Catherine Eisner: Sister Morphine

Showing posts with label Sister Morphine. Show all posts

Monday, 27 January 2025

Vignette 6: Twenty-five words.*

He’d once sold cannabis to a troupe of Moroccan tumblers.

‘It was like selling refrigerators to Eskimos,’ he’d bragged, ‘and even the strong man wept.’

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. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html

and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

*THE LAW OF TWENTY-FIVE: ‘Of the quinary, or number five; that number five pertains to the Law. . . . accordingly the number twenty-five signifies the Law, because five by five — that is, five times five — make twenty-five, or the number five squared.’

Augustine’s Tractate 25 on the Gospel of John.

Monday, 30 March 2020

A Brief Statement on Behalf of the Bereft Mother

She was the light of my life, my only child,

and now I live in darkness.

I exist but I am not alive.

There is never a day

when she is not my first thought

when I awake.

I feel like my heart has broken into a thousand pieces.

I can’t believe she will never walk through

our door alive again.

Never will I forget her.

Not until the end of my life.

There is no reason on God’s earth for this.

Honest to God,

I wish there was justice.

The last time I prayed was in the Lady Chapel at Ely cathedral where all the statues in their niches and the ‘superstitious’ shrines are destroyed. They were smashed by the iconoclasts following the Dissolution. It’s a barren, soulless spot to choose for prayer. I wonder what Jung would have thought?

The prayer is from

The Three-Tiered Grave

Sister Morphine (2008)

•

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Thursday, 31 May 2018

That space the Evil One abstracted . . . and attention gained with forked tongue . . .

This morning I was awakened by the ‘tsk-tsk!’ of a stonechat. In Provence or thereabouts they call the bird Le Tarier pâtre (the Shepherd’s Auger because it sounds like persistently abraded rock). When I hear it, I always imagine a spectral sculptor in the hills chipping away at an invisible statue of Demeter, the goddess of grain.

‘Tsk-tsk!’ It’s an imagined space with a qualitative volume.

The substance of shadow.

‘We see least with borrowed eyes,’ my art mistress once said with emphatic earnestness in my last term at school, and I’d vowed then to always question the witness of my own sight, particularly as a favoured elementary visual exercise of hers was the study of ‘counter-shapes’, that is, those structural underpinnings that give substance to a figurative composition, such as the interstices between limbs or objects and their interplay with shadows.

Perception Psychology test card.

This concern for close compositional observation very often finds expression in my fiction. Take this sentence from my narrative, Dispossession, an account of a vulnerable woman’s banishment from her family home and of her feverish scheming to revenge herself of the treacheries of her younger brother (Sister Morphine, Salt, 2008). She confesses:

I felt neglected and vulnerable, held together weakly by will alone,
like a house shored up by its own shadow.

In this case, of course, the shadow – not the house – is the powerful counter-shape that’s representative of the lost domain.

So I continue to brood on the latent power amassed in certain undiscovered counter-shapes and sometimes I’m rewarded when the art of an Old Master, when viewed afresh, unexpectedly yields – with the delayed action of a time bomb – a revelation whose explosive force is the greater for being granted five centuries after the device was primed.

Hidden emblemata revealed.

I need write little more in explanation when the subject of my recent discoveries (this past Monday) is shown to be Albrecht Dürer, hero of the German Renaissance, and when the once hidden emblemata can be seen exposed here on this page in the two drawings I’ve presumed to deconstruct, stumbled upon while riffling through a catalogue of the Dürer oeuvre.

You can see the shadowy interstices here that Dürer identified when he subtly assays the conflict between Piety and Sin – Good and Evil – for in each case the interstice of the ubiquitous Serpent appears, insinuating evil into the devotional duties of knelt prayer and priestly injunction (the First Commandment).

Is there truly a subliminal message in these interspaces of Dürer’s art? A century and a half after these images were made, the tremendous words of John Milton in Paradise Lost told of the Great Adversary whose stratagems as Tempter to suborn mankind resounded as an ordained truth . . . so, in this consideration of the latent potency of counter-shapes in religious art I think it apposite to conjoin those words with Dürer’s prophetic images, for surely they are precursors of ‘that space the Evil One abstracted’ perceived by the blind poet from out of his own darkness.

‘. . . the brute Serpent in whose shape Man I deceived:
that which to me belongs is enmity . . . between Me and Mankind;
I am to bruise his heel. . .’

‘That space the Evil One abstracted stood from his own evil . . .

To me shall be the glory sole among the Infernal Powers . . .’

‘The Potentiality of the Plane’ . . . Postscript (October 3rd 2021)

I’ve just read this by a mystic concerned (like the poet he venerated, Gerard Manley Hopkins) with the mysteries of spiritual ‘indwelling’ and the co-inherence of interrelationships . . .

‘I think in a line [as one who is sequentially conscious] – but there is the potentiality of the plane.’ This perhaps was what great art was – a momentary apprehension of the plane at the point of the line . . . the Praying Hands of Dürer . . . the Ninth Symphony – the sense of vastness in those small things was the vastness of all that had been felt in the present.

Many Dimensions by Charles Williams 1931

Monday, 25 September 2017

A Web Link to Catherine Eisner’s published works . . .

Publishers of Catherine Eisner, Salt is one of UK’s foremost independent publishers, committed to the publication of contemporary British literature. Salt Publishing was founded in 1999.

For more information :

https://www.saltpublishing.com/collections/author-catherine-eisner

Monday, 17 July 2017

A Visit to the Pushkin Club . . . destination 46 Ladbroke Grove W11

Of course, her first emotion, when she learned her husband was living with his Russian interpreter, was utter relief. No longer was he to be found brooding in his garden room, amber decanter glinting by his side, wearing that wintry smile whenever their eyes met.
  Then new feelings of resentment seized her. Looking from her study window to his room below, she could see, under the lattice of the glass roof, her husband’s whorled crown of dark shaggy hair – thinning in the centre, she noticed – where he had slumped forward, beard on chest, feigning sleep. Playing possum was invariably his ruse when unwelcome questions remained unanswered. And those he had answered had been matters-of-fact, cursorily conveyed with his face turned from her.
  He had said no more than that he was living in his unleased town flat with a young woman named Nadezhda. He called her Nadia, a Russian from Saratov who had never visited the West before. He said she was unworldly, and in the city she was endangered by a childlike inexperience. At heart, he said, she was an unsophisticated, provincial girl who was prey to primitive superstitions. Without too much thought he had bestowed on her his protection.
  ‘All that you imagine is probably true,’ Leon had said. Beyond that he would say nothing more.
  She slammed the window and saw his eyelids flicker. So be it, she decided, if he chose to retreat behind a carapace of calculated indifference, then she would contrive her manner to be no different from his – yet, she vowed, before the week was ended it would be her intention to unbeard a lifetime of manifold deceptions.

Under the heading of Russian mentalität, Miriam wrote, Izlivat
dushu – ‘pouring out of the soul; the mingling of two lovers’ souls,
for example’; Stradanyie – ‘mental suffering due to unrequited love
or coarseness of lover or spouse’; Toska – ‘melancholy homesickness’;
Grekh – ‘a sense of sin only removed when sinner reaches a state of
highly emotional repentance’; and, finally, Tyomniye sili – ‘dark
or sinister, evil forces’; the latter she thrice underlined.

•

The evening was cool so the out-of-season dark wool cape she threw over her shoulders granted her a plausible concealment to melt into the dusk. Thus seven-o’clock saw Miriam striding after two distant linked shadows as they crossed Leinster Square. This quarter of London was familiar to Miriam and she found no difficulty in keeping pace with the couple as they turned the corner of the Westbourne terraces and entered Ladbroke Grove.
She halted and drew back at the gateway of a peeling townhouse set in a neglected garden. A doorbell sounded and Miriam heard a gutteral murmur in Russian as her husband and his paramour were admitted by a hulking grizzled usher.
When the door closed Miriam inspected the illuminated bell escutcheon. ‘The Pushkin Club.’
Standing in an angle of the garden, in a quadrant of shade, Miriam found she could observe – through a slit in the shutters – the company of discussants within.

This is what she saw. A fine, high-ceilinged drawing room with flaking lemon coloured plaster. (She thought: ‘ “Lemon Peel” - wasn’t that the title of an unwritten sketch by Chekhov?’ It was.) There was a large copper samovar on the sidetable and a framed photograph of Osip Mandelstam. A frayed electrical flex holding a shaded bulb was suspended from the ceiling’s crumbling plaster rose.

  Sub rosa, in front of the vast library stacks which formed the far wall, a half circle of ill-assorted chairs had been drawn up to face the window. A row of émigrés with expectant faces drank tea from unmatched china teacups which appeared to be the only items they’d saved from their country houses before their decadent burzhuaznyi drawing rooms were converted by the Bolsheviks into grain stores.
  There was much laughter and clapping when an actor wearing side-whiskers and an old, worn frock coat darted between the chairs and stood before the window.
  ‘A monologue in one act by Anton Pav’lich Chekhov,’ he announced in a heavily accented, corncrake rasp. There was scattered applause. The mock lecture commenced.
  Leon’s hand, she saw, was resting on Nadia’s thigh, but when the actor came to the passage where the deranged hen-pecked soi-disant lecturer wrings his hands and rails across the footlights (‘ ... my wife runs a boarding school. Well, not exactly a boarding school, but something in the nature of one. My wife doesn’t give parties and never has anyone to dinner. She’s a very stingy, bad-tempered, shrewish kind of lady, so no-one ever comes to see us. If only I could run away from that stupid, petty, spiteful harridan of a wife who’s made my life a torment ...’) Miriam saw her husband reach out and grip his mistress’s knee. Nadia, however, did not smile.

•

Crossing the lobby, Miriam’s husband laid his hand on Nadia’s shoulder and gave a coarse laugh.
‘In the right hands it could be hilarious,’ Leon said, and snickered once more.
Nadia disengaged his hand as she opened the door.
‘Tell me, Lvyonok,’ said Nadia, inconsequentially, pronouncing the words thickened, as though her teeth were grinding on ice, ‘who is that Amerikanetz whose name sounds like a sneeze?’ They closed the outside door before Miriam heard Leon’s answer.

•

From the garden room below Miriam heard Leon’s discreet, suppressed sneeze. The sound grated. The truth was that the frequent muffled explosions did, indeed, sound remarkably like Kissinger! and, in time, the apprehension as one waited for the next convulsion began to attack one’s nerves.

•

On the telephone she could hear Laurence riffling the pages, then he quoted, ‘She was carrying some of those repulsive flowers,’ and crowed in recognition. ‘It’s an ugly colour,’ he read, ‘that’s because it’s Russki semiotics for an unfaithful woman, it’s central to the text, don’t you see?’ Then she heard a carillon of mordant laughter. ‘Forgive the emotional histrionicism, but I warned Leon ...’ But Miriam hung up.

•

She had taken her secateurs and gone straightaway into the garden. First the Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) and plumes of Golden Rod, then the yellowish Lilies (Enchantment), and finally she chose the yellow Aster ; not the species plant but the low-bred cultivars that had strayed to the kitchen door – the Asterasters – for these she considered the most fitting tribute of all from the philosophaster, poetaster and cinéaster she knew herself to be.

Extracts from The Cheated Eye,

Part Six of Sister Morphine by

Catherine Eisner (2008)

See The Girl on the Number 52 Omnibus . . . destination Ladbroke Grove . . .

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/the-girl-on-number-fifty-two-omnibus.html

•

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Saturday, 26 March 2016

Lament of a Girl Led Astray (score from Sister Morphine).

Put a tenner on the table as yer leavin’,

Put a tenner on the table

won’tcha, dear.

Put a tenner on the table.

if yer love me,

’Cos a girl ’as gotta live . . .

’Cos a girl ’as gotta live on more than

cold and bitter beer.

For many years, I admit, yes, we’d conducted a sort of meretricious relationship, which had branded me, I suppose, as a species of ‘kept woman’, for there was a lighthearted understanding that we should assist each other financially from time to time, when low on funds.

Hence, when Douglas stole from the warmth of my bed in the small hours, I would often run to the piano to vocalise my penniless state in a patter song of my own devising . . .

The mock pathos of my Lament of a Girl Led Astray and jangling honky-tonk beerhall accompaniment had generally been productive of more than a tenner.

Then, a change fell upon all things, when, in the light of one exceedingly feeble dawn, he confessed he was leaving me for a younger, more provident woman.

‘After traipsing after you all these years! You . . . you . . .’ I stuttered, quite beside myself with anger. ‘You . . . you . . .’

Douglas turned slowly at the threshold.

‘Well?’ There was a peculiar twist to his lips as if he were pleased to be hurting me.

‘You . . . you . . . bally bastard!’ I finally managed weakly.

He gave a derisive little laugh and slammed the door.

‘I don’t care a blind fig who she is,’ I shouted after him senselessly, I was so angry, ‘or a brass farthing for your petty fornications!’

Even now, his desertion, in retrospect – as I gazed in a reverie at the river’s oozy bed – prompted a bitter taste in my mouth; his laughter had simply added wormwood to gall.

Dispossession, Page 319, Sister Morphine (2008).

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html
and A Bad Case (2015)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Sunday, 26 April 2015

Oreville Spy Campus: An Introduction to Stoneburgh Military Academy (Pt. 1)

Familiarly codenamed ‘Oreville’ by certain analysts in our spying fraternity, Stoneburgh Military Academy is the elite alma mater for generations of British Intelligence operatives who have graduated as commissioned adepts in cryptography, code-breaking, counterespionage, covert communications, disguise, forgery, infiltration, subversion, surreptitious entry, surveillance and sabotage, not forgetting the duplicities of PsyOps. For our intelligence community it delivers a unique curriculum whose content remains sensitive and highly classified so unsurprisingly its astonishing scope has never been openly itemised

Nonetheless, the unfolding Stoneburgh Chronicles (see Catherine Eisner’s collections, Sister Morphine 2008, Listen Close to Me 2011, and A Bad Case 2014) from time to time reward spy-watchers with teasing glimpses of the Stoneburgh cadre, so for the uninitiated a number of key passages are quoted here as prompts for further study.

Perhaps the most instructive introduction to Stoneburgh may be read in the section, Red Coffee, in Sister Morphine, which acquaints us with the young Russian legation interpreter Irina P., seconded to T-FECS – the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security – to assist in the drafting of the Redistribution Plan under the direction of Brigadier Wingfield, chief of the FFES, the Forum for Federated European Security. Here are Irina’s first impressions (note: Irina does not disclose her difficulties in locating the academy since for security reasons the approach roads are unsignposted).

••••••••••••

The approach to Stoneburgh Military Academy was through the garrison’s camps, on a concrete road flanked by gorse thickets and wild heathland churned by tank tracks.
‘The English soil,’ she thought fondly.
For she could not deny that in her long-dreamt-of assignment to the foreign fields of England, after all those oppressive years of diligent study in Moscow, her soul had recognised what her masters would condemn as the delusions of a spiritual home-coming.
When she arrived at the guardpost she saw a soldier remove a black disc from a hook and hang an orange disc in its place on the message-board.
‘Security state raised to Condition Orange,’ Irina thought, suppressing an impulse to laugh, ‘but surely I alone can’t be the cause of their heightened threat alert!’
The Ministry of Defence guards inspected her Cyrillic passport, unsmiling. Not until Colonel Rees-Sholter rang the gate-house was the barrier raised.
Irina drove the hired car cautiously; nerving herself to remember the rule of the left hand lane.
Where two broad avenues met she halted before a huge, black eighteenth century mortar with a mouth wide enough to fire a Landseer lion.
The Palladian façade, she observed with a pang of disappointment, was disfigured where the portico pilasters were parcelled up in green plastic for restoration. She felt deprived of her proper due.
The guards had directed her to ‘K’ section. The college blocks for the gentlemen cadets and the great park of over six hundred acres had been laid out in tribute to beleaguered forts, border disputes and skirmishes in the Indian and Afghan Wars of the nineteenth century. An entire square mile was divided alphabetically into twenty-six sectors, ranging from Alipur and Berar, through Charasia to Zulfikar. Irina was detailed to ‘K’ sector (the siege of Kotah, 1858) which adjoined the Residency of the Lieutenant Governor.
A cadet platoon, selected from the New Intake Group of that momentous year, jogged by with war-whoops, thighs sweating like champion gladiators.
As she parked her car, a soldier-cyclist rode up and blew the midday lunch recess on his buglet.

The Residency of the Lieutenant Governor,

Stoneburgh Military Academy.

The motto beneath the parapet reads:

Non faciam vitio culpave minorem,

‘I will not disgrace myself by vice or fault.’

••••••••••••

Entente uncordiale.

In the light of current political commentary (21.04.15) on the crisis of Europe’s frontline nations under Nato, and doubts – for example – as to the defence of a former Soviet republic with a border only 100 miles from St Petersburg, Irina’s hush-hush project at Stoneburgh (her account to me was written in 1997) now seems astonishingly far-sighted. Her presence at Stoneburgh at the time reflected Nato’s accommodations with Russia in so far that the signing with Russia of a ‘Founding Act’ (1997) promised no combat units would be permanently deployed on the territory of any new members of the alliance.

Today, instead of answering demands within the alliance to deter Russia by permanently stationing at least a brigade in the Baltic states, Nato is reliant on its strategy of the provision of a very high-readiness task force of 5,000 troops for rapid deployment to the Russian border. (See Irina’s reference in 1997 to rapid MSRs below.)

••••••••••••

In Red Coffee, Irina was privy to the ramifications of that trade-off, which Colonel Rees-Sholter had outlined to her on her arrival, a trade-off that demanded new nonbelligerent uses for the demilitarised zone.

From Day One of her induction, Irina had been determined to honour the supreme trust the Academy had invested in her. In those early weeks she 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’.
Privately, the colonel had told her she had ‘made a hit’ in K section; Duncan had referred to her as ‘the lady of the regiment’.
She had almost completed the blue features on her map. The scheme was classified ‘Most Secret’.
Under the auspices of the IRP – the International Redistribution Plan – the conversion of military bases was proposed on a vast Central European demilitarised zone where three state frontiers met. This forested land-mass cradled more lakes than Finland.
The trade-off was two-fold: admission of the former satellite states to an Entente with the Powers, and development of the infrastructure for new rapid MSRs – Main Supply Routes – to their borders, in return for cutbacks in front-line military establishments.
The MSRs had been carefully assessed for vehicle choke points

••••••••••••

Wingfield’s Redistibution Plan was to integrate a series of foreign equity-funded water sedimentation plants to yield highly mineralised compounds for fertilizers and animal foodstuffs. Fifty lakes taken together contained more than five hundred million tons of sapropel, it was estimated, based on optimal utilisation of the natural resources beneath waters surrounded by the largest undisturbed ancient forest in Europe.
The Report’s centre-fold map summarised the Industrial Reclamation Plan with a legend keyed to Irina’s own symbols.
Lakes containing sapropel were marked with a gold leaf.
Formed by broadleaf and coniferous forests, sapropel organic matter is an aquatic carbonaceous nutrient lying in ooze on the lakebeds.

••••••••••••

But Irina’s earnest desire to be an instrument of European rapprochement is thwarted by a powerful puppet-master emerging, still active, from the crucible of a dismembered USSR transmuted by its desperate ideological reconstitution. Very soon not-so-subtle pressure to betray her new comrades is exerted on Irina by dark forces from her Soviet past.

Irina’s boss, General Yegor Bolkashin was the former Chief of Intelligence in the republic where she was born. They had met in the state capital where he chaired the powerful, post-separatist Land Utilisation Policy Commission whose delegates pulled the strings of puppet states still in thrall to Soviet centralism.
The general zeroed in and expertly squeezed Irina’s well-shaped knee.
‘Irinka. Your knees are the property of the republic. So is sapropel. You should think carefully about what you are doing.’

••••••••••••

However, Colonel Rees-Sholter at Stoneburgh is more gallant in his appreciation of Irina’s zeal.

Irina’s efficient progress with her Report for T-FECS – the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security – pleased Colonel Rees-Sholter.

His trusty workhorse he called her.
‘Don’t think for that I am all horseflesh!’ she sparked up.
‘Nor you are, my dear,’ brayed the colonel amiably.

••••••••••••

The emergence of ex-Soviet ‘placemen’ in the West, identified in Red Coffee, is highlighted in a more recent Stoneburgh instalment, Turnaround, in which my anonymous correspondent – a novice codebreaker in Stoneburgh’s exclusive cryptanalysis sorority – makes clear the continuing threat.

Hans-Jürgen Weissener, a former agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, and respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and subversion, taught politico-criminalistics at Stoneburgh.
Klara Weissener was the only daughter of this eminent spy-catcher and master intelligence analyst whose lectures had been a memorable feature of our first year’s cadetship at Stoneburgh.
I remember so clearly his visionary conspectus of the Anno Jericho emergency – the collapse of the Berlin wall – and how, in his own words, ‘surveillance of Tumbleweeds from the Badlands’ should be classified as an immediate Heightened Alert Condition. By the label, ‘The Badlands’, he denounced the entire Eastern Bloc.
Attendance at his acclaimed lecture on Soviet Sleepers was compulsory.
He spoke English correctly but slowly. ‘Do not doubt,’ he cautioned, ‘when I tell you that any number of placemen in the West are still in position feeding secrets to the Soviets. Beware of Latebloomers!’ A disarming smile had flickered for a moment. ‘I speak horticulturally. My subject is Badlands fauna but my metaphor is drawn from flora. (There had been a scattering of knowing laughter.)

••••••••••••

This continuing global threat shapes the academy’s strategies for spycraft that must answer to constant vigilance, the watchword of the Stoneburgh cadre. Of course, the academy’s more colourful personnel will become known to you in time, but a résumé is not out of place in this brief introduction, together with one or two directions as to where principal characters may be encountered in these occasional chronicles.

Dramatis Personae

Current notable Stoneburghians

(From Red Coffee and Turnaround and Lovesong in Invisible Ink
and In Search of the Fourth Man)
Brigadier Wingfield: chief of the FFES, the Forum for Federated European Security.
Colonel Rees-Sholter: director of T-FECS – the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security, with special responsibility for the IRP – the International Redistribution Plan.
Major Roland ‘Rollo’ Poultney: a ‘Green Fly’ from Intelligence seconded to the Task-Force as the colonel’s ADC.
Lieutenant Duncan Pym: administers the Surreptitious Entry Unit and Special Surveillance Teams for his mentor, the colonel. (Poultney’s opinion of Duncan? ‘Mission creep? He was Mission Creep!’)
Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener: former agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and subversion, lecturer on politico-criminalistics.
Klara ‘Flags’ Weissener: brilliant daughter of the professor and leader of Stoneburgh’s Cryptocomms, an exclusive cryptanalysis sorority.
Hilary Challis: youngest daughter of Stoneburgh’s Custodian-Marshall, on non-regular assignment to Klara’s Decrypt section. A mathematical prodigy, a fixated numerologist, she is a hyper-systemised teenage savant with eidetic recall.
Mrs Greenham: only representative of non-regular personnel at top-brass level. She is Colonel Rees-Sholter’s secretary. (‘Wretched name for the unfortunate woman,’ the colonel would often confide to newcomers.) She is sometimes retained as an innocuous-seeming ‘handler’ in sensitive cases involving compromised women.
‘Barbara Ely’: Establishment socialite and co-opted to work with Stoneburgh’s psychological operations unit as a psycho-scenarist of criminal rôle-play for lectures in state espionage.
Major Vivian X: Intelligence officer and undercover operative in ‘Paddyland’.

Off-site deep-cover operatives.

(From Inducement and A Singular Answer: Memories of an Interview with the Grey Men)
Edward Faucon: manages a ‘shop window’, the Faucon Detective Agency, a bureau for commercial surveillance operations under a cloak of legitimacy.
Verity Y: Successful divorce lawyer, working as a ‘talent spotter’ in the recruitment and vetting of potential intelligence operatives.
See
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html

Hostiles

(From Red Coffee)
General Yegor Bolkashin: ex-Chief of Intelligence, semi-retired career intelligence officer in the Soviet military security service; chairs the powerful, post-separatist Land Utilisation Policy Commission whose delegates pull the strings of puppet states still in thrall to Soviet centralism; founder of his Institute for Security Affairs.
Konrad W: operates his own press agency in Warsaw – Biuro K – and exchanges communiqués with Yegor’s outfit in the neighbouring republic.
Stefan Mikhailovich Kazimirov: Intelligence officer with diplomatic cover as a geologist; sub-section chief at his trade mission attached to the Russian Embassy in London.

Classified Operatives – Access Denied (Highest Level SC accreditation required)

(From Red Coffee and Turnaround and A Room to the End of Fall and Inducement and The Cheated Eye and Listen Close to Me)
Irina P: Rôle classified.
Frieda Tace: Rôle classified.
Dr. Walther T. Reindorf: Rôle classified.
Anneliese Hildegard Wintermann: Rôle classified.
Constance Bryde: Rôle classified.
Nadezhda Stepanovna Cheremisovna: Rôle classified.
Professor ‘Pappi’ and his nephew Vernon: Associate Lecturer in Cognitive Robotics in the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Applied Neural Computation, and wunderkind astrophysicist/roboticist, respectively; both non-regular Stoneburghians. Rôles classified.

Lost in Translation . . . the Desire for Union.

Irina P is not alone in permitting me to share a number of Stoneburgh’s intelligence insights revealed in despatches from prescient informants, often at great personal risk. As long ago as 2004 I related the conclusions of another Stoneburgh insider (see Elegy from a Locked Drawer): ‘Espionage specialists and security experts have known for almost a century that police bureaux in communist bloc countries have penetrated international academia by deploying suborned academics, awarded spurious honorifics and doctorates, to provide their political masters with local intelligence concerning the underground activities of émigrés around the world.’

Any overtures to establish closer ties with the West are so often subverted by the ‘placemen’ and ‘placewomen’ Professor Weissener identifies in his seminal monograph, Red Whitewash. It’s pretty evident that Stefan Kazimirov (Inducement) was not the geologist he claimed to be. More than this, is it not curious that Stefan’s London address was Chesterfield House, Mayfair W1, just a stone’s throw from MI5 operatives’ quarters in South Audley Street? Did Stefan follow the first rule of concealment? He Who Wants to Hide a Leaf should put it in a forest.

No. Our differences are irreconcilable, if Irina P is to be believed,

(The Custodian-Marshall gave Irina P licence to explore the stacks at Stoneburgh’s extensive library.) On the shelves labelled ‘Anthropometry’ she found an early monograph on Slavonians. ‘The tribe of Slavons is characterised by darker hair and eyes than the Saxon.’ There was an engraving of a house set far apart from others. ‘An Anglo-Saxon, if possible, always stands detached.’

Even a well intentioned olive branch can be misconstrued. Irina P laconically once noted a passage in her copy of Varieties of Topical Interpretation by I. S. Slovenko (Moscow 1993): ‘A false transcription by an interpreter rendered President Carter’s words on his arrival in Poland, in 1978, as “I desire the Poles carnally.” ’

Maxie’s . . . Come Again Soon!

Yes. Our best diplomatic endeavours can be so very easily lost in translation. A thought not unconnected with the fact that those two Russian interpreters of my acquaintance, Irina P and Nadezhda Cheremisovna, may well have successfully deceived with ease their assigned intelligence targets but in their own amours they are as likely as any lovelorn temptress to deceive themselves. Curiously, I notice only now in these reflections that, significantly, the nexus of their assignations was Maxie’s cocktail bar, Knightsbridge – the works canteen for certain active hostiles – just a short constitutional stroll from the Russian embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens . . . and their love potion du jour? Fact. Honey Dew Screwdrivers. Vodka, Orange Juice and Melon Liqueur.

As the exhortation on Maxie’s bar check reminds us: Come Again Soon. So maybe, if we remain vigilant at this intriguing watering-hole – who knows? – before very long we’ll encounter these femmes fatales once more. If not, be assured, the cocktails are delightfully inventive.

For Part 2 of the Stoneburgh Files (the instructive text for probationer agents, Turnaround) see [CLASSIFIED/DELETED) http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-2-turnaround.html
and for Part 3, which reacquaints us with the criminological theories of Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-3-religio.html

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)