Murdering Americans

by Ruth Edwards

  ‘VRC, VRC, VRC,’ carolled Horace happily. ‘VRC, VRC, VRC.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Amiss, as he took the glass from the baroness. ‘Why has he that on the brain?’

  ‘I suppose he heard me mentioning the VRC on the phone today,’ she said, as she went over to put the black cloth over his cage.

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘Why are you always asking questions?’

  ‘Because it annoys you to answer them. Come on, get on with it. Whom have you been conspiring with?’

  ‘Myles rang.’

  ‘Oh, good. Is he still in Iraq?’

  ‘He’s just popped over the border to Kuwait for a bit of R & R.’

  ‘Has he done anything useful? Last I heard, Iraq still had its problems.’

  ‘Not everyone is as inquisitive as you.’

  ‘Stop being a pain, Jack.’

  ‘He said interesting things had happened but he’ll talk another time.’

  ‘Did he have any advice?’

  ‘Hit them fast and hard.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My enemies.’

  ‘Directed at you, that advice is about as useful as advising Tiger Woods to take up golf. Who else was on, Jack?’

  ‘Edgar.’

  ‘You old two-timer, you.’

  ‘We old-timers are adept at two-timing. What do you think Myles is likely to be doing in Kuwait?’

  ‘I dread to think. What’s Edgar’s take on things?’

  ‘There’s progress on the Mike and Vera-Velda front. Vera-Velda’s mother has taken on Edgar Junior as her lawyer, and after a lot of fuss the cops have agreed that the crashed car can be examined by an independent forensic expert, so they’re not going to get away with sweeping murder under the carpet. I was released quickly because Edgar Junior threatened to sue the cops for trillions of dollars for dereliction of duty if they charged me and/or didn’t give me back my gun, so they let me out for now after a heavy lecture about permits and violations of this and that that I didn’t pay attention to.

  ‘Now, how did you get on?’

  ***

  ‘Towards the end, Ryan talked a lot more about Ayn Rand and the importance of individualism and how reason is all and rational self-interest is what we should be all about. Though in this case, he seems to think rational self-interest requires individuals to liberate the oppressed masses of Freeman. He had some quote from her along the lines of civilisation being the process of setting man free from man. Which could involve helping to free man from man, though then he got bogged down in some confusing stuff about the real meaning of altruism.’

  ‘What a prat that woman was. How could anyone take seriously someone who changes her name from the perfectly OK Alissa Rosenbaum to a poncy name like Ayn Rand? And insists to boot that Ayn be rhymed with “fine.”’ She snorted. ‘All her stuff is boring clap-trap which ends up justifying libertarianism and anarchism. Prince Kropotkin put it better.’

  ‘Who the hell was Kropotkin?’

  ‘I thought you were supposed to be an historian. Kropotkin was the patron saint of anarchic communism. Became very disillusioned by what happened after the Russian Revolution. I used to be very keen on him when I was a girl. I lectured my teachers about him.’

  ‘You must have been insufferable.’

  ‘I still am.’

  ‘Never was a truer word spoken in jest.’

  ‘It wasn’t jest. It was a statement as obvious as most of Rand’s when you strip away what I might term her intellectual directoire knickers.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘They conceal all that is valuable.’

  ‘I’m not sure this is making much sense, Jack, except that I grasp that you’re not keen on Miss Rand. Yet Ryan seemed to think you took her seriously.’

  ‘I was being tactful.’

  ‘That hadn’t occurred to me as a possibility.’

  ‘Despite what everyone says, I’m very tactful when I want to be and I didn’t want to frighten them off. When I get the chance I’ll wean them away from her rubbish Objectivist philosophy and onto the really sensible people like Aristotle and David Hume. Or even, better still, Isaiah Berlin, if they want to see how ideas affect people.’

  ‘Don’t get carried away just because you’ve managed to get Betsy to like Jane Austen. Though having said that, she’s so heroine-worshipping at the moment she’d probably try to like Schopenhauer if you asked her to.’

  ‘First I’ll have to get out of their heads what’s already in there,’ said the baroness, picking up a stapled pile of paper and waving it in front of him. ‘This is the stuff that Ryan gave me that he’s trying to feed into the VRC. What isn’t plagiaristic in what I’ve read that this bloody woman has produced is commonsense regurgitated pretentiously. Apparently, the basic tenets of Objectivism are: existence exists; consciousness exists; existence is identity. Kindly tell me how that differs from Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum”*?’

  ‘Er….’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Or what’s new about her contradiction of Bishop Berkeley?’

  ‘Look, Jack. I haven’t read Rand and I’m rusty on philosophers. All I can remember is that Dr. Johnson thought Berkeley a bit woolly. Spell it out.’

  ‘Berkeley thought people couldn’t know if an object exists, only how they perceive it and Rand made a big thing of refuting that by saying if it’s there, it’s real.’

  ‘Like those false boobs of Traci Dickinson’s that you told me about?’

  ‘In that case, false is false but is also real, since Traci’s boobs are undoubtedly false but also undoubtedly exist. Look, Sam Johnson refuted Berkeley two centuries before Rand just by kicking a stone. He didn’t need to deck his argument with a load of intellectual twaddle. All these clever-silly people drive me mad.’

  ‘But how do you know they exist?’

  ‘By kicking them. Hard. And that’s what we have to begin planning to do. Have you got Godber on board?’

  ‘I’m getting there, I think. He seemed to be sloughing off some of the defeatism and getting a bit angry again. He eventually said if we tell him what we’re doing and we’re not planning anything criminal, he’ll help. Not that he hasn’t already. I really feel I understand what’s going on now.’

  ‘He’s hooked. Good, now what’s our strategy?’

  ***

  From: Robert Amiss

  To: Rachel Simon; Mary Lou Dinsmore; Ellis Pooley; Jim Milton; Myles Cavendish

  Date: Tue 13/06/2006 10.30

  Subject: The New Paddington Revolution

  Since New Paddington is, as you know, the hub of the universe (not least because it is the present residence of one Jack Troutbeck) I thought I should issue a comprehensive news bulletin to those of you not fully up-to-date. The position is roughly that Rachel’s mother is getting back to normal, that Mary Lou’s had several flattering reviews, that Ellis has become increasingly multicultural and with Jim is now chasing Latvian forgers, that Myles is resting up in whatever is the Kuwaiti equivalent of a spa, that Plutarch disgraced herself by eating five substantial St. Martha’s goldfish and leaving the spines at the Porter’s Lodge and has been saved from eviction only by special pleading from Mary Lou and the prompt provision of a temporary net over the pond, that my marriage being in its infancy, I haven’t had the nerve to ask Rachel if she’d retrieve Plutarch from St. Martha’s as soon as she leaves her parental and returns to our marital home but that I hereby ask her, that Horace’s fascination with train noises is driving everyone within earshot to distraction, that I think that if all goes according to plan I’ll be home in three-and-a-bit weeks (having had an extension of leave from Rachel) by which time Jack and I should have seen through the revolution we’re organising. When you’ve read this, do whatever is the electronic equivalent of eating it, as I’m sharing with you all the broad outline of our top-secret plan for taking over Diversity Farm. And please don’t now start making jokes about the pigs.

  The plan is to have the Presi
dent and the Acting Provost replaced respectively by Martin Freeman, the university’s chief benefactor, who is a sane businessman, and by Warren Godber, who believes in all kinds of old-fashioned notions like the need for people to acquire enough knowledge to be able to think. This will not be easy to achieve.

  We think the President is a crook. Now admittedly, this is based on one of Jack’s rather alarming intuitive leaps, but she may well be right. She has read much into the President’s cosmetically enhanced airhead wife’s reference to money being now no object. The implication was that the riches were comparatively recent, which sits rather oddly with the Pres having moved from Wall Street five years ago to a relative backwater like New Paddington where he isn’t paid that much.

  From what Jack observed, the quarter-of-a-million-or-so annual salary wouldn’t begin to cover Traci’s present running costs. This was confirmed when Traci somewhat unexpectedly rang Jack’s room the other day (well, the other evening, to be precise; she was very animated), got me in Jack’s absence, and asked me to invite Jack over for another fun girlie night to meet something called a parti-coloured teacup poodle which she had named Sweetie, which was the most darling doggie ever, had allegedly cost $4,000, already had the cutest wardrobe with matching jewellery and she was thinking of having dyed gold. With magnificent presence of mind I explained that while I was sure Jack would like nothing better, she was being tested for psittacosis which was a parrot disease lethal to dogs and humans, so it might be wise to postpone the meeting for a while. She screamed and rang off. On transmitting this message to Jack, I had great difficulty in preventing her from storming the presidential palace on an animal rescue mission.

  Of course President Dickinson may have made a lot of money in Wall Street and made good investments, but still….

  Jack and one of our allies, Marjorie—secretary to that almost extinct breed, the Distinguished Visiting Professors (aka DVPs) and a prime source of institutional memory—maintain that since Dickinson looks like a crook and talks like a crook and acts like a crook, he must be a crook. Indeed they also believe he murdered the previous Provost so as to put in his own placewoman. We don’t know where he would acquire dishonest money in his present job, but hypothesise that it may be a by-product of his very energetic fund-raising. Marjorie and a young member of the VRC who is a serious computer geek and knows how to hack, are looking into his finances and we’re very grateful to Jim for offering to talk informally to his New York police contact.

  Meanwhile, Jack has begun poisoning Martin Freeman’s mind against the Pres. She says she’s being subtle. I haven’t met Freeman because he’s in Europe, but he’s rung her once or twice to ask what the hell’s going on on campus, so I guess that’s a good sign.

  Meanwhile, what the hell is going on on campus, I hope I hear you are still interested enough to ask? Well, the Acting Provost, a woman who is to intellectual rigour what Hitler was to racial tolerance, was a rather foolish choice as stop-gap by the Pres, but he’s away so much he’s perhaps not aware of it. Her irrationality and bouts of hysteria are so frequent that her predecessor’s secretary walked out within forty-eight hours claiming that she feared for her safety.

  The best the human resources crew (who, Marjorie says, are so demented from trying to balance the rights of Korean lesbians with dyslexia against Nigerian transvestites with Attention Deficit Disorder) could do was to offer the A-P the services of Marjorie. This was done on the grounds that a) she had once been secretary to a Provost so knew where the bodies were buried—correction, so knew her way around the filing cabinets—and b) since two of the four DVPs decamped last week, and as we speak, Jimmy Rawlings aka Mujaahid (of whom more later), is on his way home and they don’t want Jack to stay anyway, she can be spared. This is excellent news since Marjorie will be able to spy. Of course Jack kicked up a huge fuss as a form of disinformation and has now been awarded her driver and gopher Betsy as a part-time secretary as well. The A-P made a feeble effort to argue that Jack’s contract should be invalidated by her having been arrested, but one phone call from Edgar Brooks Junior sorted her out. One of Marjorie’s priorities is to find out what wickednesses the more recently murdered provost and her enforcer had been up to. She’s hoping the A-P is too thick and mad to have thought to get rid of any evidence.

  Meanwhile, the VRC no longer exists. While lamenting that it could not be renamed The Vast Reactionary Conspiracy, Jack—like its originators—accepted that what we need for a revolution is as broad a church as we can get, so we’re now called SFU, short for Save Freeman U, which is boring but sensible. The quartet who set up the VRC accepted this manfully. Ryan admitted that trying to convert the student body to an arcane philosophy was perhaps a mission for another day: he had a sad little reprise of how students must have a philosophical revolution founded on the supremacy of reason and intelligent self-interest or something like that, but accepted that the immediate objective was to give them a university in which they can learn to read and write and talk and think without fearing being executed or sent to a gulag.

  Meanwhile, the VRC crew and hangers-on have already recruited enough bodies under the new name to get an SFU website set up which will shortly be publicised in the New Paddington Sentinel. The site has so far mostly anonymous stories of what happened to students who challenged authority in any way and invites any student who has evidence of bullying, harassment, or coercion by the authorities, egregious dumbing-down or grade inflation, the condoning of plagiarism and other kinds of cheating and all the rest of it to make contact with SFU in order to spill the beans and start blogging. To give you an example of the kind of thing we need to hear about, Betsy has finally admitted that she dropped out of being a cheerleader not just because she hated the drunken orgies and the gross ill-treatment of new recruits, but because the coach wouldn’t let up on trying to blackmail her into sex. She said the woman threatened and bullied her, and that she believed because of the way the campus operated that if she complained she’d be chucked out on a false charge because it was so un-PC to suggest a lesbian could be a predator. She had to lie to her mother—she thought Mom would have made everything worse—by pretending she’d lost her nerve, so the mother, who was living out her ambitions through Betsy, has been distraught for weeks.

  Meanwhile, a few of us are working out what to do on Founders’ Day, which is on the Fourth of July and is an occasion when families show up, there’s a bit of a patriotic celebration and addresses from various luminaries including the Pres and Martin Freeman about the eternal values of Freeman U. We all fantasise about an Animal House kind of day, but that isn’t what we’re about. What we’re trying to organise is a means of demonstrating how corrupt the university has become, how a large number of students are sickened by spending four years learning nothing and how political correctness has disappeared up its own asshole, as we say in the vernacular. All suggestions gratefully received. The choreography will be very complicated, but I’m hoping for great things from Ryan, who now that he’s been given a sense of direction, has closed his books and settled down to serious planning. He and Sue-Ellen and Joshua and Mark—the core of the old-VRC—have drawn up a list of trusties who are now busy recruiting malcontents. They have to be economical with the information they give these people, since it was known that Gonzales had a network of informers, so initially they’re just testing people out by asking their opinions of individual teachers and that kind of thing.

  I often wonder why I’m here and what the hell I’m doing, but the exposure to what’s being done to the young has been so horrifying that I’ve really bought into the idea that we need to sling a shot at a few of the fools and knaves who are ruining education in the West, fomenting bad relations between races and religions and opening the gates to fanatical enemies who no longer have to work out how to break down the gates, since they’re being invited in by cultural suicide bombers whose bombs are intended to blow up their own side.

  I haven’t yet mentioned what is most immedi
ately appalling, the fate of Mike and Velda, the private eyes whose deaths have shaken Jack much much more than she’ll admit. On the evenings after their funerals, she retired alone to her room, refused all company, and looked distinctly shaky the mornings after. She’s absolutely certain they were murdered, in which case it really was murder most foul. Our top suspect is the late Dr. Ethan Gonzales, sociologist, and Beria to Provost Fortier-Pritchardson’s Stalin, and no longer around to be interrogated. Other private eyes are now on the trail.

  Which brings me to the small matters of the Islamist demos, the jihad against Jack, and her legal position vis-à-vis her episode with the gun. Oh, yes, and of course the interesting question of who killed Stalin and Beria. Obviously our Islamist chum is the favourite candidate for murderer, but Marjorie thinks Dickinson shouldn’t be ruled out. She says he was around at the time, maybe there was a falling out among thieves and the burqa’d bird and running dusky person were red herrings. Too complicated for me.

  The demonstrators got even more excited after Jack was taken off to the copshop and—with Rawlings’ encouragement—did a lot of yelling about their lives being in danger, but it began to rain, they became hungry and they eventually went home. According to Marjorie, Rawlings was offered so much money to leave town that he forgot his principled need to outstay Jack, to secure a name-change for the university, extract reparations for the entire African-American population, destroy Whitey, impose Sharia law on the U.S., kill the apostates and the infidels and whatever other reforms he had in mind, and instead duly buggered off quickly with no word of farewell.

  However, a few of his abandoned followers became extremely excited when the D.A. did eventually get around to authorising a raid of the relevant area with a view to seeing if anyone looked like the man who was seen running from the Provost’s office. They got even more upset that policewomen began questioning burqa’d and veiled women whose shape resembled the woman seen outside the office before the murders.

  The raid began early this morning and from the local news bulletins it appears some Muslims have taken noisy umbrage, though they’re a bit quieter now that Rawlings is no longer inspiring them. I hope this means the radical Muslims have forgotten about Jack in their general vexedness against the D.A. We must all pray that the murderer will be discovered without his or her neighbours having their feelings hurt.