#GenghizInLove: Episode 16

"Where the devil is Lucy?"

I looked up in surprise. Professor Masaryk seemed agitated. His tie was askew and the buttons of his rumpled suit jacket were in the wrong holes. It was Monday morning and I didn't feel like telling him that his favourite secretary was probably carousing in the arms of an Amerikan embassy flack. "I'm afraid I don't know, sir," I lied sympathetically. "I saw her on Friday. Maybe she took a few days off."

"I don't know how I can work with you people!" the Director of the Prague college of the University of Truth and Justice said vehemently. He exasperatedly flipped through the papers on my desk with shaking hands and glared at the beer bottles and pizza boxes in my trashcan and at the bent butts in my ashtray. "How can we rely on you? You are untidy. You are irresponsible. You drink, smoke, and eat fattening foods. You take days off. You are young!"

"Don't worry, sir, we'll get older," I said, emptying the ashtray into the garbage in an effort to calm him.

"Yes, but it will be too late by then!" Masaryk replied heatedly. I bent to pick up the papers that he had sent flying all over the parquet. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled around on the floor looking at each piece of paper. "Where is it, oh, where is it? Otto will shout at me, I know it..." he mumbled tearfully.

"What exactly are you looking for, sir?"

"The agenda of this afternoon's meeting," Professor Masaryk replied, his cheeks waxen with worry. "Lucy typed it and sent copies to everyone, and now I've lost my copy. And she's not here. Oh, Lucy, where are you? Nobody has given me vitamins for days!"

I handed The Director a sheet of paper and a pill. His enormous sigh of relief made the papers on the floor fly like confetti all over the room and his large sunken eyes jumped back into place. He ran out of the room, whistling and skipping. I blinked a few times and picked up the remaining papers. I noticed a small crumpled piece of coarse toilet paper with a blotchy scrawled message on it. It was my turn to sigh. My boss, Otto Hell, had the unhygienic habit of scribbling his memoranda in the hours he spent closeted in the water closet. I tried to decipher his latest missive. It seemed to read `Gone fishing. Best wishes, Otto.' I looked out the window and pouted. It was a beautiful afternoon outside and I wished Hell had taken me fishing with him.

And as I sat in the dim conference room, panelled from ceiling to floor with somber walnut wood, reluctantly inhaling its musty odors of wood polish and stale air, I dreamed of the shady bank of a gurgling brook, of the drowsy drone of cicadas, of the dappled iridescence of leafy trees in bright sunlight, of pretty girls in white dresses and straw hats, of wicker picnic baskets and thick green bottles and thin stemmed glasses of champagne and bowls of strawberries, of blithe laughter and naive games, sweet dreams of an innocence I had never known... With a start, I realized that the meeting had already begun and that Professor Masaryk was impatiently asking me to take the minutes.

"As chairman, in the absence of our rector Lord Hades, I call this meeting to order," the Director began pompously. "As you know, we are gathered here to organize the activities of the Department of Culture. Novak is the chairman of the department but..." Masaryk turned to Professor Jiri Novak with an avuncular smile and palpitated his shoulder with a series of painful squeezes. "I hope he will let me give a few suggestions from time to time as an older colleague." Novak giggled, wriggled his neck from side to side, muttered something inaudible, and surreptitiously massaged his shoulder, making sure that nothing was broken. "We must introduce our students to the delights of culture!" the Director exclaimed excitedly, spreading his arms out wide. "To the delights of Central European culture! Welcome to Prague! This is what we must say to them. Welcome to the world of Schopenhauer, Schnitzler, Weininger, Freud, and Kafka! Welcome to the charms of Weltschmerz!"

A short balding man crossed his arms across his barrel chest and yawned ostentatiously. "Ah, yes, Piknik!" Masaryk exclaimed warmly. "You must give us the benefit of your advice." Everyone stared curiously at the famous ex-dissident. Cain Piknik cocked his head back on his thick neck and stared at the ceiling through closed eyes. A hush fell over the room, broken a few moments later by the sound of loud rhythmic snoring. "We will let him think," Masaryk said graciously. He turned again to Novak. "Now, Jiri. Introduce your staff to me. Tell me what they will teach our students."

"Well, Tomas..." Novak began hesitantly. "Shouldn't we begin with what we will teach?"

Masaryk seemed surprised. "Why, sociology, of course! I thought it had all been settled, my dear fellow."

"Well, Tomas, I don't think it has been settled..." A fierce red glint began to glow at the back of Novak's normally mild brown eyes as he rolled up the sleeves of his jacket in preparation for the usual brawl.

I gathered up my courage and decided to intervene. "Gentlemen, with all possible respect," I said firmly. "May I remind you of Lord Hades' solution to this issue? Neither Philosophy nor Sociology, the great man has said, but Culture." I sat back, satisfied, having said my piece.

Both men looked disconcerted and dissatisfied, like boxers who had been stopped from entering the ring at the very beginning of a championship fight and told that the prize money would be split between them and that there was no reason in the world for them to inflict brain damage on one another. "But what is culture?" Novak said rebelliously. Masaryk didn't seem to know the answer to that one either. Silence sat heavily in the room.

Piknik opened one eye briefly. "Half and half," he said enigmatically in a husky baritone and then closed his eye again. Satisfied snores again punctuated the baffled silence.

Immanuel meekly raised a hand at the end of the table. "I think I know what Mr. Piknik means. He wants us to split the spoils. We should hire one person from each related discipline. A sociologist." Masaryk nodded. "A philosopher." Novak nodded. "An architect." Masaryk nodded. "A philologist." Novak nodded. "An anthropologist." Both men shook their heads. "A historian." Both men burst out simultaneously in horrified disagreement.

"Coffee," the oracle murmured huskily. Eager hands filled a cup and raised it to Piknik's lips. He drank it down in a gulp, smacked his lips, shook himself, opened his eyes wide, and spoke in a pleasant tenor voice. "Are you a philosopher, my boy? I thought so. Only someone trained to decipher cryptic utterances pregnant with profound meaning can understand what I mean. This is the problem with the editorials I write for my newspaper. Novak and you can teach philosophy. Masaryk, I will persuade Flysenko, the famous Polish sociologist, to join you. And Hachek Katastrofski can be your architect. He is young and he still has some fascist leanings which proves that he is a bright lad with ambition. I know nothing about philology. I must go. I have a plane to catch. Be so kind as to give me ten thousand dollars immediately as my regular consultation fees. Thank you very much. I will mention your department and this university favorably in my next editorial. You will then have many Polish students. You will give me five thousand dollars per student. My fees for headhunting. The circulation of my newspaper is now over seven million since I decided to print soft pornography. Can you explain to me why men like to look at large uncovered breasts when they eat breakfast? I must run. Is the limousine downstairs? My private jet is waiting. Being a dissident was much more fun. Please give my best regards to Xox. Goodbye." Piknik walked rapidly around the conference table, shaking hands cordially with everyone except Divka, whose hand he raised to his lips with a fervent flourish and kissed with a self-satisfied smack, and then, slamming doors and whistling heartily, the oracle was gone.

"I know a philologist," Divka said uncertainly, breaking the thoughtful silence. "But I don't know if she will join the department."

"Why not?" Masaryk and Novak both looked offended. "We are both famous intellectuals. We have won prizes. Our weighty tomes are published in many languages. No conference is complete without our presence. Surely it would be an honor for any woman to work for us."

"I'm talking about Marya Madlenova," Divka said succinctly. Man whistled softly and both Masaryk and Novak looked alarmed. As well they might: Madlenova was not merely a world-famous intellectual who had won every single prize going, including the Goebbel for her nostalgic novel Before Calvary, and whose incredibly erudite academic writings were translated into every language, and whose presence at a conference would be reported on the front page of the New York Times; she was a legend. The only daughter of a Bulgarian diplomat of secretly noble extraction, Madlenova had been given a special scholarship at the age of sixteen to study philology in Paris. Within a year the Bulgarian sylph had become the last muse of the ageing Jean-Saul Fartre: in the renewed vigor of this senile infatuation, Fartre wrote his late masterpiece, the Critique of Heartless Reason, and died a year later, leaving his papers, library, and enormous fortune to Madlenova, who, catapulted to prominence by this inheritance and by the student revolt of 1968 in which she played a conspicuous role, published a series of immensely difficult books and became a full professor of the prestigious College des Hautes Etudes at the age of twenty-seven. Rumor had it that Madlenova's rise to fame and fortune was largely caused by her blinding beauty and by the utterly heartless calculation with which she chose her lovers, rumors which made Madlenova the role model of such aspiring feminist philosophers as my friend Lulu.

"Deride tells me that Madlenova is a very... difficult woman," Jiri Novak said nervously.

"It would be an incredible coup to have her," Man declared. His eyes shone with enthusiasm. Divka looked a little worried.

"We will have to ask Lord Hades." Professor Masaryk looked at me timorously. "Will you ask him?" I nodded. "Good," Masaryk said, brightening. "I think we have resolved everything, haven't we? Otto will be pleased with us. But where, oh, where is Lucy?"

#GenghizInLove: Episode 15

A few hours after my experiment with Lucy's mysterious vitamin, I walked into Prague's Central Post Office and looked around furtively at the morose elderly sourpusses patiently waiting in long straggling lines. Eventually I figured out which line to join and after an hour or two managed to send off a very small package to a friend of mine in Kalifornia. The package contained one of Lucy's remarkable pills and a short note asking my friend Luke Leazy just exactly why these vitamins made me feel so good. And it wasn't just me, everyone else at the University of Truth and Justice felt good too: Lucy had been dispensing her vitamins like a little ministering angel to all and sundry, besides which they were also freely available at the reception desk and at the various bars and cafes in the building. Everyone at the university was on them, from the eminent Professor Masaryk down to the cleaning ladies, all the students and staff, everyone, with the exception of my formidable boss, crusty old Otto Hell. The environment at the university was scarily sunny, especially for a building crammed with Central European intellectuals. Not that I had anything against all this peace and love: it's just that I like to know what drugs I'm on and I figured Sleaze could find out.

I first met Luke when I was fifteen. I had just arrived at boarding school in New Hampshire, very tired from an all night flight from San Francisco and a long slow bus ride from Boston. It was a beautiful fall day, the kind of day you can only get in New England or on acid, the sky a heart-breaking ethereal deep blue and the air was so cool and clear that it made me dizzy. Little white wooden houses and stores lined the main street of the little town and I wondered where the school was. I dragged my heavy suitcases up a hill and beneath me I saw an expanse of old brick buildings with marble porticos and vivid swaths of emerald lawn. I had arrived. Young people in beautifully cut jackets and white dresses milled around everywhere. Someone directed me to my dormitory and I looked around the dark hallway, apprehensively awaiting my first real encounter with the sophisticates, the bored habitues of this swanky school. Suddenly, from around a corner, a compact boy of about my age with crisp curly brown hair appeared. My immediate impression was of neatness, of an impossible maturity, a watchful and intimidating self-control. The boy frowned slightly and then broke into a wide open smile that died as quickly as it had appeared. "You look lost." The boy's words were as crisply enunciated as his hair. "I'm Luke. I know who you are. Drummond, that's the house master, has been talking about you for days. He's a pompous asshole. My room is back here. I share with Jesus. Come and meet him. I'll make some tea. Do you smoke dope?"

And then a few minutes later, I was sitting on a Mexican rug in a big room hung with tapestries, two wooden desks under big bay windows, bunk beds in one corner and a big bookshelf stacked with books in the other corner, and weapons mounted on one wall, scimitars, numchuks, air pistols, sharpened stakes... The arsenal did not look like just decoration. The room gave me the same feeling as Luke's appearance: a watchful and meticulous neatness that had nothing to do with conformism. Luke's room-mate was a bulky South American with long shiny black hair and a pockmarked round face. He introduced himself in a mild slightly accented voice and with a kind smile. "Jesus Guevara. I am from Peru. We've heard all about you. Drummond has been boasting about the new Mongolian boy who will add to Bendover's diversity. Ah, tea. Thank you, Sleaze. Would you like to smoke some dope?" Jesus asked politely, bringing out a large hookah and a little plastic bag filled with grass. Luke pulled out two rolled up towels from a closet, with practiced movements dampened them under a tap, tossed one over to Jesus who caught it neatly, and then tucked the other towel tidily under the door, heightening my impression that I was in a fortress, a safe area in a war zone.

"I've never smoked any," I confessed. "But I'd like to. Thank you. I hadn't expected this kind of... welcome."

Jesus and Luke looked at each other and burst out laughing. There was a palpable closeness between them which I found appealing. "You'll go through the usual Bendover induction for the next two weeks," Luke said. Jesus carefully loaded the hookah with dope, set fire to it, inhaled deeply, held his breath for an eternity, held the damp towel to his mouth, and then exhaled silently. I watched the procedure admiringly. Jesus loaded the hookah again and handed it to me. "But this is our special induction. For people we think we might like."

And so I encountered the counter-culture on the very first day I arrived at Bendover, a small clique of iconoclasts who had no intention of joining the mainstream of the smart rich kids from good families who lived on 5th Avenue and Nob Hill and played on the lacrosse team and did their homework and only got drunk covertly on weekends and on other nights sat drinking chocolate frappes together talking about which Ivy League university to apply to and whether there was more steady money in investment banking or in medicine; but the rebels felt a stronger pull in their blood, an urge to test the limits, to break the rules, and they did break the rules, often stupidly, like Tim who once got caught spending the night in his girlfriend's room when he was already on probation, or through some demonic urge to self-destruction like Johnny, my best friend and the most naturally talented writer I have ever known, who got thrown out of school for coming out of the dormitory during a surprise fire alarm in the middle of the night with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other and coolly asking an infuriated Drummond if he had been born a hypocrite or if it was an acquired skill, why there was whisky on his breath and a pipe in his hand if alcohol and tobacco were all that bad, or through simple fatigue, like Steele, who just got worn out from the rigors of adolescent infatuation and long nights talking and writing his masterpiece, an epic poem in rhyming Greek hexameters on the sad fate that awaited Drummond's stupid black labrador bitch if it barked just once more outside Steele's basement window at seven in the morning, and a brain that worked too fast for his bewildered teachers who eventually told his diplomat father that Steele belonged either in an institution for emotionally troubled teenagers or in a military academy and that his education and everyone else's was suffering while he remained at Bendover; but other rebels were either less stupid or less clever or maybe just more careful and so Jesus, Luke, and I all managed to evade Drummond's stern scrutiny and we all graduated cum laude from Bendover and went to good colleges after years of deliberately and repeatedly breaking every single rule and never drinking chocolate frappes.

Luke's family was from old New England Puritan stock. I stayed with them one Christmas vacation and I came to understand that there was really no contradiction at all between Luke's self-control and his disregard for established rules: as a good Puritan should, Luke did what he considered rational and good for his soul. After Bendover he went to Yale and studied chemistry, then moved to the West Coast and did a Ph.D. in psycho-pharmacology at Berkeley, and then became a drug dealer. I was in contact with him only intermittently during the years since the only times I saw him were during my brief visits to Kalifornia, but I remained impressed by his essential neatness. There were no fuzzy edges in Luke's world, no hazy mists left behind by the many powerful chemicals with which he experimented, no intellectual shadows marred the precise crispness of his thought. People did silly things because their bodies and brains were warped by the ingestion of the wrong substances produced and regulated for maximum profit and social control by large companies and government agencies run by men who were themselves warped by preservatives, sedatives, laxatives, stimulants, anti-depressants, analgesics, and other dangerous chemicals, Luke thought, and in his own reserved and unemotional fashion, sitting in his clean underground laboratory, calmly fitting together molecules which would forever alter the brains of those who took his sleek designer drugs, Luke was trying to change the world for the better.

Like Xox?

After mailing Lucy's vitamin to Sleaze I wandered aimlessly around Wenceslas Square, elbow to elbow with tourists from every European country, so easily mocked because they behaved so true to type, Bavarians whose ruddy flesh, fed on pork swilled down with beer, nearly burst through ruddy sausage skins; throngs of teenage Spanish chiquitas whose harsh sibilant speech matched their thick tanned hides; tall Scandinavian couples loping along, hand in hand, bovine blue eyes glazed in trusting confusion even after their pockets had been deftly picked for the third or fourth time by one of the swarthy street Arabs in patched leather jackets, loitering in packs at the entrances to the dark passages that led off the square, calling each other dirty names to fill the time until the next unguarded wallet came along just asking to be lifted; a mousy English couple of indeterminate age shuffling along stiffly, the husband looking around vaguely, wiping his spectacles on the lapel of his blue and white zipped windbreaker which matched so well with his brown synthetic trousers and his wife's flowery dress, poor dear, so staid, so dowdy next to the chic black suit of the well-preserved Parisian lady stepping along with her rather younger but equally well-groomed companion showering icicles of disdain with every glance of his frosty grey eyes; and then, of course, there were the Amerikans, hordes of them on their annual pilgrimage to see Europe, now bigger, better, since the Wall came down and the word went around the grapevine of the travel agencies and the tour buses moved freely east on the Autobahn, and the families came to swarm, noisily gawking at the statue of King Wenceslas proudly astride his horse, some dim comprehension of history distending their mouths into a gasp of happy surprise that the money they had saved up for this trip had not been spent in vain even if these Czechoslovaks did speak a weird language and were clearly all alcoholics who drank beer at breakfast instead of orange juice or milk, and where was the nearest McDonalds anyway?, questions provoking a superior smirk on the tanned face of the nearest backpacker doing Europe on two dollars a day, an initiate in the arcana of wilful penury, secretly hoping that the two chicks near him would look up from their Tough Guide and just ask him where to go and what to see and maybe the cute blonde would dump her fat freckled friend with the plain earnest face and big round glasses and go hiking in Romania with him instead... I stopped seeing individual faces and could see only types and I knew it was time for me to go to a cafe and hide.

"Hey! How are ya? Good to see ya!" An Amerikan with long blond hair and a vaguely familiar face greeted me heartily. I recognized his type but I couldn't quite place this specific specimen. But then he announced that `Manny' should be here soon, and I remembered: I had met him soon after my arrival in Prague, sitting with the radical philosopher Immanuel, talking about environmental catastrophe and the end of the world. He was Bob, a liberal, and he ran an English language newspaper catering to Prague's Amerikan expatriates. There were no other chairs free so I reluctantly sat down with Bob and his companion. "Lemme introduce my friend, Benny."

"My real name is Benito," an impossibly handsome young man said, smiling, exposing two rows of perfect white teeth. Very tall, broad-shouldered, tanned, thick long eyelashes obscuring liquid olive eyes, Benito was the epitome of a male beauty I had previously seen only in the airbrushed pages of men's magazines. "People used to call me Benny at Santa Cruz but now I'm getting in touch with my roots. I am Benito! And I am a wop!" he declared with a pleasant loud laugh. I liked him immediately.

Oddly enough, so did Immanuel, despite his professed aversion to surfers. He showed up a few minutes later holding hands with a pretty woman with short silky black hair that nicely set off the high color of her cheeks. As I soon discovered, Divka was always running from one appointment to another. While Man and Bob and Benito bonded with loud mutual insults, Divka and I indulged in the luxuries of polite conversation and hot chocolate laden with lots of whipped cream.

"You're Czech? But your accent sounds Arabic…"

"Well, Arabic was the last language I was working with. I am a linguist by training," Divka explained shyly. "Academic work doesn't pay so well here, so I also teach Czech to foreigners. I'm trying to teach him," she pointed accusingly at Immanuel, "but it is not easy. He just wants to hold hands all the time."

I grinned, recalling Immanuel's declaration that the only justifiable ethical response to apocalypse was to hold the other's hand. "He's a philosopher," I said soothingly. "He's just putting his theories into practice. Why were you working with Arabic?"

"Well, an old friend asked me to help him a little in this difficult period..." Divka squinted vaguely at her cup, took a dainty sip, and made a face. I silently agreed: besides leaving a gritty bitter residue on the tongue, the chocolate content was abysmally low. Life in Prague had its drawbacks, especially in the finer details of creature comfort.

"What kind of help?"

"Well, I have to travel all the time."

"Why do you have to travel all the time?" I felt like I was pulling teeth.

"I wish I had never agreed," Divka said mysteriously. "But Wenceslas was so insistent and then, you know, it was just after the revolution and I felt that I should do something to help. So now I have to go somewhere with him almost every week. I don't know why he likes travelling so much. Maybe it's just because he has so many friends everywhere from his dissident days and he likes to see them again. But I have to go along with him and translate and most of the meetings are so boring! I will have to stop. But then he would get upset and I don't want to hurt his feelings. He cries so easily. Oh, I don't know." She shook her head. I stared at her.

"Divka, are you telling me that you are the President's interpreter?"

"Well, he's known me since I was a little girl and he has to have someone with him whom he trusts," she said defensively.

"Don't you like travelling?"

"That's the thing. I really like to meet people from different places. It's so interesting. And I must admit that I have met a lot of interesting people because of Wenceslas. The amusing ones are those he knew before he became President. The heads of state and the other official people are so boring. Also I really hate all the protocol. Red carpets and limousines and luxury suites in hotels and security guards and you can't go for a walk and you can't just have a coffee somewhere nice and quiet. I think Wenceslas misses his privacy also. He likes to talk about how much privacy he had when the Communists put him in jail. Sometimes he says that he wishes he could put himself in a nice cell in solitary confinement. Just now and again, so he could relax a bit."

"All those servants. It must be very difficult."

"Oh, but that's not the worst of it. The poor man likes drinking and gambling and smoking smelly cigars and getting into fights in bars and chasing girls and raising hell, and now he can't do any of these things. His guards won't let him go outside the castle with his friends. And most of the rooms in the castle are so gloomy, you know, big formal rooms with moulded ceilings and uncomfortable furniture. So Wenceslas and a few of his old dissident friends who became ministers sit together all cramped up in a little unused lavatory they discovered in the attic. His friends insist that Wenceslas has to sit on the toilet seat because he is, after all, the president. And they sit there all night long drinking plum brandy and talking sadly about how relaxed life was back in the good old days when they were dissidents and they could at least go to pubs. And then he has to give all these speeches to the nation and pretend to be so responsible and moral when actually he's got this terrible hangover and a splitting headache. That's why he looks so worn out on television these days. Don't tell anyone," Divka said anxiously.

"Whom would I tell?" I shrugged. "You're almost the only Czech I've spoken to since I came to Prague."

"What are you doing here?"

"I work at the University of Truth and Justice."

"Is that Xox's university? I just got a letter a few days ago from Professor Masaryk asking me to come to a meeting there tomorrow. Something about starting a Department of Culture. Is that right?"

"Yes. But how did you get involved with the university?"

"It's Blodgett Scrotum's fault," Divka said crossly. "I don't like that man. He told me that a woman's place is in the kitchen and not in the library and that I should have had at least three babies by now. I wanted to arm wrestle him but Wenceslas told me that I had to be polite because Scrotum is so influential in British politics. Anyway, I think Scrotum must have told someone at this University of Truth and Justice about me, maybe this thin man with the glasses and the shaky hands who looks like a vulture..."

"Terence Killjoy-Yuck," I confirmed.

"Yes, well, so now I'm supposed to be on some of your overseeing committees. Did Immanuel tell you that he got a job at your university? Jiri Novak told him to come to this meeting."

"Do you know Professor Novak?"

Divka grinned ruefully. "I was married to him for two years."

"Oh, I'm sorry..."

"No, I'm sorry," she said. "Jiri is a nice man and he is very smart but he has the emotions of a three month old baby. He sees a breast and he grabs for it. Any breast. That reminds me. I must go to a meeting on breast cancer. Wenceslas is making a speech. I have to tell him not to smoke cigars at the meeting" She drank the rest of her hot chocolate and stood up. I watched her sweep away with long strides, clearly in a hurry to get to her next appointment. I liked her hair and I was glad to have finally met some local person after spending almost a month in Prague. The University of Truth and Justice seemed an impenetrable bubble in which I was trapped: a luxurious bubble filled with interesting people but disconnected from the outside world. I sometimes felt like a guinea pig in a mad scientist's laboratory, and I had to wonder afresh about Xox's motivations in setting up the university. Fear billionaires bringing gifts...

#GenghizInLove: Episode 14

It was quite a sight watching Rasputin exert all his personal magnetism, the all too resistible appeal of glistening steel teeth, bloodshot eyes, and the sour odour of his unwashed body. "Do you want to make some money?" he asked as he drank down his sixth tumbler of whisky and leaned over for more.

"How?" I held my nose and grudgingly poured him another shot.

Rasputin grabbed the bottle from my hands. "It's so simple! All you have to do is to go to a pine forest on the Ukrainian border where a small fat man in a brown nylon jacket will give you a package and you'll give him ten thousand dollars. Then you fly to London and give me the package and in two weeks I'll give you back your ten thousand dollars. And a couple hundred extra bucks of course," Rasputin added generously. "One way. Well?"

"No."

"Come on!" Rasputin was disappointed. "Why not? What's happened to you? You used to like adventures. Just do it as a favor to me."

"I nearly got my head blown off the last time I did you a favor," I reminded Rasputin. "It put me off adventures."

"Are you still upset about that?" Rasputin seemed surprised. "It wasn't my fault."

"Oh, really?" I stared coldly at Rasputin, remembering how he had maniacally paced about in the small upstairs room of an unfurnished house still smelling of fresh paint, in a suburb of London with an evil reputation, his fake Burberry trench coat flapping over a navy blue suit with trousers that were too short, showing dirty white socks above brown loafers, making rude demands for whisky and girls on the two short Hungarian-Jewish twins wearing double-breasted check jackets with whom we were negotiating to buy powerful computers that were still officially banned for export to Russia because of their potential military applications. Rasputin was playing his favorite role, the Russian with connections, this time in the Interior Ministry whose generals were keen to get that extra edge in ballistic technology over their rivals in the Red Army and the KGB in the military power-struggle in the Kremlin, and Rasputin had coerced me into acting inscrutable, the silent Asian financier figure, a part I was handling with some success until the nattily dressed man from Macao appeared with a stripped down demonstration model of one of the actual computers we were ostensibly buying, and then proceeded to ask us probing questions about the financial details and logistics of the whole deal. Rasputin lost his head and began babbling about An-22 transport planes, the biggest aircraft in the whole world, loaded with roubles which would fly at night from secret Interior Ministry bases near Moscow and unload their valueless cargo in Dubai where they would then take on board stacks of yen, and the roubles would be smuggled in Arab dhows across the Red Sea into India and exchanged for rupees at the old fixed rate of exchange which was still valid through some oversight and the rupees could be converted on the black market into hard currency; at this stage, Rasputin looked wildly at me and I nodded authoritatively but it was no use, Rasputin was fading fast, `and then they'll fly to Macao and pick up the computers?' he said, looking at the Chinese supplier hopefully. But the Chinaman only looked coldly at Rasputin's loafers and told the twins to take us away. We were bundled into a large new Volvo station wagon and driven at high speeds into a cheerless wilderness of row houses and railway lines and telephone poles, and I am quite certain that if it hadn't been for the lucky chance that I had slicked back my hair that morning with a particularly waxy mousse which caused the gun pressed hard against my neck by one of the twins to slip for an instant, a moment long enough for me to use the rudimentary self-defence skills I had acquired at my mother's insistence that I go to karate classes as a teenager in Kalifornia, Rasputin and I would not have been sitting a year later in my room in Prague drinking whisky in the early hours of the morning.

"Maybe I can get Godfrey to pick up the package," Rasputin said morosely. "I can sell that icon for fifty thousand pounds easy. I really need the money."

"What did you do with all the prize money from your article in The Voyeur? You can't have spent ten thousand pounds in three months."

"Well, I had to give Godfrey half of it since he wrote..." Rasputin quickly corrected himself. "Since he helped me write the article." He scowled at his empty glass. I brought out another bottle of whisky. I was curious to hear this story. "And then the rest... well, bad investments. And lawyers are so expensive."

"Isn't The Voyeur paying for your defence? Aren't they co-defendants in the libel suit that Blodgett Scrotum brought against you?"

"They were," Rasputin corrected me gloomily. "But they apologized to Scrotum. And to Monica Bigglesworth-Fume. And to Olivia Pebble. The treacherous bastards sold me out." He laughed harshly. "First they give me their prestigious prize for best travel writing of the year because they think it's cute to hear the English establishment described by a Russian. Next thing they won't even pay for the lawyers. The whole conservative establishment is out for my blood. The only thing that could save me now is if Terence would introduce me to Lady Snatcher. But the bastard refuses. And now two weeks ago the literary editor of the Daily Paragraph refused to give me even one book to review. He reminded me that Lady Monica's husband had been the editor of the Paragraph."

"Well, you shouldn't have written that her hair looked like overcooked spinach tagliatelle," I said without sympathy.

"I said that about Olivia Pebble!" Rasputin yelped. "I just said that Lady Monica needed... variety in her sex life."

"Rasputin. That was the one bit in the article which I knew you had written and not Godfrey. God is not crude enough to say that the lady needs to be sodomized because she is so uptight. And he is certainly not coarse enough to describe the Russian narrator proceeding to do precisely this in graphic detail."

"They're trying to drive me out of England," Rasputin said dismally. "They want me to go back to Russia."

"What about your job at The Sociologist? Did Jenkins fire you as well?"

"No. He promoted me. I'm now their Mafia correspondent."

"Is that why you were in Moscow?"

"No, we were gathering material. For Revolvers, Wretches, and Russian Roulette. Remember? The novel you and I were planning to write before you stopped speaking to me. Godfrey and I are writing it now." Rasputin's face brightened a little. "That's the good thing about this libel suit. Lots of publicity. But my agent says I have to cash in on it quickly. Besides, all these English people have started publishing novels about the Russian mafia. What the hell do they know about it anyway? Have they gone skiing down virgin powder slopes in the Caucacus with corrupt KGB agents and then spent the night in orgies with beautiful prostitutes? Have they been in car chases along the Dnieper valley being shot at by drug-crazed Georgian mafiosi? Have their girlfriends gone mad because their fathers have been sentenced to hard labor as part of a cover-up by Communist party bosses?" Rasputin's voice had risen to an unearthly crescendo wail. "Why can't these English writers stick to writing about themselves?"

"Just like you, eh? So are you moving back to Moscow?"

"No," Rasputin said emphatically. "I'm still having trouble with my visa and Terence Killjoy-Yuck refuses to help me. Ungrateful bastard. When I think of all the Corona Corona cigars I gave him. But Meredith is definitely going to marry me."

"Who the hell is Meredith? What happened to Stefania? Wait." I was genuinely appalled. "Is Meredith that crazy chick who was giving me advice about shampoo?"

"No, that was..." Rasputin scratched his head vaguely. "I can't remember her name now. I think she finally killed herself. She was always talking about doing it. No, I just fucked her sometimes. She bought me cigarettes. But she liked you."

"As I recall, she called me a rude, overbearing, insensitive bully just because I very politely told her that Ulan Bator is the capital of Mongolia. And there you were, nodding away, being Mister Sensitive, saying that she was right and that I only told the truth because I couldn't be amusing." I glowered at Rasputin. "So what the hell happened to Stefania?"

"Oh, it just got too complicated. After her stupid Polish husband finally found out about our affair, he had me followed all the time by armed thugs, and then he wrote to the Home Office telling them that I was a Russian spy pretending to be a student, and then he kept Stefania under lock and key at home and beat her up..."

"So you dumped her when she needed your help. As ever, Rasputin, the flower of chivalry."

"It was leading nowhere. She didn't have any money," Rasputin replied reasonably. "Meredith has a British passport and some money. And she's pretty well preserved for her age." He looked around the room and nodded approvingly. "They treat you nicely here. Are they paying you lots of money?" His bloodshot eyes glittered red.

"They haven't paid me anything yet."

Rasputin shrugged. "But you don't need money anyway."

I could see what was coming a mile away. "My mother's gone bankrupt," I lied. "Nobody wants to eat Mongolian fast food anymore. You know how quickly fashions change in the West." I coaxed a sob into my voice. "That's why I have to work. I'm going to beg them to pay me something. So that I can support my mother in her old age. Now that she's all alone and poor. She needs my help."

Rasputin sniffed. Even the most hardened criminal has his soft spot, I suppose, and I knew that Rasputin really loved his mother, despite the cruel words and harsh manners with which he upbraided her in public. But then it was hard not to adore Katyushka. It was because everyone loved that small dark plump woman with a caressing voice and sweet smile that Rasputin had gained his entry into the highest circles among British conservatives in the first place, because Blodgett Scrotum and Lady Monica had drunk blackberry tea in Katyushka's flat and had heard Katyushka gently urge them to try another pickled mushroom... My appeal to Rasputin's filial feelings worked, up to a point. I escaped scalping at the cost of only a hundred dollars.

"What time is it?" Rasputin asked abruptly. "I have to get to Berlin this morning."

I was startled. "Why Berlin?" I almost told him that Lulu was in Berlin but then in the nick of time I managed to bite my tongue. While rinsing the blood from my mouth, I looked up at the mirror and saw Rasputin sidling across the room. His bulky body obscured my view but he seemed to be putting something under my blanket at the foot of my bed. I made a mental note to make sure he hadn't planted a bomb but then I promptly forgot all about it. After a last slug of whisky for the road, I took Rasputin to the train station. It was already four in the morning and his train to Kiev left at seven. My boss, the rector of the University of Truth and Justice, Professor Otto Hell was coming back to Prague that morning anyway, and since it made no sense to bother getting any sleep, I sat with Rasputin on a damp bench on the deserted platform, two huddled figures in trench coats drinking bottled beer and smoking cigarettes in the dim blue light of a cold autumn dawn.

I had heard most of Rasputin's stories before and so I wasn't paying much attention as he babbled on about the latest cause celebre, the mysterious death at sea of the media magnate Max Bulge which had caused frenzied media speculation on whether Bulge had jumped from his yacht or been pushed. Rasputin claimed that world-famous investigative reporters were rolling around drunkenly on the scummy floors of seedy Fleet Street bars trying to punch each other on the snout because they disagreed about whether Bulge had been bumped off by the Israeli Mossad or the KGB. Rasputin himself believed that Bulge had laundered money for the Soviets for many years and that the political changes in Russia had brought Bulge's usefulness to an end. "He was definitely working for the KGB," Rasputin said, as his train pulled in. "What better cover for a Communist than to pretend to be a successful capitalist? And where did Bulge get his money from in the first place?"

Rasputin's parting words stuck in my head as I took the tram back to the University building. His last question seemed oddly familiar as I held on to the strap amidst a crowd of Czech workmen in blue coveralls on their way to their first beer break of the morning. It was only in the shower, as I switched the temperature from steaming hot to freezing cold in an excess of masochistic fervor, attempting to clear my head from a long night of drinking and chain-smoking, gasping for breath, heart pounding, that I remembered asking myself the same question about the origins of Xox's mysterious wealth. The rumor was that Xox's Fund for Peace and Love was a conduit for covert payments by the CIA and the British secret services to shady Third World governments and terrorist groups. Why then were the Western secret services so eager to dig up the dirt on Xox?

Hell seemed pleased to see me when I finally made it to his office. "Busy day ahead," he said gruffly, shaking my hand. "Got to muck out this pig sty. Where's the filth thickest?"

"The European Community department, sir?"

"Right," Hell said. "Thought I'd told you to call me `Otto'. Find Sonnerschein."

I called up the director of the European Studies department and asked him to meet Lord Hades immediately. "Jawohl!" an agitated voice answered. A minute later, Professor Hohenstaufen huffed his way into the office. "Any idea what it is about?" he snuffled nervously, staring at me with those protuberant gooseberry eyes.

"Lord Hades," I announced without reply. "Professor Prince Maximilian von und zu Hohenstaufen-Niebelungen is here to see you."

I ushered the Prince into Hell's office and looked through my peephole. Professor Hohenstaufen was on his knees besides Hell's deck-chair, his hands clutched in prayer, clearly making an impassioned appeal to impassive Hell. Tears were rolling down the Prince's cheeks into his sodden moustache and he was sobbing helplessly. It was not a pretty sight. A few minutes later, the Prince staggered out, still sobbing.

"He told me we couldn't teach the students court etiquette! And we aren't allowed to use the word `federalism'. Boohoohooo... Boooohooo...." I offered Hohenstaufen my handkerchief and patted him on the back. He gulped a few times, blew his nose loudly, and then smiled at me slyly. I smiled back. His smile turned into a leer. He winked. "Let's have dinner together one night," the Prince suggested. "Just you and me. Eh?"

I took a step back. "I'm afraid I'm very busy," I stammered.

The Prince's face turned purple. "What?" he shouted in a voice like thunder. "You decline my proposition? A boy from the dungheap of Asia, a child of savages without history, a mere nothing, rejects the friendship and goodwill of a nobleman like myself? I am Maximilian of Hohenstaufen! Not to mention Niebelungen! I am the direct descendant through my mother's line of Ulrich the Fat! And Adolph the Mad! Do you even know what that means? But of course you don't. You uncivilized... aborigine. I lay claim to the kingdoms of Poland-Lithuania, Greater Moravia, Ruritania, and Transylvania! My family is older than the Hohenzollerns! I am the cousin of the Holy Roman Emperor himself! Yes, I tell you, even Franz Josef von Gapsburg does not decline my invitations!"

Hell came out of his office and surveyed the scene coldly. Professor Hohenstaufen staggered back and retreated to the door, making fawning obeisances to Otto, wordless gestures indicating eternal obedience and servility. Recoiling in disgust, Hell turned away. Hohenstaufen-Niebelungen waved his clenched fist threateningly at me as he left. "Man's mad. What's the next mess I need to clean up?"

"Well, Otto, there is some confusion about whether we have a philosophy department or not. Professor Novak thinks we do. Professor Masaryk thinks we don't. He wants to start a department of sociology again. It's not good for staff morale to see the two most eminent members of the faculty wrestling in the corridors and calling each other names..."

"Call 'em in. And you sit in as well. Keep a record of the meeting."

Professors Masaryk and Novak made an odd couple as they walked in together, arguing heatedly. Tall, silver-haired, grey-suited, bespectacled, stern, Tomas Masaryk looked every inch the distinguished academic, while Jiri Novak, short, stocky, square, smiling, with his sharp brightly-colored jackets, shrill voice, and lecherous reputation, looked and behaved like an Italian film director with connections in the mafia. In fact, he was a noted philosopher whose refined and austere work on the epistemology of art had won him the respect and friendship of such legendary philosophers as Deride and Muzil. Both men fell silent as Hell politely offered them armchairs and then sat down in his own deckchair. I sat on a small three-legged stool in the corner and unobstrusively took notes.

"This eternal dispute between idealists and materialists is ridiculous," Hell began peremptorily. "Especially vicious here because of Communism. Have to transcend this narrow-minded and petty dispute. Compromise." Masaryk and Novak both looked suspicious. "Neither Philosophy nor Sociology. Instead we will have a Department of Culture. We will eradicate the mind-body dichotomy!" Both men looked aghast at first but their expressions rapidly altered to adoring admiration. They walked out of the room with their arms clasped around each other's shoulders, which was difficult for Novak even when he raised his high heels off the floor and walked on his toes. Hell winked contentedly at me. "Any other problems?"

"Well, Otto, something needs to be done about Professor Attila Ugh at the Budapest College. He wants students drawn exclusively from the Hungarian minority populations in Slovakia, Transylvania, and the Vojvodina. And his proposals for courses seem a bit peculiar..." I fished around in my pocket for the course outline Ugh had reluctantly sent in. "Sniper Training; Advanced Guerrilla Tactics; Low-level Bombing Simulation; Blitzkrieg Tank Maneuvers; Effective Ethnic Cleansing... and a graduate course on The Production of Weapons of Mass Destruction?"

"Bloody Hungarians!" Hell exploded. "Always the same. Ever since Attila the Hun. The same atavistic urge for empire. World domination." He frowned thoughtfully. "Tricky. Can't just fire him. He'll apply somewhere else for the money to turn himself into another Admiral Horthy. Doesn't seem to grasp the meaning of Peace and Love. Have to talk to Xox about this. He'll be here in a few weeks. Ran into him this weekend at this conference in Vienna."

"You're just going to let Professor Ugh go ahead in the meanwhile?"

"Told you not to ask questions!" Hell growled. "'Course I am. Don't want to raise his suspicions. Besides, can't disturb Xox about some petty tyrant. He's a busy man. Now go away. Leave me to my thoughts."

I bowed and withdrew. I felt very tired. I went down to my room and lay in bed but I couldn't go to sleep. In that grey haze of insomnia, an incipient hangover looming threateningly like a black storm cloud, certain questions kept repeating themselves in my head until they lost all meaning. What were Hell's thoughts? What kept Xox so busy? Why had the University of Truth and Justice been set up in the first place? What was the meaning of Peace and Love? That reminded me of an experiment I had been meaning to carry out for some time now. I got wearily out of bed and took one of Lucy's vitamins. Very soon I felt much better. I lay down again and breathed deeply. My muscles lost their strung-out ache and my eyes their strained dryness. The confused questions in my head were drowned out by a soothing murmur, waves breaking in gentle chaos on a sandy beach, nice waves, leaving behind an intricate geometry of foam, a fractal geometry of peace and love...

#GenghizInLove: Episode 13

Was it my fault that I never managed to call my mother? As I staggered that night into the University of Truth and Justice, I had every intention of calling Kalifornia and asking for more money. But then a heavy hand spun me around by the shoulder. My queasy stomach heaved up into my mouth and then sank into my boots as I recognized the steel teeth that glittered at me in the darkness.

"Why did you never call me back?" a familiar disagreeable voice growled in hoarse reproach. "You're a bad friend."

"Rasputin," I quavered. "You're supposed to be in Moscow. What are you doing here in Prague? Is that blood on your hands? What do you want from me?"

"I got into a fight at the train station. I want to talk to you," Rasputin rasped, more in anger than in sadness. "You have veesky in your room. I can smell it. Let's drink it."

Rasputin's nose for alcohol was legendary. I remembered my friend Navel recklessly running down the treacherous spiral of the Oxford staircase where we all had rooms at the time, taking the stairs three at a time in his haste to welcome me back after the cruise in the Norwegian fjords which I had been ordered to take by my doctors in order to recuperate from a particularly horrible summer with my mother. "We saw you walking into the quad from Flossie's room," he explained breathlessly. "You're late. Terence is awfully mad at you for skipping your first three tutorials of the term. There's someone here whom you have to meet. He's a mad Russian." Navel paused for breath. "He has occult powers. He can smell vodka. He's like a sniffer dog. It's amazing. Last night I hid a bottle of vodka under the dirty laundry in my closet."

I opened my eyes as wide as I could. Navel was the only person I knew who was even messier than I am. His accumulation of unwashed clothing had long since become the stuff of myth. Songs had been written about it. I could never restrain my tears when on quiet evenings Floss would pull out her battered old acoustic guitar and in her thrilling Joan Baez voice croon the excruciatingly sad ballad called `Navel Tries Bleach' which she had written herself, based on the true story of Navel's tragic experience early in his Oxford career when he put all of his fifty-three white Egyptian cotton shirts, made especially to his exacting specifications by a Filipino tailor, into a washing machine, unfortunately overlooking a dark blue sock which Floss wore to aerobics and which she had carelessly left behind in the washing machine; and Navel flew into paroxysms of rage and despair when he discovered that all his beloved shirts had turned a cheerful shade of sky-blue (the sock, on the other hand, as I helpfully pointed out, had bled itself white, a curious transference which made Navel wrap his freckled hands around my throat, and it took the violent intercession of Floss and two strong men to prevent me from asphyxiation, which explains why I am eternally grateful to Floss for saving my life, even though I still feel a ghostly ache in my throat in humid weather); but the worst was yet to come: at Maya's suggestion, Navel put his shirts into the washing machine again, this time along with huge quantities of strong chemical bleach, and watched the steel cylinder go around and around in the machine for eight hours, recklessly feeding in fifty pence coins by the handful to keep the cycle going, but when, at last, with bated breath, he let the alarmingly overheated machine wheeze itself to rest and opened the door, the shirts had indeed shed their blue but also their whiteness and had turned a pale and sickly yellow. This experience put Navel off washing his clothes forever, and, as he pointed out, the subsequent accretion of coffee, egg, and tomato stains had turned his shirts into an almost paisley pattern which matched rather better anyway with the somber brown tweeds he affected in emulation of the Oxford dons whose number he still desperately hoped to join.

And now Navel nodded impressively. "It's true," he said. "Rasputin managed to sniff out an unopened bottle of vodka even though I had hidden it at the very back of my closet. We don't know what astrological sign he was born under," Navel continued. "But Flossie and I feel that you two will get along."

And we did get along, at least for the first few weeks of our friendship. The very first time I met him, at a party in Maya's room, we eyed each other warily like dogs sniffing one another's tail on making first acquaintance. But the ice was broken that very night, literally, as we hacked our way with kitchen knives at the stalactites that had grown in Maya's freezer, to liberate a few bottles of vodka that Rasputin had placed there immediately upon his arrival in Oxford from Moscow. It turned out that he had brought several cases of vodka with him and a carton of the finest Havana cigars and little else besides, except a racing bike of which he was inordinately proud since its frame was made of the same carbon fiber used in Soviet military spy satellites. I have a theory that it was the theft of his bicycle a week after he arrived in Oxford which turned Rasputin into the monster of greed he later became: the loss of his bike convinced him that the only road to success in the West was through bare-faced and colossal theft.

I never managed to convince Flossie and Maya of this subtle psychological explanation. With typical brute feminine logic, they blamed me for Rasputin's transformation. "He was a sweet gentle aesthetic philosopher," Maya once said to me, sadly wiping a fat tear from her thin cheek. "Until you shaved off his beard."

"I didn't shave his beard. He did it himself," I protested half-heartedly. But I knew deep down, even as I demurred, that Maya was probably right. It was my fault. I have never liked facial hair, not even the soft shapely fluffy halo of hair the color of honey which enveloped Rasputin's face in those early days, giving him the air of a young and cheerful Solzhenitsyn. He didn't want to shave it off at first, but my principled campaign against beards eventually broke through his defenses. (Only later did we realize that it was a Pyrrhic victory at best.) Rasputin and I were sitting around one night, drinking old port with God and Lulu after three exhausting rubbers of bridge. I subtly brought up the subject of beards. Wasn't there a connection, I asked, between the appearance of a thinker and the nature of his thought? "I don't mean measuring the shape of people's skulls," I said. "But surely the defensiveness an ugly person feels about his appearance also affects the way he writes?"

"Go further with that thought," God urged languidly. I had bribed him earlier with a first edition comic book which he had coveted for years. "It may even affect what he writes. Look at all the systems of thought and then look at the portraits of their builders. What do they all have in common? Beards. Great big masses of hair hanging down their fronts. It must affect one in the head, you know, you've just woken up with a hangover and you're brushing your teeth, and you're feeling terrible anyway, but then you look up and in the mirror, you see an Old Testament prophet." Rasputin fingered his beard uneasily. "Hegel," God drawled. "Engels. Marx."

Rasputin shuddered at that dread name. Lulu clinched it. "I would never sleep with someone who had a beard," she declared flatly. "It would tickle."

"I'll shave it off!" Rasputin shouted wildly, jumping up from his chair. "But I need vodka."

We sat him down again and placed a bottle of bison-grass vodka in his shaking hand. Rasputin drank down the vodka in three long gulps while we draped a sheet around him and put another bottle in his hand. Lulu leaned over in front of him and began shearing away tufts of hair with my Swiss Army knife. Rasputin stared down the front of Lulu's low cut dress as she hacked off most of his beard. "There," she declared at last, deftly flicking Rasputin's wandering hand away from her bottom. "You'll have to shave the rest off yourself."

Rasputin finished the vodka and staggered over to the mirror. He howled in pain and clutched his head in his hands. Even I felt a twinge of remorse. He was a distressing sight, odd little tufts of hair bursting out like measles all over his face. "I'll shave it," I offered but then backed away when Rasputin turned and snarled.. It took six new razor blades, two cans of shaving cream, another bottle of my vodka, and a pint of his blood before the deed was done. He rinsed the bloody lather from his face, emptied a bottle of my incredibly expensive Catnip Pour Hommes cologne over his head, and turned around to face us. We cowered in our chairs. Gone forever was the Rasputin we had come to know and love, gentle, unassuming, sweet, kind, a friend. Before us stood a perfumed devil disguised as a schoolboy, a sixteen-year old with a savage smile, a vicious infant who would murder with a grin. And this monster had every intention to kill, if the Swiss Army knife he was brandishing menacingly as he bounded about the room was any sign. "Oh, my God, what have I done?" I moaned, feeling like Dr. Frankenstein.

"My creator," Rasputin bellowed, leaping at me. "You Mongol. I'm going to scalp you!"

Godfrey and Lulu managed to calm him down after he had chased me around my room for a while. I hid in Flossie's closet that night while Lulu (bless her heart!) made it impossible for Rasputin to chase me around the building by sitting down in his lap and letting him fondle her. Godfrey plied Rasputin with more of my old port and vodka until he eventually calmed down. But the nature of our relationship was forever altered by that traumatic night. For the next three years, I held Rasputin at bay with vodka, cigarettes, and currency, but I was always uneasily aware that the old vendetta might flare up again in his embittered Russian heart. And so I was terrified now at Rasputin's uncanny arrival, the eerie manifestation of this restless soul demanding whisky and conversation from me in the middle of the night.

#GenghizInLove: Episode 12

I spent much of my long weekend writing a long letter to my friend Flossie. She had sent me a postcard from Amritsar where she was interviewing fierce bearded Sikh warriors about their future plans to assassinate Indian heads of state. Floss was clearly in a didactic mood. Her message was a poem entitled `Bad Habits Which Children (Like You) Should Be Warned Against':

smoking is bad

so is fatty food

never cross the street

without looking

both up and

down

avoid a sedentary life

write back to your friends

and don't argue

with your parents

all of these things can

kill you

I thought it was a beautiful poem and I told her so. I also asked her to let me know just exactly how she had heard of the Fund for Peace and Love from whom she was getting the money for her research in India.

Memories of life with Floss reminded me of the long afternoons I had spent in our apartment, cooking elaborate gourmet meals which I had encountered in my favorite reading in those days, French cookbooks from the turn of the century, a more leisurely time in which servants thought nothing of waking up at four in the morning to stoke the kitchen fire and then begin to peel asparagus and braise rare meats. Our sleek computerized stove lessened my pleasure in cooking, but only a little: I stole my pleasure where I could find it, in wandering around vegetable markets looking for that little sprig of some out-of-season herb which might be just the perfect garnish for the cassoulet I had been engrossed in preparing all day, in earnest consultations with heavy-set stooped wine merchants about the provenance of some unusual Rhenish wine which, I thought, might suitably wash down the chicken breasts a la Reine d'Autriche with which our simple evening meal would begin; but my greatest pleasure was reserved for the moment late in the evening when Floss would emerge from her bedroom, her face flushed pink from the hot shower she had taken for over an hour after she returned home dripping from cycling back at mad speeds on her racing bike with a backpack full of heavy books from the libraries in which she spent her days, and we would sit down at the table and eat and, more importantly, drink, and talk about terrorists.

I missed cooking. One day I coaxed Lucy into going shopping for food with me. The local department stores were admittedly a disappointment, cavernous spaces lit grimly with blinding fluorescent lights, shelves lined with tins of fish preserved in vinegar and salted meats, jars of pickled fruits and cucumbers in brine, but cucumbers seemed to be the only vegetable with which Czechs seemed familiar, unless one counted as vegetables a few limp grey cauliflowers and rotten round dark brown objects which on gingerly inspection I discovered to have once been tomatoes. Sacks of potatoes lay around on the grimy tiled floors. Empty handed, Lucy and I walked past a queue of shapeless old ladies waiting patiently for their turn to count out to a surly cashier their small change, the pensions with which they eked out their meagre lives on a diet of tinned pork and potatoes.

"Try Legumes du jardin," sweet Annichka at the reception desk said helpfully. "It's where all the diplomats go." She gave us directions. As we stood waiting for a tram to take us to the center of Prague, I shivered. Autumn was already here now. The sun had long since set and a chill wind soon blew away the remaining shreds of twilight. I missed Kalifornia. I missed the sheer indulgence of fresh vegetables and warm evenings. Why was I in the desolate heart of Europe, loitering in the cold center of this alien melancholy? My question was easy enough to answer: I still hadn't called my mother. Harassed attaches in Amerikan embassies all over the world had probably been committing suicide for weeks now, cracking under the strain of fending off her insistent demands that they personally track down my exact whereabouts.

Legumes du jardin was a bright little outpost of Western prosperity in a dark alley near Wenceslas Square. A throng of people were gathered outside the shop, their noses pressed to the plate glass windows, staring at the price tags prominently attached to the tempting display of produce within, mushrooms of every descriptions, massed strings of crisp white Spanish garlic, the exuberant foliage of romaine lettuce. Lucy and I pointed dumbly at plump red tomatoes and thick green cucumbers, at the rich purple of aubergines and plums, and a cheerful shop assistant carefully wrapped each individual vegetable in tissue paper and then led us to the cash counter. Leaving Lucy to pay with a wad of bills I had thrust into her hand and which she was staring at in confusion, I broke away towards the cheese counter at the back of the shop which I had just noticed through the corner of my eye, a glistening array of cheeses, crumbly Roquefort, wheels of Stilton and, wait a moment, could that possibly be Cheddar...

"Hey, bud!" A familiar voice stopped me in my tracks. "Found your way around Prague already, huh?"

"Steele! What are you doing here?"

"It's where I do my shopping," my old school friend explained patiently. "I'm a diplomat. You never returned my call."

"Sorry, Steele. You know I never return calls."

"What are you doing right now? It's Friday night and there's a decent wine bar just around the corner."

"Let me ask Lucy." I pointed at Lucy who seemed to be having trouble paying for our groceries. Steele gaped longingly at Lucy's shapely behind. I batted my eyelashes. "She's a Mormon."

"Kinky," Steele replied approvingly. "Very kinky."

"She's weird. I think she's possessed. Oh, there you are, Lucy. This is Steele. He's an old friend of mine."

Lucy appraised Steele coolly. "You're Amerikan, aren't you? Are you a tourist here?"

"I work at the Embassy." Steele caught my warning glare too late. Lucy turned and looked at me hatefully. "Uh, did I say something…"

"Never mind," I snapped. "Let's just go get a fucking drink, all right?"

Surprisingly Lucy agreed to go drinking with us. Even more surprisingly the prim little angel was drinking with us, glass for glass. While refusing to talk to me, Lucy was getting along just a bit too well with Steele for my liking. By the time we were halfway through the second bottle, Lucy was leaning her head against Steele's shoulder and singing (a hymn?) softly to herself. By the third bottle, Lucy's face was buried in Steele's suited abdomen. Steele didn't seem to have a problem with that: he was happily stroking her hair.

"Psst… Steele," I whispered cautiously. "How do people make money on Wall Street these days?" Lucy was staring glassily at her empty glass. I reached out and carefully poured her some more just in case she was still conscious.

Steele looked up at me with mock horror. "Don't do it! Don't even think about it!"

"Why not?"

"Scary people," Steel explained. "Monsters. Evil brutes. Real crazies. Ugly demons. With a head for numbers. And political savvy. You need both in the currency markets. That's where the big money is made these days. By the serious players anyway."

"Like who?"

"Oh well, there's the pension funds. But they don't really want to make money. They just want to keep it safe for Joe Steelworker who's going to retire next week and then keel over with a heart attack. That's where they make their profits. Lots of tobacco stocks. But then there are maybe fifteen really big individual players who go for broke. They're like sharks with technology. Megalomaniacs with a killer instinct. Like this guy you work for. Mister X-O-X. He's a big boy on the currency markets. A master of the universe. And a nut. Certified."

Lucy sat up suddenly. "What do you know about him anyway?" she asked drunkenly before subsiding again with a hiccup.

"Is Xox was a front for the CIA?" I asked cautiously.

"Not that I know of. Where the hell did you hear that?"

"From a friend in British intelligence."

Steele laughed. "They should know," he replied sardonically. "They give most of their bribes to Third World governments through the guy. Not to mention their covert payments to all the dissident groups that want to overthrow those same governments. Just ask the Sikh revolutionary groups in London."

"Through the Fund for Peace and Love?"

"Is that what it's called?" Steele asked with interest.

Like a wind-up toy, Lucy sat up again. "You are both stupid," she slurred belligerently. "Mister Xox works for no man. You cannot serve both Man and Mammon!"

Steele tried to stroke Lucy's head again but she dodged his hand and fell off her chair. "Take me home," she moaned. I moved to help her up but she swatted me away viciously with her shoe. "Not you," she groaned. "Traitor. Deceiver. CIA mole. I hate you. Never want to see you again."

"Do you want me to take you home, honey? " Steele asked. He winked at me. I stared back in outrage.

"CIA man?" Lucy asked, opening one eye. "Always wondered what it would be like to fuck a spy. James Bond, baby."

"Good girl. Shaken not stirred. I'll take care of her," Steele promised. "I'll be nice. She's sweet. Does she drink much normally?"

"Never. I don't know what came over her."

"I did. Or I will," Steele said lewdly.

"Bed! Any bed!" Lucy said loudly from the floor. The waitress looked concerned. I hurriedly paid her off. Steele and I pulled Lucy to her feet. Steele had his arm around her as their taxi pulled away. I sighed and went back into the bar and ordered another bottle of wine and a plate of appetizers. The waitress made disgusted faces at me as I stuck greasy handfuls of fried cheese into my face. I didn't really care. Heart break yet again. I didn't feel like calling Lulu about it just yet. Besides she had probably gone to Berlin. Eventually I decided to walk back to the university and call home. The cool night air might clear my head and I was just sober enough to stagger back. It was late afternoon in Kalifornia and I felt just drunk enough to talk to my mother. I needed money. Man cannot live on wine and cheese alone.

#GenghizInLove: Episode 11

The next week passed by as a total blur. I had never worked so hard in my life, and at every moment that I raised my head from a desk cluttered with soiled and crumpled papers and the greasy remains of squashed pizza boxes, pausing only to rub my weary eyes with the back of a grubby hand, I devoutly hoped that I would never have to work so hard ever again for the rest of my life. At his meeting with the distinguished academics who headed the various departments and colleges of the University of Truth and Justice, Hell had airily passed on to me the responsibility of coordinating the recruitment of staff and students within one week. And while I grovelled on my knees in my tiny cubicle of an office, scrambling desperately through stacks of files in search of various relevant reports and the minutes and memoranda of many meetings, while I juggled phones with one hand between two ears while trying to send urgent faxes with the other hand to inaccessible locations like Warsaw, Vysegrad, Tirana, and Skopje, Hell sat comfortably in his sumptuous office next door, tip-tapping away at his laptop computer, writing yet another elegant and closely reasoned book destined for rapturous reviews and sales in the millions, pouring out the words straight from his prodigious brain and enormous memory. The man didn't even have to read: he knew everything. Worst of all, Hell whistled as he wrote, tunelessly, merrily.

I think I would have murdered Hell if it hadn't been for Lucy. Besides removing all knives and other sharp objects from our office kitchenette, Lucy persuaded her reluctant boss, Professor Masaryk, to give her a leave of absence for a week. Like a true angel, Lucy used her free week to help me call up the offices of all the various philanthropic foundations set up by Xox, scattered all over the jigsaw puzzle of Central and Eastern Europe. Miraculously, Xox's people were friendly, helpful, and efficient. Within days of our request for their help in recruiting students, we received large parcels sent by overnight courier, boxes which contained hundreds of applications from students. Xox's people had even interviewed the prospective students and ranked them. I suspected that Xox had ordered these lists to be prepared in advance of our request, which after all, emanated directly from his own desire that the university which he was funding should have students. Miracles are nice but, unfortunately, hard to arrange. Even if you work for a billionaire and have an angel by your side.

And after all the tedious work of arranging the transfer of stipends and travel money to the winners in Xox's lottery, after organizing such prosaic chores as buying decaying buildings in the central districts of five different capital cities and renovating them into modern dormitories, after negotiating such humdrum matters as staff salaries and curriculum conferences, after our week of toil was done, Lucy and I stood at the reception desk of the university building in Prague, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the first students.

They came in dribs and drabs, not as a flood, singly, in pairs, in small groups. Some had met at the very outset of their long journeys to Prague, others during their travels, after the usual tearful partings at decrepit train stations, leaning out of the train to accept a last minute salami or a jar of home-made preserves pressed upon them by an apprehensive mother, ostensibly for the trip, but more importantly, as something to clutch onto in the frightening future, a symbol of the certainties of home, a talisman. They came worn out from their journeys, like pilgrims, bent over heavy suitcases battered from years of family holidays, lent out to cousins and uncles, reclaimed now for this ultimate voyage. They came in their wide woollen trousers and badly cut dresses and shapeless winter coats, made at home and worn with reluctance commingled with pleasure, and in these fashions of scarcity I began to understand the reasons for their desire for escape and why they would always miss home. I also thought that I was beginning to understand Xox's philanthropic motives, if he had any. The best things in life are free, with the exception of fashion.

The splendour of the university building was too much for some. I became friends almost instantly with Paulina, a tall Romanian woman with wide grey eyes, pouting red lips, and proud breasts, dressed better than the rest in elegant white shirts, jeans, and well-cut jackets. One day, after a harassing excursion with some students to whom I had offered to show the beauties of Prague, an architectural loveliness in which they took no interest, complaining constantly that they were too cold, that they wanted coffee, that their feet hurt, and that they wanted to go home, on our return to the university building I discovered that Paulina was missing. I went in search of her and found her cowering beneath the washbasin in her bathroom. Some children had let off some fireworks outside her window while she was taking a nap, she explained, and she had instinctively ducked for cover, thinking that they were gunshots, that she was in the main square of Bucharest once again during that fierce and bloody revolution in which she had seen her friends dying. "This is not real," Paulina exclaimed, grabbing the luxuriously soft bathtowel. She got up, turned on her shower and stood fully dressed under the endless flow of hot water. "This is not real!" I could see the tips of her breasts punching out her wet shirt and the gleam of her large grey eyes staring at me. "You are not real." I shrugged in defeat and led her gently out of the shower and dried her hair with the towel. She was still staring at me and around her fine mad eyes and rosebud mouth I could see a fine network of lines, the cruel work of time and deprivation, all too real. Such a crumbling beauty. The next day she left the university and went back to Bucharest.

But most of the others soon came to cling to their new-found comforts. It was hard work to persuade them to go out of the university building even for a short walk. They preferred to stay in their well-appointed rooms and to make strong tea and to chain-smoke foul-smelling cigarettes and to talk endlessly. They sat up all night in the computer rooms and played games. They padded around the building noiselessly, in dressing gowns, pyjamas, and slippers, like inmates of a sanatorium. Lucy flitted among them, dispensing bottles of vitamins and angelic smiles. They seemed better after a while, after their travel fatigue had subsided and they had become accustomed to their new home. Perhaps Lucy's vitamins helped. They even began to complain about the room service. I was thrilled when I heard Fyodor, a balding Bulgarian, boldly declare that Prague was boring.

My work was done and I decided to tell the boss. I found Professor Hell sitting in his office, as usual, writing. With his usual Old World courtesy, he offered me a chair and listened gravely to my account of how the students had finally settled in. "Hmmph," he finally pronounced. "Anything else?"

I hadn't exactly expected Hell to jump up and hug me and declare me his anointed successor, but I was faintly annoyed by his total lack of interest in the sheer amount of work I had done. "Well," I said a little petulantly. "When do you plan to arrive at that conference in Vienna this weekend? The organizers just called. They want to know so that they can receive you properly."

"Damn," Hell growled, painfully twisting his bulky torso around in his canvas deck chair. "I'd forgotten all about that conference. Don't like trains. Oh well. Rent a car and drive me there."

"Uh, actually, I don't have a driving license," I said uncomfortably.

"An Amerikan who doesn't drive," Hell frowned to himself. "They take your license away from you? Drunk driving or what?"

"I wasn't drunk," I said quickly. A tear welled up in my eye. I really did not feel like telling Hell about my deepest trauma, about the most painful episode in my checkered past, about how they had taken my license away from me for life the day after I had finally obtained it, my sixteenth birthday. I wasn't even driving (in fact, I was comatose in the back seat): it was my little friend Barbie's unfortunate habit when she was roaring drunk of rolling her eyes around in her pretty little head while she sang pirate sea-shanties at the top of her voice that led to that ill-fated near-collision with a gigantic truck carrying nuclear wastes which they had planned to reprocess a little further along the Pacific coast. Since Barbie was fourteen years old at the time, they blamed me for irresponsible and reckless behavior, especially my mother. For six consecutive hellish summers, for a total of eighteen sweaty months, I had slaved in the infernal sculleries of my mother's Mongolian fast-food joints scouring dishes in order to pay back a fraction of the cost of her brand new silver-grey Mercedes 560SEL limousine which I had borrowed just for that evening. `It glowed in the dark, anyway,' I had protested, but my mother was, as ever, implacable.

"Doesn't matter," Hell grunted. "I'll drive myself. Chance to see the countryside. Haven't been in South Bohemia since my last escape from Czechoslovakia." A nostalgic light glowed in his eyes. "Thinking of buying a cottage around there." He smiled at me. "Take the weekend off."

"But it's only Wednesday…"

"A long weekend then. Get drunk. Chase girls. Have fun."

#GenghizInLove: Episode 10

"I'm Hell. Who are you?" Lord Hades glared around the room. A frightened hush settled over the conference table. Twenty pudgy balding men in their late fifties quivered like schoolchildren. The only person who seemed unfazed by Hell's ominous presence was Lucy, sitting next to me in a corner of the room, a quiet blonde angel, the perfect secretary, shorthand pad and pencil at the ready, waiting to take notes. I still couldn't figure Lucy out, even after several days and nights of being together. She didn't mind snuggling up with me at night, but my two main concerns, romance and shopping, were clearly alien concepts for her. Take lingerie. She never wore any. And when I asked her to at least loan me her soiled undies, she looked at me like I was crazy. Secretly peeking into her closet, gaping at the tidy piles of starched white cotton panties like neat stacks of crisp currency, I had to wonder which planet she was from. Don't angels leave stains? The girl was practical to the core. She would moan throatily at the tall bunches of velvet black roses I brought her; an hour later, all that were left were the chewed up stems. "Yummy flowers," she would murmur happily, snapping up a stray petal with her pointed pink tongue. I had no time to seduce her properly since we were too busy most of the time sending out summons to all the high academics involved in setting up the University of Truth and Justice to come to Prague and to meet their new Rector. They were all here now, assembled in Hell's sumptuous office, shaking in their well-polished boots.

All but one: Professor Greedmann, the chairman of the Economics department, had flatly refused to come. `Tell Hades to go to hell,' Greedmann had faxed from New York. `I'll do whatever I want with my department.' I sneaked into Hell's office at midnight and placed the fax on his desk on top of an amazing clutter of papers and books. I spent the entire next day in my office, waiting for Hell's reaction. In the late afternoon, as I was standing on a chair, boring a small peephole in the wall separating Hell's office from mine, I heard the door slam open. Professor Hell stood in the doorway, breathing heavily.

"Call Xox. Tell him I've resigned." I stood transfixed on my chair. Hell frowned at me peevishly. "What's the matter with you? You deaf? What are you doing on that chair? Get off it. Call Wall Street. Now." He adroitly hooked one of his walking sticks onto the leg of the chair on which I was standing and pulled hard. I fell onto the parquet floor with a heavy and painful thud. A slight smirk played on Hell's broad wrinkled face. Without getting up, I pulled the phone off the desk by its cord. It fell to the floor in a crashing tinkle of protest. Hell looked slightly taken aback. I called up the New York headquarters of Xox's financial flagship, Exponential Investments.

"Hullo. This is the Special Assistant to Lord Hades, the Rector of the University of Truth and Justice. Would you please connect me to Mister Xox's secretary? Yes, it's urgent... Hullo. Lord Hades wishes to inform Mister Xox that he is resigning. Yes, you heard right. I really can't say why. Professor Greedmann might know. Have a nice day."

"That should do the trick," Hell muttered. He looked down at me with a grim smile and held out the end of his stick. I heaved myself up off the floor. "Good show, boy." He held out his hand. I shook it. "Have a nice day," he repeated. "You Amerikan?"

"I was taken there when I was fourteen."

"Fourteen, eh?" Hell mused. "That's how old I was when I left Czechoslovakia the first time. I think we'll get along, boy. Never ask questions. Do whatever I tell you or whatever you want. You'll find out that it's the same thing anyway. And always stand up for yourself."

"Aye aye, sir. I mean, yes, my lord."

"Call me Otto, damn it."

"Jawohl... I mean, yes, Otto." The phone rang. I picked it up. "University of Truth and Justice, Rector's Office," I sang out cheerfully. "How may I help you?"

A shrill worried Noo Yawk accent. "Greedmann. Gimme Hell."

"I think Lord Hades would prefer to do that, sir." I handed the phone to Otto.

"Greedmann. Listen carefully. When push comes to shove I win. I fight dirty. No holds barred. Now do as I tell you. Send an abject apology by facsimile to me. Now. Copy to all members of the University Senate. And to Xox. Got it? Don't like repeating myself." Otto slammed the phone down and scowled at me. "Think he'll do it?"

I considered. "How much does he get paid by the University of Truth and Justice?"

"Good question. A lot. Takes a lot to get anyone interested in working for a crazy Peruvian billionaire," Hell said frankly. "They're giving me ten million a year. Chairmen of departments probably get a quarter of that."

"I thought Xox was Albanian, Otto."

"Just born there, as I understand it. Went to Peru when he was young. Lots of people emigrated to Peru after the war. Good climate."

Greedmann's apology now lay before his colleagues seated at the conference table. He himself lay in a hospital bed in New York recovering from a heart attack. The Rector scowled around. "Come on. Haven't got all day. You." He turned menacingly on the unfortunate gentleman cowering next to him. "Who are you?"

"Tomas Masaryk..." The hapless Director of the Czech college whispered to his friend of seventy years standing.

"Right. Next!"

"Attila Ugh. Director, Budapest College," a small ugly man said sullenly. I suppressed a gasp. I recognized that perfectly round head with slicked-back thinning dark hair. Ugh was the mystery man with whom Terence Killjoy-Yuck had been filming Xox's romp with Lucy. And Ugh had seen me watching as well. I shuddered now as Ugh's glance swept over Lucy and I. Little black eyes glistened with malice and hatred out of a dead white rodent face. I wondered if he were really the megalomaniac that Professor Masaryk had called him.

A tall gentleman stood up. His orange tweed jacket stretched tight across broad fleshy buttocks as he bowed. "I am Professor Prince Maximilian von und zu Hohenstaufen-Niebelungen at your service," he intoned gravely in a thickly undulating South German accent, stubby fingers nervously twisting one end of a drooping grey moustache. "It is an honour to be present on this august occasion in the history of our..."

"No speeches!" Hell bellowed. "What do you do here, Niederzollern?"

"I am the Chairman of the European Studies department," the Prince droned. "We will teach these ignorant Eastern Europeans the proper etiquette with which they ought to behave towards those great and good officials in Brussels who in their magnanimity are giving..."

"Stop it!" Hell scarred the burnished surface of the conference table with a wicked whack of his walking stick. He waved the stick at the next victim in the firing line. The introductions went on and on, professors, directors, chairmen, distinguished elderly men frustrated in their self-importance, unable before Hell's fierce scrutiny to convey the grandeur of their appointments, the dignity of the pulpits from which they had bored generations of students. At last I became aware that the interminable chant of names and offices had come to an end. Everyone was staring at Hell uneasily. I leaned forward eagerly.

"Xox wants students," Hell said at last. "He's paying. We must get students." Angry jabbering broke out. "Shut up!" Hell shouted. There was instant silence. "Every department will have students next week!"

"But, Lord Hades," a voice objected meekly. "That isn't enough time to..."

"There isn't enough room..."

"We would have to hire lecturers..."

"Teaching assistants..."

"Build up a library..."

"Give them diplomas..."

"Degrees..."

"Accreditation..."

"Do it!" Hell said with quiet menace. "Now. Get to work. My special assistant here will coordinate all recruitment of staff and students. This meeting is over."

A tall handsome gentleman with an insufferably noble florid face got up dramatically. "Let the Senate decide! Or else I shall resign!"

Hell frowned. "Which one were you?"

The man tore at his mane of thick white hair. "I'm the chairman of the Social Policy department!" he shouted. I leaned over and looked at Lucy's list of names. "I'm the most eminent sociologist in the kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland!" Professor Ronald Dahl proclaimed. He shook his fist threateningly at Hell. "If you don't do what I say, I will discredit this university! I will make it the laughing stock of academic conferences all over the world!"

Hell shrugged. "I accept."

Professor Dahl's face brightened. "You accept my suggestion?"

"Your resignation," Hell said coldly. "And your department is hereby disbanded. Who needs sociologists anyway?" Professor Dahl turned pale, clutched at his throat, moaned, staggered, and finally collapsed to the floor in a crumpled heap. Hell looked around the room. "Anybody else here want to resign?"

A few heads shook. The surviving academics filed out of the room silently, heads drooping heavily on sagging shoulders. I noticed Attila Ugh turn at the door and grimace with surly malevolence at Hell's turned back. His dripping fangs glistened yellow under the bright overhead lights. The he scurried away without a word. Hell slumped back comfortably in his chair and put his arms behind his head. His massive head and jutting belly made him look like Humpty Dumpty. I felt a sudden surge of liking for this vicious old man. He opened his eyes a little and looked at Lucy and me.

"Well, children. What did you make of all that?"

"Watch Ugh!" Lucy and I said in unison.

Hell nodded and then seemed to go back to sleep again. He made me think of a very old and practiced crocodile, a survivor from some primordial past in which time oozed by as slowly as the movement of the viscous marshes which covered the earth. Was ten million dollars a year really sufficient bait to lure Hell out of a drowsy retirement replete with the fame and honor that had been heaped upon him by grateful nations? Or was it more than just greed that had brought together Lord Hades and his enigmatic employer, the billionaire master of that inexplicably successful business, Exponential Investments, Xox?

How had Xox made his money? How does an Albanian move to Peru and then on to New York, making billions of dollars in the process? Was it true, as my friend Godfrey had hinted to me on the telephone, that Xox served as a conduit for covert payments from Western governments to guerrilla groups throughout the world, skimming his commission off the top? Would such commissions add up to billions, or had Xox parlayed the money into successful investments in his own right?

Not for the first time in my life, I regretted the laziness which had prevented me from going to business school and the childish boredom that had made me long since renounce all those friends from boarding school and college who had decided to spend their lives making money. Suddenly I remembered my old school friend, Steele. He had mentioned that he had worked on Wall Street before becoming a diplomat. I wondered if a few drinks in some quiet bar would persuade Steele to tell me more about the mysterious Midas touch of Mister Xox.