chapter seven

The Village

There was no breeze apart from the dry carbon coughs from the yellow cabs, rattling the geometric ribcage of the city. Frank paused for a moment to light a cigarette and felt rather than saw the flood of pedestrians pull curtains of colour, sound and odours around him. Germany before the war had been characterised by long nights of wild decadence, excess of music, drink, style; but counterbalanced by the introspective wintry pessimism of a race chastened by centuries of barbaric internecine conflicts. The Germans never let themselves forget that it was they who had put an end to the Roman circus, so they watched their own decadence with a vague numbed sense of its own doom.

New York, and more particularly Greenwich Village was something else again. It was already, in 1960, populated with a mass of nationalities, pushing against each other and feeding off each other in a creative and cultural melting pot. There was no unifying protestant ethic, and only the flimsiest of moral codes. Frank let the lungful of Lucky Strike shimmer into the neon atmosphere and sought to find in the miasma of sensation the pulse of Jazz from the club behind. It was already a cliché, but he really was standing by a basement café with the smell of fine coffee and strong brandy mingling with the staccato bop phrases played on bass, drums, sax and trumpet. Tonight it was Art Pepper, a white boy but sharing the narcotic tastes of most of his black colleagues, and also their flamboyant sense of melody and rhythm. Frank checked his narrow tie and choreographed his descent to the fanfare that was “Smack Up”.

It was just after ten, so the club’s population was dominated by followers of the music, mostly white students or black or latin youngsters with their own bands learning and dreaming of one day being on stage themselves. The others were tourists, dealers or pimps waiting for their women to come back from work and spit dollars into their hands. Frank hardly knew which music he was really hearing; the percussive bop or the orchestration of social existence. Both were beautiful and, for him, objects of abstract inspection.
At this point in his career, and he regarded life number four as being a bit like the mid to late twenties, Frank was still shaking with the dawning realisation of what he had actually done. He didn’t mean by this his incredible achievements in biological science, he took them for granted along with his inexorable genius; no, he meant what he had done in the way a mother looks aghast at a clumsy child and utters the commonplace phrase. What he had done at the end of life number three had more than confirmed his misanthropy. When a relationship dies you hurt, you feel despair, empty and worthless (although Frank regarded empty and worthless as distinct as pH1 and 14), even a misery bordering on suicide; and then you get even. What had shocked Frank was that when he got even he did it in a way that was to take out millions of lives over the coming century or so.

In Germany the death camps had been a constant impingement on his consciousness, a sawing bowed bass line to acknowledge his present environment or a pervading scent like opium or diesel. He had lived with the knowledge of what was happening to the Jews, Gypsies, mental defectives etc. and could see it as some kind of primitive aesthetic gesture, a kind of action painting with blood. On reflection he supposed it had raised his sights, given him a glimpse of the power he had to make his sensations more real, more lasting; certainly more subtle and infinitely more refined than those of his Austrian model.

He ordered whiskey, Irish; the taste for which he had acquired along with cerebral substance of Professor O’Connell in 1916. Loud and familiar laughter from the lobby caused him to swing around and he was delighted to see three of his acquaintances enter the bar. They were seasoned bohemians, a man and a woman in their thirties and an older man approaching his fifties. The men wore the uniform of the demi-monde that Frank himself favoured, the two piece suit, black trousers and jacket, white shirt and thin plainish tie in a dark shade. The woman wore a long skirt featuring a large floral print and white man’s shirt rather than a blouse. She smoked only French cigarettes through an ancient mother-of-pearl effect filter.

“Ellsworth, Helen,” called Frank, shaking another Lucky strike from his pack, “Good to see you. Let’s grab a table. What can I get you?”

“Frank! There must be fine music here tonight if you’re hitting the spot,” replied the younger man. “I’ll have a vodka in honour of your Norwegian roots.”

“That’s Russia, Ellsworth. Norway is different,” protested Frank.

“Hush! Don’t mention the Reds. There’s an iron curtain across my soul and only your pure non-Commie Norwegian vodka can dissolve it tonight. Anyway, we’re celebrating with Morris here.”

Frank recognised the name. Helen had been deep into Morris for some time now, and although he was a lot older than the other painters, sculptors and writers that congregated in the village, word had it that his new work was going to make a big noise, move things on like Johns had. “A show?” he asked, moving to the bar.

“Sure,” replied Morris, “and most is already sold. Beer?”

Frank didn’t need to ask Helen what she was drinking. By now they had an agreed code of slight eyebrow movement. It was going to be two beers and another Irish whiskey. Helen blamed Frank for introducing her to the stuff, but he didn’t believe her. She went her own way. That’s why she had pursued Morris. Everyone assumed she would start to paint like him, but in fact it had turned out the other way round. Frank liked her. He found the idea extraordinary. He had never liked anyone, and after Jack he would certainly never love anyone again. Helen was unique and he was quietly determined that she would never know what he had done; not to save his own reputation of course, simply to respect her innocence. He looked at her, smiling seriously through the smoke, and imagined how she would laugh if she thought he was ‘respecting her innocence’. The Pepper Quintet blotted out conversational traces and improvised with the smudged skeins of meaning. The whiskey dissolved the rest.

chapter six

Frank's creativity is widely based. Here he is in London in cullinary mode... ellipses for D there.
The Café

South-east London was a long way from the rugged landscapes of south-east Brazil. The café had begun as a joke; his latest contributor had been an enthusiastic chef as well as an invisible but ubiquitous arms dealer and the café existed on paper as a business through which millions of dollars could be channelled. When things had got a little too hot in Belo Horizonte Frank decided to take a breather by indulging his newly acquired hobby and opening up the café for business.

He finished counting the take from the evening and slipped the cash-box into the safe. A warm self congratulatory glow suffused his limbs as he reflected that his arithmetically progressive genius had given him once again the rewards that other people spend their lives toiling to attain, and all without the inconvenience of developing ulcers, anxiety, addiction or coronary disease. In fact he’d rarely felt better.

Wibz shuffled past the door and attempted a sentence in English, thickened to the limits of comprehension by his Balkan accent and most of a bottle of over-proof Polish spirits.

“Need girl to stay this time.”

“I am not in the mood to entertain your pathetic attempts at levity,” replied Frank. “You know the way we operate here: you bring them in warm and I send them out piping. What on earth makes you want to keep this one?”

Wibz reached down into his suede trousers and let a long string of mucus swing from his nose. Frank was delighted that the unexpectedly large dimensions of the dwarf’s member distracted him from the gleaming nasal extrusion. He had already calculated the relative dimensions of the organ and applied it to a man of 185 cm (giving the dwarf a relative penis size of length approximately 35 cm and diameter 11 cm. Big by any standards) before he added “As long as there’s no security issues that’s fine for a few days, but make sure we have enough raw materials for tomorrow, there are reviewers coming and some music group or other.”

The dwarf coughed happily into his hand and moistened the tip of his extended member. For a second Frank imagined what was about to happen to the girl and felt a double shock of disgust and nostalgia. He had, of course, identified with the teenager Wibz had locked in the cage. Frank had enjoyed sexual union for a brief spell in the year 1876, in this very city, less than a kilometre from the spot where he now stood. He recalled his amour, a slaughter-house worker with an amateur interest in chemistry, married to Agnes, exhausted from providing and providing for six children. He could still smell the blood, beer and bromine as he had been deliciously impaled, Friday and Saturday nights in a shed off Borough High Street.

He whistled the memory away tonelessly between his pursed lips and made his way down to the ice house. Here hung the cadavers he plundered to create his delicious and increasingly popular dishes. The gate was of late medieval design and the ice house itself a hidden gem in the ramshackle dereliction of South-East London. Political tension between central and local governments had led to patchy development and an almost total disregard of aesthetic or archaeological values. Frank had been laughed at by the planners when he had expressed his interest in developing the old jail as a theme restaurant, and even health and safety checks had been less than minimal. In discovering the ice house he had removed the junk of the centuries by hand because something cold had been tugging at his tired blood.

Beyond the gate he had found then, as he did now, a calm well of sub-zero temperature that spoke to him of his origins inside the Arctic Circle. Here he could still be Norwegian, here he felt comforted by his infancy in the Nineteenth Century. Here hanging the bodies and eviscerating them seemed as pure an act as the experiments on flora he had carried out in Edgeøya. It was under the thrall of these comforting thoughts that he spun the body on the hook and found the meat on the left buttock and thigh. He needed thin but fatless slices for his signature dish; a millefeuille for carnivores; leaves of human carpaccio gleaming beneath a rich aspic. He expertly shaved the subcutaneous layers before turning the body again and swiftly removing and opening the penis and testicles longitudinally. These would provide the stock.

He returned to the kitchen and fed his saucepan. He viewed the crates of vegetables and considered preparing them himself, but then decided that this was in truth the dwarf’s job and that he could not entertain paying any respect whatsoever to his diminutive colleagues carnal appetites. Wibz could forget about fucking the girl and get down to peeling potatoes.

chapter five

Here are some details of Frank's life in the Nineteenth Century. You can see that he certainly gets around.

The Isolation Hospital

It took hardly a week for Frank to convince himself that he was incarcerated in the isolation hospital as part of an elegant plan of his own devising. He had, in this relatively early part of his career, the habit of writing down his thoughts; observations, strategies, even random musings. His notes made on the first Sunday of his imprisonment read as follows:

Megalomaniacs will inevitably render all to me because they are obsessed with attaining an objective goal, whereas I care nothing for their goal, only for supremacy over their minds.

I flatter them by even bothering to make use of them.

There is no amount of power as there is no amount of money that is ever enough. Power and money are irrelevant in themselves. Genius is the ability to have them both in unlimited quantities by right.

Physical appetite is starvation of the intellect.

Above all else Browne’s flatulence condemned him to his appalling death.

I can see an application for considering roots of negative numbers as themselves being infinite yet countable, leading me to conceive of operations in them as taking place in dimensional spaces which must in number extend beyond four and which may be likewise infinite.

Dirrane’s cheeks have an elegant line and hue. I found it necessary to discharge after observing him in the communal latrines.

He realised that such documents could be used against him soon after his time in the hospital, and later Franks were much more taciturn, although he could never silence the press and he continued to keep almost childish scrap books of clippings whenever he was mentioned or photographed throughout the coming century.

In a sense it was true that Frank had chosen to make use of the isolation hospital, although not using it would have led him to the gallows in double-quick time. This temporary embarrassment was due to the fallout from the Browne affair.

He had been contacted by Browne whilst still living in Paris, making a good living by supplying ether and other intoxicating gasses to the decayed aristocracy of the Belle Epoque. Browne had heard a rumour concerning a particular effect that Frank had created for a very exclusive club in the 13th arrondissement. This club epitomised the decadence of the time and place and so was frequented by the cream of society and the criminally insane. Frank considered himself to encompass both extremes and was therefore amenable to a request from someone not very far removed from the highest political office to produce a gas that would have an unforgettable effect on all who would witness its demonstration. Mummification was a topic which the five year old Frank had found fascinating; he would go so far as to credit it as a major influence upon his later work, so therefore the idea of aiding in the production of a tableau vivant in which a subject would be rapidly but effectively mummified was irresistible. The fact that it would all happen during a pageant of the most disgusting pornography was utterly irrelevant to him.

Of course it was the pornography that had led to Browne. He lived in Ireland in the Victorian era. The authorities found Catholicism and Irish-speaking far more offensive than the acts carried out by Frank and his colleagues in the backstreets of Paris, so Browne, who publicly denounced the native Irish as degenerate and demonstrated his beliefs by treating his tenants in a similar fashion to his pigs, was regarded as a model citizen. Someone in Browne’s circle had been present at that spectacle in Paris, and in the withdrawing room had mentioned it as being the highpoint of his trip to France.

Browne seized upon this new information. His sense of utter superiority to the local population and his ritualised cruelty had led him to regard the Empress herself as foreign, weak and far too liberal. The government in England were throwing loans at Irish tenant farmers to allow them to buy their land. It was obvious to Browne that these ‘people’ had only one use for money, and that was to drink it. He resolved to carry out a coup that would purge the Empire of the corruption at its head, but he needed a weapon that would dismay any opposition. Frank’s gas was to be that weapon.

chapter 4

Frank makes that nasty discovery and has some feelings which disturb his normally icy intellectual equilibrium. Bad news for someone...

The Black Pool

Some time in the 1980s Frank had dragged the tank into this forgotten room. He had set up a basic laboratory and, following a half-term trip to Edgeøya, had filled it with water rich in the nutriment. Frank VII had then been initiated, inception coming from a cell he had removed from...

He had no idea where. He shivered with mental fatigue and the horror of the new reality of his decay. More than the new body which was vital, he needed a new brain which was essential. He reached into his jacket and found the phial. He remembered the getting of the contents and smiled. As usual he would enjoy this particular victory over the one who had thought to use him; who had the arrogance to imagine that he was superior to Frank. Every second of each of his campaigns had given him the warm satisfaction of knowing in just whose farmyard the chickens were going to shit, as Professor O’Connell, the contributor to Frank III had often said.

This particular contributor to the Greater Frank had been a brilliant bio-chemist in the traditional Western mode and a ruthless businessman. His enormous wealth had allowed his interests to wander along the more obscure by-ways of science and so, like most of the others he had found Frank and come to him with his ambitious requests. It had taken Frank less than five minutes to decide that Michael Driscoll’s cerebral vigour would one day be his, although if he had realised then how risky and futile the operation was going to be he may well have opted for a more immediate harvest. He’d had his fingers burnt, he didn’t mind admitting it, but it was only a blip. The big plan, as personified by the Greater Frank was unaffected. He knew that Frank VII would by now be full formed, a perfect clone of himself suspended in the nutriment, waiting only for the cognitive serum that would enable the transfer.

He loved the sub-basement for a number of reasons. The academic nostalgia was important of course, but also the convenience of the school’s neglected boiler, easily reached by the platform, and into which Frank VII would place his current body sometime tomorrow for a rapid and discrete incineration. He filled his trusty Victorian syringe with Driscoll’s mental essence and turned to the tank. Back in the Nineteenth Century he had used opiates to crush the ache of bleeding himself out into the nutriment, but these days that drowsiness was the twenty year kick for which he waited with an edgy passion. To die, to spill the life-blood and experience everything dissolving in the dark liquid, to cease in every sense. He sighed and sought himself in the tank. He felt the cold slippery flesh of his chest, moved his hands up to grip his body under the arms and lifted it into the yellow light.

His breath stopped suddenly, prematurely, painfully. His perfect clone’s skull was grotesquely malformed, a huge crack had been opened in the back of the skull and the brain was a slushy mass of stinking grey mud. His mind reeled at the recognition of his own abortion. An immense unmoveable gate had slammed shut over the future. It was to be weeks before the shock would recede enough for him to be able to focus not on the end of the Greater Frank; his failure and consequently fairly imminent death, but on who had been the agent of this disaster and yes, why not? On revenge.