Out-and-Out Liars; Of Ice, Fur and Fire. (Chapter 4, Part 5)

 

 

                                                                                 5.

 

She was daughter of a mercenary and mercantile race, National Geographic Magazine sent her the DNA mouth swab kit the result of which revealed that her ancestors had never travelled outside the British Isles and never mixed; she was one hundred percent Anglo-Saxon. Hadn’t they originally filled a vacuum left by the retreating Romans as occupying force? So why should she feel any qualms, over a dozen centuries later, about asset stripping a land her Germanic ancestors had meant to…well, asset strip anyway. Karen Smith was twenty-six, she had been in London only three years now found herself in the privileged and very lucrative position of negotiating the telephone bid at the world famous Auction House Christies on behalf of a Saudi Prince for, (page 13-18 in the catalogue),  Lot 26: The United Kingdom, otherwise known as Great Britain,

 

One hundred and fifty pounds… over there.” Bellowed the middle-aged, ruddy faced auctioneer in a cut-glass accent and the alcoholic shakes as he leered out among the general tat of a country that would soon only exist only on the Footsie 100, Nasdaq, in cyber-space and on BBC Radio 4. and which was about to come under the hammer. The country was already being auctioned off by share-holders who lurked in smug  monetary oasis, like crocodiles, removed from the lives of their own extended family whose habitat was being sold off piecemeal in a bid for the largest share of the waterhole. The populace waited with baited breath and deeply frightened eyes, their blurred poverty-curfewed silhouettes reflected against the myriad cell-block windows of their fuel-poor over-priced hovels, “Any advances on one hundred and fifty pounds;… for this glorious reversible collapsible nineteenth century mahogany card table”. The mainly Chinese clientele stared back blankly.  “Going once, going twice, I repeat, do I hear two hundred?  He bought down a hammer on an green velvet auction block, indicating an inanely grinning Russian oligarch.

 

Karen felt she was at the top of her game; she was about to justify her existence on the planet, especially in the eyes of her highly-strung parents, an international arms trader and politician respectively, who had sent her away at the age of six to Preparatory school, then to Rhodean private girls school and had constantly reminded her of the expense she had cost them and cautioning her that the only attitude to take towards them, was not one of affection, but extreme gratitude. During these periodic parental Power Point presentations the possibility of a simple hug was incrementally eroded and replaced by the need to embrace the idea of the acquisition of wealth as surrogate; her parents even began to look like characters on bank notes. Karen Smith had a brief  moment of insecurity when  her emotions spiked; on the verge of selling her own country. she wondered weather a warm hug might indeed be preferable. She swatted the invisible thought with her hand, hardened and dialled up her Saudi buyer.

 

“Lot 26. the United Kingdom”. Announced the auctioneer. “The United Kingdom. 244.820 square kilometres . Population 60 million, optional. Comes complete with external territories The Channel Islands, The Isle of Man, Anguilles, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, The Falkland Islands, Saint Helena, Turks and Caicos Islands, South Georgia. Five previous owners: the Celts, the Romans, the Saxons, the Vikings, the Normans, current owner the Bank of England. Constitutional monarchy, again optional. Can we start the bidding at 5 billion dollars”.

 

Before long, imperceptible nods and micro-gestures had pushed the bidding price up to a cool 20 billion. Karen Smith knew her job, she would hold out, her Saudi boss was out for a bargain and had an absolute limit with no reserve; Greece, after all, was also up for grabs in the coming months.

 

“Twenty-six billion pounds, cheaper than the Damian Hirst collection”. Someone who looked suspiciously like the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne was in the audience, and Karen felt that throughout, the bidding price was being raised artificially. “Do I hear 27 billion dollars?” An almost inaudible grunt came down the telephone; Karen Smith raised an eye-brow.

 

“That’s 27 billion for Lot 26, The United Kingdom”. The room fell into a hush. “Do I here any advances on 27 billion? Going once, going twice. Sold! Would you see one of our ushers afterwards”. The auctioneer said to a slightly depressed Miss Smith. There was an immediate hubbub of conversation as everyone turned to see who the current owner of The United Kingdom might be. She was vaguely aware that her Saudi boss intended to digitally map the country, recreate it as a virtual museum and film studio for period costume dramas and then dismantle the whole and turn it into an aircraft carrier.

 

“Now Lot 27, a collection of original 1960s larva lamps…”

 

She walked past the Natural History museum with a massive sense of anti-climax; she was unaccountably miserable and exhausted. “That’s lovely dear”, said her mother absent-mindedly down the phone as Karen sat under an oak tree staring at a buttercup in Hyde Park. “Don’t be short-changed on the commission, will you dear. You can be a soft touch”. Having just made the biggest deal in her career Karen expected…well she wasn’t sure exactly what she expected; all she knew was, she wasn’t getting it. She hung up, lay down and fell into a deep sleep.

Out-and-out Lairs ;Of Ice, Fur and Fire. (Chapter 4, Part 4)

                                                                                  4.

Although Floy, the simian who invented the 0 1 binary code used in computers all over the planet in the 10.000 Hour Monkey Typing Pool was technically in police custody he suddenly found himself in the unique position of being the only Macaque Crested monkey to have diplomatic immunity; the Ecuadorian government refused to allow him to be removed from its Embassy. The disappearance of Julian Assange and the appearance of Floy in his absence sent the nation into yet another bout of introspection and conjecture.

 

It was a while before Lady Gaga, the international singer was even remotely linked to the Wikileaks founder absconding the territory from his place of asylum a few yards from Harrods in Knightbridge. In the interim period many witnesses came forward to say they had seen the men who had executed the kidnapping of Assange ; Some came forward to say they heard the abductors speaking German though they themselves did not speak German. Others swore blind they spoke Greek and a ransom demand to pay off the Greek National Debt was posited. Bulgarians and Romanians were also placed at the scene which fed the already isolationist consensus that whoever they were, continental Europe was at fault. A Palestinian academic recognized the Hebrew language in their gruff commands to a struggling Mr Assange. A Russian millionaire claimed the gang were Russian and used Polonium. Emotive and flagrantly xenophobic words became the order of the day. After the owner of a local newsagency declared he may have seen 'Middle-Eastern types' in the vicinity the words ‘Storm’ and ‘Al Queda’ were unduly linked to the word ‘Embassy’ and as front page headlines appeared in the red-top tabloids a noxious alchemy somehow transmuted a formerly vilified Assange into hero again, the word ‘kidnap’ having crept, first into the periphery of the nation’s sight, then by dint of general and customary apathy, into the dead-centre of its slumbering awareness. Suddenly others came forward, taxi drivers, neighbours, shoppers, and the inevitable opinionated old bag-lady. “ I see everything that goes on ‘round here”, she said, a veritable fortress of coats, scarves, zimmer frames and shopping trolleys protecting her from the world’s scorn.

 

A recently homeless middle-class family had been rooting through the dustbins in an alleyway immediately behind the famous department store’s Food Hall in search of foie gras and jars of out-dated lobster bisque. “Yes, they were dark men, three of them”. Declared Mrs Evans as she held a Harrods bag in full view of the camera, her radar for respectability still partially intact. This single interview with the down-and-out yet well-spoken Evans family secured coverage in the broadsheets. “From what I saw, I can safely say that Mr Assange seemed reluctant to leave with his captors. “ Mr Evans, a former careers advisor, told the press. “Are you saying Mr Assange was forced at gun point?” Someone asked pressing a recording device forward. “That might have been the case, but I am not…” As though the wind had changed direction, those who traded in smoke without fire, as suddenly, lost interest; AL QUEDA LEADS JULIAN ASSANGE FROM EMBASSY AT GUNPOINT hit evening rush-hour newsstands across Britain.

 

A murderous chronology of hostage-takings, beheadings and heinous acts against western civilisation presented itself to the weary commuter adding to the general and generalized fear of the ‘other’ gleefully fostered by the Daily Mail and the Telegraph; many phoned home to warn their spouses once again to stay within the besieged boundaries of the garden fence. Scaffolders, working on a nearby building detecting an opportunity for their five minutes of fame came forward to swear unanimously they had seen the driver of the white get-away van. However, their story was refuted by a Nigerian Traffic Warden, a Mr Ade Anuolua who testified that no such vehicle would have left unticketed on his beat. “If I had encountered these people, I would have held them in negotiations and pointless discussions”. A white South African intervened to declare, boorishly that he was taking over the whole crisis single-handedly.

 

                                                                  

Floy now made appearances at the balcony window in place of its former guest and tourists threw exclusive chocolates and organic bananas bought from Harrods and Harvey Nichols into his out-stretched arms while the nation cringed. Had this ape been left as a token insult, for that is how it felt. A negotiator was sent to the window, ducking an assortment of luxury foodstuffs to plea-bargain with Floy, to no avail. A female Macaque Crested monkey was found in Harrods’ Exotic Pets Department and in a role reversal of Romeo and Juliette, stood bewildered before the balcony; it was hoped she would somehow translate the preference of life in the basement of a department store over that of a Latin American embassy. Instead she merely grunted at Floy, gathered what she could of the fallen chocolates and organic bananas and indicated to her keeper that she would now like to return to her cage. Meanwhile, Floy had, with his feet, surreptitiously and deftly removed the bunch of keys dangling from the keeper’s belt and on her departure gave his new female Macaque Crested friend, who he found exceedingly pretty, a knowing grunt in return.

 

Messers Pilger, Lynch, Moore, and Miss Kahn now found that the bail money of three hundred and forty thousand pounds collectively stumped up for bail was, in the blink of a mischievous Supreme Court Judge’s eye, now transferred to the conditions of Floy’s house arrest, the reflected glory of which did not have the same shine as that of the internet revolutionary Julian Assange. In the mendacious scramble to recoup the money there followed among the contributors a great deal of mud-slinging and there was no part of the absent man’s ego that was not retrospectively torn to shreds. Furthermore, in an act of one-upmanship over the Supreme Court Judge’s decision they declared that the bail money, three hundred and forty thousand pounds was now being offered up as a reward for Mr Assange’s capture, dead or alive. In the days and weeks that followed the announcement, anyone looking even remotely like the Wikileaks founder had a very hard time of it indeed.

 

A government Think-Tank convened an emergency meeting at the revelation that Assange had indeed fled voluntarily concealed in one of Lady Gaga’s most extravagant costumes to date; how could an apology for the veritable rivers of crud written in the national press, online and spewed forth in the media 24/7 about the, generally gentle and hospitable Arabic speaking races be avoided?  It was to Inspector Salamander Buckle’s absolute amazement that a mug-shot of the Algerian who had met his end in and been discovered by him up the chimney with the Ecuadorian Ambassador was published with two fresh bullet holes where bullet holes should not have been; his swarthy death-mask exonerating Lady Gaga in one yawn of national soporific collusion. Some years later, Salamander Buckle’s illustrious career would end somewhat less illustriously in a field some yards away from the suicide note, incorporated into a thrushes’ nest, of an equally isolated former weapons inspector.

Out-and-Out Liars; Of Ice, Fur and Fire. (Chapter 4. Part 3)

                                                                                     3.

Once Floy was safely in the custody of the police he began to relax. It was the first-rate detective by the name of Salamander Buckle, he who had  famously solved the Nigerian Law School Murder back in 1996, who now, at 56 years of age, in middle age, having recently solved  L’Affaire d’ Un Singe, ( a gallic pun, Knightbridge being French) could now like Floy also relax. Buckle was the son of an Irish Catholic priest, again like Floy, who had had to flee, under the guise of insanity the nightmarish conditions of The Ten Thousand Hour Monkey Typing Pool, Salamander Buckle had fled a homeland in which guilt had become the cornerstone of paranoia measured on how well one could evade answering a direct question directly. Before Buckle’s recent vertiginous trajectory into the full glare of public adoration, he maintained that most if not all of his sleuthing methods were, indeed to be found in the scholarly study of the Good Book, for it constituted a catalogue of humanity’s vices and sin and gave a clear insight into motive, as it were. “Leviticus stands out” He mused. The rest he’d learned at the cost of an awful lot of hard work at the scene of various murderous sprees.

 

His first suspect was the singer Lady Gaga, for was it not she the media snapped going into the Ecuadorean Embassy wearing a life-size live monkey as both stole and headdress; this was not an era to be stuffy about such attire, for had the quirky international star not received an award dressed as an abattoir. “I’m the Lady who has her name in the paper on a daily basis, several times a day- how do you expect me to recall the photo shoot I did outside of a horrific and inexplicable crime.” She said at her New York apartment, fame and insanity parting in each other’s company. Buckle would need to take a firm stand; she wasn’t the first flaky artiste he had interviewed. To jog her memory he recreated the scene.

 

A dark dappled room in the Ecuadorian Embassy,  a vortex of disarray, the furniture, Spanish colonial was trashed, one of the pillaged Inca relics which stood in pairs on the ambassador’s desk lay, along with a razor in the middle of the room. Unaccountably, there were traces of human hair, whole clumps, seemingly yanked out in a cat-walk-model-like frenzy, though no cat-walk models were present. Upon the middle shelf above thirty leather-bound volumes the complete series of Las Dias Del Conquistadores,  volume twenty-three lay open on a desk along side a  hat belonging to the Latin American revolutionary Simone Bolivar, a picture of Jenifer Lopez hung above the fire place with greasy talcum-powered fingerprint of the Algerian upon its smashed glass; An open laptop was found on the floor by the open bay window, bouncing diagonally across the screen to the strains of Waltzing Matilda, the legend, ‘G’DAY MATE; Julian Assange was nowhere to be found.

 

Of the Ecuadorian Ambassador there was no trace. “After  recounting the crime scene Miss Lady Gaga claimed to know nothing of the diplomat’s whereabouts”. In the following media scrum Inspector Buckle would tell anyone who cared to ask, “Miss Gaga stated, when interviewed, ‘I remember buying an Orang-utan in Harrod’s Exotic Pets Department that day. You know they recently reinstated that department, but it took a distinct dislike to my wrap-stroke head-wear…something about cross-species war…well that’s what the sales manager was telling me as my purchase ran toward the perfume department to mate with an assistant who was spray tanned the same colour , you know’”. Inspector Buckle did not know, as a dyed-in-the-wool policeman he took Orang-utan to mean someone from an immigrant background. “‘Then I went next door, well I’d come this far. I told Mr Assange how I understood how restricted he must feel, I mean I ought to know’, she said her head artfully wedged into a micro wave oven, the door ajar.  ‘I congratulated Mr Assange on being instrumental in my progress; He said he quite understood and I said when my president gets England’s president to let him out then he was a good as employed, as far as a job goes. Then we went to the balcony; I think the crowd all enjoyed seeing me, you know, with him’.”

 

It was an Algerian-whose finger prints were being presented to  the jury as Exhibit A, in talcum-powdered relief from the black rubber dildo found at post-mortem, (incidentally, left out of all Inspector Buckley’s descriptions due to his catholic up-bringing and unsavoury flashbacks,) - who was found halfway up the chimney, pushed with some force, dead and with lacerations where lacerations should not be. “Indeed”, said Inspector Buckle,” had this young Arab been the only casualty, this case would not be a murder case, not on my watch anyway, but simply a matter of Mr Assange absconding from our territory”. The High Court Judge presiding over the trial ignored the institutionalised racism asking “And you say the ambassador of Ecuador to London was also found stuck up the flu, also with some force?…curious. It would appear this case has more of entrances than exits”, quipped His Honor, to Inspector Buckley’s evident disgust.

 

However it would be the word ‘entrance’ which would prove a vital clue to the solving of this incredible mystery.It was the picture of Lady Gaga in the papers the day following the tragedy that, for Inspector Salamander Buckle crystallized the beginnings of a theory. One broadsheet newspaper wrote ‘The singer looked beyond surreal as she was snapped ascending the steps through an aisle of bobbies wearing a live Crested-Macaque Monkey up to and unannounced through the doors of the Embassy’. Whatever the ambassador and his magrebin guest were up to when she entered the room, on seeing her they found themselves simultaneously scrambling for the nearest escape. L’Affaire D’Un Singe, [The French cannot say the Wikileak founder’s surname without dragging their knuckles along the ground], the unfolding details of which first sent Scotland Yard into such delusions of SAS grandeur that their own grandmother’s could have gone down in a volley of fire so mindlessly eager were they for action, was a national embarrassment. Luckily the order for summary execution through wildly disproportionate force upon an Australian guest of the Ecuadorian Embassy was belayed. There then followed a period of national volt-face, in which the nation’s embarrassment transmuted the heretofore hero into vilified scapegoat. England entreated Ecuador to release Assange to face a rape charge in Sweden Britain now openly  and unanimously found him guilty of. Ecuador, grabbing the slim window of international attention threw a party, its president reminding the world that ‘since the end of its empire Britain was still farting higher than its arse’.

The deafening silence that followed does not make sense; the gargantuan elephant that is Julian Assange, remained plonked firmly on the nation’s lawn, the view obfuscated not by a painful and somewhat begrudged collective introspection but by the tacit agreement the man might be simply nationally ignored into annihilation.

The clumps of hair found at the scene of the crime were, after DNA tests found to contain no DNA whatsoever, the fur proving to be entirely synthetic of a type produced in China and exported in the form of  monkey suits for fancy dress sold at a costume hire outlet on Shaftsbury Avenue in London’s West End. The sales assistant remembered nothing out of the ordinary maintaining that customers dressed as Salome wearing a platter with a decapitated head as a hat, in the company of a Yeti was all in a days work and since the Ivy restaurant was a stones throw away and the likes of the late milliner Isabella Blow and costume designer Zandra Rhodes popped in frequently before dining to use the toilet so versed were they at assisting in the deconstruction and reassembling of complicated and angst-ridden haut couture.

Imagination was all the Inspector Salamander Buckle need apply to conjure the ensuing chaos as, once Lady Gaga had produced the suit from her bottomless handbag, an eager Assange and star-struck Floy tried to climb into the suit at the same time while the famous singer perused the leather-bound tomes on the book shelf. At one point, keen to help and ignoring the eventuality of smuggling both out upon her slender shoulders, she found she had somehow entered the suit herself, backwards. In wresting la Gaga’s head stuck firmly in one of the arms, Assange and Floy clearly lacked the skill of theatrical dressers and handfuls of fur fell to the floor of the Ecuadorian Embassy. At another point all three found themselves blinking at each other from its dark interior and in a frenzied attempt to extricate themselves ambled dangerously about the room crashing into furniture eventually head butting the framed picture of Jenifer Lopez. Unnoticeably dishevelled, Lady Gaga emerged airily suggesting that it would be easier to leave with the Ambassador and his friend as they were already in a favourable position to be shoe-horned into the suit while wedged in the chimney. That was the point at which Floy seized the cut-throat razor and Assange armed himself with the Inca relic; it was becoming desperately apparent that time was running out and only one of them could leave alive. The public permanently positioned outside Assange’s place of asylum would surely notice if the singer left with if an extra Macaque Crested monkey above her head.  Lady Gaga artfully came between the two antagonists and with one randomly choreographed move deftly knocked both weapons to the ground, seized volume twenty three of Las Dias Del Conquistadores, Simone Bolivar’s hat, lead Floy to the large velvet upholstered chair behind the former ambassador’s desk, sat him down, placed the hat firmly on his head, placed the book upright in front of him and hoped no one would notice until long after she and Assange were out of the country.

It was thus that Lady Gaga was photographed leaving the Ecuadorean embassy; wearing an all-in-one headdress and stole live Crested-Macaque suffering from acute alopecia. And it was a hawk-eyed Inspector Buckle who pieced together the incredible jig-saw that was L’Affaire d’Un Singe, albeit too late.