On a lovely evening in the early summer of 1991, in an extremely excellent restaurant in a corner of the Grand’ Place — the splendidly gabled market square that forms the heart of Brussels, just as Brussels itself nowadays forms the heart of our brave New Europe — I sat pleasantly drinking champagne across the white-clothed table from Cosima Bruckner. Brussels, with its great stone public buildings, capped with green-domed roofs of verdigrised copper, glowed with the warmth of an early June day. Outside in the great cobbled square, the evening tourists were beginning to wander, the evening drinkers to gather on the café terraces. Inside the quiet restaurant in the corner, behind thick net curtains and velvet drapes, it was already quite clear that La Rochette was somewhere just a little bit special. In fact it was obviously the heart of the heart of the heart of Europe. As Cosima, leaning forward, and revealing a stunningly fine cleavage I had not even known was there before, quietly explained to me, while we sipped at our bubbles at a table for two by the window, power and privilege, politics and pleasure, all customarily met and mingled around the tables and banquettes of the Restaurant La Rochette.
As we sat, a row of silver carts passed us by, bearing large pink lobsters on their final funeral journey to stoke the meditations of a group of European Foreign Ministers, informally gathered together to put a few finishing touches to the looming of the year 1992. On banquettes in another corner, a dark-clad band of the Higher Eurocrats — Commissioners and Directors-General, Chefs de Cabinet, Directors and Principal Administrators A4, certainly nothing lower nor less — were calling to the maître d’, Armand, to bring them their usual order, and opening up their slimline leather document cases to consider some fundamental European Community crux: the noise emission levels, say, of petrol-driven lawnmowers in urban and semi-urban areas, or whatever may have been worrying them about the Euro-future that night. In various alcoves, huddled over bottles of the finest claret and burgundy, Euro-lawyers and Euro-lobbyists, Euro-fixers and Euro-framers, were wheeling and dealing, dealing and wheeling, while the glossy, backlessly-dressed Euro-bimbos they had brought with them for purposes of elegant decoration yawned frankly into their makeup mirrors and glanced seductively around the room. A visiting delegation of Arab sheikhs, in their best white robes, sat together at a central table, drinking the spirituous liquors forbidden to them at home, while their foodtasters, dressed in appropriate black, sat together quietly at a smaller table behind.
Meanwhile a pianist of concert standard, or even better, played somewhere unobtrusively in the background. Great crystal chandeliers tinkled and twinkled just above our heads. Dark-suited and near-invisible waiters, one hand held behind their backs, slipped small boatlike pâtisseries of herbs, caviars and other rare goodies onto the crested plates in front of us, trying subtly to tempt us towards the complex erotic joys of future gastronomic adventure. ‘This really is quite a place, Cosima,’ I said, looking around appreciatively. ‘Oh, yes, I think so,’ said Cosima Bruckner. ‘About the best I’ve ever been in,’ I said, ‘And you come here often?’ ‘Not so very often,’ said Cosima, ‘It would be a month’s salary. But naturally in my job it is necessary to come here from time to time and check on how those in the Commission spend their expenses.’ ‘Well, naturally,’ I said, ‘So just explain to me, what is your job? You told me once you were a sort of sherpa on the Beef Mountain.’
‘This was not exactly true,’ said Cosima, ‘Oh look, do you see who is sitting over there, under the mirror?’ ‘Who is it?’ I asked. ‘The King of the Belgians,’ said Cosima, ‘You don’t recognize him?’ ‘I’m afraid not,’ I said. ‘Such a pity, nobody ever does,’ said Cosima, ‘But of course you know this man who has just come in. With the Yves Saint-Laurent suit, and the Legion d’Honneur in the buttonhole?’ I looked at the small sharp bird-eyed man, glancing around the restaurant. He looked important, but he was entirely unfamiliar. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said, ‘Who is it?’ ‘That is only the Deputy-President of the European Commission, the man under Jacques Delors,’ said Cosima, ‘He comes here all the time.’ ‘So he’s powerful, then?’ I asked. ‘Powerful?’ asked Cosima, ‘This is the man who has been put in charge of 1992. I work to him also. His name is Jean-Luc Villeneuve.’ ‘How fascinating,’ I said. ‘But this man is not at all what he seems,’ said Cosima, leaning forward confidentially. ‘No, of course not,’ I said. Now I knew I was back, firmly back, in the strange conspiratorial Euro-world of Cosima Bruckner.
So how did I come to be there, tête-à-tête in the heart of the heart of the heart of Europe: the New Europe where, as at some great medieval court, the world’s princes and plenipotentiaries gathered, where the ministers of great nations came to consult, the lawyers to plead, the modern courtiers to make their courtly careers, the framers to frame, the fixers to fix, the sick, the poor and the foreign to beg for crumbs from the princely European table? Well, as it happens, it happened something like this. After I had jumbo-jetted my way back from Argentina, I spent, I admit, a depressed and directionless few weeks. For several months I had been obsessed by a quest that had confused me, challenged me, fascinated me, elated me, but which had now ended in disappointment. I felt upset and dismayed by the tale of Bazlo Criminale that Gertla had told me. Whether it was true or not was no longer quite the question. It had burdened me with things I really did not want to know.
How can I explain it? Here I was, a good latter-day liberal humanist, if that isn’t too grandiose a term to describe the chaotic mixture of tolerance, permissiveness, pragmatism, moral uncertainty, global anxiety and (as you know) deconstructive scepticism I had come to steer my small life by. I lived (as I knew perfectly well, because all the experts kept telling me) in the age of historyless history, the time after the great meta-narratives. Rather like some amiable American who had spent rather too long on the West Coast, I perceived the recent European past as a handy aid to the present: a birthplace I had long left behind, a festering ground of old political resentments, a theme park for constant nostalgia, a useful source of designer imports. In other words, I gladly took the fruit off the European tree, plucking from it just what I needed in the way of decoration, ambience, mental backcloth, occasional ideological food and drink. Taking the fruit, I had never bothered to look very hard at the tree itself.
Then, thanks to an excess of professional curiosity, a brash careerist wanting a story, I had started examining the knotted trunk more carefully: I discovered that I didn’t like what I found. The familiar if not entirely companionable past had turned into an ugly, twisted growth, hung about with deceits, obscurities and betrayals. The story Gertla had poured out on the pampa was of course a very old tale: thirty-five years old, in fact, set well and truly before my birth, in a time I had never touched. But it concerned a Criminale whom I had (after a long search) met and, having met him, liked. I had no complaints of him. I found him human and benign, generous and serious. He had done me no harm; no, he had done me good. His ideas gave me pleasure, his thought had made a difference. He had shared with me his confidence, a certain passing friendship, even — on the boat on Lake Geneva — his cigars. I had no wish at all to find him flawed.
I also had no need either. The Eldorado programme had definitely been aborted, pronounced defunct by all formerly interested parties. I had quite lost touch with Ros. I had no Lavinia breathing down my neck, asking for thrills and spills, loves and crimes, trips and travels and tickets for the opera. If the story made my present newspaper, it would go somewhere at the back, after the much more familiar scandals about the Royals that obsess British national life. I had no scores to settle, no advantage to gain. I knew no easy way of checking if what Gertla said was actually true. Even if it was, I remembered the other thing she had said: that if Criminale had taken the side of Irini, he would probably have gone the same way as she did, gone to prison, become an un-person. Then we would have had no Bazlo Criminale. The fruit of the tree was perfectly good: why start trying to show it was corrupted?
So I did what most good latter-day liberal humanists would very probably have done in the circumstances: nothing, that is. But there is one trouble with human curiosity, a.k.a. the need to investigate. Once you have nourished it, it doesn’t go away. Which is why, over the next weeks, you could have frequently found me (if, that is, you had cared to) sitting alone in some Islington pub or other, a large glass of lager in one hand, a small German dictionary in the other, reading — no, I mean re-reading — Codicil’s little life of Criminale. Now re-reading is not like reading; it is something you do with changed eyes. This time, I knew that the book by Codicil was almost certainly not by him at all, but by one of the several other people who had crossed my life over the recent months. And if the author was doubtful, so, of course, was the subject. The book’s Criminale wasn’t the real Criminale, and certainly not my Criminale — who in turn no doubt wasn’t the real Criminale either. And if writer and subject had changed, so had the reader. After what had happened during my recent wanderings, I was certainly not quite the same person who so gaily had given his witless opinions over the tele-waves at the Booker.
In every respect, then, Bazlo Criminale: Life and Thought(Wien: Schnitzer Verlag, 1987, pp. 192) was now not the book I, or he, had read before. In fact my Sussex tutor — who, you might like to know, had resigned his post during the year, and opened a French restaurant in Hove famous for its experimental kiwi-fruity menus — would probably have been proud of me, as I picked up the authorless text, noted the disappearance of the subject, and read the text not for what it said but only for what it didn’t. Now I indeed deconstructed: read for the omissions and elisions, the obscurities and absences, the spaces and the fractures, the linguistic and ideological contradictions. I read it, in fact, as a fiction, which of course is what I should really have done in the first place. But now I read it with the benefit of alternative facts, which of course were also, as it were, fictions, to set against its fiction. I had alternative authors to try out on it, alternative Criminales to poke into its pages. This was a text — I could work on.
With benefit of my new wisdom, it was now very plain to me what kind of book it was: a progressive, uplifting and piously Victorian story about a virtuous man of virtuous mind who is confronted with conflict and adversity, but finally triumphs in a reasonably happy ending. In other words, it was a whitewash. It also matched and mirrored the line of recent European history fairly exactly. It started in the time of Hiroshima and the Holocaust, of angoisse and Angst, of the collapse of the old pre-war philosophies and the need for new ones. It opened in the terrible, shameful chaos of Europe after 1945, and the growth of dreams of a new, anti-fascist Utopia. It followed those brave new dreams into times when they were cursed and corrupted, and then shifted into the age of Adidas and IBM, the materialist, multiple, post-technological age, the era of the economic miracle, when the vague proletarian dream gave way to the late-twentieth-century bourgeois revolution, hi-tech, scattered, multi-national. It started in hard ideology; it ended in random, uncertain metaphysics. You could say, if you were European, it was more or less the story of us all.
It was also, of course, a romantic tale,of a man and his female muses: the Bazlo Criminale version of the mistresses of Borges. In the ruins, physical, political, moral, and philosophical, of postwar beaten Berlin, two student lovers, Bazlo and Pia, he a young scholar from Bulgaria with philosophical inclinations, she a keen anti-Nazi and Marxist, met and married. They gave their lives to anti-fascism, the building of the progressive and socialist future. Then, somehow, their lives separated. The where, how and why of this were unclear, but I gathered it had something to do with their ideological disagreements over the East German Workers’ Uprising of 1953 (an event which I had totally forgotten). It was hard to see who was on which side, but I fancied Criminale dissented from Ulbrecht’s repression. Now Pia disappeared from the story, as, I had gathered from others, she had disappeared from life itself. What should have appeared in Criminale’s love-life next, as I knew now, was Irini. However she didn’t; she was not mentioned at all. Instead the next important figure, in love and life alike, was Gertla, the Hungarian writer and painter who took up the muse-like role for most of the remainder of the story.
They had met and fallen in love: but where and when? In this section dates became strangely obscure: the entire period between 1954 and 1968 was treated as if continuous. Criminale —– was now the reforming socialist democrat in the glacial Cold War age. He was under constant attack from younger Stalinist critics, one in particular (could it be Sandor Hollo?). His books ran into trouble; some were banned in the Marxist countries, presumably at Russian behest; others appeared but then were withdrawn. Yet, by one of those strange ‘Aesopian’ arrangements that occurred in the Marxist world at the time; he was allowed, even encouraged, to print them in the West. This had worried me from the moment I first read this book in Ros’s house. But I was naive then, and I understood a little bit better now. This was one of Ildiko’s arrangements under the table, which the times and Party deviousness sometimes permitted. Now, though, I realized it was possible that, for political reasons, Criminale had been deliberately asked to play the role of East-West linkman. At any rate, this was when his influence began to spread, his reputation as a reformer began to rise, he became a world traveller, and took on international fame.
Conspicuously omitted was any mention of the events in Hungary in 1956: Imre Nagy’s democratic reform government, the Russian invasion, the suppression, the mass arrests, the imprisonment of Nagy. Unlike the reference to the German Workers’ Uprising, where the implication was that Criminale had taken a critical line, here he had no role. In fact the general impression given was that Criminale and Gertla were nowhere near Budapest at the time. The stress was on his travels, his rising fame, his high philosophical detachment, his continuing intellectual voyage beyond Marx and Lenin, Heidegger and Sartre. There was also little about his general lovelife. Conspicuous throughout was Gertla’s role, which was represented as quite opposite to everything she had told me in Argentina about herself and her links with the regime. Here she played a part more like that of the nebulous Irini. She was the loyal wife, the intellectual helpmeet, the supporter, above all the brave companion in daring revisionist thought. And even after the marriage had broken up (this was briefly referred to, with no how or why), she retained the role of intellectual muse through the later years.
Now, of course, Sepulchra — our great La Stupenda — popped up in the story. But it was only in a perfunctory role, as the attractive artist’s model and lowlife bohemian who had become a sexual and secretarial appendage to the now undeniably great man. Of course, anyone who had met them both would know that, in stature, Sepulchra did not compare with Gertla. But this was an unkind portrait, and she might just as well have been omitted altogether, along with Irini. The other women in his life — I realized now there must have been many — were not touched on at all. I particularly looked for a mention of Ildiko, whom I naturally hunted for in the text just as I did elsewhere, but there was no sign. And nowhere in the book was it suggested that Criminale had clay feet, that in the view of the author he had ever committed any serious error, moral, philosophical, or political. Yet, as I’d noticed earlier, the book also seemed quite distant and critical. And this was particularly true of one section that I had not really taken in before.
This was actually not too surprising, since it was an extremely obscure discussion of something the book called ‘Criminale’s silence’. It turned on various deep philosophical concepts, as well as on some splendid German compound nouns that reached parts of thought that even my larger German dictionary did not reach. But it concerned his interpretation of Martin Heidegger, die German philosopher with whom he had had, in print, a very famous quarrel (it was over irony, you will probably recall). Criminale’s attack was in English translation, and by putting this and the book together I was able to grasp rather more of the issue this time round. Briefly, the question was whether it was possible to elevate thought over circumstance. The issue was Heidegger’s famous silence after 1945, when the acknowledgedly great German thinker had refused to give any real account or explanation of his activities both as a philosopher and as a university rector over the Nazi years. (Incidentally, there is plenty written about this, if you want to follow it up.) Despite being banned from teaching for a while, Heidegger simply insisted that his thought lay so immeasurably far above and beyond the historical episode of Hitlerism and the Holocaust that it required no explanation, no confession, no apology.
To Criminale, Heidegger was here taking the line of Hegel: ‘So much the worse for the world if it does not follow my principles.’ But this, Criminale said, led his thought into a fundamental philosophical error. This arose from two contradictory beliefs: thought stood above history, but also created it. For Heidegger, the task of the philosopher was to deliver history, and the task of the German philosopher (Heidegger saw Germany as the true philosophical nation) was therefore to deliver German history. That Heidegger tried. He thus trapped philosophy in an impossible position. He was fundamental to modern philosophy, no doubt about that. He placed it over and above history; yet the philosophy helped make the history, and it proved disastrous. Criminale held that this was in fact inevitable, since history could never satisfy philosophy, being made of muddle, conflict and uncertainty. But that is what led to ‘Heidegger’s silence’, which was impotence, and marked the end of the road not just for his thought but for his concept of the philosopher’s task itself.
So Criminale took the opposite view: the philosopher’s work was what he called ‘thinking with history’. This meant that philosophy itself was actually ‘a form of irony’, one of his more famous remarks. It observed failure, and dismantled itself. It did not consider a truth was something that corresponded to a reality. It assumed there was no escape from time and chance. However the author of the book (this made the who, who, who much more interesting) argued that this had simply caught Criminale in the opposite trap. His view tied philosophy irretrievably to muddle, historical directionlessness, moral confusion. It also robbed him of the means of being free to think, or even to decide. So if one path led to ‘Heidegger’s silence’, the other way led to what was called ‘Criminale’s silence’, which prevented him from constructing any form of mental or ethical independence. A familiar state, I thought, not unlike my own.
Of course I found this highly obscure, as I expect you do too. It somehow reminded me of the term we spent at Sussex with my tutor on the complex matter of Nietzsche’s umbrella (we had to discuss whether Nietzsche’s umbrella was, as Derrida argued, a hermeneutic device, or whether it was a thing that stopped him getting wet when it rained). Both of these were philosophical silences. Both had a strange aroma both of honour and betrayal. Heidegger had not stood out against a time of evil, perhaps because to do so was impossible, perhaps because he had not seen that the time was turning to evil, the problem of so many in our century. But when the chance came he had not ‘confessed’, perhaps because it is hard to confess that a considered thought is wrong, or that all that comes out of our time of history is wrong. The same might be said of Criminale. His silence had become a philosophical paradox, but he too had not ‘confessed’, brought his contradiction into the open. If Criminale, a hero of thought, had betrayed, is there any way he would or should have ‘confessed’?
Do we call those things betrayals? Yes; if you accepted Gertla’s story on the pampa, then philosophy or ideological conviction did not save him. Indeed betrayal and deceptive silence simply had to be read back into the book’s record, onto almost every single page. There was romantic betrayal: he had loved Irini but allowed her to be silenced, to disappear. There was intellectual betrayal: the radical and revisionist philosopher had, by Gertla’s account, signed a Devil’s Pact with Stalinism in 1956. Then that meant political betrayal: he had become a creature of a corrupt and conspiratorial regime and system, repressive to its marrow, and everything he said and did thereafter could be considered suspect. There was personal betrayal: when Criminale made his high-level contacts and friendships in the West, he was reporting everything back to Gertla, who was herself pillow-talking with the Hungarian (which must also have meant the Russian) secret police. There was perhaps even financial betrayal, in the special accounts in Switzerland that had so interested Ildiko Hazy and Cosima Bruckner.
But to measure all that, it seemed important to decide who really had written the book, to make up my mind about the absent author. Here I had quite a rich choice: Otto Codicil, Criminale himself, Sandor Hollo maybe, Gertla Riviero. I thought of others: Sepulchra, say, even Ildiko. But by the time I had put the book down I had little doubt; I was more or less sure it was really Gertla. She came out as a kind of heroine. In fact if the book was a whitewash of Criminale, it was even more a whitewash of Gertla, or what I understood of Gertla. I checked the things I could check. She had the opportunity: when the book was written, in the mid-Eighties, she was still living in Budapest and could have sent it via Hollo to Codicil. She had the motive. For the book came from the age when Marxism-Leninism was coming apart, in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, during the great time of glasnost and then perestroika, and in the Eastern European countries — almost everywhere, you could say, except in China and the seminar rooms of some British and American universities. Reform was spreading, history moving fast. The pointless inhumanity of the system, the prison walls built round it, the shameless manipulations of its power-brokers and bully-boys were plain, and even the old Party hacks and hardliners were busy rewriting their histories in case. Criminale, Great Thinker of the Age of Glasnost, tough but tender, revolutionary yet reformist, a philosopher of reconciliation and rapprochement, was a perfect mask.
There was only one problem with all this. If the mask was there above all to protect Gertla, why would she now want to take it off? Why say something different and opposite now — and not just to me, but through me, a known and convicted journalist, to the world beyond? Why, if she was the secret police agent who had, in effect, corrupted Criminale, would she want that known — especially at a time like this, when the files were opening everywhere, the scores were being settled, and everyone was claiming virtue? At first, on the plane, my thought, as you know, was this came from the jealousy of a strong-minded, powerful woman who, in a time of change, was losing her influence over a world-famous man. Something like that wasn’t new. It was what I had heard from the Mistresses of Borges; it was what I remembered from the great fights among the lovers and friends of Jean-Paul Sartre over who had the ‘right’ to his thought when he changed his opinions in his final, ailing years. But now I saw that made very little sense. If she was changing her position, and trying to undermine and expose Criminale, there had to be another, better reason.
Having got here, I knew even less just what to do next. There was Criminale’s secret, there was Gertla’s secret, and goodness knows what other obscurities else. I put it all aside. Like Jean-Paul Sartre on his summer holidays, I felt I wanted a rest from all this Angst for a bit. My desk was piling up with the new spring books, which burst out like crocuses at this season. I did my work and let the story ride. But then one day, typing down the computer linkline in my all too open open-plan newspaper office, I had a thought on pure impulse: I knew someone who might know. I picked up the phone and rang the European Commission in Brussels. There followed the usual confusions: multi-lingual chatter, switchboard misdirections, cries of Ciao, invitations to please hold onto your piece. Then a familiar voice was on the line. ‘Ah, ja, Bruckner?’ it said.
‘Oh, Bruckner, guess who?’ I said, ‘Your contact in London.’ ‘Ah, ja, which contact in London?’ asked Bruckner. ‘It’s quite all right to talk?’ I asked. ‘Why not, we talk all the time in the European Commission,’ said Bruckner. ‘It’s Francis Jay, remember,’ I said. ‘Ah, ja,’ said Bruckner. ‘I promised I’d call if I knew any more about Bazlo . . .’ ‘Wait, I transfer this to a more secure line with a certain device,’ said Bruckner. ‘I thought you might,’ I said patiently. A moment later, her voice sounding strangely magnified, Bruckner was back again. ‘So you, my friend, you found out something?’ ‘It may not be important,’ I said, ‘But I was in Argentina and met Criminale’s second wife.’ ‘Gertla Riviero?’ asked Bruckner. ‘You know her?’ I asked. ‘Of course,’ said Bruckner, ‘You just saw her there? So how is she like?’ ‘Well, re-married, rich, and starting a whole new life,’ I said. ‘Yes, I think so,’ said Bruckner, ‘So what did you really find out?’
My news evidently sounded weary and unprofitable, I thought; I went on anyway. ‘She told me a lot of things about Criminale’s political past,’ I said, ‘His links with the Hungarian regime and so on.’ ‘It’s interesting?’ asked Bruckner. ‘It’s dynamite for his — reputation, that is, if it’s true,’ I said, ‘The trouble is I don’t know whether to believe a word of it.’ ‘You called but you think it is not true?’ ‘I think it needs checking carefully,’ I said, ‘That’s why I called. I thought if you ever came to London I could take you out for a bite to eat and we could compare notes. I’m in no hurry to print it.’ ‘You think you will print it?’ ‘She wants me to print it,’ I said. There was a pause, and then Cosima Bruckner said, ‘Listen carefully please. Here are your instructions. Go now to the airport and take the first flight here to Brussels.’ ‘I can’t, I have a job to do,’ I said. ‘Europe will pay,’ said Bruckner, taking no notice, ‘Do not tell anyone what you are doing. Mention Riviero to no one. Go to the Grand’ Place in the centre. In the corner is a restaurant, La Rochette. Everyone knows it from the outside. Meet me at eight. I will expect you. Once again you have done very well, my friend.’ It was curious how, when Cosima instructed, one always obeyed.
That same afternoon, then, I found myself once again in Heathrow’s packed, vile Terminal 2, caught a Sabena flight to Brussels, walked out through the controls at Zaventem, and took a taxi down tram-tracked streets into the grey city centre. There was hardly time to inspect the chocolate shops and pâtisseries before the city clocks were ringing eight. A row of black limousines waited outside La Rochette, their chauffeurs buffing them up to perfection. I made my way through the obscure, dignified entrance: the maître d’ pounced in the doorway. ‘I regret very much, m’sieu, but we take only guests with reservations,’ he said. ‘There’s a guest here from the European Commission,’ I said. ‘Yes, m’sieu, they are all from the European Commission,’ he said, ‘Only they can afford La Rochette.’ ‘I’m joining Miss Bruckner,’ I said. ‘Ah oui, Miss Bruckner! She likes always the quiet table by the window,’ said the maître d’, relieving me, with evident distaste, of my anorak and rucksack, and offering a tie from an extensive rack.
He presented me with a house aperitif; Miss Bruckner had not yet arrived. I sat at the table looking at the prices on the finely printed menu, and quickly realized why the citizens of Brussels knew La Rochette only from the outside. A few moments later, Cosima Bruckner walked in. I saw at once she looked different. She had abandoned her usual leatherized motorcycle gear, and was wearing a soft, expensive dove-grey dress. I have to confess that, to my: Nineties post-punk fabric-loving eyes, she looked suddenly much more attractive. The maître d’ seated her: ‘Armand, this is my special guest from London,’ she said, ‘Look after him nicely.’ ‘Enchante, m’sieu, welcome to La Rochette,’ Armand said, ‘The best champagne, perhaps?’ ‘Please,’ said Bruckner, ‘And how is the lobster this evening?’ ‘Ah! Parfait!’ cried Armand. ‘Do you like some?’ Bruckner asked me. I glanced at the prices on the menu, and must have turned starch white. ‘Oh, please do not worry,’ said Cosima Bruckner, ‘Europe is willing to pay.’
The chandeliers tinkled and twinkled over our heads; the quiet waiters flitted, the champagne buckets clanked. I glanced round the room, and realized it was a murmur of ministers, a parley of parliamentarians, a babel of bureaucrats, a chatter of commissioners, a lobbying of lawyers, an argument of advisers. ‘Who are all these?’ I asked, ‘Why so many people here from the European Commission?’ ‘Remember, this New Europe is a very strange place,’ said Cosima, ‘A great and complicated mega-country. And these are the élite of Brussels how, the new class, the people from the Berlaymont.’ ‘The Berlaymont?’ I asked. ‘That is the great four-legged building in the Rue de la Loi, with all the flags, you know?’ said Cosima, That is the Commission, where I work. I and about fifteen hundred other bureaucrats.’
That’s where you work,’ I said, ‘What do you do there?’ ‘I think you know,’ said Cosima. ‘Not exactly,’ I said, ‘I only know you chase people and spy on them all the time.’ ‘You also, I think,’ said Cosima. ‘For different reasons,’ I said. ‘No need to tell your reasons, I know almost everything about you,’ said Cosima. I looked up. ‘You’ve been checking on me?’ ‘Naturally, it was necessary to check on everyone,’ said Cosima. ‘You probably know more about me than I do,’ I said uncomfortably. This is possible,’ said Cosima Bruckner. ‘Well, as Professor Codicil would say, who is the man who can entirely explain himself?’ ‘He said this?’ asked Cosima, ‘You were right about him, of course.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘It was as you said, he was the centre of it,’ said Cosima. The centre of what?’ I asked. ‘Naturally I cannot tell you,’ said Cosima, the eternal enigma.
‘So you know about me,’ I said, ‘Now tell me a bit more about you.’ ‘Why should I do this?’ asked Cosima. ‘Because I can’t see what this Criminale business has to do with the people of the Berlaymont.’ ‘Please, my friend, you do not know what riffraff might be listening,’ said Cosima, glancing round. ‘Riffraff?’ I asked, glancing myself round the room. Nothing could have seemed in better order. I saw the King of the Belgians, the European Foreign Ministers (I recognized Hurd and Genscher), the Sheikhs of Araby, the Deputy-President of the European Commission, closeted in a quiet corner. ‘Of course,’ said Cosima. They look like a very high class of riffraff to me,’ I said. ‘Many of these people are not what they seem,’ said Cosima, ‘I see you do not really understand our New Europe.’ ‘I probably don’t,’ I said.
‘If you like to understand it, think of Switzerland,’ she said, ‘You remember Switzerland, where we last met?’ ‘I shall never forget it, Cosima,’ I said. ‘Both have many things in common,’ said Cosima, They are confederations, they have complicated government, they are rich. That is why tonight you eat lobster.’ ‘At moments like this I’m all for the New Europe,’ I said. ‘Both have many different cultures, many different languages. In Europe nine official ones, and then Euro-speak.’ ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘It is mostly acronyms, like when the ERM of the EMS leads to the EMU and the ECU,’ said Cosima, ‘And both are very pretty countries, no? The fields are full of cows and grain and vines, all supported by subsidies. Both have wonderful lakes and mountains. You know our nice lakes, I hope? The Wine Lakes, the Milk Lakes, the Olive Oil Lakes? Then our wonderful mountains.’ ‘Yes, the Beef Mountain, the Wheat Mountain, the Butter Mountain,’ I said.
‘You really know our country quite well,’ said Cosima admiringly, ‘But do you understand how hard it is to govern? Three hundred million people, a quarter of world resources. And who is in charge?’ The Parliament,’ I suggested. ‘Oh, you know where it is?’ asked Cosima, ‘No one else can find it. It meets only four days a month. Mostly it is lost on a train between Strasbourg and Brussels.’ The European Heads of State, then,’ I said. ‘You are joking, of course,’ said Cosima, They cannot agree on anything, especially now you British are in. No, it is governed by the Commission.’ ‘Oh yes, Jacques Delors,’ I said, fondly remembering (I often did) Ildiko’s shapely tee-shirt. ‘Except he likes to be President of France for a change,’ said Cosima, ‘So the important one is the one I showed you, Jean-Luc Villeneuve. But the Commission has problems too. We have created a great bureaucracy that would drive even Franz Kafka crazy.’
‘Frankly I thought he was a little crazy,’ I said. ‘Oh, no, he is alive and well and living in the Berlaymont,’ said Cosima, ‘You know, in a few months they will pull the building down. Why, because it does not meet the asbestos regulations invented by the people who like to work inside it.’ ‘Franz would admire that,’ I admitted. Then in fifty offices are fifty officials working to design the perfect Euro-pig.’ That too,’ I agreed. ‘Also now we have a Europe completely filled with paper crops and paper animals,’ said Cosima, ‘Paper olives which never grow, but still the farmers make a fortune. Paper cows nobody sees, but they walk across borders and double their value in one minute. Paper pigs climb in trucks in Ireland and arrive in Romania with an export refund. And think of a system where people spend all day in meetings making budgets and subsidies, then come out at night to restaurants like this and plan how to defraud them. Perhaps now you understand better what my job is.’
‘Yes,’ I said, as the best champagne was replaced by a very fine Sauvignon, ‘Your job is to sit at night in very expensive restaurants like this, working out how your colleagues fix things so they can sit at night in very expensive restaurants like this.’ That is it exactly,’ said Cosima, with an unexpected hint of a giggle, ‘You see, where there is a great budget, usually there is also a great fraud. So maybe there are some riffraff here, after all.’ ‘But that doesn’t explain why you came to Barolo, what you were doing in Lausanne,’ I said. ‘We had our suspicions,’ said Cosima. ‘Or why you were checking up on me,’ I said. ‘We checked on you of course because we thought you were a part of it.’ ‘A part of what?’ I asked. ‘Please,’ said Cosima. ‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘Let’s start again. What made you think I was a part of whatever it was you thought I was a part of?’ ‘Of course,’ said Cosima, ‘Because you were travelling with the Hungarian agent.’
‘I do wish you wouldn’t keep calling Ildiko the Hungarian agent,’ I said, nervously, ‘She’s just a charming little publisher from Budapest who has an unfortunate taste for luxury goods.’ ‘You think so?’ asked Cosima, ‘I thought you knew her very well.’ ‘I did too, but I’d have to admit in the end it was hard to know Ildiko very well,’ I said, ‘She has a, well, Hungarian mentality.’ ‘So you didn’t know her quite so well?’ asked I Cosima. ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘And yet when you left Lausanne so suddenly, we found you had stayed in that brothel hotel with this Hungarian agent.’ ‘We didn’t have the same room,’ I said. ‘And then we discovered that she was the one who drew the Criminale money from the Bruger Zugerbank,’ said Cosima, looking at me. ‘You have been busy,’ I said, drinking my Sauvignon uncomfortably.
‘So you didn’t know this?’ asked Cosima. ‘I just thought she’d gone out for another day’s heavy shopping,’ I said. ‘And you did not see her again after?’ ‘I never saw her again after that,’ I said truthfully. ‘And you do not know what happened?’ ‘No,’ I said, as innocently as I was able, ‘Do you?’ ‘Yes, your friend had quite a busy day in Lausanne,’ said Cosima, ‘The Bruger Zugerbank was not the only bank she liked to visit. There was also the Crédit Suisse, the Banque Cantonal, the Crédit Vaudois, the Zürcher Volkshandlung, the Hamburger Kommerzfinanzgesellschaft, the Bedouin Trust of Abu Dhabi, the Yamahoto Bank of Japan and the Helsinki Pankii.’ I stopped drinking and stared in surprise at Bruckner. ‘A lot of banks,’ I said, ‘And Criminale had accounts in all of them?’ ‘All of them,’ said Cosima Bruckner. ‘He must have sold a hell of a lot of books,’ I said. ‘If you really think that is where the money came from,’ said Cosima.
‘So Ildiko went round the whole lot and stripped the cupboard bare?’ I asked. ‘All of them,’ said Cosima. ‘She must have got away with a hell of a lot of money,’ I said. ‘I think so,’ said Cosima, ‘This surprises you?’ ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘Really I knew nothing about it. And it’s not at all like her. She really is a very nice person.’ ‘Very charming, I am sure,’ said Cosima, ‘And you know what happened next, after she did this?’ ‘They didn’t catch her?’ I asked, nervously. ‘No,’ said Cosima. ‘She went off and cleared out the stores of Lausanne?’ I suggested. ‘No, there was no more time for shopping that day,’ said Cosima, ‘Early that evening your friend left the country by the Austrian frontier and was driven full-speed back to Hungary.’ ‘You’re sure?’ I asked. ‘Of course, this was observed,’ said Cosima, ‘Her time of departure was logged precisely. Unfortunately none of these countries detained her, and all of them are just now outside EC jurisdiction.’ ‘Ah, so she got away,’ I said. I must have shown too much relief, because Cosima Bruckner looked at me sharply.
‘As for you,’ she said, ‘you left the next day. The twelve o’clock flight from Geneva to London.’ ‘I see, that was logged precisely too, was it?’ ‘Criminale left for India the same evening, and is now in California,’ said Cosima. ‘Really?’ I said, ‘Well, the TV programme was cancelled, so . . .’ ‘Before you left Geneva you too visited a bank, I think,’ said Cosima. ‘Did I?’ I asked, ‘I can’t remember.’ ‘You like to be reminded?’ said Cosima, dipping down into a handbag and coming out with a photograph. There was no doubt about who the young man was, walking there with his luggage out of the Credit Mauvais. ‘I must have gone to change money,’ I said. ‘You like to see some more?’ asked Cosima, handing me photos, ‘One on the lake steamer, talking to Criminale.’ ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Notice the false name, see the badge, Dr Ignatieff,’ said Cosima, ‘One in the basement of Chillon castle, discussing your plans with the Hungarian agent.’ ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘Hans de Graef from Ghent. He was one of yours.’ ‘As I told you in Lausanne, names are not necessary,’ said Cosima.
A fine terrine, doubtless made from the best wild game the Forest of Soignes could offer, came before us, but I could hardly touch it. ‘So you do think I’m a part of it,’ I said. ‘A part of what?’ asked Cosima. ‘How do I know?’ I said, ‘I thought you were going to tell me. I just went there to make a film about Bazlo Criminale.’ ‘Yet you met some strange people,’ said Cosima, ‘We thought perhaps you could help us find the real accomplice.’ ‘What real accomplice?’ ‘I think I told you she was driven at speed from the country,’ said Cosima, ‘A young man was waiting her in the Boulevard Edward Gibbon, and she got into his red BMW. Maybe if you look at these photographs you can identify him.’ Cosima looked in her bag again. ‘Don’t bother,’ I said, as a great many things fell suddenly into place, ‘His name’s Sandor Hollo, Hollo Sandor. He’s a Hungarian fixer.’
‘Yes, I think so,’ said Cosima, ‘And so you do know him?’ ‘Yes, I know him,’ I said, ‘He used to be a philosopher. I met him in Budapest. In fact he probably fixed me up. He fixed up my meeting with Ildiko. He probably fixed her entire trip too. Barolo, Lausanne, the whole thing.’ ‘Perhaps he is a member of the state security,’ said Cosima. ‘No, I don’t think so. I think he’s right in the forefront of the free market. You ought to give him a subsidy. He’s a juppie, he makes deals.’ ‘So you say you were his dupe?’ asked Cosima. ‘You know, one of the wonderful things about talking to you is I hear words I haven’t heard for years,’ I said, ‘But you’re right. His dupe was exactly what I was.’ ‘And you know this man very well?’ ‘I had lunch with him once,’ I said, ‘That was when he introduced me to Ildiko.’ ‘I am sorry, but I think this girl was perhaps not such a good friend for you,’ said Cosima. ‘She was,’ I said, ‘A very good friend. But maybe I wasn’t the only very good friend she had.’ ‘Criminale also?’ asked Cosima. ‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘So why would she join up with Hollo and steal his royalties?’
‘Maybe that was not exactly the point of it,’ said Cosima, ‘Those Swiss accounts were interesting to very many people. Why?’ ‘Because they had a lot of cash in them?’ I suggested. ‘But also because perhaps they were not quite what they seemed,’ said Cosima. ‘Like the people in this restaurant,’ I said. ‘Think, a man like Criminale,’ said Cosima, ‘With a Hungarian address, an Austrian passport, a Swiss bank account. A great philosopher, a man everywhere trusted. He can travel everywhere, go between East and West. He is a friend of the great, he can go even where diplomats cannot. He is not observed, no one suspects him. The ideal cover, don’t you think?’ ‘Probably,’ I said, ‘But cover for what?’ ‘You don’t know, really?’ asked Cosima. ‘Of course I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I don’t know anything.’ ‘Why do the Hungarian authorities let him hold such accounts in the West?’ asked Cosima, ‘Of course, because they can be used for other things. Putting in Party funds. Making big secret deals. Buying technologies. Other people could use them.’
‘Like Ildiko,’ I said. ‘We think she was probably a bag lady,’ said Cosima. ‘I don’t think so, unless the bags came from Harrods or Gucci,’ I said. ‘You understand, a female bagman,’ said Cosima, ‘Europe is an equal opportunity employer. She was the one who could bring it in, also take it out. We think that is why she came to Lausanne. Perhaps those two did not think it was Criminale money at all.’ ‘Missing millions,’ I said, ‘That’s what you thought I was a part of.’ ‘You must admit your actions were most suspicious,’ said Cosima. ‘And now?’ I asked. ‘Now we think you probably are almost but not quite what you say you are,’ said Cosima. ‘From you that’s a terrific compliment,’ I said. ‘You must understand, in my job this is highly unusual,’ said Cosima, ‘Look, here is the lobster.’ ‘Good,’ I said, relieved. Because frankly I was now beginning to realize there was no end to the trouble you could get yourself into, once you had entered the complex world of Bazlo Criminale.