Tintin in the New World: A Romance

by Frederic Tuten

  "The clown who killed," Settembrini sputtered, "that jaw­jutting, strutting ham in uniform, that is the man you extol! No, this is too much."

  "II Duce's vainglorious posturings do not affect me — each to his own mode of theatricality, I say, for no man is exempt from some form of histrionics — but his actions do address me. I speak, of course, of Mussolini's actions prior to his entering the shameful African and European theaters of war. For in what dictatorship of our times do you find a regime as benign toward its people and its enemies alike? So long divided between upper and lower boot, Italy knew no leader concerned with the joining of the two, with the mending of the lower, especially, which through the years had been made to wear down so that the upper could better shine like a gentleman's leathered calf. II Duce set out to repair the worn-out sole so that the entire boot might stride among the nations of the world in dignity. Need I remind you that only under that man's rule did Italy not feel itself the pensione of the industrial world, the inn for every foreigner who came to pluck the ripest figs and to drain off the Tuscan sun."

  "A deceiver, a liar, a confidence man, a bully, a despot, a murderer, there's your protector of his people — my people," Settembrini cried.

  "Nonsense! As for tyranny, injustice, class genocide, who is it that killed millions in the name of social and economic democracy only to create a new inequality? Was it the square-jawed Italian or the Georgian who killed off peasant and worker and intellectual alike, who murdered his enemies from vanity? The Italian only prescribed castor oil and beatings, and death for a few really bad ones, the terrorists. Every regime must protect itself against subversion, and the fascist is no less deserving of such self-protection."

  Settembrini straightened himself and brushed the sleeve of his sorry coat. His voice trembled as he spoke. "Class interests, state interests. Murderous abstractions. What of human interests, my own living self-interest? I wish neither the individual nor the state to oppress me."

  "Well, my friends," Peeperkorn said gently, "let's cease all Old World noise and share together the splendors of this vista, this grand sky and vast, plunging abyss."

  The group, after some huffing by the two antagonists, gathered obediently at the cliffs edge. Tintin felt a brushing of his hand and turned to see Clavdia smiling at him.

  "Beauty is incomparable, crime, criminals, or no. Beauty needs no historical gloss, sublime, divine, out of time. Isn't that so, young sleuth?"

  "Quite so, Herr Peeperkorn," Tintin answered. But, then, he heard himself say, his voice distant, recognizable yet unfamiliar, "What is the beauty of nature compared with that of the beauty of woman? The beauty of woman, which leaves me, leaves me — "

  "Speechless!" interjected Settembrini.

  "A blabbering fool," Naptha chimed in.

  "Leaves me — "

  "Helpless," ventured Peeperkorn. "No, no, leaves me."

  "Ah," said Clavdia, "this beauty departs from you, yes?"

  "It was there, in me," Tintin said, "and was flowing through my tissues, the beauty of oceans at dusk, of triangles. Then it left me, and joined us here," he continued, blushing, his eyes averted from Clavdia's, his voice returning to itself.

  "Is it this talk of crime that leads you to the theme of the beauty of woman?" Naptha asked mischievously.

  "Oh! Crime and women, I know little firsthand of that particular relationship," Tintin answered.

  "Crimes of passion not your sort of stew, eh! Well, what would you say is your actual line of expertise?" Peeperkorn asked. "Who are your protagonists? Criminals of the street, pickpockets, muggers, cutthroats, bicycle thieves, and the like?"

  "He wouldn't dirty his hands with such minor filth," exclaimed Clavdia. "Why would you suppose such a thing? This is Tintin you are speaking to. Tintin, and not some detective you hire to smell people's bed sheets."

  "No offense, none intended, none. It's the anemic air up here.... What could I have been thinking!"

  "No injury, sir. But to answer you, in my line, my métier, I encounter — seek out — criminals less of the manual and more of the cerebral kind. Wrongdoers on the brainy scale, who abhor and shun deeds of personal violence. I've noticed that each commits the crime to which he has access. Thus the poor, whose life is in the streets, engage in crimes of the streets, those sometime violent assaults and holdups, as well as those more pacific muggings and pickpocketings. To the clerks and persons working in offices go the larding of petty-cash vouchers, the pilferings of stationery, paper clips, and staples; to the middle management, the inflating of expense accounts, the cooking of books, and outright embezzlement ... well, you understand my drift.

  "My types," continued Tintin, "seize governments of nations by bribe and corruption or by engineering revolutions. They are not criminals common to our streets. They do not walk beside us in the thoroughfares of the day or brush by us in the glittering commotion of the urban night. We never see their photographs in newspapers or magazines; no press heralds their marriages and deaths; no advertisements announce their dealings, legitimate or otherwise. It is sheer pedantry of me to study them since they are an obscurantist breed. Very recondite fellows, hermetic, one may say with justice. Scholars, they are, whose subject is the nefarious circuitry of power and sophisticated misrule, for they love dominion perversely. Shy, like true scholars, they prefer the studious and clandestine accommodations of secluded chateaux in Brittany or Normandy or some or another English shire to the ostentatious bureaus found so widely in cities given to international finance and interlocking, corporate consortium. Their minions are legion, and it is their upper-level minions, not they, who occupy, in various guises and facades, the grand offices in the major capitals of the world representing the legitimate-seeming enterprises of their otherwise illegal, filthy doings. Then, to abbreviate somewhat, there is an order of underling, the subspecies of international criminality, the lumpen criminal, if you will, the eyes and tentacles of the vast empire, who perform (never knowing the purpose or motive behind their commissioned acts) the requisite blindings, bone breakings, teeth shatterings, kidnappings, and killings. The Captain and I have crossed paths with many of this class — often one must cut through them in order to advance to the superior levels — but felons of this low rung generally do not wander the streets in search of random victims. And thus criminals of the street are a genre apart from my specialization."

  "And grateful I am for these nice distinctions, and glad you have made them for us," Naptha said. "And all the better to introduce and clarify my prospectus. You have omitted in your discourse that criminal species that count as profit not merely goods and money but the thrill of violence, the passion of cruelty, those who are as soon content to kill for a shoestring as for a gold bar.

  "But leaving this aside, let me speak of the bizarre way the liberal democracies have in treating their thieves, their assaulters — the lowest on the rung of malefactors. Claiming that poverty drives criminals of this order to steal and murder, these democracies attempt to deal compassionately with these criminals, yet this kindness only encourages the criminals further since because their actions go largely unpunished, they undertake greater crimes without fear of punishment. Bolder and bolder these criminals become until eventually they need no weapons to pose their crimes, needing only to present their demands to the cowering victim. Why not resist? you ask. Can the aged resist? Can the ordinary person resist, faced with the loss of an eye, of teeth, of life itself?

  "And suppose," Naptha continued, his cheeks glowing, "one does resist and even turns the tables and apprehends the criminal and gives him to the law. In these democracies there is no guarantee that the criminal will ever be incarcerated! Yes, this is true, though I see from your smiles and smirks your incredulity. And if he is incarcerated, the sentences are so brief and the criminal so angry, more maddened, vice-filled, and fearless than when he entered his cell, that there is danger of his returning to revenge himself on the victim, stabbing or shooting him and his family in their very ho
use. The liberal democracies neither adequately suppress their criminals nor attempt to destroy the roots of crime, poverty, and social misery. Liberal societies reason themselves out of their instinct for self-preservation, commit suicide, swallow their own human poison."

  "And what is your antidote?" Settembrini asked. "For I'm sure you have one."

  "Terror. Terrorize the malefactors as they do us. Not revenge but simple, impersonal, painless evacuation of the poison in the body social. Restore the penal colonies and the labor camps; restore corporal punishment. Let the wrongdoer feel the gnawing humiliation of a public flogging; let him know that if he raises his hand against the community, he shall receive a full dozen or two that his back shall never forget — and start the beatings at school age, when they leave maximum impression of pain and shame. Restore shame to the culture. And for all those who repeatedly attack society and for whom all efforts at correction have failed, kill — let's not mince words — kill them as quickly as and soon after the commission of their crime as possible."

  "Yes, kill, kill everyone," Settembrini said, his voice trembling and soft. "That is all your brutal kind understands, to kill. The voice that reasons and soothes alone can heal the angry world. How few who say, 'Yes, rob me of my goods, but never let my anger seek to revenge the loss in kind greater than the theft, for trinkets may be replaced but lives never.’"

  "Do you think it's trinkets they're after? Colored glass and hand mirrors, necklaces of paste? A soothing word, a kind gesture for the canaille, the brutes who rape and murder anyone weaker than they? They, my friend, wish to do mayhem simply because they were born. Because, my friend, the short hate the tall, the ugly the handsome, the poor the rich, all that is low loathes the higher, and most of all, the low hates itself, and with a rage that, were it harnessed, could level mountains and cities to pebbles and dust."

  "Well, you both," said Peeperkorn cheerfully, bowing to the now-silent antagonists, "seem to know so much of these matters. Why, a regular compendium of philosophies you are. Most rewarding, I assure you, to stand here by this historical precipice and receive, free of charge, I may add, such informative views. This young man, this very one standing beside me, guileless, earnest, and dreamy, he must share my appreciation for what learning you have broadcast here among us. N'est-ce pas, young detective? Quite an education on human nature and other such related matters."

  "I would have supposed, Tintin, that the investigation of the criminal mind and all matters pertaining to criminality would be your major and absorbing preoccupation," interjected Naptha. "And I regret you did not complete your earlier discourse on these matters, for they interest me not a little, touching as they do on issues whose source is the study of sin, salvation, and the soul."

  "How marvelously you put it!" exclaimed Tintin. "I've never really thought my subject extended to the depths you suggest, though in the annals of the literature of crime there is, I'm reminded, a proponent of such an approach, good Father Brown. He who could see in a person's face or gait, in the way a man tied his shoelaces, the workings of conscience, the measure of his guilt and his innocence. Father Brown's method is the intuitive, his purpose, the salvational. Yes, I long ago studied his cases and approaches but found them inapplicable to my own detecting endeavors."

  "Bravo, in a newfound voice you express the essential format of the fascistic Chesterton," declared Settembrini, "locating in the so-called intuitive antiempirical methodology of his hero the antirational rationale that so inspires the prophets of instinct and blood knowing, this good Father Brown, as you called him, being no less than the priest of darkness."

  "I must confess these are claims that have eluded me, for I thought Father Brown a sweet man and good-natured, but I've been troubled by the inapplicability of his approach in matters where a network of criminals operating in areas outside one's ken is involved, for surely one cannot study faces and personalities that are not directly before you, seated beside you on a park bench, let us say. Thus in cases of large interlocking international criminal organizations whose chiefs are located in several nations and whose agents number in the hundreds, Father Brown's method is inapplicable. And then, too, I am not concerned with punishment or with the spiritual fate of the transgressor, only with the criminal's severance and elimination from the criminal operation."

  "Yes," Naptha said, "but that apart, I'm sure we all would like to know what interests you in this line of work. What, may I ask, is your motivation in tracking and apprehending criminals?"

  "A propensity for action which would otherwise enlist itself in such activities as yachting, chess playing, stamp, coin, postcard collecting, bird watching — that is, I might have become an alcoholic, a psychoanalytic patient, a rose gardener, a polo player, a Sunday painter — "

  "Enough, you've established your point quite sufficiently," said Naptha.

  "Not finished yet," said Tintin, facing down his interrupter, "for to answer fully, I must explain how in my early youth I thought the world a happy place, where apart from grief beyond one's control — the death and loss of those one loved, the fall from fortune or from health, blindness, or the loss of limbs — all human sadness caused by humans was remediable. Thus to extirpate the wrongdoer from the community of the good was to restore the community to health. How and why wrongdoers came into being, whether by nature or circumstance, was a matter indifferent to me, for the excitement of their pursuit and the knowledge that their elimination from the world restored — even in small part — peace to the world gave me satisfaction.

  "How little I understood the workings of the community I had wished to serve, how less I knew of the human heart, the least known of all, my own. And now, in retrospect, I think my chiefmost aim, and the noble cloak it had provided me, were no more than a concealment for my restlessness, for what would I have done with my stunted, skimpy life had I not had this purpose and this self-appointed commission but amuse myself with the pastimes of my leisured solitude? And now, through some strange transforming thing that has happened and is happening to me, these illuminating conversations with you, perhaps, which have served me such abundant nourishing stuff, or because of these mountains, whose casual air may have set off some chemical spark that, yeastlike, makes rise this arrested flesh, or perhaps through some other unknown influence, I begin to form new thoughts and new purposes, as yet inchoate but promising to cohere and to bring me to new vision.

  "I have come to learn through observing you and listening to your conversations (and from a dream I think I had) that discord, violence, and passion rule in even those innocent of wishing to do wrong. How strange I did not understand that this discord wreaks more savage havoc than any mere theft or assault, for while the individual criminal is, by comparison, easily locatable and plucked from the community he or she infects, the community itself is rife with readiness to do mayhem in the name of right-headedness and principle. How, then, may remedy be applied to the community at large, this civilized world, I mean?

  "Perhaps I should puff a stout English pipe, blow pensive rings at hearth's fender, and swirl my brandy till idle, indolent slumber takes me. Keep myself at home, I mean, among my books and my toys, with the tight captain and the dog, innocent and loving both, companions of my ignorant youth and comrades of my premature dotage, for dotage it is to live without desire or without wishing to inform each hour with personal intent.

  "What wrong and what wrongdoer," Tintin continued sadly, "are there left to stalk when now I know I would need to stalk the tracks of every living human, for all are guilty, even as they sleep, guilty of mischief done or yet to be done? The human womb breeds human monsters, sucking eel mouths of desire and willfulness. Why, it disgusts me now to eat meat. I am a criminal of the table and the plate, the eater of animal legs and breasts and flanks, but yet worse than even I live in cozy respectability, and worse than many murderers I have known live to receive honors and banquets for deeds that the world deems licit but which obdurate criminals, whether from lack of ingenui
ty or means of sufficient badness, would shun.

  "Whom, then, should I now pursue? Let the people know their jaguar prince, in whatever guise he comes, has come. Let the forest oak, the jungle mahogany, the tender sapling cleave the ax that strikes it; let the whale and the seal, the otter, and the fox render mad with wails the hunter; let the insolent and the deceivers, the wasters and the spoilers, the greedy and the ignorant go and beg their food from those they've injured; let them live long and racked in memories of their white plates heaped with tasty dishes.

  "Punishment shall know no class exception, shall excuse no man or woman for reason of high birth, or for his lack of education and good breeding, but his deed shall condemn him.

  "Among the crimes I consider worthy of severe punishment are: the beating of animals; the misuse of children; the injuring of the old; the extirpation of trees; the mutilation or otherwise defacing of hills, mountains, natural rock formations; the dumping of streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans with chemical and industrial wastes; the general befouling and rending of our atmosphere. For such offenses I warrant the penalty, for first offenders, of hard labor with long sentences, labor that restores, in some measure, what has been robbed from the community, its fresh water, its pure air. Vandals and desecrators of public monuments, parks, cemeteries, vehicles of transportation, I commit to hard labor until said destructions have been financially and physically recompensed to the community; let vandals sweep and wash the streets, the metro, all places of thoroughfare and concourse, let them repair, repave, mend roads, fill potholes and other such crevices, yes, and let them weed out rank gardens and rake the autumn leaves. Punishment, too, for the creators and purveyors of defective and faulty products, punishment for shoddy workmanship and for the malingerer and the shiftless, for the idle parasites, the time server, for all those who share neither in the formation of goods nor in the production of industry but gain from the chancy flow of profit and loss — the speculator, the middlemen who do all sorts of middling services. And all those who destroy nature shall be the last of their destructive breed. The lion and dolphin, the elephant and whale shall replace them.