‘He’s trying to,’ Professor Probrius replied. ‘But he isn’t quite sure what it is he’s done. He came across the word anagram in a tweet the other day and had to put himself to bed. He’s going in for a lot of jutting and pouting which is the usual sign he’s bluffing something out.’
Whether Fracassus was aware of what he’d done or not, his name now hung in the firmament, fierce and vivid, like a hunter’s moon. Invitations to him to return home and give a talk, a seminar, a lecture, anything he chose, flooded his mail box. Caleb Hopsack congratulated his ‘star twitter pupil’ and begged him to address the annual conference of the Ordinary People’s Party. It took a while for the phlegmatic citizens of Plasentza to grasp that the tweeter of the hour, a real live Prince and property tycoon who’d broken the spell under which they’d been living for decades, was actually resident in the capital city of their country. But once his presence had been verified they were eager to hear him. They hadn’t realised how pusillanimous they were until, in 140 characters of fire, he’d shown them. They had practised tolerance for evil-doers and tried to reintegrate them into society. They had cared for minorities and strangers, but now these same minorities appeared to them as self-pitying schismatics and those same strangers were planting bombs. What about their own needs? Who was speaking up for them?
Fracassus was.
Time to Muck Out the Pig-Pen, he tweeted, remembering a phrase his father had whispered into his crib.
Invited to discuss the Bomb as Opportunity at a meeting of the Plasentza Scientific and Philosophical Society, he drew huge crowds. He had feared he would have to make a speech of more than 140 characters and ordered Professor Probrius to write it for him, but the organizers assured him it would be enough if he simply mounted the rostrum and shouted ‘Kill the killer.’
‘Kill the killer,’ the crowd chanted back.
‘We’re too scarred,’ someone shouted. And then that too was picked up and passed from voice to voice.
Not knowing what to say, Fracassus turned his face sideways to the audience as he’d seen someone called Mussolini do in old newsreels. It was the very expression – though he could hardly be expected to remember that – with which he came into the world. He folded his arms and pursed his lips: a stance suggesting petulance on a Homeric scale. As though by divine chemistry, the audience was at once transformed into supplicants and Fracassus into a God who could stand there for eternity, waiting to be appeased. Nero, Mussolini, Fracasus.
‘Fra-Ca-Sus!’ the people called.
Peevish and impassive, his fists clenched, Fracassus raised his chin and stared towards the East.
He left the stage still clenching his fists. Women fought to kiss his knuckles. ‘Such a boy,’ one said. ‘And yet such a man,’ said another.
‘You haven’t seen anything yet,’ he told them.
‘They haven’t heard anything yet either,’ Dr Cobalt muttered to Professor Probrius. They were standing to one side, waiting to escort him back to the hotel, not wanting to be seen. Fracassus was a prodigy. A monstrous and abnormal thing. He appeared from nowhere. It would disappoint the faithful to learn he had an elocution teacher and a life coach.
‘He has a terrific advantage,’ Probrius said, ‘in that they don’t actually come to hear him. There’s something about him that compels attention. It can’t be looks and it can’t be presence, because he has neither.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘I think it’s that very question. What is it? Why are we looking at him? He possesses the opposite to charisma to such a degree that people will stand for hours trying to figure out why they’re standing there for hours.’
‘But see how transfigured they look as they leave. It is as though they’ve been vouchsafed a vision.’
‘They have. A vision of themselves. He is a mirror into their secret selves. They applaud their own words and leave transported.’
‘He should go far.’
‘He will.’
But first he had to address the Plasentza Chamber of Commerce.
Observing his reluctance – for Fracassus had been asked not to make his ‘Kill the Killer’ speech in deference to the feelings of businessmen who might have thought he meant them, and he couldn’t remember what else he believed – Professor Probrius undertook to brief him, though his own understanding of business matters extended little beyond the conviction that the pursuit of money softened men’s brains.
‘Hardens them, you mean,’ Dr Cobalt said one night, by way of pillow talk.
‘I think that’s your politics talking,’ Probrius replied, sitting up on one elbow. ‘In my experience, those we call business men are the quickest of any profession to be impressed by the platitudes of success; to be dazzled by the prosaic financial exploits of one another; and to invest the most basic tricks of their trade, though they don’t surpass the bartering of the schoolyard, with an unfathomable mystique. The whole science of business could be written on the back of a post card.’
‘You’ve never heard of the rich crushing the poor?’
‘I have, my love. I have heard of it and observed it. But the cruellest of men can be gullible, and it is to tickle their gullibility that I am preparing the Prince.’
In which spirit he advised Fracassus…
To claim credit for what he hadn’t done. To inflate figures. To make much of little. To drop names of people he didn’t know. To invoke the sacred mysteries of the ‘deal’ and declare himself a master of its arts. To take delight in scoring the meanest of triumphs over the smallest of men. To reverse the normal rules of polite society and brag about his worth. In short to be himself.
How Fracassus beguiled an audience of bankers, fund-managers and developers three or four times his age, is the stuff of Plasentza business community legend. How he told them that he owned more properties than in actuality he did. How he omitted all mention of his father and presented himelf as a phenomenon of self-generation. How he told them, above their gasps of admiration, that he aimed high. How he told them that he thought big. How he made the shape of something big with his hands. How he divided life into those who push and those who allow themselves to be pushed, and how he was a pusher. How he told them that the first law of business was to know what you wanted, and how he told them that the second law of business was to make sure that you got it. How he told them that enriching oneself was Godly but enriching oneself at the expense of others was very heaven. How he told them that he paid no taxes, for to pay tax only showed one ran one’s business inefficiently. And therefore how he told them that he never would pay tax so long as there was a bone in his body…
As the audience of high aimers and big thinkers rose to reward Fracassus with their admiration – for never had the things they thought found better expression – Professor Probrius counted himself satisfied.
‘Didn’t I tell you?’ he told Dr Cobalt.
‘To be proved right isn’t always to be vindicated morally,’ she said.
‘You mean what’s true shouldn’t be true.’
‘That’s exactly what I mean.’
Vindicated morally or not, Probrius had to admit himself surprised by how well Fracassus’s asseveration that he paid no tax was received, not only by the business leaders and captains of industry, but by the waiters and waitresses, the winer pourers, the glass polishers, the ushers, the security men, the sound engineers, and the members of the press. If the poorest of the poor had been here, Professor Probrius thought, they would have cheered with equal zest. Here, to all men, in an age of business, was the apotheosis of success: ONE WHO PAID NO TAX.
Yet again, Fracassus had his finger on the pulse.