Involuted spiral

He put his mug down - it was a large white bone china mug with drawings of a Bauhaus chair depicted on its surface and it was drained of every last vestige of coffee - and lit another cigarette. The second packet was opened and its predecessor lay crumpled beside the cheap Bic lighter in its odd black rubber cover. His left hand held the cigarette and his right snaked out to fondle the lighter - "Questions so far? On this layer?"

"Why", ventured Power, "the Litvinenko story? Why that one? Of all possible threads to hang his text from, why did he choose that one?"

"Two reasons I'd say. First, the very contemporaneity of it - it was all over the papers all over the world when he started and so that alone gave him the grounding he needed. Second, the intrinsic nature of the story as it was unfolding then. Nothing to do with the deaths or the poison or the foreignness of the whole thing, but the nature of reportage, the nature of story-making to serve ulterior motives. It was, you see, an opportunity for him to have the inner story a reflection of the outer story. Just like his own text to be. But here we are getting ahead of ourselves - like the text itself our session is traversing layers already. It was clear that there were many ways that the real-life story could pan out but that the press would would decide the nature of that unravelling and the ultimate "truth" of the matter. And that is where his second layer comes into play: the nature of the relationship between truth and the written. Of course the fact that the spy like tenor of the defining layer story allowed him to indulge his own favour for the noirish genre would have tempted him to the story too. One might almost imagine that a lot of what we are was already worked out and that the Litvinenko story drew it forth from him".

Charlie drew a piece of paper from his pocket and laid it on the desk between Lory and Power. As neither of you deciphered the whole spiral text I have made a copy of it but with the text direction reversed. Now that we are into the 2nd layer of the palimpsest it would be as well for you to appreciate the whole of that defining text.





(TBC)