Showing posts with label Cicero. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cicero. Show all posts

Monday 19 June 2023

His Master’s Remembrancer

No man is a hero to his valet.

Armimas
rmimas
mimas
imas
mas
as
A protective charm against forgetfulness.

‘Obey!’ he commanded the wolfhound.

          There were only the three of us in his private quarters in our capital’s last redoubt.

          As far as the social divide was concerned he might just as well have rebuked us both.

          He had named us both ‘Wolf’. ‘In this room,’ he told us grimly, ‘there can be no Trinity!’

          (‘Nor a triumvirate,I thought. I understood his meaning readily enough. He despised the ineptitude of his field marshals whom he treated like waiters.)

          This was his world now – the Boss, his Dog and the Valet – an enemy-infested world that had shrunk to a fortified underground room he was content to inhabit to be spared sight of the grey hopeless distance. Besides, his eyes were intolerant to sunlight.

          He glanced at the clock, then spoke again: ‘Remind me once more, Wolf. At what hour did our great Warrior-King leave this world?’

          ‘Twenty minutes past two, my Master,’ I answered promptly. ‘1786. In the morning.’

          (The Bakelite electric clock above the steel bulkhead door read twenty-past-two. Four hours would pass before dawn.) Evidently his challenge was yet another sly test of his memory-man. (‘Cicero kept a slave,’ he had bluntly told me on the day I was appointed. ‘A mnemonist to summon up the names of plotters against Rome. A nomenclator.’)

           His love of our nation’s Great Warrior King was only matched by his love of the Roman Empire and its chronicler, Cicero.

          I saw him stoop and whisper to the dog: ‘I rather fear, my dear Wolf, that when we have more citizens than soldiers it is time to take my leave.’ (It was evident the news had reached him of mass desertions at the front. As one of my duties, I was expected to keep a tally for the Action List of names marked down for elimination as conspirators, a running total in constant dispute. The Master loathed the patrician class, particularly those who’d retained their nobiliary particle.)

          ‘Take my leave.’  It was if a sudden chill had caused me to shiver. In his talk of the death of an emperor there was clearly a terrible meaning; an acceptance that saw him bow to his own imminent dissolution. I had a comforting sense that this moment was preordained, an unalterable scheme of events that would culminate in the defeat of his Great Cause.

          For how else could it end when it was I, the Master’s valet, who had engineered his fall?

You might just wonder how a hexed chicken-bone can be introduced into the royally guarded sick bed of a vegetarian tyrant and Would-be Autocrat of All the World. I will tell you how.

          My hair is saxon-flaxen. My eyes are blue. So it is true, of course, that from my infancy I have passed for a member of my Master’s tribe but, then, ever since the Middle Ages, so many of the Newly Converted – the Noviter Conversis – have assumed the mantle of their inquisitors, and adopted their speech; a language which – like the Master’s bull-bellowing-orations – is often merely a turgid and mystical aggregation of words promising nothing, to which his voice easily lends itself.

          Such is the inviolable certainty of the Master’s race. Hence his diktat that the beliefs of our Outcast Elect must be reduced to the obscurity of a debased creed deserving of being wiped off the face of the earth.

          Yet do our rulers imagine that, following our distant ancestors’ enforced conversion, the secrets of the Elect were not restored to us in our cradles even while the recusant Elders perished within their walled Settlements of Exclusion? Let me confess: the prepotent words of ancient and secret ordinances, conjurations and maledictions, still echo in our blood from birth. For I, who had received the slave’s portion, had received a greater gift.

          ‘As fast as the throbbing progresses,’ the Master had grated, nursing his left hand, ‘as quickly my flesh withers.’ He had cut an abject figure. A pained smile, his face blueish-grey.

          He could not have known that my people for centuries have regarded all sleep as a perilous state since the unguarded body is peculiarly open to attack by demon-magic.

          That the Master’s vanity could be flattered by my demonic stratagems can be understood only when you consider that many ladies of the arts, particularly young movie starlets, pursued him with shamelessly seductive love letters often clipped to glossy publicity stills of their posing as come-hither ingénues in popular celluloid froth for the masses.

          Naturally, I considered it my duty to intercept such importunities.  

          For it was one of these cris de cœur that lent credence to my subterfuge: ‘I love you, my Emperor, and want to be with you always in the joy of your divine-anointed future. My heart bursts with the ardency of my respect for you, etc.’ The letter with a single rose, its stem embellished with a red silk ribbon, I placed on the pillow of the Master’s bed.

          A pullet’s bone had been concealed within the ribbon’s folds, a charm against evil men invested with our most powerful necromancy. I’d performed the prescribed forty-two repetitive adjurations over that hollow bone in which a louse, teased from the wolfhound’s bedding, had been imprisoned.

          When the Master uncovered the rose and letter beneath his counterpane, his gaunt cheeks were seen to be singularly flushed in a patchy, unnatural way, yet the tributes remained untouched because that night the profound sleep of beseeched misfortune at once overtook him.

          The next morning an early dispatch informed the Master of incalculable casualties on the Eastern Front as his armies retreated pursued by a massive counteroffensive.

Ours was once an enslaved people so the Ancients tell us and, from that morning, the ineffaceable suffering in my life – as another Androcles – intensified under the brute I served.

          Whereas it is not exactly a case of putting one’s head into a lion’s mouth, it is too near for absolute peace of mind when at close quarters one is required to apply mortician’s greasepaint to the Master’s sunken cheeks to evince a counterfeit bloom.

          It was the face not of an individual; it was the face of an entire nation, seen on postage stamps.

          That face was now rigid. Sweat beaded his forehead and his limbs pulsed with a sharp acrid smell. A bestial stink.

          Day and night, deep below on Sub-level Four, I was caged with this totem. On the increasingly rare occasions he ventured out in his armoured car to view the ruined city, the warning signs that reminded him The Enemy is Listening seemed only to prolong his caged paranoia.

          Things come apart precipitately when they are held together by lies. So when they learned the Eastern Front was held by broken promises the ranks fell apart.

Not all occasions are equal for the efficacy of a curse. I chose carefully the hour when the stars favoured me to call down a curse on this loathsome man.

          The Master’s voice had the charm of Satan; he’d oil his voice with a glass of clear honey, glycerin and water. My duty was to prepare the mixture he’d gargle before his speeches.  In accordance with the rituals of our fabled mystics, before the glass was filled the seven signs of seven were written in honey on the inside of the glass while the given invocation was recited.

          The next day, for the first time, his left arm began the violent twitching with which henceforth he would be afflicted, while the tremors in his hands were more pronounced, his lips quivered, and his left eyebrow was gripped by a persistent nervous tic.

          Consider. Were not the tremors of his hands the mark of Cain, mankind’s First Murderer and likewise a vegetarian? Thereafter, in public, the Master would hold a pair of gloves, grasping his left hand to conceal the infirmity rendered by my sorcery.

          Such was the ground I had prepared for the Master’s downfall. Nothing sharpens the mind like a condemned cell. That it was a conspiracy of one against the powers of evil and entirely dependent on my own acts and devices is an historical fact.

Behind me, from his desk, I heard an almost inappreciable indrawn breath, a sound I recognized as a cue preparatory to speech, as if something had just occurred to him.

          So I turned at the door.

          ‘Don’t you know it’s unlucky to turn back?’ The Master was smiling with a sickening glazed look; the sort of cynical smile you see on the face of the dead.

          ‘Have you a revolver?’ The words were hardly audible.

          Before I could answer he went on:

          ‘Take mine.’

          He looked round him as a person looks round a room before starting on a long journey to remember all he leaves behind.

          He fondled the muzzle of his dog. (His breath was fouler than Wolf’s when scavenging the old winter garden, now overrun with willow herb and nettles.)

          ‘His life will be nothing without me.’

          I stretched out my hand and took the revolver, which was of an unfamiliar pattern. I made up my mind to shoot Wolf at once. 

          ‘The quietus will seem from my own hand, you understand.’ The words were pronounced by a tyrant who issued orders that sent thousands to their deaths. Even in this extremity he was shooting from someone else’s shoulder; demanding I do his dirty work without compunction, as though I were simply another thuggish condottiere from his elite death squad.

          He half rose in his chair to unlock a drawer. I saw his own service revolver reposed within. He withdrew a leather-bound cigarette case, which he opened and extended to me.

          (I curbed a start of surprise. Famously, the Master neither took strong drink nor smoked.)

          The cigarette case revealed a dozen glass ampoules packed in sawdust.           

          ‘Take one.’ He lowered his voice.

          Often – so very often – I wanted to cram glowing ashes into my mouth rather than answer with the expected rote assent: ‘Very good, my Master,’ or ‘As the Master pleases,’ regardless of the task he ordained.

          I smartly placed the cyanide vial in my tunic breast pocket. I noticed the master was – unusually for this early hour – wearing service dress, yet such was his physical decline the uniform was now a poor fit. His trousers hung on him; in the first week of my appointment, I had been commended for introducing knife-edge sewn-in creases to spruce up his turnout.

          On his left breast the Master wore his Medal for Valour, awarded for distinguished service when a corporal. Beneath the medal was pinned his gold Party badge, member Number One. It was whispered a misfortune had befallen the original owner of this coveted membership number, which had been reassigned to the Master. His rival for first place, we heard, had been ‘administratively exiled’ to a Detention Camp for Political Education.

          As it was, I was haunted by my recollection of sewing that uniform with thread moistened by my own heathenish spittle, every stitch counted according to a numeromancy older than the Witch of Endor and her demon familiars.

          And, yes, it’s true the Master did indeed shoot himself that morning but, if I am to be believed, he died by my own hand; the hand that threaded the fatal needle because, you see, the day was chosen. A Monday it was, remember, a day especially opportune for blood-letting.

          The Master’s last words to me?

          ‘We are now willed to flourish from the ashes, free of our infantile servitude to the People’s legends from the Old Dispensation. The new man must fight for the New Order, Wolf.’

          ‘I give my word, I answered glibly, ‘as freely as my life is given, repeating the pledge that had bound me to this barbarian for seven long years (and in my mind I rehearsed again its curiously equivocal deniability).

          (‘There has now risen a new authority as to who our Redeemer is,’ his Minister for Spiritual Reform had once explained to me. ‘This new authority is our Master.’)

          The Master clasped and unclasped his hands without thought, a sure sign of his bodily pain. His eyes glittered with rheum. His teeth were resolutely clenched and he pressed his abdomen while feigning to adjust his waistband.

          His inflammatory bowel complaint was first defined by a brilliant gastroenterologist, regrettably a remote lineal descendant of one of our recusant Elders, with whose name the discovery would be for ever linked. The Master refused to utter the physician’s name. He called his gastrointestinal affliction his Vulcanitis (even his own pathology he made the stuff of Olympian myths).

          The Master was a delusional case. How desperate was his search for panaceas, to my mind, may be measured by his craven submission to the remedies of a crank dietician who, ever since our incarceration in the redoubt, had prescribed a treatment of crushed nettles in an infusion, fetched daily from a makeshift dispensary at Sub-level Two in one of the fortress’s surviving cellars.

          It was to this dispensary that I now withdrew, the wolfhound close on my heels.

          One of my tasks had been the supply of fresh nettles from the winter garden for steeping in a field water cask. I would pour the foul-smelling potion from its brass spigot into the Master’s carafe to be taken as a tincture.

          The Master believed the decoction fired up his rhetoric. He was fond of repeating a folk saying well known in our language: ‘My words, like nettles, sting only those who are incautious.’

        (He had touched my arm at our parting. ‘And when I give my word, I am in the habit of keeping it.’ A moment later a faint gunshot was heard confined by the door I had just closed behind me.)

          I took Wolf by the leash and scrambled up the service access shaft that connected the dispensary to the surface where the entrance was concealed by a cunningly disguised trapdoor professing to be a commemorative slab dedicated to a long-lived empress whose baroque belvedere pavilion collapsed on the Ides of March on the same spot following the great hurricane of 1876.

          (Even then, if truth be told, it was borne in on me that the meretricious convolutions of the Master’s overwrought speeches were no less baroque than his nation’s florid civic splendour now laid waste under the relentless carpet bombing dealt by his enemy’s superior firepower . . . and, indeed, that both floridities were now no more than so much scorched earth few could deny.)

          Wolf surged ahead, teeth bared, bristling with unease, as we emerged hidden by a clump of nettles into a smoke-shrouded dawn. The last boom of our guns defending the city was like the slamming shut of a prison door on our freedom; we were besieged. A hail of returning shell and mortar fire caused us to draw back to seek refuge in the crater of a half-toppled obelisk that mocked the remains of the garden colonnade.

          Ahead of us machine-guns stuttered and a breach in the outworks appeared, lit up by signal flares. I was assailed by the stench of machines and smoke and fell back oppressed, faint from intimations of my destiny, while headlong through the opening burst a host of messenger-angels – incorporeal, transcendent – clothed in the pure white samite raiment predicted by our prophets.

Comrade Wolf! was their first greeting. There were yells of wild laughter when Wolf slipped the leash and the platoon leader deftly caught him.

            As they came near, I saw the invaders were cradling sub-machine guns half-concealed by their white capes; evidently their advance from the snowbound Eastern Front had been so rapid their winter service uniforms were all they had: fleece caps, belted sheepskin coats or white quilted jackets.

            Broad faces. Cheekbones as though hacked out of ice. Nearly all were marked by some disfigurement, a record written on them of fatal combat where frostbite was no less cruel a foe.

            Yet, astonishingly, they clapped me on the back and chorused, ‘Wolf! Wolf!

            It was thanks to the Party’s ultra-demagogic Minister of Information that Wolf was more renowned than Rin Tin Tin.

            We were celebrities. So, of course, they – those guileless white-clad victors – delivered us as valued trophies to their own feared despot and for a gilded hour they were heroes.

‘I did not inherit my throne,’ my new master boasts with a slippery flippancy, ‘I was chosen.’

            Again we have fallen on evil days. For now Wolf, too, has a new master.

            Our new owner is, indeed, of a New Order. He is the Supreme Leader of the new World Order and rules half the hemisphere. Truly, my former Master had espoused the Great Cause to see his arch-enemy vanquished, yet this victorious peasant-faced Man of the People, at a stroke, has seized the ideological high ground.

            Under his peasant heel, the Master’s fatherland has been damned a vassal state. And I? My fate is to be the Supreme Leader’s valet, installed in a new reptile house.

            (Once, once, I had dreamt of a time when I’d be granted a great estate such as that bestowed by our Warrior-King in 1740 on his valet, the son of a peasant. Now my eyes have been opened. Am I to be ever cursed a Gibeonite, and never cease to be a slave?)

            The Supreme Leader is a man, so far as I can see, of no particular distinction. From the way I see it, he fails to apprehend what is important and what is not. That will be his undoing.

            His time will come.

            He wears with relish my gold watch, the watch with a personal inscription the Master had presented to me. The defeated ruler’s favorite slave, too, becomes the trophy of a conqueror.

            Now I live lower than dirt; below, in the basement area, under the arch of the steps that lead to the Supreme Leader’s grand front door. Of his mute slaves there is not one who does not fear their hell-bent ruler and quake at his tread. 

            Many times, on his approach, the monster bawls my name; stamps a tantrum at his door to bid his prized drudge: ‘Take off my boots!’ 

            And there, on that doorstep, so near above my head, there at that boot scraper, under his tyrant heel he stamps out the dirt while I, his bootblack, suffer his taunts to bear all the cold earth, all the cold earth he rains down to mire my hair. 

          Ranting. Ever stomping to defile my hair.

          I am Absalom, my golden hair caught in a thicket of my own trickery.

          The Supreme Leader’s promises are ruinous. In time, he too will learn.

          There shall be more conjurations. More maledictions.

          Misfortune seldom comes alone to a house.

Ochnotinos
chnotinos
notinos
otinos
tinos
inos
nos
os
A protective charm against the deliriums of fever.

Keeping accounts does not necessarily mean one settles them. 


© Catherine Isolde Eisner 2023

See also: A fervent proselytiser for the mystical recovery of a Greater Germany. Between life and death, January 14 1944. Poet Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast.
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/02/between-life-and-death-january-14-1944.html 


See also: Correction Notice, Soviet Weekly January 17 1946 . . . an ‘Exchange of Information’ Restored.

Saturday 23 January 2016

Stoneburgh Spy Campus . . . B.A.R. . . . ‘Please Burn After Reading’ Rubs Out Accountability of Command. (Part 6.)

Earlier this week, passing through the parklands of Stoneburgh in the bright winter sunlight, under a cloudless sky, I was reminded of a former denizen of our garrison town  –  our celebrated double agent, Irina P. – striding along the selfsame path in her military double-breasted coat (cadet-issue, a special indulgence!). She, too, in those early years of our acquaintance, was truly enamoured of our historic military academy . . . as I recorded in my memoir, Red Coffee* . . . 
[Irina] could scarcely believe her good fortune. The six historic cannon evenly spaced along the South Terrace, the great Park, the ornamental Lake, the Piranesian vaulted library, all conspired to create a classically golden atmosphere of privilege and distinction in which she basked. The day was warm; the month was March; Shirt Sleeve Order was five weeks away. She sat at the lakeside and wrote an airmail to her sister.  Irina described Stoneburgh as a ‘time capsule’. In her own country Time and Change raced like the clouds reflected on the water. She could not conceal her yearning to ‘remain always in ancestral gardens, seated on soft grass, without thinking’. 
     So you can imagine I was brooding on the duplicities of our tradecraft and on its pervasion of even the most humdrum routines of domestic life, including the demands of my daily jog, when I spotted Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener lounging on a bench in the sunniest corner of the colonnade. (Prof. Weissener, as I have mentioned in my earlier despatches, was formerly an agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, and is now Stoneburgh’s senior lecturer on politico-criminalistics, a respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and subversion.)
     

‘Please Burn After Reading.’

Prof. Weissener put down his newspaper as I approached and pointed to a headline with his unlit briar pipe:
UK’S EU EXIT: ‘MEMORY-MEN’ CIVIL SERVANTS 
FOIL FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACTIVISTS

Speaking of the implications of preserving secrecy, as to the UK Government’s plans in the event of Britons voting Britain exit from the European Union, the former Senior Government Economist in the British Civil Service said today: ‘The Civil Service will have to do much preparatory work on trade and migration, so I think there’ll be a lot of highly classified work retained mentally. How much civil servants write down is a different question – that is one of the potential drawbacks of the world of Freedom of Information we live in – so, actually, if the Chancellor does not want anything written down [to avoid disclosure of plans to campaigners and journalists] then that is the way it will be.’   
     ‘Memory-men at Whitehall!’ His laugh was harsh. ‘Evidently one of the Mandarins has heeded my faculty Induction Lecture for the New Intake Group! Rule Number 9. It is extremely unwise to leave a paper trail if you intend to outpace the hostiles.’
     Sunlight glared on his spectacles so I could not see his eyes.
     He playfully wagged his finger to include me in the ranks of his favoured antagonists.
     ‘You more than most are familiar with the platitudinous exculpation of our spymasters: “Should you choose to accept this mission and you are captured or killed, the Government and the Service will disavow any knowledge of your actions.” 
     ‘You mean the St Catherine’s House Switcheroo?’
     (I should explain that the St Catherine’s House Record Office, near Aldwych in central London, was at one time the primary source of intelligence agents’ false identities; our agents themselves had, as a ghoulish test of initiative, the task of locating a death certificate of a child whose birthdate and forename was closest to their own. Armed with the dead child’s birth certificate and shared forename, the agent was then able to assume a new mask and build a complete ‘back-story’, including intimate knowledge of the locale where the child had lived and died.  It was by the integrity of this fake identity that the plausibility and confidence of an agent in the field was sustained. In addition, of course, all essential documentation – passport, driving licence, bank account and national insurance card – were issued in the dead child’s name.)
     ‘Agreed,’ I added. ‘No paper trail. No comebacks. Unless the paper trail’s a false one . . . and one that would certainly NOT lead back to our masters.’
     ‘B.A.R. Burn After Reading. All government agencies, including our Intelligence Services, have that ultimate recourse, of course, and there’s always the principal’s washroom for surreptitious briefings, with or without the facility of eidetic recall.’


Memory-Men Bumped Off.

Prof. Weissener laid his cane aside and, after some deft preliminaries, lit his pipe.
     ‘But what of Cicero,’ he mused, ‘and his memory-man?’ Weissener – our most senior expert in the art of cryptanalysis – sent out an unreadable smoke signal as he spoke. ‘Cicero retained a nomenclator.’
     ‘A what?
     ‘A Mnemonist. A Remembrancer or Prompter. A mnemonically gifted aide-de-camp. A nomenclator was often an astute polyglottic slave. Cicero’s man was charged to keep a roll call in his head of Cicero’s supporters together with a tally of all his master’s enemies. During his consulate, when Cicero declared martial law and upheld it by imposing the death penalty on conspirators against the Republic, I have no doubt that in the course of all those labyrinthine machinations his nomenclator was the repository of many of Cicero’s stratagems, an advantage that the Freedom of Information Act no longer permits our public officials here in Londinium, private email accounts notwithstanding!’ 
     ‘A human databank that walks and remains sober? An obvious security risk.
     ‘Too true. To be a nomenclator in Roman times could be dicey. Wasn’t it Claudius who threw his memory-man to the lions. Maybe the poor fellow knew too much.’
      ‘Yes, a memory-man bumped off with a head full of ciphers,’ I ventured. ‘Surely that was the climax of Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps?’
       ‘There you are then.’ Prof. Weissener rose and stretched and favoured me with a grin, a rare concession.


Here lie the bones
of Aristarchus, freedman,
nomenclator.
Roman sepulchral inscription, 1st century AD.


‘The Art of Covering Your Tracks.’

Stoneburgh’s Senior Lecturer in Politico-Criminalistics fell into step beside me as we walked to the Refectory for morning coffee.
     ‘You know, after Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington reviewed a number of our passing out parades here on this very quad; apart from attending our Commissioning Dinners.’
     Prof. Weissener knocked out his pipe on the wheel of a gun carriage.
     ‘Now he knew the Art of Covering Your Tracks. A cunning devil whose actions we could all learn by.’
      The keen eyes of Weissener were alert to judge my response. 
      ‘Funnily enough, I was told this tale by the Chelsea Hospital Commandant. And he’s straight as an arrow himself.  The way he told it, the duke’s battle plan was to rarely give orders verbally. If an order had to be conveyed to one of his commanders holding a distant terrain, he was obliged to write them down and entrust them to an ADC to deliver them for him on a charger.  But listen to this. The duke’s strategy to preserve the infallibility of his command as a tactician was absurdly simple.  His orders were not written on paper – no, far too fragile in such conditions – nor were his commands written with quill and ink obviously in the field. Far too precarious under fire.’
     Weissener cleared the dottle from his pipe with a ballpoint pen and replaced them in the breast pocket of his Norfolk jacket.
     ‘No. On the battlefield, Wellington carried a sheaf of specially-treated ass and goat skins.  About the size of cloakroom tickets. He could write on these with pencil and once the orders were read, the skins could be wiped clean, preparatory to writing a new set of orders. How devilishly simple! By this method he neatly sidestepped the accountability of command! The clever fellow was never caught out in error . . . ’
     ‘. . .  Because he never left a paper trail!’ I completed with amused complicity.  I had never before seen the professor with such a pronounced Machiavellian disposition.
      ‘We should take a leaf from his book!’ the Professor Weissener concluded with a flourish of his cane. ‘The Cabinet Office should bring back vellum!’
      ‘Or publish and be damned,I murmured.


We ought to have more of the Cavalry between the two
high roads.  That is to say three Brigades at least besides
the Brigades in observation on the Right . . .   


* Sister Morphine (2008) see below . . . 

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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)