Whereupon, as more laughter rattles through the smoke-filled room, the mustachioed editor of the city newspaper, closed by government order since the last election, arrives, the last of the Colonel’s conspiratory assembly. He rushes in, looking unkempt, harried, flicking his half-smoked brown cigarillo into the fireplace and taking up the brandy offered him, tossing it down in a single swallow, but rejecting a refill, muttering apologies for his late arrival. The Colonel introduces him to the group, though most know him already, some all too well, and also explains that the man with the heavy bottle-glass spectacles is his family doctor. A man of impeccable discretion, the Colonel says, and the future director of the National Health Services. The doctor nods without smiling. He is also, the Colonel adds, the doctor of the President’s wife, whom all present know to be a woman subject to periodic fits of depression, and in frequent need of personal counsel. Now the others nod back, the hint of a smile flickering on some faces.

“He’s done it all. There’s nothing left to draw.” Facebook

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The apron is handed to the editor, who stares at it in puzzlement, shrugs, tosses it over the back of a chair. He is the riskiest of the Colonel’s choices, a man not known for keeping confidences or entering into alliances; he may be here merely for the story that’s in it. Moreover, he has managed at one time or another to offend just about everyone in the room, including the Colonel, who once was targeted in a series of articles on alleged abuses of the military. But, as a skilled shaper of public opinion with a vast range of connections to all elements of society, the editor could be an invaluable asset to their movement, and, like almost everyone else in the room, he has his darker secrets—the death of a former lover, who was said to be blackmailing him, has never been adequately explained, for example. The Colonel feels certain that he can secure the man’s full coöperation.

The professor, his back now to the window, surveys the Colonel’s motley band of privileged renegades, not surprised, but not heartened, either, by the arrival of this capricious servant of the status quo. The professor knows about the cloud hanging over the editor’s past, because at the time, all those years ago, they were competing for the same ill-fated woman. They were also competing in university debates about the future of the nation. The professor has always been a romantic at heart, his politics unchanged, though then much less disciplined and informed. His young adversary, the future newspaperman, had no politics at all; for him, it was all just a game to be played, eloquence and cleverness of more value than being right. Still true. In this gathering, however, the editor is, at least, something of an intellectual and the professor’s only feasible ally. He reminds the editor now, addressing him directly (behind him, twilight has descended in the garden), that in his student days he once wrote a much praised essay on the coded language of the disenfranchised. Is there a hidden or symbolic message woven into the apron? What does he think?

The editor, a new cigarillo dangling from his lips, picks up the apron again as if to study it and considers his present audience, piecing together the various strands of the Colonel’s strategy—the three branches of the military, the civil police, business leaders, the government (the Deputy Minister’s presence here is the only real news), plus the discredited professor, with his presumed links to the students and the unions—while searching for a response that will be both safe and original. The patterns on the apron are traditional ones that he has in the past interpreted in various ways, depending on the circumstances and his own purposes at the time, and he could no doubt find new meanings suited to this occasion, but just then the Colonel’s daughter brings him a cup of coffee and offers him a sweet biscuit. He knows from those debates of old that the unanticipated wins the day, so he tosses the apron back over the chair with a shrug, calling it a creation of routine habit, pops the biscuit into his mouth, then seems to draw up short, his eye on the daughter’s woven vest. Ah! However . . . He points at a figure on the front of it, near the tip of one breast. May I? he asks through a mouthful of crumbs, and the daughter slips the vest off shyly and hands it to him. He holds the vest up before him, still chewing, his head moving left to right, as though reading it. The story embroidered here, he says, running a stained finger over the threads, is an ancient pagan one about a national god or hero who taught the people how to read the sky. All these sequins are, in reality, stars, and the beads, in their various colors, represent the different human races. What is unusual about this design is the way the beads are not simply scattered about the garment but are gathered into little clusters and enclosed in chain-stitched circles, suggesting the formation of societies, or perhaps—see here the metal threads—of armies.

The Colonel recognizes that the editor, with typical flair, is improvising as he goes, and probably few in the room believe a word he’s saying, but he has captured their grinning attention, and now they are all passing the vest about to see if they can see what he claims to see. No, the editor says when the professor asks, the civilizing hero or god is not depicted, because it is considered bad luck to do so—or sacrilegious, same thing; he is represented by the whole, being part of everything that is, a primitive religious notion you’ve often accused of creating a predisposition to tyranny. He winks at the Colonel. The Colonel, with a tolerant smile, uses this interlude to collect his thoughts. He will soon lay out for the others his strategy for overthrowing the present regime. This is not a guerrilla operation (he will remind them) but a quick strike from within. Some will die—that can’t be helped—but if they act briskly and ruthlessly casualties can be kept to a minimum. He will outline some of these moves, but without releasing any details not already known to those in the room. In individual meetings later, he will add more information, telling each conspirator something slightly different, some of it false, to see if any of it is acted upon by the President, hopefully thereby singling out any traitors to their cause before it is too late.

He whom the Colonel is hoping to ferret out knows that the Colonel will try to set a trap. He has been asked to meet with the Colonel privately. He will listen attentively, but act on nothing the man tells him except as commanded. Nor will he expand on his clandestine reports to the President beyond these witnessed gatherings. Names, numbers, dates. The bare minimum. Both the President and the Colonel have made him the same promise. He trusts neither of them. But soon, or sooner yet, he must choose. The Colonel is the nicer man. Therefore, he will no doubt choose the President. He watches the daughter’s vest circulating through the room, its transmission bonding the gathered insurgents and generating a heightened excitement. Anticipatory. Fearful. Prurient. They are moving into history; the hour draws near. When the vest reaches the former Police Chief, he passes it on without comment. A cold man intent on nothing but his own ambition. The future betrayer has been asked by the President to try to recruit this man, so close to the Colonel, a dangerous project. He has cautiously befriended him, speaking of the general need for a private security agency, and his willingness to search for financial backers. The others take up the vest eagerly, fondling it as if fondling what it once adorned. Fresh interpretations of it are offered as it moves through the room, none a match for the newsman’s inventions. Shorn of its pretty curtains, the girl’s white blouse seems to glow as, outside, the light fades. Shall he include this in his report? No, he shall not. The uncouth department-store magnate, the flushed young pilot, the naval Captain, with his stupid remarks, all ogle her as she passes. He can imagine their imaginings. When it’s his turn to comment on the vest, though reluctant to feed their vulgar appetites, he will do so. The ex-professor’s gaze, he notes, is one more of affection than of lust. She was once his student. What transpired between them? The Deputy Minister of the Interior seems to be outraged by the sharing of the vest and by the salacious commentary that accompanies its travels, yet compelled somehow to join in. Though he handles the daughter’s vest when it reaches him as if it were some obscene object, he nonetheless scours it with hungry eyes. Could the Deputy Minister be a double agent, employed to keep an eye on him, to verify the veracity and completeness of his reports? Who knows? A tricky no man’s land he’s in, wherein he has walked all his days, on the principle that life is short and meaningless and one must amass what one can, enjoy it, and die whenever.