The Care of Time (4 page)

‘I have made a date for you to meet Mr McGuire in his office at three tomorrow afternoon. And before you start belly-aching, let me remind you that you will be listening to a proposal which you can accept or reject. If you fail me by not turning up, you will not be forgiven. Still, for the sake of old times, I hope that if you decide that you can’t be bothered you will be so kind as to call Mr McGuire’s secretary in good time and tell her so. Then, when you feel like it, you can let me know what happened, one way or the other. Goodbye, my dear.’

I finished my drink and went to see what the daily woman had left for me in the refrigerator.

Later, when I had completed the Williams changes for my secretary to fair-copy, I tried saying
Children of the Twilight
aloud. After I had said it several times I found that it became a tongue-twister. Only as I was getting ready for bed, though,
did I wonder what the phrase was supposed to mean.

What kind of human beings were there, or had there been, who could sensibly be called ‘children of the twilight’? A political movement? Surely not. They sounded more like the members of some remote Amazonian rain-forest tribe discovered by an anthropologist with a taste for journalese. My mind’s eye could see their pictures in the
National Geographic
. Fragile little creatures they were with lank hair, blankly terrified stares and willowy spears clutched in their hands. If the spears were used for killing anything larger or more dangerous than a guinea pig, the heads would have to be tipped with poison.

As sleep came it occurred to me that the postcard picture must have been taken quite recently. Those big oleanders beneath the palms around the driveway of the Hotel Mansour had only just been planted when I had last been there.

Not many of the old Wall Street firms live very near that street nowadays. I found the one of which Mr McGuire was a member located almost eight blocks away in the new Syncom-Sentinel building off Fulton. The firm occupied two entire floors and, by some miracle of the decorator’s craft, and the expenditure of vast sums on dyed leather, had managed to give them an appearance of old-world cosiness.

McGuire was in his early fifties, a dark, thick-set man with rosy cheeks, bushy eyebrows and a beak-like upper lip that allowed him to give only very small smiles. I had looked him up in the books. He was a Princeton graduate, had been to Harvard Law School and had served in the Judge Advocate General’s department during the Korean war. He was an officer of the American Bar Association and a member of several professional bodies concerned with insurance. An authority on legal aspects of the international insurance business, he had lectured at Columbia on the subject and often read papers before the Investment Bankers Association and the Society of Chartered Life Underwriters. His qualifications as a commissioning editor (even in an acting capacity) for a serious Italian publisher seemed, unless the proposed book were to be a technical treatise dealing with insurance law, to be virtually non-existent.

If he was aware of that fact, however, he was undaunted by it. His self-confidence appeared total. His manner was relaxed, genial and patronizing.

He had a conference table as well as a desk in his office. ‘I am told,’ he said breezily as he waved me to a chair at the table, ‘that I must be very careful, in putting the Pacioli proposition to you, not to offend your professional sensibilities.’

‘Told by whom?’ I asked. ‘Not by Mrs Reynolds, I’m sure.’

‘Naturally, I am interpreting what she said. What she actually said, I think, was that you were very “choosy” – would that be her word? – about the kind of assignments you accepted. I gathered that you have certain strict rules and some prejudices. In my own choosy way I call them professional sensibilities. Isn’t that what they are?’

I was getting the small smile and its message was plain.
Halliday, we both know that what I’m doing is hiring a hack for fifty thousand bucks to do some scribbling for an important client. Let’s not waste time analysing your literary conceits
.

So, I answered the unspoken appeal as well as the spoken question. ‘I have prejudices against some things, certainly, Counsellor, and imprecise language is one of them. That’s a prejudice I would have thought we might have shared.’

I was pleased to see him wince at the word ‘counsellor’. When you have had as much to do with lawyers as I have in my work, you get to know that quite a lot of the good ones, even the good trial lawyers, don’t like being addressed as Counsellor. One of them told me that it always made him feel like a character in a TV series. As an honorific it has become debased.

McGuire changed his tune slightly, but without noticeable loss of countenance. When people proved touchy, he was reminding himself, you just let them think that they had scored a point.

‘Obviously,’ he said, ‘there’s no need for
me
to tell
you
that I haven’t had much occasion to do business with authors. Shall we just take it as understood, then, that you always have, in making your choice of a subject, a set of criteria to apply and that fifty-thousand-dollar fees aren’t going to change the fact?’

‘That’s about it, yes. All I’ve heard so far is that the Pacioli book is to be the history of a political movement. It is to be organized around a hitherto-unpublished nineteenth-century
manuscript with an informed commentary by a modern expert on the movement. I assume that this expert is not a scholar.’

‘Why should you assume that?’

‘A scholar wouldn’t accept the kind of editorial assistance that I have to give. He would believe, rightly or wrongly, that he could do the whole job himself.’

‘Then you have no objection to the basic proposition?’

‘I find the proposed title meaningless and a bit off-putting, but I’ll be able to judge better how valid that objection is when I know whose memoir we’re talking about and which political movement.’

‘Cards on the table then. I must put it to you as best I can and then attempt to answer the questions that your experience will prompt you to ask.’ He had a file on the table in front of him and he smoothed down the cover of it before he went on. ‘As you may know, we in this office have among our clients a multinational corporation with extensive interests in some of the more politically conservative and stable areas of the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf states. Obviously, our client likes, when it can, to oblige its friends in those countries. So, when word came through that there existed a book which a high personage considered to be not merely worthy of publication in the west, but of potential importance to the west’s policy-makers, our client took notice. Are you with me, so far?’

‘I think so. When your client had its people at Pacioli look into the matter, they came back with the bad news that much of the memoir and most of the commentary existed so far only as disjointed fragments. In other words, the book is at present little more than an idea.’

He chuckled. ‘I hear the voice of bitter experience. But not, it’s by no means as bad as that.’ He opened the file and from then on referred to it steadily. ‘Have you ever heard of a nineteenth-century terrorist by the name of Nechayev? Sergei Gennadiyevich Nechayev?’

‘I’ve heard of an anarchist of that name.’

‘You’ve probably heard of him as such because he was the anarchist who gave anarchy a bad name. I know it’s true to say that classical anarchism believed in the possibility of changing society for the better by demolishing centralized government, but it also held that man was essentially a reasonable being who could be improved by means of peaceful persuasion. The early anarchists were cranks, but they were idealistic cranks. It was Nechayev who hung the label of terrorism on the movement and handed to nineteenth-century cartoonists that symbol of anarchism that has lasted right into our own time – that round, black, sinister-looking bomb with a burning fuse sticking out of it. As for the man himself, he was a crook as well as a fanatic, a thief, a liar and a murderer. Nowadays, I dare say, we’d call him a criminal psychopath.’ He glanced at his file. ‘However, it is his relationship with Michael Bakunin of which I must now remind you. If you’ve heard of Nechayev, I don’t suppose you need telling about Bakunin, eh?’

‘I think I’d better hear what your brief there has to say.’

He smiled approval of my caution and then began to read directly from the top paper in the file.

‘From eighteen-sixty-five, after the death of Proudhon, Bakunin was the foremost anarchist thinker and writer. Like Herzen before him, he chose Geneva as his first place of exile. Unlike Herzen, though, he was an activist as well as a thinker, a militant and also something of a romantic. He was, for example, a friend of Garibaldi. So, he became the rallying point not only for exiled Russian intellectuals but also for adventurers with intellectual pretensions. The judgements he made were often too hasty. You can’t really blame him. In Switzerland at the time there was always a steady flow of refugees from Czarist prisons and the Czarist police. In eighteen-sixty-nine Nechayev arrived.’

McGuire’s beaky mouth pouted his distaste for the event and he slapped the file irritably as he looked up.

‘You can see how it was, Mr Halliday, eh? Nechayev
must have been the archetypical brooding boy-wonder revolutionary. With his con-man tales of secret rebel networks back in the old country, his fanaticism and his flatteries, he soon had the great man in his pocket. While still in Russia the boy-wonder had collaborated in the writing of a frightening Revolutionary Catechism which Bakunin admired, and now they worked together on a series of manifestos putting forward what was in effect Nechayev’s own programme of revolution through terror. You see, Nechayev believed in violence for its own sake.’

‘And the great man went along with him?’

‘Until he saw where the manifestos were really taking him and came to his senses, yes. Then he tried to dig in his heels. He said that passion must be allied to reason and complained that Nechayev was like a man in a dream. But what a dream! It was Nechayev who invented the modern terrorist doctrine of “propaganda by deed”. Not that anything that Bakunin said could have made any difference by then. It was all too late. In a movement like that there will always be the lunatic few who have been waiting for,
longing
for, violence. And without even knowing it. No matter what anyone says, the hopeless cases will always respond. Michael Bakunin and Professor Marcuse may have had their second thoughts, but it was too late for both of them. It’s always the same. When that sort of damage has been done, it can’t be repaired with more talk.’

‘How did Marcuse get into this?’ I asked.

The question was rewarded with a fleeting smile. He tapped the file. ‘I have notes here of some catch-phrases and slogans coined by the terrorist New Left when Marcuse was their guru. Material prosperity, for instance, becomes “consumption terror” when you want to justify the fire-bombing of a department store. And when you can think of no better excuse for an act of violence than your wish to commit it, you simply declare that “talking without action equals silence”. That’s the rubbishy kind of pseudo paradox that Nechayev liked to invent. But we mustn’t dismiss such nonsense too
lightly. Half-baked idiocy can be dangerous. That first great terrorist wave which began moving in the eighteen-seventies was carried along by those who thought that they could destroy European society with the weapon of assassination. And at Sarajevo in nineteen-fourteen one tiny group of terrorists almost succeeded. There
are
historians who say that they
did
succeed.’

‘They weren’t trying to start World War One, Mr McGuire. They weren’t anarchists. Their cause was the liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.’

‘And the cause of the PLO is the liberation of Palestine. Those people could still start World War Three by mistake.’ He rode over my attempts to enter further objections by raising his voice. ‘Yes, I know. The official leadership of the PLO would regard such a mistake as the ultimate catastrophe. But that’s beside the point. The real power lies with those who have the catalytic ability to provoke over-reaction. What we have to face now, as this second great terrorist wave starts to break, is a threat to our civilization of a wholly different kind and on a wholly different scale from anything we have experienced before. And the west will continue to be peculiarly helpless in the face of it. Unless western political institutions are prepared to pay yet again the dreadful price of moving towards fascism and the corporate police state, they will very soon be finding themselves unable to function. They will have been
provoked
into impotence.’ He was, of course, again reading directly from his script, but he had enough of the ham instinct in him to raise a hand aloft and wag a warning finger as he swept on. ‘You think I’m overstating the case or even joking? Listen again then to the founding father of the movement. I quote. “We have”, Nechayev wrote, “a uniquely negative plan that no one can modify – complete destruction.” That’s plain enough, isn’t it? Well, we know what his followers of the first wave did. Can you imagine what may be done in the near future with the technical facilities now available to those fine young lunatics of the second wave?’

Even a McGuire has to draw breath occasionally and this time I interrupted firmly enough to secure his attention. ‘Mr McGuire,’ I said loudly, and then waited until I had his full attention before continuing. ‘Mr McGuire, I’m sure that both you and your clients feel very strongly on the subject of international terrorism, but I have to tell you that so far you haven’t said a thing that hasn’t been said before a dozen times. There have been a lot of books published about it, many of them just as indignant as your brief seems to be. The Entebbe and Mogadishu shoot-outs even started a movie bandwagon. As a subject for serious study, international terrorism must now be regarded as, at best, suspect. As far as I am concerned, the subject is old hat and rather boring.’

With a real commissioning editor that would certainly have been the end of the matter. His reply would have been polite but crisp. If terrorism bored me so much that I wasn’t even curious to know how and why a few weeks’ editorial work from me could suddenly be valued at fifty thousand dollars, then he wouldn’t waste any more of my time. It had been good of me to stop by.