasional tables, and, as they
advance between them, the Butcher searches the faces that open up
to him – Hi, Jonathan … Jonathan – what’s the news, old chap?
D’you know Jonathan De’Ath? – for any indication of … consciousness.
At the old Lubyanka, where tea ladies in nylon housecoats
pushed their trolleys along strip-lit corridors over dun carpeting,
past despairing pot plants and beneath disintegrating ceiling tiles,
the scene was so dispiritingly anonymous it had been difficult to
visualise the building at all – unless you were actually standing on
the scuffed linoleum floor of the reception area. For EyeBee officers
of the Butcher’s generation, who’d joined the Firm when post-Philby
paranoia remained rife … Kall-me-Kim, the Kommie Kunt
wore brown suede shoes – keweedee all brown-suede-shoe-wearers are
Kommie Kunts, and London was played by Moscow Rules, there
was a degree of security to be gained by this fact alone: their own
offices were so woefully under-imagined they were impossible
to surveil – whether with the mind’s eye or a sub-miniature Minox.
But now … ? Well, since the Service’s public avowal, courtesy of
the Currie-stirrer, the fish-eye lens had been inverted, so, children
that we undoubtedly are … with our Secret Sam briefcases and
bottles of invisible ink, we hide in plain view – although remaining
exiguous … a distortion in full sunlight … a spinning sphincter
implanted in the smooth screen-skin –. How’re you, Jonathan? says
an … affectionate? voice, issuing from a corn plaster the Butcher
peels off, exposing the pink face of … that pinko one (Who’s always
banging on about civil liberties …) and has been demob-happy since
ninety-seven – ‘though I’ve heard he’s a weekend warrior. – Not too
bad, David, you? Then the politician does an unexpected thing –
rising from his flowery chair, he takes the Butcher’s arm and
leads him through the open French windows and into the garden.
A series of red-brick terraces descend to an oblong ornamental
pond covered in water lilies. Beyond this rhododendrons screen off
the garden below – for the hillside falls away sharply here, while,
from the Baldwins’ peak perspective … Nick must be minted –
this place has to be worth five mil’ and rising, the Butcher can gaze
right out over North-West London, all the way to the leafy streets
surrounding Shoot-Up Hill. What a perfect day, David says,
and the Butcher agrees: Yes, such clarity – I feel I might look into
the soul of Kilburn. David darts him an odd look, then gestures
with his flute: Not drinking, Jonathan? They’ve gained the edge
of the first terrace and the Butcher peers down at his handmade
Franceschetti loafers and shuffles them a little (Nice sheen!): Bit of
a flap on at the office – prob’ly have to go in later … Better keep
a clear head … The politician perks up – and when the Butcher
gets out his cigarettes and offers them, takes one, then a light,
before striking a macho little pose with this prop and saying, Oh,
yes, the office – you mean VeeBeeArr, don’t you? David has the
look they always do: eyes clenching into knuckles, which in turn
deliver the lightest knock on the door of … hell’s darkest chamber.
The Butcher smiles tightly – but says nothing, only puffs away,
thinking of how newcomers to London – natives and long-term
residents as well – cannot help but think of the Thames as a straight
line, and so are repeatedly surprised by the way the solid bastions of
the North Bank – Saint Paul’s, for
example – suddenly up foundations
and, trailing their … cold stone skirts, step over its chilly waters.
This grand optical illusion is particularly evident when the Butcher
goes out on to the terrace of the Aztec Camera, escaping the airlessness
of his office to breathe in a cigarette. From this vantage, the
channel separating VeeBeeArr, Tintagel and Camelot houses from
the Tate Gallery, Millbank Tower and Thames House … where
the EmmEyeFive plods swing their limp dicks appears ruled straight
by Victorian masons. No wonder, he’s often mused, the British
political class, despite our numerous betrayals, continues to place
such trust in its intelligence services. Any former imperial power
will have – in the modern idiom – abandonment issues, but
we spooks aren’t going anywhere: Here we are … right beside
them, hiding in plain view, and perfectly located for upstream data
collection … As it is with the buildings – so it is with their denizens,
who constantly cross over from one side to the other of this, the most
deceptive bend in the world … Taking the Butcher’s abstracted
silence for clamorous engagement, David remarks, I’m just back
from Saudi … then goes on to recount how … he walked in marble
halls, while the Baldwins’ other guests nose out from the French
windows, lowing hungrily about the roast to come: When all’s said
and done, I’m perfectly happy with chicken … David – perhaps
make-believing he’s in the field – goes sotto, so his tale of a furtive
princeling, beckoning him away from the Potemkin progress of the
trade delegation, becomes compressed to the width of a news-thread
which unrolls between them: I’mnotsayingthere’sanythingdefinite
therebuthemadeitprettycleartomehe’dbeinterestedinworkingwithus
ObviouslyIunderstandabout … andsaidnothingtoindicateIwasany-thingotherthanwhatIappearedtobe
… As the EmPee rattles on,
the Butcher allows some warmth to enter his expression – albeit his
mind remains, as ever, coldly calculating: What’re such assets
actually worth? Fuck-all, really. I’ve seen ’em all and done ’em all
myself … There’re so many of these princelings, swirling about in
the cloacal confines of the court-cum-seraglio – they bob about in
there, slathered in the shit-and-piss of their kickbacks and corruption,
and if you ever try and catch one of ’em by his toe – (He hollers,
I’m the PeeEmm’s son! So you have to let ‘im go!). So to David
he says, Well, that is, ah, interesting – I’ll certainly mention it to
some people who may be … ah, interested. The EmPee looks a bit
deflated and shuffles his desert boots on the suburban terrace. The
Butcher considers the many solecisms David embodies – where to
start? Surely with this screamed admonition: Never, ever, ever …
BROWN IN TOWN! But then it’s the baby-boomers who’ve their
fingers on the brass buttons now. He remembers being in Kosovo
with Dick, who was then head of the Eastern Europe Controllerate.
They’d watched the Great Liberator going walkabout in a crowd of
natives, sporting the same black Levis as this one, together with a
red shirt thrifty Cherie prob’ly bought for him at fucking Millets …
Watching him bend his smiling, beautifully orangish face to their
frowning hairy brownish ones, Dick had said, We’ll wait ‘til he’s
had his fill, then we’ll tell him they’re all his enemies … Confident
words, spoken cramped up in a whited-out Warrior with YouEnn
painted on its turret – assertions they were more than able to back
up with the contents of the buff folders they’d brought with them.
The Butcher remembers also, how, as TeeBee flicked through the
pages, Dick grew giddy seeing the application of the secret cog to
the political drive-shaft … ahh, the old in-and-out. – The Filipina
reappears bearing a plate covered with little filou-pastry parcels.
What’s in these, please … ? But before David has an answer he’s
popped one … two into his mouth, and positioned a third on his
meaty palm. Vron, who comes fussing along behind her maid,
says, Honestly, David, you won’t have any room for lunch … And
he offers up: But these look too scrumptious, Veronica – besides,
I’m utterly famished. Well, she titters nervously? You can blame
Jonathan for that – took him forever to chop up a few cloves of
garlic … She looks to the Butcher for ruefulness? but he’s yards
away – an iridescent dragonfly, flitting over the lilyscape – then
miles … While the new Chief had sat cosseted by Cumming’s
clocks, the Butcher had stood at the window looking down at
the deceptive river, and remembering the previous year, when the
great Ferris wheel had been borne upstream on tugs in prefabricated
sections, then assembled and oh-so-slowly winched upright. For
at least a day it was set at a forty-five degree angle, its massive
clockface … gushing time: a mighty flow of hours and days,
swirling past TeeBee’s tit, Canary Dwarf – and all the other terrorist
targets – and out into the sea of forgetting. Thing is … Dick had
spoken to the hands massaging the Butcher’s tender kidneys …
I mean to say – well, I hope … The Butcher rounded on him:
You don’t seriously imagine I thought I was in contention? There
was then some fountain-pen fiddling – so the Butcher went on,
quite recklessly: For Christ’s sake, Dick, I know what people say –
I know what people would think. No … he’d dropped down into
cockney … I know my place. There’d been restrained laughter at
this, and the Butcher considered then – reconsiders now – how the
mores of the secret world are really an extreme intensification
of the reticence, obfuscation and well-schooled evasiveness the
English upper-middle classes think of as … good manners. Manners
only intensified by the spooks’ tendency towards selective breeding.
All those colonels’ daughters, whinnying and whickering – bucking,
snorting, ramping and curveting, their jodhpurs and hacking
jackets cast aside, before whinnying some more – until they hand
over a leisurely composed note, on a piece of pale yellow notepaper,
decorated with a single drooping primrose, which reads: I think I’m
going to come … But Dick sees Jonathan run – Dick knows Jonathan
likes dick … Dick can still remember the fag hunts of the late seventies,
when swishy-swashy, swishy-swashy … they swept through
the Intelligence Branch: Dick was trying to tell him times have
changed … trying to flush me out … The Butcher was having none
of it – he waited the moment out: he was to be sidelined – that
much was clear. And why not? Another round of cuts was hacking
dead and live wood alike from the decision tree, it being so very
hard to convince the Exchequer that the bearded weirdos and
Turkish smack-runners represented quite the same existential threat
as the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Thing is … Well, the thing is …
Dick had eventually stuttered into life … I mean, the sort of thing
you do at the moment … sort of troubleshooting, really – going
into a station … a whole section as well, and sort of sorting it out.
Well, I thought –. – You wondered whether I’d be prepared to keep
on with it, now you’ve taken the helm? – Yes, yes … that’s right.
Would you, Jonathan? Would you do … just … that? And the
Butcher, staring across at the Tate Gallery, but seeing only Kins’s
scraggy saggy unshaven RED face staring back at him from the
lead-reinforced glass, had thought, What the hell, one more roll of
the dice … Dick had then told him about the Chargé d’Affaires
attached to the Iranian delegation in Geneva: Might be bugger all,
but we’ve reason to believe he’s one of Younesi’s. Claims he’s an asset
well placed to source intel’ on Saddam’s doubleyouemmdees. I’d
really rather it was you who went over and met with him – you’ve
some Farsi, haven’t you? It’s not that I don’t have confidence in
Roger, or his people, it’s just … At this the Butcher turned from
the window to confront the man (You must, perforce, call your line
manager). Fair enough, Dick, I’ll sort out some fig-leaf cover with
Requirements and get over there in a week or so – but if you’re
expecting me to play pat-a-cake with this stuff, put it in an acceptable
shape for the PeeEm’s bag-man, I’m not playing ball. I won’t
bypass the usual analysts, and I’m not going messing about with
long-established sources – some of whom I recruited myself …
Given the circumstances, this had been about as pale and yellow a
note as he could manage. Vron Baldwin has gone. David stands
with that stupid, puppyish expression on his face they all have:
those loyal dogs, waiting for their scraps of clandestine preferment.
The Butcher toys with telling him what happened to the last EmPee
the Firm ran – because it does happen, although very rarely, and
only in collusion with the more paranoid prime ministers. He’d
been useful enough for a while – reasonable product on the Serbs
around Milošević. Then it all got a bit tainted, and the Butcher had
taken a rather proactive role, working closely with the officers faking
photographs, receipts and bookings. He’d shared just a soupçon
of his intimate knowledge of London’s nethermost portions. The