Hav (25 page)

When, after breakfast, the resort's public-relations officer took me on a tour of the project, I asked her to explain this curious choice. ‘You are aware I suppose', she replied, ‘that the artistic heritage of Myrmidonic Hav has been essentially Minoan, in all genres. Our greatest artists down the centuries, from Melchik all the way back to Avzar himself, the supreme maze-maker, found their inspiration in the Cretan mysteries. That is why the Perfects invited our famous Kiruski to bring to this project an overriding sense of our intellectual heritage. It is an unprecedent project, you realize. There has been nothing like it in the history of civilization.'

Well, she was a public-relations person, but she may be right. The resort Lazaretto! is a vastly confusing sprawl of a dozen separate guest-houses, each with its own swimming-pool and squat Havian wind-tower, linked by a succession of bridges, hedged footpaths and pedestrian tunnels, and designed in a striking melange of moods or analogies. I am at a loss to define its style — like that reception hall, it seemed to me slightly Kremlinesque, and a bit Bedouin, with touches of the Ottoman and underlying vibrations, so the PR lady suggested, ‘of the unique evocative symbolism that is so characteristic of Hav's thought and art'.

Fine sandy beaches line the northern coast of the resort, impeccably raked, lined with cafés and patterned with chaises-longues and parasols. From there one can look across the harbour to Hav City on the northern shore. ‘So near and yet so far,' the PR lady commented, ‘yet there's nothing there that you can't get here.' It looked very different from the Hav I remembered. Gone was the esoteric skyline of turrets, minarets and gilded domes. Only the castle still stood on its crag high above. For the rest, all was a grey flattish blur of new buildings, low and flat, with a minaret protruding here and there, and a distant jumble of masts and riggings at the waterfront, but none of the gaudy eclecticism that made the old city so compelling.

In the southern part of the island, the former San Pietro, the foreign legations are assembled in a Diplomatic Suburb. My cicerone did not take me there. It was not part of Lazaretto, she told me, but was placed adjacent to the resort for administrative purposes. As in the old Hav, the sovereign states had been permitted to build their missions in their own national styles, ‘folksy, modernist, mock-primitive, what have you,' and she was not impressed. ‘The area is outside the direct remit of our famous Kiruski, and so lacks ideological certainty.' But actually, in the very middle of the whole ensemble, built on the landfill which has made the two former islands into one, the Myrmidon Tower stands, so far as I can see, utterly beyond ideology — a virtuoso display of unashamed, unrestricted, technically unexampled vulgarity.

Over lunch I told the PR person that nevertheless I would like to call that afternoon on the British Legate, in the Diplomatic Suburb. ‘I can't think why,' she said, but she called the Legate for me anyway, on her mobile telephone. I asked if I could come and see him.

‘What for?' he said.

‘For old times' sake. I knew one of your predecessors, long ago.'

‘And who might that have been?'

I thought of saying Harry Potter or Sir Homer Simpson, but restrained myself.

‘I forget the name,' I said. ‘It was a long time ago.'

‘I see. Well come along at 3 p.m. this afternoon. You know where we are? I can give you five minutes.'

Again I considered a sharp retort, but what the hell, said I to myself, you're not going for the fun of it.

And fun it wasn't, my visit to the British Legate. I agreed with the PR lady. The Diplomatic Suburb turned out to be a drably incomplete development lot, laid out in petty avenues and crescents and a very far cry from Lazaretto! — a far cry too, from the grandiose diplomatic quarter of the old Hav. Half a dozen unprepossessing villas flew the flags of different states, and displayed half-hearted architectural features of their nationalities — here a florid touch of Alpinism, there the simulacrum of an Iowa barn — but several more were unfinished, and there were some vacant building sites, too. The British Legation had mock half-timbering and was rather like a Surbiton villa of the 1930s, even to the garden gate and the box hedges.
O tempora, O mores
, I thought to myself, remembering the colonial elegance of the old Agency.

The Legate opened the door himself when I rang the crested doorbell. He looked at his watch as we shook hands, and walked before me into a downstairs room with royal portraits above a desk and copies of
Britain Today
on a deal coffee-table. He was a plumpish man of about thirty-five, wearing an open-necked shirt beneath his suit jacket. He had a gingerish moustache and pale, protruding blue eyes, and suggested to me a middle-ranking regimental officer offered early retirement. His vowels were not impeccable.

‘Now look here,' he said, ‘I've found out about you since we talked, and I want to give you a few words of advice. I've had trouble with your sort in previous postings. We had that Mary Ann Abbott at Lagos, and that was bad enough. I'll be straight with you. Here in Hav it just won't do. Do you understand me? I gather they've given you a blue pass, God knows why, but I'm not going to tolerate any hanky-panky or prying about. You are a British subject, remember. None of that Welsh nonsense with me. Do you get me?'

‘I really only wanted to ask you—' I began, but he interrupted me.

‘Don't ask me a damn thing. If you want to ask anything, ask at the Office of Ideology. You have a blue pass, go and ask them. You see my situation here, I have a very small staff and I have my work cut out for me. As for old times' sake, if I were you I'd forget all about old times. Old times is not what Hav is about. Old times is not what this Legation is for. Here, take this to read on the way back to the resort. Hear, read and inwardly digest.' And thrusting a pamphlet in my direction, he led the way to the hall and without offering his hand closed the door behind me.

I looked back when I got to the garden gate, and caught sight of him watching me from a corner of his office window, like a Parisian concierge at a lace curtain. The pamphlet was an order from the Myrmidonic Republic, headed by the Republican helmet-logo, and evidently circulated among all foreign legations:

No wonder, I thought as I walked back towards Palast One past the glittering entrances of the Tower — no wonder half those legations were unoccupied.

Lazaretto feels so utterly alien to all that I remember of the old Hav that when I returned to my suite I was surprised to find a letter awaiting me.

I called home later, and this was an exhilaratingly Lazzareto experience, because it was all voice-activated. It works like this. You lightly press your door-key (a round metal representation of the Havian Maze) upon a gun-metal strip which runs around every wall of your suite, like a dado, whereupon a disembodied operator, speaking apparently out of the ether, invites you to place your call. Name the number you want, and after a few clicks and pauses the voice of your beloved replies from far away — not through a single loudspeaker, but through multi-stereos throughout the suite. You speak wherever you like — walking about, in the bath, pouring yourself a drink, and the voice from home is vibrantly all about you. The conversation ended, the last oral kisses exchanged, and a touch of the key on the tele-dado switches it off.

‘Not much like the old days, eh?' said Biancheri at the dinnertable. ‘Remember the black dial-phones at the old Casino? But look over there now — and there behind the bar was the very same barman whom I had known at the Casino in the old Hav, and years before that at Harry's Bar in Venice — still smiling the same Gorgonzola smile, still managing to wave a hand and polish a glass at the same time. ‘You see? Not everything is gone . . .'

For I must understand, he told me, lowering his voice a little, that Hav's Myrmidonic rulers were no fools, whatever else one might say of them. ‘They knew that our old team at the Casino was a good team, not only very professional, respected throughout the world, but also experienced in the sometimes circuitous ways of Hav. You understand me? They knew us, we knew them.

‘At the Intervention we were scattered of course, as you will remember, but they had no difficulty in finding us. I had stayed in Turkey, old Giovanni there had gone back to Venice to retire, Chevallaz went home to his family restaurant in Zurich. It was not difficult to lure us back to help launch this somewhat excessive venture. What's the phrase you have these days — over the top? OTT? Well, dear friend, if Lazaretto! is OTT, so were the opportunities they offered us.'

Chevallaz joined us then, and remarked to me that he was glad our cat Ibsen had recovered from his wounded paw. I was taken aback. How did he know about Ibsen? The two men looked at each other wryly. ‘My dear Signora,' said Chevallaz, ‘you must realize that your telephonic system here is not exclusively your own. High-tech is inter-tech in the new Hav.'

‘Precisely,' said Biancheri, laughing. ‘And you should assume that if Chevallaz knows about it, by now the Security Perfect himself is aware of your cat's misfortune. If you don't wish to start a War of Ibsen's Paw, take my advice, Jan, don't make use of the tele-dado in Palast One.'

I didn't know how to reply, but they soon changed the subject anyway, and told me about their problems with the Chinese construction workers, and their difficulties in adjusting the demands of the hotel industry to the immemorial Havian ethos — ‘It must have been rather the same for whoever designed the House of the Chinese Master, if he had Taoist theologians on his back.' And what had happened to that House, I wondered, that ancient wonder of Hav, which had amazed so many travellers down the centuries? Burnt out in the Intervention, they told me, together with nearly all the monuments of old Hav. The copper-domed Serai? The Montenegrin Legation? League of Nations International Settlement, where I had lived last time?

Gone, all gone, they said. Even the Medina was burnt to the ground, and the slum-quarter of the Balad had been entirely rebuilt — ideologically rebuilt, they said,
Myrmidonically
rebuilt, and they laughed a lot. There was not much left of the old Hav, as I would see for myself when I went over to the city — ‘You do have a blue pass, I suppose? Of course you do, or you wouldn't be in Palast One.'

The truth seems to be that the Lazaretto island is a self-contained, insulated conclave within the Myrmidonic Republic. If visitors arrive by sea, as I did, they disembark there. If they come by air, they are taken straight there by helicopter from the airport. The island is in effect the Foreign Quarter of Hav, all tourists confined there, all legations within their own compound, rather like the districts where aliens had to live in Stalin's Russia.

But it is also the public face of the Republic. Everybody recognizes the image of the Tower. Every glossy tourist brochure portrays the luxury of the resort, with its restaurants and bars and bazaars and swimming-pools and casinos and boutiques and beaches, and the white-clad straw-hatted servants attentive at every corner. The brassily capitalist structure of Lazaretto is rigidly regulated by the Republic (‘one feels so
safe
, dear'), and as everyone knows it is already one of the great international tourist destinations, attracting wealthy pleasure-seekers from half the world — ‘just the same types,' said Biancheri, ‘as used to come to the old Casino, only very much more so . . .'

After dinner he suggested I might like to see the view from the top of the Tower. By now the building was floodlit from top to bottom, and its lobby, sheathed in chrome, was blindingly illuminated. Soldiers or policemen were everywhere inside, wearing combat gear and toting automatic rifles, but the duty officer at the desk knew Biancheri. ‘Where tonight, signor?' he said.

‘No stops,' Biancheri replied. ‘I would just like to show my guest the prospect from the top.'

‘She has a blue pass? Show it me, please. Right. Proceed, signor. Car 7 it is'.

‘Ciaou,' said Biancheri, and we stepped into an elevator. It was very large and empty, with glass sides, and when Biancheri pressed its only button it seemed to explode upwards out of its pad, like a rocket. My heart went into my mouth. I nearly fell.