Well, there’s no doubt about it – television arts documentary is a fast and furious world. No sooner were we dry and dressed again than the doorbell rang and there was Lavinia on the step, a code-locked briefcase in her hand and a gratified grin on her wide face. ‘Not celebrating?’ she asked. ‘No, Lav, we just finished,’ said Ros, ‘But we can give you a drink instead.’ ‘It’s Francis I’ve come for,’ said Lavinia, ‘Francis, listen, I’ve put out a contract on your life, okay?’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘This is it,’ she said, taking a long and legal-seeming document from her bag, headed with the distinctive, indeed weird, logo of Nada Productions, ‘Just sign at the bottom, please.’ ‘What’s this?’ I asked. ‘Just a sort of paper thing that assigns us the rights in your glorious treatment, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘I just wanted to do the right thing and regularize your position. You do like a regular position, don’t you?’

‘I don’t know, I haven’t been in one for ages,’ I said, ‘I’d better talk to my agent.’ ‘Does he have an agent?’ Lavinia asked Ros, ‘Isn’t he too young?’ ‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Ros, ‘I’ll be your agent, Francis. Sign it.’ ‘Shouldn’t I get a law­yer to check it out?’ I asked. ‘Listen to him,’ said Lavinia, scratching her way into a bottle of wine, ‘This is a cracked-up out-of-work journo who lives off women and he’s just been offered the best TV deal in town.’ ‘Have I really?’ I asked. ‘Take a look, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘You see? Researcher credit. Writer credit. Presenter credit. Three credits on one programme.’ ‘And the money?’ I asked. ‘That’s credit too,’ said Lavinia, ‘If we ever make this thing, and remember, TV is a very tricky world, you’ll get yours, dearie. Especially after Ros and I have got ours. Sign it, Francis.’ I looked at Ros. ‘Sign it,’ she said, ‘Everyone signs for Lavinia,’ I looked at Lavinia, bigger and bolder and rounder than ever. I signed it.

That’s terrific,’ said Lavinia, shoving the contract into her briefcase and then taking from it a plastic wallet, ‘Now you need this.’ ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘It’s an air ticket, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘Austrian Airlines, economy class, check in seven o’clock tomorrow morning, Terminal Two, Heathrow, flight to Vienna. No upgrades allowed, by the way.’ ‘Why are you giving me this, Lavinia?’ I asked. ‘Just sit down here with me, darling, and I’ll explain,’ said Lavinia, ‘It may be a great treatment, God knows, I haven’t had time to read all of it, it’s very long.’ ‘Thirty pages,’ I said. ‘But it’s all questions and no answers,’ said Lavinia, ‘Now we actually have to make this programme. Our work isn’t done. The writing time’s over, recce time starts. You see?’ ‘I don’t see why I’m going to Vienna,’ I said. ‘Because, honey, you’ve only got one lead, haven’t you?’ asked Lavinia, ‘This man Otto Codicil. You have to go and talk to him. Nestle in his bosom like a viper. And get him to tell you all the mysterious secrets of our enigmatic Doctor Criminale.’

‘How do we know there are any secrets?’ I asked. ‘Because it says so in your treatment, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘That’s why they bought it. The Mystery of Doctor Criminale.’ ‘I only meant he seemed a bit of a mystery to me,’ I said. ‘Let me quote one bit, darling, if I can find it,’ said Lavinia, putting on glasses and opening my document, ‘It struck me forcibly. “Criminale has evidently led a life of contradictions and obscurities, of blanks and deceptions, of fragments and evasions, slippages and,” what’s this word here, darling?’ ‘Aporias,’ I said. ‘What’s that?’ asked Lavinia, ‘Is he sick or something?’ ‘No, what it means is that there are gaps,’ I said, ‘To me, the reader, his presence is obscure, his sign is occluded. He’s hard to read and interpret.’ Lavinia stared at me. ‘What do you mean, hard to read?’ she asked. ‘I mean, he’s an incomplete text, difficult to deconstruct, yet for that reason requiring to be deconstructed,’ I said.

‘That’s what you mean by the Mystery of Criminale?’ asked Lavinia, ‘Thank God they didn’t read the damned thing. Now look, Francis, we have to have a better mystery. That’s what they paid for, that’s what they’ll get. I want political deceptions. I want sexual betrayals, financial frauds, that kind of thing.’ ‘I don’t know there are any,’ I said. ‘There’d better be,’ said Lavinia, ‘I want some.’ ‘Where from?’ I asked. ‘Find out from Codicil,’ said Lavinia. ‘Why would Professor Codicil tell me anything like that?’ I asked, ‘He calls Criminale the greatest contemporary philosopher, the leader of modern thought.’ ‘Darling, he’ll tell,’ said Lavinia, ‘They all tell. Just make him think you want him to be in the programme. Then he’ll tell you anything.’

‘Do you mean he won’t be on the programme?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know, till we’ve checked him properly,’ said Lavinia, ‘He may not speak good English.’ ‘You could use subtitles,’ I said. ‘He may not even be telegenic,’ said Lavinia, ‘You can subtitle words, but you try subtitling his face. No, just go there, talk to him, probe him, find an angle, get a story. And then you’d better get him to tell you where you can find Criminale.’ ‘You want me to go after Criminale too?’ I asked. ‘Maybe, if the budget runs to it,’ said Lavinia, ‘It’s very tight, don’t forget. And we have to shape the programme first. So find out where he is, and then check back here with Ros.’ ‘With me?’ asked Ros, ‘I thought I was going to Vienna too?’ ‘Oh, no, darling, I need you to stay here with me and edit,’ said Lavinia, ‘Oh look, taxi’s waiting. Good luck, Francis, and auf Wiedersehen, pets.’

‘That bitch, that bloody bitch,’ said Ros, ‘I just spent two nights in her bed and now she does this to me. Upstairs, Francis. If I’m not coming on this recce with you, I want you to have something to remember me by.’ ‘Honestly, Ros, I’ve got lots to remember you by,’ I said, ‘And if I’m going away for a few days I ought to go back to my flat and pack some things.’ ‘No you don’t,’ said Ros, ‘You can buy what you need at the airport in the morning. There are plenty of shops in the concourse.’ ‘I always wondered what they were for,’ I said, ‘After all, not many people arrive naked at an airport.’ ‘You’re learning a lot, aren’t you, Francis?’ asked Ros, ‘Come on, if this is our last night together for a bit we don’t want to waste time. Is there any more of the Frascati left?’ ‘No, there isn’t, Ros,’ I said very wearily, ‘There’s only orange-juice.’ ‘All right,’ said Ros, ‘Let’s try that.’

So that night before I set off for Vienna turned into a sleepless one, and for several reasons. Ros felt it necessary to give me a great deal to remember her by, but even when she slipped off into sleep’s kind oblivion at last I still lay there restless. Sounds of Bengali floated up occasionally from the street at me; now and then Ros groaned in her sleep. Why, just why, was I going off in quest of Bazlo Criminale? For, in the course of a hyper-active evening, something strange had plainly happened. Criminale had changed for me: no longer a text I had to decode, he had switched into a person I had to follow. But why, when nothing at all linked us together? He was the giant, one of the great superpowers of modern thought; I was the Patagonian pygmy. He was the Lukacs of the Nineties; I was an out-of-work journo. He was the modern master; I was the postmodern nobody in particular. He was the friend of the great and the good, or for that matter the big and the bad: Bush and Honecker, Gorbachev and Castro, Kohl and Mao. Important philosophers like Sartre and Foucault and Rorty had bowed to him; great leaders had honoured him; it was even said that Stalin (notoriously no respecter of persons or keeper of unwanted mementoes) had asked for his photograph. He was complex, confusing, contradictory. But why should I set off to chase an enigma that could well be of my own making?

At that time, not so long ago, I was innocent (I suppose I still am to this day, this very day). But I was not so innocent that I couldn’t see that anyone who had survived and bested the second segment of our sad terrible century must have had some remarkable struggles with history and terror, contradiction and ambiguity. Silence, exile and cunning were James Joyce’s prescription for the task of the modern writer and thinker in an age of brutality and unreason, bombardment and slaughter, ideology and holocaust, a century of intellectual terrorism, an age, as Canetti once said, of burning flesh, when police thuggery had turned on thought itself. Thanks to silence, exile and cunning, some artists and intellectuals had had strange flirtations with the mad ideological world. Pound had played with Fascism, Heideggerwith Nazism, Brecht with Stalinism, Sartre with Marxism, and so on and on. Right to our time the terrible game went on, and still would, whenever intelligence faces power, totalitarianism and fundamentalism of any kind.