Doctor Criminale

by Malcolm Bradbury

  Well, there’s no doubt about it – television arts documentary is a fast and furious world. No sooner were we dry and dressed again than the doorbell rang and there was Lavinia on the step, a code-locked briefcase in her hand and a gratified grin on her wide face. ‘Not celebrating?’ she asked. ‘No, Lav, we just finished,’ said Ros, ‘But we can give you a drink instead.’ ‘It’s Francis I’ve come for,’ said Lavinia, ‘Francis, listen, I’ve put out a contract on your life, okay?’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘This is it,’ she said, taking a long and legal-seeming document from her bag, headed with the distinctive, indeed weird, logo of Nada Productions, ‘Just sign at the bottom, please.’ ‘What’s this?’ I asked. ‘Just a sort of paper thing that assigns us the rights in your glorious treatment, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘I just wanted to do the right thing and regularize your position. You do like a regular position, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know, I haven’t been in one for ages,’ I said, ‘I’d better talk to my agent.’ ‘Does he have an agent?’ Lavinia asked Ros, ‘Isn’t he too young?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Ros, ‘I’ll be your agent, Francis. Sign it.’ ‘Shouldn’t I get a law­yer to check it out?’ I asked. ‘Listen to him,’ said Lavinia, scratching her way into a bottle of wine, ‘This is a cracked-up out-of-work journo who lives off women and he’s just been offered the best TV deal in town.’ ‘Have I really?’ I asked. ‘Take a look, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘You see? Researcher credit. Writer credit. Presenter credit. Three credits on one programme.’ ‘And the money?’ I asked. ‘That’s credit too,’ said Lavinia, ‘If we ever make this thing, and remember, TV is a very tricky world, you’ll get yours, dearie. Especially after Ros and I have got ours. Sign it, Francis.’ I looked at Ros. ‘Sign it,’ she said, ‘Everyone signs for Lavinia,’ I looked at Lavinia, bigger and bolder and rounder than ever. I signed it.

  That’s terrific,’ said Lavinia, shoving the contract into her briefcase and then taking from it a plastic wallet, ‘Now you need this.’ ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘It’s an air ticket, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘Austrian Airlines, economy class, check in seven o’clock tomorrow morning, Terminal Two, Heathrow, flight to Vienna. No upgrades allowed, by the way.’ ‘Why are you giving me this, Lavinia?’ I asked. ‘Just sit down here with me, darling, and I’ll explain,’ said Lavinia, ‘It may be a great treatment, God knows, I haven’t had time to read all of it, it’s very long.’ ‘Thirty pages,’ I said. ‘But it’s all questions and no answers,’ said Lavinia, ‘Now we actually have to make this programme. Our work isn’t done. The writing time’s over, recce time starts. You see?’ ‘I don’t see why I’m going to Vienna,’ I said. ‘Because, honey, you’ve only got one lead, haven’t you?’ asked Lavinia, ‘This man Otto Codicil. You have to go and talk to him. Nestle in his bosom like a viper. And get him to tell you all the mysterious secrets of our enigmatic Doctor Criminale.’

  ‘How do we know there are any secrets?’ I asked. ‘Because it says so in your treatment, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘That’s why they bought it. The Mystery of Doctor Criminale.’ ‘I only meant he seemed a bit of a mystery to me,’ I said. ‘Let me quote one bit, darling, if I can find it,’ said Lavinia, putting on glasses and opening my document, ‘It struck me forcibly. “Criminale has evidently led a life of contradictions and obscurities, of blanks and deceptions, of fragments and evasions, slippages and,” what’s this word here, darling?’ ‘Aporias,’ I said. ‘What’s that?’ asked Lavinia, ‘Is he sick or something?’ ‘No, what it means is that there are gaps,’ I said, ‘To me, the reader, his presence is obscure, his sign is occluded. He’s hard to read and interpret.’ Lavinia stared at me. ‘What do you mean, hard to read?’ she asked. ‘I mean, he’s an incomplete text, difficult to deconstruct, yet for that reason requiring to be deconstructed,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what you mean by the Mystery of Criminale?’ asked Lavinia, ‘Thank God they didn’t read the damned thing. Now look, Francis, we have to have a better mystery. That’s what they paid for, that’s what they’ll get. I want political deceptions. I want sexual betrayals, financial frauds, that kind of thing.’ ‘I don’t know there are any,’ I said. ‘There’d better be,’ said Lavinia, ‘I want some.’ ‘Where from?’ I asked. ‘Find out from Codicil,’ said Lavinia. ‘Why would Professor Codicil tell me anything like that?’ I asked, ‘He calls Criminale the greatest contemporary philosopher, the leader of modern thought.’ ‘Darling, he’ll tell,’ said Lavinia, ‘They all tell. Just make him think you want him to be in the programme. Then he’ll tell you anything.’

  ‘Do you mean he won’t be on the programme?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know, till we’ve checked him properly,’ said Lavinia, ‘He may not speak good English.’ ‘You could use subtitles,’ I said. ‘He may not even be telegenic,’ said Lavinia, ‘You can subtitle words, but you try subtitling his face. No, just go there, talk to him, probe him, find an angle, get a story. And then you’d better get him to tell you where you can find Criminale.’ ‘You want me to go after Criminale too?’ I asked. ‘Maybe, if the budget runs to it,’ said Lavinia, ‘It’s very tight, don’t forget. And we have to shape the programme first. So find out where he is, and then check back here with Ros.’ ‘With me?’ asked Ros, ‘I thought I was going to Vienna too?’ ‘Oh, no, darling, I need you to stay here with me and edit,’ said Lavinia, ‘Oh look, taxi’s waiting. Good luck, Francis, and auf Wiedersehen, pets.’

  ‘That bitch, that bloody bitch,’ said Ros, ‘I just spent two nights in her bed and now she does this to me. Upstairs, Francis. If I’m not coming on this recce with you, I want you to have something to remember me by.’ ‘Honestly, Ros, I’ve got lots to remember you by,’ I said, ‘And if I’m going away for a few days I ought to go back to my flat and pack some things.’ ‘No you don’t,’ said Ros, ‘You can buy what you need at the airport in the morning. There are plenty of shops in the concourse.’ ‘I always wondered what they were for,’ I said, ‘After all, not many people arrive naked at an airport.’ ‘You’re learning a lot, aren’t you, Francis?’ asked Ros, ‘Come on, if this is our last night together for a bit we don’t want to waste time. Is there any more of the Frascati left?’ ‘No, there isn’t, Ros,’ I said very wearily, ‘There’s only orange-juice.’ ‘All right,’ said Ros, ‘Let’s try that.’

  So that night before I set off for Vienna turned into a sleepless one, and for several reasons. Ros felt it necessary to give me a great deal to remember her by, but even when she slipped off into sleep’s kind oblivion at last I still lay there restless. Sounds of Bengali floated up occasionally from the street at me; now and then Ros groaned in her sleep. Why, just why, was I going off in quest of Bazlo Criminale? For, in the course of a hyper-active evening, something strange had plainly happened. Criminale had changed for me: no longer a text I had to decode, he had switched into a person I had to follow. But why, when nothing at all linked us together? He was the giant, one of the great superpowers of modern thought; I was the Patagonian pygmy. He was the Lukacs of the Nineties; I was an out-of-work journo. He was the modern master; I was the postmodern nobody in particular. He was the friend of the great and the good, or for that matter the big and the bad: Bush and Honecker, Gorbachev and Castro, Kohl and Mao. Important philosophers like Sartre and Foucault and Rorty had bowed to him; great leaders had honoured him; it was even said that Stalin (notoriously no respecter of persons or keeper of unwanted mementoes) had asked for his photograph. He was complex, confusing, contradictory. But why should I set off to chase an enigma that could well be of my own making?

  At that time, not so long ago, I was innocent (I suppose I still am to this day, this very day). But I was not so innocent that I couldn’t see that anyone who had survived and bested the second segment of our sad terrible century must have had some remarkable struggles with history and terror, contradiction and ambiguity. Silence, exile and cunning were James Joyce’s prescription for the task of the modern writer and thinker in an age of brutality and unreas
on, bombardment and slaughter, ideology and holocaust, a century of intellectual terrorism, an age, as Canetti once said, of burning flesh, when police thuggery had turned on thought itself. Thanks to silence, exile and cunning, some artists and intellectuals had had strange flirtations with the mad ideological world. Pound had played with Fascism, Heideggerwith Nazism, Brecht with Stalinism, Sartre with Marxism, and so on and on. Right to our time the terrible game went on, and still would, whenever intelligence faces power, totalitarianism and fundamentalism of any kind.

  As for me, I lived on a small island on the edge, spared much of this history, and tucked away at what looked like the safe end of the century. No doubt, if I went looking, if I searched hard or critically enough, I would find something. Criminale had lived through dark passages and false directions; he must have had his weak spots, his feet of clay, his own deals on silence, exile and cunning. Anyone who had struggled through the brutalities and absurdities of the modern chaos, the gulag horrors and extremities, had probably come put a little marked or impure. The enigmas I believed I’d seen were perhaps no more than the devious ways needed for a man of public thought simply to survive. And who was I to go unmasking? Wasn’t there something just as impure about the investigative journalist who, trying to hold on to a career, make a living, make a programme, goes gaily out hunting secrets, hoping to find the worst? And did I really want to go down in the record as the man who’d misread, misused, misrepresented the great career of that hero of late modern thought, Bazlo Criminale?

  So I had a bad night, followed by a bad morning. When dawn light came up, I got out of bed and kissed Ros lightly on the forehead, not wanting to stir the sleeping beast again. Luggageless in the street outside, I found a taxi that took me, as sore in body as I was in mind, out to Heathrow. I went gratefully round the franchise stores, buying socks at Sock Shop, ties at Tie Rack, knickers at Knickerbox, shirts at Shirt Factory, shampoos and stuff at the Body Shop. Finally I bought a lightweight carry-on suitcase at the last franchise, and sat on a bench by check-in, packing my new wardrobe carefully inside. ‘Did you pack the bag yourself?’ asked the girl at the desk, when I checked in for the Austrian Airlines flight. ‘Of course I did, you just watched me,’ I said; but of course she unpacked it anyway, unloading what I’d loaded, stripping the case to its linings before she would grant me a boarding pass.

  I went through Security, where it was not my baggage but my very self they stripped down to the bare forked basics. The guards felt me up unmercifully, as if I had not just had enough of that sort of thing with Ros during the night. In the departure lounge, as I headed into duty-free to buy a razor, a girl in satin tricoloured panties came over and sprayed me with perfume. ‘A new male parfum from Chanel called Egoiste,’ she said, ‘We ’ope you like it.’ ‘Egoiste?’ I said, ‘If Chanel want to sell perfumes in airports, why don’t they make one called Terminal Depression?’ I went to the bar, where all the seats were taken by travellers watching screens for information about their delayed flights. Standing by the wall, with a gin and tonic melting rapidly in a plastic glass, I looked for news of the Vienna flight. Then the intercom announced it would be two hours late, because of lack of landing slots for the incoming flight, which they had decided to leave hanging up there in the sky for most of the morning.

  I stank of perfume, my baggage was new, my body was sore, and the lounge filled to the point of maximum congestion. It was as I was standing there that it occurred to me, for the first time, that even the life of a great world-traveller like Bazlo Criminale, a man who hopped like a rabbit from government meeting to international congress, from hub air­port to hub airport, from VIP lounge to stretch airport limo, from first-lass recliner to prison-like plane toilet, a man who made homelessness into a postmodern art form and had never stayed in one place for anything like a reasonable length of time, probably also had its downside. He must have had more than his share of delays, crowds, congestions, strip-searches, luggage losses, misdirections; he too must have his portion of Terminal Depression.

  They called the Austrian Airlines flight to Vienna three hours late. I dragged my way down the long Heathrow passages, through the green-seated lounge, down the grim boarding tunnel, in through the plane door – and found myself suddenly in the world of Gemütlichkeit. ‘Gruss Gott, mein Herr,’ said a dirndled stewardess in red and white, as Papageno and Papagena chittered and chattered happily on the plane Tannoy. Passengers in great green loden coats stuffed green Harrods bags into the overhead lockers, or sat staring stolidly into the stern financial pages of the Austrian newspapers that were on offer at the plane door. Then we took off, and the trolleys came along. There was cream with the coffee, cream with everything. There was even cream on the face of the fat girl dressed like a sofa who came smiling down the aisle as we passed at high altitude over the white-capped, roadless Alps.

  ‘What are you doing here, Lavinia?’ I asked. ‘Hallo, darling, I just came back to see if you were all right,’ said Lavinia, ‘I’m in the club, if you see what I mean.’ ‘You’re sitting in club class, are you, Lavinia?’ I asked, ‘Why?’ ‘Well, I am the executive producer,’ said Lavinia, ‘But I could only afford it for one, this show is on a very tight budget. Would you like me to get them to send you back a bottle of champagne?’ ‘No, Lavinia, I meant, where are you going?’ I asked, as if I didn’t know. ‘Vienna, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘Home of the waltz and the Sachertorte, those wonderful creamy cakes, have you ever tried them? I just couldn’t resist. Well, I’d better get back up front for the liqueurs.’ ‘So I’ll see you in Vienna?’ I asked. ‘Yes, you will, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘We’ll have an absolutely brilliant time there, hunting for that old bugger Criminale.’

  3

  Vienna smelled of roasting coffee and new gingerbread . . .

  From the very moment we landed (three hours late, of course) on that sharp cold noontide in Novem­ber, Vienna seemed to smell of hot roasting coffee and crisp new gingerbread – the haunting flavours of childhood and Christmas, which by now was not so very far away. Vienna’s airport is modern and international, spacious and pleasant, and yet the moment you walk into it from the bus that brings you in from the plane a strangely Austrian sense of tradition, the scent of a certain long-lived, leather-jacketed kind of history, immediately seems to prevail. Despite what is sometimes said, no one should really accuse the Austrians of neglecting their great men, especially the ones who are firmly and safely dead. And certainly no one can complain that they were ignoring the one they had carted out of the city, coated in lime, and buried deep in an unmarked pauper’s grave just one year short of two centuries earlier.

  The fact was that we had arrived in Vienna on the very brink of one of those great end-of-century anniversaries that Austria and indeed the world as a whole had no intention of overlooking. The sign, the symbol, the signifier of little Wolfgang Amadeus was everywhere. His natty little portrait, perky and periwigged, hung all over Immigration. The fine bright notes of ‘La ci darem la mano’ soared out of the loud­speakers as, carrying off our carry-on luggage, Lavinia and I marched side by side through the corridors of expensive shops toward the central concourse. Here you could find a Mozart delicatessen where you could buy sticky Mozartkugeln (‘the sweet heritage of Amadeus’), rich Mozarttorte, Queen of the Night olive oil, Mozart mayonnaise. You could stock up on Seraglio perfume at the nearby boutique; there was a chocolate bust of the man melting beside the Don Giovanni cocktail bar. Even though there were still a couple of months to go to the full celebrations, it was already quite safe to say that, when 1991 dawned on us, in Vienna the Mozart bicentennial would not pass entirely unnoticed.

  Nor could you accuse the Viennese of neglecting the many, many tourists who, despite the uneasy mood of the times, the fear of terrorism, the growing threat of war in the Gulf and disorder in the Soviet Union, still poured in massive numbers to the city of Amadeus, and Johann, and Ludwig, and Franz. Downstairs in the baggage claim, where a jumbo-load of Japanese tourist
s were noisily hunting for the cases that, in a properly organized world, should have come with them on their flight from Tokyo, Lavinia and I discovered the perfect economic Euro-toy: a fine electronic machine with flashing buttons that, at a press, gladly turned any form of currency into any other, in a hi-tech, silicon-chip version of the good old game of rates of exchange. ‘Look, Lavinia, a money machine,’ I said, stopping. ‘Not for you, darling, now come away,’ said Lavinia. ‘All you have to do is empty all the notes out of your wallet and put them in here,’ I said, ‘Then it turns them all into something else. Pounds to schillings, dollars to zlotys, Japanese yen to Slakan vloskan.’

  I’d already got my own wallet out when Lavinia took me by the hand, to the strains of ‘La ci darem la mano’, and took me outside into the chilly Viennese air. ‘All right, Francis,’ she said, ‘Let’s get this straight. This show is on a very tight budget. I’m in charge. Money’s not a game. Or if it is, I’m the one who’s playing it. Stay away from banks, leave money machines alone, forget about rates of exchange. That’s for the big people, I’ll see to all that. Just stick to simple art and ideas, that’s what you’re here for. Every time you want anything, ask me first. Keep all your receipts, write down your expenditure in a little book. Now where’s the bus?’ ‘With two of us it’s probably just as cheap to take a taxi,’ I said. ‘No, Francis, this is your first lesson in television economics,’ said Lavinia, ‘If I was alone I’d go in a taxi. With you I go on the bus.’