#GenghizInLove: Episode 7

Hell's arrival was a momentous event. While Professor Masaryk quavered behind his cluttered desk and I pretended to be invisible, Lucy ushered in a little old man, bent double over two stout walking sticks. Bright brown eyes peered up and darted around the room sharply from beneath one massive eyebrow. The old man's cheeks were bloated red pouches that folded over under their own weight into the immense dewlaps of an aged bloodhound. A battered beige corduroy jacket was drawn tight against a powerful torso barely covered by a sporty purple and puce checked shirt, unbuttoned at the throat and well beyond, exposing a matted growth of grey chest hair that sprouted thickly up to the old man's unshaven jowls. Faded blue denim trousers, folded up at the ankles, flapped loosely against thin twisted legs as he hobbled with audible effort into the room. "Where's Masaryk?" the old man growled in a powerful bass voice. "Where's my lunch?"

Professor Masaryk advanced across his office, smiling, deferential, glad to be of use. "Otto!" he exclaimed, holding out both hands. The old man grudgingly let his hand be shaken. "Otto, my old friend! When did you arrive? Did you have a safe trip? You look well!"

"You said lunch was at twelve," Professor Hell grumbled, looking at his watch. "It's twelve. I want my lunch. They feed you badly on aeroplanes these days. Plastic! Plastic trays, plastic meat, plastic rolls. Wine in a plastic bottle and a plastic glass to pour the wine into. Disposable culture. Shoddy manufacture. Modernity!"

"But we will have glass!" Professor Masaryk exclaimed unctuously. "Genuine hand-crafted Bohemia crystal."

"When?"

"We should wait for Killjoy-Yuck and for Monica Fume."

"Fume? Bigglesworth-Fume?" Professor Hell tilted his large head far to one side. He was so top-heavy that I feared for his center of gravity. I moved discreetly to his side to support him in case he fell over. "Is that Haighte-Westerclyde's youngest daughter? Runs some women's college at Oxford these days, doesn't she?"

"I know nothing about women's education, Otto," Professor Masaryk replied. "We must ask Killjoy-Yuck."

"Killjoy-Yuck? That the chap who resembles a vulture? Must say I didn't like the way he's been staring at me in all these meetings. Most disconcerting. He at Oxford too? Regular Mafia."

"Terence Killjoy-Yuck is Senior Tutor at All Fools College. Lady Monica is the Principal of D'Urberville," I piped up. I thought of the terrifying stories I had heard about Lady Monica from my friend Flossie who was a fellow of D'Urberville College and had been coerced, at the age of thirty-two, to spoon up all her custard at a formal college dinner presided over by her austere Principal. Did I really want to have lunch with these scary old people?

Hell grunted without looking at me. I wasn't sure if he hadn't heard me or if he believed that children should speak only when spoken to. "Didn't like her husband. Told him so. But he's dead now, I suppose? Fell off a horse, I was told. Stupid thing to do."

Masaryk nodded solemnly. Professor Hell still looked dubious. "Is that official?" he asked. "Never can tell with these journalists. Play silly games with obituaries. Mark Twain. Harry Truman. Nothing makes a chap look more stupid than writing nice things about some fool who isn't even dead. Happened to me once..." The memory of this mishap made Hell glower.

"Knew her father in the war," he continued. "Worked for me. Good man. No airs. 'Course he didn't know then that he'd inherit Blastedheath and the Dukedom. His brother, Angus, hadn't gone down yet with that damn convoy to Archangelsk. Stupid mission, if you ask me." Professor Hell laughed mirthlessly. "'Course they didn't ask me. Stick to breaking German codes, Hell, and don't talk to us about strategy. Fools!" he shouted. A vein throbbed on his temple and his cheeks swelled to alarming proportions. Luckily, at that moment a gaunt middle-aged lady strode into the room. Ramrod-erect, she marched up to Hell, saluted, and curtsied stiffly. They then shook hands without exchanging a word. The rest of us watched this brief ceremony in respectful silence.

Terence Killjoy-Yuck's entrance broke the hush. A confused babel of introductions broke out. Professor Masaryk seized the moment. Grabbing me by the arm, he led me up to Professor Hell. "Otto, may I introduce this young man to you? He is... uh..." He had clearly forgotten my name but he recovered adroitly. "Your Special Assistant."

"And what the devil does that mean? What is he supposed to do? What's your job?" Hell scowled at me. I smiled meekly and looked beseechingly to Terence Killjoy-Yuck for rescue.

"Lord Hades, he will, ahem, arrange your transport," Terence said silkily. He smiled at me. I involuntarily shuddered. "He will make sure that the Rector's office, which we are so glad you have consented to occupy, functions smoothly. He will represent you at meetings which you might not wish to attend."

"Good," Hell grunted. "Hate meetings. Hate administration. Hate shuffling papers." He wheeled around towards me. "Think you can take care of these things, boy?"

"I can vouch for him," Terence interjected with unnecessary ownership. "I was his tutor at Oxford. He shuffles papers with the best of them. Literally."

"What does cheating have to do with it?" Hell glared at Terence. "Didn't ask you. Mind your own business. Boy isn't dumb, is he?"

"I'll try, sir," I whispered timidly.

"What's that? Hmmm..." Hell frowned at me. Abruptly, his expression changed into a surprisingly gentle smile which broke out like an allergic rash over his withered cheeks. He reached over and patted my arm. "You give it your best shot, eh?"

"Yes, sir!" I said, snapping to attention. That smile had given me fresh heart. I began to understand why raw recruits in the army looked up to their gruff sergeants. I had heard of Hell. His reputation preceded him wherever he went, mounting with the decades, like a snowball before an avalanche. As Professor Masaryk had mentioned, he was a living legend. Generations of terrified undergraduates had passed through his hands. Some were traumatized for life by the experience, nervous wrecks fit for nothing better than managing country branches of banks and pruning roses on weekends with nerveless shaking hands. Others, Hell's favored acolytes, trailing clouds of fame and glory, sailed on to dizzy heights in the academic world and beyond, into exalted realms of secular power and fabulous riches. I devoutly hoped that this would be my case.

These were my thoughts as our small procession walked down the hushed pile-carpeted corridors of power and took the elevator down from the twentieth floor. Pressed close to Professor Hell in the crowded lift, I inhaled that musty odor peculiar to old men, a strange dank exudation of dust and sweat and port wine and pipe tobacco, accreted together over a lifetime spent in fusty rooms. For his part, I trust, Professor Hell could only smell the sharp clear woody fragrance of my favorite cologne, Solipsiste.

"Close in here," Hell muttered. "Need some fresh air."

"Soon, Otto," Professor Masaryk promised. "The restaurant is just a short ride away. The food is very good. Even Zoosh always goes there whenever he comes to Prague."

"Does he? Well, well," Terence Killjoy-Yuck murmured. "I always thought billionaires travelled with their own personal cooks."

"Just poison-tasters," Lady Monica stated bluntly.

"What does Xox eat?" Hell demanded. I started. It was exactly what I had been wondering. I remembered our billionaire benefactor telling me that the secret of his success lay in understanding that we are what we eat. So what did he eat? And could I have some?

"I must say that I never noticed," Professor Masaryk responded shame-facedly. "I was too busy eating."

The elevator door opened noiselessly. Sheltered from the curious eyes of proletarian passers-by by the mirrored windows of our stretch limousine, the bigwigs of the University of Truth and Justice and I were whisked off to a small chateau on a hill overlooking Prague, once the favorite restaurant of high party apparatchiks, now the haunt of fat men in natty blazers, hefting bulging briefcases and cellular phones, regularly raking the room with cautiously shifty eyes between phone calls marked by excessively jocose camaraderie. Perhaps they were the same people.

"They just didn't have those little portable phones back then," Professor Otto Hell muttered. I looked at him sharply. I had said nothing. Was I working for a mind reader? "Otherwise, you're right. Power never really changes hands. Thugs."

"Line 'em up against a wall," Lady Monica Bigglesworth-Fume uttered crisply. "Shoot 'em. Shoot horses, don't we? Scum."

"You're wrong," Hell barked. "Wouldn't do any good. Look at the replacements. What's the difference?"

"Lord Hades! That's defeatist talk. Won't have it in my presence."

"Feisty woman," Hell said admiringly. "Comes from her father. Generations of aristocrats. Telling people what to do. Practice. Funny how it gets inherited. Enters the genes. Breeding will tell."

"I fought for this revolution!" Lady Monica glared. "Gave my time and money for the cause of freedom. Won't have it subverted. Otherwise what good was it to support all those tedious ungrateful dissidents?"

"But they are grateful," Professor Masaryk murmured soothingly. "I met the President just yesterday when Shoozh was up at the Castle and Good King Wenceslas asked how you were."

Lady Monica snorted. "I haven't been invited to the Castle yet. Can you imagine, that man invited these rock bands first, all these long haired musicians, instead of remembering that it was Blodgett Scrotum and I who brought him to the world's attention. Ingrate!"

"Well, Lady Monica, it was slightly tactless of Professor Scrotum to be so scathing about the new uniforms the President had ordered for the castle guards," Professor Masaryk reproved.

"And I imagine Good King Wenceslas must have winced just a little when he read Blodgett Scrotum's particularly caustic remarks on the choice of colours for the new presidential limousines," Terence Killjoy-Yuck chimed in.

"Blodgett was making a very important point which Wenceslas should have heeded," Lady Monica said, her thin colorless lips drawn together tight. She peeled the crust off a roll with acerbic severity. I winced, imagining what her students at D'Urberville College must endure on a daily basis. "Those in power must never permit themselves to play the fool. They must behave with decorum and sobriety. A certain mystique was required of Wenceslas if he was to convince the vulgar masses that he was in fact in charge after the Revolution. What did he do instead? He ordered BMW limousines. Fair enough, he needed new limousines, those tatty old Soviet tanks obviously wouldn't do. But why couldn't he order from Rolls Royce? And then I really fail to see why he should have wanted his limousines to be painted red, white, and blue."

"But they're the Czech national colors," Professor Masaryk objected. "People thought it was a nice touch."

"Limousines should be black," Lady Monica pronounced grimly. "And I think that Wenceslas demonstrated his fundamentally irresponsible character by taking offence with Blodgett."

"Is Blodgett Scrotum still teaching at Imperial College?" Professor Hell inquired.

"No," Lady Monica replied, a tragic quaver barely discernible under her stern veneer. "He was disgusted with England after all those Communist architects ganged up on the Prince of Wales. Blodgett took it as a personal attack."

"How so?" Hell seemed amused.

"Blodgett shaped the Prince's views on architecture. He took the Prince around the country, showing our future Sovereign the contrast between these disgusting modernist buildings sprouting like rank weeds all over our fair green land, and those old gracious mansions which accord so well with our sense of dignity and individualism. And Blodgett is really so sensitive beneath his crusty public persona. The venom of that attack on the Prince's views, his views, really, poisoned him against England. He felt that his Englishness was threatened. So he decided to go to Amerika. He was offered a professorship at Yale but he refused because he felt it was too permeated by this same fashionable... eclecticism." Lady Monica spat out the word with disgust and rinsed her mouth with mineral water. "Then this agricultural university in Texas wrote to him and he decided to go there since he felt that some of the original English spirit might still be felt in that pioneer frontier ethos. So he went off to Texas to commune with the crops."

"England is the poorer for it," Terence exclaimed, shaking his head sadly. "Lady Snatcher was quite apoplectic about it when we met the other day. What a great lady." A look of reverence crossed his thin ugly face and for a moment he almost looked human. "But there was also that awkward law suit. In my opinion, it's just as well that Blodgett left the country rather than see his name dragged through the mud of the Sunday papers."

"Oh, it makes me so furious to think of that viper we nourished in our bosoms," Lady Monica shrieked, clutching her scrawny chest. "That... Rasputin!"

I hid my gulp behind my napkin. But it was no use. Terence had been watching me. "You know Rasputin, don't you?" he asked maliciously. "You studied together at All Fools. And then you worked together as foreign correspondents for The Sociologist. You two are friends!"

Two bright red spots appeared on Lady Monica's pale bony cheeks. "You're friends with that vampire? That ghoul? That dastardly ingrate? How dare you?"

"I'm not friends with him anymore, Lady Monica," I said earnestly. "I broke off relations with him in disgust and anger ages ago. Even before he wrote that article about you and your friends..."

"Tell me the truth," Lady Monica said coldly. "What is your candid assessment of Rasputin's character?"

I considered for a moment. "He is a scheming, quarrelsome, sycophantic swine," I enunciated carefully.

"Oh, how right you are!" Lady Monica trilled, her thin hands clutched together in ecstacy. "What a concise and yet precise description of that evil monster." She turned to Professor Hell. "This young man strikes me as a very good judge of character, Lord Hades," she said. "I am sure he will do nicely as your assistant."

"Depends how he does his job, don't it?" Hell replied coldly. I was uneasily aware of the searching scrutiny of his bright beady brown eyes. I felt like an apparatchik. Was I really capable of deceiving the greatest living intellectual in the world, and a mind-reader to boot?

"I am sure he will do well," Lady Monica urged on my behalf. "Such judgement of character is, alas, all too rare in this degenerate age. God is dead, we proudly declared, and so now we are ruled by the devil. That's exactly what I wrote to Rasputin's mother. `I love you dearly, Katyushka,' I wrote, `but what devil raped you that you were forced to spawn such a treacherous freak?'"

"What the devil are you talking about?" Hell asked gruffly.

"It was all a Communist plot," Lady Monica declared dramatically. "During our fight against Communism, Blodgett and I became friendly with various Russians, magnanimously overlooking their racial origins and intellectual pretensions. One such family beseeched us to help their son get into Oxford. We helped in every way. I believe I persuaded Terence to give the young man a scholarship at All Fools." Terence nodded in sombre confirmation. "We did our best for him. We gave him books to review for scholarly journals. We invited him to our country cottages and gave him tea and long talks on the superiority of the English way of life. But then, after worming his way into our confidence, this Rasputin then proceeded to prostitute himself for various filthy Fleet Street rags. He wrote an article mocking the English way of life for some base magazine in which he insulted Blodgett and I and all our friends in the coarsest of terms. We had no choice but to seek recourse from the law in order to clear our names."

"Any publicity is good publicity," Hell responded without sympathy. "You should know that, Monica. Your late husband edited one of those filthy Fleet Street rags, as I recall."

Terence excused himself from the ensuing fistfight and went to the men's room. After a discreet interval, I followed. Terence had seen me watching him watching Xox and Lucy make love, and I didn't know if this was good or bad for my fledgling career as a British spy. On the one hand, it proved I was diligent. On the other hand, I didn't want Terence to think I knew too much, it would just raise expectations. I figured I'd try once again to brazen it out and demonstrate blatant ignorance, just as I had so often in my Oxford days. And so I stood at the urinal next to his and hissed. "Psst... Terence. What am I supposed to do?"

Terence frowned. "Did no one teach you as a child? You pull it out and then…"

"I'm toilet trained, thank you. What am I supposed to do at work?"

"Didn't Masaryk tell you?"

"He just said that I'm supposed to be Hell's assistant."

"Well, what else do you need to know?"

I nudged him in the ribs and winked inanely. "What am I supposed to do for you lot?"

"That is a very indiscreet thing to say," Terence replied stiffly. "And it was not discreet to follow me into the loo either. It is bad manners for one thing. You've made me piss all over my shoes. And it is bad for our reputations. Didn't they teach you even the basic skills when you were up at Oxford? You must have had a very incompetent tutor."

"You were my tutor," I reminded him.

"Oh, that's right," Terence conceded. "I must have had my mind on other things. Well, dear boy, just do whatever Lord Hades requires from you. I shall come to Prague at regular intervals. We may have lunch together on occasion. Keep your wits about you. Open your slit-eyes wide. Look around. See what is going on. Gather the dirt on Socks. Above all, just be there. Now let us get out of here before our reputations are irretrievably ruined. You go first. Being British, I shall pretend to be suffering from constipation."

The others were already on their feet when I got back to our table. After a suitable interval, Terence emerged from the toilet, making profuse apologies for his bowels. As we parted outside the restaurant, Lady Monica Bigglesworth-Fume and I shook hands warmly. The butterflies in my stomach had long since drowned in the splendid lunch. As a budding apparatchik, I had wondered if I should order exactly the same meal as Professor Otto Hell or have whatever I wanted. In the event, our choice had been the same: a delicate appetizer of home-made ravioli filled with the flesh of baby partridges followed by a robust rack of lamb with fresh mint sauce, washed down with several bottles of vintage 1952 Chateau Rochefoucauld. Exquisite. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I like to eat well. So, apparently, did my new boss. I had the feeling that I was going to enjoy working for Hell.