And which nations are Ted Mundy's most vociferous allies when he airs these futile opinions to anybody civil enough to listen to him?

The beastly Germans.

The perfidious French.

The barbaric Russians.

Three nations who have the guts and good sense to say no, and may they long continue.

In his shining bright anger Mundy _redux__ writes to Kate his ex-wife--now, for her sins, tipped for high office in the next government. Perhaps he's not as diplomatic as he should be, but he was married to the woman, for heaven's sake, we have a child in common. Her four-line typed reply, signed in her absence, advises him that she has taken note of his position.

Well, it's a hell of a long time since she did that.

Mundy _redux__ next appeals to his son, Jake, after several false starts now in his final year at Bristol, urging him to get his fellow students onto the streets, put up barricades, boycott lectures, occupy the vice chancellor's lodgings. But Jake relates better to Philip these days, and has little time for menopausal offshore fathers who haven't got e-mail. A handwritten reply is beyond his powers.

So Mundy _redux__ marches, the way he used to march with Ilse, or with Sasha in Berlin, but with a conviction he never felt before because convictions until now were essentially what he borrowed from other people. It is a little surprising, of course, that the beastly Germans should bother to demonstrate against a war that their government condemns but, bless them, they do. Perhaps they know better than most just how easy it is to seduce a gullible electorate.

And Mundy _redux__ marches with them, and Zara and Mustafa come, and so do their friends, and so do the ghosts of Rani, Ahmed, Omar and Ali, and the Kreuzberg cricket club. Mustafa's school marches and Mundy _redux__ marches with the school.

The mosque marches and the police march alongside, and it's a new thing for Mundy _redux__ to meet policemen who don't want war any more than the marchers do. After the march he goes with Mustafa and Zara to the mosque, and after the mosque they sit sadly over coffee in a corner of Zara's kebab house with the enlightened young imam who preaches the value of study as opposed to dangerous ideology.

It's about becoming real after too many years of pretending, Mundy decides. It's about putting the brakes on human self-deception, starting with my own.

"Your little prime minister is not the American president's _poodle,__ he is his _blind dog,__ I hear," Sasha is saying, as if he has been looking in on Mundy's thoughts. "Supported by Britain's _servile corporate media,__ he has given _spurious respectability to American imperialism.__ Some even say that it was you British who led the dance."

"I wouldn't be at all surprised," says Mundy, sitting upright as he recalls something he has read somewhere, probably in the _Suddeutsche,__ and repeated.

"And since the so-called coalition, by making an unprovoked attack on Iraq, has already broken _half the rules in the international law books, and intends by its continued occupation of Iraq to break the other half,__ should we not be insisting that the principal instigators be forced to account for themselves before the International Courts of Justice in The Hague?"

"Good idea," Mundy agrees dully. If not exactly his own, it's certainly one he has lifted, and used to stunning effect.

"Despite the fact, of course, that America has _unilaterally declared itself immune from the jurisdiction of such courts.__"

"Despite it." He has made the same point to a packed meeting at the Poltergeist just two weeks ago, after something he heard on the BBC World Service.

And suddenly that does it for Mundy. He's had enough and not just of this evening. He's sick to death of sly games. He doesn't know what Sasha's up to, but he knows he doesn't like it nor the superior grin that goes with it. And he's about to say some of this and perhaps all of it when Sasha barges in ahead of him. Their faces are very close and lit by the Christmas candles from the Berlin attic. Sasha has grasped him by the forearm. The dark eyes, for all their pain and desperation, radiate an almost pathetic enthusiasm.

"Teddy."

"What the hell is it?"

"I have only one question for you. I already know the answer but I must hear it from you personally, I have promised. Are you ready?"

"I doubt it."

"Do you believe your own rhetoric? Or is all your huffing and puffing some kind of self-protection? You are an Englishman here in Germany. Perhaps you feel you must strike an attitude, speak louder than you feel? It would be understandable. I don't criticize you, but I'm asking you."

"For Christ's _sake,__ Sasha! You wear the beret. You drag me out here. You smirk at me like Mata Hari. You throw my own words in my face. Now will you kindly lay your egg and tell me what the fuck is going on?"

"Teddy, please answer me. I bring unbelievable hope. For both of us. An opportunity so great you cannot imagine. For you, immediate release from your material worries. Your role as teacher restored, your love of the multicultural community made real. For me--a platform greater than I ever dreamed of. And nothing less than a hand in the making of a new world. I think you are going to sleep."

"No, Sasha. Just listening without looking at you. Sometimes it's a better way."

"_This is a war of lies.__ Do you agree? _Our politicians lie to the press, they see their lies printed and call them public opinion.__"

"Are these your words or something I stole?"

"They are the words of a great man. Do you agree with them? Yes or no."

"All right: Yes."

"_By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed. Then we have a war. This war.__ These are also his words. Do you agree with them? Please, Teddy! Yes or no?"

"Yes again. So what?"

"_The process is incremental. As more lies become necessary, more wars are needed to justify them.__ Do you still agree?"

With the anger rising inside him Mundy waits with seeming impassivity for the next salvo.

"_The easiest and cheapest trick for any leader is to take his country to war on false pretenses. Anyone who does that should be hounded out of office for all time.__ Am I being too strident for you, Teddy, or do you agree with this sentiment also?"

Mundy finally explodes. "_Yes, yes, yes.__ All right? I agree with _my__ rhetoric, _your__ rhetoric and your latest _guru's__ rhetoric. Unfortunately, as we have learned to our cost, rhetoric doesn't stop wars. So goodnight and thank you, and let me go home."

"Teddy. Twenty miles from here sits a man who has pledged his life and fortune to the Arms Race for Truth. That expression also is his own. To listen to him is to be inspired. Nothing you hear will alarm you, nothing will be to your peril or your disadvantage. It is possible he will make a proposal to you. An amazing, unique, completely electrifying proposal. If you accept it, and he accepts you, you will come away with your life immeasurably enriched, spiritually and materially. You will enjoy a renaissance as never before. If no agreement is achieved, I have given him my word that his secret will be safe with you." The grip on Mundy's forearm tightens. "Do you want me to flatter you, Teddy? Is that what you are waiting for? Do you want me to woo you the way our beloved Professor wooed you? Hours of foreplay over expensive meals? Those times are over too."

Mundy feels older than he wants to feel. Please, he thinks. We've been here. We've done this stuff. At our age there are no new games anymore. "What's his name?" he asks wearily.

"He has many names."

"One will do fine."

"He is a philosopher, a philanthropist, a recluse and a genius."

"And a spy," Mundy suggests. "He comes and listens to me at the Poltergeist and he tells you what I said."

Nothing can prick Sasha's enthusiasm. "Teddy, he is not a spy. He is a man of huge wealth and power. Information is brought to him as a tribute. I mentioned your name to him, he said nothing. A week later he summoned me. 'Your Teddy is at the Linderhof, spouting bullshit to English tourists. He has a Muslim wife and a good heart. First you will establish whether he is as sympathetic as he claims. If he is, you will explain to him the principle. Then you will bring him to me.'"

The _principle,__ Mundy repeats to himself. There will be no war, but in the pursuit of principle not a stone will be left standing. "Since when have you been attracted to rich and powerful men?" he asks.

"Since I met him."

"How? What happened? Did he jump out of a cake?"

Impatient of Mundy's skepticism, Sasha releases his arm. "At a Middle Eastern university. Which one is unclear to me and he will not reveal it. Perhaps it was Aden. I was in Aden for a year. Maybe Dubai or Yemen, or Damascus. Or further east in Penang, where the authorities promised to break my legs if I wasn't gone by morning. He tells me only that he slipped into the Aula before the doors closed, that he sat at the back and was profoundly moved by my words. He left before questions but immediately ordered his people to obtain a copy of my lecture."

"And what was the subject of this lecture?" Mundy wants to suggest the social genesis of knowledge, but a merciful instinct restrains him.

"It was the enslavement of the global proletariat by corporate-military alliances," Sasha declares with pride. "It was the inseparability of industrial and colonialist expansion."

"I'd break your legs for that one. How did He of Many Names make his money?"

"Disgracefully. He is fond of quoting Balzac. 'Behind every great fortune lies one great crime.' Balzac was talking bullshit, he assures me. It requires many crimes. Dimitri has committed all of them."

"So that's his name. Or one of them. Dimitri."

"For tonight, for us, it is his name."

"Dimitri who?"

"Mr. Dimitri."

"From Russia? Greece? Where else do Dimitris come from? Albania?"

"Teddy, you are being irrelevant. This man is a citizen of the entire world."

"We all are. Which bit of it?"

"Would it impress you if I told you he had as many passports as Mr. Arnold?"

"Answer my question, Sasha. How did he make his bloody money? Arms dealing? Drugs? White slaving? Or something really bad?"

"You are charging through open doors, Teddy. I exclude nothing. Neither does Dimitri."

"So this is penance. Guilt money. He's fucked up the globe, and now he's going to rebuild it. Don't tell me: He's an American."

"It is not penance, Teddy, it is not guilt, and so far as I know he is not American. It is reform. We do not have to be Lutherans to believe that men can be reformed. At the time he chanced to hear me speak, he was a pilgrim in search of faith, as you and I have been. He questioned everything and believed in nothing. He was an intellectual animal, brilliant, bitter and uneducated. He had read many books in order to inform himself, but he had not yet defined his role in the world."

"But you were the boy. You showed him the light," says Mundy roughly and, resting his head in his hand, closes his eyes for a bit of quiet, and realizes that his body is gently shaking from head to toe.

But Sasha allows him no quiet. In his zeal, he is unrelenting. "Why are you so cynical, Teddy? Have you never stood in a bus queue and overheard ten words that expressed something in your heart that you didn't know was there? It was my good luck to speak the ten words. He could have heard them anywhere. Today he knows that. Already at the time I spoke them, they were being spoken in the streets of Seattle, and Washington, D. C., and Genoa. Wherever the octopus of corporate imperialism is attacked, the same words are being spoken."

Mundy remembers something he once wrote to Judith about having no firm ground. He has none now. This is Weimar all over again. I'm an abstraction, talking to another about a third.

"So Mr. Dimitri heard you," he says patiently, in the tone of somebody reconstructing a crime. "He stood in your bus queue. And he was knocked out by your eloquence. As we all are. So now let me ask you again. How did you _meet__ him? When did he become flesh and blood for you? Or are you not allowed to say?"

"He sent an emissary. Exactly as he sent me to talk to you today."

"When? Where? Whom did he send?"

"Teddy, we are not in the White Hotel."

"And we're not deceiving anyone either. That's over. We can talk like human beings."

"I was in Vienna."

"What for?"

"A conference."

"Of?"

"Internationalists and libertarians."

"And?"

"A woman approached me."

"Anyone we know?"

"She was a stranger to me. She evinced a familiarity with my work, and asked whether I would be willing to meet an illustrious friend of hers, a man of distinction who shunned the limelight."

"So she didn't have a name either."

"Kolbach. Maria Kolbach."

"Age?"

"It is not relevant. She was not desirable. Perhaps forty-five."

"From?"

"It was not revealed. She had a Viennese accent."

"Working for whom?"

"Maybe Dimitri. It is not known."

"Was she part of the conference?"

"She did not say so, and her name was not on the list of delegates or organizers."

"Well, at least you looked. Was she Fraulein or Frau?"

"It was not revealed."

"Did she give you her card?"

"No. And I did not request it."

"Show you her driving license?"

"Teddy, I think you are actually full of shit."

"Do you know where she lives, if she lives anywhere? Did you look her up in the Vienna telephone directory? Why are we dealing with a bunch of fucking _ghosts?__" He catches sight of Sasha's crestfallen expression, and reins himself in. "All right. She accosts you. She pops the question. And you say, yes, Frau or Fraulein Kolbach, I would like to meet your illustrious friend. _Then__ what happened?"

"I was received in a substantial villa in one of the best quarters of Vienna, the name of which I am not at liberty to reveal. Nor may I reveal the burden of the discussion."

"She took you there, presumably."