Rabies
Novel published in Serbian as "Besnilo", Sveučilišna Naklada Liber, 1983, Zagreb, © Borislav Pekić English translation © by Bernard Johnson.
Peste si grande viendra a la grande gousse Proche secours, est bien loinge les remedes, Nostradamus
Mrs. Andrea Milliner of Stroud, Gloucestershire, died two months after being bitten by a dog while on holiday in India… Fifteen people have died from rabies in Britain since 1945. Mrs. Milliner's death was the firs for three years.
PROLOGUE – RHABDOVIRUS
Penetrating into the live cell of a foreign body, the virus substitutes its own for the cell's
substance and transforms it into a factory for the production of new viruses. The changes which it brings about in this way in the life medium of the cell are incomparably deeper and more dramatic than man can ever hope to bring about in his own milieu.
The virus is the most perfect being in the cosmos. Its biological organization is nothing less than a machine for producing life in its purest sense. The virus is the summit of natural creative evolution.
The summit of artificial creative evolution is – an intelligent virus. A creation with the form of a man and the nature of a virus, the vitality of a virus and the intelligence of a man.
A symbiosis of a virus, divested of its lack of purpose and of man, freed of his limitation would rule over nature, which both otherwise serve only as refuse.
Professor Frederick Liebermann
When in the 8th Book of the Iliad, through the mouth of Aias Teucros Homer describes Trojan Hector as 'Kion lisitir' – mad dog, man did not yet know of It. Seen for the first time under the electron microscope in 1962, it was bullet-shaped, bulging outwards at the top on an elongated base. It measured approximately 180 milicrons in length and 75 across. It was three hundred times smaller than the animal in which it was born, and sixty million times smaller than the man it would kill.
It lived in a cosmos called a Neuron which was five thousand times its size. It was smaller than any other living thing, but this injustice was of no importance, for, paradoxically, it was more powerful than anything else alive.
It was a wonder of nature, its origins shrouded in mystery, as are the origins of all mysteries. But its purpose was beyond doubt, and beyond hope. It devastated all its native surroundings with the same treacherous, diseased, savage heedlessness with which man abuses and ravages his own environment. It was the murderous black sun of its cosmos, destined to become the sun of all others.
In his persecution of Its ancestors, man had disguised It under the imprecise and innocent-sounding designation of a helical ribonicleoprotein acid in a lipoprotein membrane with a glikoprotein casing.
But in that ancient war there was nothing for It to fear, for it came into the world with yet a third casing which so far had no name. When that name was given, it would mean that It was
impenetrable and indestructible. For It was a mutant, the first of its breed.
It was alone, but It had no sense of loneliness. It had an inborn affinity for large numbers. In twenty-four hours there had been six thousand of its ancestors; in ninety-six human hours – two hundred thousand; in two weeks – twenty million. But in Its likeness in twenty-four human hours there would be forty million others. Its multiplication was ruled by a progression which lost itself in incalculable infinity.
And by then no one could know where It would be.
It would journey through its microcosm as man journey through the macrocosm. Its wanderings would take It through places with names which are mysterious for modern man as are the
Hindukush Mountains, the desert of Karakum, the primeval forests of Amazon; as mysterious for mankind of the future, if there were a guarantee of his continuing existence, as the mists of Andromeda, the constellation of Aldebaran, the star Proxima Centauri… Its cosmic entry ports would be the Nervus Sciaticus, the Ammon's Horn, the Cerebellum, the Hyppocampus, the Salivarna Glandula; its transgalactic route would be by way of the spinal cord, its final detination – the Brain.
Wherever It passed, worlds would be transformed by cataclysms more terrible than any earthquake that had ever struck the Planet since its very beginnings.
Wherever It passed It would transmit fear, hatred and frenzy to those with the misfortune not to go mad at once from its touch; to those lucky enough to go mad it would transmit some other consciousness whose very nature no one would ever be able to penetrate.
It would once again become what It was created to be, what arrogant man had for some short time disputed: the smallest, yet the most powerful, the most dangerous, the most pitiless living creation in the Universe, incomprehensible to the unity of worlds to which its Neuron belonged. Born to die only when It alone would be left, and when there would be no more death for It to live on.
This time man would not be able to stand against It. Only Aristaeus, the son of Apollo, could have done so, but there was no belief left in the old gods any more.
PHASE I – INCUBATION
'The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and has still to appear'.
Revelation of St. John the Divine, 17,8.
It was the first Sabbath of a hot, dry July in a certain year after the Creation of the World according to the Hebrew Calendar; a different year by the Hedzhiri, or Mohammedan
calculation, and yet another year for the Christians. For those with no belief in God it was some unknown year after Satan's Fall, and it was no year at all for those fortunate ones for whom time no longer existed.
The place was the Plain of Ezdraelon in biblical Samaria and preset-day Izrael. It stood in the shade of the Har-Carmel mountain and the river of Quishron wound past it. It was called Tell-el-Mutesellim; but in the tongue of local people it was Harmagedon, though everyone knew it by its ancient name of Maggido.
A full moon shone over the ruins of the once famous town; from it there no longer came the hubbub of the market place, the lazy march of the warriors of Izrael, nor even the neighing of Solomon's four hundred stallions. The only sound came from the clear night sky, from the jets of the El-Al flight from Lod Airport, Tel-Aviv, to Rome, whose red navigation lights mingled with the yellow spider's web of the Mediterranean stars.
Nothing moved; it was as if everything had been caught up in some magic spell. Nothing except one shadowy form.
It was gray and amorphous. It had no likeness to any known thing. The diffused, pre-dawn light could make no firm shape of it. It came up out of the ground and soundlessly, like some dark, primitively colored picture of night floating above mater, merged into the ruins of the south-western rampart of Solomon's fortress.
In the west, Lucifer, the morning star, glowed brightly, the falling star. It would disappear in the west, above the place which had its shape, the radial shape of a star.
The shadow slipped easily over the rocky ground which fell in steep, rough, stony sweeps
towards the plain. Behind it the earth took on the virgin hue of hoar frost. The leaves on the olive tree, sycamores and palms hung down stiffly in thin crystal membranes. The rock became
smooth and slippery as if raised up from the seabed. The landscape lost its brownish yellow warmth and was turned into the frozen waste of some unreal north. In the height of summer Maggido was gripped by an Artic blast.
At the feet of the mountain firm where once the marshes of Ezdraelon had given off their
poisonous vapors, but where now stood rows of ploughed furrows, as yet untouched by the cold, the shadow stopped.
If it had a body, it must have raised its head, since with that sudden movement its indistinct, phantom shape was turned into something which resembled a powerful animal.
It stayed for a moment on the spot from where, beneath the fading moon, could be made out the high wall of the 'Rose of Sharon' kibbutz, built after the last war with Syria. From the kibbutz, like some painful memory, reached out the sharp, aggressive smell of people.
And taking on the shape of a wolf, or of a dog with foam dripping from its jaws, the shadow set off towards it.
PHASE II – PRODROME
'Rabies is a killer!
One selfish act of animal smuggling could bring rabies permanently into this country. There is no cure for rabies.
The symptoms are very painful and distressing. The disease affects both animals and people.
Rabies is now widespread in Europe and is getting closer to our shores. Please help to keep rabies out of Britain!'
(Poster, Central Office of Information, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, London, 1976)
1.
The six electronic clocks of Heathrow Central Underground Station, on the Piccadilly line at London Airport, simultaneously indicated 07.15 hours as the train from Hatton Cross emerged with a hollow rumble from the eastern tunnel and stopped opposite the entrance to the western one where a dead-end section of the track, wrapped in darkness, led towards the end of the line. The automatic doors of the neon-lit carriages opened with a hiss and from them, as out of the glistening cocoon of some magical, mechanical birth-form, poured the passengers with the exuberance of prisoners unexpectedly set free.
Random patterns of nomadic humanity of different sexes, races, shapes and sizes, but all united by travel fever; bent beneath the weight of their luggage, they jostled each other frantically along the platform, colliding with others whose less agitated behavior showed that the temptations of summer or the excitement of departure had passed them by. Unhurriedly they stepped into the empty train waiting to take them back to London, whilst the newcomers pushed forwards impatiently towards the escalator and rapidly disappeared from the view of the angular clergyman, the only person to have remained seated on the torn seat of one of the smokers' compartments. The train opposite on the left hand platform closed its doors and disappeared into the tunnel in the direction of Hatton Cross. A few tardy passengers began to get into the train on the right. Only then did the clergyman stand up and step out onto the platform.
He stumbled and almost fell. His Pan-Am travel bag had got caught up round his legs. He swore loudly before managing to straighten up, regain control of himself and glance around him. He'd have to watch that damn tongue of his, he thought. Although for the rest the Church had kept in close ecumenical step with time, as far as language was concerned, She was still hesitant about accepting obscenities as the most efficacious medium of understanding between people. He was a man of about forty with quick, mobile features whose sharpness was tempered by his bronzed skin, light-brown hair and tall, thin body in the depths of his too-large suit. Over his shoulder hung the blue Pan-Am travel bag and in his hand he held a black, leather breviary with a gold cross engraved on the cover.
His train too closed its doors and disappeared towards Hatton Cross. He looked round about him. The station was empty. He walked past the escalator in order to examine the platform from the other side. There was no one standing along the left-hand track either. He wasn't surprised – he had counted on this very kind of favorable circumstance. Unless, of course, there was some hidden trap. An observation post which kept watch on the station unseen.
He didn't think they'd got round to that. One day televised surveillance would be installed here too. Magic spying like in the big stores and banks. But only after something serious had happened. Not before. Never in time. In Britain no one ever hurries. In Britain, in principle, as Heinrich Heine said, everything happens a hundred years late. A German, of course, that
explained the impatience of the remark. This time the lethargy of the Authorities, in the majority of cases intolerable, was working in his favor. He was satisfied. He was quite definitely alone. He knew that he wouldn't be alone for long, but he wanted to check once again for exactly how long that would be.
After 59 seconds the first group of passengers, Africans in tribal dress, came noisily down the escalator. They were quickly followed by others. And immediately afterwards a train from Hatton Cross drew in. The catacombs of the Underground were once more filled with the noises of that jungle which optimists have called civilization.
The clergyman with the Pan-Am bag made a mental note, in such a public place he couldn't risk writing it down in his breviary, right beneath the already recorded information that on weekdays the first train for London left from Heathrow Central at 05.07, and the first arrival was at 05.45, that the last departure was at 23.50 and the last arrival at 01.21, but that the frequency of trains between those times varied with the time of day: during the morning and evening rush hours, trains ran every four minutes, but during the day the interval could be between three and a half and six and a half, and in the evening, after the rush hour, it was even seven and a half minutes. Paying no attention to the bustle around him, he walked slowly round several concentric circles along the platform stretching out between the two parallel tracks. He checked the position of the escalator, built into their twin massive supporting pillars. Two more, cutting deep into east and west walls of the station, hid, behind thickly iodized glass, stores and offices whose function, as now, he had not been able to detect on earlier visits. On both sides of the oblong platform, the four-pronged furrows of the rails disappeared in the impenetrable darkness of the tunnel. But the station itself was uncomfortably well lit. Too well for what he had in mind. He wondered if it was equally extravagantly illuminated between 01.21 and 05.07 when the Underground was not working. And whether perhaps part of his task should not have been carried out the night before. Once again the platform emptied. The clergyman with the Pan-Am bag verified once again that in the morning Heathrow Central was empty for a variable number of seconds every four minutes. This time it was no more than forty. After a fortieth second he saw the graceful calves of an Air France hostess coming down the escalator.
The first time, Heathrow Central had been empty for fifty-nine seconds. Then for forty. The third time most probably it would be still tighter. The time was shrinking like shagreen leather. And it seemed not likely that for fourth time he checked, nothing at all would be left of it. More
particularly, that there would be no time at all when it was needed. Castor, of course, was experienced; he'd get round it somehow. After everything that he, Pollux, had made of him,
resourcefulness in unexpected situation was something that could be logically taken for granted. But in this business the skill lay not in being able to cope with unexpected eventualities, but to eliminating them by logical forward planning.
He should never have made his tours of the Airport by daylight only. He ought to have come at night as well. In any case, it was quieter here at night. Flights were cut to a minimum by the Noise Abatement Act, the legal consequence of the ban on overlying the Royal Castle at
Windsor. There were very few passengers and security measures were lax. And for anyone with that aim in mind it was easier to take note of things, one's thoughts were clearer, more logical. As if on a dark, photographic plate, details lost in the daytime chaos became more visible. He would have realized the unreliability of his calculations.
On the other hand, they had to make up the essential part of the conditions in which 'Operation Dioscuri' was to be carried out. Otherwise they would be of no use at all. It had been an inspired place of foresight to dress Castor and his companions in the everyday suit of a protestant
minister. Consisting officially of a dark suit with a white clerical collar, but in practice reduced to the 'dog-collar' below which one could wear a sack if one felt like it, it threatened no
unpleasant surprises. He admitted, of course, that the whole masquerade somewhat resembled a comic opera, but there was a certain consoling irony in disguising men of War and Chaos as men of Peace and Order.
Along the wall above the empty track was a placard several meters high. On the black
background, like the universe strewn with gilt, wasp-like stars shimmered a haze, also golden, filled with the elaborate coat of arms of Harrods. Beneath this commercial cosmic vista was written in huge letters:
WHERE THE FUTURE BEGINS!
Quite an ambitious advertisement, he thought. As if its inventor had the magic power to blow away the unknown, which, like a cloud of condensed possibilities kept hidden from people what lay in store for them tomorrow. The imaginative artist had erred only with the last word. Had he been truly clairvoyant the advertisement would have read:
WHERE THE FUTURE ENDS!
And there, on the other wall where it said:
WELCOME! YOU'RE IN LINE FOR YOUR HOTEL! should be: WELCOME! YOU'RE IN LINE FOR YOUR GRAVE!
The escalator hummed dully beneath his in its monotonous movement, like the mechanism of a time bomb. Constructive machinery still had a destructive sound to it. Castor would probably have said - like everything else made by a human hand. He liked to gild his bombs with the philosophy with which he formulated them. The circle was complete. In that Janus-like duality of human products there was a certain perversely perceptive mockery. Beneath the metal staircase which seemed unending, like evil, suffering, injustice, there was, of course, nothing. Not yet. But there was would be. Beneath the whole Airport. A damning memorial to man's treachery. A matricide which right from the Golden Age of the Greek gods had forgiven no one.
Mother nature, said Castor, created us for us to perfect her. Instead of that we are killing her. We shall have to pay for it. All right, he thought, but 'abused and offended' nature would have to wait a while. The Airport would suffer today, but only incidentally. They weren't challenging the shortcomings of civilization, only the shortcomings of the politics which made that civilization possible. There's no point in fighting a hole dug in the wrong place, you have to fight the idiots
who dug it. The hole gets filled in any case. He himself, in fact, was not so mad about nature. Privately he considered that a little less nature, especially in the shape of the vulgar, aggressive instincts of lower carnivores and higher bank employees, would in no way detract from
mankind's well being. But he needed Castor. Castor could perform tasks of which the castrated brain of any ordinary citizen would not have been capable.
With a short, soft jolt the escalator deposited him on the station's upper level. He found himself in a marble foyer from which pedestrian subways led to various Terminal Buildings. He had read somewhere that the Central Terminal Area covered 158 acres, and the whole Heathrow Airport with its auxiliary buildings, hangars, workshops, depots and runways, 2819 acres, ringed by a perimeter road 9.3 miles long. The mammoth proportions of this aeronautical domain suited his plans to the highest degree. At one time he had thought of choosing a transatlantic liner for his operation. But however big, a ship would not have allowed the freedom of action which Castor would have at the Airport complex. True, on some tourist cruise ships there were areas more easily accessible than the Airport, which was certainly more strictly guarded but on the other hand, the surveillance of a relatively small boat was comparatively easier.
The fact that at Heathrow Airport during the summer season and at the period of the densest air traffic, there sometimes came together at one time more than 200 000 passengers and people accompanying them daily, together with more than 60 000 airport staff, made any kind of surveillance at best unsatisfactory.
Finally, an official state delegation was flying out today. Everywhere, everyone was in a hurry. Even trains, which in their day had replaced the earlier diplomatic mules, had become too slow for the general rush towards a rapid lack of mutual understanding. So, that morning at Heathrow Airport a top-level Soviet State Delegation would be accompanied on their departure from London by important representatives of H. M. Government. There would have been no logical or revolutionary purpose in laying in wait for the Russians with bombs beneath the deck of some ocean liner bound for Murmansk.
He gave up his ticket at the ramp and with a light step set off to walk across the foyer. He was humiliatingly aware that he was imitating Castor's professional calm, but he consoled himself with the thought that he was only taking back what he himself had once given. Castor was his product. He had both conceived and created him just as he was. But he sensed a certain creative reciprocity linking them together, that of an author and his hero. Instead, Castor had now begun to shape him, Pollux. Creator and the created had come together in an unusual mixture in which it was barely clear which was which.
With a camera's precision his apparently uninterested eyes took in for the 9th time the
architectural details of the station hall, the features of its internal layout, communications and he distances between them, each and every slightest, most insignificant detail of the confused life going on around him. If he had been followed, he would have been seen to stop a little longer in front of the escalator leading to the underground bus station, but it would have been impossible to guess why. He would have been lost to view amongst the bustling crowd of passengers and appeared again opposite the battery of wall telephones under their glass domes, for all the world like oversized space helmets.
Waiting for the hands of his wrist watch to come together at Zero hour, the time fixed for the beginning of 'Operation Dioscuri', he sat down in a low armchair and began to read extracts from his diary in the notebook inside the cover of the breviary:
'…Castor was against the code name 'Dioscuri' for the operation at Heathrow, just as he had been against his underground name of Castor. It reminded him of castor oil which he had been made to drink as a child. (It must have been a bourgeois childhood since the poor were effectively protected against similar digestive problems by hunger). Pollux, the name I took for myself, seemed to him like a firm producing light bulbs. A bit like Osram. He gave in finally. They were just two dead names which we shall inspire with a new meaning. 'Dioscuri' was
something different: it joined Castor and Pollux in an event which already had a definite sense. It was as if he were afraid lest by usurping the names we might not be heir to the fate of their original bearers in some mystical way, even though he didn't know anything about them, (nor about a lot of other things, incidentally).
He wanted to know: 'who exactly were they, those two guys?' He had no comment to make when he heard that Castor and Pollux were the sons of Zeus. I hadn't expected any. Revolutionaries are convinced that they have a direct relationship with the highest necessities which govern history. That they themselves are, as a natural incarnation of the cosmic laws of progress, in some way gods. Self-deification is a necessary pre-condition for the secret functioning of any revolutionary machinery. Without it, it would be quite impossible to undertake those exalted missions which in the language of ordinary mortals are called 'outrages'. I told him, too, that the Dioscuri are considered as the protectors of travelers, which, bearing in mind what we are preparing for the Russians at Heathrow, seemed to him to be 'a bloody good joke'. He was particularly happy to know that in reward for their virtues the brothers were given immortality and the privilege of shining in the heavens as stars. I don't know if his optimism would have survived the discovery that Castor, before his astronomical transfer, was obliged to die a somewhat uncomfortable death. In the meantime, the other members of the group were also given names. I chose them because of their mythological associations with the Dioscuri. The two men became Paris and Menelaus, and the three girls Helen, Leda and Clytaemnestra, shortened to Mnestra…'
'… The Anglo-Russian talks have been going on for three weeks and if most of the London papers weren't in the middle of one of their endemic strikes, Fleet Street would have designated them quite unambiguously as
'exceptionally fruitful' – 'certainly the most successful since Munich' would have added the few eccentrics, isolated in the swamp of trite pacifism into which British public opinion has sunk. For this special occasion, the BBC has abandoned its natural diplomatic double-talk, and, gallantly espousing Soviet pancosmic rhetoric, has called the talks 'historic'. For Castor they are 'the shameful coupling of exploitory capitalism and exploitory pseudo-socialism, just one more imperialistic grand plot calculating on deceiving the broad masses of the people'. The imperialists, however, are mistaken. It's they who will be deceived. An attack on the Soviet delegation will destroy the agreement even before a single paragraph can be violated in some other, more elegant fashion. Icy blasts will once again blow through international relations. Chaos will follow. And out of Chaos are born the stars…'
Beneath the extract he could see the plans he had sketched out on an earlier visit to the Airport. The first was a rough layout of the Central Terminal Area; the second represented the lower level of the Underground at Heathrow Central. There was no need to sketch the upper level. At the Information Desk he had picked up a brochure entitled 'Heathrow Airport Station and Pedestrian Subways with a pull-out plan of the Underground', published by the BAA, with the black
silhouette of doves in flight across the yellow air of its paper cover. From this simple plan it was clear that the Station was built beneath the aerodrome's approach road network between
Terminal 2, the Queen's Building and the Control Tower, and that mechanical walkways connected the tree separate corridors to the tree Passenger Terminals.
He read:
'… It is now 6.00 hours. In fifteen minutes I shall set off. I can feel nothing. Certainly none of the emotions usually attributed to terrorists. No excitement. No fear. But no joy either. Perhaps only relief. I feel like a writer on the last chapter of a book where the subject has at last worked out. If I've made a mistake somewhere, I can no longer put it right. Castor and the other Dioscuri are already on their way to Heathrow and there's no turning back. My
imagination. I should have known that for somebody not used to it, it would make you incongruous in your own eyes. And self-ridicule is destructive. It undermines your determination. That in turn leads to a falling off of concentration and thence to failure. Since I am not taking part in the immediate action, the mistake is not fatal. I take note of it only to avoid repetition in the future.
At 07.15 I shall be in the Entrance Hall of Heathrow Central Station, at 07.45 in Terminal 2 where Helen will be waiting for me in the nun's habit with tickets for SAS Flight SK 514 to Oslo. The Russians are expected at about 09.00. The VIP Lounge is being redecorated so that the official leave-taking will take place in the Terminal Lounge of Terminal 2. Castor and his companions will already be in position. The operation will begin at 09.50. It will last 10 minutes. At 10.00 it will all be over. At 10.00 also, Helen and I will be airborne en route for Scandinavia. This phase of 'Dioscuri' has no code name. No one knows about it. Not even Helen. She thinks that it's our escape route and that Castor and his followers have theirs. There is no way out for them, Helen. Surely the myth is clear enough? In order to become immortal, Castor must die in battle. To become a star in heaven, one must first bite deeply into the earth. Am I at all sorry about Castor? Subjectively – a little. (But since for us 'subjectively' has no sort of meaning, only 'objectively' means anything at all, I have no pity for him, none).
There'll always be plenty of Castors to be found. Castors are expendable. It's Pollux's we're short of. Have you noticed, I'm already speaking of him in the past tense? So we'll let that go, he'll put it right when he dies, it'll be his epitaph. For he is going to die, Helen. He owes it to himself and to his code name. He won't risk losing his place in the heavens through a cowardly betrayal. As for me, I shan't go to heaven. I'll stay here on earth as long as I can. In a year or two I'll send some other Castor up the stairs. That one too will shine down on us with his eternal light. I shan't be jealous. I shan't be jealous of anybody. Somebody has to stay down here and clear up the mess…' He closed his breviary. It might attract the attention of a member of the Airport Security, or of a passenger with a hysterical imagination. But despite the danger, he had not given up his diary. It helped him to understand his aims better. He looked at his watch – it was 07.35 – and lit a cigarette. At one time he had smoked expensive, aromatic St. Moritz. But since he had been with this present Castor, for he wasn't the first, nor would he be the last, he had been smoking
'Caporal' out of solidarity. He hadn't gone as far as rolling his own. There were, after all, limits to solidarity, However much a man loves his dog, he doesn't chew the same bone out of solidarity with him.
His nicotine-stained fingers were trembling as if charged with miniature electric shocks. His nerves had always played him up. They were evidently not strong enough for the imagination they had to sustain. Fortunately, they only bothered him when he was collecting information, putting together his plan. When he had defined the 'plot' and chosen the means of carrying it out, his anxiety disappeared. The morbid hesitation gave way to cold, clean-headed determination. Apparently it was like that with any talent, any skill.
In the initial phase of 'Operation Dioscuri', the interconnecting links between the Terminals would be an undoubted help to Castor. Afterwards, all the passages would be blocked. For ease of control the police would probably cordon off the Central Terminal Area into separate sections. To get through from one to another a special pass would be needed. But in the good old British way, preventive measures would only be taken after it was all over. While it was all happening panic would make any sensible organization impossible. Radio controlled explosives in the Entrance Hall of Terminal 2 would drive passengers out onto the plateau above ground or down into the Underground, where other bombs would await them. In the ensuing chaos in which no one would be able to establish any order, Castor would get through to the Russians. The rest would be part of a myth.
The yellow BAA brochure with its flight of doves on the cover had helpfully informed him that the walking distances along the three corridors were all different. A passenger leaving from
Terminal 1 had to walk 205 yards along the subway from the upper level of the Underground; on arrival, however, he had only 188 yards to cover. For Terminal 2 on arrival and departure there were 167 yards; to the Departure Lounge of terminal 3 the passenger had to walk 252 yards, but back from the Arrival Hall the route was 410 yards long. Fortunately the figures could not be verified. If there was some room for criticism of the veracity of the Authorities in more serious matters, their statistical accuracy concerning such trivialities was beyond reproach.
But he had been obliged to work out the time to walk the distances for himself. In any case, the time in the brochure was the time of flights, of business trips, of tourist excursions and of honeymoons, the time of life. His and Castor's time was the time of dying. So he had needed to calculate how long it would take someone running. By then a frantic run would be the normal pace of movement at Heathrow Airport. The quiet walk, at the worst, civilized, carefully circumspect haste which had been normal up to just a little earlier, with the first second of 'Dioscuri' would become an unnatural risk which few would be prepared to have. Indeed, if everything went off as he had planned, quite a lot of things would not be exactly as they were shown in the picture which the Information Bulletin of the Public Relations Office of the BAA painted of everyday life at the 'world's greatest aerial crossroads'.
It's good, he thought, that the redecoration of the VIP Lounge has made it necessary for the Authorities to transfer the official leave-taking ceremony for the Russians to the Transit Lounge of Terminal 2. The time needed to get from the Terminal 2 Lobby to the Underground or to the plateau in front of the Terminal building was the shortest possible. There was the least likelihood of the police realizing what was going on before Castor had finished with the Russians. Most of all, Terminal 2 was international. A majority of foreigners always counted in learning English, if they needed to at all, once in London. The language problems would make it still more difficult to re-impose any kind of order, which would not have been the case if the Russians had been leaving from the Terminal for domestic flights.
He walked across the marble entrance of the Station from where, like some aerodynamic intestine, the passage to Terminal 2 led off. Before stepping onto the moving walkway, his eyes fell on the milky white glass with the illuminated advertisement for BA:
WE'LL TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOU!
It's quite true, he thought. Only it would be he who would take that care, at least for today, instead of BA. He stood on the walkway while the constantly changing silhouettes of a ceramic dove in flight slid noiselessly past his face. When he had stepped onto the walkway the dove had been 'taking off': it had 'flown' with wings spread wide while he moved along, to 'land' when he got off at the other end. Whenever he came to Terminal 2 he always looked at the bird's flight with indignation: whatever it meant in its free state, here, imprisoned in stone, it represented only dead and vanquished nature. But this time it didn't happen. He saw the dove 'take off' but then the bird suddenly disappeared in an evil phantasm which filled the tunnel with the images of a ghostly cataclysm. First he heard a hollow echo of the Airport's welcome, re-arranged in the ominous order of his own world game:
WELCOME! WELCOME WHERE THE FUTURE ENDS! YOU'RE IN LINE FOR YOUE GRAVE!
I'LL TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOU!
Then the same echo was lost in an eruption of phantom silhouettes which in a massive rush peopled the corridor with a mute stampede.
In the distance where the sharp line of the subway was broken by the bend leading to the
escalator, there was a dull rumbling and the flickering red glow of fire. Everything was wreathed in a sulphorous mist, in same dreamlike water in which movements were slow and soundless. In a sleep-walker's nightmare from which there was no escape, the shadows rushed towards him, yet remained rooted to the spot, struggling against the moving pathway which carried them implacably back towards the Terminal and death. He couldn't make out their faces; they still looked human but with something animal in the immeasurable, primordial fear in their expressions.
His vision had made him draw back, almost knocking over the passenger behind him. He swore loudly, as he moved aside, dropping his breviary as he caught the handrail.
The moving band crawled monotonously on towards the exit.
"Um Gottes Willen, was tuhen Sie – for God's sake, what are you doing?" The man with whom he had collided was in his early thirties. He had the smothered-down blond hair of a model, his clean-shaven, rather horse-like face was lightly tanned and his eyes were a watery blue beneath glasses in fine gilt frame. He had a square, black, overnight case in his hand. He was just about to continue his outburst but a glance at the clerical collar stopped him short. In a heavy German accent he asked:
"Are you all right?"
"Yes, of course" he mumbled impatiently, bending down to pick up the breviary which was lying accusingly beside his feet. The fair-haired stranger was quicker. He picked up the breviary and without closing it handed it to him. He had ugly finger nails bitten down.
"Thank you" said Pollux without further comment and stuffed the book into the outside pocket of the Pan-Am bag. He wondered if the bastard had seen its contents, and if so, what he would conclude from them. He looked like a commercial traveler whose livelihood depended upon his appearance. He probably even cleaned the underside of his shoes, but he wouldn't get far unless he stopped disfiguring his nails like that. He looked with revulsion towards the exit which was slowly coming closer. Ordinary-looking passengers were gliding towards him now. Between the moving bands several Indians in turbans were pushing trolleys loaded with luggage. Everything was back in place – routinely and recognizable.
It was 07.15 hours when the automatic double glass doors of Terminal 2 opened wide in front of him. At exactly the same moment, Enrico Marcone, the captain of Alitalia Boeing 747 AZ 320 on the route Rome – London – New York requested permission to make a high-priority landing 15 minutes before his scheduled arrival time because one of his passengers had suddenly taken ill. But of course Pollux had no inkling of this. The information belonged to the secret life of large international airports of which only a little becomes known occasionally from the
newspapers while the dead are being counted and the cause of yet another airplane crash is being sought from the black box with its preserved voices of the dead crew. And even if he had known of it, it would not have concerned him. He, Pollux, alias Daniel Leverquin, alias Patrick Cornell, had more important things on his mind today. He had to keep an appointment with a myth. He stopped as if he had little faith in the automatic doors; then disappeared in the bustle and
throng before the BA's counter on the ground floor of Terminal 2.
Where, according to the Airport advertisements, for everyone the future was just beginning, but where, according to his scenario, for many it would in fact end.
2.
He too knew nothing of the before-schedule arrival of the plane on the Rome – London – New York flight. The man disguised as a clergyman with the false breviary at least knew why he was at the Airport, whatever judgments might be made about his reasons for being there. But the down-at-heel figure of indeterminate years with thinning gray hair, an unshaven, grayish face and a similarly gray, jumble-sale, tweed suit, who was leaning on the rail of the Roof Gardens above the Queen's Building, from where, for the price of 35 p. the aircraft taking off and landing could be observed, didn't even know that. Although he himself found it strange, he simply had no idea why he was there or what it was he was looking for at Heathrow.
From a bird's eye view, the Central Terminal Area, bounded by its multiple bands of radial take-off and landing runways, was both impressive and frightening. Its dirty gray surface, criss-crossed by the arrow-like reinforced concrete tracks formed, at its outward perimeter where it merged with the metal caterpillars of hangars, warehouses and workshops, a hexagonal crystal, diamond-shaped, like a star of David with its sixth, northernmost point broken off. Along the edges and axes of the aerodrome, as along the boulevards of some enchanted mega polis, there were shining steel insects that stood or crawled forwards, groaning, and then either fell silent or rose howling into the sky towards the sun and towards other hymenoptera which were buzzing down towards the ground from all sides.
From on high it looked like a giant mechanical wasp's nest whose organization, like that of a beehive, the uninitiated observer had no means of understanding, even though he knew it must exist. In response to its unseen commands and in predetermined patterns there moved through that noisy chaos the tiny ants of the service vehicles, and yet others, still smaller, inside the armor of those working overalls it was possible to discern men only by using binoculars. The man with gray hair didn't have them. But he had no need of them to make out the objects which had attracted his attention. Of all the aircraft taking off and landing, he had eyes only for the giant outline of the Concorde. Scheduled to take off for Washington at 08.15, it was in the process of being loaded with luggage, brought along from Terminal 3 and lifted into the cargo hold by a mobile crane.
To some people it looked like a great bird with a predatory beak. To some it looked like a silver shark. Its silhouette didn't remind him particularly of a fish, or a bird, but it did leave him with the unpleasant sensation of having seen it somewhere, or in some way, before, where or how he didn't know. Something in those nightmares of his, a dream image without a definite shape, whose amorphous and changing shadow gave promise of a future body only in a few vague
features – it was that mysterious, menacing, dangerous something which reminded him of the Concorde.
But what could it be, what for Christ's sake was it?
Last night as usual, he had gone to bed without the slightest idea of how he was going to spend the day. His life had no need for any plans. The everyday, routine things were waiting for him in the morning. He simply had to observe them. For most of the time he didn't find it difficult, even though he could frequently see no sense in them, as in much of the behavior of the people around him. But whenever he had his own ideas about how to spend time, they conflicted with the fixed order by which one lived in the Home. When he carried them out it got him into difficulties. And that brought him back to the agonizing question of whether there was really something wrong with him, as they told him from time to time.
Fortunately, he couldn't remember the last time that had happen, or even whether it had really happened at all. There was something not right with his memory. He could remember things, which people said he couldn't possibly have experienced, and he completely forgot others which again they told him had really happened to him. His memory was really lousy. He had to admit that much. All the rest was hidden in darkness about which, evidently others knew more than he did.
Lying in bed the night before while all around him the light bulbs were going out like distant stars growing cold, he didn't know what he was going to do today. Least of all that he would be watching the Concorde take off at the Airport. The disturbing need to go somewhere, to do something, it wasn't clear where or what, had come to him months ago, but in the last few days he had suffered from severe headaches and the need had become an unconquerable longing which drove him to satisfy this wandering instinct as soon as possible. From that first very vague vision, when one stormy April night he had woken covered in cold sweat with a hesitant memory of his dream, he had had the knowledge that he was summoned on a journey whose meaning he would find out only later.
Last night had been just like that night in April. The south-westerly gale had lifted off roofs along the Thames valley, overturned cars on the motorway to Cornwall and uprooted trees in London parks. He had been wakened by the thunder. The extinguished sky in the frames of Victorian windows, like repeated copies of the Ascension, was flooded with a bright, purple glow. The reflections of the ghostly lightning flashes crushed against the empty walls of his room. The air was full of electricity, the skin prickled, the hair crackled. He sat up in bed with his knees beneath his chin and his palms on his cheeks which were dripping with clammy moisture. Suddenly he knew where he had to go. Not yet why, but he was certain he would find out as soon as he got to the right place. Otherwise, the knowledge of where he had to go would make no sense.
Single details scattered through all his earlier dreams came back to him.
Once again he was passing through a dark tunnel whose walls, rising in an arch, had the
sharpness and cold of artic crystals. He was wading through a swamp, shallow at first, but later deeper, of a yellowish, oily color in which floated human faeces covered with a film of white hoar frost. It was getting colder. The source of the cold seemed to be at the bottom of the
labyrinth, where a dark mass had formed, like a shadow which had lost all shape, but which was recovering it again with every step he took. The shadow was waiting in an icy whirlwind to be given back its body. In every one of his dreams he was standing in the same spot, at the bottom of a mysterious lagoon, but never managing to guess at the shape or the name.
Even in the dream which had been shattered by last night's storm, it had been waiting for him. But now he knew where he could find it. The crossed outline of illuminated pathways in the form of a six-sided, pointed precious stone with the sixth point broken – the X-ray photograph of his nighttime wanderings which in the daytime gave him no peace – did not represent, as he had thought, some seascape or a picture of the star of David, but the ground plan of Heathrow, which, like a heraldic coat of arms, was to be found on the cover of the book 'Air Traffic Control, a man-machine system'.
It was a text book which was used in the technological studies of the Open University's Second Level course, and it had attracted his attention quite by chance. It had been lying open in front of young Charlie Rees, who was mad about aero planes. There was no possibility, of course, that Charlie would ever be a pilot, or even travel in one, not to mention to rule over the network of flights above some aerodrome from the Control Tower, but that fact, clear to everyone except him, in no way weakened his desire to find out everything he could about aeronautics from books. Nor did it stop him, quite impervious to his surroundings where everyone else was equally passionately absorbed with his own world, from imagining himself seated at the controls of a Jumbo-Jet on a fatal collision-course, or before a crowded Air Traffic Control radar screen, setting in order, in the impersonal voice of an experienced controller, the aerial chaos above the Airport.
Charlie's preoccupation with some such aeronautical crisis had given him the chance to look at the book rather more closely. While the conscientious Charlie, sweating profusely, had been peering into his invisible screen, filled with the bright dots of aircraft positions, and sending out laconic instructions on their behalf, he had examined the picture on the cover of the book.
There was no doubt about it. In the ground plan of Heathrow, a hexagonal diamond, pointed, in a shape of a broken Star of David, was the mysterious route he had taken so many times in his dreams, to end up in each one in a windswept tunnel where, frozen in ice, a shapeless, faceless, nameless shadow awaited him.
He lived in South Ealing. Heathrow belonged to the Borough of Hillingdon. He knew more or less where it must be from the aero planes which flew over his head during the day. And so, a little before the mist-soaked dawn, with the storm rolling away towards the north-east, he found himself, wet and cold, at the entrance to the brightly-lit approach tunnel above which in clumsy neon letters was written:
WELCOME TO HEATHROW AIRPORT!
Immediately, he heard the sound of the first aircraft gathering speed on the unseen runway. He had reached his target, the enigmatic territory of his dream. Somewhere in the Terminals, only just rousing from the lethargy of the night, or in the open space between them, was the answer for which he had come. Before climbing up to the Roof Garden, he wandered between the Airport buildings which were like beehives whose gleaming, glazed honeycombs were darkened by the swift shadows of the passengers.
Found no answer. He still didn't know why he had been brought there.
He felt hungry. He hadn't eaten much the night before. His nerves had sensed the arrival of the storm. He had some small change in his pocket and could buy something to eat. Perhaps he had even a few pounds. He didn't usually worry about money. He never knew how much he had. Or even if he had any at all. Many of the cares which were important for the majority hardly bothered him. There were many things he simply didn't understand. You couldn't, for example, do the most natural thing in the world, to say you were hungry. Actually, you could say it, but no one would feed you. No one considered themselves responsible for you being hungry. You had to buy your food or go hungry. Of course, he didn't pay for his food. He was given it. But always at a certain time. He wasn't allowed to be hungry at any other time. Or rather, he could be, but he wasn't given any food.
On the reinforced concrete runway the Concorde was still insatiably swallowing its load. There was hardly anyone on the Roof Garden. People were only just arriving. Most of them had probably come to see the Concorde take off. He would watch it too. He had nothing else to do, apart from waiting for something to show him why he had come to the Airport, why he had obeyed a dream with no apparent meaning. For what meaning would there be to an icy tunnel with frozen human excrement and a shadow in its depth, a shadow which, like primeval cosmic chaos, searched in torment for its true form?
Something in all that didn't fit somehow. Something was wrong. Either it was wrong or he was in no condition to discover the link between the shadow and the Airport, if it really existed, if the broken Star of David, along the axis along which he moved in his dreams was really a bird's eye view of Heathrow and not something quite different.
The gray-haired man in the grey suit looked so exhausted that it seemed that he might collapse at any moment. Sue Jenkins looked at him out of the cornet of her eye, her hands clenched tight on the railing and her heels pushing against the concrete as if she were exercising on the bars in her school gym. He looked like one of those lonely people in the park. They were never taking children or dogs for a walk. They never talked. Not even to each other or to others walking there. They behaved as if they had all the time in the world but didn't know what to do with it. They sat without moving on distant benches, quite alone, without company, without newspapers, without any sense of the time of day. The park-keepers had to shepherd them out before they closed the park gates. And when they went, meekly and quietly, each one wrapped up in himself, like a procession of ghosts, it didn't look as if they had any idea of where they were going. Her mother had told her not to go near them. But her mother wasn't here now. She'd gone off to find out how much longer they had to wait for their delayed flight for Nice. Sue Jenkins was left on the Roof Gardens of the Queen's Building, to observe the Concord's take off and 'all the rest which was happening on an international airport.'
Of course Mrs. Jenkins wouldn't know for certain that her daughter would be asked to write about aerial transport in Britain at school, but she did know for certain that in this sordid world one had to be prepared for all kinds of stupidities. Even for her husband to have abandoned her after ten years of model, if not exciting marriage, leaving nothing behind save his Asiatic
features on their wedding photograph, a few pairs of dirty underpants, two or three 'not very nice' intimate souvenirs, and not a penny to their joint account. And that after everything she had done for that yellow swine from Singapoor to be given British citizenship and a chance to become a
real man. She didn't want something like that to happen to her daughter. Sue would have her own, separate bank account, which would be guaranteed by a good education and by the capacity to know all important things about the Concorde at any time. In her quest for a husband, Sue wouldn't have to change some ape's passport for him.
Unfortunately, at ten years old, Sue already had that independence of spirit which is supposed to lie at the roots of any successful civilization before it ceases to be successful and disappears. If she had been told to watch people, she would probably have watched aero planes. But since it was aero planes, she naturally turned her attention to the people around her. And of those, particularly to the elderly man with gray hair and eyes filled with emptiness.
He felt that he has being watched. At first he thought that his untidy appearance had attracted some policeman's suspicious gaze. He didn't think he was known here. Back in Ealing, in the House, they'd probably only just noticed his absence. He glanced round. No one was taking any special notice of him. Everyone's eyes were fixed on the Concorde which was now moving slowly towards take off. Then his eyes looked down and he saw the little girl's smiling face. She was standing beside him and watching him with curious blue eyes. She had high, oriental cheekbones and her skirt was the color of light amber. He felt an urge to stroke her black hair, caught up behind in a poly tale. But he stopped himself in time. Perhaps that would frighten her. He certainly didn't want to scare her away. He felt quite alone at the Airport, where apart from him, everyone was with someone, or knew someone. He almost regretted having given way to his instinct. He ought to have been more patient. He should have waited for his dream to have become clearer. Then he wouldn't have been so helpless. He would have known exactly why he was here, if he would be here at all. If in its clearer form his dream hadn't led him off somewhere else.
'Hallo!' said the little girl. 'I'm Sue.'
'Good morrow, Sue!' he answered with the old-fashioned greeting, smiling.
He liked children and knew how to get on with them. Only he rarely had the opportunity. People were funny. It was as if they didn't want anyone but themselves to like their children. It was something he couldn't understand. Like a great many other things besides.
'Sue, that's from Susan, isn't it?' 'Yes.'
'Susan's a holy name, from the Bible.' 'I hate it,' said the little girl, and frowned. 'Really, why is that?'
'There's at last four Susan in my class.'
'But thou'rt the only they call Sue?' he said, using the old-fashioned biblical 'thou'. 'That'd be all right. But there are two more. We never know which is which.' 'Yes, that's very awkward.' He admitted.
'It's beastly horrible.'
He smiled. On her lips the words didn't sound ugly. Just a precise description of a fact for which there was no remedy.
'I'm Susan Lee really. But so is Susan Lee Alvin. Her name comes before mine in the register, so I had to be Sue, and she's Sue Lee.
'Well, dost know Sue' he said reflectively, 'that's not so hard to put right.' She looked at him doubtingly.
'How can you put something like that right?' 'Simply change the name.'
'Names can't be changed,' she answered crossly. After all the grey-haired man wasn't any different from all the others. He just looked different. And it was funny, he talked so strangely. 'And why not?'
'What do you mean, why not?' 'Why shouldn't they be changed?'
'I don't know why,' she said. 'I only know they can't.'
'But if they could'st, what would'st thou be called?' – Once again the biblical thou. 'Ariadne, I think.'
'Ariadne? Why Ariadne?'
'It's from a story. It's about a man who had to go into a labyrinth and kill a bull which ate people. But the labyrinth was so long and mixed up that no one had ever found their way out of it before. So Ariadne gave him a ball of thread and he unwound it while he went to look for the bull. When he had found it and killed it and saved the town, he found his way back to the entrance by
winding up the thread and following it.'
'All right then,' he said, seriously. 'I'll call thee Ariadne.' 'But I'm Susan, Susan Lee!' laughed the little girl.
He leaned over, took her hand and said confidently: 'For those who don't know thy real name. But I know it and for me thou shall be Ariadne. If thou would'st like, of course.'
'Yes, I do' she answered. She was beginning to like the game, it was like a fairy-tale. The man with the grey hair really was different from the others. 'But what shall I call you?'
'Wait now, let's see,' he said perplexedly. 'What name dost thou like?'
'Theseus. He was the one who killed the bull and found his way out of the labyrinth with Ariadne' thread.'
'That's' – he hesitated an instant, 'that's really very strange.' 'What's strange?'
'That's my real name.'
'But Theseus is a Greek name. You don't look like a Greek.' 'What do Greeks look like?'
'I don't know.' She was puzzled. 'But different.'
'That's right,' said the man with the gray hair almost apologetically, 'it happened. But it's a long story.'
'Tell it to me!'
He looked at her doubtfully.
'Please. I could be called to board the plane at any minute.'
The man with the gray hair seemed worried: "I thought thou wast here to watch the flying machines?'
'What made you think that? I'm not mad about planes. I'm going on one, that's all.' She was jumping up and down on one leg, looking at him seriously. The wind lifted her kilt round her
smooth, thin thighs. She thought it was funny the careful way he watched her every movement. 'Where art thou journeying?' He almost had to shout. From the runway came an ever deepening roar.
'To the seaside.' She shouted. 'But the flight to Nice has been delayed.' 'Thou art not going on thine own?'
She shook her head: 'With Mummy.' 'Where is she?'
'She went to find out how much longer we've got to wait.'
The roaring turned into a howl. A Swissair Boeing 707 taking off, shattered the air through which the sun was just beginning to break.
'It looks like a great white whale, like Moby Dick,' said Sue.
From the opposite side, the Concorde was dignifiedly taxing along the perimeter track towards the runway.
'And that one looks like an arctic wolf.'
The thundering roar gradually decreased. The Swissair Boeing became rapidly smaller and smaller in the shining air which blurred its outline. Peace returned to the Roof Garden, disturbed only by the rumble of the Concorde as it moved towards take off.
The man with the gray hair looked towards the entrance to the Roof Garden from where Sue's mother would come. It was always like that. Whenever he got close to a child, someone always turned up to separate them. They would take Sue away from him too. He would be left with his worries and his headache, which was becoming unbearable. He would never see Sue again. And soon he wouldn't even remember her. Sue-Ariadne would be lost in the forest of memories like so many other details of his life and who knows when she would emerge again as a person he was sure he had seen somewhere before, although he could never quite place where.
'Listen,' he said quickly, 'I am hungry, and thou?
'Not particularly!' said the little girl, and then: 'But I can always eat some chocolate.' She didn't know why she said that. Probably because she had been told it was something one never said. Especially to someone you didn't know.
'Shall we buy some?'
She hesitated. 'But what if Mammy comes back?' He stretched out his hand. 'We'll be back by then.'
He led the child onto the flat surface from where a stairway went down to the road in front of Terminal 2. He supposed her mother would go up to the roof by the internal staircase and that in this way they would miss each other. Meetings always led to misunderstandings. People were morbidly distrustful. It was as if they were continuously at a state of war with each other, as if no one expected any good from anyone else. People were really very strange. As if they were from different worlds.
Even those who showed kindness to him, even they didn't approve of his way of thinking. It's just not done, they said. But when he asked why, why it wasn't done, they were quite unable to give him an answer. Why were they like that? The headache which had tormented him ever since his dreams had begun, was once again clouding his eyes and driving thin, sharp wedges into the back of his head.
'You're squeezing my hand,' said Sue.
He released the pressure on his clenched fingers, although he had not been aware of squeezing tightly. Nor was he aware that someone was running after him. Not that the women in the wide-brimmed summer hat was shrieking hysterically. The howl of the Concorde deafened all the other sounds of the Airport. The aircraft was sucking all that was left of the world into its
engines and suffocating it there. It was even suffocating the crunching of the wedges in his brain. Something tugged at his shoulder. He only caught sight of the woman when he turned round. Her mouth was opening and closing but only the howl of the engines was coming out. Suddenly she raised her handbag. The silver chain flashed in the sunlight. He felt a piercing pain at his
forehead, stumbled and let go of the girl's hand.
The noise was too loud to permit any explanation. He backed away awkwardly and then a column of schoolgirls carrying a placard with 'EF LANGUAGE SCHOOL – HASTINGS' came between him and the woman. He ran down the stairway whose massive pillars linked the roof of the Queen's Building with the Airport's roadways by an aerial bridge, then stopped in the shadow of a pier. He must go, he thought. They would soon be coming down to look for him. Obviously he was being blamed for something. He didn't know what but he was sure both that it would only bring him harm if they found him, and that it had all happened to him before, only he didn't know where or when.
He stopped indecisively in front of the doors of the Medical Centre on the ground floor of the Queen's Building. He could make out neither the roof area from which he had escaped, not the policeman talking to Sue and her mother and the witnesses of what had happened. Evidently they couldn't agree about the direction that the man with the gray hair had taken. They were pointing in conflicting ways. The policeman, notebook in hand, bewilderedly tried to follow the
argument.
The sky shook. He lifted his hand. The Concorde was rising skywards above Heathrow. Sue had been right.
The aircraft was an artic wolf with a stream of foam trailing from its pointed snout.
3.
For people who value Order, even if they are not policemen, the world is a logical creation, according to some plan, as a result of which the same causes always give rise to the same effects. Crime leads to Investigation, which in turn leads to Punishment. That this happens most often, but by no means always, in certain well-defined patterns, and only sometimes, but not often, in others, in no way destroys the logical beauty of the plan. The plan is O. K. It's just that certain events don't keep to it. Most of what happens, in fact, does not at all resemble something well thought out, or simply doesn't follow the accepted rules of logic. Many things could quite easily
be considered to be the results of some magic lottery, governed by some Mad Hatter-like Chance.
The passengers and crew of Alitalia's Boeing 747 Flight AZ320 Rome – London – New York had no need at all of any 'high priority' landing. It was quite enough for them to be flying in their hermetically sealed, coffin-like box at 30,000 feet above mother earth, which God had created to be crawled upon rather than flown over. It certainly wasn't needed either by the Heathrow's personnel, right after the gale-force winds which had turned the Airport into air traffic chaos. And least of all was it needed by P. R. Larcombe, the diplomatic correspondent of the
Washington Post who had come to Heathrow officially to cover the Russians' departure, but also for an article on Pan Am, which was to show that air travel was less dangerous than walking along the street.
But they all heard about the flight from Rome's difficulties and some of them were soon going to experience them. The only one whose future depended upon his knowledge of the facts
concerning this particular flight – for the others it boded only stomach ulcers - was the fair-haired passenger in the white raincoat, and just he knew nothing at all of them; so much for that logic which guides events.
The aircraft was scheduled to land at 08.45 hours. But the man in the white raincoat, Hans Magnus Landau, Chief Accountant of the Deutsche Bank of Cologne, had no intention, for once, of relying on his instinct to obey orders and trust in the announcements of those whose job it was to give those orders or to make information available to the public. Because of the previous night's bad weather, the flight timetable was completely disorganized. He wanted to be one hundred-per-cent certain.
For the third time he walked to the left of the Arrivals' Gate, watching the laconic details flickering on the TV screen's glass face and the flights due to arrive at Terminal 2. In between the information about the flights from Madrid and Moscow shone the phosphorescent band which stated that Alitalia Flight AZ320 from Rome was still expected at the scheduled time. He waited a few minutes longer during which time the details of the flight from Rome disappeared, and again appeared on the screen unchanged.
On the supposition that there was little probability that any delay would arise during the flight's final stages, and calculating that, with the overloading of the peak flight season, passport control would take longer than usual, thirty minutes at least, the passenger he had come to meet, the Director of the Cologne Branch of the Deutsche Bank, could not be expected to arrive in the Main Concourse Area before 09.15 at the earliest, even though he would have no luggage to hold him up. He looked at his watch it was 08.15. So he had a good hour at his disposal to prepare for the meeting with Dr. Julius Upenkamph on which his self-respect depended, and to make the telephone call as a matter of conscience.
Hans Magnus Landau could not know, of course, that at the moment when the Information Services' TV screen showed the flight from Rome still thirty minutes out from London, it was in fact already making its first circuit over Heathrow while waiting for the Control Tower to free a landing lane reserved for other aircrafts. No great fuss is ever made over exceptional
circumstances. For their own peace of mind and the Air Lines' profit, it would not be desirable for passengers, enquiring about their flights, to find them in the following predicaments:
OSLO/PARIS - diverted to Island due to bad weather; PARIS/LONDON – delayed due to engine trouble; BELGRADE/LONDON – lost in fog; ATHENS/LONDON – burned down in mid-air collision with the aircraft SOPHIA/PARIS; CARACHI/LONDON – crashed near Dover; MOSCOW/LONDON – highjacked; ISTANBUL/LONDON – blown up by a time bomb. The telephone number he dialed belonged to the Airport Office of the Metropolitan Police. As soon as it rang, the receiver was lifted and a throaty voice with a strong Caribbean accent answered:
'Metropolitan Police Office, Sergeant Elmer.'
Hans Magnus was silent. He still wasn't certain he was acting wisely. 'Metropolitan Police Office, Sergeant Elmer. Can I help you?'
His civic reflexes came into play. Hans Magnus answered quietly, slowly, searching for the English words from his international banker's vocabulary.
'You can be of help to yourself if you don't interrupt me. Keep quiet and listen. Otherwise I'll put down the receiver.'
'Speak slowly, Sir…' The heavy voice had a matter-of-fact, reassuring tone.
'A priest has just entered Terminal 2. He's tall, thin, with a dark complexion. He is carrying a blue Pan-Am shoulder bag …'
Perhaps he should put down the receiver. Why should all this be his concern? It was true that he always tried to be a good citizen in every way. German, that is, not English.
'What's this all about, Sir?' The voice was making an effort not to seem too interested. Matter-of-fact again, thought Hans Magnus. But wasn't what he was doing just as common-place? - The ordinary reaction of a good citizen who knew his place and his duties. A good citizen of one country is a good citizen of every country.
'That man is certainly no priest.'
'May I ask what makes you think that?'
Hans Magnus was in every respect an average example of his kind, a passenger who it would have been hard to distinguish at Heathrow from the majority of the rest. Like everyone else, he thought more of himself than reality allowed, and less of all the rest of the world than they really deserved. But that morning there was a special reason which made him different from the rest of traveling humanity. Passengers usually go into the Airport Toilets to wash, shave, freshen-up, and more often than not, to comply with their most urgent needs. He was going into the toilets to completely change his appearance.
He would go into one of the men's toilet cubicles on the first floor gallery of Terminal 2 a man in his early thirties, blond, smooth-skinned, with a light Aryan complexion, blue eyes and
meticulously clean-shaven face; he would come out ten years older with black, unruly hair, a swarthy complexion, almond-colored eyes and a short, graying beard. He would go in, in a white gabardine and come out in a black one. He would go in with the step of a man who never missed his morning exercises, and would come out with one leg slightly dragged. But not for a single moment during this process of transformation would he be bothered by the fact that in all
probability he was doing exactly the same as the man he had denounced to the police ten minutes earlier.
For Hans Magnus was a prime example of the kind of person who in that respect differed little from the majority of other passengers at London's Heathrow Airport on that July morning.
