BLACK HAND INCORPORATED

(The first three chapters of the novel)

CHAPTER ONE: DESIGNATED TERMS OF SERVICE

It is part of human nature to hate the man you have hurt.

Tacitus, senator and historian of Rome during the Antonine Imperial Era, c.56 – c.120 AD.

Transcript-excerpt of original portable tape recording from Black Hand Incorporated company confidential archives. Contract number, client(s), date and target individual(s) are strictly classified, company president and senior deputies' eyes only.

(Acoustics of a large and enclosed elevated room but with faint outside sounds of heavy metropolitan traffic, possibly from an open balcony.)

BLACK HAND INCORPORATED SENIOR COMPANY REPRESENTATIVE: "This is the Presidential Suite, is it not?"

EXECUTIVE CLIENT VOICE 1: "Actually there are two here at the (hotel name and location classified) and we, the company I mean, lease this one permanently for top guests."

EXECUTIVE CLIENT VOICE 2: "They change it over to 'Royal Suite' when we have some oil prince staying over. Everybody and their uncles come with said prince frigging little Sinbad Fauntleroy. Absolutely incredible what they spend when they're over. The women book private days at Tiffany's and Bloomingdales and clean the places out. We even get some minor royalty and nobility from Europe with heavy historical interests in the business too. Funny just how much old money there still is in it."

BHISCR: "Belgium and Holland, for example?"

ECV1: "This guy a mind-reader or something?"

ECV2: "I told you he was sharp, (client forename 1 classified)."

BHISCR: "Petroleum as a global business originated when Europe was still in its colonial empire era. After what was then called the Great War the Western European empires continued but the holdings of the old German and Austro-Hungarian empires were largely absorbed by their European rivals as war reparations. Great Britain and the United States moved forcefully into the Persian Basin following victories of Arab guerrillas over the collapsing Ottoman Empire. The excellent David Lean film Lawrence Of Arabia touches strongly on parts of that story."

ECV1: "I hope this isn't offensive but, talking classic movies, I keep expecting you to sound like Sabu from The Thief Of Baghdad or something."

BHISCR (short pause): "Not at all."

ECV2: "Hey, (client forename 1 classified), we're all professionals here."

BHISCR: "I was born here in America, a rather rural part. I've lived in New York for many years now, but you never lose the accent where you originally come from."

ECV1: "Yeah, we're a nation of immigrants. You should hear my grand-folks. Straight out of the Ural Mountains in Russia ahead of the advancing Reds in 1919. Somehow they managed to get to what was then still Persia and a ship over the Caspian Sea through the straights to Istanbul. Then across the Mediterranean and eventually to Ellis Island with about three words of English between them. Grandpa made his pile in Schenectady selling dry goods and breeding race horses on the side."

ECV2: "Mine came out of Ireland just before everything blew up in 1916. I can recite every patriotic shamrock poem William Butler Yeats ever scribbled over his bottomless pint of Guinness for my sins."

ECV1: "And (forename of target classified)'s great grandpappy was a dock worker on the wharves in Liverpool, England. That was back when it was one of the biggest ports in the world. Dirt poor all his life until he sailed on one of the ships he saw leaving for America crammed with people."

ECV2: "(Surname of target classified)'s grandfather was a Yale man and his dad was a Rhodes Scholar who did some of his degree at Cambridge back in the family's old country, so you get the idea how fast they climbed up the ladder. One generation for that clan to put themselves towards fully gold-plated in the third. Us Paddies have nothing on those English oppressors, begorrah."

ECV1: "Except for the Kennedy's, of course."

ECV2: "None of the good ones survived. Joe outlived his two best sons and his empire crashed with him. Ted should never have got past Chappaquiddick."

BHISCR (quickly interjecting): "I've always found the St. Patrick's Day parade and other similar ethnic celebrations in New York very picturesque and encouraging. America is almost the only country to honour its overseas heritage that way. If enough of my own people are fortunate to eventually come here we might celebrate a sacred period we call the Diwali festival time."

ECV1: "Whatever that is, hope we do. Why should the leprechauns have all the fun, anyway?"

ECV2: "We know where the pot of gold really is (client forename 1 classified), and it ain't hiding at the end of no atmospheric optical illusion. Here's to the little guy making good, private enterprise and professionally covering our exposed stinking corporate assets. Try this hoary old vintage brandy on your jaded palates for a second."

(Sound of drinks being poured and mixed and glasses mutually struck, appreciative drinking.)

BHISCR: "Superb vintage, unmistakably French, I would say from a provenance of at least twenty years under the label of Aurique Marengo."

ECV1 (tone of amazement): "You got it. Tipple from the old royal vineyards near Versailles. One of Napoleon's top generals grabbed it when Old Bony, as the English used to call him, got flushed down the Waterloo. The guy was smart enough not to re-join when Napoleon turned up again straight out of exile on some island not far enough. Said former general renounced the Returned Emperor as he was calling himself, escaped all the purges afterwards and the family have been top boozers ever since."

ECV2: "The loudest loyalists are usually the first ones to bring out the knives."

BHISCR: "I see you are familiar with Julius Caesar and all of its subtleties. Bringing us very effectually to the business at hand."

ECV1: "Brutus and Cassius and the rest of the conspirators knew Caesar would eventually be the death of all of them. They had to do it."

ECV2: "And so do we, for the same reasons."

BHISCR: "We do not ask your reasons."

ECV1: "Murder, call it assassination, isn't what we want. I wish we could just retire the old geezer. But there's no other way because he won't go and he's too solidly dug in."

ECV2: "(full name of target classified) is a friend. And I'm talking about for decades here because I grew up in the company with him. I'm a god-parent to his children, for crying out loud. I'll do everything I can for them in the aftermath and the long term when he's gone. But it won't stop this. Even your best friend can't put you in hock for a billion dollars and not expect a response."

BHISCR: "That is an awesome amount of potential debt. I see your dilemma."

ECV1: "The entire national budget deficit of the United States is about nine hundred and eight billion dollars right now, according to the Treasury department official report. Nearly a trillion. One company, our company liable for something best described at that level? It's so insane it becomes abstract."

ECV2: "If news got out we'd be the Titanic sinking into the sunset on an ocean of black gold."

BHISCR: "A metaphor I hope never to read in the financial pages of the Wall Street Journal to be sure, gentlemen."

ECV1: "Imagine nosey smart journalists like Woodward and Bernstein getting ahold of those numbers. Or some academic liberal creep like Noam Chomsky who could tie it all together."

ECV2: "And that's only the first part of it. The Federales are after us too now."

ECV1: "Uh, (client forename 2 classified), should we really be talking about this?"

ECV2 (irritably): "Goddam why not, (client forename 1 classified)? Given what we're talking about in the first place, namely the cold-blooded murder of a friend and professional colleague we've both known for more than twenty five years?! None of this leaves the room (Black Hand Incorporated Senior Corporate Representative alias classified), right?

BHISCR: "Right."

ECV2: "Brass tacks in the asset-sheet storm, then. (Full name of target classified) has been summoned to testify next month in front of no less than three separate Congressional and Senate and joint house committees. Only the senior board know this at the moment. We've got infallible inside dope the IRS and Securities and Competition Commissions intend to raid us. Timing the raids to be in the middle of said hearings. Crushing us with about one million records requisition warrants and personal subpoenas."

BHISCR: "And you are certain of this, (client forename 1 classified)?"

ECV1 (glumly): "Yup. Every word, and there's worse to come."

ECV2: "Here's the worse. That billion dollars I mentioned is actually a very complicated web of prohibited loans and illegal slush funds and untaxable offshore accounts held in trust by a network of overseas banks. We have about three hundred million bucks stashed in Zurich and Vaduz safe deposit boxes alone. Every cent is liable to be confiscated if the whole thing unravels from false accounting exposure. I know (target forename classified). He'll let something slip. Give something vital away without thinking. One little transaction thread they can follow straight to our secret Aladdin's Cave."

ECV1: "Federal and international fines and a horde of compensation payments combined with legal bills would cost us at least another billion dollars over the next ten years."

BHISCR: "And there is also the distinct possibility of at least several of you and your colleagues and senior staff potentially losing their liberty."

ECV1 & ECV2 (simultaneously): "Don't say that, (Black Hand Incorporated Senior Corporate Representative alias classified)!"

BHISCR: "You will all have discussed these possibilities together in some detail before contacting the organisation I represent, not so?"

ECV1 (sarcastically): "Sure, we clubbed together and made some advance bookings to be sure we get the best available prison places. I've chosen the luxury wing at Terre Haute and (client forename 2 classified) here's plumped for the famous Health Spa at Riker's Island because they've got the best hot tubs. Of course we've discussed the possibilities and we're scared spitless."

ECV2: "I am not going to prison. Any prison, even one of those genteel stripy holes they keep reserved for white collar convicts these days. It's the little people who go into the can. If the price is one friend I'll pull the trigger myself."

ECV1: "Easy, (client forename 2 classified)."

ECV2 (angrily): "What the hell's the difference? If we pay for it or do it ourselves it's still the same crime. The point is this single crime lets us prepare to dodge all the other ones when they come after us."

BHISCR: "Naturally I would not counsel against my own company. We sell our services at a very high price and have to make a profit. However we are, by definition, something of a last resort."

ECV1: "Earlier this week we had an informal board gathering without (full target name classified), of course. It had to be a unanimous decision one way or the other."

ECV2: "We've talked it to death. Unanimously and literally. That's why we're here. Everyone knows and agrees it has to be done. There is no way on earth (target forename classified) is going to steer us through this one safely. Doesn't matter how you bully and bribe the accountants and actuaries. Or fix the bankers. Or schmooze auditors to keep the peace. Sooner or later the smell gets out and it'll burn us all up like mustard gas in the trenches."

BHISCR: "One sacrifice, or martyrdom if I may so put it, will turn all prying eyes away for just long enough to enact repairs."

ECV2: "You got it, (Black Hand Incorporated Senior Corporate Representative alias classified). Initially we reckon shares will go down through the floor like an anvil. Every stock exchange on Earth will fumble and drop us like a hot plutonium potato. Of course our competition will muscle in hard while we're loose to take full advantage. So we rally and reassure investors. We may still have to do the Congressional and Senate and joint hearings, but they'll have to give us slack over the transitional period. Just to look fair and balanced they'll have to if we play it right. Make absolutely sure to have our lawyers ready with injunctions to bargain for time. Then we move fast in the night and bury the losses."

ECV1 (chuckling): "Along with (name of target classified)."

BHISCR: "I think I can promise you both, and collectively, at least two billion dollars-worth of value for your fee money."

ECV2: "We have a deal. Let's get down to the preliminary planning, then."

ECV1: "I want to do the eulogy."

BHISCR: "Our payment criteria does not include remembrance services, my friends."

(General laughter, conversation moves on to details of planned operation and habits of target.)

*

From Black Hand Incorporated company confidential archives, Operations-Related Media Coverage review file for: (contract number, client[s], date and target individual[s] and location strictly classified, company president and senior deputies' eyes only). Please see file sub-headings for Printed Media, Audio-visual Footage, Police & Official Reports, Related Intelligence.

Opinion piece for the Consolidated Associate Newswire Organisation London by its American correspondent Michael Tumesne (dated one day after operation):

"PO-OPI WILL EAT ITSELF: The tragic and apparently senseless murder yesterday morning of company president and chairman of the board Doyle Cowie-Kemp III at Planetary Occidental-Oriental Petroleum International's annual shareholder meeting in New York has already been described in exhaustive and grisly detail. Three rapid gunshots yesterday morning ended a remarkable and industrious life of achievement in the energy business that this morning's major American and European newspapers will undoubtedly rate a full page obituary as commemoration.

His immediate board colleagues and other senior figures in the oil-sharking business have all delivered uniformly bland and salutary and thoroughly unconvincing eulogies. Shouted them out in a literal blizzard of press statements full of patently fake goodwill and fabricated regret.

Deceit and hypocrisy and craven subservience to the memory of, and I'm putting it very diplomatically here to spare his family additional undeserved pain, such a controversial man and the equally controversial company he made a direct and predatory reflection of himself is worse than distasteful to read. I personally have very thoroughly and assiduously investigated the late Mr Cowie-Kemp III and some of his close associates in PO-OPI for many years now.

A very fat file of press clippings on his and the company's nefarious doings entirely fills one of the filing cabinets in my office. I do not choose my words lightly or carelessly.

Over the past twenty-five years since he accomplished executive seniority, Mr Cowie-Kemp III and an inner vicious circle of his closest executive board colleagues have been notorious. Outrageous personal conduct and harsh business employments both abroad and here at home in America have persistently characterised them in an unpleasantly persistent way.

Personally I have collected many documented instances and many others anecdotally which are largely unsubstantiated. Collectively however they add up to an all too brutally clear picture.

One of a rapacious and greedy and corrupt and ferociously determined style of what these days is called 'corporate culture'. I prefer a biologist's interpretation of the 'culture' part, studying the late Doyle Cowie-Kemp and his fellow culture-vultures through my humble journalist's microscope.

With my intense love of the arts and humanities I hesitate to use the word 'culture' in connection with such ugly trading practices at all. Such behaviour as I have inferred in PO-OPI and its fellow travellers in the transnational energy sector deserves far less elevated an interpretation.

More accurately perhaps these most plutocratic of executive company officers could best be described as an extended 'Frat House' in the jargon of collegiate life. Sort of a brotherhood, if that's the word.

In America a fraternity house is a club and generally modest living and leisure quarters for students on a college campus. Membership is often very difficult to secure.

Generally, getting in to a fraternity house is characterised as a desirable social goal. Approval for candidacy is much sought after.

Primary requirement for 'passing in' is to undergo frequently humiliating initiatory rituals. Uniformly they are designed to be demanding and complex and contradictory.

Once inside however, there is reputedly a genuine mutuality and long term friendship. Plus many other privileges that can help offset the loneliness and pressures and academic demands of attending a larger university while being away from home for the first time.

(None of said houses would let me in when I myself went to Yale, by the way.)

All too often such 'Frat Houses' have a more baleful reputation. Tendencies towards institutionalised bullying are frequently described.

Just as regularly narrated are tales of bad campus behaviour such as drunken brawling and sexually predatory conspiracy. Above all, resolute secrecy about all of it.

Continued membership typically depends on that absolute wall of silence about the frat house's activities. Almost all the stories I have gathered over the years about Mr Cowie-Kemp III and his close club of direct corporate associates show this kind of pattern of arrogant behaviour.

Power and privilege however count. So does money. Astronomical amounts of it, in fact. Like the proverb says it makes the world go round.

Controversy has followed this man and his fellow executives around the world too on their frequently police report-described adventures. Various hotels and resorts and chateaus and lodges and chalets and fleshpots internationally between important business meetings and conferences.

Most although by no means all the bad behaviour has been in the same places. Subsidised party these men take with them on their travels has a staggeringly extensive international dossier.

I have personally interviewed police officers and magistrates about these activities all over the world. Officials in nations as diverse as France, Yemen, Switzerland, Tunisia, Lichtenstein, Venezuela, Scotland, Iran, Peru, Kuwait and Mexico have generously given me their time.

Scandalous cases of 'painting the town red' attributed to the assassination victim and his business friends replicate themselves almost endlessly in conversations and on the public record. I heard some quite thorough and convincing accounts.

Depressingly infantile and even grotesque excess. Rather extreme episodes of drinking and carousing and squalid romantic entanglements, again being diplomatic.

That's where I could get coherent answers. All instances I researched had an official record in the form of one or several police complaints.

More than a few instances of appearances before local magistrates or other judicial officers according to local legal tradition. Everything on which I followed up was in the public domain according to the laws of the country or territory concerned.

Only a small percentage of those documented cases elicited frank and open interviews. Numerous court officers and police officials and witnesses and participants would say nothing to me at all.

Proverbial wall of silence, or the Omerta our Italian and Sicilian colleagues frequently refer to, was by far the most typical response. In the course of my international enquiries, both in person and by phone and Telex, perhaps five percent got to an actual story stage I could use.

Whether that obfuscation or outright silence in too many of too many cases was officially commanded or bribed for insurance, I cannot say. You do not necessarily need all the pieces to construct the frame and picture of a puzzle.

Silence is frequently as eloquent as the most garrulous outraged bystander. Gaps of deafening silence followed the man and his corporate cronies wherever I followed their trail.

Doyle Cowie-Kemp III himself has also now been silenced. At a surprisingly convenient time for his company and colleagues.

Amongst the minor items of news also happening on the day of his assassination it was quietly announced in a brief Department of Justice press release that the victim had been summoned to testify next month. No less than three separate investigative committees representing the Senate, Congress and a joint body incorporating various senior members from both demanded the benefits of his wisdom.

Character of these hearings before their scheduling, naturally cancelled in wake of DCKIII's very timely death, was to be on subjects of financial and legal and regulatory irregularities. Grave gaps of silence in the assorted records of Planetary Occidental-Oriental Petroleum International.

Not unlike the holiday record of its senior executives over a similar period of about twenty-five years. According to my contacts at the DoJ's press office it will be many months before new hearing dates and executives to be summoned are decided.

Coincidence? Happy or unhappy accidental timing?

Full-blown venomous cover-up corporate conspiracy perhaps, depending on your collaborating point of view? No one can really say for sure, and PO-OPI's press office certainly ain't.

Silence reigns. Apart from the effusions of elegiac synthetic goodwill and faux fellowship from his fellow board-members.

Even less convincing panegyrics from DCKIII's ranking counterparts in the various oil multinationals. Both they and the late man's clearly beleaguered company has also been resolutely tight-lipped about all alleged and recorded peccadilloes by its executives.

I assure them and their fellow travelling fossil fuel-fattened corporate Krakens I will not be silent. I have appended to Doyle Cowie-Kemp's obituary a full list of his known arrests and cautions and complaints made against his assorted entourages abroad.

And there is more.

Persistent rumours of colossal debts and financial shortfalls and gaping holes in PO-OPI's accounts have circulated in the transnational energy biz for years. Plain institutionalised corporate malfeasance, another kind of culture I object to much like influenza or e-coli in my food, is implied by many reliable insiders of my acquaintance to be endemic.

Calls for explanations within and without the industry go unheeded. All legitimate written requests for clarification including quite a few of mine are starkly ignored.

Finally, Doyle Cowie-Kemp III was to be called to answer before legislators. Testify under oath to the vast voting public they represent, only to go suddenly to a premature grave with his secrets.

Doyle Cowie-Kemp III was betrayed. The company whose interests he so faithfully served betrayed by his callous and thoroughly rational assassination.

Despite the apparent irrationality of the assailant, no attempt was made at capture. He was instead meticulously shot dead by attending armed security staff.

None of whom, by the way, were anywhere in the vicinity of the victim protecting him. And that despite numerous threats volubly made against his life by environmental activist groups and other clearly deranged individuals over the years.

For all of us in the aftermath, Truth itself was clearly and intentionally betrayed. In all things, including Truth, I say Caveat Emptor.

Your faithful correspondent, Michael Tumesne."

*

Little Caesar was on one of the local channels in the graveyard shift last night and I simply couldn't miss it, even though I needed to be fully alert today. That classic gangster picture was playing in an after-midnight double feature with Fritz Lang's much later Scarlet Street. You would have expected the other half of the double feature to be Tight Spot or The Cincinnati Kid or especially another favourite of mine, Black Tuesday, to properly match the doom-laden tone.

A uniquely surreal and harshly ironic sense of tragedy haunts Lang's film, a very European sensibility which is rare even in Lang's American films. Robinson plays a bank clerk and amateur painter who gets caught up with a victimised girl played by Joan Bennett and her abusive boyfriend played by Dan Duryea. The abusive boyfriend ends up selling Robinson's paintings for huge profits when his character sets up Bennett's character in a flat that doubles as his secret artist's studio, and it wrecks his life apocalyptically.

Personally I would have chosen The Sea Wolf had I been the programmer. It's listed for another double feature later in the week broadcasting on the same station, so they certainly have it. One of the most remarkable performances Robinson ever gave was as that terrifying and sadistic Norwegian sea captain whose cruelty and wilful blindness slowly destroys his ship and crew.

Adapted from the savage Jack London novel of the same name. Alexander Knox plays a writer trapped with Ida Lupino's character on the ship with the brutalised sailors among them the incomparable John Garfield, and Knox narrates this incredible speech as the ship eerily sinks into the Atlantic at the end, smashed by a rival vessel commanded by Larsen's brother. Hope I don't have to miss it.

For me it's certainly Robinson's best. Curiously a lot less well known than his equally memorable turn as the deadly gangster lord Rico brought low. Little Caesar is still resounding through my mind, especially the final death scene and Rico's penultimate despairing line.

Movie ends with his gone-straight friend and former partner in crime seen on a billboard above Rico's body, now a successful movie star. The perfect brutal contrast of two ways of life and their rewards. Much as I love the other thriller, it jarred with me thematically.

Most local TV stations buy their movies in bulk job lots that are usually ill-assorted, however. We really need a professionally curated movie channel, maybe in the cable TV world that's rapidly evolving now. Cinema, as the Europeans tend to more grandly call it, is the only modern art form without its own comprehensive educational museum.

Perhaps there should also be a channel for real-life footage of killings and capital punishments. There's certainly enough of it in both legitimate and more secretive circulation. The sickening filmed execution of Hitler's would-be assassins by hanging from abattoir hooks using piano wire can still be privately screened if you know the right people.

Stalin had the butchering of some of his senior purge victims, the ones he really loathed, filmed too and reputedly showed them to his inner circle. Mao Tse Tung apparently ordered the agonies of prisoners selected to be in different proximities to his regime's H-bomb tests meticulously visually recorded, but those are still undoubtedly classified. Like those numerous well indexed torture films of hapless high ranking Viet Cong and Cambodian guerrilla prisoners they keep in a certain little-known and very secure temperature controlled vault next to a secret-training projection room at Quantico.

We ourselves could supply more than a few instructively lurid items from our own private archives. I'll be expecting some new footage delivered tomorrow in fact, supplied by one of our best freelance operatives with false press credentials and very handy with those new miniaturised cameras that use videotape instead of celluloid film. Prefer to maintain objective impartiality with our audio-visual records.

But have to admit to myself I'll enjoy seeing the moment-of-death motion picture. We planned for it so painstakingly and something curiously provoking about the target himself got into me. Most of all I will secretly be savouring his demise, although it's distinctly unprofessional of me to be so engaged.

Doyle Cowie-Kemp III, who was until about sixty seconds ago chief executive officer and senior trustee and Chairman of the Board at Planetary Occidental-Oriental Petroleum International, was never someone I personally hated. Actually I despised him. I always make a point of trying to formally or informally meet the company's most prominent designated victims.

I found him sincerely despicable. Meeting him socially and anonymously in circumstances I managed to contrive with great difficulty I heard him drunkenly and unselfconsciously admit a kind of perversion that surprised even me out of my detachment. Roughly obliterating the coldly calculating demeanour I usually adopt toward our quarries.

Automated teleprinters are already describing the initial item and radio bulletins are interrupting programming on more news-emphatic stations. Inflected with that peculiar sudden gravitas they put on for shocking events. All the best newscaster's voices drop down an octave immediately whatever their usual style of delivery to capture the sombre mood.

Vintage ticker-tape machine which I had installed as the central showpiece of the communications room on our first day of business is clattering in response. New York Stock Exchange's dedicated information service has its own brief and cryptic mention at the top of the hour's prices when I check it, they're always close to the first. Reuters and CANOL and Associated Press of course are buzzing, corporate assassinations are always very big news.

My private stockbroker has advance instructions to buy nose-diving PO-OPI shares. I can see that's already happening on the ticker-tape. So I'll make a double killing on this one.

Smiling sardonically I switch on the TV projector for the hysterical horror show to begin. 1980 is going to be a good year for business and it's a gloomy and grim November drizzly New York day outside, the perfect bleak atmosphere I was hoping for. A day encompassing our thirteenth professional and solvent anniversary as Black Hand Incorporated.

Quicker and more enterprising channels are already showing the video footage. Doyle Cowie-Kemp III liked the record to include filmed presentations. He'd also do a full press conference immediately afterwards, and he was good at it.

PO-OPI has benefitted many times over the years from his smooth and well-prompted TV manner. Especially on that Sixty Minutes exposé episode so accurately pinning down corruption within the petroleum and international energy business in general a few years ago. I watched it and he almost convincingly faced down that very hardest-of-hard-bitten investigative journalists, Mike Wallace himself.

Admittedly in that tough and relentless and surprisingly long interview Doyle had helped save his company's reputation. Making his management regime and policies sound and look marginally less worse than the others was hard going, but he did it somehow. Privately he said later he learned his approach from Jack Kennedy no less, back in his heyday on the fringes of the Peter Lawford Camelot set.

A simple policy of anticipating all the worst possible questions. Giving the same type of informed and vaguely reassuring answer that really meant: 'I Don't Really Know But Look At Me Smile, I'm A Good Guy.' Radiating sincerity and responsible family-man sobriety.

That, along with some carefully selected favourable market share statistics and detailed mention of community involvement and sponsorship projects. Had Doyle made it to the press conference stage this morning he would have been announcing some new schools and a community centre and theatre and church compound. PO-OPI were funding all that down in some New Mexico towns where they had a growing forest of oil wells.

And at least as many expensive pollution citations from the Environment Agency.

Perfect legacy for Doyle's successors to capitalise on in his name. Video footage I'm seeing captures the event remarkably well without being too gratuitous. Clearly there were several cameras from the different angle shots proving that Doyle was being more than usually media-thorough.

At the friendly suggestion of his senior colleagues, probably.

Great capstone on our professional efforts, this successful killing. More accurately and ironically a tombstone. I wonder if Doyle left any last words in his company or personal will to be engraved on it in whatever executive cemetery they plant him.

Or maybe his corporate executors will use something from his final speech. The one he was making within the last few minutes so memorably cut short by our carefully selected and trained disposable assassin. What they call an environmental activist these days, and from one of those New Mexico towns where PO-OPI was apparently doing so much to give back to the local community.

We had to look very carefully and quickly to find just the right disillusioned revolutionary loner. Someone deluded enough to think public murder would help their cause but competent enough to pass for a respectable middle class stakeholder. Who wouldn't hold forth and talk too much beforehand.

Most importantly someone who could already handle a gun, could buy one themselves in a pinch and willing to use it on the target with a reasonable chance of success. The real difficulty was finding someone like that who was already deeply involved and committed to the lunatic fringe lifestyle and also didn't have a criminal record that might accidentally stymie even a well-constructed temporary identity.

Suggestible enough on top of all of that to believe we actually wanted them to survive. Help them escape afterwards from a bustling hotel swarming with even more armed security and police outside. Myself and Trucker had to create and rehearse with our dupe the most elaborate getaway plan using models and photographs and abstract mock-up sets of the interior where the killing had to happen.

Hardly cost-effective. Even given the fee of two million dollars, for us as with any business every single plug nickel counts, as Warky might put it in his colloquial rural way. Trucker pointed out in his first conversation with our initially shocked clients that apparently exorbitant sum represented a mere thousandth-part of their potential losses otherwise, and they grudgingly accepted it.

Naturally we had to promise our idealistic cutthroat not payment as such but a donation to the cause they served just suitably large enough to risk life and limb. Go through the motions of putting the false sum in trust and legally bequeathed in legacy to named beneficiaries should the escape go wrong. That took up more unnecessary expense and time for our forgery department too.

Necessary charades, but wearisome. I really prefer dealing with professional murderers who know the true risks and accept them than stupidly naive sacrificial marks. But of course the use of expert talent at market rates practically doubles a given contract's payment criteria.

Four armed security guards were in on the killing-the-killer plan with our co-conspirators, they had to be. Specifically recruited and trained and instructed and very well paid to make sure our one-time-only amateur assassin left in precisely the same terminal condition as the first intended victim. Unobtrusively staying just far enough away from said victim to look authentically busy and alert but allow a clear line of fire from various designated angles that had also been previously rehearsed.

Assassinations at this level are always symbolic. This one had to be very specifically public and blatant to grab the largest possible share of media exposure with maximum immediacy. That in turn requires the most numerous audience that can be contrived, and we've achieved that dramatically.

Survind Juggerghazi (nickname 'Trucker'), my senior deputy alongside the other two board executives Dag and Warkentin, planned and strategized and supervised execution of the entire operation as he frequently does. Owing to the nature of our business things don't always go flawlessly but from what I can infer in the news reports already this one proceeded without a glitch. At our preliminary conference to decide on tactics we both agreed the most appropriate staging had to be a general shareholder's meeting at our client's suggestion, despite the obvious difficulties.

Meticulous personal security for the target. Thorough vetting of all attendees. Exhaustive background checking of all staff leading up to the event and in progress on the day.

Strictest monitoring of the invitation list. Personal credentials and day passes for the shareholder meeting to be verified. Even the catering checked for adulterations or other contaminants down to the last mini-sandwich and canapé and crate of cheap wine and beer for the booze-it-up junket afterwards.

Corporate conspiracy is highly detailed and nuanced and subtle at its best. This particular designated victim was certainly one of the best. He always insisted on understated but scrupulously effective security for those kinds of large gatherings and took personal charge of implementation.

Oddly enough that made it much easier for us since he issued confidential electronic memorandums at board level on those security arrangements. Of course we intercepted all those confidential dispatches within minutes of consecutive issue and not one of them was even encrypted. Electronic mail and internal telegrams are still the easiest business communications to tap into.

Naturally we would have had the same information if he had done the most sensible thing. Merely informed the assembled board at a scheduled meeting with the confidential secretary simply instructed not to put details on the official Minutes record. When close colleagues who know your every idiosyncrasy and foible decide to betray you there's very little that can be kept hidden.

Doyle Cowie-Kemp III had already been very precisely and painstakingly measured for his senior executive patrician gilt-edged blue chip sarcophagus long before the fatal shot was fired. His own supposed friends and loyalist board allies set him up more thoroughly than a stage managed revolutionary show trial. Boardroom coups are seldom quite so savagely terminal, but I like to think Black Hand Incorporated is playing its part inaugurating a progressive new decade in that respect.

I wanted to be alone to savour this moment and the Blackwell's Island original headquarters, once a prison asylum infirmary building beside the parish Workhouse, is quite empty apart from myself. Technically I should be at our more recent modern corporate headquarters building upstate but I wanted to be near the heart of actual events and sense how the city reacts. Trucker and Warkentin and Dag all wanted to close this place down after we moved to a then newly-built private industrial compound near Albany a good few years ago.

But I insisted we have an alternative and emergency duplicate facility, despite the expense, just in case. A small and trusted maintenance crew come in three times a week and once over the weekend. They change teleprinter paper and ticker-tape on the machines, clean and tune the radios and telephones and other equipment. Carefully inspect for any evidence of infiltration attempts or other break-ins.

Every so often, also at my insistence, our own senior controlling board of four holds a clandestine meeting here like in the old days, where we started the business all those years ago. In the worst case scenario it can also still serve us as a refuge. Dag and Warkentin and Trucker haven't say so, at least to my face, but they clearly don't like it.

No one likes admitting we're all just as vulnerable as our designated victims. TV coverage after only a few minutes reaches the repetitive. There won't be more until the afternoon with the inevitable witness and police interviews so I switch off the projector.

Instead I surprise myself and take the dusty cover off the gramophone which I had Warky plug into our intercom system on a whim all those years ago too when we first started. It was new to have a record player-and-radio system back in the days when we started. The then-state-of-the-art device was also designed to be plugged directly into larger stereo amplifiers or even a house-wide speaker system.

With only a little tinkering Warky adapted the plug-ins to fit an intercom system I had him install in all offices and operational rooms including the main one. Larger speakers that have the effect of subtly filling the whole building with their sound. Perfect for music too.

Stacks of records both new and second-hand still sit eclectically in the cabinets beside the gramophone. I pull out Herbie Mann's classic Memphis Underground and set it playing at a low non-intrusive volume to liven the air. A favourite of mine I used to play regularly for myself when I first came to New York, and before all this was built.

Love the delicate interplays of the album. Herbie was and is the most incredibly and uniquely talented flautist. A fairly unusual instrument to use in jazz of any kind.

Novelty and virtuoso skill of performance makes his work additionally distinctive. A true musician makes you forget what instrument they're playing. You just hear their distinctive voice and love of the music through it. Herbie Mann and Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans always do that for me.

Lost in the music's sublime flow I head off out of the communications room towards the now largely disused offices. On the way I pass the nearly empty old infirmary open ward-room. This is a surprisingly huge and ancient-feeling space lit by frosted glass skylights.

Only tall room in the building, about twenty feet high to let air circulate. Transparent windows for natural light, an innovation back then, were both expensive and progressive. There's even an adjoining bathhouse which is still perfectly functional with huge zinc tubs brought in later.

During its heyday as our headquarters, the ward-room was our staff open plan office and operations room and reference and resources library. North wall is whitewashed to make a full-sized movie screen for necessary footage projections. South wall served as a collage for all related photographic and printed materials related to a given target.

East wall was the company library and the spacious shelves are still there with their built-in sliding ladder, but all empty and dusty now despite the cleaners. Desks are still here too piled opposite against the west wall under thick dark nylon sheets, beautiful old black oak Victorian writing tables with their own roll-down lockable covers I found piled up outside a decommissioned office building in Queens back in late 1965. I remember that date forever.

It was the day before I first saw an early promo trailer for the classic paranoid movie Seconds directed by John Frankenheimer. One day after I'd founded my own secretive company. When I saw it early the next year I remember incongruously identifying with every conspiratorial company character in the film, not Rock Hudson's hapless and naïve yearning victim.

Had I not bought those remarkable desks on the spot from the demolishers for a song, said priceless solid craftsmanship would have probably been chopped up for firewood. Always thought of the desks as a kind of inauguration gift. I regret we didn't take them but they would never have fit into the ultramodern concrete and steel and bruised limestone décor of the compound building at Albany.

Desks and the stacked still-solid chairs that match them just sit forlornly here like the rest of the still-functional place, unjustly abandoned and neglected. Lonely old timers who still have muscle and resilience for the job if they could only get the opportunity. Relics of that strong and determined imagined older world I was never part of.

Everyone loves our smart new efficient building in Albany but me. The years we've been there blur in my memory. We're quite anonymous and indistinguishable from all other resident blandly named interchangeable corporate enterprises.

Black Hand Incorporated, with the menacing gripping-fist logo that looks distinctly like a tarantula on its white-star background on a red back panel, wouldn't fit very comfortably in with the rest. Of course we only use the actual company name and logo among ourselves. Nowadays we have a single false name and contractor records for continuity that haven't changed since we took up residence.

Originally when we started we used a long series of frequently changed dummy corporation names. All our mail and shipments came to private mailboxes like a lot of international companies used, for when they couldn't afford a reasonably sized New York office but still did a lot of business there. Changing name and mailbox and message services at least once every year kept us comfortably near-invisible.

I made the decision to use only one official name when we moved. Frequent changes and reorganisations would clearly pose a security risk from simple gossip. Not to mention the tax and other bureaucracies that always hover watchfully.

Officially we're a private secure communications consultancy doing largely corporate installation and systems maintenance work. A self-contained unit within the company that has no idea of what Black Hand Incorporated really do. Entirely implemented by sub-contractors, none of whom share space in our offices, Warkentin oversees operations with his remarkable expertise and it brings us in a steady legitimate income for the annual tax audit.

Actual administration and payroll and other essential clerical tasks are all done by an efficient private agency based at Bedford Stuyvesant over in Brooklyn. Although we keep up the appearances of a working office in reality it's a façade and we have all our appointments outside. Now and then we hire actors to turn up in an important-looking car or some other ploy to keep the pretence going.

Can't really adjust myself to Albany's clinical modernity. Even after years of living and working there. Dag and Warkentin and Trucker and myself all have apartments on the top floors.

We can live or sleep the night there alongside the secure operations and archives rooms if there's late or early-morning work to be done. That's less frequent now than it used to be. The other guys seldom use their apartments.

I'm the only permanent resident at our compound building despite not liking it at a fundamental level. Somehow I don't feel safe commuting like they do. Much of the time I stay entirely in the place, sometimes for weeks on end if we don't have in-the-field jobs on, like a sentinel.

Always lived just a few minutes away from the old headquarters here on Blackwell's Island too. They used to call it Welfare Island. Roosevelt Island is actually the official name these days but interestingly most of the old residents use the earlier originals.

It derives from a privateer Anglo-Dutch family of the seventeenth century and somehow that feels more fitting. Back then New Amsterdam, later renamed New York for Charles the Second's brother when the English took it from the Dutch, was a launch pad to the great wilderness beyond for pioneer settlers. And the city's stayed on the frontier in new ways ever since, culturally and in business and commerce.

Blackwell's Island came to be where growing New York sent its worst criminals and lunatics and poor invalids. A sort of leper colony for victims of the worst diseases of the era. Continuing the tradition, practically half the buildings here are hospitals or clinics or sanatoriums.

Infirmary building I walk through in solitude was progressive in a radical new design theory when it was built in 1825. Natural light in the wards and exercise in adjoining grounds of the prison asylum hospital were supposed to rehabilitate prisoner patients. Incidentally make them fitter labourers in the Workhouse factories then nearby.

Walking through the too narrow rock-solid brick arches and low ceilinged rooms and severe ruler-straight corridors always intimidates me. But I like the way I instinctively react against the deliberately oppressive and controlling architecture, it keeps me edgy and off-balance and vigilant. At our newer building I feel too safe and it puts my vital sense of imminent danger to sleep.

Senior offices open off a long claustrophobic passageway, once for the administrators of the infirmary. This ends in a portico and surprisingly large congregating space leading to the infirmary's beautiful ecumenical chapel. We offered full Sunday use of it to the community when we originally moved in as public relations cover and to stymie local gossip about our mysteriously nebulous 'business information and secure communications' service.

To my surprise the local church authorities ignored us. They favoured using the nearby Chapel of the Good Shepherd instead. Probably the lingering shameful reputation of the infirmary was the reason and saved us the security headache of letting the public in on Sundays.

Visiting the chapel sometimes at odd moments I wonder why. It's remarkable, built entirely of differently coloured granite and sandstone and marble by largely German immigrant masons who donated the materials ad hoc and voluntarily constructed it for the medical authorities and staff and inmate patients. But I've never come across it in any reference book or magazine article, one of those strangely forgotten treasures in a great megalopolis so replete with them.

Whole gloomy interior manufactures menacing shadows. Somehow the dark brick walls seem to absorb all light that falls on them. I'm not superstitious, but if there's just one genuinely haunted building in New York City it would have to be this one.

You can feel those generations of tuberculosis and scurvy and typhoid victims who suffered and expired here. Not to mention those of all the other many epidemics of the nineteenth century. Smallpox and cholera and highly infectious fevers were everyday killers before radical health reform and construction of the sewers and fresh water supplies were properly engineered.

Ruins of the old Smallpox Hospital aren't far from here. It's a bustling community of present-day hospitals and apartment buildings as well as the ghosts of the past right in the heart of the city. Curiously not quite accessible from the Queensboro bridge that goes right overhead further down the island.

There is the Welfare Island Bridge for traffic and the newer elevated tramway system now, of course. But I don't like that kind of travelling isolation and I've never liked driving if I can avoid it. It's a running joke between Dag and Warkentin and Trucker behind my back that I'm all too aware of.

Prefer to take the regular ferry over to the United Nations buildings opposite if I stay on the island. Or I'll take the express bus that starts near the Queensboro Bridge's middle pylon to Penn station for anonymity, not liking taxis either. I still secretly keep my old cramped studio apartment (really two badly-converted rooms) in one of the older blocks a few minutes' walk away from here.

In my old office, once the records room for the infirmary, still keeping the richly grained Connecticut maple filing cabinets that entirely line one wall, I take out the copy I've made of Trucker's carefully taped initial contact. We're fastidious about gathering incriminating evidence and also being unobtrusive doing it. Instead of a micro-miniaturised recorder, Trucker or myself usually have only a tiny concealed transmitter microphone actually on us.

One that won't be easily found or identified. Good enough for complete audio capture. But so innocuous even a careful and experienced observer won't notice it.

Normally the microphone transmitter will be a cufflink or tie pin. Sometimes in an extreme security jeopardy situation we'll use a cleverly designed plastic and ceramic unit woven into a sleeve to look like part of the stitching. Sometimes a particularly careful and/or paranoid client insists on a body scanner or metal detector treatment.

Whatever the portable transmitter type, it broadcasts a very high frequency signal to the actual tape recorder which will be concealed in the inevitable briefcase our representative carries. That too is usually searched but this is easily countered. You just thicken the walls of a custom-built cardboard case and cover it with quality leather, fitted with hinges and locks and the handle manufacturer-monogrammed to look authentic.

Tape recording device with its battery is installed within the cardboard and sealed in. Sometimes a longer-life flat battery is used as a counterweight on the other side and cross-connected to the recorder. Expensive and it takes careful craftsmanship, but long years of practice make you an expert if you work at it.

I've been doing it fifteen years now. First as an amateur in my old days at the United Nations. Briefly worked for one of their international statistics departments and it was there I got the idea.

Using the micro-recorder I managed to successfully draw out conversational anecdotes and confessions from ministerial and diplomatic interviewees. Visibly I was only carrying a notebook. Nothing written was directly attributable, so I sometimes got the most remarkable information because they thought they were safe from any proof of connection.

Absolutely essential to have the blackmail option if a client reneges. It does happen occasionally. No client is formally accepted until we have substantiating very damning proof, and that has been the company rule from the beginning.

Spooling the tiny ribbon of black tape into a duplicate machine I play back the conversation with two of Doyle Cowie-Kemp III's closest friends and colleagues, both long-standing members of the senior corporate executive board of Planetary Occidental-Oriental Petroleum International, plotting the general details of his brutal murder. Even I'm shocked how casual they are about it. At one point much later in the conversation one of the men half-drunkenly snarls, very sincerely, that he'd like to do the shooting personally.

Doyle apparently keeps beating him at handball matches. Burning the arrogant opponent's raw and petty ego like an agonising splash of acid every time. For awhile the man can't stop raging until his embarrassed colleague finally intervenes and changes the subject.

So much for the twenty-five years of friendship and association they talked about earlier.

Shocking what a small and petty-minded world these privileged men and their targeted 'friend' live in. If poverty breeds ignorance, these dazzlingly wealthy oil-fattened scions of corporate America seem to exist in a milieu so insular and self-referential it's like an infant's school. I can imagine the luxurious scene with Trucker keeping rigidly poker-faced and polite through the puerile tirade, that characteristic mordant grin of his playing irresistibly at the corners of his mouth.

Opulent setting of that meeting was the presidential suite of the Vanderfeller Hotel, one of New York's finest. It rivals the Chrysler Building both in size and for its splendid Art-Deco sculptures, fixtures and fittings inside and out. All of these have all been lovingly and defiantly preserved amidst the hateful new soulless and colossal Manhattan of irredeemably ugly concrete and steel.

I've always loved staying at the place, it combines old world service with progressive Modernism and a touch of the aristocratic-futuristic. A sense of how the Future was going to be elegant and inspiring and egalitarian all at the same impossible time. Buildings like Vanderfeller give the lie to Le Corbusier and Philip Johnson and all their destructive Brutalist acolytes.

Of course the assassination was at the Vanderfeller too, in the magnificent astronomically-themed ballroom. I regret that a bit as I switch off the tape while Trucker is making his urbane farewells to the now thoroughly-drunk corporate conspirators. Probably they didn't even jointly book the day off.

According to Trucker's clandestine reports from observant well-bribed hotel staff they spent the rest of it boozing and some well-known high priced call girls arrived subsequently. Presumably on company time and expense accounts. Now the Vanderfeller will also have a significant and highly prominent slaying to add to its list of marketable notorieties.

I've always idly wondered if we should charge for that, too.

Shadows have become starker and deeper in the long connecting corridor outside as I double-lock and leave my office, although noon has just struck. Somehow I instinctively know that I'm no longer alone in the building. Too late, passing the large ward-room again, I fail to turn and run as I know I should.

Relatively bright from the frosted glass skylights in the morning, by noon the sun's meridian is always blocked by the vast and symmetrical United Nations building across the water. Infirmary ward-room is watchfully still and the wintry light is so low it is almost darkness. Wide open arched brick entrance looms over me like a dangerous shadowy cavern.

Silence reigns apart from the regular gentle skipping of the gramophone needle amplified by the intercom system. I didn't set the record-player to repeat, not really liking re-listening to a record immediately, even to something I love. The intense expectancy of the artificial quiet is abruptly menacing.

Now I stop short almost involuntarily. Like natural prey catching the scent of a known inescapable predator and rendered helpless with primal terror. Already I can see in my mind's eye its patient and waiting shape in the cold blackness.

What little grey smouldering illumination reaching down from the remote glow above is fully occupied. Reflecting directly along the solitary barrel of an ugly oversized pistol silencer. One aimed straight at me out of the cloying dark.

Cannot see the gunman until he steps smoothly and unhurriedly out. Scene is de-saturated and colourless and etiolated like I'm watching an old film of myself. Dismayingly and with a sense of grim inevitability I see my own half-smiling assassin is the single deadliest and most ruthlessly proficient freelance professional executioner our company ever employed.

My disoriented vision suddenly alters like a hidden optical picture has revealed itself within a seemingly random polychrome pattern. Storms of pixelated visual static instantaneously resolve into a harshly clear and abrasive perfectly-tuned image in my reeling terrified mind. Pieces arcing and scattering on complicated outward trajectories abruptly reverse and converge into a pitiless gestalt whole.

In one fearsome coruscation I see the truth. My eyes and those of my killer meet. Doyle Cowie-Kemp III was not the primary designated victim today.

I am.

Actually see the name and fee engraved on the bullet about to terminate my contract as the sneering black muzzle silently flares and deathly monochrome fluorescence envelopes me. See my contract too. What clause of my designated terms of service has led to this company action.

Mother of Mercy; is this the end for Gary Banomena?...

CHAPTER TWO: GARY FROM 'GARY'

The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.

Eric Ambler, crime and mystery writer in his novel A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS.

Transcript-excerpt of original portable tape recording from Black Hand Incorporated company confidential archives. Tape made privately by current company president prior to formation of company, while a student. Recording captured using micro-miniaturised device with attached concealed microphone originally the property of the Central Intelligence Agency. Conversation takes place in the boardroom of Indiana Central University, Good Hall Building, Indianapolis, from approximately 10am on 31.10.1964. Participants company president-to-be university student Gary Banomena and two federal government agency representatives, both unidentified at time of recording.

(Sound of heavy wooden door opening, hesitant footsteps, rustling of papers, a chair being pulled up.)

GARY BANOMENA: "Okay if I sit down?"

UNIDENTIFIED FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AGENCY REPRESENTATIVE ONE: "No. You may sit when told to. Please remain standing until then."

(Decisive sound of GB sitting down and noisily scraping his chair up into place.)

GB: "Tough luck. You've kept me waiting for over an hour in the Dean's office and I've missed a class. Let's get to it right now or I'm walking straight back out of here."

UNIDENTIFIED FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AGENCY REPRESENTATIVE TWO: "Sounds like we have a young troublemaker across the board."

GB: "Across the board table, you mean. This is where the faculty and the college trust do all their dirty establishment deals, then. I've never seen it. So am I under arrest?"

UFGARO: "Kindly adopt a more respectful tone."

GB: "Or you'll do what, exactly?"

UFGARO: "Arrest is one distinct possibility."

GB: "Oh, yeah? On just what charge?"

UFGART: "When I said across the board before, I meant spectrum. You seem to have an obnoxious attitude both on paper and in your social manners, Gary."

GB: "So we're on first name terms, are we? I don't think I got yours. Either of you."

UFGARO: "My colleague and I represent two different federal government agencies whose responsibilities deal with law enforcement and other issues of national and international concern."

GB: "Those agencies you mention, do they have names, unlike yourselves?"

UFGART: "For the moment let's talk about you."

GB: "Fine. My name's Throckmorton E Neumann, brother of Alfred. Birthday January the third, most years, 'cept for Leaps. Otherwise I'm a pathological liar and surreal full length movie parody."

UFGARO: "Are you hung-over or something? You look feverish."

GB: "I always get sick in the presence of distempered animals who like bullying their prey."

(Short and palpably very tense silence.)

UFGART: "You have some kind of problem with authority?"

GB: "Nope. I have a problem with the abuse of authority."

UFGARO: "And how are I and my colleague abusing what you call our authority? Have you been directly intimidated or threatened in any way?"

GB: "Yep. By being forced to come here against my will without being read my rights."

UFGART: "This is not that kind of interview."

GB: "That makes it the illegal kind of interview."

UFGARO: "Young man, this is not helping your case."

GB: "Case? Did you say case as in legal? If I have some kind of case to answer, where's my lawyer? You know, the one the Constitution of this country you say you represent guarantees me? You two do represent this country, right?"

UFGART: "Two branches of the federal executive authority, yes. Rather than case, for clarity let's call it the issue at hand."

GB: "Which is what?"

UFGARO: "Among other things, suspected advocacy of acts legislated as federal crimes including illegal surveillance and outright conspiracy to first degree premeditated murder."

GB: "Guess that means we're talking about the practical economics of political homicide."

UFGART: "The title of your final term's graduate dissertation research paper, yes."

GB: "It's part of the title. For the record, the full thing is The Practical Economics And Business Model Methodology Of Organised Political Homicide."

UFGART: "Sounds like a long-winded way of recommending Murder Inc."

GB: "Either of you unidentified federal agency employees representing some kind of not-quite-specific executive authority which you won't admit to know what satire means?"

UFGARO: "That's Lenny Bruce's favourite word for treason."

GB: "I thought HUAC had been dismantled."

UFGART: "Some of us continue to believe in and uphold its principles."

GB: "All of you live in the same nuthouse as former senator Joseph McCarthy?"

(Second palpably tense silence, longer before GB resumes.)

GB: "Before you two get around to unconstitutionally nosing into my politics I said what I just said as a soft Republican. I voted for Nixon in the presidential election."

UFGARO: "I don't think I've heard an individual your age admit to that."

UFGART: "Are you in the Young Republican branch of the party?"

GB: "No, I don't carry a card for any political party or ideology. I voted for the Right in my first time at the booth in 1960, but I'm not dogmatic. I voted Left Wing Imperialist for Lyndon Johnson my second time because he's the man who can move this country forward. The reason I go by individual and not party is that I originally heard the Kennedy-Nixon debate on the radio, not TV."

UFGARO: "A lot of informed commentators say Nixon lost that debate because he looked like he was dying on camera and Kennedy was got up and glowing like a movie star."

GB: "Maybe there's some truth to that. I saw the debate repeated on TV a few nights later. Contrast with the pictures didn't change my mind, though. Nixon won that debate on all the important geopolitical and domestic issues. From what I saw Kennedy was just playing to the gallery, except the gallery was fifty million people on three TV networks instead of one convention centre."

UFGART: "Did you dislike Jack Kennedy, Gary?"

GB: "No, and I didn't like him either."

UFGARO: "That sounds almost like a politician's answer. Maybe you should run for Congress."

GB: "They elected him. Then some militant socialist maniac shot him dead and we suddenly woke up to the fact we were really an empire. Not some sweet and homey small town anymore like we'd been deluding ourselves. Historically the Caesars had a nasty tendency to get rubbed out by the reactionaries. Now Kennedy's very competent Veep is president and good luck to him because it's one heck of a job in this totally insane world we've inherited."

UFGART: "Would you say your satirical term paper, as you call it, was in any way influenced by the Kennedy killing?"

GB: "Kennedy being shot was the most seismic political event of the late twentieth century. At least in this country. Of course it influenced how I was thinking at the time. Everything happened while I was writing the paper. In the end though none of it was relevant."

UFGARO: "Aren't you contradicting yourself there?"

GB: "No. My paper was partly about necessary conspiracy. Political homicides would require that in double spades if they were being professionally organised the way I describe. I don't believe any of the guff that gets talked about a huge conspiracy to kill Kennedy."

UFGART: "Sadly for this country a great many people do, Gary."

GB: "Essentially the Warren Commission got it right, as I see it. People just don't want to accept that one determined man could pull off something of that magnitude."

UFGARO: "The First World War started with a fairly similar assassination."

GB: "Yeah, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was killed in 1914 by a Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Principin the city of Sarajevo. It was part of a genuine conspiracy by something called the Black Hand organisation which operated separatist terrorists in Serbia and Montenegro for years. Even with all their planning and secret support of a network of Serbian military officers they almost bungled it."

UFGART: "You know your history."

GB: "That's why I know Kennedy's assassination was one man. Because that's the only way it could possibly have worked. Anything otherwise would be so over-elaborate and confused and stupid that it would never come off. A successful political homicide plot like in my paper would have to be as small as possible to have a prayer of working."

UFGARO: "From what you say you seem to like Kennedy and sympathise with what happened to him. You were saying before it didn't matter to you one way or the other?"

GB: "It mattered for this country. Personally, I never saw the point of electing the equivalent of a blue-blooded crown prince and the son of a billionaire. Nixon had to fight his way up the ladder every step. His family were practically sharecroppers. It's a shame he bowed out this time around. Nixon knows how the big decisions weigh down on the little guy. That's why I'd trust him in office more than a pampered aristocrat whose filthy rich dad bought his way in."

UFGARO: "Politics runs on money. Not just in this country. In every country"

GB: "I didn't say Jack Kennedy was a bad president. I just think he was the wrong president. The first major act of his presidency was the Bay of Pigs catastrophe. Trying to overthrow the acknowledged national leader of a sovereign state, effectively using mercenaries and criminals. Look at the price we paid for that. Castro laughed at us in our faces and made us pay ransom to get our people back. He was so mad he asked the Russians for nukes and we almost lost civilisation over it. I don't call that prudent statesmanship, although Jack and Robert navigated us through it and proved themselves great men."

UFGART: "So do you have any fixed political views, Gary?"

GB: "Nice leading question. You're so subtle in the FBI. I know your diehard Republican boss hated Democrat Jack and especially hates even-more-Democrat Robert Kennedy like poison. Despite how effective they ultimately proved themselves when the nuclear chips were down. The president's brother as Attorney General and head of the Justice Department made Hoover scream inside. His immediate boss with an office just four doors down back in the day. Herr Director must just have loved the frisson."

UFGARO: "How did you know...neither my colleague nor myself have said anything about our respective agencies."

GB: "Natural cop leading an interrogation by trained instinct. Whereas the CIA are harvesters of information, to use the intelligence community jargon I've read about. Just a little more passive in approach, so you take the back seat when putting on the heat, so to speak. It's not exactly difficult to figure out."

UFGART: "Let's get back to the subject of discussion."

GB: "You really mean my loyalties, don't you? I was born in this country."

UFGARO: "Your college application and copy of your birth certificate in the file here says your parents were immigrants from Europe, correct?"

GB: "They were war refugees from a country in eastern Europe, Rumania. You'll really get a laugh from this next part. The province they were from is called Transylvania."

UFGART: "Like in the Dracula story? It's a real place?"

GB: "I think Bram Stoker had been there once on his travels. Liked this castle on a mountain he saw and local legends that talked about it. Transylvania just sounds mysterious so I guess he decided to make the origin of his aristocratic vampire character. Sort of a precursor to Joe Kennedy, I guess. I use my Transylvanian origins wherever I can as a conversation starter. A lot of girls seem to think it's funny but I've never gotten any further on the strength of the punchline."

UFGARO: "We didn't miss the gibe about the elder Kennedy. It's in bad taste, young man. So your folks made their way here exactly how?"

GB: "The way most other war refugees did. They got as far as they could ahead of the advancing Russians, you'd say Commies I guess, when the Germans began to lose. Somehow they dodged all the partisans and militias looting and murdering everything and everyone in sight and made it to what became the Allied part of northern Austria. They had to get all the way over the Alps to do it. After that they spent over a year in a refugee camp before getting visas to travel to the States."

UFGART: "You said you were born here?"

GB: "In the quarantine infirmary about a week after they arrived at Ellis Island. Nobody there knew their rural Rumanian dialect or could pronounce their name. That's how they ended up with 'Banomena', which sounds like a sneeze, on their papers and my birth certificate. January the third in 1946, just like I said before. Personally I think it was probably a joke. Eventually they settled in Gary, Indiana, where I grew up. I got my name from the city."

UFGARO: "That makes you just nineteen. It says here you're a scholarship student."

GB: "Yeah. My high school teachers recommended me for the Tumesne Humanities Fellowship to get rid of me because I was always too mouthy in class. I was given a university study place when I was sixteen. To resume the family history, such as it is. I don't have any memory of Ellis Island or the trip west. I would have been only a few months old at the time. All my memories are in my neighbourhood and looking out across Lake Illinois. Before you ask, my dad told me that before and during the War he had been an electrical and telephone engineer. Worked for the Rumanian national post office. At a New York labour exchange he heard there were jobs in his field out in the Midwest. Industry was still expanding out there even after the War. He didn't want to end up in Chicago, too crowded, so he chose the state next door."

UFGART: "Howabout your family's politics?"

GB: "My dad almost threw me out of the house when he heard I gave Tricky Dick my vote. He's as Democrat as they come. It was an American-run refugee camp he and my mother got into and he's never stopped being grateful. Dad still talks about FDR as if he was in office."

UFGARO: "All right, no one's questioning your freedom of political conscience or anything like that. This country was and continues being built on new people coming in from all over the world. Anyone can make their new start here without fear or favour. But in the climate of growing political protest and violence in America today, a paper like yours could be seen as inflammatory."

GB: "Maybe by those with a guilty political conscience. Know anyone?"

UFGART: "Gary, this country also has powerful enemies internationally with sympathisers here at home who would love to see our democratic institutions undermined."

GB: "Name a few."

UFGARO: "I think you know Soviet Russia and Red China both sponsor subversion directly into this country. More than a few so-called New Left liberals and their fellow travellers are willing to dance to that fake revolutionary tune. Just the top of a pretty crowded pile, but you're clearly a very well-informed young man and know the political score in this world."

GB: "Do you count those who call for their Constitutional rights among the subversives? Because I still don't see any sign of my legal counsel."

UFGART: "We're drifting away from the real point again here."

GB: "I don't think so."

UFGARO: "That point being you've written an end of term graduation paper that could be seen as an inciting criminal document and it has a definite political dimension too."

GB: "If I've committed a federal crime like you say, then you have to arrest me. I can see the headlines in all the most salacious American tabloids: 'Gary Banomena, Mad Transylvanian Student Assassin Management Consultant Goes To The Director's Room For Special Treatment!' Or something even more inane and hysterically over-emphasised."

UFGART: "Very funny. We didn't say actual charges were imminent. But as I've mentioned there are several possibilities. What we do want from you is some clarification."

GB: "Sure. Neither of you two mystery men fit into my paper's fundamental premise of rank and prestige or intrinsic significance as the payment criteria for an act of political homicide. There'd be no applicable fee for either of your assassinations. Enlisted men don't count. So rest assured, you're safe."

UFGARO: "Please tell me we can arrest him for that."

UFGART: "No, we can't."

GB: "The same, however, cannot be said for current Directors Thomas Braden of the Central Intelligence Agency or J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Or the head of any such comparable executive agency. By my calculations the terminated lives of either or each of them would be worth approximately two hundred and fifty thousand current dollars."

UFGART: "But we can arrest him for that."

UFGARO: "No, we can't."

UFGART: "Why not?"

UFGARO: "The boy's just quoting his term paper."

GB: "Paraphrasing, actually. Continuing my précis, a national president or premier or head of state otherwise would be worth well over a million current USA dollars, plus necessary logistical and other expenses. On balance I'd demand two million at least. That would probably cover everything. Glad you read it all the way through. My bibliography of research sources is three full pages in itself. Personally I avoid footnotes though. They break the narrative flow. Did you say no charges were imminent?"

UFGART: "I did. We're well aware your paper was speculative and essentially comic in tone. But it reads like an expert how-to manual or blueprint. We think an intelligent criminal or political malcontent could potentially use a treatise like this as a working business plan."

GB: "Like an intelligent terrorist could use Sun Tzu's The Art Of War to plan operations or a smart politician could use The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli to inspire his campaign strategy and subsequent term in office? Both those books are free to borrow in the college library here if you want to look them up. So is A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift which has an interesting and surprisingly contemporary take on the welfare crisis. For the moment though, sadly, I'm unpublished. Unlike Richard Condon, who really has mapped out how to do this right as a novel. Which became an incredible movie of how to do it. Either of you seen the thriller The Manchurian Candidate? Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey and of all people Angela Lansbury as the villain. Khigh Dieh is the best thing in it. I heard John Frankenheimer's going to option something called Seconds, a novel by David Ely I've read, for movie production next."

UFGARO: "Never heard of that writer or novel but we all loved Frank in that freak-out flick. On a whole different level than Ocean's Eleven. By the way, just for the record, do you have plans to release this paper of yours more widely?"

GB: "Haven't had any offers. Maybe I should get a literary agent. Paranoid conspiracy and brainwashing and insane political fanaticism seem to have a big audience these days. Now I'm suddenly seeing how I could turn this into a whole series of short stories or novels."

UFGART: "I'd strongly advise against that."

GB: "That guy who published the book on how to build an atomic bomb, all culled from published material in the public domain by the way, didn't write his book for profit."

UFGARO: "Hardly a responsible action."

GB: "Only if the wrong nuclear power sells the wrong weapons grade plutonium to the wrong apocalyptically-minded evangelistic psychopath. You know, like L. Ron Hubbard."

(Laughter from both unidentified federal government agency representatives.)

UFGARO: "Young man, you do have a certain abrasive kind of wit."

UFGART: "Definitely. But you keep trying too hard to have the last laugh."

GB: "I'm definitely getting the feeling I won't have it here."

UFGARO: "How right you are."

(Sound of loud peremptory knocking from the outside of thick wooden door.)

UFGART: "That will be the Dean. With providential timing, as it happens."

*

From Black Hand Incorporated company confidential archives, excerpted from introduction to 1964 end of term graduate paper The Practical Economics And Business Model Methodology Of Organised Political Homicide by Global Politics and World Economic Trends Batchelor Degree course scholarship student Gary Banomena (current company president), then at the Central University of Indiana.

'Traditionally, assassination of kings and emperors and rulers of all kinds along with their most powerful viziers and ministers and advisors has always been a business. Most historical sources demonstrate conclusively that it's one best left to qualified professionals. I've invented the unique term Political Homicide to distinguish this kind of murder from more internecine killings like palace coups, popular or military uprisings, civil wars and those more random kinds of successfully fatal attacks by aggrieved and embittered individuals that help to make up the long antiquarian death tally.

A political homicide by definition is typically directed at the very top of a power structure, although not necessarily at the apex. In all and every instance however, it is meant to shake up and undermine and demoralise and ultimately discredit the whole both from within and without. A genuine political homicide is a message to all members of that society, usually and intentionally at a nationally vulnerable moment.

Ideological and religious and political motives, whatever their character or form of expression, will not be the subject of this dissertation. Thesis of this paper is rather the realistic acceptance of assassination as a tool of statecraft in the current world order. Having acknowledged the inevitable tendency for great powers of the post-war global settlement to regularly use political homicide to achieve their assorted political and economic and ideological aims, it logically follows the practice should be regulated. Appropriately cost-effected and subject to auditing scrutiny like any other legitimate industry.

Strategically placed and vital resource-rich and geographically anomalous nation states important to the vast power blocs that divide our world frequently have vacillating and difficult-to-deal-with rulers. Poised between contradictory and all too often dangerous alliances with one international organisation or pact or the other. This being necessary to maintain national economies and regional prestige and defence. Such rulers naturally play one bloc against another as best they can. Sometimes taking from both and delivering to neither with any degree of satisfaction. Sooner or later if they upset senior leaderships of East or West enough, a very public elimination attempt will result.

Given this is going to happen inevitably, despite the framework of international law now supposed to ameliorate such conflicts more diplomatically, one issue is clear. Why should those nefariously planned rub-outs and bumping-offs not also be subject to some kind of proper regulation and agreed global treaty? One that will responsibly guarantee and ensure that desired results are fair for hired perpetrators as well as clandestine top-secret beneficiaries?

Almost every aspect of global trade and commodity in commerce has its guidelines and protocols and default rates. Specified, often in exhaustive detail, by the World Trade Organisation under the aegis of the United Nations from which it derives its authority. Great and small nations alike who are signatories to the United Nations Charter agree to abide by them. Global trade may still not be entirely fair and equitable, but the basis of a greater prosperity for all is there. An ongoing work in progress, constantly being added to and improved legally and administratively.

Why should assassinations and similar attempts at either regime change or intimidating the incumbent one for whatever target smaller country, traded between the most powerful opposed nation states as part of their ongoing political and economic and ideological commerce, be any fundamentally different? In short, why shouldn't there be an internationally agreed going rate (in all major recognised traded currencies) for the demise of a senior civil servant or military officer, a minister or head of state? One fully taking into cost-account that individual's responsibilities and duties to the government they serve? And of course their intrinsic importance otherwise in the national power structure?

Time has come in this new Age of Information and unprecedented global communications to employ modern progressive transnationally accepted methods to the necessary business of organising and regulating state sponsored terrorism's finances. There is now a scale of charges for just about everything else. Excess and waste and poor accounting have been the death of countless otherwise viable businesses.

Confusion over standards of quality and trading practice must end. So must uneasy ambiguities of differing quantitative perceptions. If you can go to a modern supermarket and get the same potatoes weighed and priced in Metric or Imperial measures for example, why should you not be as confident expecting the same standard of political homicide whether paying in US dollars, English pounds, Swiss or French francs or Shekels or Yuan or Deutschmarks or Rupees or Pesos or Roubles or Krugerrands or Rials?

Charging scales for political homicides and their perpetrators I propose are simple and rational. Fees will start at an agreed basic rate and adjusted upwards by appropriately qualified actuaries. These will calculate and balance together elements like initially necessary degree of elaboration to enact the crime successfully. Rank of victim and their international commitments and prevailing public opinion will also be significant contributing factors, amongst others.

For example, there should be a marked differentiation between a simple sniper or knife-wielder's quick execution and, say, the full live dismembering and secret burial of a popular and prominent elected national leader or reigning monarch...'

*

Expulsion didn't happen the way I half-expected. But I had to withdraw my first paper in favour of a much more conventional one and although I initially argued it out with the Dean, I caved in. In the end I submitted an alternate one I'd prepared just in case on how various revolutionary insurgencies in non-aligned resource rich nations had affected world food and commodities supplies since 1945.

What I hadn't expected at all is how the paper was savagely marked down. I passed successfully, just, but near the bottom of my class when my work over the previous three years had entitled me to be an Honours graduate. It was blatantly unfair because my alternate paper was fully researched and about a subject entirely relevant to my studies, but those unnamed government agencies still took revenge on me using the Dean and my own college tutors for the bumptious disrespect I showed them.

Started with such hope on the degree course. Even if I was too young to be away and looking after myself the college authorities had taken the trouble to keep a closer watch on me. Instead of the campus student hall, where it was considered I might be too vulnerable, I'd been placed in a cheap apartment in town with three other 'special needs' guys and the college provided a counsellor we saw every week between classes.

Setup worked and I got to gradually be friends and then sort-of comrades with my flatmates. We all did well over our time at study, even if we were all kind of social outcasts one way or another. But my debacle killed the immediate future for me.

Trucker and Dag and Warkentin all got offered jobs in their respective fields of study even before graduation. Right in Indianapolis or locally and naturally they all walked straight into them. But there was nothing for me and after a hurried and distinctly muted farewell party of sorts at the apartment I went back home with nowhere else to go.

My mom was all quiet sympathy. My dad looked at me with a kind of tired resignation. Both of them had a wary watchfulness towards me I'd never seen in them before.

Like I was suddenly going to mutate into a juvenile delinquent. Go out on expeditions of debauchery and licentious adventures in the fleshpots of Gary, Indiana. Begin a long career of depravity and dissolution culminating probably in the electric chair or gas chamber after God Knows What Else.

Tried to explain what happened to them but I couldn't justify it. They knew how argumentative and lippy I could be when I convinced myself I was right. Nor could I excuse myself over showing disrespect to representatives of federal authorities, who had actually written to them.

Letter had come from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the family house, no less. Signed by the local FBI liaison officer based at the Federal building in Indianapolis. Not the man I'd seen, who'd apparently been sent over from the larger regional field office at Chicago.

Smart and impeccably typed and impressive-looking, it said that in view of my youthful enthusiasm I had inadvertently touched on matters of national law enforcement concern. While the Bureau was sure I had meant no actual harm and had no criminal intent, they had to look into possible advocacy of unlawful behaviour whatever the premise. Concluding by hoping that a good parental example would continue to guide me as I sought employment and found my way in the world.

My parents had been saved by the protection and generosity of American soldiers in Austria when they were refugees. Naturally, with terrible experiences I could never share they regarded the American government as nothing but benign. And me showing the height of arrogant ingratitude.

I couldn't explain to my parents how annoyingly condescending and self-important those unidentified agents were. I was just a student at an obscure provincial university trying to make my mark. We were all told again and again by our lecturers to think outside the conventions of our subject and contribute something original, an idea the tutors and professors hadn't seen before.

And when I did just that I was summoned first to the Dean's office to be barracked and intimidated. A few days later two federal agents grilled me in the college boardroom without legal counsel. All of that added up to my nearly being summarily expelled for, as I saw it, doing too well what my college had told me to endeavour in the first place.

But all my parents did was look sad. Worst thing about it was that I knew they were right. I'd intentionally crossed a well-understood common line of decency and good taste on that term paper to see if I could get away with it and didn't really believe I would.

Vindictiveness of the Dean and the college authorities did shock me, though. Even my counsellor put in a few words against me that didn't help, and that was even more unexpected. For the first time I realised I wasn't liked at the college, either by most of my fellow students or the faculty.

I spoke up in class and made jokes on the subjects we studied. I got prickly and personal in class debates. Could turn a phrase like I wanted and make an unusual point that was hard to answer.

Way too sure of myself in other words, and it counted against me without my realising. Thought it was just my youth and not quite fitting in generationally with the older students, but in fact it was active dislike. Didn't see this until it was too late.

Of course my parents did, because it had been the same for me in elementary and middle and high school. I was smart but not popular. Too quick to speak up and make a joke about the wrong thing at the wrong time and not apologise as I should.

Missing too many things in other people meant I just wasn't conscious how influential general opinion of you, right or wrong, can be. I didn't get gossip and I would brush off criticism from parents or peers. Always felt like they were just trying to maliciously drag me back.

Ashamed of myself, both for letting my parents down and letting small-minded bureaucrats get the better of me. I couldn't stand the half-grieving atmosphere at home and finally had certainty, which had been a building conviction for years. I was in the wrong place, and it had no place for me.

So I eventually went to Chicago once I'd saved enough to start out with and caught a transcontinental express for New York City with one small suitcase and a travelling bag. I only left a brief note for my parents when I went, I couldn't face them. On the long trip east, watching my remarkable fast-growing country pass by me with all the breadth and magnitude of a mighty empire, I reflected on my now distant-seeming college days as I looked into my unknown future.

Remembering too the ominous secret I carefully kept, another reason to Go East and hide.

*

Transcript-excerpt of original portable tape recording from Black Hand Incorporated company confidential archives. Tape made privately by current company president prior to formation of company, while a student. Recording captured voluntarily, agreed to by participants, using micro-miniaturised device with attached concealed microphone originally the property of the Central Intelligence Agency. Conversation takes place in shared apartment at Hoosier House, Shelby Street, Indianapolis, some distance from main university campus. Recording from approximately 23:56 on 30.10.1964.Tape length of 60 minutes. Participants future company founders and senior staff as self-identified.

(First voice heard on recording is coming from a radio near to recording device microphone.)

RADIO VOICE: "...and that was the incomparable Oscar Peterson with his freeform jazzy adaptation of the Moonlight Sonata. Good evening to all you midnight music fanatics in not-so-sleepy insomniac Indianapolis! This is WICR, your friendly high-frequency hotbed of student subversion, playing the best of contemporary jazz and blues and everything else interesting that occurs to us through the night. It's four minutes to midnight and in five minutes it'll be the countdown to Halloween, so start carving your pumpkins now. Coming up is the local and national weather and then the news, but first our station signature tune..."

(A choir-sung excerpt rendition of the current Indianapolis University official song plays, succeeding to an instrumental version of the Indiana state anthem 'On The Banks Of The Wabash, Far Away', then a time signal indicating midnight. At this point the radio is switched off.)

DAG ULKÖLN: "Okay guys, that was for independent verification of time and general location. We are now on the record. Don't mind about sitting back from the microphone, it'll pick up everything we say. Just rap like we would normally. Give your name and club nickname and a brief intro if you feel like it. I'll kick us off. Gary, you wind up the introductions and name the Frat Club. I'm Dag Ulköln, nickname inevitably 'Dagnab It!' from my first mis-spent day of reform school kindergarten in Fort Wayne of this state. Currently taking classes in economics, psychology and game theory while studying more nefarious operations of the New York and Chicago stock exchanges on the side. On top of that, if we're going by the four humours and personality types, I'm this apartment's official Melancholic."

SURVIND JUGGERGHAZI: "I am Survind Juggerghazi, son of Bengali immigrants. My temperamental humour is perpetually twisted between the Occident and Orient. This slightly stilted and over-precise way of speaking I inherit partly from my parents, who had little English when they first arrived. I helped them to learn since growing up here, English is naturally my first language and I read a lot of tuition books. I study chemistry which is my first love and am also doing a Business Major at the insistence of my parents. I think they believe I will eventually take over US Steel, a big employer in my home city. The reason Gary, Indiana became my home is that my parents naturally thought the state of Indiana contained many Bengalis like them because of its name when they emigrated to the United States. Needless to say they were very surprised when they got here and were expected to wear deerskin tunics and eagle-feather headdresses..."

(General laughter.)

SJ (continuing): "...my nickname is 'Trucker' because my folks are Hindu and 'Juggernaut' is one of the deities in the Hindi pantheon. A deliveryman to my family's general store who drove a large truck for a transcontinental shipping company referred to it that way casually in conversation with my father one Sunday morning. We were receiving a shipment and I was helping to unload our consignment, it being one of my monthly trips home from the school I went to in Chicago at the time. Not understanding the man's completely different character of cultural reference, my father chose to interpret the confusing terminology as a blessing. He believed from that time that all the delivered goods to our store in Gary, Indiana received a sort of benediction from our gods. Ever since I've mischievously thought of myself as a humanoid Mack Truck. Such is the great and glorious melting pot of America."

(More laughter, applause.)

WARKENTIN WESTGATE: "Uh, Warkentin Westgate, the Phlegmatic one, I guess. Point of origin, Corydon, Indiana, which is way down south, and I'm pure white trash. From a long line of backwoods Hoosiers, and the first of my hillbilly family to go north to university. They all think I'm some kind of Martian changeling who appeared among them. I call myself the 'Morse Code Killer', my Citizen's Band handle. I'm what's referred to as a 'Radio Ham', and pretty good building communications equipment and the like. I got drafted into the student radio station we just heard and spend a lot of afternoons there when I'm not in classes, for which I get extra course credit. I'm doing electronics engineering and broadcasting technology courses. Over to your continuing comedy riff, Gary."

GARY BANOMENA: "This is the junior member of the frat club at Hoosier House, which is the actual name of the building, and not a follow-on from my bucolic colleague, here. He's pointing a corncob shotgun at me as I say this by the way, and I haven't got the heart to tell him it only shoots moonshine..."

(Warkentin Westgate laughs uproariously.)

GB (continuing): "...excessive quantities of which we are secretly imbibing against college regulations, tomorrow being a typical day of classes, at this impromptu frat club party."

WW: "Actually Gary, its Old Kentucky Hangman brand bourbon. Pretty much the best you can get. I've mixed us up the classic 'Hangman's Special' with infused lime juice and very finely ground pepper. My dad runs a little bar at home for his pals and is a cocktail expert. He smuggled a whole crate of it across the state line last year to avoid sales tax. He doesn't realise I know where he buried it in the woods near our house. So I brought us up a few bottles for the party and one for graduation."

GB: "Warky, they are wackily and warkily delicious and I salute you. I will prove it by gradually finishing the bottle. Lippy young unidentified man doing the salutation is me, Gary Banomena. An unusual name for this country. Or probably any country. Come to think of it, all of us stand out in that department. I stand out even more so for my larger than usual lips and distinctly swarthy complexion. And I am the most infectiously Choleric of personality disorder types."

(Laughter.)

SJ: "And a razor-sharp debating technique on issues of politics and legal issues of justice and all things involving the comparative anatomy of voluptuous co-eds."

GB: "Thank you, my devious friend. My little moniker comes from the mysterious province of Rumania known to horror novel and movie fans as the place where Bela Lugosi, otherwise known as Count Dracula lurks. Transylvania. Hence the abiding interest in high-temperature devil women, which is clearly a cultural heritage thing and not simple individual perversion..."

(General laughter.)

GB: "To resume. My folks dropped in at Ellis Island as refugees with almost no English other than US Armyspeak and couldn't read their settlement and identification papers. So we got stuck with what was probably a made-up phonetic name or a weird joke. Never mind, it's unique so far as I know. I am sentenced in the delightful prison campus of Indiana University to be studying economics in all its permutations with political science on the side. My cruel nickname with these cruel fellows and undoubtedly more of their ilk in the future is 'Gary from Gary', since like chemically creative and superbiz-savvy Trucker here I also hail from that dreary old steel town, so we're calling the frat house Alpha Chrome."

(Applause, more laughter and toasts to and repetitions of the christening term just mentioned.)

WW: "Dag, I just can't stand it anymore. You've got to give us the dope for that thing on the table. That tiny gizmo is actually a tape recorder? It's only an inch and a half wide and about three long. I've seen wallets it could fit into."

SJ: "Yes, and that microphone on the insulated wire lead is literally no larger than a pinhead. It looks like a prop from a science fiction movie like This Island Earth."

DU: "My boys, you are indeed looking at a piece of the Forbidden Planet future. I think Robbie The Robot carries one of these metal babies as a portable friend. They came out two years ago but you won't have heard anything about it unless you subscribe to Sheik Magazine or For Spooks Only. There are all kinds of models. This one's called the Holzuckermann Mikro-Rekordisch 49e and is jest as squarehead as it sounds. Even got a tiny playback speaker and a plug for tiny headphones built in."

WW: "That is never a tape-recorder."

DU: "Micro-miniaturised tape recorder, Warky. I snow thee not. As used by spies and undercover cops to entrap the bad guys. Plus assorted overpaid and pomaded bad-guy heads of hoggish international capitalist companies as a very expensive toy. Used to record their micro-miniaturised thoughts on how to screw more out of the little guy. The tapes for the thang are, get a load of this, exactly 0.49 centimetres wide. Made of the highest-grade ferric oxide tape there is. Small and thin yes, but you could tie somebody up pretty securely with it if they weren't saying what you wanted to hear."

GB: "How good is the microphone range?"

DU: "In a quiet room like this with decent acoustics it's supposed to audio capture everything including low incidental noise. These are actually made for field work though, and in the outdoors good for about twenty feet even in a noisy environment. One tape like this lasts for an hour. You can even get lower quality ones that go for two. Those are purely for conversations and interviews in controlled conditions like this. See, there's a counter below the tape reel slot that goes up to 7200. That times seconds for a full two hours, and on an hour tape you can measure by the half-second or re-set it to only go halfway. The synchronisation is standardised for any comparable machine using the same tape size."

SJ: "If you get a great deal of extraneous noise, is there any way to isolate dialogue on the tape?"

DU (chuckling): "You're a natural spy, Trucker. Yeah, a good sound engineer can process a tape like this and lift out both background and foreground noise, depending. If there's a track with an identifiable dialogue or other sounds you want, if the capture has been decent enough they can do that."

SJ: "Remarkable."

GB: "You said your dad was something in the CIA. Did he actually give this to you?"

DU: "Nope, that would violate the Official Secrets Act and half a dozen other federal laws. Probably lose him his job if his bosses ever found out. But my dad's absent-minded. They keep giving him spares because he loses them. He does something called debriefing, which means interviewing people who go to overseas countries like behind the Iron Curtain or other sensitive places. You know, like if the head of an important company goes to some international business or industrial or trade conference."

WW: "Like all that business summit stuff we hear about going on in fancy hotels in Switzerland and Bermuda and Hawaii?"

DU: "Just like that. But these guys fly first class to everywhere, like Europe and even Asia and Africa. They meet lots of people from other countries in the same business or industry. Other top people they meet occasionally let interesting things they're working on slip when they're not supposed to. Maybe they want to make deals on the side. Sometimes they've even got sensitive competitive information to sell. That kind of spook stuff. My dad actually goes to the offices of these people once they've flown back so he travels all over the country. Some of them are really high-powered types you know, like the heads of Dupont or General Motors or Chrysler. I think he debriefed Lee Iacocca once, and some of the Fords too. Interviewers have to tape the conversations secretly so they're totally candid. Dad keeps the spare units and batteries in a locked basement store-room, but I've known where the key for it is since I was eight years old."

(Warkentin Westgate's voice increases in volume as he audibly brings the microphone closer to his mouth, sounds of recording device being examined and turned over.)

WW: "Wow. This really is state-of-the-art. I'd love to take one of these apart and see the guts of the inside engineering."

DU: "I thought you might, Warky. So I brought another one back with me that Dad dropped and broke last year. You can have it."

WW: "Hot Deputy Dawg! I love you, Dag."

DU: "Wish some notoriously nice college girl like Belinda Balzack would say that."

GB: "You could try offering her an XXX-ray machine."

(Sudden general burst of spontaneous laughter.)

WW: "How do you come up with those one-liners, Gary?"

GB: "I read the letters page in Scientific American a lot."

(More spontaneous laughter.)

DU: "The history of this thing is amazing. My dad loves to talk around the dinner table, maybe more than he should. He told us that he knows this group of guys that were in the old Office for Strategic Studies during the war years when they finally invaded Germany."

GB (audibly interested): "That came before the CIA and the NSA, right?"

DU: "Right. All these guys were learning as they went. One of the leads they were tracking was this new recording technology they'd heard about on something today we call ferric-oxide tape. Their unit was in a spearhead attack that took over the German city of Dortmund and they just walked into the factory where these new tape recording machines were made."

GB: "Didn't Bing Crosby get in on the patenting of that and capitalise on it for years after the War? I read about it in this book about the recording industry."

WW: "Yeah, him and his group of investors got a good head start. But the technology is so versatile that it spread really fast to become the industry standard up to today."

DU: "Yep, the company was one of several that had been set up by the Third Reich. They never really had the time to develop it properly but what they did accomplish was pretty incredible for the time. That factory in Dortmund was part of a company called Holzuckermann and the place was full of ready-made recorders all packaged to be shipped. They just loaded them up and flew them back to the States. But the best part of it came right next in the aftermath of the War."

GB: "They didn't start making cheap Kraut TVs, did they?"

DU: "Ha, ha! Imagine. All the television pictures would have been square. No, the place was completely undamaged because it didn't look like a factory and wasn't near a railway or main road. The OSS just put it back into production with the original workers and design engineers. They ran it as a highly profitable legitimate business with themselves as a secret majority shareholder. The CIA as it became inherited the company as a going concern and it's trading stronger every year since. Every single rich man and his even richer uncle want toys like this one and they'll pay through the nose to get them."

GB: "And they actually sell these things on the open market? Isn't it all locked-up classified technology or something?"

DU: "Nope, incredible as it sounds a model twice the size of this one, but using exactly the same size of tape reels, is available commercially. You can get one in any good electronics shop practically anywhere in the world, or at least in capital cities. Dad told me the actual unit cost is about twenty bucks in total to manufacture, but they sell for a cool five hundred smackers. That's to keep them exclusive. There's a parallel policy to make the tapes easy to find in almost any country, so you can basically use these things anywhere. Even Radio Shack carry the tapes over here. You can use the same kinds of miniature-work tools to repair both versions if you know what you're doing and use a magnifier."

GB: "Oh Lordy, does that have possibilities for my deranged little paranoid mind."

WW: "What's the biggest mad secret you think you could learn, Gary?"

GB: "Just how low Belinda Balzack's romantic opinion of me actually is."

(Everyone hoots with laughter as Warkentin Westgate audibly and gently places audio recording unit back on the table.)

SJ: "Subtle and careful businessmen could use such a device to get a great deal of sensitive and valuable information if they asked the right questions in the right way."

DU: "You got it, Trucker. One of many such opportunities. I'm going to try my luck that way in New York with another one of these little miracle devices from my dad's secret stash. Anyway, that's the introductions and explanations taken care of. Now to the biz at hand."

GB: "Which is what?"

DU: "The future, as discussed in a soon to be abandoned frat house."

WW: "Well, to be fair it's an apartment. The whole top floor of the building, so we're okay for space and it's quiet. We're the only ones here because no one else wants to live this far from campus. It's practically free because the college owns the building but it's not convenient. I mean, there isn't even a local bus that goes this way. The college express turns up at the head of the road onto Broadway and then heads for Carson Heights right in the opposite direction. If I didn't run the carpool our feet would all get worn out and we'd be hobbling around on our bony kneecaps."

(General laughter.)

SJ: "But we do have the kitchen. Because I suffer from about one million food and other allergies my mother made sure to teach me to cook long before I went away to university."

DU: "And that's had the effect of saving our lives, Trucker. The folks send you all that free food, too, don't they? You've made us all into diehard vegetarians, almost."

GB: "I still have a secret crazy carnivorous side, Trucker. Never underestimate the lure of the barbecue just outside the old family cave. Or the Deadbeef Steakhouse over on East Hanna Avenue."

(General laughter.)

SJ: "Admittedly I particularly like their Giant Blob-Burger Gary, especially the Melted Cheese Meteor version, but with my digestion all over the place I have to be careful. Curries and fresh vegetables are remarkably cheap, luckily. My father bulk-buys traditional curry powders from Sri Lanka and the Punjab through our food import business as part of the general store. Surprisingly those are some our biggest selling products. He trans-ships them on to restaurants in Chicago and Detroit and Toronto. It's cheaper for them than dealing with importers in Los Angeles. To be honest, my mother would call the food in the student commissary inedible. I know the canteen staff do their best but they seem to be forced to buy the worst and not the best things to feed growing students who most need decent nutrition."

WW: "Amen to that, Trucker. All of us owe your mom and dad, big time. Here's to them and to you, until the world ends."

(A murmur of a general toast and clink of glasses, all four young men audibly drain their glasses. Sounds of new drinks being poured and mixed.)

GB (playfully): "What brought on this lonesome and wistful mood, Warky?"

WW: "All our terms finish at the end of the year. So the future is looming."

GB: "Glooming, you mean."

WW: "Be serious, Gary. Soon we're going to have to go our separate ways. I don't really want this to end. I feel freer and more at home here than I do at my real home."

DU: "Yeah. So do I."

GB: "And me."

SJ: "My friends, when you come from a cultural background like mine, your parents depend on you to be everything they could not. Impossible to live up to. I certainly don't know how to do it. Frankly, I dread returning. I've been offered a provisional junior laboratory job at Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals back home. Even if I moved out though, my mother would live half the time in any apartment I got locally. She'd keep a close beady eye on me until some nice modest Bengali girl came along in Gary, Indiana."

WW: "You're a magnet, Trucker. They'll be lining up. All I've got near me at the old family shack are local forest vixens and wild girl rabbits."

(Muted laughter.)

DU: "Goldcalf and Ventnor Investment Partnership Equitable Resources in New York heard about some of my experimental share trading deals on the Chicago stock exchange. They were just small trades on low value company shares I did with some other students as a research project. We scored a few surprise hits on the returns. Analysts at the firm picked up on the percentages. GVIPER actually sent someone out to a college open day to recruit me and some of the other people in my class I clubbed in with."

WW: "Some new national TV company are building a local station in Corydon. Building them all over the Midwest with plans to expand east, apparently. They need broadcast and transmitter engineers. I've been told I can pretty much walk into a job there. It sounds just about the most boring thing I could imagine. Good luck in the big city, Dag."

(A general 'Hear, Hear'.)

GB: "I'm not even sure I've got a future. Something I wrote for my course got me in trouble. I have to meet some nosy federales tomorrow in the Dean's office, no less. Dag, I'd really like to borrow this recorder to have some proof of what they say without them knowing. I get the feeling they're going to try to get really heavy with me. Have you got a spare tape for this?"

DU: "No problem. In fact you can have it, that's one my dad thought he lost and got replaced. Found it one afternoon in his den under a pile of stuff when I was clearing up for my mom. After we finish up I'll prepare it and show you how to use the microphone best. I can tell it appeals to your devious side. Thinking of becoming a spook yourself?"

GB: "Just got the feeling it'll be good training. Whatever the future."

WW: "Nobody knows what's going to happen. But one thing I do know is that I never really had any friends growing up or in school before I came here. Nobody I ever trusted or really liked. And I know that I can trust and rely on you guys for any emergency. We're just as close as family, or even closer. Somehow we'll come back together, I can feel it. So right now, before anything else, the future is as many Double Hangman Specials we can put away with what we've got left. Blot out the cold light of day tomorrow. Get your glasses over to the makeshift kitchen bar, gentlemen."

(All present laugh heartily, footsteps and the sound of pouring liquid and ice being tipped into glasses and enthusiastic mixing.)

*

Warkentin Westgate, a gentle rangy redheaded and soft-spoken likeable giant, definitely had a kind of second sight or talent for precognition. He was never wrong when he anticipated something. Maybe it was part of the fatal flaw he had otherwise.

Horrifically I found out about that only a few weeks later, with less than a fortnight before we all finished our courses and Indiana State University closed for the holidays.

*

Sixteen wasn't even that unusual an age to take up college study, as I found to my surprise when I arrived in early 1961. There were already ten or twelve other young people there my age, all on various other appropriate scholarships or bursaries. All of them, unlike me, were either from Indianapolis itself or boarded with sponsor families approved by the Dean's office.

My family didn't know anyone in the state capital and the university didn't have any more suitable families on their list. Since legally I was still a child they had to provide supervision, and it wasn't deemed advisable I go to the student halls of residence. In the end they solved the problem by putting me in a more isolated apartment the college owned with three other 'special needs' students.

Those being Dag Ulköln, Warkentin Westgate and Survind Juggerghazi, four seemingly ill-assorted guys who had all been outsiders at home. Who still found themselves outsiders in what for us was the first big city any of us had ever lived in. But what we now had was freedom.

I was wary of sharing living space with people I didn't know, and to be honest I was afraid of being bullied as the youngest. I'd always been physically small and it seemed to attract the worst inclinations of the tougher boys and girls I went to school with. When seventh grade and high school began it got especially bad and I had to repeatedly change schools, to my parents' intense frustration.

Despite all those distractions I did surprisingly well academically at the subjects I liked and voluntarily did more study and homework than I needed to. Which impressed some of my teachers and of course made me even more socially unpopular. All of them were glad to finally get rid of me to a scholarship-assisted college course because I was angry and argumentative in class too.

Resigned to probably being equally badly treated by my new flatmates I was amazed when initially nothing happened. Then nothing continued to happen. We just got on with our courses and gradually got used to each other and after a few months the school nurse supervisor stopped visiting, seeing that we'd all apparently adjusted perfectly well.

For the first time I found I could trust people close to my own age, even though a few years makes a big difference generationally when you're that young. I was really a kid and they were all young men. But to my even greater surprise I actually found myself taking the lead frequently.

'Latch-key Kids' as they were later called was what I grew up as. Both my parents worked long hours and couldn't be there when I got home from school so I looked after myself. A lot of the time I made a start on dinner for my mom or cooked it entirely.

Mom was insistent that I learn to cook properly for later in life. At first I hated it like any child who hates to stand still, but grew to enjoy experimenting and usually picked up our groceries on the way home from school. Oddly enough I bought most of our food from Survind Juggerghazi's parents without knowing or meeting him or even knowing of his existence.

Indian-A General Food And Import Store was at the grimier lower end of Broadway in Gary and had been a derelict warehouse before 'Mr Jug' put his money down on it back in the late 1940s. Just as Survind later told me in his rueful way, Father and Mother didn't in the slightest understand the American idiomatic meaning of 'Indian'. Nor the historical/geographical/navigational confusion of Columbus and his conquistador successors which led to it.

As you went in to the store you'd be confronted by a larger-than-life stand-up cardboard cut-out of a beaming 'Mr Jug' spreading his hands beneficently and indicating the extensive list of food types you could buy. All the usual things and noticeably fresh bread and vegetables, which were delivered at six in the morning each weekday and Saturdays. Unusually the store opened only an hour later without fail, and stayed open until nine in the evening on the same fourteen-hour schedule, the only store in the city to do so.

It was also the only place in Gary where you could get certain kinds of imported food too. Shrewdly, 'Mr Jug' made food importation a cornerstone of his business and it stood out for that reason. You could actually order otherwise difficult to get spices and condiments and assorted rarer foods if you paid a deposit and agreed to buy them for three months or more.

Sundays 'Mr Jug' would open at eleven and close at three, but made it special because this was 'Deli Day' when Mrs Juggerghazi made delicious traditional Bengali food you could carry home. Curries and similar foods were almost unheard-of there at the time, and it was fabulously exotic to most people once they lost their various inhibitions. Once it caught on they couldn't sell enough of it.

Mrs Juggerghazi even started teaching popular traditional food classes on the side and they quietly raked in money from their unflinching hard work. And that was the reason I never saw or met Survind or 'Trucker' as I later knew him, because they used most of the money to send him to a private boarding school in Chicago. He only came back home every month or so.

When university beckoned he had some of the highest marks ever recorded for a student applicant for his courses and just sailed into port as far as the academic side went. But he suffered from so many allergies and reactions against various typical American foods that he had to have special meals prepared for him at his school. So the university placed him in the apartment we shared because it had a kitchen and he could never have eaten in the usual student canteen.

Benefitting all of us living there with him, because he had his mother's natural chef's gift. Out of necessity he made himself into a gourmet and was the most effortlessly independent guy I ever met. Between myself and Survind we all ate well against the odds despite our tiny budget from the college.

Survind's parents regularly sent him huge parcels of dry food and spices so we were actually better off than most of our peers. Parcels were so big we had to use the car we pooled in to pick them up from the shipping distribution office in town. Dag and Warkentin, talented as they were in other ways, would burn water if they left it on the boil.

Quietly, 'Trucker' Survind was generally the head of the class for most things he did. So were Dag and Warkentin. All three had a kind of visibly apparent confidence they knew where they were headed in life and towards the future instinctively.

Envied that in them, and the kids I remembered from school who also had that natural seeming ease with themselves. Never had it myself, or any kind of inner peace. Always I was tormented by a sense of just too many things staying perpetually beyond my grasp.

Living in the apartment did also teach me that despite appearances everyone has their vulnerabilities. Dag was a case in point. He was a genius at planning and abstracting problems successfully, wheeling-dealing and a genius-level mathematician. But he suffered from a severe condition of depressiveness that seemed to be part of his Scandinavian heritage and sometimes made him miss classes.

He had to take something called 'anti-depressants' which back then had to be dispensed directly to you by a nurse in a hospital or proper dispensary. At the college pharmacy they would only give him a couple of days' supply, mainly for weekends or public holidays. It surprised me to see someone with such vitality and intelligence practically paralyzed by a mental condition, and I always made sure to update the nurse about Dag if he was in a bad way, giving me a sense of responsibility.

Partly due to my age and not living at any of the student halls of residence, I didn't socialise that much otherwise. The usual college tradition was that any students over the legal age of 21 bought the booze for the others in their particular group. I'd never drunk before I came up to Indianapolis since I wasn't part of any clique where beer occasionally got passed around after school.

Warkentin brought up bottles of bourbon and brandy and wine from home he swiped under the nose of his wealthy 10,000 acre farming connoisseur father, but neither he or Dag or Survind much drank to excess either. Surprisingly again, Trucker was the most experienced of all of us with strong liquor. 'Mr Jug' was fond of Japanese Sake and they regularly had it with family meals, so the young Survind was fortified earlier and much more sensible about intoxication than the usual young American male.

We all became friends. For the three years I spent at Indianapolis State University that dingy but pleasant apartment was the happiest home I ever knew before or since. I took economics with Dag and Trucker so we constantly talked through our subject and readings in it at lunch.

In the evenings we helped each other out with all the homework and too-frequent tests. 'Warky' as we dubbed our gentle red-headed giant and natural on-campus bodyguard, had a beaten up old second-hand spacious Chrysler '53. He punctiliously carpooled us to college most mornings.

'White Trash' Warkentin Westgate, as he so frequently described himself to the extent most other students thought he was an actual hillbilly, was in fact the son of an affluent landowner and gentleman farmer who owned the aforementioned 10,000 fertile acres of land and most of the other businesses in Corydon, Indiana downstate. He never talked much about why he was classified a 'special needs' student but he also took medication pills from the college pharmacy and I gathered he'd been in regular psychiatric care since his childhood. Warky was otherwise a smart boy and his father wanted him to go to a big university like Columbia or even MIT with his brains and talent, but the 'Morse Code Killer' preferred to stay near home.

I found out the reason why during early December of 1964. Unusually we hadn't had any snow yet that year and none of the local lakes yet had ice on them. That was what probably saved all of us, if that's the right way to describe covering up a sexually motivated first-degree murder.

Dag and Survind and myself were all at the apartment getting ready to turn in and wondering what had happened to our usually strictly regular flatmate when the phone call came through. Hoarse and uncharacteristically almost hysterical, the usually phlegmatic Warkentin begged all of us to drive down to an address none of us knew, where he said he was, and to park in the back alley. Even more unusually we discovered his car parked neatly in its usual place outside, although he hadn't carpooled us back that day and there had been no contact or explanation from him.

Warkentin proved to be in an incongruously tasteful and large suburban mansion which we found easily in one of Indianapolis' richest neighbourhoods. It was completely empty of people apart from himself and the brutally strangled body of a girl I recognised from my politics classes. When he came to the back door and let us in I didn't even recognise Warkentin himself, deathly pale and drawn and haunted, practically gibbering with mortal terror at what he'd done.

It was then I and the others learned that Warkentin Westgate suffered from intense murderous impulses aggravated by something called 'Audient Autosuggestive Syndrome'. Certain kinds of combined sounds and music could virtually hypnotise him into a sort of fugue state where his killer instincts became uncontrollable. He invariably lost consciousness until the attack was over, and his great strength meant he was virtually unstoppable.

When he was only eight but already preternaturally strong he'd tried to kill a farmhand and very nearly succeeded. Immediately he was taken out of school and quietly sent to an out of state private sanatorium where a battery of psychiatrists and doctors diagnosed the extremely rare disorder. Finally they prescribed him Lithium and several other strong medications to control it, released Warkentin back to his family's care and he'd been more or less all right ever since.

But he'd secretly stopped taking his medication at university over the last few months. Frequently upsetting his digestion and making him feel sick and poisoned, Warkentin hated his dependency on the pills. He felt fine otherwise and the urges hadn't come at university, probably because he was too busy to let them affect him, so he felt it was safe.

He'd met the girl I and Dag and Survind recognised to our horror a few days previously by chance in the student canteen. They started carrying on a secret passionate and quite illicit love affair, something new to Warkentin, who'd never even, like myself, had a regular girlfriend before. They'd gone off into the countryside to do it since they had nowhere else.

Her parents were strict Catholics but had left her in the house to go to Chicago for the weekend, which they regularly did. The girl had friends but had never been the partying type and never let them down. So with the well-policed neighbourhood they lived in they felt it was safe.

Warkentin said he didn't remember anything from the moment the girl brought him to her beautiful house and put on one of her parent's classical records, danced with and kissed him and led him upstairs to her bedroom. He came to himself what must have been hours later, with her cold and pallid throttled body beside him. Stumbling downstairs he found the phone and desperately called us.

Now what were we going to do? Frigidity settled over my mind. All of us were complicit just by being there and we'd never be believed if we claimed innocence of involvement.

Something cold and unwholesomely calculating activated in me and to my own great surprise I took command of the impossible situation. I told Survind to take Warkentin downstairs to sit in the living room and quickly turn out all the lights downstairs and stay away from the windows. Since we'd actually parked on the street up from the house I told Dag to quietly bring the car into the rear access alley and back it into the small carport there up to the back door of the house so we could load up the trunk.

When Dag came back a few minutes later I had him help me strip the bed and wrap the girl's body in her bedclothes. We took it downstairs through the living room and into the kitchen at the back, passing Warkentin on the way huddled up and quietly whimpering on Survind's shoulder. Swiftly and as silently as we could in the dark we put the body in the trunk and closed it firmly.

Then Dag and I had to put new sheets and matching pillowcases on the bed which we finally found in an airing cupboard in the hallway between the girls' and her parent's bedroom. That was the hardest part, we had to get it right so that a casual inspection wouldn't show anything suspicious. Slowly and patiently we got Warkentin out, all of us into the car and drove away at a moderate speed.

Before we left I took a moment to examine the record player, still with the needle quietly skipping and scratching in the final blank groove. A nocturne by Chopin which my own parents loved and incessantly listened to the same classic recorded version of back home. I made a mental note never to play the works of any nineteenth century Romantic composers with Warkentin in the room.

Most dangerous part wasn't the initial drive back to our apartment, since young men in a car even at that time of night in a university town is no news. Most of the time the police barely take notice unless you're driving erratically. We got back almost without seeing another car and not a single police cruiser.

Behind the small building where we had the apartment there was an unfinished new apartment block development. The construction workers had left piles of bricks out, and there was rope and some canvass sacks I remembered seeing. I was small enough to squeeze through the makeshift gates of the temporary chain link fence enclosing the stuff and passed enough for our purposes to Dag.

No one else inhabited at the back of our building, just vacant lots full of old trash, so that meant we weren't seen. Soon we were out of town and headed along country roads to a lake we knew as a popular scenic beauty spot. A road ran the circumference of the lake and there was a section that was danger-signposted as being unusually deep and not to be used for swimming.

Wrapping the body tightly around the middle with the rope, we used each end of the coil to tie on the canvass sacks filled with pilfered bricks. We lowered the body in and it sank quickly out of sight, barely any bubbles at all in the gloom. The others wanted to rest but I insisted we get back right away, we could rest in our own beds where it was safe, because this definitely wasn't.

Don't know how I got through the tense and panicky exhaustion of the next few days. We didn't talk much, but I told Warkentin and Dag and Survind we had to make sure we did nothing out of the ordinary. Every student at the college was probably going to be questioned when the inevitable hue and cry began.

But to my astonishment the police never even noticed any of us. When the disappearance did provoke an investigation the local chief went through the student hall of residence records and grilled every student listed there, but somehow missed us off-campus ones. Our tutors must have assumed that we'd been seen like everyone else and I was never asked a thing, nor my flatmates.

None of the other students in my classes talked about it to me either. I wasn't friends or close with anyone else and had only spoken to the girl herself a few times. I'd just respond if it came up with wondering what had happened to her and looking sad and confused, so I got left alone.

Incredibly, no one seemed to have noticed that Warkentin and the girl had been talking in the canteen either when they met, or after. But he was shy and undemonstrative, pretty much the quietest young man on campus and didn't attract attention of any kind. Instead they'd simply gone to her house in her own car when they both finished their classes early in the day and in a largely empty student parking lot, nobody had apparently noticed that either.

We took a vow of silence. I made Warkentin solemnly promise as part of it never to stop taking his medication again and he just as solemnly undertook it and kept it all the years I knew him later. But we didn't escape the full weight of grief that came out of what we'd done.

A few nights before our scholastic careers respectively ended and the university closed for the holidays we were watching our small television together, starting to relax again with no breath of suspicion falling on any of us. The local news came on at 10pm and then, before any of us could react, the parents of the girl Warkentin had murdered came on live to make a general appeal for information about her disappearance. They showed family photos and a portrait picture and her enrolment portfolio taken on the day she'd started two years previously, heartbreakingly wholesome and hopeful and young and radiantly beautiful.

None of us had the gumption to get up and switch it off. We watched the piteous and tragic public entreaty all the way through and wordlessly the rest of the evening programme until the graveyard shift movie double bill slot came on after midnight. The others silently got up and went to bed as I stayed motionless staring blankly at the screen, finally passing out halfway through Whirlpool starring Gene Tierney.

And now the memories intermittently blocking out dawn glaring through the foggy night train windows abruptly dissipate into insistent light. Granite and steel canyons of New York City loom over like great incisors and swallow me as my express grinds to a halt in Grand Central Station. Three long days of remembering grim episodes of the past I don't want and the fearsome unknown future, suspended in a timeless instant of clarity, like nothing I've experienced before.

*

CHAPTER THREE: WRATH OF KINGS

Fear is an assassin; if you let it in your life, it will kill your dreams.

Matshona Dhliwayo

Transcript-excerpt of original portable tape recording from Black Hand Incorporated company confidential archives. Tape made privately by current company president prior to formation of company, while a freelancing employee-candidate to the United Nations, applying to various related global economic trends-analysis departments and public information units. Recording captured using micro-miniaturised device with attached concealed microphone originally the property of the Central Intelligence Agency. Conversation takes place in the office of the director for Economics of Commodities Commerce and Harvest Yield global statistical analysis branch of United Nations at New York City headquarters, self-identified as indicated. Date of recording: 17.03.1965. Participants are aforementioned director, Gary Banomena (recording) and additional United Nations human resources and legal advising official unidentified at time of recording.

(Applicant Gary Banomena has already entered office and activates micro-miniaturised recorder manually in briefcase while removing papers, conversation in progress.)

UNKNOWN ADVISING OFFICIAL: "...him, Director. Although I concur with some of your assessment, this applicant lacks experience. He only graduated from Indiana State last year."

DIRECTOR ACHILLE KOLOBO ENTEBBE: "And were we all not such callow and hopeful young men once? This is meant to be a progressive institution, David. It is very much a work in progress and not yet twenty years of age in itself, like this young man here. It was built for his generation and needs the finest thinking his generation can offer for the greater good. It is why we are all here."

GARY BANOMENA: "Thank you for seeing me sir, Director."

DAKE: "The office of Achille Kolobo Entebbe is always open to youngsters willing to think outside the conventions of dry statistical analysis, Mr...have I pronounced 'Banomena' correctly there?"

GB: "Yes sir, the emphasis is on the 'om' syllable in the middle."

DAKE: "In my home country of Burundi and across the continent of Africa, nuances of inflection in a name are crucial to identity and its implied heritage and loyalties. Not merely those of the tribe and immediate ancestry, either. It fascinates me that a nation so relatively new as the United States also has such a plethora of subtle distinctions, for all its seeming leaving behind of the past otherwise. Your name, young man, is of a type I am entirely unfamiliar with."

GB: "I'm first generation descent from European war refugees, sir. A lot of others were going through the same terminal at the time. I think the family name may be a collective administrative typo."

(Director and Doctor Achille Kolobo Entebbe and other advising official laugh politely.)

DAKE: "All the horrors and absurdities and paranoid character of the twentieth century seem to have their roots in administrative bureaucracy. It's mad determination to find a categorisation and segmentation for every imaginable person and concept. Hence the conspicuously surreal acronym of my own department. One which requires much more creative thinking and inference than the rather dry categorisation of a statistical information department might suggest."

GB: "That's why I sent you my paper, sir."

DAKE: "I have read with interest and minute attention Necropolis Economics: Famine And Food Supply As Modern Tools Of Statecraft. I also managed to obtain a copy of your remarkable The Practical Economics And Business Model Methodology Of Organised Political Homicide. Both are, to use a pleasing colloquialism of your fine country, attention-grabbers."

UAO: "In this field that's a big understatement, Director."

DAKE: "Please indulge me, David."

GB: "If I can be bold, Director, was it the Dean?"

DAKE: "Precisely. We are required to thoroughly vet our prospectives. I contacted your former college's head merely to confirm your studies at Indianapolis. To my surprise however he was more than obliging and provided me with a Telexed mimeograph copy of the work that caused you no little trouble. He advised me strongly against hiring you. For a student to provoke such intense reactions from authority over an academic submission is always of interest. He called your withdrawn term paper morally subversive."

GB: "I had to see what were probably representatives from the FBI and maybe the CIA. They were pretty rude and condescending. Then refused to identify themselves and it really irritated me. I wasn't polite and I kind of surprised myself. Probably they would have arrested me if they had real grounds to."

DAKE: "The Dean said his unidentified visitors had mentioned that very subject. And, in passing, that they were indeed from those two federal agencies. You are as quick on the uptake, using another such lucid colloquial, as these two excellent papers indicate. So I am hiring you with equal temerity. You will report to my personnel office at eight-thirty tomorrow morning for signing the necessary papers. Then begin the tasks I decide to assign. I hope this will prove feasible."

GB (long pause): "...It can't be that easy? I mean, thank you. Sir and Director both."

UAO: "Ha, ha! Kid, the Director here is not like other bureaucrats. He's a builder and we're trying to rebuild the world into a better place. Truthful and impartial information is an essential part of that. In this world split ideologically right down the middle that's a tall order. That's what thinking young guys like you can make happen here if you're given an open field of operations."

DAKE: "Just so, David. Mr Banomena, Gary if I may, without being too unrealistically idealistic, what I am looking for is genuinely subversive thinkers such as yourself. Ones willing to draw truthful conclusions even if they are politically inadmissible. Statistics and social and economic policy are not associated with humour in general. But Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, which you reference in your own index of sources for your latter paper, debunks the cherished rational empiricism of its time. By using its own principles to quite sensibly suggest the ultimate extreme of systematic cannibalism. Solving at a stroke the food crisis facing the disadvantaged rural and urban poor of his era. Humorously, Swift states the grotesque and horrific with the same kind of detachment as nuclear strategists today talk of megadeaths from a theoretical atomic weapons conflict between the Western and Eastern powers. Your uncomfortably insightful papers have done something not dissimilar. I believe you wrote both, particularly the one on assassination, for the same principled reasons. That, as I see it, is the perfect qualification for working in my department. I look forward to welcoming you as my latest junior colleague first thing tomorrow."

GB: "...Wow. Again, thank you both. I hardly know what to say."

DAKE: "You will not find me an easy boss, Gary. The department I direct has strenuous requirements. Youth and energy find discipline slowly and with tolerant guidance, which I will provide if that does not sound too paternalistic. I succeeded to becoming the Director I am only from having once been sitting just as uneasily and in need of a decently paying job as you are now. In short, and again colloquially, work the job for me and it will pay and reward you."

GB: "A friend of mine from college would say, Hot Dawg."

DAKE: "Excellent. It is approximately noon. There are always good theatrical matinee shows in Manhattan and of course numerous movies and diverse other entertainments to choose from. I recommend you go out and enjoy yourself for the rest of the day and make sure to have a good night's sleep. You will be working hard tomorrow and thereafter. Welcome to my team."

GB: "Thank you, Director. I go to the Little Rialto over on Seventh Avenue a lot and there's a triple bill there this afternoon of Peter Lorre in Confidential Agent, Arsenic and Old Lace and The Mask Of Dimitrios starting at 1:30. If I hurry I can just make it over there."

DAKE: "Then you must waste no time, young man. Cinema will soon of necessity be the least thing on your mind. Until tomorrow."

*

Op Ed piece for the Manhattan Globe And Mail newspaper, New York City, special extra morning edition, International Affairs correspondent Michael Tumesne writes (dated 12.11.1965):

"Brutal assassination is unfortunately for all of us no stranger to the streets of New York City. The list of murdered prominent politicians and citizens and criminals that all call this great capital of the Eastern Coast home is wearisomely long.

Predominantly however it has been domestically motivated violence, political or criminal or outright lunacy that has traditionally disgraced our peace. Lawful conduct of business in a great city with big money at stake often goes with such desperate and grotesque barbarity.

Seldom, however, do we become so blatantly the arena for corrupt and craven and powerful foreign potentates to make their most vicious kinds of political statements to their audience abroad. In my humble view that is unquestionably what has happened here, in a dark context which I will shortly make clear after giving a little relevant background.

My father was also a journalist like myself, and I followed on in his footsteps with his help. During the latter 1920s and through the entire 1930s until the Second World War intervened he was a foreign correspondent and covered the rise of Fascism in Europe. In particular as it hastened the downfall of the Weimar Republic in Germany, and other nations of central Europe.

Prior to the election of Adolf Hitler in a Germany reduced to desperate beggary by the Great Depression, partisan violence on its streets reached levels we can hardly imagine. Political killings and assassinations became almost grimly normative.

So brutalised and coarsened did everyday society become in some parts of the country, so great the poverty, people would turn to anyone who could seem to deliver national order. Social and ethical liquefaction took hold of the failing Weimar Republic, then the most liberal nation state in Europe, and it ultimately became the all-devouring monster which was Nazi Germany after a long and determined process of subverting and moral and political perversion.

On his return to America my father established an educational trust promoting scholarships at regional American universities to promote unusual and unconventionally gifted students, one given additional federal bequest funding in 1949. He believed that the stifling of unusual thought and expression on arbitrary grounds of custom and prejudice and doctrinally interpreted moral compass to be anathema to a progressive society, having seen one consumed from within by vicious totalitarianism.

Fascism has not yet taken hold in America despite the imperialist policies we have lately adopted under the grimly determined Harry Truman, seemingly kindly Ike Eisenhower, late statesman Jack Kennedy and his iron-willed successor Lyndon Johnson. However it would appear commonplace savage assassination has made a terrifying comeback in a new transnationally motivated form on our own streets.

Assassination at its most sickening is to my mind the only possible explanation for the tragic death of Mr Achille Kolobo Entebbe, a champion of the poor and dispossessed of our sorry world. A full three page obituary listing his achievements and a bibliography of his official and private publications is being carried as a tribute in this same special morning edition of the MGAM.

I have interviewed Dr Entebbe several times, for this newspaper and also the Consolidated Associated News Organisation London newswire service publishing in various international daily newspapers in translation. He had considerable international respect.

Unfailingly courteous and patient over explaining often complicated statistical issues of food supply mechanics and trade routes and the policies influencing them in assorted nations overseas, he never failed to clearly demonstrate their intimate human impact. Tremendously intelligent and well-spoken, he was no condescending or remotely unapproachable intellectual, though.

Whenever I met him I was unfailingly impressed with his dedication to truth. Researching and verifying and publishing that truth to the multifarious and ever-growing global audience that looks towards the United Nations, his employer.

This remarkable man, a native of the central African state of Burundi which is a neighbour to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda and Congo-Brazzaville, was the late professional director of an important agricultural statistics branch of the UN and based at their headquarters here. Also an honourable and well-known opponent of oppression imposed on various national minorities, specifically via restricted food supply and bad agricultural policies by more authoritarian foreign governments.

He did not flinch from criticising our own government over its continuing policies of arguable oppression with respect to our own Native American population either. He is one of the few United Nations officials to have paid unpublicised and extended working visits to assorted Reservations across the country and also similar ones in Canada, meeting their leaders and ordinary residents and hearing their grievances.

Ostracism both political and economic of our own native populace remains a stain on America's honour and gives the lie, at least partially, to our proclamations of love of liberty for all. Doctor Entebbe was not shy of pointing this out and earned the enmity of many current Administration officials.

Impartiality however was his infallible watchword. There was nothing ideological or politicised in any of Dr Entebbe's work, despite him holding distinctly left-wing views personally.

First and foremost a scientist, he applied a rigorous detachment to all the national and regional cases he studied and his conclusions were only on the data. Whether a particular regime was NATO or Warsaw Pact-leaning, or the American government itself, never signified in his conclusions.

Solely concerned with human need and suffering, he bravely and unhesitatingly named the guilty as he could identify them. Who the guilty were friends with, Us or Them or non-aligned (or indeed Us), connoted less than nothing to his sensibility of injustice against the weak and callings for succour on their behalf.

He was found slain in an alleyway early this morning near a meat processing and packing installation in lower Manhattan. So grievously wounded that initial identification could only be made from items found in his coat pocket.

Our own Coroner's office swiftly declared an accidental death. No criminal investigation is to proceed, and that to my mind is itself culpably criminal.

Of late Director and Doctor Achille Kolobo Entebbe had reportedly been the target of an amplified number of threats to his person, some even delivered at places he patronised such as restaurants and other places of leisure. These were directly related to his work.

Clearly he was being followed. Almost incontestably he was marked directly for assassination and there was detailed and specific knowledge of this by our own law enforcement agencies.

In short, there was a price on his head. Authorities here with sources across the international spectrum of power knew it.

The ultimate sanction was to be levelled on Dr Entebbe for his integrity and expressions of it in the world's media. Powerful potentates overseas offered money and eager professional killers took it up with the result we tragically know.

According to one of his own trusted staff, the director was offered protection by unnamed senior federal law enforcement officials. Temporary protective custody was mentioned.

Allegedly this offer was refused. The director apparently listed among his reasons an abiding concern for the welfare and safety of his staff who might be aimed-at in his place should he take refuge.

Having no way to independently confirm or verify this assertion (my staff informant contacted me anonymously and provided an unsupported transcript of the purported conversation), nevertheless I believe it. Moral determination and humanitarian sentiments of this kind are entirely consistent with what I know of former Director and Doctor Achille Kolobo Entebbe.

Identity of the paymasters of the assassins, and there must have been more than one assassin, are of course currently unknown to the public here and overseas. Quick suppression of any serious official inquiry means that the global public who have been deprived of this good man may likely never know who gave blood-soiled treasure to silence him.

Unlike the unidentified federal officials who offered the later Director protection. Here we find a resounding official silence, a criminally culpable silence.

National leaders and premiers and prime ministers and foreign kings have fulminated against this man who dared to expose their tyrannies in his gentle and measured and empirically researched way. There is a depressingly long list of likely suspects who wanted to put an end to his activities.

Let me list some of them who are on the public record in the last ten years as hating the victim in print and recorded and published speeches. I would not want any of them to feel unfairly discriminated against in the international hierarchy of murderous-regime notoriety.

In fact, let's set it out in the form of a possible candidates-for-charging sheet:

Prime Minister Mohammad Hashim Maiwandwa in the name of Mohammed Zahir Shah, current reigning King of Afghanistan.

Enrique Peralta Azurdia, President of Guatemala.

Ahmadou Ahidjo, President of Cameroon.

Héctor García-Godoy, Provisional President of the Dominican Republic.

Fernando Belaúnde Terry, President of Peru.

Norodom Kantol, Prime Minister, in the name of Norodom Sihanouk, Head of State of Cambodia.

David Dacko of the Central African Republic.

Sukarno, President for Life of Indonesia.

Batista of Cuba before the revolution We're Not Supposed To Talk About.

Fidel Castro of Cuba AFTER the revolution We're Not Supposed To Talk About even if we really miss the superior quality of Cuban cigars.

Faisal, Prime Minister in the name of Faisal, King of Saudi Arabia, another one We're Really Not Supposed To Talk About Patriotically because we prop Faisal and his repressive kingdom up with permanently stationed troops and by training his monstrous regimes' professional torturers and murderers.

Chiang Kai-shek, President of Taiwan, and we ABSOLUTELY are Not Supposed To Talk About Him Ever because in 1949 he failed to keep Mao Tse Tung from turning Our Red White and Blue ally China into Red Hot Enemy Red China.

Tulsi Giri, Prime Minister, in the name of Mahendra, King of Nepal.

Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Prime Minister of Malawi.

Eduardo Frei Montalva, President of Chile.

Aden Abdullah Osman Daar, President of Somalia.

Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, King of Bhutan (via press statements through his ministers).

Said Bin Taimur, Sultan of Muscat and Oman.

René Barrientos + Alfredo Ovando Candía, Co-Chairmen of the Military Junta of Bolivia.

Nicolas Grunitzky, President of Togo.

Tunku Abdul Rahman, Prime Minister in the name of Sultan Ismail Nasiruddin Shah, Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaysia.

Oswaldo López Arellano, President of Honduras.

Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Francisco Orlich Bolmarcich, President of Costa Rica.

Houari Boumediene, President of the Revolutionary Council of Algeria.

Ayub Khan, President of Pakistan.

Ferdinand Marcos, President of the Philippines.

Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco, President of Brazil.

Aklilu Habte-Wold, Prime Minister, in the name of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia.

Ne Win, President and Prime Minister of Burma (also known as the Republic of Myanmar).

Alfredo Stroessner, President of Paraguay.

William Tubman, President of Liberia.

Fiame Mata'afa Faumuina Mulinu'u II, Prime Minister of Western Samoa.

...and finally, from my sources the most personally and violently outspoken of the whole crew directly and publicly in his own country advocating the victim's death and, incidentally, the directly USA military-sponsored source of so much of our cheap gasoline through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company via a domestic intermediary oil company straight to your (again) innocent-looking local station fuel pump:

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah or king of Iran (my italics).

...Otherwise and so much uncomfortably closer to home let's include, for completing the ugly picture of successfully-conspired murder, both Richard Helm and Henry Kissinger. Helm I name for his recent time as head of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Kissinger from a politicised academic perspective, curious since he himself has some historical experience of a tyrannical and homicidal regime. Both are very firmly on the record in similar sentiments to many terrible despots Dr Entebbe had set himself against.

Helm and Kissinger in their published comments took direct issue with Dr Entebbe's outspoken championing of so many persecuted minorities in our sorry world. Both of them were resolutely against his vocally articulate advocacy challenging, in whatever overseas country, deliberately cruel policies of starvation as a tool of targeted minority genocide.

At least half those regimes and national leaders listed above are our allies.

Who paid? Who looked the other way?

All we know for sure is the Manhattan Coroner's office did look the other way. Whatever agency or Agency got to them first is, so far, a matter of conjecture.

Whatever guilty agents and Agency agents there are out there, be assured of one thing. Myself and others disgusted by this vile and immoral and perverted fascist act of political murder on our streets of a dedicated and principled man will be watching for you.

However subtle you think you have been there will be a trail. We will find that trail and follow it relentlessly until we expose your guilt wherever it leads.

The director's work will continue. Truth will out.

No Caveat Emptor on this one. Caveat Homicidus; more like.

Your faithful correspondent, Michael Tumesne."

*

Director and Doctor Achille Kolobo Entebbe was the winner of several major international awards in his field of comparative economics. Startlingly intelligent and a professional statistical scientist. From a central African country twice as big as my home state which I'd never even heard of.

Modest and offhand about his personal achievements I learned from the other guys in the office he had at least two doctorates and PhD qualifications. Belonged to more than fifty professional organisations and was a trustee on countless charitable boards. Rumour had it he was in line for a Nobel Peace Prize.

He'd grown up in a nameless village more than a hundred kilometres from Burundi's capital Bujumbura. Parents were poor farmers but he showed such incredible ability on the abacus, only means of computation in those parts, that his entire district clubbed together to send him to school in the big city. His mathematics and economics teachers successfully applied for a board-and-study Fulbright scholarship to send him to Columbia University in New York and he'd been here mostly ever since.

The Director was the most impressive single individual I'd met up to that time and more than as good as his elegantly-expressed word. From working gruelling twelve-hour graveyard shifts at various all-night Greenwich Village left-wing bookstores, barely able to pay the rent and bills, I was suddenly in a global institution on his say-so. I didn't even have to go in front of a panel or committee because he had complete autonomy in hiring juniors from whatever source he deemed appropriate.

Wasn't quite starving or destitute, but New York City hadn't proved to be the grand welcoming megalopolis of limitless opportunity it advertised itself. I'd found a cheap but very cramped and tiny furnished studio apartment from a tabloid Want-Ad quickly enough. I'd thought I'd end up in Brooklyn or Queensboro from my research but there were a lot of cheap converted and subdivided flats at the rougher northern end of Roosevelt Island, in old buildings the more affluent weren't interested in.

Compared to the house I'd grown up in the place felt like a prison cell. It even had bunk beds instead of a single since it had been previously rented by four construction workers who alternated night and day shifts. I never realised until then how I'd taken ample domestic space for granted.

Roosevelt, or Welfare or Blackwell's Island as the old-timers there more often called it, was surprisingly large and densely populated. Two miles long, right in the middle of the East River, and with the Queensboro Bridge going right over it. Interestingly the United Nations was right opposite on the Manhattan side and there was a regular commuters ferry over.

Otherwise it wasn't quite so popular with well-paid professionals because even the new apartments going up there were small. Without a subway station you had to take an express bus across the crowded Island bridge since it was mainly a car-free urban area. Extremely rare in a place like New York where the traffic is maddening, it drew me in at once.

Soon realised I wasn't going to get a job in my degree field. I'd come out of university study almost at the bottom of my class, even if undeservedly. That really counted when you were up against Ivy League and PAC 10 graduates with Honours marks.

Even if they didn't and weren't pitching with top marks themselves they often had professional contacts in the city acting as references. Just as importantly that unmistakable confidence and sense of belonging that comes from wealth and a good family background. Mediocre on paper, embarrassingly provincial and with the obnoxious frequent confusion over explaining my first name and hometown were the same, I made zero progress in the big city.

In my first couple of months I sent out more than a thousand application letters and enquiries on speculation. Answering numberless job ads I copied from the newspapers, spending whole days in the library just around the corner from my apartment off Main Street on the island. Tried banks, big institutions, large companies, trading houses, even the Stock Exchange and other financial outfits, anywhere that needed economists and buying and selling numbers interpreted.

Barely a quarter even replied, and from the few interviews I could get it became rapidly clear just how ferocious the competition out there was. I'd brought the portable recorder with me and used it to judge how I did at interviews and that taught me a few things. Also discovered the recorder had a neat trick built-in, it could be set to automatically switch on in a quiet room when the sensitive microphone detected voices.

Knew my small funds wouldn't last long when I came to town. My parents despite their disappointment in me had been generous. But when you're on your own without that background but solid support of family, everything changes.

After I came back in January of '64 I got a temporary job as a clerk in one of Gary's department stores doing their payroll and sales statistics, since practical accountancy had been one of the options on my economics courses. Hellishly boring and poorly paid with it, the temporary turned into an established thing that threatened to trap me. Fortunately my parents wouldn't hear of me paying rent, I just contributed towards the bills and food, but they didn't charge me anywhere near my full share.

Everything else I saved, secretly determined to get to New York, which I did towards the end of the year when I judged I finally had enough to make a start. I read as far into current developments in economics and political science as I could. All the time thinking I'd hit the big city as the most well-informed small town kid my future employers would ever see and hire me on the spot.

But I couldn't tell my parents that. They saw me in a steady dependable job, solvent and saving money, presumably for a place of my own. The few times I talked about going to New York got me those intensified sad disapproving looks that were never far away to begin with and followed me like shadows.

In the end I left secretly. Only leaving them a short letter, I explained I had to try my luck while I was still young enough to risk everything and hoped for their forgiveness. It was only after Christmas and New Year had come and gone that I sent them a post office box number as my address.

Couldn't even afford a long distance phone call to Indiana by that time. In fact I didn't even have a phone in the apartment for my first years, I used the payphone in the apartment building's tiny draft-infested lobby. From the New Year I'd given up on my initial hopes and realised I had to find some kind of survival job while I continued to work on new unconventional theses like the one that had nearly gotten me expelled.

Greenwich Village proved to be an unexpected panacea of a kind. Nationally it was the effective visible centre of the counter-culture, as the learned Op Ed pages of the New York Times and Herald Tribune and TIME magazine called what was actually many hundreds of combined social and political and charitable and educational and avant-garde and individually eccentric enterprises all conflated together under that misleading name. To me it felt like a frontier.

Back then you could feel idealism in the air. That air was additionally scented by incense, odd foods I didn't know from the many Vegan restaurants and cafeteria-coffee houses, and an astringent dark harshly persistent odour I only much later learnt was marijuana.

Everywhere in Greenwich Village you saw the symbols and equipages and even the openly practiced rituals of other religions. I saw Buddhists swinging censers and Hare Krishnas rattling tambourines there for the first time, people of every race and faith and eccentric style. A fabulous and surreal exoticism.

Fortunately for me it was equally saturated with political and experimental and revolution-promoting bookshops. Every second store seemed to be a book dealer of some kind. Everything available from the latest literary fiction both American and European and academic books to rough-cut unbound tracts from secret publishers and treasonous pamphlets and roughly stapled close-typed photocopies offered for pennies by aspiring novelists.

Many of the bigger bookstores opened twenty-four hours in the day. Greenwich Village never seemed to really sleep. There was always some kind of conspiratorial-seeming meeting going on somewhere.

Lots of them seemed to happen at Kerry's Kuomintang: a spacious and blatantly Communist-aesthetic emporium. Here you saw oddly compelling early Soviet propaganda posters everywhere, busts of Karl Marx and Frederich Engels and yesterday's edition of Pravda, the official Soviet newspaper. Every imaginable left-wing book and publication, including the complete works of Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin and the ongoing output of Mao Tse Tung.

Crawford Kerry who owned it wore a beret like Che Gueverra, an American Communist Party badge and the most bohemian outfits I ever saw, all velvet and lace and wild colours that on him looked stylish in an old-world way. He wrote for the ACP's own national newspaper, plus numerous other liberal newspapers and magazines including the Saturday Evening Post and Sheik Magazine. He was openly and wittily homosexual and loved my jokes about the capitalism of political homicide.

I'd met him by chance while browsing, not knowing he was the owner and held forth about my paper, since I'd earlier noticed there was a photocopied book section for local aspirants. Said I was thinking of making some copies and see if they sold. Kerry laughed like a maniac at the idea of regulated political killer's rates and when he learned I was looking for a job hired me on the spot for graveyard shift work.

Three times in the week and the entire weekend I did twelve hour shifts overnight. Money was small but I could just live on it. If I did a brisk walk to Greenwich Village from a Seventh Avenue stop on a Queensboro-to-Manhattan route I only needed to take one bus to get there.

Young and resilient and determined as I was, nevertheless it was a punishing and utterly exhausting schedule, especially after my weekend work which included the following Monday to make three night shifts in a row. One advantage for me was that it was cheap to eat in Greenwich Village with all the commune-cafes and charitable giveaways. The Hare Krishnas ran an almost-free restaurant that subsisted on food and volunteers and small-change donations.

Crawford Kerry was a generous boss. He had an ongoing deal with a friend or fellow traveller who owned one of the local delicatessens across the street. The man delivered sandwiches for staff in the morning, some of the most delicious I ever tasted, and usually huge.

At his closing time of 6pm the owner always brought over anything he hadn't sold for the night shift people. Delicatessen was also a small restaurant-cum-coffee house where more bohemian types always seemed to be congregating and migrating into the bookstore. We even got spare pies and treats.

I'd come close to starving in my first few months economising on food and it was one of those blessings you always remember later. Now and then Crawford would bring us luxurious delicacies from expensive restaurants he got taken to by admiring commissioning editors and senior journalists and liberal cosmopolitan socialites. In my experience otherwise, very few vocal socialists would even share the sugar bowl at a coffee shop and I constantly had to prevent them shoplifting at the store.

Solitude characterised my early time in New York. I knew no one in the city apart from the people I worked alongside and wasn't naturally sociable. Danger always seemed to be very close at hand too, I had to watch my back everywhere.

Felt and looked vulnerable, which always gave me away. Metropolitan predators always notice and follow that. Younger-looking than my age, I always seemed to attract the watchful ones.

Fortunately I never actually got robbed or mugged. I know I came pretty close a few times. One thing I learnt early was to look like you knew where you were going and in a hurry.

Reading voraciously at the local and main city library when I could kept me occupied, but it was cinema that transported me from the depressing pressures of urban life. Late night television was a good way to discover older films but it was haphazard. There was also this bizarre Midwestern prejudice back in Indiana against frequent movie-going that you even found reflected in job application form questions.

New York had something called Repertory Cinema, an active film culture of past and present that I discovered almost immediately. Manhattan was full of small movie theatres that exclusively showed programmes of earlier film eras. The Metropolitan Art Centre had a cinema club that did full themed seasons of famous classics and more obscure works by well-known directors.

I got to know a place called The Little Rialto on Seventh Avenue, near where my bus stopped on its way to upper Manhattan. For a couple of dollars you could see three features in a row in the afternoon, double features in the evening. Depending on the programmer it might be the genre or star or subject matter or even a supporting actor's presence that grouped the films, leading to the most unusual choices.

Just as true to my new boss's word though, I had no time for that kind of freewheeling day from the moment I started with him and his department. On my first day, the next day after the interview, I was given a stack of international and national and regional and local agricultural reports about six feet high. My task was to get them into a proper tabulated statistical format for each nation in alphabetical order and a generalised précis of derived global trends by the end of the week.

Which I did by putting in twelve hour days like the shifts I'd been doing for Crawford Kerry, the 'Red Queen' as he laughingly called himself, but for this I didn't notice the time. The United Nations had units which ran around the clock since they communicated in real time with every country on Earth that were signatories. To my surprise there were two bathrooms and showers in the basement you could use anytime.

Director and Doctor Achille Kolobo Entebbe made sure I was known to security staff, got full use of those facilities and I think he appreciated my diligence. For my first week I barely went out of the building and turned him in a report he said surprised even him for its care and attention to detail. I had caught more than a breath of the idealism of the place.

Working on the reports and statistical data from all those countries made me realise just how few free nations there were in the world. In spite of the hardships and frustrations I'd experienced that freedom gave me opportunities so many millions, billions even, didn't have a hope of aspiring. Food, something I'd always taken for granted as a birthright in America, was a very real political issue in many lands.

So urgent in fact it provoked armed resistance, terrorist attacks and entire revolutions overseas, which was part of what the statistics I worked on covered. Although our reports and publications and public information had any ideological content carefully screened out, it always hovered there. I equally didn't realise how controversial my department director was in the councils of the powerful.

Juniors in the department didn't only work on the national and international data and government and informal information we received. Everybody answered the phone and outside queries as needed. We also maintained the director's diary and set provisional appointments to be confirmed or cancelled later if he and his secretary were out of the office.

From this I learned he had contact with a great many organisations both in America and overseas that had a conspicuously left-wing profile. He himself joked with staff about being a 'Pinko' socialist, but it was clear those were his genuine beliefs and principles. To the authorities here that was a half-step from actual Soviet communism, and we were then at the height of the Cold War.

Growing up in the American heartland, I only knew about the great Red Scare and the vague grey immensity of the Soviet Threat. Unconsciously absorbing the ideology of my rather narrow context, my parents with their wartime experiences quite consciously reinforced it. So the idea that there were other tangible dangers in the world apart from the everyday of my own never occurred to me.

Until I learned that money, any kind of money but mostly bad money in the hands of bad men, really did make the world go round.

*