Authors: Malcolm Bradbury
‘That’s what you mean by the Mystery of Criminale?’ asked Lavinia, ‘Thank God they didn’t read the damned thing. Now look, Francis, we have to have a better
mystery. That’s what they paid for, that’s what they’ll get. I want political deceptions. I want sexual betrayals, financial frauds, that kind of thing.’ ‘I
don’t know there are any,’ I said. ‘There’d better be,’ said Lavinia, ‘I want some.’ ‘Where from?’ I asked. ‘Find out from
Codicil,’ said Lavinia. ‘Why would Professor Codicil tell me anything like that?’ I asked, ‘He calls Criminale the greatest contemporary philosopher, the leader of modern
thought.’ ‘Darling, he’ll tell,’ said Lavinia, ‘They all tell. Just make him think you want him to be in the programme. Then he’ll tell you anything.’
‘Do you mean he won’t be on the programme?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know, till we’ve checked him properly,’ said Lavinia, ‘He may not speak good
English.’ ‘You could use subtitles,’ I said. ‘He may not even be telegenic,’ said Lavinia, ‘You can subtitle words, but you try subtitling his face. No, just go
there, talk to him, probe him, find an angle, get a story. And then you’d better get him to tell you where you can find Criminale.’ ‘You want me to go after Criminale too?’
I asked. ‘Maybe, if the budget runs to it,’ said Lavinia, ‘It’s very tight, don’t forget. And we have to shape the programme first. So find out where he is, and then
check back here with Ros.’ ‘With me?’ asked Ros, ‘I thought I was going to Vienna too?’ ‘Oh, no, darling, I need you to stay here with me and edit,’ said
Lavinia, ‘Oh look, taxi’s waiting. Good luck, Francis, and auf Wiedersehen, pets.’
‘That bitch, that bloody bitch,’ said Ros, ‘I just spent two nights in her bed and now she does this to me. Upstairs, Francis. If I’m not coming on this recce with you, I
want you to have something to remember me by.’ ‘Honestly, Ros, I’ve got lots to remember you by,’ I said, ‘And if I’m going away for a few days I ought to go
back to my flat and pack some things.’ ‘No you don’t,’ said Ros, ‘You can buy what you need at the airport in the morning. There are plenty of shops in the
concourse.’ ‘I always wondered what they were for,’ I said, ‘After all, not many people arrive naked at an airport.’ ‘You’re learning a lot, aren’t
you, Francis?’ asked Ros, ‘Come on, if this is our last night together for a bit we don’t want to waste time. Is there any more of the Frascati left?’ ‘No, there
isn’t, Ros,’ I said very wearily, ‘There’s only orange juice.’ ‘All right,’ said Ros, ‘Let’s try that.’
So that night before I set off for Vienna turned into a sleepless one, and for several reasons. Ros felt it necessary to give me a great deal to remember her by, but even when she slipped off
into sleep’s kind oblivion at last I still lay there restless. Sounds of Bengali floated up occasionally from the street at me; now and then Ros groaned in her sleep. Why, just why, was I
going off in quest of Bazlo Criminale? For, in the course of a hyperactive evening, something strange had plainly happened. Criminale had changed for me: no longer a text I had to decode, he had
switched into a person I had to follow. But why, when nothing at all linked us together? He was the giant, one of the great superpowers of modern thought; I was the Patagonian pygmy. He was the
Lukacs of the Nineties; I was an out-of-work journo. He was the modern master; I was the postmodern nobody in particular. He was the friend of the great and the good, or for that matter the big and
the bad: Bush and Honecker, Gorbachev and Castro, Kohl and Mao. Important philosophers like Sartre and Foucault and Rorty had bowed to him; great leaders had honoured him; it was even said that
Stalin (notoriously no respecter of persons or keeper of unwanted mementoes) had asked for his photograph. He was complex, confusing, contradictory. But why should I set off to chase an enigma that
could well be of my own making?
At that time, not so long ago, I was innocent (I suppose I still am to this day, this very day). But I was not so innocent that I couldn’t see that anyone who had survived and bested the
second segment of our sad terrible century must have had some remarkable struggles with history and terror, contradiction and ambiguity. Silence, exile and cunning were James Joyce’s
prescription for the task of the modern writer and thinker in an age of brutality and unreason, bombardment and slaughter, ideology and holocaust, a century of intellectual terrorism, an age, as
Canetti once said, of burning flesh, when police thuggery had turned on thought itself. Thanks to silence, exile and cunning, some artists and intellectuals had had strange flirtations with the mad
ideological world. Pound had played with Fascism, Heidegger with Nazism, Brecht with Stalinism, Sartre with Marxism, and so on and on. Right to our time the terrible game went on, and still would,
whenever intelligence faces power, totalitarianism and fundamentalism of any kind.
As for me, I lived on a small island on the edge, spared much of this history, and tucked away at what looked like the safe end of the century. No doubt, if I went looking, if I searched hard or
critically enough, I would find something. Criminale had lived through dark passages and false directions; he must have had his weak spots, his feet of clay, his own deals on silence, exile and
cunning. Anyone who had struggled through the brutalities and absurdities of the modern chaos, the gulag horrors and extremities, had probably come out a little marked or impure. The enigmas I
believed I’d seen were perhaps no more than the devious ways needed for a man of public thought simply to survive. And who was I to go unmasking? Wasn’t there something just as impure
about the investigative journalist who, trying to hold on to a career, make a living, make a programme, goes gaily out hunting secrets, hoping to find the worst? And did I really want to go down in
the record as the man who’d misread, misused, misrepresented the great career of that hero of late modern thought, Bazlo Criminale?
So I had a bad night, followed by a bad morning. When dawn light came up, I got out of bed and kissed Ros lightly on the forehead, not wanting to stir the sleeping beast again. Luggageless in
the street outside, I found a taxi that took me, as sore in body as I was in mind, out to Heathrow. I went gratefully round the franchise stores, buying socks at Sock Shop, ties at Tie Rack,
knickers at Knickerbox, shirts at Shirt Factory, shampoos and stuff at the Body Shop. Finally I bought a lightweight carry-on suitcase at the last franchise, and sat on a bench by check-in, packing
my new wardrobe carefully inside. ‘Did you pack the bag yourself?’ asked the girl at the desk, when I checked in for the Austrian Airlines flight. ‘Of course I did, you just
watched me,’ I said; but of course she unpacked it anyway, unloading what I’d loaded, stripping the case to its linings before she would grant me a boarding pass.
I went through Security, where it was not my baggage but my very self they stripped down to the bare forked basics. The guards felt me up unmercifully, as if I had not just had enough of that
sort of thing with Ros during the night. In the departure lounge, as I headed into duty-free to buy a razor, a girl in satin tricoloured panties came over and sprayed me with perfume. ‘A new
male parfum from Chanel called Egoiste,’ she said, ‘We ’ope you like it.’ ‘Egoiste?’ I said, ‘If Chanel want to sell perfumes in airports, why don’t
they make one called Terminal Depression?’ I went to the bar, where all the seats were taken by travellers watching screens for information about their delayed flights. Standing by the wall,
with a gin and tonic melting rapidly in a plastic glass, I looked for news of the Vienna flight. Then the intercom announced it would be two hours late, because of lack of landing slots for the
incoming flight, which they had decided to leave hanging up there in the sky for most of the morning.
I stank of perfume, my baggage was new, my body was sore, and the lounge filled to the point of maximum congestion. It was as I was standing there that it occurred to me, for the first time,
that even the life of a great world-traveller like Bazlo Criminale, a man who hopped like a rabbit from government meeting to international congress, from hub airport to hub airport, from VIP
lounge to stretch airport limo, from first-class recliner to prison-like plane toilet, a man who made homelessness into a postmodern art form and had never stayed in one place for anything like a
reasonable length of time, probably also had its downside. He must have had more than his share of delays, crowds, congestions, strip-searches, luggage losses, misdirections; he too must have his
portion of Terminal Depression.
They called the Austrian Airlines flight to Vienna three hours late. I dragged my way down the long Heathrow passages, through the green-seated lounge, down the grim boarding tunnel, in through
the plane door – and found myself suddenly in the world of
Gemütlichkeit.
‘Grüss Gott, mein Herr,’ said a dirndled stewardess in red and white, as Papageno and
Papagena chittered and chattered happily on the plane Tannoy. Passengers in great green loden coats stuffed green Harrods bags into the overhead lockers, or sat staring stolidly into the stern
financial pages of the Austrian newspapers that were on offer at the plane door. Then we took off, and the trolleys came along. There was cream with the coffee, cream with everything. There was
even cream on the face of the fat girl dressed like a sofa who came smiling down the aisle as we passed at high altitude over the white-capped, roadless Alps.
‘What are you doing here, Lavinia?’ I asked. ‘Hello, darling, I just came back to see if you were all right,’ said Lavinia, ‘I’m in the club, if you see what
I mean.’ ‘You’re sitting in club class, are you, Lavinia?’ I asked, ‘Why?’ ‘Well, I am the executive producer,’ said Lavinia, ‘But I could only
afford it for one, this show is on a very tight budget. Would you like me to get them to send you back a bottle of champagne?’ ‘No, Lavinia, I meant, where are you going?’ I
asked, as if I didn’t know. ‘Vienna, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘Home of the waltz and the Sachertorte, those wonderful creamy cakes, have you ever tried them? I just
couldn’t resist. Well, I’d better get back up front for the liqueurs.’ ‘So I’ll see you in Vienna?’ I asked. ‘Yes, you will, darling,’ said Lavinia,
‘We’ll have an absolutely brilliant time there, hunting for that old bugger Criminale.’
From the very moment we landed (three hours late, of course) on that sharp cold noontide in November, Vienna seemed to smell of hot roasting coffee and crisp new gingerbread
– the haunting flavours of childhood and Christmas, which by now was not so very far away. Vienna’s airport is modern and international, spacious and pleasant, and yet the moment you
walk into it from the bus that brings you in from the plane a strangely Austrian sense of tradition, the scent of a certain long-lived, leather-jacketed kind of history, immediately seems to
prevail. Despite what is sometimes said, no one should really accuse the Austrians of neglecting their great men, especially the ones who are firmly and safely dead. And certainly no one can
complain that they were ignoring the one they had carted out of the city, coated in lime, and buried deep in an unmarked pauper’s grave just one year short of two centuries earlier.
The fact was that we had arrived in Vienna on the very brink of one of those great end-of-century anniversaries that Austria and indeed the world as a whole had no intention of over-looking. The
sign, the symbol, the signifier of little Wolfgang Amadeus was everywhere. His natty little portrait, perky and periwigged, hung all over Immigration. The fine bright notes of ‘La ci darem la
mano’ soared out of the loudspeakers as, carrying off our carry-on luggage, Lavinia and I marched side by side through the corridors of expensive shops towards the central concourse. Here you
could find a Mozart delicatessen where you could buy sticky Mozartkugeln (‘the sweet heritage of Amadeus’), rich Mozarttorte, Queen of the Night olive oil, Mozart mayonnaise. You could
stock up on Seraglio perfume at the nearby boutique; there was a chocolate bust of the man melting beside the Don Giovanni cocktail bar. Even though there were still a couple of months to go to the
full celebrations, it was already quite safe to say that, when 1991 dawned on us, in Vienna the Mozart bicentennial would not pass entirely unnoticed.
Nor could you accuse the Viennese of neglecting the many, many tourists who, despite the uneasy mood of the times, the fear of terrorism, the growing threat of war in the Gulf and disorder in
the Soviet Union, still poured in massive numbers to the city of Amadeus, and Johann, and Ludwig, and Franz. Downstairs in the baggage claim, where a jumbo-load of Japanese tourists were noisily
hunting for the cases that, in a properly organized world, should have come with them on their flight from Tokyo, Lavinia and I discovered the perfect economic Euro-toy: a fine electronic machine
with flashing buttons that, at a press, gladly turned any form of currency into any other, in a hi-tech, silicon-chip version of the good old game of rates of exchange. ‘Look, Lavinia, a
money machine,’ I said, stopping. ‘Not for you, darling, now come away,’ said Lavinia. ‘All you have to do is empty all the notes out of your wallet and put them in
here,’ I said, ‘Then it turns them all into something else. Pounds to schillings, dollars to zlotys, Japanese yen to Slakan vloskan.’
I’d already got my own wallet out when Lavinia took me by the hand, to the strains of ‘La ci darem la mano’, and took me outside into the chilly Viennese air. ‘All right,
Francis,’ she said, ‘Let’s get this straight. This show is on a very tight budget. I’m in charge. Money’s not a game. Or if it is, I’m the one who’s
playing it. Stay away from banks, leave money machines alone, forget about rates of exchange. That’s for the big people, I’ll see to all that. Just stick to simple art and ideas,
that’s what you’re here for. Every time you want anything, ask me first. Keep all your receipts, write down your expenditure in a little book. Now where’s the bus?’
‘With two of us it’s probably just as cheap to take a taxi,’ I said. ‘No, Francis, this is your first lesson in television economics,’ said Lavinia, ‘If I was
alone I’d go in a taxi. With you I go on the bus.’