Edie Investigates Read Online Free Page B
stricken and abject, and Edie after a few rounds parlayed this into a new table and a new pot.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, reaching into her bag for a pair of wire-rimmed glasses she had found, broken, on the floor of a party in 1974 and never quite managed to throw away. “Would you mind if I—oh, dear, now I shalln’t be able to see anything at all, oh, my—would you mind if I sat just here? I don’t want to crowd you, of course.”
And when the young man smiled in great embarrassment and assured her that the table next to his own was exactly where she should sit, he would not dream of her going anywhere else, and the driver winced at this folly and buggered off, Edie was left able to let her perfectly good eyes wander. And understood at last what it was her subconscious had wanted her, needed her to know.
Across the back of the folder was the single word: BARIKAD.
It was the fashion in some Russian families, during the Soviet period—which Edie regrettably must acknowledge she remembers—to choose names for children which reflected their devotion to the socialist cause. A thousand young Bolsheviks were christened Revolution, Proletariat or Potemkin. But there was only one Barikad.
He had no patronymic, no other names at all. He was the iron man of Stalin’s secret research towns, out in the tundra between Moscow and the Pole. It was said he had transformed his nation’s old superstitions into a new science of the mind. In the stone white of the Russian winter, he built machines to empower his brain, ran current from hydroelectric dams through his bones and mortified his flesh, and achieved a species of transcendence. He had projected his aetheric body into the secret councils of other states. He could curse a man to death, cause sickness with his thoughts. He was the Party’s wizard, and armies and secret organisations and even parliaments went in fear of the Eye of Barikad.
Except finally it was all a lie: a brilliant, implausible, impossible campaign of disinformation to send Western scientists down blind alleys, seeking defences they would never find against attacks which did not exist. Millions of dollars, thousands of hours of research, US marines staring fixedly into the eyes of confused goats; psychic tests run onCelts in Wiltshire and Kerns in Brittany; years of divining, dowsing, spoon-bending and card-reading; Barikad was a fantasy, and he cost the West more money as a dream than he ever could have as a tangible truth. The man, yes, had been real. He had tortured himself on steel frames, drunk wormwood and spoken with spirits. And, predictably, he had died, cooked to cinders in the electric discharge of a turbine driven by the waters of a nameless river. His great engines were never built. The science outposts he supposedly constructed were just labour camps, bizarre make-work for the losers in Stalin’s games: Abkhaz and Ingush forced from the Caucuses, unwise poets, and Party members rash enough to remember yesterday’s promises. In their hundreds of thousands, the unwanted of the Soviet Union were made to disappear, spent as coin to persuade the beancounters in London and Washington of an enormous and uneconomic falsehood.
For a while, it worked.
The liner is terribly grand, and Edie’s wardrobe is made to match. She has learned in the last few weeks the fine points of fluttering, and faffing, and even—in spite of her considerable misgivings—simpering. She quite enjoys simpering. In the compass of the simper lies a vast and nuanced syntax of vapid communication which can mean anything from “Tell me more about your enormous investments” or “Not until after we’re married, Your Grace” to “Get lost, creepy, before I call a copper”. She has to acknowledge, too, that the cruise as a concept is not without charm. All the stultifying rules of sexual conduct which prevail in England seem to be left behind when the ship leaves the White Cliffs in its wake.
Note to self
.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, reaching into her bag for a pair of wire-rimmed glasses she had found, broken, on the floor of a party in 1974 and never quite managed to throw away. “Would you mind if I—oh, dear, now I shalln’t be able to see anything at all, oh, my—would you mind if I sat just here? I don’t want to crowd you, of course.”
And when the young man smiled in great embarrassment and assured her that the table next to his own was exactly where she should sit, he would not dream of her going anywhere else, and the driver winced at this folly and buggered off, Edie was left able to let her perfectly good eyes wander. And understood at last what it was her subconscious had wanted her, needed her to know.
Across the back of the folder was the single word: BARIKAD.
It was the fashion in some Russian families, during the Soviet period—which Edie regrettably must acknowledge she remembers—to choose names for children which reflected their devotion to the socialist cause. A thousand young Bolsheviks were christened Revolution, Proletariat or Potemkin. But there was only one Barikad.
He had no patronymic, no other names at all. He was the iron man of Stalin’s secret research towns, out in the tundra between Moscow and the Pole. It was said he had transformed his nation’s old superstitions into a new science of the mind. In the stone white of the Russian winter, he built machines to empower his brain, ran current from hydroelectric dams through his bones and mortified his flesh, and achieved a species of transcendence. He had projected his aetheric body into the secret councils of other states. He could curse a man to death, cause sickness with his thoughts. He was the Party’s wizard, and armies and secret organisations and even parliaments went in fear of the Eye of Barikad.
Except finally it was all a lie: a brilliant, implausible, impossible campaign of disinformation to send Western scientists down blind alleys, seeking defences they would never find against attacks which did not exist. Millions of dollars, thousands of hours of research, US marines staring fixedly into the eyes of confused goats; psychic tests run onCelts in Wiltshire and Kerns in Brittany; years of divining, dowsing, spoon-bending and card-reading; Barikad was a fantasy, and he cost the West more money as a dream than he ever could have as a tangible truth. The man, yes, had been real. He had tortured himself on steel frames, drunk wormwood and spoken with spirits. And, predictably, he had died, cooked to cinders in the electric discharge of a turbine driven by the waters of a nameless river. His great engines were never built. The science outposts he supposedly constructed were just labour camps, bizarre make-work for the losers in Stalin’s games: Abkhaz and Ingush forced from the Caucuses, unwise poets, and Party members rash enough to remember yesterday’s promises. In their hundreds of thousands, the unwanted of the Soviet Union were made to disappear, spent as coin to persuade the beancounters in London and Washington of an enormous and uneconomic falsehood.
For a while, it worked.
The liner is terribly grand, and Edie’s wardrobe is made to match. She has learned in the last few weeks the fine points of fluttering, and faffing, and even—in spite of her considerable misgivings—simpering. She quite enjoys simpering. In the compass of the simper lies a vast and nuanced syntax of vapid communication which can mean anything from “Tell me more about your enormous investments” or “Not until after we’re married, Your Grace” to “Get lost, creepy, before I call a copper”. She has to acknowledge, too, that the cruise as a concept is not without charm. All the stultifying rules of sexual conduct which prevail in England seem to be left behind when the ship leaves the White Cliffs in its wake.
Note to self
.
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