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strategic planning, all these were borne at first in a grim spirit of suspicion and
competitiveness. That has now gone, I m glad to say, and in its place blooms a genuine and
formidable esprit de corps. There are jokes that we all finally understand, after the thousandth
repetition; there have been love affairs that have amicably fizzled out; and we share the
cooking, complimenting each other in a chorus of nods and mmmms on our various
specialities. Mine, which I do believe is one of the most popular, is hamburgers with potato
salad. The secret is the raw egg.
It is the middle of December now, and we are about to travel to Switzerland - where we
plan to ski a little, relax a little, and shoot a Dutch politician a little.
We are having fun, living well, and feeling important. What more can one possibly ask
from life?
Our leader, inasmuch as we acknowledge the concept of leadership, is Francisco; Francis
to some, Cisco to others, and The Keeper to me, in my covert messages to Solomon. Francisco
says that he was born in Venezuela, the fifth of eight children, and that he suffered from polio
as a child. I ve no reason to doubt him on any of this. The polio is supposed to account for the
withered right leg and the theatrical limp, which seems to come and go depending on his mood
and how much he is asking you to do or give. Latifa says he is beautiful and I suppose she
may have a point, if three-foot-long eyelashes and olive skin are your thing. He is small and
muscular, and if I were casting the part of Byron, I would probably give Francisco a call; not
least because he is an absolutely fantastic actor.
To Latifa, Francisco is the heroic elder brother - wise, sensitive, and forgiving. To
Bernhard, he is a grim, unflappable professional. To Cyrus and Hugo, he is the fiery idealist,
for whom nothing of anything is enough. To Benjamin, he is the tentative scholar, because
Benjamin believes in God and wants to be sure of every step. And to Ricky, the Minnesotan
anarchist with the beard and the accent, Francisco is a backslapping, beer-drinking, rock  n
roll adventurer, who knows a lot of Bruce Springsteen lyrics. He really can play all the parts.
If there is a real Francisco, then I think I saw him one day on a flight from Marseille to
Paris. The system is that we travel in pairs but sit separately, and I was half a dozen rows
behind Francisco on an aisle seat, when a boy of about five, sitting up at the front of the cabin,
started crying and moaning. His mother unhitched the lad from his seat and was starting to
lead him down the aisle towards the lavatory, when the aircraft pitched slightly to one side,
and the boy stumbled against Francisco s shoulder.
Francisco hit him.
Not hard. And not with a fist. If I was a lawyer in the case, I might even be able to make
out that it was nothing more than a firm push, to try and help the boy get upright again. But
I m not a lawyer, and Francisco definitely hit him. I don t think anyone saw it but me, and the
boy himself was so startled that he stopped crying; but that instinctive, fuck off reaction, to a
five-year-old child, told me rather a lot about Francisco.
Apart from that, and God knows we all have our bad days, the seven of us get on pretty
well with each other. We really do. We whistle while we work.
The one thing that I thought might prove our undoing, as it has proved the undoing of
almost every co-operative venture in human history, simply hasn t materialised. Because we,
The Sword Of justice, architects of a new world order and standard bearers for the cause of
freedom, actually, genuinely, share the washing-up.
I ve never known it happen before.
The village of Mürren - no cars, no litter, no late payment of bills - lies in the shadow of
three great and famous mountains: the Jungfrau, the Monke, and the Eiger. If you re interested
in things of a legendary nature, you may like to know that the Monk is said to spend his time
defending the virtue of the Young Woman from the predations of the Ogre - a job he has carried
out successfully and with very little apparent effort since the Oligocene period, when these three
lumps of rock were, with relentless geologic, wrenched and pummelled into being.
Mürren is a small village, with very little prospect of getting any bigger. Being accessible
only by helicopter or funicular railway, there is a limit to the quantity of sausage and beer that
can be got up the hill to sustain its residents and visitors and, by and large, the locals like it that
way. There are three big hotels, a dozen or so smaller boarding houses, and a hundred scattered
farm houses and chalets, all built with that exaggeratedly tall pitched roof that makes every
Swiss building look as if most of it is buried underground. Which, given their fetish for nuclear
shelters, it probably is.
Although the village was conceived and built by an Englishman, it s not a particularly
English resort nowadays. Germans and Austrians come to walk and cycle in the summer, and
Italians, French, Japanese, Americans - anyone, basically, who speaks the international language
of brightly coloured leisure fabrics - come to ski in the winter.
The Swiss come all year round to make money. The money-making conditions are famously
excellent from November to April, with several off-piste retail sites and bureau de change
facilities, and hopes are high that next year - and about time too - money-making will become an
Olympic sport. The Swiss are quietly fancying their chances.
But there is one feature in particular that has made Mürren especially attractive to Francisco, [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]