Absolute Friends (35 page)

"Nearly all." And nearly all Adorno, nearly all Horkheimer and nearly all Marcuse, Mundy thinks, recalling a similar interrogation in Berlin a few lifetimes ago. I love them all, but I can't remember a word any of them said.

"From their varying perspectives, each of these eminent writers tells me the same story. The corporate octopus is stifling the natural growth of humanity. It spreads tyranny, poverty and economic serfdom. It defies the simplest laws of ecology. Warfare is the extension of corporate power by other means. Each thrives off the other and the recent war proves the point in spades. Does this urgent message cut any ice with you, Mr. Mundy, or am I conducting a dialogue with myself?"

"It rings a lot of bells, actually," Mundy politely assures him.

Dimitri is evidently approaching the summit of his oration, as he has no doubt approached it many times before. His face darkens, his voice lifts, as he leans confidingly towards his audience.

"How do these corporations achieve their stranglehold on our society? When they're not shooting, they're buying. They buy good minds, and tie them to their wagon wheels. They buy students wet from their mothers, and castrate their thought processes. They create false orthodoxies and impose censorship under the sham of political correctness. They build university facilities, dictate university courses, overpromote the professors who kiss ass, and they bully the shit out of heretics. _Their one aim is to perpetuate the insane concept of limitless expansion on a limited planet, with permanent conflict as its desired outcome.__ And their product is the zeroeducated robot known otherwise as the corporate executive."

He has reached the summit and is starting down the hill.

"Mr. Mundy, twenty years from now there will not be a place of learning in the Western Hemisphere that hasn't sold its soul to corporate bigotry. There will be only one permitted opinion in every subject from the Garden of Eden to pink stripes in toothpaste. There won't be a contrary voice that's worth a whore's embrace unless somebody turns the river round and gets it flowing in the opposite direction. Well, I am one of those somebodies, and so is Sasha, and I am inviting you to be another."

The mention of Sasha rouses Mundy from his trance. Where on earth is he? Is he still working on that print of Tyrolean peasants, or has he graduated to postmodern architecture? Dimitri has taken to the floor. Other men of power, when describing their plan to redesign mankind, might fling their arms about, but Dimitri is a master of the economic gesture. His walk is measured, hands clasped behind his dock laborer's back. Only occasionally does he release an arm to make the short, emphatic point.

The purpose of his great plan is to create _corporation-free academic zones.__

It is to foster _seminaries of unbought opinion,__ Mr. Mundy, open to students of any age, nationality and discipline who are interested in reinventing human incentive in the twenty-first century.

It is to establish nothing less than a _rational marketplace of free opinion,__ where the true causes of war, and the means of preventing it, can be aired.

And finally his plan acquires a name--not several names, like its author, but one resounding name to echo down the ages: the Counter-University, no less, a global venture, Mr. Mundy, as multinational and elusive as the corporations it seeks to counter, untainted by vested, religious, state or corporate interest, and financed by Dimitri's own immense, larcenous resources.

"The Counter-University has no dogma," he declares, swinging round on one heel to address Mundy down the room. "We offer no doctrinal front for our corporate adversaries to piss on. Like them, we shall be offshore and responsible to nobody. We shall use stealth. We shall be intellectual guerrillas. We shall install ourselves wherever the enemy is encamped, and subvert him from within. Think your own fine University of Oxford. Imagine a student of science. He walks out of the bio lab. He comes a couple of hundred yards down the road. It's been a long day. He sees our sign, THE COUNTER-UNIVERSITY. He's had his head up some corporate test tube all day. He walks in, sits down, listens. 'They're inviting _me,__ as an individual, to live up to my duties as a responsible citizen of an endangered globe? What the fuck's happening to me?' he says to himself in perplexity. 'These guys are off the wall. This is not what my corporation sponsors me for. I'm not paid to have a conscience, I'm paid to find new ways to fuck up the planet.' Then he listens a little longer, and he begins to get the idea. 'Hey. I'm somebody after all. Maybe I don't have to prove what a big guy I am by fucking up the planet. Maybe I should reconsider my relationship with it, love it even.' Know what he does then? He takes our card. And he goes home. And he visits a certain Web site we have discreetly recommended to him. This Web site will further awaken the sense of discovery in him. Soon he will see himself as a pioneer of disrespectful thinking. He will have a dozen such Web sites, each one of them a stepping-stone to spiritual freedom. Web sites for our Counter-University. Web sites for our Counter-Libraries. Web sites for scurrilous but informed debate among our ever-growing army of renegades."

He stops dead, turns, tilts his body so that Mundy has to meet his gaze. _I've got it,__ Mundy thinks. _You're Erich von Stroheim in__ Sunset Boulevard.

"It sucks, okay, Mr. Mundy? An old crackpot with money coming out of his ass thinks he can redesign the world."

"I didn't say that."

"Well, say something. You're making me nervous."

Mundy finally manages to: "Where do I come in?"

"You were until recently the joint owner of a language school in Heidelberg, I believe, Mr. Mundy?"

Sven speaking. Sven who picks flyshit out of pepper. Behind Sven sits Angelo, arms folded in the shadows. Exhausted by his performance, Dimitri has collapsed onto the sofa.

"Guilty," Mundy agrees.

"And the purpose of the school was to teach advanced English to business professionals?"

"Correct," says Mundy, thinking that Sven speaks exactly like one of his best pupils.

"And this school is now closed, sir? Pending legal proceedings?"

"It is quiescent. It is, at present, an ex-school," Mundy says blithely, but his wit, if such it is, finds no acknowledgment in Sven's unyielding eyes.

"But you are still co-owner, together with your former partner, Egon?"

"Technically, maybe I am. Practically I'm sole owner by default. Along with the bank, six mortgage companies and sundry creditors."

"Sir, how would you describe the status of the school building, please, at this moment in time?" Sven opens a folder that looks as though it knows more about Mundy's affairs than Mundy does. _Moment in time,__ I'm not sure about, thinks Mundy the pedant. How about just _at this moment,__ or even plain _now?__

"Boarded up and padlocked, basically," he replies. "Can't be used, can't be rented, can't be sold."

"You have seen it recently, the school, sir?"

"I tend to keep my head down. Lots of writs still flying about. I drove past it a month ago and the garden was a jungle."

"What is the capacity of the school, please?"

"In numbers? Teachers? What do you mean?"

"How many persons may be seated at one time in the main room?"

"Sixty, probably. That would be the old library. Sixty-five at a pinch. We didn't work that way. Well, we did for the odd lecture. It was small classes in small rooms. Three teachers--me, Egon and one other--six to a class, maximum."

"And in income terms? Cash? What were you taking, if I may inquire, sir?"

Mundy pulls a face. Cash is not his best subject. "That was Egon's side of the house. Top of my head, reckoned in teaching hours, twenty-five euros a pop, per hour per student, three teachers working on demand--it was made-to-measure stuff, mind you, six in the morning some of it--grab 'em on their way to work--"

"Sure," says Sven, bringing him down to earth.

"Say three, three and a half grand a day if we're lucky."

Dimitri comes suddenly alive again. "Your students, they came from _where,__ Mr. Mundy?"

"Wherever we could get them. We targeted the young managerial class. Some from the university but mostly local business. Heidelberg's the high-tech capital of Germany. Biochem, IT, software, media, print technology, you name it. We've got a whole satellite town down the road that does nothing else. And the university to back it up."

"I heard people of all nations."

"You heard right. French, German, Italian, Chinese, Spanish, Turkish, Thai, Lebanese, Saudis and black Africans, the whole caboosh, male and female. And a lot of Greeks."

But if Mundy is fishing for Dimitri's nationality, he's wasting his time.

"So the money came from all over the world," Sven suggests, as Dimitri again lapses into silence.

"Just not enough of it."

"Did any go out, sir?"

"Too much."

"All over the world?"

"Only with Egon. Otherwise we just paid ourselves and the bills."

"Did you work weekends in this school, sir?"

"Saturdays all day and Sunday evenings."

"So the students came and went all days, all hours? Foreigners of all kinds? In and out?"

"In our heyday."

"How long was your heyday?"

"A couple of years. Till Egon got greedy."

"You had lights in the windows all night long? Nobody was surprised?"

"Only till midnight."

"Who says?"

"The police."

"What the hell do the police know about anything?" Dimitri cuts in sharply from the sofa.

"They're authorities on peace and quiet. It's a residential area."

"Did you have, like, school _terms?__" Sven resumes. "Like 'this is vacation time, this is term time'?"

Thank you for explaining what a school term is, Mundy thinks. "In theory we were open all year. In practice we followed the established pattern. High summer was no good because pupils wanted to go on holiday, Easter and Christmas the same."

Dimitri sits suddenly upright like a man who needs to hear no more of this. He slaps his hands on his thighs. "Okay, Mr. Mundy. Now you listen to me and listen hard, because here it is."

Mundy is listening hard. He is listening, watching and marveling. Nobody could ask more of his powers of concentration.

"I want your school, Mr. Mundy. I want it back in business, up and running, chairs, desks, library, all appropriate equipment. If the furniture's been sold, buy new. I want it looking and talking like it was before it went belly-up, but better. You know what is a mystery ship?"

"No."

"I saw the movie. A crappy cargo ship like a tanker is rusted to hell. It's a sitting duck on the horizon for the German submarine. All of a sudden the crappy cargo ship hoists the British ensign, drops its side and has like a sixty-pounder stashed in its guts. It shoots the shit out of the submarine and the Nazis all drown. That's what your little language school is going to do on the day the Counter-University hoists its flag and tells the corporations they are no longer running the fucking world their way. "Give me a date, Mr. Mundy. If St. Nicholas came through with a bag of gold tomorrow, how soon would you be able to open for business?"

"It would have to be a pretty big bag."

"I heard three hundred thousand dollars."

"It depends how much interest they calculate. Over how far back."

"You're a Muslim. You shouldn't talk interest. It's against your religion."

"I'm not a Muslim. I'm just learning the ropes." Why do I bother to say this?

"Three-fifty?"

"I wasn't able to pay the staff for the last three months. If I'm ever going to show my face in Heidelberg again I'd have to pay them first."

"You're a hard bargainer. So it's half a million. When d'you open?"

"You said for business."

"I said _when.__"

"Technically, as soon as we've cleaned the place up. We might be lucky and get a few walk-ins, we might not. To be functioning in any way that makes sense--September. Mid."

"So we open early and we open small, why not? If we open big, they'll get us thrown off the campus. Open small and look busy, two cities only, and they'll think we're not worth the hassle. We open in Heidelberg and the Sorbonne and fan out from there. Do you have signs on the door?"

"Brass plates. Did have."

"If they're there, clean them up. If they've gone, make new. It's business as usual, the same old crap. September, when we bring in the big lecturers, we'll drop our side and start shooting. Sven, see he takes an ad somewhere. 'Mr. Edward Mundy will resume his former post as principal of his school with effect from whenever.'" The baby-blue eyes hold Mundy in some kind of painful, almost pitying stare. "You don't look right to me, Mr. Mundy. Why aren't you waving your bowler hat in the air? Are you depressed or something that a guy you don't even have to fuck is getting you out of hock for half a million bucks?"

Being told to change your expression is never easy, but Mundy does his best. The sense of dislocation he experienced moments earlier has returned. His thoughts are the same as Dimitri's: Why am I not rejoicing?

"Where does Sasha come in?" he says, which is all he can think of to ask.

"The Counter-University will have a fine lecture circuit. My people in Paris are in the process of assembling a stable of incorruptible academics, men and women who regard orthodoxy as the curse of free thought. I intend that Sasha assist in this process, and be one of the lecturers. He's a fine mind, a fine man, I heard him and I believe in him. He will have the title of director of studies. In Heidelberg, he will supervise the creation of your library, advise you on your future academic schedule and assist you in the recruitment of human resources."

Dimitri stands up with a speed and decisiveness that brings both Sven and Angelo leaping to their feet. Mundy unwinds himself from the sofa and stands too. It's like my first time in the mosque, he thinks. When they stand, I stand. When they kneel down and put their heads on the rush matting, I kneel down too and hope someone's listening.

"Mr. Mundy, we have done our business. Sven will discuss your administrative concerns with you. Angelo will take care of your remuneration. Richard upstairs has a short contract for you to sign. You will receive no copy of your contract, you will receive no confirmation in writing of anything we have agreed here tonight."