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By Root 1049 0

Belindo: old and over the hill he can't climb into the ring these days without stuffing himself full of stimulants. It's Widow Roessler who doles them out, slipping them in his mouth with a soup spoon. Snooping through the keyhole, Inigo, a glutton for psychodrugs, interrupts and demands a dose for himself. When they refuse, he blackmails the wrestler threatening to have him banned from the championship; Belindo ties and gags him, then prostitutes him for a few guineas to Ogiva who has for some time been infatuated with the elusive aristocrat; impervious to eros, Inigo can only achieve an amorous state if on the point of being strangled, Ogiva presses on his carotid artery with her slim fingertips; perhaps Belindo lends a hand; just two of his fingers and the little lord rolls his eyes and gives up the ghost; what to do with the corpse? To simulate a suicide they knife him … Stop! Have to rewrite the whole programme: have to cancel the instruction now stored in the central memory that someone strangled cannot be knifed. The ferrite rings are demagnetized and remagnetized; I'm sweating.

Let's start again from scratch. What is the job my client expects of me? To arrange a certain amount of data in a logical order. It is information I am dealing with, not human lives, with their good and evil sides. For reasons that need not concern me the data available to me only has to do with the evil side, and the computer must put it in order. Not the evil, which cannot perhaps be put in order, but the information relative to the evil. On the basis of this data, contained in the alphabetical index of the Abominable Deeds, I must reconstruct the lost Account, true or false as that may be.

The Account presupposes the existence of a writer. Only by reconstructing it will we know who that was: certain data, however, can already be placed on his or her file. The author of the Account couldn't have been killed by knifing or strangling, because he wouldn't have been able to include his or her own death in the report; as far as suicide is concerned, the writer could have decided on it before writing out the copybook-testament, and carried it out later; but someone who believes they have been incited to suicide by the force of someone else's will does not commit suicide; every exclusion of the author of the copybook from the role of victim automatically increases the likelihood of our being able to attribute to him or her the role of perpetrator: hence this person could be both the originator of the evil and of the information regarding that evil. This presents no problems for my work: evil and information regarding evil are coincident, both in the burnt book and in the electronic files.

The memory has also been fed another series of data to be compared with the first: the four insurance policies taken out with Skiller, one by Inigo, one by Ogiva and two by the Widow (one for herself and one for Belindo). An obscure thread may link the policies to the Abominable Deeds and the photoelectric cells must follow that thread in a bewildering blind man's bluff, seeking it out amongst the tiny holes of the punch cards. Even the policy data, now translated into binary code, is capable of evoking images in my mind: it's evening, there's fog; Skiller rings at the door of the house on the hump of wasteland; the landlady imagines he's a new tenant and greets him accordingly; he gets his insurance brochures out of his bag; he's sitting in the lounge; he accepts a cup of tea; clearly he can't get the four contracts signed in just one visit; he makes sure he is thoroughly familiar with the house and its four inhabitants. I imagine Skiller helping Ogiva to brush out the wigs in her collection (and in so doing his lips brush the model's bald scalp); I imagine him as, with a touch as sure as a doctor's and as thoughtful as a son's, he measures the widow's blood pressure, enclosing her soft white arm in the sphygmomanometer; or again I see him trying to get Inigo interested in home maintenance, pointing out problems with the plumbing, subsidence in the loadbearing