And fun it wasn’t, my visit to the British Legate. I agreed with the PR lady. The Diplomatic Suburb turned out to be a drably incomplete development lot, laid out in petty avenues and crescents and a very far cry from Lazaretto! — a far cry too, from the grandiose diplomatic quarter of the old Hav. Half a dozen unprepossessing villas flew the flags of different states, and displayed half-hearted architectural features of their nationalities — here a florid touch of Alpinism, there the simulacrum of an Iowa barn — but several more were unfinished, and there were some vacant building sites, too. The British Legation had mock half-timbering and was rather like a Surbiton villa of the 1930s, even to the garden gate and the box hedges. O tempora, O mores, I thought to myself, remembering the colonial elegance of the old Agency.
The Legate opened the door himself when I rang the crested doorbell. He looked at his watch as we shook hands, and walked before me into a downstairs room with royal portraits above a desk and copies of Britain Today on a deal coffee-table. He was a plumpish man of about thirty-five, wearing an open-necked shirt beneath his suit jacket. He had a gingerish moustache and pale, protruding blue eyes, and suggested to me a middle-ranking regimental officer offered early retirement. His vowels were not impeccable.
‘Now look here,’ he said, ‘I’ve found out about you since we talked, and I want to give you a few words of advice. I’ve had trouble with your sort in previous postings. We had that Mary Ann Abbott at Lagos, and that was bad enough. I’ll be straight with you. Here in Hav it just won’t do. Do you understand me? I gather they’ve given you a blue pass, God knows why, but I’m not going to tolerate any hanky-panky or prying about. You are a British subject, remember. None of that Welsh nonsense with me. Do you get me?’
‘I really only wanted to ask you—’ I began, but he interrupted me.
‘Don’t ask me a damn thing. If you want to ask anything, ask at the Office of Ideology. You have a blue pass, go and ask them. You see my situation here, I have a very small staff and I have my work cut out for me. As for old times’ sake, if I were you I’d forget all about old times. Old times is not what Hav is about. Old times is not what this Legation is for. Here, take this to read on the way back to the resort. Hear, read and inwardly digest.’ And thrusting a pamphlet in my direction, he led the way to the hall and without offering his hand closed the door behind me.
I looked back when I got to the garden gate, and caught sight of him watching me from a corner of his office window, like a Parisian concierge at a lace curtain. The pamphlet was an order from the Myrmidonic Republic, headed by the Republican helmet-logo, and evidently circulated among all foreign legations:
Members of diplomatic missions accredited to the Myrmidonic Republic are reminded that they will be held accountable for the behaviour of foreign guests in the Republic. Reports of disrespectful conduct, circumvention of Republican security or privacy laws, blasphemy towards Cathar establishments or unauthorized intrusion into the affairs of the Myrmidonic Republic will invite serious repercussions. Foreign visitors should be advised that under Myrmidonic customary law private citizens are subject to the discipline of organs of the State, including diplomatic missions, which are themselves permitted to operate within the Myrmidonic Republic only as licensed agents of that Republic
No wonder, I thought as I walked back towards Palast One past the glittering entrances of the Tower — no wonder half those legations were unoccupied.
Lazaretto feels so utterly alien to all that I remember of the old Hav that when I returned to my suite I was surprised to find a letter awaiting me.
Welcome back [it said]. You are no doubt surprised to hear from me, after all that has happened in Hav since we last met, but the force of destiny can be merciful and here I am installed as general manager of Lazaretto! (spelled with an exclamation mark, please note, to show how excruciatingly fashionable we are). Remember Chevallaz, who use to be our restaurant manager? He now runs the catering here, with a staff of a thousand chefs. No, I am joking, but any complaints about the food, put them to him — not enough ginger with the sea-urchins, eels over-pickled, I know what a gourmet you are. It’s all a far cry from the old Casino, but we are lucky to be here still, and there are still some friends about. Now then, mark in your engagement diary: Dinner with Mario, Casino Grill, 7.30 p.m. Monday evening! THIS VERY EVENING!! Until then, many embraces. Ciaou, Mario Biancheri.
PS. I expect you know that the book you wrote last time was banned after the Intervention, so I’ve never read it. I’m told it mentions me. If you happen to have a copy tucked away in your make-up bag…
I called home later, and this was an exhilaratingly Lazzareto experience, because it was all voice-activated. It works like this. You lightly press your door-key (a round metal representation of the Havian Maze) upon a gun-metal strip which runs around every wall of your suite, like a dado, whereupon a disembodied operator, speaking apparently out of the ether, invites you to place your call. Name the number you want, and after a few clicks and pauses the voice of your beloved replies from far away — not through a single loudspeaker, but through multi-stereos throughout the suite. You speak wherever you like — walking about, in the bath, pouring yourself a drink, and the voice from home is vibrantly all about you. The conversation ended, the last oral kisses exchanged, and a touch of the key on the tele-dado switches it off.
‘Not much like the old days, eh?’ said Biancheri at the dinnertable. ‘Remember the black dial-phones at the old Casino? But look over there now — and there behind the bar was the very same barman whom I had known at the Casino in the old Hav, and years before that at Harry’s Bar in Venice — still smiling the same Gorgonzola smile, still managing to wave a hand and polish a glass at the same time. ‘You see? Not everything is gone…’
For I must understand, he told me, lowering his voice a little, that Hav’s Myrmidonic rulers were no fools, whatever else one might say of them. ‘They knew that our old team at the Casino was a good team, not only very professional, respected throughout the world, but also experienced in the sometimes circuitous ways of Hav. You understand me? They knew us, we knew them.
‘At the Intervention we were scattered of course, as you will remember, but they had no difficulty in finding us. I had stayed in Turkey, old Giovanni there had gone back to Venice to retire, Chevallaz went home to his family restaurant in Zurich. It was not difficult to lure us back to help launch this somewhat excessive venture. What’s the phrase you have these days — over the top? OTT? Well, dear friend, if Lazaretto! is OTT, so were the opportunities they offered us.’
Chevallaz joined us then, and remarked to me that he was glad our cat Ibsen had recovered from his wounded paw. I was taken aback. How did he know about Ibsen? The two men looked at each other wryly. ‘My dear Signora,’ said Chevallaz, ‘you must realize that your telephonic system here is not exclusively your own. High-tech is inter-tech in the new Hav.’
‘Precisely,’ said Biancheri, laughing. ‘And you should assume that if Chevallaz knows about it, by now the Security Perfect himself is aware of your cat’s misfortune. If you don’t wish to start a War of Ibsen’s Paw, take my advice, Jan, don’t make use of the tele-dado in Palast One.’
I didn’t know how to reply, but they soon changed the subject anyway, and told me about their problems with the Chinese construction workers, and their difficulties in adjusting the demands of the hotel industry to the immemorial Havian ethos — ‘It must have been rather the same for whoever designed the House of the Chinese Master, if he had Taoist theologians on his back.’ And what had happened to that House, I wondered, that ancient wonder of Hav, which had amazed so many travellers down the centuries? Burnt out in the Intervention, they told me, together with nearly all the monuments of old Hav. The copper-domed Serai? The Montenegrin Legation? League of Nations International Settlement, where I had lived last time?