by Hunt N. Peck
In the aftermath of the bizarre affair of the Dee Codex I had squeezed some money out of the University of Bumbleside by threatening to sue them for traumatic stress, and this money was at the beginning of its running-out. You know how it is. One receives a sum of money, the future seems rose-tinted, dull care vanishes from one’s life, one is generous to one’s friends, and even to complete strangers, one spends freely. Then comes the middle period, when one curbs one’s profligacy and begins to regret that case of vintage Burgundian ancien vin, that crashed sports-car, that bet on a five-horse combo that could not have paid off in any of the infinite alternative universes that quantum mechanics boasts of. Then, at last, comes the running-out, when the remaining pennies should be regarded as an emergency reserve, as a cushion to soften the inevitable fall into poverty, yet that diminishing pile of lucre glitters in the mind, reminding one of the good times, and seeming to ask coyly whether it would not be better if it was blown on one last glorious foolishness, a gesture of laughing defiance to the watching world, a challenge to mediocrity and humourless humbug.
Many times in my life I have known such reversals of fortune, because I do not, and will not, compromise. That is why I am the world’s foremost Consulting General Specialist.
Such thoughts occupied me as I sat in the rickety chair in my garret room in the early evening, the day turning twilight-blue outside, rain rattling on the windows. I was glad to hear the creak of my landlord’s tread upon the stairs. The Bosun is an oafish fellow, but when one is feeling low and conflicted any company is welcome. He knocked and entered, a fat bearded cully in dungarees carrying a large flagon of cider, the kind of glass bottle that is called a ‘pig’s ear’. A minor resolution of my inner conflict occurred; I would make a small gesture of defiance to common-sense, that scolding nanny.
“Hold the cider, Bosun!” I said, “for tonight we shall drinks like princes!”
I rose and took a bottle from the cupboard, a glass jug in which to decant the wine and two glasses.
“My last bottle of the 1948 Petrus,” I murmurred as I drew the cork with due reverence. A cloud of beautiful fragrance enveloped me, and my blood ran cold in my veins. The Bosun sensed something amiss and raised an eyebrow. I took a glass and carefully poured a little of the wine. I held the glass to the light; it was brownish, with a nasty yellow tinge. I sniffed the wine; there was now only a dead fungussy odour. I sipped the wine; vinegar, I spat it straight back.
“Corked!” I said, my voice choking with grief.
The Bosun sometimes surprises me by showing a refined sensitivity, as he did now. He said not a word, but swiftly cleared away the bottle, the jug and the glasses, plonked down two beer-mugs stolen from the pub and filled them with cider. I drank deeply. While I came to terms with my sadness and sense of loss, the Bosun filled his pipe and lit it. We sat in silence, only when he had refilled our glasses did he speak.
“What was that flowery smell that so upset you?” he asked. I sighed deeply.
“When a noble wine collapses under the weight of its years sometimes all the bouquet is expelled into the air-space under the cork. That smell was the bouquet of six glasses of fine wine escaping instantaneously. It was the ghost of the dead wine haunting us for one last time. My last bottle, too.” I shook my head in sadness and drank more cider.
The Bosun suddenly started searching the pockets of his paint-spattered dungarees.
“A-ha!” he said and passed me an envelope. “It came this afternoon. The kerfuffle with the vino put it right out of my mind.”
The envelope was of a fine creamy paper. I felt apprehensive – it had the look of a letter from an expensive lawyer – but then I remembered that I had spent most of my money, so anybody taking me to court would be wasting their efforts. I opened the envelope.
“What does it say?” asked the Bosun, digging the dottle out of his pipe with a screwdriver.
“Mister Jules Fraxinus wishes to see me. Phone this number.” I handed him the letter. He felt the thick bond paper between his fingers and examined the gold-embossed letterhead before reading it.
“Um, not very informative, is it? Who is this Jules Fraxinus character?”
“I have no idea. I’m sure I’ve never met anyone of that name. I’ve never heard of Caitiff, Recreant and Varlet Associates, either.”
“They are ‘management consultants’ is says here,” said the Bosun, squinting through his thick spectacles at the six-point print at the bottom of the letter.
“In that case they are undoubtedly devils in human form,” I said, sipping cider and thinking.
“Will you phone them, then?”
“I must, because now I am curious, and there is no reason not to because they already know where I live.”
The Bosun examined the letter once more, holding it to the light as though it might contain messages in invisible ink, then gave it back to me. I put it on the dresser, propped up where I would see it the next morning, and took the chess set down from the shelf.
The Bosun beat me in three straight games as we drank the cider. He has an aggressive thuggish style of play that can disconcert a fine mind like my own, especially when it is distracted by the tragedy of a corked ‘48 Petrus and a mysterious letter from sharks in the City, but I accepted defeat graciously despite his childish crowings and kicked him out before midnight. The next day it was still raining outside, grim and grey, and I had to hop over streams in the gutters to get to the village shop for a newspaper and milk. I had noted the letter on the dresser as I washed and shaved in the sink of my garret room, but I ignored it until I had eaten scrambled eggs on toast, made some coffee and read the headlines in the Telegraph.
Before phoning Caitiff, Recreant and Varlet Associates I checked-out Jules Fraxinus on the Bosun’s computer, downstairs in the front room. Mr Fraxinus was substantially wealthy, having founded the Plastipoppet Corporation toy company back in the ‘Forties. He had sold out to the entertainment division of Kyodai Koumaru Heavy Industries of Osaka at the height of the ‘Eighties stockmarket-bubble and had put the loot into blue-chips, high-tech stocks and property, thus making himself the kind of guy that King Midas would hit on for a loan until payday. He now concerned himself with charitable works and immense utopian architectural projects. This made me very thoughtful. I phoned the number in the letter. A snooty-sounding female voice answered after only a few rings, conceding that this was the offices of Caitiff, Recreant and Varlet Associates.
“Hello. I’m Hunt N. Peck. I have a letter here from you asking me to get in contact.” I said.
"Ah. Yes. Mr Peck,” said the Sloaney voice. “Mr Fraxinus has instructed me to ask you some questions. Do you mind?”
“Not at all. Ask away.”
“Are you fluent in Farsi?”
“Yes, my mother is Persian. It is my mother-tongue.”
“Are you fluent in any other languages?”
“Yes, my father, may he rest in peace, was Hungarian and I was educated in Budapest, so I am completely fluent in Hungarian. I am also fluent in Arabic, and English, of course, which was my fourth language.”
“Is that all?” said the Sloane Ranger, rather dismissively, I thought.
“You said ‘fluent’,” I chided her. “I speak French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Turkish and Swahili.” The Sloane tried to interrupt, but I ignored her. “I can get by in Italian, Portugese, Greek and Russian.” She tried to speak again. “And I can get a drink and a meal and curse a taxi-driver in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Finnish and Japanese. All the Scandiwegian ones are similar, of course, except Finnish, which is related to Turkish. I don’t speak Chinese, or any Eastern languages apart from Japanese, and I can’t read and write that except in rōmaji. Oh, and I speak a little Mongolian, but that’s a bit like Turkish, too, you know.”
There was a silence, and I realised that she was writing this down. I hoped I had not over-egged the pudding, as my grasp of Mongolian really isn’t that good. My grasp of Italian, Portugese, Greek, Russian, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, and Japanese isn’t that good, either, I confess, but then none of us is perfect.
“And you say that you are a general specialist?” she enquired, leaving the capital letters out quite deliberately, I am sure.
“Indeed yes, I am a Consulting General Specialist. The World’s Foremost,” I said.
“You appear to be the world’s only general specialist,” she cooed.
“Then I must surely be the World’s Foremost General Specialist,” I countered. “It is not a profession to which many may aspire, in any case.”
“A jack of all trades, then?” When she was being sarcastic her snooty voice became more attractive, like an argumentative Joanna Lumley. I suppressed the thought.
“But master of the most important,” I riposted.
“And that would be….?”
“The trade of General Specialist, of course. Which is why, I assume, that Mr Fraxinus wishes to consult me.”
“I am afraid that I cannot discuss why Mr Fraxinus wishes to speak with you, but he will see you tomorrow, if that is convenient.”
She was good. Straight for the throat. Did I want to meet the rich guy, or did I want to bandy words?
“Please inform Mr Fraxinus that I would be honoured to meet with him tomorrow. How do I get to the meeting?”
“You will be collected. A car will come for you at nine tomorrow morning. Any questions?”
“Why should I come, when I do not know why I am summoned?”
“Because you will be paid a consultation fee for the day,” she said in a more encouraging tone, “and you will get a very good lunch.”
I made to answer, but she had hung up on me.
The Bosun returned from the boat-yard to get his lunch, finding me trying to sponge green mould off my dark-grey Udo Unheil business suit.
“You should have put it in a suit-bag if you were going to hang it in the cellar,” he said. “You have an interview?”
“Yes. Mr Fraxinus wishes to meet me tomorrow. He is immensely rich. This suit is ruined. There are insects in the pockets. Little beetles and some woodlice.”
“Don’t let them escape. Here.” The Bosun handed me a black rubbish bag. “Check the pockets for money before you bin it. Do you want some food?”
“How do you think I found the insects? Damn! That was a good suit, too. Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny used Unheil’s to make the fake US uniforms for the Waffen-SS infiltration teams in the Battle of the Bulge, you know, and they all got caught and shot because the Yanks kept stopping them to ask who their tailor was. Yes, some lunch would be nice.”
I stuffed the suit into the dustbin and the Bosun made sausages, chips, eggs and beans. As we sat eating he waved a fork at me.
“Anyways up, a suit may not be the best thing in which to meet an eccentric billionaire,” he said. “They have a tendency to despise men in suits as mere corporate flunkeys and yes-men. He himself probably wears a teeshirt and jeans, or a kaftan.”
“You checked out Jules Fraxinus on the computer?”
“I was curious. He’s an interesting fellow. The prince of plastic dolls, as was. The director and founder of the Persephone Project, whatever that might be. Why does he want to see you?”
“I have no idea. I have no suit, either.”
“You still have some money.” The Bosun scribbled on a piece of paper and gave it to me. “Go to this place. It’s on the Terminus Industrial Estate, you know? There’s a sign at the roundabout says ‘Terminus Est’, which I think is kind of amusing. It’s a warehouse, but ask for Mr Patel and say I sent you and he will fix you up. Take his advice.”
“How do you know this fellow?”
“I repaired his boat. He has a Century Resorter, a classic waterski boat from the ‘Sixties, with a Chrysler vee-eight. Very nice, it is. Take my Land-Rover, but put some petrol in it. I can walk back to the yard.”
So it was that when there was a knock upon the door at precisely nine o’clock the next morning I was dressed in a brown leather blouson, tan slacks and a pink-yellow-and-white-striped cotton shirt, rather like a Bollywood film star, but not as plump. I was not displeased, though. Mr Patel’s apparel was of excellent quality and looked much more expensive than it had actually cost. Appearance is important in the consulting game, so it is better to look prosperous and slightly eccentric than down-at-heel and run-of-the-mill. The Bosun was right, it was fortunate that my suit had been destroyed.
I checked my new haircut once more in the hall mirror and opened the door. A driver in a blue uniform and a peaked cap saluted me, said “Mr Peck?” then led me to a black Mercedes with tinted windows. After he had settled me in the back seat with great solicitude he trotted around, got in and drove off. I attempted to engage him in conversation, but he and the car were from a limo-hire company and all he knew was that he was to deliver me to Bumbleside International Airport.
The driver went past the main entrance to the airport and entered at a slip road by the freight terminal, showing a pass at the gate. He turned the Mercedes away from the ‘departure lounge’ (which looks like a petrol station with no pumps) and followed the perimeter road to the other side of the runway. I suddenly felt as though I was in an old movie. The grey-painted hangars, sheds and Nissen huts looked like an RAF base at the time of the Battle of Britain. The effect was spoiled only by a few colourful signs on the old breezeblock buildings; ‘Bumblebee Flight Training’, ‘ZARTCO’, ‘Fribble Freight and Logistics’. No Spitfires or Hurricanes, though, but a business jet on the tarmac apron in front of a hangar. All biz-jets look the same to me, wings borrowed from a jet fighter, cigar-tube fuselage with two podded jet-engines, a T-tail or one of the other variations, depending upon the fashions in aerodynamics. Through the tinted windows of the Merc it appeared to be fairly normal, but as I got out of the car I saw that it was painted in a psychedelic swirl of pastel colours on top and dark blue underneath. As I walked closer I saw that it had an insignia on the fuselage, similar to the USAF circle and bar, but in green and yellow instead of blue and white, with a green heart instead of a blue star in its centre. The dark blue underside of the plane had stars and planets painted on it like a cartoon night sky.
The pilot standing by the boarding steps was film-star handsome, a tall man with a lean tanned face, white teeth, silver-grey hair and moustache. He wore a spiffy grey uniform with patches on the shoulders of a green heart in a yellow circle. His grey peaked pilot’s hat was set at an ever-so-jaunty angle.
“Mr Peck. I am your pilot,” he said, in a mellow Texas drawl, shaking my hand with a manly grip. “The stewardess will show you to your seat. If you please…”
The limo driver was hopping about, trying to hold an umbrella over my head against the slight rain. I knew his game. I reached into my pocket then two-fingered a little something into his breast pocket.
“Have a drink on me,” I said.
The stewardess was in her late thirties. Blonde, petite and very pretty, she had the authority of a ward-sister in an army hospital. I was buckled into my seat in double-quick time and given a glass of fruit juice and a plate of tiny sandwiches. I ate one. It was smoked salmon. The limo driver would be reaching into his breast pocket about now, to find a tea-bag. I watched the stewardess standing by the door in her smart grey uniform. Run away with me, I thought. We will live on a houseboat in Amsterdam, I will grow a beard and weld sculptures out of sawn-up bicycles, you will teach yoga and give Tarot readings, and nobody will ever find us. You sad old fool, said an inner voice, her husband is a truck driver and this gig on the little plane is going to put their two-point-four children through college. You are getting soft in the head because you are a lonely old goat. You fall for a sexy upper-crust voice on the phone yesterday, and today you fall for a stew you have known for three whole minutes. Get a grip. It is the aeroplane, I protested to myself. Air travel is disorienting, that is why religious cults hang around at airports fishing for mugs to recruit. Well-known fact. A woman got on the plane and the stewardess shut and latched the door. The woman sat opposite me and buckled her seat belt. She was mid-thirties, tall and slim, with a mop of curly black hair and large brown eyes. She was very beautiful. I was beginning to feel a little intimidated by all these good-looking people. Rich people like to show off their nice things, but this was creepy; ‘Look how lovely my slaves are, I purchase only the best’. I shook myself.
The plane’s engines started with a faint distant hum. It taxied for a while, swung onto the runway, the engines whistled as they spooled up to max and then we were off into the grey sky.
Seat belts off, and the pretty stewardess brought coffee and little pastries.
“Sob bekheyr, Mr Peck, ismam Yasmin e,” said the beautiful woman. Good morning, Mr Peck, my name is Yasmin. So, she was here to test my grasp of Persian,
“Salaam, khoshvaqtam, Yasmin,” I replied. Hello, pleased ta meetcha, Yasmin.
We continued to talk in Farsi, the usual pleasantries. She was very striking, with a long face, an aquiline nose, but quite serious in manner, unsmiling.
“You must be here to find out if I can speak Persian,” I said, in Persian, smiling to show that I was not offended.
“The task requires excellent Farsi,“ she said. “The knowledge of a native speaker who has lived in many parts of Iran, and who has read widely in both old Persian and in modern colloquial Iranian. I don’t know what the task is, they didn’t tell me, but I am assured that it isn’t anything cloak-and-dagger.”
She was bright, too. The bit about ‘modern colloquial Iranian’ had set my alarm-bells ringing. I have been approached once or twice by fools from the ‘intelligence community’ who seem to think that I would like nothing better than to be parachuted into Iran with a cameras in my cuff-links, a radio in my shoe and a cyanide pill in my belly-button. The selection of my good self is usually based solely upon the facts that I was brought up in Iran and that I do not abstain from alcohol. She had made sure there was no funny stuff going down before she had got herself involved, or me involved. Clever girl.
“Who are ‘they’?” I asked.
“The Persephone Corporation. That’s Jules Fraxinus, though, as far as I can see. He seems like a nice man, for a billionaire, anyway.”
“Aren’t you worried that we’re being taped?”
“Maybe we are, but they’d probably have to get me to translate. Or you.”
“Where are we going? On this plane, I mean.”
“Bournemouth. I’m a director of the Intergloss language school there. That’s why Mr Fraxinus has his yacht moored in Poole harbour, I think. He needed someone to check you out, Bournemouth has a large Persian community and lots of language schools and he could go sailing, too.”
“Hmm, I’m wondering how to impress you with my language skills. Perhaps I should tell you a story?”
She nodded, and I told her a Mullah Nasruddin tale. A ludicrous and slightly vulgar story which required that I use four regional dialects and a bit of Tadjik. I cannot transcribe it here in English as it would require too much long-winded explanation, and then it wouldn’t seem funny. I guess that she had heard it before, but she liked my version, and rewarded me with a smile, which was a wonderful thing to see. To demonstrate my familiarity with the classics I recited some lines from Vis o Rāmin:
“She grew into a silver cypress tree,
her heart was steely, and her spirit free,
and Wisdom gazing on her lovely face
was baffled to describe her radiant grace.”
Yasmin laughed and supplied the next quatrain:
“It said, ‘She is a garden burgeoning
with all the freshness of the early spring,
her eyes are two narcissi, and her hair,
the purple violets darkly nestled there’.”
She was lovely. The Persian language is at least two-and-a-half thousand years old, and rich in poetry, fantasy and romance, and the gulf between English speakers and Farsi speakers is immense. Don’t get me wrong; I love the English language. It is just so amazingly pragmatic, the language of engineers and businessmen. Persian is the language of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, though. It is the language of storytellers, of the weavers of dreams. When one is in a generic biz-jet whistling through space above the clouds with a woman of astonishing beauty who knows the ancient lines of one’s mother-tongue, and who speaks them so well, it’s difficult not to be moved. Why aren’t you running away with her to ze casbah, zen? said the inner voice. Because she is Not Available. Why the stewardess, therefore? Because she flies a false ‘Maybe Available’ flag. Yeah, so she can push soppy old gits like you around like a little pink bulldozer and get through her busy day with a minimum of bother, said the irritating inner voice.
Beautiful Yasmin suddenly changed languages like a racing driver shifting gears and questioned me in French, German, Spanish, Arabic and Russian. I fluffed the Russian just a little, and she looked at me with a raised eyebrow. She consulted a piece of paper.
“And you can ask for a taxi in all these other languages?” she said, with a sly smile. There was no fooling her.
“Finnish, Turkish and Swahili I do speak, a little Mongolian, and perhaps I should have said that I might be need a phrase book for the others. I was showing off to the lady with the Sloane-Square accent.” I tried to look contrite.
“I won’t tell,” she said. “It’s the Farsi that’s important. We’re landing. Any quick questions?”
“Who are Caitiff, Recreant and Varlet?”
“Three jolly old codgers. Mr Fraxinus bought the company for the address. He uses them as a front. He’s just careful of his privacy, I think, not crooked. Joss runs the place, really, and the three old guys just hang about to give it credibility. The firm makes a profit as management consultants, or they do now that the three old guys aren’t running it anymore. Joss is the lady with the upper-class voice.”
“Is there anything odd about the deal?”
“I don’t know what the job is, but there is only one Persian speaker allowed on the whole project, and I don’t know what the project is either. There were a couple of US-based hardware engineers who were born in Iran, but they got moved. Given other jobs and a bonus to keep quiet. They told them it was a mistake, that there could be no Persian-speakers working on ‘The Room’. I didn’t tell you that, mind, and it may not be entirely correct, but you know how people gossip.”
Well, I know how Persians gossip. If there were Persians on the Moon they would have heard all about it too. The plane bumped onto the tarmac with a little squeal from the tyres.
“What does Joss look like?” I asked, as we were unbuckling seat-belts and the stew was unlatching the door.
“I’ve never met Joss, only spoken to her on the phone. My husband treated her horse. He’s a veterinary surgeon. She returned the favour and contacted us about this job. My husband says she’s nice, which means that he didn’t just remember the horse, so she is either pretty or else she has two heads.”
We laughed. The stewardess standing by the door ordered us to have a nice day and we went down the steps into watery sunlight. Yasmin shook my hand and there was an odd awkward moment. Being together in the psychedelically-coloured jet plane had given Yasmin and I a brief sense of companionship, now ended.
“Well, goodbye then. It was nice meeting you.” Yasmin said, smiled, and walked away. I felt sad that I would probably never see her again.
A stocky red-headed man said “Mr Peck?” and led me to a helicopter, also painted in the swirly-coloured pattern with yellow-and-green insignia. The chopper pilot was a handsome man, too, with a swagger in his walk that made one think of an invisible kilt, and the charming but slightly-aggressive masculinity that Scottish men have refined over the centuries as the best way to annoy the sassenachs. He was a cheerful knave, though, and had a great relish for flying helicopters, which he demonstrated by whizzing us at low level across the Dorset farmland then west along Bournemouth beach, the weak sunlight glinting on the grey waves as they rolled onto the sand, no sunbathers on this autumn day, and then we were over Poole harbour, the quay a white traffic-jam of big motor-yachts, with a few spiky patches where sailing-boats were clustered, bare masts like reeds.
A ship was moored by Brownsea Island. It was the size of a destroyer, and painted in the same swirly light-show pattern of pale pastel colours. It had aerials, radar arrays and big shiny plastic spheres to protect the satellite dishes. It had a helipad. The chopper went wockety-wockety around to get downwind of the big white H and I saw Il Bouno Barchetta Succio on the stern; ‘The Good Ship Lollipop’. Mr Jules Fraxinus had a sense of humour, maybe.
A heavily-built man in a grey uniform opened the helicopter door and ushered me from the helipad. I was relieved to notice that he was not good-looking, until it occurred to me that he was a bodyguard, selected precisely because he had a face like a bag full of spanners. I followed him down a corridor (is that what they call them on ships? Or is it ‘companionhead’?) There was a pleasant odour of wax polish, but underneath it there was still the ship-smells of salt-water, diesel oil and paint. The bodyguard’s grey uniform blazer was vaguely nautical, double-breasted with patches on the shoulders of a green heart in a yellow circle. He opened a door (or is it a ‘bulkhatch’?) and waved me into a stateroom (I know that one). There were windows (‘portlights’?) on three sides and the thin sunshine gleamed on a teak conference-table big enough for about twenty magnates, moguls, oligarchs, tycoons and panjandrums to parley without blowing cigar-smoke in each other’s faces. There was only one there, though. A man with a lined tanned face, a leonine mane of white hair and a neatly-trimmed white beard. He stepped forward and grasped my hand.
“Mr Peck, I am Jules Fraxinus. I am so pleased that you could come.” I knew that he was in his eighties, but he looked younger, a vigorous sixty or so. His handshake was firm, and he was wearing a beautiful Italian suit.
“I am pleased to meet you, Mr Fraxinus,” I said. “Excuse my casual attire, but my suit was eaten by beetles.”