The Care of Time (5 page)

Mr McGuire, however, capitulated. For an instant he stared hard at me, then nodded. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I allowed myself to get carried away. Let’s go back to Nechayev.’

‘Is the memoir his?’

‘I’m coming to that. You won’t be surprised to hear that, where women were concerned, he was poison. One affair he had has become notorious. You may know about it. No? Well, Alexander Herzen the doyen of the exiled Russian intelligentsia had a daughter. After his death in Paris she returned to Geneva to live on the small fortune she had inherited. Nechayev, who was always broke, tried to get his hands on the money by seducing her. He failed, but it was such an ugly story that it has been well remembered. What has
not
been remembered, mainly because there was a family cover-up, is that he had another affair around the same time. It was with the daughter of an Italian doctor named Luccio.
Dr Luccio was a member of Garibaldi’s corps of volunteers. He had fought beside the Liberator in Italy and attended him between campaigns. When Garibaldi made his new home on the island of Caprera, the Luccios set up house there too. Now misfortune strikes. In eighteen-seventy Garibaldi goes to Switzerland to attend the Congress of Peace and Freedom in Berne. Dr Luccio takes his family along. Enter Nechayev. He is attending the Congress and that’s where he meets and woos the doctor’s daughter. When Garibaldi suddenly takes off again with his volunteers to fight the French, the doctor naturally tags along. The wife and daughter linger, unwisely maybe, in Berne before returning to their home on Caprera. That’s off the north coast of Sardinia, you know, small and isolated. Anyway, it is there, in eighteen-seventy-one, that Nechayev’s illegitimate son is born.’ He raised his bushy eyebrows at me. ‘Where was Nechayev? We can’t be certain. There were undoubtedly letters exchanged, but they have been lost. All we do know for certain is that during the following year, ’seventy-two, the Swiss extradited Nechayev to Russia. The charges were technically criminal, not political. He was wanted in Russia for the murder of a student. Tried for and convicted of the murder, he later died in a dungeon of the fortress of St Peter and St Paul. He left behind him as his legacy to the world the doctrines of modern terrorism, an illegitimate son and a memoir of his life and thoughts – written in Geneva apparently – which he had handed or sent to the girl for safekeeping. It has survived and is in the hands of his great-grandson. A copy of it is now with Pacioli.’

‘What language is it written in? Russian?’

‘A mixture of Russian and French mostly. That would be the way most of that circle wrote. Some of the French is in a nineteenth-century shorthand. There is a little Italian too. The memoir ends with a dedication to the girl in expectation of a marriage in Caprera which could never have taken place.’

‘The great-grandson owns it?’

‘Yes, he inherited it. In fact, until it came into his hands
nobody quite knew what it was because nobody could read it properly. It survived, I guess, as one of those family heirlooms with no intrinsic value that gets passed on as a sort of keepsake with romantic associations. This one was valued, perhaps, because it had belonged to the foreigner who, supposedly, had married great-grandmother in Switzerland and then been spirited away to Russia by the Czar’s wicked secret police.’

‘Does the great-grandson read Russian?’

‘Enough, I gather, to figure out the Russian passages in the memoir and grasp the importance of it. His name, too, is Luccio and he is the person who has suggested the form the book should take. I’ll come to his actual contribution in a moment. The Nechayev memoir is short, less than thirty thousand words, but it is of obvious importance as an historical document. Incidentally, the phrase “children of the twilight” about which you have reservations, Mr Halliday, happens to be one of Nechayev’s own. He applies it in the memoir to those who share his thinking on the subject of purification through atrocity.’

‘Are you sure that the memoir’s genuine? Has there been an independent vetting?’

‘The process of vetting is still going on, but I understand that those experts on nineteenth-century Russian manuscripts who are outside the Soviet Union seem unable so far to agree on all the relevant issues. Those inside Russia to whom extracts from the work have been submitted have yet to give an opinion. Presumably they will have sought ideological guidance from the authorities there before deciding whether or not it would be wise to give opinions at all. Dr Luccio is naturally disposed to regard the provenance of the manuscript as in itself conclusive. He had heard of its existence when he was a young man. The difficulty is that he never actually saw it until a few months ago. An aunt in Sardinia died leaving him the little she had. That was in compliance with Italian inheritance laws. The manuscript was found among her personal effects.’

‘You say he’s a doctor too. Of what? Medicine, like his great-grandfather?’

‘It happens to be civil engineering in this case. They have doctors of everything over there. But that’s unimportant. The thing about this Dr Luccio is that he is senior defence adviser to a highly influential Persian Gulf ruler. He’s at present on vacation in Italy. I understand that he went out to the Gulf originally on an airfield construction job and became involved in counter-insurgency and intelligence work more or less by accident. It seems that he discovered in himself a talent – if that’s the word – for the craft. Anyway, he has made it his business to gather intelligence on all the various terrorist gangs now operating and, above all, on their sponsors and protectors in the various governments concerned.’

‘And now he’s feeling that this inherited talent of his should be publicly recognized and deployed on the side of the angels?’

‘Why not? He has the ear of an important person in the Gulf. So, when Dr Luccio says that he can, from his own knowledge of the terrorist international, predict beyond all doubt that the next fifty years are going to be a re-run of the last hundred only ten thousand times worse, we listen. When he reminds us that we can no longer think in terms of those old, round, black bombs because the new wave will certainly go nuclear, we are entitled to ask him what he, the expert, suggests that we do about it. Agreed? Well, his reply is that the only solution, the Luccio solution, is exposure of the governments involved to world opinion. The governments he indicates as peculiarly responsible for the international terrorist training camps include, of course, those of Libya and South Yemen, but Iraq is also high on his list. Names of what he calls the “terror-masters” in those countries’ secret police services would be given along with detailed accounts of their crimes against humanity.’

‘He really believes that exposure to world opinion would actually trouble men like that?’

‘More, it seems, than we might think.’

‘You make him sound very innocent, Mr McGuire.’

He huffed a bit. ‘How I may make, or fail to make, him sound is beside the point. How can I know or appreciate the quality of the revelations he has to make? You must form your own judgements.’ It was back to the brief. ‘He has one final statement of importance to make. To those doubters who may question the relevance of Nechayev to the problems of dealing with the Baader-Meinhofs, the Red Brigades, the Black Septembers and all their modern counterparts, he offers Santayana’s reflection that those who refuse to recall the past are condemned to relive it.’

‘He seems to have thought of everything.’

‘Almost everything, yes. Though I doubt if Pacioli was his idea. I think that if our client Syncom-Sentinel had happened to own an American publishing house you would have been having this conversation a bit farther up town and with someone who knows more about books than I do.’

The smile he gave me with that was nearly coy, inviting compliments.

‘Just talking about books calls for no special skills, Mr McGuire,’ I said. ‘Do you know who this Gulf ruler is, this high Arab personage who believes so touchingly in the power of the printed word to make secret policemen blush and change their ways?’

‘We’ve been given no name. We’re instructed simply to ask you to work with Dr Luccio in putting the book into shape so that it can be published world-wide.’

‘Me specifically?’

‘That was the word from the Gulf via Rome and Milan. I don’t know why you specifically. No doubt inquiries were made and you, with your Middle East experience, were considered exceptionally qualified. If you accept and go to Milan you could ask them yourself.’

‘Yes, I could. Meanwhile, Mr McGuire, I am going to have to disappoint you by making my acceptance subject to conditions, and they will have to be written into the
agreement that I think I see there in your file.’

For a while there we had grown quite friendly. Now it was, on his part, back to the snotty smile. ‘Well, there can be no harm in your telling me what sort of additional conditions you are hoping to impose. As far as I can see, your rights, all those your agent insisted upon anyway, are fully and thoroughly protected already.’

‘My agent didn’t know what was involved. The first condition concerns the Nechayev memoir. You may not know it, but forgery is a cottage industry in Italy. My acceptance has to be conditional on proper authentication of the memoir.’

‘I told you. There is a measure of disagreement among the experts.’

‘There always is a measure of disagreement among experts when it comes to appraising holograph manuscripts. A few years ago there was a measure of disagreement among those experts called in to pass judgement on a manuscript purporting to be Mussolini’s personal diary. One lot said that it was absolutely genuine. No doubts at all. In fact, it had been forged by two elderly Italian ladies living in a country village. They and their front man got away with a great deal of money paid out by a newspaper publisher for exclusive rights before they were found out. I know that you can’t guarantee in advance that this memoir’s genuine, but I can’t afford to have my name linked with a forged memoir, no matter whose. I have to reserve the right to pull out if there’s no valid authentication forthcoming.’

‘Before publication?’

‘Of course. Equally, I would not in those circumstances expect to be paid the second instalment of the fee.’

He sighed. ‘Well, I suppose it’s not unreasonable.’

‘The other condition is not so simple. I want it written into the agreement that, once the draft has been approved for publication by its authors, it may not be changed.’

‘By the publishers, you mean?’

‘By anyone
except
the publishers. I don’t want there to be
any second thought on either Dr Luccio’s part or that of his patron.’

‘I would have thought that in writing a book of this character with the declared object of influencing international policy-makers, an author ought to be allowed to think not just twice but a great many more times.’

‘As long as the thinking is all done before the typescript is made ready for the publishers, he can do as much of it as he likes. It is the period between then and publication that concerns me.’

‘You’ll have to explain. I know nothing of these matters.’

‘In this projected book there are to be in effect two works one of which, we hope, is a document of some historical interest. That will be translated but not edited, except possibly to take out obvious repetitions or to clarify slipshod passages. We can forget that then. But what about Dr Luccio’s contribution? He, apparently, is going to tell all, straight from the shoulder. He’s going to be commenting on his great-grandfather’s role in the original terrorist movement as he goes, no doubt, and drawing modern parallels, but his main effort is going to be put into spilling the beans on the direct involvement of certain governments in terrorist activity. And he’s going to do this in a way that shakes the civilized world to its foundations. Agreed?’

‘You’re exaggerating of course.’

‘Not all that much. If, as you said, the book is expected to influence government policies, it’s going to have to shake
somebody
’s foundations first. I realize that you were giving yourself a blurb-writer’s licence when you stated the case for the book, but if it is to have any real impact at all, that has to be delivered by Dr Luccio’s contribution. Nechayev’s memoir, if genuine, will give the book a measure of academic respectability that will attract some critical attention, but if the only real meat is Nechayev on Nechayev, the attention will be no more than polite. So,
how good is Dr Luccio? How sensational are the revelations he has to make and what’s the quality of his evidence?’

‘That remains to be seen, surely.’

‘Then, I’ll put the question more baldly. How do we know that Dr Luccio’s motives and those of his patron are those you have described? In my work you come across all sorts of reasons for writing books. Some of them are very strange.’

‘Vanity would become a common motive, I suppose. Or exhibitionism. The writer wishes to display himself or herself to the world?’

‘Yes. Also common as motives are self-justification, vindication and the need to make converts to some oddball view of a religion. Sometimes the thing’s written in the hope of making money, or of shoring up a sagging career with publicity, or even of starting a new career altogether. Then there are the needs, real or fancied, to establish a truth or perpetuate a falsehood, to make saints or fulfil moral obligations to history. There is the need, as there is here apparently, to set the world to rights by prescribing courses of treatment. Those are some of the commoner motives. Also common as a motive is the simple desire for vengeance.’

He was almost grinning at me. ‘What fun you must have in your work! I hadn’t understood the possibilities. Which out of this galaxy of possible motives is the one that is troubling you where Dr Luccio is concerned?’

‘One that I haven’t mentioned. It goes like this. I write a book of memoirs or reflections. In it I include facts, half-truths or anecdotes about you that could, if published, seriously discredit you, or even threaten your life. I then let you know that I have done this and that for a consideration, usually though not necessarily financial, I will omit the passages in question.’