And Then There Was No One (2 page)

Now, that done, let’s zoom in on the gist of the gist, on the very last of the nine essays, the one which shares its title with the collection itself, ‘Out of a Clear Blue Sky’.

It seems, by the way, that Slavorigin’s two initial choices of title, for the essay, not the book as a whole, were ‘Come, Friendly Planes’, a paraphrase of Betjeman’s still mildly infamous line of verse ‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough’, and ‘Small Atrocity in New York – Not Many Dead’, which aped the memorable winning entry in a
New Statesman
competition for the most boring newspaper headline imaginable.
||
Naturally, his publishers vetoed both gags
as just too outrageous, although somebody somewhere nodded, for both still feature in the text itself. As he elsewhere writes, however, ‘Let us have no excessive piety in the face of individual horror, for individual horror is the supreme constant of human history.’

The thesis of the essay is, in brief (and ‘brief’ is the word, since it is by far the shortest of the collection, a mere eight pages): notwithstanding the eschatological glamour of September 11 (‘Ah, those images, how we gorged on them, how we feasted on them!’), notwithstanding the undoubted and, as Slavorigin concedes, understandable shock to the nation’s system, a shock he compares not to that of the Pearl Harbor bombing, frequently referenced in this context, but to the sinking of the
Titanic
and the extinction of all the plush Edwardian complacencies which sank along with it, it was, from the loftiest of overviews – I repeat, this is Slavorigin speaking – a relatively minor atrocity, boasting (his word) fewer than three thousand victims and causing the destruction of a pair of skyscrapers of scant architectural distinction, leaving scores of others intact.

What followed was an abject and disastrously ill-judged ‘poetic’ description of the event itself, from which I decline to quote. Then a few, very few, words in memory of the victims, a gesture immediately subverted by a phrase I never thought to see in a text published by a reputable house (and for letting which pass, neither diluted nor deleted, some poor copy reader who had doubtless been terrified of
crossing so touchy and temperamental an author, was sacked), ‘But, after all,
they were only Americans.’
**

Slavorigin concluded thus: ‘For what was, I repeat, a middling massacre, on the human and urban scale alike, when compared with the genocides of Rwanda and Darfur, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and East Timor, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths in occupied Iraq itself, to have been exploited by such excrement as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and that pallid fall-guy Colin Powell, with the overt or tacit support of virtually the entire population of the United States, in order to justify the invasion of a secular country which could not conceivably have played a role in the jihadist attack on the World Trade Center – that was the true atrocity of September 11.’

It was, in short, a polemic deliberately designed to stir up controversy. Nor did the argument, indefatigably inflammatory as it was, possess any real analytical depth or sophistication. And, probably to Slavorigin’s own disappointment, the furore he had so obviously sought quite failed to materialise in the British media. Aside from a rave review from a single diehard Slavoriginite, the book received mostly mixed and muted notices from the national press, the principal criticism being of the untethered bombast of its style. It did, however, become an instant bestseller, a rare distinction for such a ragbag of undisciplined musings, and the ‘Out of a
Clear Blue Sky’ essay itself was reprinted in the
London Review of Books.

It was, instead, on the other side of the Atlantic that the scandal finally erupted.

Slavorigin’s American publishers wouldn’t even touch the book. It was available on Amazon, however, and soon circulated as freely as if it had been published. Naturally, in view of its author’s reputation, it took no time for the first of what would turn into a cascade of newspaper articles to hit the stands. To begin with, and for the next several weeks, these articles did not much more than acknowledge its existence and the vague disquiet which had been occasioned by its British publication. Then there came a full-frontal assault from an influential neo-con monthly published out of Washington DC, followed by another, suspiciously similar piece in the
Wall Street Journal.
Then, as the rumpus gathered pace, and ordinary Joe Six-Packs were gradually made conscious of the blasphemous affront to that occurrence in their country’s history which more than any other since Lincoln’s assassination had been brushed by the sacred, even moderate rags began to editorialise on its implications for the special relationship between the USA and what Slavorigin scornfully referred to as the UKA. He was savaged by the tabloids. He was denounced, absurdly, as a Twin Towers ‘denier’. Why, there was even talk of a diplomatic incident. The American ambassador in London dispatched a note to 10 Downing Street ‘in protest at this unwarranted attack on
the single most tragic event in the history of the United States by a writer who has been honored by the government of our nation’s oldest and closest ally’. (This, as it happens, was slightly misleading, Slavorigin having rejected the OBE which had been offered him.) The response of Her Majesty’s Government was that, while it too regretted the intemperance of the book in question, its author had committed no crime, none at least, save possibly that of libel, added a perfidious little parenthesis, for which he could be held to account in a British court of law, and his views, however offensive, were protected by the right of free speech, that same right, note well, which Slavorigin claimed had been irreversibly undermined by Blair and his yes-men.

It was at this stage of the crisis, just as the original press coverage was petering out for want of a replenishment of new developments, that, like a spider, the Web started to spin its own web. Virtual rumours ricocheted round the blogosphere before converging on an exceptionally eccentric website, albeit one which received many more hits than most such eccentric websites. It was called
For a Trans-World America
and the man who apparently masterminded it, even though his identity was nowhere disclosed on the page itself, was that Howard Hughes-y individual, down to the very initials of his name, Hermann Hunt V, notorious for never venturing out of his Scottish baronial-style castle in suburban Dallas.

HHV, as he was referred to by his mythologising cronies
and toadies, was by no means the self-made billionaire his trumped-up legend made him out to be. His grandfather, Hermann Hunt III, had founded the Hunt fortune in Texan oil in the fifties, a fortune that his father, whom it occurred to no one ever to call HHIV, had neither squandered nor augmented when he died of a ruptured aneurysm at the age of forty-three. While still in his twenties, HHV, coerced by family pressure to forgo youthful ambitions of becoming a writer – with, so word had it, Ayn Rand as his model – began the process of transforming what was still, relatively speaking, a mom-and-pop business into a vast tentacular corporation by diversifying, first, into real estate, then into the liquor business, then agricultural equipment, then timber and forestry, then by a natural extension, the proprietorship of a myriad of ultra-reactionary publications.
††
It was whispered meanwhile that an indeterminate number of shady organisations, all of them based in the West and South-West of the country’s hinterland, that ‘mainland of madness’, as Slavorigin had dubbed it, owed their inexplicable solvency to his generous financial backing.

Spoken of in this context were several survivalist communes in the Anaconda Mountains of Montana. A white supremacist group which held covert recruiting sessions in a desert motel, the Clandestine Inn, located seventy miles or so
from Reno, Nevada, and owned by a former Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan. The Neo-McCarthy Brotherhood, anti-Jewish, anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-Catholic, anti-French and, although one assumes just for old times’ sake, anti-Communist. The Knights of the White Camelia, a fraternity of Doomsday prophesiers whose mailing address was a shopping mall in Eugene, Oregon, and all of whose members, running their respective businesses on a pleasantly profitable day-by-day footing while in anticipation of the looming Rapture, belonged to divers Rotary Clubs and Chambers of Commerce. These and many, many others had benefited from HHV’s inexhaustible munificence.

Then, suddenly, the website began twitching with a whole new set of instructions to the faithful. Nothing connected with HHV, however, was ever straightforward. If you sought to decipher them, you had to print out each of the site’s four pages, cut them up into two unequal halves, unequal in one and only one fashion (i.e. one fat oblong and one thin one, each oblong being parallel to one of the four sides of the rectangular page itself, and no two widths being identical), then paste them together again, but differently, like the four individually incomplete and independently meaningless segments of a pirate’s treasure chart. Once they had been successfully recombined, and it had all fallen into place, the very first change to catch the eye was an unexpected refinement of the site’s typeface, causing its name now to read
F
or
a
T
rans-
W
orld
A
merica.
What was the point, you asked
yourself for a moment, of those five ugly bold-type caps? But only for a moment. A moment later enlightenment irradiated the screen. F.A.T.W.A.

The acronym was patently intended to remind impressionable bloggers of the Salman Rushdie affair, an affair which, for most of us, seems already to belong to a dim, nearly unknowable past when (in a narrative that Chesterton would not have repudiated) a significant fraction of the planet’s population had actually set off, by plane or by proxy, in pursuit of a single hapless human being. In a world in which terrorism itself has become globalised, we are all potential Salman Rushdies now, are we not, so who could be the object of this new personalised fatwa?

It was of course Slavorigin – Slavorigin who had blasphemed against the American creed, who had lampooned its prophets (‘the so-called, pompously so-called, Founding Fathers whose fabled Constitution is about as relevant to the contemporary world as the Ten Commandments’) and spat upon its martyrs (the fallen of September 11).

If the website’s cunning dynamics still made it impossible to know for sure who was calling the shots, even a technological duffer, blessed with a modicum of patience and luck, would have been able to work out what was at stake. All it required of the committed hacker was a diligent bout of clicking, copying and pasting. Then, assuming a few booby-traps had been sidestepped, the screen would display a cute little rebus whose pictorial clues, including a popular
coconut-filled chocolate bar (simple), the forementioned town of Eugene, Oregon (even simpler) and a movie by the director Sam Peckinpah (a bit trickier), would, when aligned in the correct order, end by generating the unequivocal message: ‘A bounty of one hundred million dollars for the head of Gustav Slavorigin’.

One hundred million dollars! That put those stingy mad mullahs in their place. And yes, before long, through deepest cyberspace coursed the Chinese whisper that scores of claimants – at least one of them said, with a tremor of excitement, to be a woman – were boarding trains and planes, were heading for London, had already landed at Heathrow, on the first stage of the million-dollar crusade.

What happened next everybody knows. Like Rushdie before him, Slavorigin instantly went into hiding. Withdrawing from circulation, from the social and literary circus of which he had been both cynosure and clown, he found himself escorted, in the weeks that followed, weeks that would drag into months, and months into years, from one safe house to another.

During his long internal exile he was, however, neither idle nor suicidal. The despair he must initially have experienced – the more so as, to nobody’s surprise, the American government, taking its lead from the British, refused to intervene – began to be cushioned, after a rigorously cloistered first year, by an occasional dinner in town, at the Caprice or the Ivy, by a starry gala première at Covent
Garden, the sole sign of his unannounced attendance being the proximity of two hefty minders wearing wraparound dark glasses night and day, pacing up and down outside restaurant or theatre rain and shine.

Then, almost exactly two years into his ordeal, he completed another book, a shortish thriller (of sorts, naturally).

How to describe
A Reliable Narrator?
Its opening chapter resembles the concluding chapter of a whodunit, one that just happens never actually to have been written. Thus the reader of Slavorigin’s book (I mean, the book which
was
written) cannot hope to comprehend the picturesque twists of this first-chapter denouement since, of the murder which has clearly taken place, the only detail to which he is made privy is the identity of the murderer, a murderer who has already been apprehended, charged, tried, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Or, rather, an
alleged
murderer. For, as the reader comes to realise, there has occurred a gross miscarriage of justice. The real murderer (
A Reliable Narrator
is written in the first person, as if we were inside this murderer’s head) has eluded the law, has, as they say, got away with it. But therein lies his dilemma. It transpires that the murder he committed was no more than a parenthesis, open then closed again, in an otherwise suffocatingly dingy existence. The protagonist was a nonentity before he committed it and, never having had the chance to bask in the limelight of guilt, never having enjoyed his fifteen minutes of infamy, he has become a nonentity all over again.
Just imagine the agony of his frustration. To have destroyed a fellow creature, to have barehandedly squeezed the last breath out of ‘a whorehouse miscarriage, a lying, foul-mouthed, poo-flinging ape’, yet to gaze into his shaving mirror every morning and see gazing back at him the same old pre-murder loser – this becomes so insufferable to his self-esteem that he howls out his guilt to anybody who will listen to him. But nobody will. Nobody but the reader, of course, who alone
knows.