by Stephen Fry
‘A Hungarian is the only man who can follow you into a revolving door and come out first,’ quoted Adrian.
‘Exactly. Szabó is just one such hornery cuss. He had been working, during the seventies, on cures for the common stutter, experimenting with ways of playing back the speech of a stutterer into their ears as they spoke. Apparently if a subject hears his own voice back a split second after he has spoken and while he is moving on to the next thing he wants to say, his stutter will be eliminated.’
‘How baroque.’
‘Baroque? If you say so.’
‘But not very practical to go about the place in headphones, I should have thought.’
‘Quite so. Far from a feasible cure for the affliction. Experience in this area, however, did lead Bela towards what turned out to be immensely fruitful researches into the speech centres of the brain. The subject that most interested him was that of lying or, as it were, saying the thing which is not. He wanted to find out what happened in the brain when people said things which were not true; to see, for example, whether there is any difference between telling a lie, making a mistake in memory and inventing a fiction, all of which involve, in one way or another, saying the thing which is not. Thus a man might say: “I have to work late tonight, darling,” or “The German for a chive is ein Zwiebel,” or “Once upon a time there was a fabulous trouser-eating dragon called Geoffrey.” These might all be taken to be examples of a lie. The speaker is in fact not going to be working late that night, he is instead going to the flat of his mistress there to conjoin with her in carnal riot. That is an Alpha-type lie. In the second case the man’s brain knows full well that Zwiebel is in fact the German for “onion” and that the word he is groping for is Schnittlauch, but his mind is unable for the moment to gain access to that information. His statement that ein Zwiebel is the German for “a chive” is therefore a Beta-type lie. And lastly, there never was a fabulous trouser-eating dragon called Geoffrey, once upon any time and what is more the speaker knows it: a Gamma-type pseudology. The Alpha-type, the first kind of lie, the moral lie, if you like, the lie that disturbs the conscience of the speaker, might well be detectable using a polygram machine, the other two most certainly will not be.’
‘Your friends are leaving,’ said Adrian.
The BMW couple had stood up and were making for the exit.
‘Excellent!’ said Trefusis. ‘That means we really are being followed.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘If Nancy and Simon leave the rendezvous first it is a sign that we are not alone. If they let us leave first, it means that we go unobserved.’
‘Moscow Rules, George. Moscow Rules all the way.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Nothing. So who is following us?’
‘I dare say we shall find out. Drink your tea precipitately. We must not lag too far behind.’
Out in the car park the BMW had gone. Trefusis opened the driver’s side door of the Wolseley, while Adrian looked around for signs of other cars preparing to start up in pursuit.
‘Can’t see any likely looking candidates,’ he said.
Trefusis stooped and picked something from the ground. He came up holding a thick oblong of folded paper which he handed to Adrian across the top of the Wolseley.
‘This was wedged in the hinges of the door. What does it say?’
Adrian unfolded the oblong and spread it over the roof.
‘I think it must be in code, or cypher, rather. Or whichever one was which. Either way it’s gibberish to me. You take a look.’
Adrian revolved the sheet of paper to face Trefusis.
‘Young Nancy takes after her mother,’ he said. ‘It’s in Volapük.’
‘In what?’
‘Volapük. A very silly international language devised at least a hundred years ago by a charming man called Johann Schleyer. “Vol” means world in his language and “pük” means speak. If he had known that in English it meant vomit, he might have chosen more carefully.’
‘And what does the note say?’
‘It seems that we are being followed by two cars, one a French-registered blue Lemon BX, whatever that might be, the other a white Swiss Audi Four.’
‘They must mean a Citroën BX and an Audi Quattro, I should think.’
‘That would seem to make sense. Well, this is refreshing to know, is it not?’
‘What, that we’re being followed?’
‘Yes.’
‘But we stick out like a sore thumb in this bloody jalopy.’
‘I hope so. The element of surprise is absolutely crucial.’
‘What element of surprise?’
‘Exactly!’ beamed Trefusis as he edged onto the autoroute and pointed the Wolseley towards Germany.
‘That is what is so surprising.’
The staccato rush of cars travelling in the opposite direction reminded Adrian of interminable childhood journeys to the coast. He would gaze at his father’s cocked wrists on the steering wheel or count all the four-legged animals in the fields as they passed, one for a sheep or cow, two for a horse, yawning repeatedly in a giddy cloud of car-sickness. He had had a trick of covering his ears with his hands and removing them rhythmically in time to the whoosh of each car as it passed the window.
He tried it again now.
‘Are we there yet, Daddy?’
‘Why do people always say that on car journeys?’ asked Trefusis.
‘It reminds them of when they were young.’
‘Humph.’
‘Anyway,’ said Adrian. ‘We were talking about lies.’
‘So we were. Light me a cigarette, there’s a good fellow.’
Adrian lit two from Trefusis’s cigarette case and passed one over.
Trefusis took in a deep lungful of Gold Leaf.
‘We can be fairly certain,’ he said, ‘that animals do not lie. It has been both their salvation and their downfall. Lies, fictions and untrue suppositions can create new human truths which build technology, art, language, everything that is distinctly of Man. The word “stone” for instance is not a stone, it is an oral pattern of vocal, dental and labial sounds or a scriptive arrangement of ink on a white surface, but man pretends that it is actually the thing it refers to. Every time he wishes to tell another man about a stone he can use the word instead of the thing itself. The word bodies forth the object in the mind of the listener and both speaker and listener are able to imagine a stone without seeing one. All the qualities of stone can be metaphorically and metonymically expressed. “I was stoned, stony broke, stone blind, stone cold sober, stonily silent,” oh, whatever occurs. More than that, a man can look at a stone and call it a weapon, a paperweight, a doorstep, a jewel, an idol. He can give it function, he can possess it.’
‘Surely when a bird uses a twig for nesting material it is doing the same thing?’
‘Birds collect for nests much as we expand our lungs a dozen or so times a minute in order to suck in air or, in our case, tobacco smoke. It is, or so I am reliably informed by those who know, an entirely instinctive mechanism. Animals do not have the lying capability of man.’
‘Keats’s negative capability?’
‘To some extent, yes. Within our brains connections are made and stored all the time. This word signifies this thing, this fact actually occurred, this experience was in truth undergone; the whatness and whichness of everything is established. Thus I ask you, “What did you drink just now?” and you reply “lemon tea” because lemon tea and your recent drinking are connected. If you deliberately wish to lie you think “lemon tea” – you can’t help that because the link is there – but you search for some other drinking material and say, for example, “apple juice”. A link is now made between your recent drinking activities, lemon tea and apple juice. The strongest link, however, is between the drinking activity and lemon tea because it is the true one. The link between what you drank and apple juice exists, because you created it. But it only exists through the link wit
h the lemon tea. Are you following me?’
‘Like a panther,’ lied Adrian.
‘The details of a lie are harder to recall than the truth, because they are less strongly linked in the mind. The act of remembering is literally just that: the act of reassembling the members of something. If the members are illusory it is naturally more difficult to enact this mental reconstruction.’
‘So your friend Szabó discovered what happens in the brains of people when they lie and has invented some kind of lie-detector, is that it?’
‘No, no. He did much more than that. He discovered a lie-deflector!’
Adrian watched the smoke from his cigarette being sucked through the quarter-light of the car. He had an awful feeling, deep down inside him, that he was somehow more than a passenger on this journey, more than an observer.
‘A lie-deflector?’ he said.
‘Let us suppose that all true things are connected in the brain by pathways called A-type pathways and all untrue things are connected by B-type pathways.’
‘Okay.’
‘Imagine a machine which inhibits the brain from making any B-type connections. When under the influence of such a machine, the subject is simply unable to lie.’
‘And this is what your friend Szabó has come up with?’
‘Such is his claim.’
Adrian thought for a moment.
‘There are some lies,’ he said, ‘which you tell … which people tell … so often that they believe them themselves. What about those?’
‘However much you may consciously believe what you are saying, your brain knows the truth, and has made connections accordingly. You may imagine, for instance, that on holiday in Sardinia you witnessed a gang of twelve bandits robbing a bank with machine guns and hand grenades, you may repeat this story to the dismay of all your acquaintances at every dinner party to which those friends have made the rash mistake of inviting you, such that you believe it surely and wholly. Nonetheless, buried under the dead neural weight of all these convictions, your brain knows perfectly well that in fact there were only two bandits with nothing more than a water-pistol and a spud-gun between them. Your brain was there too, you see, and it has registered the truth.’
‘I do see. I do.’
‘Szabó claims the machine is in fact as much a memory-retrieval device as a lie-inhibitor. It can just as easily make the subject disinter the German for “chive” as disgorge the details of his true whereabouts on the night in question.’
‘Wow.’
‘W, as you rightly remark, ow. Or, as they say in Poland, “Vov”.’
‘And where do you fit into all this?’
‘Nowhere in the development of the machine. Bela and I have corresponded over the decades, and a little over a year ago he began to include in his letters to me references to his development of Mendax, as he has fancifully dubbed this fruit of his intellectual loins. Last July Istvan Moltaj, a violinist friend of his, left Hungary to take part in the Salzburg Festival. Bela entrusted him with a sheaf of papers relating to Mendax. The idea was that Moltaj should give the papers to me. We had an appointment to meet at Mozart’s Geburtshaus in the Getreidegasse. It is apparent that someone had either been following Moltaj or had intercepted Bela’s letter to me arranging the rendezvous. He was there most unpleasantly killed, not ten yards away from us, as we both have cause to remember.’
‘And he never got to give you the papers?’
‘Moltaj had taken the sensible precaution of leaving a package for my collection at the reception desk of the Goldener Hirsch Hotel. The package contained a sheaf of musical manuscript paper. A duet for piano and violin. The music was cacophonous in the extreme but the notes corresponded to letters which spelt out a text in classical Volapük.’
‘So you got it?’
‘You may remember that on our return to England last year we were robbed?’
‘They took your briefcase!’
‘They did indeed.’
‘But, Donald, if I may say so …’
‘Yes?’
‘Why didn’t you post the papers or something? If they were willing to cut a man’s throat in broad daylight … I mean just to go round with them in a briefcase in your car! Not exactly tradecraft, old man.’
‘Tradecraft?’
‘You know. Not how Sarratt would train Circus men to operate in the field.’
‘Adrian, I’m rather afraid that you are gibbering.’
‘Le Carré. Operational procedures. A good field man would have taken the papers and shoved them in a DLB or DLD.’
‘A what?’
‘A Dead Letter Box or Dead Letter Drop.’
‘Oh.’
‘Moscow Rules, George, old boy. Moscow Rules all the way.’
‘Yes, no doubt a Dead Letter Drop would have answered perfectly. I should have thought of that. Instead I made a false copy of the manuscript and left the real one in Salzburg.’
‘You did?’
‘It seemed sensible,’ said Trefusis.
‘So the papers in the briefcase that was stolen …?’
‘Were drivel. It must have taken them a long time to discover, read it which way they might, that the manuscript they took from us contained nothing more illuminating than pages three-two-three to three-six-seven of the Salzburg telephone directory.’
‘And what exactly did you do with the real manuscript?’
‘There was a very nice chambermaid at the hotel. She said she would look after it for me. Was that bad trade-craft too?’
‘Well,’ said Adrian. ‘If she’s still got it, it was good tradecraft, if she hasn’t, it wasn’t.’
Trefusis inclined his head gratefully. ‘Don’t look behind you,’ he said, ‘but there has been a white Citroën two cars behind us for the last twelve kilometres. As to whether it’s a BX or not, I really couldn’t say.’
Adrian looked behind him.
‘You still haven’t told me,’ he said, ‘who was responsible for cutting this violinist’s throat … what was his name again?’
‘Moltaj.’
‘Right. Do you know who killed him?’
‘So many people would love to get their hands on a machine that can inhibit pseudology, mendacity and falsehood. The police, Intelligence services, all sorts and conditions of interested agencies and institutions. Bela, like any good scientist, is worried that he may have opened the door to something rather frantic, something rather ghastly.’
‘What have I done? What have I done? Have we any business taking away people’s right to lie? That sort of thing.’
‘Questions of free will certainly do seem to arise. It is perfectly possible to live a life from cradle to grave that is entirely dishonest. One might never reveal one’s true identity, the yearnings and cravings of one’s innermost self, even to the most intimate circle of family and friends; never really speak the truth to anyone. Priests and psychotherapists may believe that the confessional-box or the analysis session reveals truths, but you know and I know and every human being knows that we lie all the time to all the world. Lying is as much a part of us as wearing clothes. Indeed, Man’s first act in Eden was to give names to everything on earth, our first act of possession and falsehood was to take away a stone’s right to be a stone by imprisoning it with the name “stone”. There are in reality, as Fenellosa said, no nouns in the Universe. Man’s next great act was to cover himself up. We have been doing so ever since. We feel that our true identities shame us. Lying is a deep part of us. To take it away is to make us something less than, not more than, human. So at least Bela fears.’
‘Yes,’ said Adrian. ‘You still haven’t told me who killed Moltaj.’
‘The Hungarians have a wonderful word,’ said Trefusis. ‘It is puszipajtás and means roughly “someone you know well enough to kiss in the street”. They are a demonstrative and affectionate people, the Hungarians, and enthusiastic social kissers. “Do you know young Adrian?” you might ask and they might reply, “I know him, but we�
��re not exactly puszipajtás.”’
‘I have no doubt whatever in my mind,’ said Adrian, ‘that all this is leading somewhere.’
‘A few weeks ago Bela’s grandson arrived in England. He is a chess-player of some renown, having achieved grandmaster status at last year’s Olympiad in Buenos Aires. No doubt you followed his excellent match against Bent Larsen?’
‘No,’ said Adrian. ‘I missed his match against Bent Larsen and somehow his matches against Queer Karpov and Faggoty Smyslov and Poofy Petrosian also managed to pass me by.’
‘Tish and hiccups. Bent is a perfectly common Danish Christian name and it would do you no harm, Master Healey, to acquire a little more patience.’
‘I’m sorry, Donald, but you do talk around a subject so.’
‘Would you have said that?’ Trefusis sounded surprised.
‘I would.’
‘I will then straight to the heart of the matter hie me. Stefan, the grandson of Bela, came to England a fortnight ago to play in the tournament at Hastings. I received a message to meet him in a park at Cambridge. Parker’s Piece to be exact. It was ten o’clock of a fine June night. That is not extraneous colour, I mention the evening to give you the idea that it was light, you understand?’
Adrian nodded.
‘I walked to the rendezvous point. I saw Stefan by an elm tree clutching a briefcase and looking anxious. My specifying that the tree was an elm,’ said Trefusis, ‘is of no consequence and was added, like this explanation of it, simply to vex you. The mention of the lad’s anxiety, however, has a bearing. The existence of the briefcase is likewise germane.’
‘Right.’
‘As I approached, he pointed to a small shed or hut-like building behind him and disappeared into it. I followed him.’
‘Ah! Don’t tell me … the small shed or hut-like building was in fact a gentlemen’s lavatory?’
‘Meeting for the first time one of his grandfather’s oldest friends, a man of whom he had heard much, Stefan naturally embraced me, bestowing a friendly kiss on each cheek. We were puszipajtás, do you see? Stefan then knelt to open his briefcase. It was at this point that two policemen emerged from a cubicle, making unpleasant insinuations and an arrest.’
