Chapter 11. | The Adherents

Les Voyants summoned Jude Hengsterman to France.

The Marseille airport, like most airports, is not a glamorous way to enter a country. Stepping through the exterior doors into the open air, he was immediately greeted by the Mistral, the forceful wind that blows down from the Rhône Valley to the Mediterranean. The intense current bombarded him with the brine of the Étang de Berre, unpleasantly accented with the harsh, industrial aromas of airplane fuel and car exhaust.

He fastened the top buttons of his waxed coat to brace against the chill. Luggage in hand, he made his way towards the train. The ride to the Marseille-Saint-Charles station offered a sweeping view of the lagoon, but his capacity to enjoy it had been reduced through the exhaustion of travel. He had scarcely slept on the journey (from Washington, D.C., to Lisbon and finally here). The acidic coffee he sipped was curdling his stomach and making him feel ill.

At any rate, the old-world, lived-in charms of Marseille were lost on him. Hengsterman would have rather been called to one of the tidier modern metropolises, like Dubai, where experience and culture had been distilled and organized into efficient containers. To him, the crumbling cities of old Europe felt untidy and sad.

Hengsterman had been given his destination without clarity as to the broader nature of his assignment. There had been the familiar short, automated voice on the phone call from the unrecognized number, followed by a Signal message with flight details and instructions. He had collected his ready-packed duffle and gone.

He had sent a message confirming his arrival at the airport, and now, on the train, he received a series of short, clarifying messages in turn. Hengsterman had seen the endless reports about the destroyed Matisse (the news had not hesitated to capitalize on the drama of a burned masterpiece). He could not have imagined that his organization had been involved. Individual members of Les Voyants had little visibility into the extent of its activities, but, given his past experiences, he had envisioned Les Voyants as too purely futurist in its ideals to be associated with old swatches of paint.

This would be quite the complicated situation, especially with the scrutiny of the police. Lots of big egos, each looking to make their mark as the avenger of this act of terror. He had certainly done some high-profile work in the past. That unpleasant business with the whistleblower whom he had left in the San Francisco Bay a few years back had been particularly sensitive. But this was in another arena. He interpreted this new assignment as a validation of his past successes.

The name of his contact, Lorin, was expectedly unfamiliar. In his career, Hengsterman rarely collaborated with the same individuals. Besides, he had not spent much time in Europe. He had typically been sent to the American coasts, dealing with executives, engineers, and consultants, along with the rarer international excursion to India, China, or the Middle East. Less than a month ago, he had been obtaining leverage for blackmail in Bengaluru.

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First impressions are everything, or so we’re told. As a character of modern folklore, James Bond has been reintroduced to the public again and again, perpetually being unmade and remade in a new cultural moment.

As we look ahead to yet another reintroduction for the character, Denis Villeneuve’s Bond 26 (which is the first entry in the Amazon MGM era of the James Bond film franchise following the close of the EON Productions era with 2021’s No Time to Die), it may be valuable to look back at the ways the character was first introduced to the public in the literary and cinematic domains, and how that establishes the character’s fundamental ethos.

The Fleming Bond

James Bond made his first appearance in Ian Fleming’s 1953 novel, Casino Royale. The celebrated opening lines of Casino Royale’s first chapter exemplify Fleming’s penchant for overwrought, baroque prose, which, at his best, applied to great effect through a keen sense of rhythm:

The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling - a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension - becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.

James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired.

There’s a power in maximalism just as there is a power in economy, and Fleming is always at great pains to lay it on thick in order to conjure a vivid sense of place. In a few sentences, Ian Fleming has conjured up a whole world and placed James Bond in it.

James Bond, from the start, is defined by setting and context. Fleming was intentional about preserving a certain kind of vagueness about Bond, allowing him to be a more ephemeral vessel for his readership. This vagueness was both a strength and weakness. In one of Fleming’s more evocative descriptions in Moonraker, the third Bond novel, Bond is “the man who was only a silhouette,” one of the more effective attempts to inject Bond with an existential air (Fleming is routinely concerned with Bond’s inability to enter into the world of normal human beings; Bond is both empowered and cursed by the way he, as a spy, exists in the shadowlands of identity and life). But Fleming also became frustrated by Bond’s inability to be a proper vessel for more dramatic storytelling, and, in personal remarks, disdained Bond as a “cardboard booby.” In this way, Bond is something of a fragile vessel: defined just well enough to function as a vehicle for momentum and a space for the escapist desires of the audience.

In this opening chapter of Casino Royale, Fleming is mostly concerned with depicting Bond as an agent, dangerous and capable. We follow Bond as he observes, reports, and prepares, establishing Bond’s core. In essence, Fleming’s Bond is a “blunt instrument” wielded by the West against the more sinister predators of the world: cruel Soviet spymasters, vicious gangsters, predatory billionaires, and madmen. Bond is not a noble figure, particularly, he is disreputable, and stands against propriety, but Fleming treats him with a kind of respect regardless. Bond has been freed from the burdens of polite, mannered society by giving himself over to a career haunted by death. Bond anticipates and, to a point, embraces his own death, and in that, finds a kind of freedom from the strictures of conventional moral, respectable life. Bond has been freed to indulge his appetite for pleasure and risk-taking in service of a greater cause.

If that all sounds very existential, it is. For all of the pulpy simplicity of the Fleming’s novels, Fleming’s novels are openly very philosophical, increasingly so as they go on (Fleming’s Bond has a taste for monologuing that the films have rarely attempted).

But framed in this way, Fleming’s Bond becomes an antihero to appeal to the more modest and cautious everyday male reader of the 1950s and early 1960s. Freed from the shackle of conventional domestic obligations, Bond becomes a vicarious vessel for those otherwise unable to escape their day to day doldrums, including Fleming himself, who, like his creation, had an uneasy relationship to the boundaries of respectable domestic life.

The escapist fantasy of indulgence is further made safe by the sense that Bond is an antihero on the right side, a “latter-day Saint George," as Fleming described him, who “does kill dragons after all.” (One aspect more unique to the Fleming novels than the films is the extent to which they further make this vicarious act of indulgence “safe” for readership by simultaneously indulging and chastising Bond’s decadence; physical torture and symbolic cycles of death and rebirth abound in the novels, as though Fleming is flogging his character for his excesses.)

Fleming thus constructs a world designed to play to that ferocious appetite: a world of glamour and danger, where indulgent pleasure and risk-taking is encouraged and rewarded, haunted by larger than life forces of villainy. There is a sense in which Bond belongs to the casino more than any other possible environment, because James Bond is, above all else, a gambler. He is addicted to the thrill of the big bet, both at the tables and in his adventures. He fights outlandish villains in part because they give him the opportunity to prove himself not just in skill, but in instinct, forcing Bond to continually make leaps of faith and prove himself by emerging on the other side. The quintessential Bondian victory comes not from methodical strategy, but from a hunch that is played at the right time and moment. Bond’s record of success is a record of timing and luck. In this way, Bond and the setting of the casino are wholly aligned.

But Bond is also a figure of great lethality, empowered by his employers to wield death as a weapon. His lack of attachment to his own life enables him to wield the threat of violence from a position of power. Fleming closes the introductory chapter with Bond resting his hand on the gun underneath his pillow:

Then he slept, and with the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold.

Thus Fleming establishes Bond, the gambler-killer, as a master of the game of life and death.

That core thesis would be further distilled and more vividly expressed when the character lept onto the big screen in 1962’s Dr. No.

The Connery Bond

At the time producers of the James Bond film series, Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, sought to bring the character to the big screen, they did not have the rights to Fleming’s Casino Royale; Ian Fleming had sold the isolated rights to that novel earlier in the 1950s. Instead, they chose Fleming’s sixth novel, which had more spectacle and greater stakes, Dr. No.

But in crafting the character’s first appearance in the film, the creative team still drew inspiration from the foundation Fleming had laid in Casino Royale. This was a keen move; James Bond is, as Fleming established him, first and foremost, a gambler. You cannot understand the character without understanding how he is fundamentally rooted in an ethos of risk-seeking. The shorthand of a casino setting is an ideal way to express the heart of the character.

Indeed, shorthand is something cinema thrives on. Cinema is constrained by time, and must rely on the economy of precisely observed moments to convey what may be whole passages of thought and expression in a novel. This sequence in Dr. No is, in my estimation, a lightning-in-a-bottle sequence that surpasses the Fleming material from which it draws inspiration. It ranks among the handful of perfect character introductions in the history of cinema. Not a single frame or line goes astray.

Where Fleming’s introduction of Bond in the casino focused on a loose study of Bond’s tradecraft (Bond observing his target, making a report, preparing for future danger), the film adaptation of Dr. No makes the casino a theater for Bond’s unbridled hedonism. Bond’s foil at the card table is not the villain, but a potential lover: Sylvia Trench, a married woman who pursues Bond across a game of cards.

While the scene is well-written and well-directed, what gives it its charge is one of cinema’s great special effects: Sean Connery in his prime. Connery was considered miscast by Fleming, who saw the character as more conventionally in the mold of the English elite, but his working class Scottish background and drawl gave him a classlessness that undercut some of the elitism of the character, and accentuates the ways in which Fleming had already presented his Bond as an outsider (Fleming, in Moonraker, writes that “Bond knew that there was something alien and un-English about himself”). Connery’s interpretation further distilled the character by discarding his contemplative, existential facets and focusing more directly on his animalistic impulses.

Connery had great clarity regarding his interpretations of the Bond character, which he said extended more from conversations with Fleming than the books themselves, noting:

“I saw [Bond] as a complete sensualist, senses highly tuned, awake to everything, quite amoral…He is rather cruel, sadistic.”Connery’s Bond is a confident and seasoned predator with an insatiable appetite.

Watching Connery’s Bond is a bit is like watching a panther play with its food. There is little warmth or generosity in his eyes. Instead, one discerns hunger and intention. He feels dangerous at all times.

The Dr. No scene famously establishes “Bond, James Bond” as the character’s signature catchphrase (the cadence appeared in Fleming, but never as a scene-stopping moment). What makes this rendition of the series trope unique is that it has an effortlessness about it. It is unburdened by the audience’s expectation. The scene, and Connery himself, is elegantly nonchalant. The unhurried lighting of the cigarette, the throwaway delivery, the flicker of the eyes: it’s precise and brilliant.

The name “James Bond” was chosen by Fleming precisely because it was nondescript, but as uttered by Connery it carries a surprising grandeur. It helps, too, when one is aided by the tricks of cinema; when Bond utters his name, like magic, the James Bond theme emerges, as though conjured by a spell. Cinema is often described as a visual medium, but its secret weapon is sound, and especially, music. I need not say much about the quality of the James Bond theme, composed by Monty Norman and arranged by John Barry, which has proved itself through longevity and evolved in its use and textures over the years. In the latter half of the series’ life, it has become increasingly orchestral and operatic, a kind of heroic fanfare. But, as originally designed, arranged, and used, it was more of a stalking theme, conveying Bond’s own menace as he moves like a shark through the world. This tight, original arrangement from Dr. No is still the best rendition of the theme, and it further laces the scene with a hint of menace.

Bond’s soon-to-be-lover Sylvia Trench is played quite formidably by Eunice Gayson, and in her actions with Bond, she manifests a kind of power dynamic that is unfortunately a bit rare in the realm of Bondian romance. There have been many half-hearted attempts to give Bond a female counterpart who feels like his equal, but here, right at the start, they actually achieved it. Trench is formidable. She is, in her own way, another kind of predator like Bond; she is entirely self-assured, and is, in fact, the pursuer. She, too, eyes Bond like she is looking at her meal. (Trench made enough of an impression to appear again in the second Connery Bond adventure, From Russia with Love, something rarely afforded to the female inhabitants of Bond’s world.)

It is actually rarely remarked upon that when Bond introduces himself as “Bond… James Bond,” he is merely following Trench’s cadence from her own introduction. Their repartee succinctly underlines the Fleming ethos that Bond is a gambler whose superpower is luck:

BOND: “I admire your courage, Miss….?”

TRENCH: “Trench…. Sylvia Trench. And I admire your luck, Mister….?”

BOND: “Bond…. James Bond.”

Their continued flirtation underscores the way that Bond views life as a series of games to be won: “Tell me, Miss Trench, do you play any other games?”

While Dr. No defers emphasizing Bond’s identity as a killer until a scene or two later, when he is issued a replacement firearm (the iconic Walther PPK), the film has somewhat already introduced the idea thanks to the gunbarrel logo that opened the film, so the suggestion of violence infuses all that follows.

The script cleverly reinforces that element of lethality when Bond returns to his flat. Bond finds someone waiting for him. Armed with his weapon, he throws the door to his bedroom open, gun in hand, only to find Sylvia Trench waiting for him. In the world of James Bond, pleasure and the threat of death are forever linked, and one fluidly leads to the other. This tension between desire, pleasure, and violence lies at the heart of Bondian fantasy.

Bond cannot resist surrendering to temptation prior to departing on his mission, one more moment of pleasure before he plays his game of brinksmanship with death once again.

Dr. No and its sequels revisit these same notions again and again, but never with quite the same degree of precision. Like a gemcutter whittling a stone into a radiant form, Dr. No has cut away at Fleming to get at a pure expression of the character: James Bond, the thrill-seeking gambler-killer.

The duty of writing the upcoming Bond film, Bond 26, has been handed to screenwriter Steven Knight. Were I in his shoes, I would consider that the next Bond’s first moments on screen should similarly find some way to underline how Bond is, fundamentally, the gambler-spy. That need not require the setting of a proper casino, but it might not hurt, either.

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I hold to a simultaneously pragmatic and mystical definition of art. Art is, simply, a constructed thing that allows for fascination to take root.

To make art is to chase and capture personal fascination. For that fascination to endure, it must be anchored in some sort of unsolvable mystery. We may analyze what subjects fascinates us, but we can never satisfactorily explain why we are drawn to them. Whatever rationale we may find will always be unsatisfactory; like “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane, these answers explain everything and explain nothing. The power of art lies in using the artifice of language (whether visual or written or musical or something not yet conceived) to build a container for mystery, channeling forces beyond our ken. Art is a way to commune with the ineffable.

The ineffable is not necessarily good or bad in any sort of ethical dimension. The ineffable can be frightening and it can be ennobling, sometimes simultaneously. Humans are as angelic as they are monstrous, and art, born of human consciousness, is the same. One quality in a work of art does not cancel out any other quality. Many works of art, ancient and modern, are morally repugnant to my own conscience but remain magnetic; there remains a there there.

We must be humble about the storytelling traditions and tropes and archetypes that somehow endure the vicissitudes of time, because as much as we may be skeptical of our inherited narratives about history, history is nevertheless larger and more expansive than our conceptions of it. Which brings me to “pulp,” the mode of storytelling that has perhaps most consistently and deeply shaped our popular imagination.

Pulp was a historical phenomenon before it became a mode. It was a particular expression of popular storytelling forged in the first half of the twentieth century. It extended the serialized fiction and penny dreadful format, but was uniquely tied to Western identity in the face of two world wars and the shifts that accompanied them. The name “pulp” was largely literal, deriving from the cheap paper used by magazines that collected genre fiction. They were typically sold in spaces like newsstands to provide a quick dose of narrative entertainment to the masses, the kind of thing you could digest on a train or park bench. It was a disposable format, made to be consumed and discarded.

The literature contained within these magazines was not restricted to one genre or mode. In pulp magazines you could find horror stories and crime stories and romance stories and adventure stories, each of which might appeal to a different kind of reader. What united them was a sensationalized nature. They appealed to the primal appetites and fantasies of their readership. If they achieved some other high-minded purpose along the way, as they sometimes did, that was a bonus. The primary driver was to divert, to entertain, to thrill, to titillate.

Strictly defined as a historical moment, what we might call “classic pulp” was a literary phenomenon. But its reach quickly extended far beyond words on the page. Pulp coincided with the Golden Age of Radio, which translated many of its narratives into audio drama. It would be formative in the way it shaped cinema and television, and one might argue that neither fully escaped its reach. In this sense we can speak of “pulp cinema” and the “pulp imagination,” and I would argue it extends firmly into the realm of the serialized entertainment so readily consumed across streaming services today.

Some examples of “classic pulp” have found grudging respect over the years. Decades ago, Dashiell Hammett was allowed a place on the Modern Library’s Top 100 Novels (which, as an aside, makes for a rather interesting time capsule of the opinions of the cultural elite of 1998 and 1999; it’s astonishing how many of those novels have somewhat fallen off of the map in the years since). The celebration of other pulp landmarks has accelerated; Time’s Top 100 Novels, made a little over a half-decade later, made room for not only Hammett, but Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick, as well as descendants like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.

The critical establishment has similarly been slow to embrace the cinematic descendants of “classic pulp” in the cinematic medium. Of course, the pulp mode is always more palatable to tastemakers when pulp storytelling is disguised in the aesthetics of prestige, like a pill submerged in peanut butter. The Godfather took what was a lurid, tawdry crime novel, very much an expression of pulp storytelling, and dressed it up in the clothing of a Visconti epic like The Leopard. This enabled the adaptation to bridge a cultural divide that is equivalent to that of the gap between “genre” and “literary” fiction.

Film critic Manny Farber famously created a distinction between “White Elephant Art” and “Termite Art.” Per Farber, “White Elephant Art” is art that is concerned with realizing its own significance. It sees itself as weighty and wants to be recognized as such. “Termite art” is not concerned with worthiness, but with playfulness; it’s a bit unkempt, more concerned with small, specific pleasures within the context of its project.

I find Farber’s framework useful, if only to a point. To return to The Godfather, it is a film I admire, but for all of its grandiose posturing around sin and judgment, I find it a bit bloodless. It is very much “White Elephant Art,” and, in its desire for elegance, The Godfather loses some of the rawness and immediacy of the gangster story. Beauty can have an embalming or sanitizing effect. (I feel that Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, a messier and more repulsive gangster epic, forces us to reckon more with the uncomfortable paradoxes of the American gangster.)

That said, Farber’s construct is much too dismissive of pretentiousness. The struggle to make the Great Painting or Great Symphony or Great Novel or Great Film has made many profound works. If anything, I wish we had a bit more of that ambition around these days. I remain particularly fond of ambitious follies, works that spill over with so much ambition and so many ideas that they tear at the seams. I am not making an argument in favor of the pulp mode over the prestigious mode. My feeling is that both modes are equally worthy.

But the distinctive way in which pretentious art can fail so spectacularly, rendering it false and hollow and detached from human experience, speak to the virtues of the pulp storytelling mode. Bad pulp storytelling, unless it is catastrophically inept, still often “works” in one way or another. In its pursuit of sensationalized effect, it manifests some object of fascination, even if that fascination is only momentary and shallow. The pulp mode, in its motivation to appeal directly to the primal desires of the audience, is closely bound up with those core facets of life, Eros and Thanatos. To the extent Freud was right about anything, he was right that most human affairs can be distilled down to something to do with love and death. Even the shallowest pulp narrative seeks to invoke the power of those indomitable forces.

As a mode of extremes, pulp also has easy access to expressiveness. If you agree with me that the artifice of language is what creates space for fascination, then distinctive and exaggerated language is to be celebrated. The pulp mode is steeped in glorious artifice, whether it be hard-hitting, musical words like the bracing opening paragraph of Chandler’s “Red Wind” or the way the unreal texture of old Hollywood's Technicolor era makes some kind of mythic being out of Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar. To stick with pulp cinema, the stark contrast between the conservative realism of Kramer vs. Kramer and the monster movie surrealism of The Brood is illuminating about the way pulp can take the human experience and twist it into aesthetics that are immense and bewildering and thrilling. One mode might not be better than the other, but there’s a sense in which pulp is readily able to tip into the realm of the transgressive, and in going beyond the boundaries of taste and restraint, can stumble into something vivid and vital.

That, I think, is the great argument for pulp. Pulp can, in its tawdriness and in its invocation of our darker desires, sometimes be ugly and hateful and worthy of contempt, but there is an honesty and purity about the way the mode pursues its ambitions. The pulp mode is always trying to deliver what it says on the tin, and in realizing that aim, it can give us works that serve as incredible, wondrous, horrible incantations, invoking the dark and luminous and enigmatic forces that dwell within the psyche.

Chapter 10. | Two Are Better Than One

“It was intended to be a Magritte,” Sierra said softly. As she looked on the intruder, she weighed the possibility of using the wine glass in her hand as a weapon.

Thorn studied the abstract sea of brush strokes on the canvas. “Was? Is it going to be something else now?”

Sierra’s fingers crept from the stem of the glass to the bowl, encircling it. “I have no intention of finishing it. I have not touched that canvas in years.”

“So this is your work?” Thorn turned away from the canvas to Sierra. His voice was laced with the artificial warmth of so many investigators. “Following your father’s footsteps?”

“Only to master technique. I am not my father.”

“Anyone could see that.” Thorn gestured around the room. “And the rest of these? Your work or your father’s?”

“My father’s.”

Thorn moved closer. “And the Matisse that you so bravely reduced to cinders?”

“His. Not mine.” Her fingers felt so tight around the glass that it might shatter.

Thorn’s eyes wandered to her glass of wine. He wagged his finger in the air. “I’m not here to hurt you. I come in peace. And curiosity.” He lazily gestured over to a small side table in the corner, where some playing cards were arranged in the midst of a game of solitaire. There was a glass of amber liquid beside them. “I helped myself to some sherry as I waited. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Given these circumstances,” Sierra replied, “I don’t have the standing to protest a minor theft. So you’re not here to arrest me?”

“I am no policeman. Neither of us have strictly legal professions, a fact which may or may not put you at ease,” said Thorn, backing away from her. “This black hair is an improvement on that screechy blonde you were sporting before. But it’s not entirely you. Now, the name Sierra del Bosque, well, that does feel like you.”

She shrugged. “I have not been myself for some time.”

“Matters of identity are always complicated. I speak from experience. Is identity what pulled you back here? This is no real hiding spot. If I was able to find your real name and trace you here as quickly as I did, the police cannot be far behind, even if they’re as inept as I suspect they are. They have access to the same records and resources I do. After all, you are implicated in a scandal that will be the talk of the art world for the next decade. Stealing a painting would be one thing, but you consigned a masterpiece valued at some forty million dollars to ash, and in front of a crowd, no less. I applaud your audacity.”

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Chapter 9. | Alma

Alma did not properly exist.

Alma was, much like the Matisse itself, a fiction.

There had once been a real Alma. This Alma had been an ambitious art history student who ventured from Argentina to study in Italy, having obtained a permesso di soggiorno and codice fiscale. When her studies concluded, she flew back to Buenos Aires, boarding a long-distance bus to visit her family in the provinces. Somewhere along the dusty road the bus clipped an oncoming grain truck. Alma died instantly. The files recording her death were shelved in a municipal drawer. The news never crossed the Atlantic. As far as Italy was concerned, Alma had gone on living. This left Alma’s name available for borrowing.

Les Voyants had taken the dead girl’s identity and assigned it to an individual that they had tasked with supporting the “restoration” of Odalisque aux Cheveux Chartreuse. This individual’s name was Sierra del Bosque.

The deception came easily to Sierra. She memorized the contours of Alma’s life, which had been enhanced by Les Voyants with certain embellishments: an exaggerated engagement with the Istituto per l’Arte e il Restauro di Firenze and a phantom tenure at a conservation studio in Rome.

This was enough to justify her position, since she was already more than qualified. Not only was she fluent in the history and construction of art, but she knew Odalisque aux Cheveux Chartreuse better than anyone living.

Henri Matisse’s brush had never touched the canvas. Her father had painted it, and Sierra stood by his elbow as the oils dried.

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Chapter 8. | The Point of Recklessness

The screaming was instantaneous.

A stampede followed, a panicked and uncoordinated dash that crashed bodies into each other as the attendees sought only to flee the flaming ruin that had once been the Matisse.

Julien Morand had fallen to the floor, transfixed by the sight of the canvas like Moses looking upon the burning bush. He produced a ghastly sound somewhere between a sob and a howl. His cry was soon swallowed up by the deafening siren of the fire alarm, triggered by the acrid smoke that billowed up towards the ceiling.

Thorn remained steady in the slipstream of the crowd. He peered through the shifting shapes, registering the emerald flash of Alma’s dress as she was carried out through one of the exits by the tide of the mob.

Skirting the edges of the frantic crowd, Thorn kept his back to the wall until he was closer to the entrance. He hurled himself into the twisting mass and was borne out into the night alongside the stampede.

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Chapter 7. | Flavors of Indifference

Having transmitted the high-resolution pictures of the alleged Matisse (along with his surreptitious photos of Sylvie and Alma) for analysis, Thorn lost himself in the full-flavored experience of his Ibérico pluma. The fat was faultlessly rendered, with a rich nuttiness on the palate. At least for the next hour, the table at La Cantine Provençale would provide a restorative reprieve.

Thorn’s preoccupation with culinary pleasures had not gone unnoticed by his colleagues. (Crutchfield had joked that Thorn’s codename should have been “Gourmand.”) He was quite accustomed to eating alone, and had even come to prefer it.

Cannes was more amiable than Thorn had anticipated. At this time of year, the city was no longer overcome by the plague of tourists. The aromas of high season, a blend of sunscreen, exhaust, and asphalt, had thinned. Now the air brought currents of sea spray and pine, accented with the fermented scent of turning flora. The blinding white sun of summer had mellowed into an affable gold. It was not quite the Cannes of the imagined old days, but you could feel its imprint.

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To adapt The Odyssey into a blockbuster may be an act of hubris worthy of punishment from the gods. Nevertheless, Christopher Nolan has yet again defied the constraints of the Hollywood machine to bring to the screen a film that is uniquely and wholly his own. Rarely is blockbuster cinema such a personal expression of one artist’s point of view.

Historians and literary scholars will struggle against the fact that The Odyssey, that singular, familiar, and deeply strange text that defies the storytelling conventions and moral categories of our time, has been reshaped into a vessel for Nolan’s well-established preoccupations and anxieties. But personalizing the Odyssey may be the only way to adapt it.

Nolan's Odyssey may or may not be his greatest film, but it is undoubtedly the most complete expression of his cinematic project. All of his themes and ideas are writ large onto the immense canvas of imagery and archetypes supplied by Homer. Nolan’s ongoing artistic project, simply put, is the exploration of the burden of human greatness, defined by a combination of intellectual imagination and fortitude.

In Nolan's cinema, to alter the shape of the world requires a brilliance that is simultaneously transformative and destructive. To go beyond the shape of our present, to envision new technologies or ideas or possibilities, requires the destabilization of the present order. That destabilization may be, in the long run, either good or bad, but the path to the ultimate destination is always uncertain.

Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is not the most concise or coherent expression of this idea, but prior to The Odyssey, it was perhaps the most substantial. Bruce Wayne’s strength is his capacity for imagination. Wayne must go beyond the laws and systems of society to envision a new type of symbolic hero. The Batman persona is a transgression of the status quo that opens the door to forces that would burn the world to the ground. Wayne is mostly successful in his noble aims, but for his quest to reach its fulfillment, he must cede power and find healing in exile. In Nolan’s filmography, to bring about positive change requires an acknowledgement of fallibility and a faith in the integrity of the universe. It is a relinquishment of control.

Nolan’s darker figures are those who are so single-minded on a destination, so unable to navigate the twisty labyrinth of history and narrative, that they become self-consumed. Oppenheimer may be the most recent example, but The Prestige is the cleanest: to become so myopically obsessed with a form of perfection is to destroy oneself and leave wreckage in its wake.

As Nolan has grown into his own fatherhood, the beacon of hope in his films has increasingly been embodied by familial connection. He has given us two films, Interstellar and Tenet, in which the arc of the cosmos is anchored in the love between parents and children. Family is the future his heroes strive for. Little wonder, then, that The Odyssey, a story about homecoming, would have such resonance for Nolan.

Odysseus here, played by Matt Damon in what might be the best performance of his career, is accordingly reshaped from the morally ambiguous trickster of Greek myth (for the Greeks of Homer's time, greatness and virtue were not entirely connected) into the ultimate Nolan protagonist, a noble and tormented figure paying the price of his own brilliance and arrogance. His journey in Nolan’s film is to escape the purgatory of his own guilt to return to safeguard his family and the future they represent.

This quest is, in some ways, less Homeric than it is Dantean, a nightmarish journey into the heart of Hell (literally) and out again in a quest for redemption. Nolan transforms The Odyssey into a focused study of the aftershocks of war, which enriches certain episodes of that ancient myth more than others, but the best of the sequences here (in particular Odysseus' encounter with Circe and his subsequent brush with the Underworld) represent the most vital and intelligent filmmaking Nolan has done to date, and suggest that he may yet give us a remarkable horror film.

While the story remains fixed on Odysseus, Nolan fills the margins with vivid interpretations of Homer’s ensemble, the most striking of which are the female figures that drive and haunt him. In Inception, DiCaprio’s Cobb is haunted by the memory of his wife, Mal, that bears the imprint of his sins, but there she is merely a device, a projection. The Odyssey expands that concept across mirrored female figures.

Nolan’s visions of Calypso and Athena, the supernatural female figures of the tale, are the most akin to Mal in Inception; they are essentially devices to shape Odysseus’ own journey. However, the other women of Nolan’s Odyssey are granted greater interiority. Nolan’s depiction of feminine rage is most concisely expressed in his interpretation of Helen and her twin sister Clytemnestra (two women who are really the same woman), brought to vivid life by Lupita Nyong’o in her brief appearance. Samantha Morton’s Circe may be the film’s most satisfyingly inventive adaptation (to say more would be to spoil the best sequence of the film), while Anne Hathaway’s Penelope remains a majestic and passionate anchor for the narrative.

The Odyssey is not a perfect film. Nolan’s blunt-force approach to spectacle, with its deafening (albeit rich) soundscape and immense but sparse visual language, can be wearying rather than awe-inspiring. Nolan’s appetite for sustained intensity works better in shorter doses, as in Dunkirk, than it does as a three-hour saga. Additionally, Nolan's penchant for clockwork story conceits and flat exposition laced with thematic signposting burdens the conclusion (though Nolan's inclination toward theatrical speechifying works much better in a sword-and-sandals epic like The Odyssey than it does in some of his past movies).

Nevertheless, this saga of homecoming is a profoundly moving experience, perhaps the most moving film of Nolan’s career. The care Nolan takes with some of the familiar beats of Homer’s poem in that final stretch of the story, married to the very tangible chemistry between Damon and Hathaway, makes the emotional resolution more palpable, more deeply felt, than, say, Cobb’s final reunion with his children in the final moments of Inception.

Love him or hate him, there has never been another filmmaker like Nolan, and there will almost certainly never be again. Nolan is both defiantly populist, a filmmaker who has embraced the notion of blockbuster spectacle targeted to a broad audience, and also stubbornly and wonderfully odd. Nolan’s The Odyssey is a grand, idiosyncratic epic. That it exists at all is a kind of wonder.

Chapter 6. | Life, Death, and Words

Vincent Lorin watched Thorn depart from La Croix des Gardes. From a distance, Lorin’s silver BMW M2 traced the movements of Thorn’s car as it descended down the hill.

Lorin had spent months waiting, eager for some new development following Devereux’s amusing death. An inquiry into the activities of the Devereux Gallery had been all but inevitable. That Thorn himself (whose identity Les Voyants had easily uncovered) was the face of this inquiry was a welcome surprise. Thorn remained a loose end and Lorin despised unfinished business.

Earlier that morning, after Thorn had left the Hotel Leroux grounds, Lorin had slipped into Thorn’s room, picking the old lock with ease. Lorin ran his gloved hands over Thorn’s wardrobe. He examined, but did not attempt to open, Thorn’s luggage with the biometric lock. He sorted through the array of toiletries in the bathroom, savoring the heavy, sweet almond aroma of Thorn’s shaving soap, redolent of marzipan.

Now, watching his car through the windshield, Lorin wondered if the scent of almond still lingered on Thorn’s neck.

As he drove down the hill, he recalled the rich marzipan sweets of his youth in Marrakesh, the ones he purchased only when he had some spare coin, which was not often. He had been quite poor. Those were the days when he and his friends would entertain themselves by breaking into shops or houses under the cover of darkness.

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Chapter 5. | Condition Report

Thorn’s sleep was dreamless.

Thorn woke to the swelling of Yo-Yo Ma’s performance of the Bach Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, his regular alarm. He then went about his methodical routine, which began with a shower. Thorn cranked the temperature until the water was nearly scalding. This followed with a careful shave, using a Henson safety razor and Cella’s almond-scented shaving soap (these were components of Thorn’s standard operational kit, the details of which were maintained as part of his official file, which was routinely updated every sixty days). This ritual concluded with a quiet breakfast of a single croissant and a double espresso.

His routine complete, Thorn adjusted his appearance to align with his newest cover. To become Adam Palmer of Auresco Trust required no great theatrical exertion. Identity is, by and large, a projection of the observer. A few well-chosen details will enable others to fill in the gaps with their own conclusions. Thorn parted his hair on the right, contrary to his usual style, and swept it back to give himself a slightly academic look, which he completed with a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles.

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I first wrote this essay in 2022. It may be a little dry; you can take the boy out of academia, but you can't take the academia out of the boy.

I present it again now, slightly revised, because I have been revisiting the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges in different translations.

(The Hurley translation, constructed after Borges’ death, is how I came to know Borges’ fiction, but now I am exploring the English translations that were written while Borges was still alive. It is exciting to encounter stories I know so well and once again find them exciting and new.)

Borges and Chesterton were two of the most formative writers for me, and, at any given moment, these two are wrestling away somewhere in my mind.

In his story “The Theologians,” Jorge Luis Borges conceives of two theologians who were in such perfect ideological opposition that they were seen by God as the same person. As Borges writes in another story, “Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden,” the “obverse and reverse of this coin are, in the eyes of God, identical.”

Indeed, Borges’ metaphysics are essentially mathematical. His stories are famously surreal, but their surrealism is not far removed from the surrealism inherent in quantum physics. His narratives follow rigorously constructed, methodical, if sometimes unfathomable, logic. That logic is the logic we see play out in the realm of Schrödinger’s cat, a troubling paradox that defies the human perspective of time, space, and meaning. In a Borges story, people are variables in equations that describe these paradoxical truths.

​Borges called G.K. Chesterton a “man of genius, a great prose writer, and a great poet,” and to read Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries is to encounter Borges’ mirror image, for Chesterton’s own universe is similarly dominated by logical paradoxes. Such is the nature of the Catholic universe; the Medieval theologians were resolute in their belief in discernible order. Chesterton’s Catholicism sees the universe as an intricate mathematical equation that will one day resolve with ecstatic epiphany.

​Chesterton and Borges part ways in their perception of eternity. Chesterton thought God baffling (in The Man Who Was Thursday, he depicts God as something of a benevolent prankster masquerading as a villain), but nevertheless believed in the hope represented by the Christ of orthodox Christianity. In the divine person of Jesus Christ, the concretely human becomes eternal. To Chesterton, the journey from the finite to the infinite suggests joy unending and the ultimate dissolution of sorrow.

​Borges has no such faith. His sense of the divine is cold and remote and unfathomable. His fiction and poetry again pulls at the threads of theological dogma, perhaps nowhere more concisely than in “Three Versions of Judas,” which postulates the existence of a theologian convinced that the Son of God was Judas (Jesus’ own antithesis). Only in Judas could God be “totally man,” and bear the weight of “reprobation and the Abyss.” Both humanness and divinity kneel to Borges’ Abyss, where infinity overwhelms all.

​Chesterton is more directly and arrogantly polemical than Borges, and the more polemical Chesterton gets, the less convincing his intricate paradoxes are. Chesterton is so amused by his own (admittedly astonishing) aptitude for wit, and so smugly believes in the correctness of his own convictions, that he is often unable to see beyond himself to sufficiently nuance his stances. A marvelous showman, Chesterton creates elaborate narrative labyrinths with colorful conceits and thematic resolutions that, at their worst, smack of cheap sleight of hand. At their best, they resonate with the anxious euphoria of hopeful mystery; the earnest wish that the inferno is but the shadow of a greater paradise.

​Borges is less overt in his polemical posturing (at least in his fiction), but he takes a perverse pleasure in tarnishing visions of paradise. For Borges, to consider eternity dramatically recontextualizes human experience, history, ideology, and society. Humans are but a part of the intricate cosmic riddle that extends out infinitely like a fractal. Borges, like Chesterton, sets up elaborate queues of bowling pins only so that he might knock them down and observe the way they clatter together to create new patterns, but Borges’ patterns only resolve into new enigmas.

​For Borges, his stories’ concluding moments of non-resolution reverberate like cynical, if bittersweet, sighs that dissipate into a dark expanse. Chesterton’s fiction similarly bends towards anticlimax, but his moments of modest narrative resolution gesture towards a greater cosmic reconciliation that exists beyond the boundaries of his text (and the world).

Chapter 4. | Vagabondage

Thorn watched the anonymous black Mercedes carry Thérèse away from the Casino Leroux.

He turned back into the casino, gripping the heavy brass key to his hotel room. The hotel was sequestered just off the main casino lobby, with only a discreet brass plaque to announce its existence. Beyond stretched a wide corridor with deep burgundy walls of damask silk. It terminated at an antique cage lift and a narrow adjacent stairwell. Opposite the unattended front desk, a repurposed mahogany writing desk from the late nineteenth century, slumped a pair of worn leather club chairs that flanked a marble-topped guéridon and an arrested porcelain clock. Behind the front desk sat an oak cabinet where the room keys hung on hooks. Thorn noted that nearly every key was still present.

Thorn opted for the stairs over the dubious elevator. He climbed to the second floor, the narrow staircase pungent with the smell of beeswax polish. There he found the battle-scarred solid walnut door of his room, which opened upon a cramped, narrow space that smelled faintly of the sweet smoke from papier d’Armenie.

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Chapter 3. | Cards and Caviar

As a child, Silas Thorn was fascinated by the sea. He would stand at the edge of the Atlantic and imagine that he was a sorcerer, conjuring and dispelling waves with the gestures of his hands. He no longer imagined the sea as something under his sway, but as something ancient, indomitable, and indifferent.

The runabout skimmed across the surface of the Mediterranean without resistance, a testament to the craft itself as well as the pilot’s familiarity with the waters. Thorn reclined in the stern, watching the sunset ignite the clouds, and regretted the journey. He had not traveled by boat since Potocki died. The runabout had been the most pragmatic route to the Casino Leroux, but Thorn found himself wishing he had found another way.

Upon arriving at the casino’s dock, Thorn passed the pilot a generous tip with a curt word of thanks. He checked that his midnight navy wool suit was in good order and made his way inside. Thorn winced as the recycled, musty air hit his nostrils and the obnoxious jangles and whirring of the machines assaulted his ears.

The Casino Leroux was a dying beast of the Belle Époque that had somehow limped into the present century, though Thorn suspected that it would not survive another. It had been built for a European elite willing to squander fortunes on the green baize, but the world had changed much since those days. Now, the old gambling industry was bowing under the weight of virtual prediction markets and sports betting. The Leroux was flailing in its search for new clientele.

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The locale for the opening of my spy novel, Tomorrow Comes the Bullet, was inspired by a visit I made years ago to the Quinta da Regaleira. This Portuguese estate was the pet project of an eccentric millionaire who wished to construct an elaborate monument to his occult spirituality. (For my own purposes, I placed my fictionalized version of the Quinta da Regaleira to Italy, but the influence remains clear.)

It sits in Sintra. Given the intensity of Lisbon summers, the Portuguese elite enjoyed the cooler, more forested territory of the Sintra mountains, building elaborate homes and palaces there. Accordingly, Sintra houses an embarrassment of riches for tourists to enjoy (such as the astonishingly colorful Pena Palace, with its red and yellow stucco).

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Chapter 2. | Dubious Scales

The wind was capricious, but Vincent Lorin had its measure. He compensated for the drift, and, in the hollow space between his heartbeats, pulled the trigger. The shot broke clean.

The boat disappeared from view, leaving only the wake to testify to its presence.

Lorin stepped back from the windowsill of the palazzo’s uppermost bedroom. He cleared the chamber of the SAKO TRG 42 rifle, the spent brass chiming against the floor. With practiced ease, he broke the weapon down, nestling every piece into the custom-cut foam of the carrying case.

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Chapter 1. | Voices of the Dead

Devereux promised fireworks.

His guests had received invitations, printed on fine Italian paper and hand-delivered by courier, requesting their presence for an evening of spectacle and pleasure. Many knew precisely what to expect. Devereux, a man who confused possession with accomplishment, was exceedingly eager to show off his Sicilian palazzo, and threw a party of this scale at least once a year.

As the gala’s attendees waited for the foretold fireworks, they wandered the corridors and chambers and gazed upon the treasures within. If they were entranced by what they found there, their enthusiasm failed to register on their faces. Boredom and inebriation were more discernible.

Deep in the cellars, wait staff scrambled to retrieve more champagne. As they passed crates to one another, they were wholly ignorant of the history of those stone walls, the remnants of a fifteenth-century fort that had once peered out from the seaside cliff where the palazzo now sat. Had they known, they would have remained indifferent. In Italy, where the dust of the Caesars coats windshields, history is a commodity entirely taken for granted.

As they ported the crates through twisting corridors, their soles passed over rust-colored stains in the porous stone, the lingering memory of blood spilled when the estate was requisitioned as a military hospital in World War II. In the daylight, damage from the artillery shells could still be glimpsed on the palazzo’s exterior.

Upstairs, staff poured the champagne into delicate flutes, which the servers hastily collected for distribution. The trays passed a cluster of hedge fund managers who stood bathed in the pale glow from their phones, blind to the magnificence that hung above their heads: a Gustave Moreau painting of a lithe Salome clutching the severed head of the Baptist. The group had thoughtlessly repurposed a low stone altar, inscribed with ancient Hermetic symbols, as a dumping ground for empty martini glasses, used hors d’oeuvre skewers, and crumpled napkins.

That altar, along with the considerable occult ornamentation scattered throughout the estate, was the leftover imprint of the palazzo’s prior master, an idiosyncratic American millionaire who, in the early twentieth century, had transformed the estate into a monument to esoteric spirituality. That occult resonance was precisely what had drawn Devereux to procure and restore the estate. Devereux had an appetite for the mythological.

Devereux had dedicated this gala to the great Greek icon of filicide: the sorceress Medea. He did this to commemorate a triptych of paintings depicting that same sorceress, an acquisition which had been hidden away until it could be unveiled this evening. To further underline the theme, Devereux hired an orchestra to perform two pieces dedicated to Medea: Cherubini’s overture to Médée and Barber’s Medea’s Dance of Vengeance. The promised fireworks would serve as a grand postlude.

In the vast chamber of the palazzo, which had served many purposes over the years and was now branded by its current owner the ballroom, Devereux hovered beside his triptych of Medeas, each canvas resting on its own mahogany easel. The host’s knotty fingers danced in the air as he pontificated to his glassy-eyed audience. He shifted languages to pander to his multilingual audience. Devereux’s French was fluid and melodic, as one would expect from a Frenchman, but his English was stiff and his halting Italian approached incomprehensibility.

Silas Thorn observed this pantomime from the periphery, standing by an open window that bled a desperately needed sea breeze into the room. Thorn was already running warm in his dinner jacket. He could not imagine how suffocated he would feel in the one Devereux had chosen for himself, an emerald velvet jacket that was an altogether preposterous choice for a summer night. The heavy perspiration greasing the host’s forehead suggested he might be regretting his choice of ensemble.

Thorn blended neatly into the crowd. His black, double-breasted dinner jacket fit very well, with strong shoulders and just enough elegant drape to accommodate the SIG Sauer P365 holstered under his left arm. Beneath his right, he carried an Odessa-9 modular silencer and a spare magazine of 9mm subsonic ammunition.

Like the rest of Devereux’s guests, Thorn was bored, though not for lack of interest in the palazzo or its contents. His was the restless fatigue of anticipation, sharpened by a simmering contempt for Devereux and his friends. To keep his edge, Thorn had intended to avoid the alcohol that was in abundant supply, but as the night dragged on, he found the siren call of champagne irresistible.

He took a slow sip from his flute, turning his gaze out the open window. Below, flaming torches tore holes in the darkness of the manicured gardens. A couple stumbled through the sculpted hedges towards the old estate chapel, groping at each other as they disappeared inside the dark sanctuary.

Potocki, Thorn’s partner on this assignment and a dozen others, materialized from the chattering throng. The deep corners of Potocki’s mouth turned upwards when he noticed the glass in Thorn’s hand.

“I never developed a taste for champagne,” said Potocki.

“That could prove hazardous to your spiritual well-being,” Thorn replied. “I have it on the authority of a particularly pious bishop that fine champagne is a vessel of divine revelation. Of course, the Catholics would feel that way. They invented the stuff.”

“When we’re back home, you should recommend a bottle.”

“Gladly.” Thorn glanced down at his watch, letting the light from the chandelier catch the dial of his Longines GMT that peeked out from under his cuff. Forty-three minutes until eleven. “Nearly there. I’m going to stretch my legs.”

“Don’t get lost,” Potocki said. “This place is a labyrinth.”

“I’ll keep my eye out for the minotaur.”

Thorn deposited his champagne glass on the tray of a passing server and drifted away from the crowd.

The dim light in the corridors cast odd, distorted shadows against the elaborate molding and ornamentation on the walls, floor, and ceiling: Egyptian hieroglyphs, gargoyles, Templar crosses, and all-seeing eyes peering out from the stone and plaster. The distant echoes of the orchestra’s dissonant tuning seeped up from the central courtyard.

He sought refuge in a small, quiet gallery momentarily devoid of the herd. The walls were a claustrophobic collage of gilt frames, hung in the cramped, floor-to-ceiling style of the old aristocracy. One monumental canvas still managed to dominate the room.

As Thorn approached it, he was overtaken by a wave of vertigo.

The painting was a vision of apocalyptic judgment in full Cinemascope: John Martin’s Belshazzar’s Feast. In the far distance, lightning struck the ruins of the Tower of Babel. In the foreground, Belshazzar and his court dined on a raised platform, frozen in theatrical gesticulations of terror. They cowered from a glowing apparition: the words of God, cut by His almighty hand into the palace’s entablature. In the center of the painting, Daniel the Prophet proclaimed their ominous meaning.

The hairs on Thorn’s arms stood up as he heard the Aramaic utterances of Daniel the Prophet reverberate in his ears:

“Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.”

A pause of indeterminate length passed before Thorn registered that he had not imagined the words. He was not alone in the room.

He turned to see a man with dark eyes and an impish, knowing smile. A linen dinner jacket in a warm cream tone contrasted with rich brown skin.

The man continued in an accent that Thorn could not place: “The eternal words of God, written with holy fire. ‘God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it,’ as the Prophet Daniel interprets it. I prefer this version of the scene to Rembrandt’s.”

“It’s been years since I’ve seen the Rembrandt,” Thorn replied.

“I’m often in London, but haven’t taken the time to visit it in some years. I may be doing the Rembrandt a disservice. It has a grandeur all its own.” The man extended a hand. “I’m Vincent Lorin.”

Thorn took it. The grip was dry and firm. “Carter Thompson.” It was a remarkably bland alias, the sort of name that could belong to an ambitious, forgettable venture capitalist. “Our host has an impressive collection.”

“Do you collect art, Mister Thompson?”

“Please, call me Carter. No, I’m more of an admirer.”

“I urge you to reconsider. Ownership enables the cultivation of a sustained, personal relationship with art. The insight it brings is invaluable.”

“What insight has it brought you?”

“That it is more worthwhile to attend to the voices of the dead than to the voices of the living.”

“But the dead don’t always speak in languages we understand.” Thorn gestured to the painting. “Even God requires an interpreter.”

Lorin smiled, a slow parting of the lips. For a fraction of a second, the polite veneer slipped, revealing something sharp and surgical, but Lorin quickly resheathed it. “True enough. I have left my companions alone for too long. It’s been a pleasure to meet you, Mister Thompson.”

“Likewise.”

As Vincent Lorin’s footsteps faded down the hall, Thorn checked his watch. Twenty-seven minutes.

The layout of the palazzo was intricate, even nonsensical, in the way that architecture tends to be when it mutates over centuries. Thorn had memorized the floor plans. The documents had been acquired from the offices of Devereux’s contractor some weeks prior with alarming ease. After a moment’s mental review, Thorn oriented himself and set on his way.

The murmur of the crowd and the strains of the orchestra faded as Thorn made his way toward the outer wall of the palazzo. He found the double-doors he sought. He tried the brass door handle and slipped out onto a balcony overlooking the sea.

A silver moon illuminated stray clouds over the Mediterranean, which stretched out to a black horizon. Thorn unbuttoned his jacket and inhaled the humid, briny night air. Far below, dark water battered a rocky shore.

Thorn closed the doors behind him and looked up at the roofline, fifteen feet above. Stone leaves and lions framed the balcony. Gripping the weather-pocked masonry with his bare hands, he hoisted himself up onto the balustrade. He was an experienced climber, and the stonework was uneven enough to offer ample handholds. The tactical rubber soles applied to his dress shoes provided some assistance, though they were a poor substitute for climbing boots.

Reaching the lip of the slanted, tiled roof, he pulled himself up and crouched low. Knowing the old roof tiles were likely to be unstable, Thorn maneuvered carefully towards his objective: a turret (one of four, each at a corner of the palazzo), which lay only yards away.

The hum of activity swelled from below as the partygoers filtered into the central courtyard.

The glass of the turret’s window was too thick to cut quietly; it would be more efficient to break it. Reaching into his coat, Thorn produced a rolled sheet of adhesive film. He peeled away the backing and smoothed it against the pane. Drawing a heavy aluminum pen from his breast pocket, he drove its hardened tungsten tip into the glass. The glass spiderwebbed instantly, but held in place by the film. A few more surgical taps finished the job. He pulled back the adhesive, taking the broken shards with it, and dropped the heavy sheet into the sea.

He reached in, grasped the window latch, unlocked it, and swung it open.

Below, in the courtyard, Devereux’s voice boomed, amplified through a sound system. The acoustics rendered him unintelligible. Thorn crawled in through the frame, swung his legs over the ledge, and dropped into darkness.

His feet met the carpet with a gentle, but firm, thud. The room, Devereux’s private office, was dominated by an immodestly large desk adorned with lion’s feet. A smattering of dead-eyed marble busts looked on from the walls. A large globe, held aloft by a sculpture of Atlas, rested in the corner. It seemed redundant given the enormous map of the world covering the far wall.

Floor plans were not the only intel Thorn had procured from the offices of Devereux’s contractor. Additional documentation identified the presence of a Boltmann X31 vault. Formidable as the Boltmann X31’s encryption was, it harbored an administrative failsafe backdoor. Its presence was not disclosed to purchasers, existing solely for emergencies. A touch of light blackmail against a Boltmann engineer had provided Thorn with the activation key.

Thorn ran his fingers under the map’s frame. It slid upward on pneumatic struts toward the ceiling, revealing the Boltmann’s gunmetal casing.

The dramatic first strains of the overture to Médée came in through the window.

Thorn’s fingers danced across the keypad, executing the complicated sequence of button presses with precise timing to unlock the keypad’s administrator mode.

He fumbled his first attempt. The second attempt gave positive results. The LCD screen beside the keypad flickered to life with the message: RESPONSE: 8492-1104-7731-0092.

Thorn reached for his phone, a burner provided by his organization’s resourcing division. It housed a bespoke application designed to run the numerals through the required algorithm. The app chewed the numerals and, agonizing seconds later, spat out a new set of sixteen digits. Thorn keyed it in. Motorized tumblers clicked into alignment. The vault door swung free.

Piles of documents and bound ledgers crowded the shelves. The only object of interest was a black, impact-resistant case of some size, nearly three feet long. Thorn hauled it onto the lion-footed desk. It was sealed with its own powerlock, but Thorn was not intimidated. From his jacket pocket, he produced some lockpicks and went to work. Not even thirty seconds passed by the time he broke the lock.

The briefing materials given to Thorn in advance had indicated what the contents of the case would be, but he was still stunned when he saw the case open before him.

Thorn looked upon Van Gogh’s ode to Adolphe Monticelli: the lost painting Poppy Flowers. The thick, violent impasto of the yellow and red blooms seemed to project off the canvas, even in the shadowed room.

Thorn considered cutting the canvas from the frame. It would be easier to transport. Still, this was a sin he was unwilling to commit. He sealed the case.

Outside, the orchestra concluded the Cherubini piece to modest applause. After a brief pause, the musicians resumed with the plaintive, tender, and ominous strains of Barber’s Medea’s Dance of Vengeance.

Thorn’s best route out of the palazzo would be to move down to the docks below, where Potocki would be waiting with a boat. Getting there could be difficult. There would be security and cameras. He would not be able to conceal the case.

Still, thefts are generally not anticipated, even when a significant infrastructure has been developed to prevent their occurrence. Paintings by Dalí and Kuindzhi had been stolen by museum visitors who simply removed the paintings from the walls and walked out the door, painting in hand.

Thorn debated drawing the SIG Sauer. He left it holstered. A gun in the hand is a liability; it magnifies the temptation to use it to solve problems when other avenues may be more advantageous.

Thorn resealed the Boltmann, waiting in the dark until Barber’s Medea concluded in a tumult of frantic, anxious rage. As the guests once again broke into applause, Thorn opened the door to Devereux’s office and slipped into the shadowy outer corridor.

The fireworks began to erupt. Gold, red, and green light burst through alcove windows, painting the walls.

He descended the back stairwell, angling for the kitchen exit.

He rounded the landing and stopped.

“What are you doing?”

It was a guard, stocky and swarthy. Australian accent. Ex-military.

Thorn’s face was a mask of mild, deferential irritation. “Devereux asked that this be brought for display.”

The guard was unmoved. “Oh? Where is it to be displayed?” His right hand moved to his thigh holster.

“In the drawing room. He wants to show it to a guest.”

The guard’s thumb popped the snap of his retention strap.

Thorn moved with sudden, steady instinct. He swung the case at the guard in a vicious, upward arc as the guard raised his weapon. It fired. The bullet punched through the case, the impact radiating through Thorn’s arm.

Thorn quickly adjusted the case’s trajectory, driving it into the guard’s head. The guard reeled backward. Thorn swung a second time, a forceful, horizontal strike. The guard’s head snapped violently against the stone wall, and he collapsed to the stone floor.

The fireworks had obscured the sounds of the scuffle.

Thorn was uncertain if the guard was still alive. He knew that, in his profession, it was likely, and perhaps inevitable, that he would die at someone else’s hands. His death might occur during an encounter such as this one. It would probably be an unremarkable scuffle with a man with a gun, or perhaps a knife, out of sight in an alley or back room. Afterwards, Thorn’s body would not be found or, if it was, it would not be identifiable. So many of his colleagues had gone missing over the years, trapped in a quantum state of perpetual uncertainty: Schrödinger’s secret agents.

If all things that can happen do happen in the infinite seas of the multiverse, then there were many universes in which Thorn died at this moment. In other universes, Thorn and the guard both died at each other’s hands. In some more curious universes, Thorn convinced the guard to become a co-conspirator, and they exited the palazzo together, eventually growing into lifelong friends.

But, here and now, there was little point in checking the man’s pulse. Thorn examined the case. A jagged hole marred its shell. A cold spike of dread hit him: the Van Gogh. He excised the thought. Survival first.

He shifted his grip, flipping the case so that the bullet hole pressed flat against his trousers, and stepped over the body.

The adrenaline coursing through his veins encouraged him to run, but he resisted it, forcing himself to breathe steadily and deeply. With patience and calm, he continued down to the kitchen. None of the staff looked at him as he moved through, but the back exit seemed crowded. He pivoted towards the palazzo’s main entrance, only a short walk away.

A tired guard leaned on the wall beside the open double-doors.

Thorn smiled warmly at the guard as he moved to exit, offering a deferential nod. “Buona notte.”

The guard’s brow furrowed as his eyes fell on the case. A cluster of fireworks detonated overhead, bathing the entrance in a blinding flash. The guard hissed a sharp “Merda!” and threw a hand over his eyes.

As the guard blinked away the burn, Thorn looked up and offered a theatrical, long-suffering eye roll, a conspiratorial signal that he shared the guard’s exasperation.

The guard huffed a dry laugh in return. He waved Thorn past. “Notte, signore.”

Thorn mouthed a silent, unaddressed prayer of thanks as he crossed the threshold.

The stone staircase to the boat dock wound down the cliffside, illuminated by strands of festive electrical lights. The fireworks above bathed the palazzo’s exterior and the pathway in a vivid, unearthly green.

Thorn passed some dockhands as he quickly moved to the dock. A fleet of idle yachts bobbed in the dark water, their crews smoking in the shadows.

Potocki waited in a sleek four-seater motorboat, the outboard motor idling with a low, vibrating hum.

“Any difficulties?” Potocki asked as Thorn stepped aboard, sliding the marred case beneath the passenger console.

“Yes. Let’s go.”

Potocki nodded, knowing better than to ask questions, and unmoored the boat.

High above, a mortar boomed, and the sky shattered into a cascade of weeping gold glitter.

The echo faded. Then Thorn heard another crack from high above. No firework accompanied it.

Potocki’s head snapped to the left. A mist of blood painted the white fiberglass of the console. The tension vanished from his frame, and he slumped to the teak deck.

Thorn lunged towards the console, slammed the throttle forward, and threw his weight against the wheel. The hull slapped the water, tearing a scar through the Mediterranean as he banked hard around the cliff’s edge.

Only when the darkness of the open water swallowed them did Thorn look down at Potocki, crumpled on the deck. Potocki no longer had a face.

In the days that followed, when, unbidden, this moment replayed through Thorn’s mind, he would once again hear the howl of the engine and the crash of the waves against the prow.

Allow me to introduce you to Silas Thorn, the protagonist of my novel, Tomorrow Comes the Bullet. This is the first in an eight-book series I call The Vagabond Cycle.

Thorn, codename: Vagabond, is an operative tasked with eliminating the threats that infest the cracks of the geopolitical order. In Tomorrow Comes the Bullet, his employers have sent him after a group of transhumanist fanatics who are firmly bent on accelerating human evolution.

In the course of his investigation, Thorn will find himself submerged in the modern underworld, crossing paths with unscrupulous data brokers, erratic billionaires, elusive art forgers, and ruthless professional killers. He will need to trace the threads of this elaborate web back to its convergence point: a doomsday vault designed to safeguard against a future where human language has been made obsolete.

The first chapter of Tomorrow Comes the Bullet is freely available to read at your discretion.

It will continue as a serial reserved for paid subscribers. Multiple installments will arrive monthly. All available chapters can be found here.

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For me, the gold standard of travel writing is Ian Fleming’s Thrilling Cities (in many ways, the James Bond novels are really travelogues with a narrative attached). No other writer understood how to make travel, and its tedious mechanics, sound compelling.

Out of love for Fleming’s travel writing, I have attempted something of a pastiche here.

First, a confession and a caveat: four and a half days is scarcely enough time to understand a city as overwhelming as Paris. These impressions are only impressions.

Anyone visiting Paris must confront the undeniable fact that the grand capitals of Europe are now largely cities of tourists. The “off-season” is a dying concept. Soon, the only tolerable time to wander through the boulevards of Paris will be during the bleakest weeks of January.

Yet, despite the invading hordes, Paris cannot be entirely stripped of its magic. You must, however, work to find it. Rome offers up its ancient beauty immediately. Upon arrival, you can reach out and run a hand along the stones of the old world. Paris does not so easily surrender its secrets. To claim to understand Paris after seeing only an arrondissement or two is like claiming you know the ocean because you have stood in a puddle.

The Agony of Arrival

Getting into Paris is an ordeal. Charles de Gaulle is a modern purgatory, and escaping it leaves you two courses of action: you can brave the suffocating, inconsistent trains, or take a taxi and pray that traffic is merciful. We chose the latter and were subjected to a ninety-minute vehicular imprisonment.

But all suffering is temporary, and we eventually arrived at the Hotel Chopin. The Hotel Chopin is tucked away in the Passage Jouffroy, one of the glass-roofed arteries that runs through the 9th arrondissement. It is one of the city’s oldest continuously operating hotels and feels its age, but still retains a quaint, undeniable dignity.

The Passage Jouffroy and the neighboring covered passages are lined with restaurants, antique dealers, and dusty bookshops that provided a delightfully atmospheric gauntlet to walk through each morning and evening.

Aromatic Elixirs

Few countries are as ruthlessly committed to perfumery as France. Accordingly, Paris offers a formidable arsenal of great perfume shops.

My first proper venture into the city was a pilgrimage to the Serge Lutens boutique at the Palais Royal. For those unfamiliar with the name, Serge Lutens is arguably the zenith of artistic perfume. It was one of a few houses that effectively wrote the “niche perfume” playbook in the 1990s and 2000s. The result of its namesake’s ongoing collaboration with perfumer Christopher Sheldrake, Serge Lutens specializes in dark, rich, and enigmatic scents.

The boutique itself, awash in amethyst hues, feels less like a shop and more like a palace in a dark fairy tale. The aromatic creations contained within demand patience, time, and a tolerance for the strange. You may find yourself drawn back, almost against your will, to smell them again.

A cheerful antidote to Lutens’ opulent gloom is Oriza L. Legrand, which we would visit later that same day. A storied house of the 18th century that fell into ruin, it was lovingly resurrected in 2012 by two men obsessed with its historical archives.

The result is the Parisian equivalent of Florence’s storied Santa Maria Novella, with a collection of old-world perfumes that stand fiercely apart from the fare found at today’s department store counters. The operation is intimate (fewer than ten people work for Oriza L. Legrand) and the boutique is unpretentious and welcoming. You are freely invited you to explore its accomplished lineup at your own pace.

The Phantoms of the Opera

The first major disappointment of this Paris expedition was the Palais Garnier. The storied opera house is currently entombed in scaffolding and Ralph Lauren advertisements, hiding its famous exterior from view. Inside, with the auditorium closed for rehearsals, we were restricted to visiting the foyer and its adjacent corridors.

Navigating the Garnier in the age of Instagram means dodging influencers desperately monopolizing every square inch of marble to replicate the same tired photographs and short videos as thousands before them. I must tread lightly here, for as someone with a social media presence, I might be counted among their ranks. But we always despise most passionately that which holds up a mirror to ourselves.

(A brief stop at Harry’s Bar for a Boulevardier, my favorite cocktail, restored our spirits. Despite being a Paris legend, Harry’s Bar was, blessedly, trafficked mostly by locals.)

The Best Meal of My Life

When in Paris, it behooves you to at least sample the world of haute cuisine, and so our first dinner in Paris was at the sublime Passionné, the work of chef Satoshi Horiuchi.

High-end food is performative in ways that can frequently be stuffy and disappointing, but every component of this seven-course meal was astonishing in its intricacy, thoughtfulness, and dynamic presentation. Each course of this flawless culinary symphony seamlessly built upon the one before. I highly doubt that I will ever have a meal of its like again.

Among the Dead

Hedonism requires an antidote.

The following morning took us down into the freshly renovated Paris Catacombs. I have always harbored a fascination with the macabre, and have previously inspected the bone chapels of Milan and Rome, but the Paris Catacombs are something else entirely.

Beneath the streets lie the remains of over six million Parisians arranged in a labyrinth of femurs and skulls. These are interspersed with altars and philosophical engravings designed to make you contemplate your own mortality. Standing among so many anonymous dead casts a profound, existential chill that did not readily leave me.

A Cure for the Mega-Museum

We resurfaced and took the metro up the hill to Montmartre. Lunch was at Restaurant La Petite Charlotte, which delivered precisely what was required: a satisfying, practically perfect beef bourguignon.

Fortified, we approached the neighboring Musée Gustave Moreau. The fatal flaw of the world’s “great” museums is their size. They are exercises in exhaustion; eventually, even for the most ardent art-lover, masterpieces dissolve into a blur of white noise.

The intimate, idiosyncratic Musée Gustave Moreau does not have this problem. Established by the painter himself in his former residence, it is beautifully focused. Spanning just a few floors, including his preserved private apartments, it contains expansive galleries crammed with his artistic triumphs.

Moreau is my favorite painter. Moreau’s works are primarily narcotic, mystical visions of the ancient world. Moreau was particularly fascinated by femmes fatales: Salome glittering in exotic jewels as she demands the head of a saint, or the Sphinx locking her cold, psychological gaze with Oedipus. But I also find myself fascinated by his singular, strange interpretations of Biblical scenes, which imbues the sacred with a sense of the uncanny.

The Seine of It All

The following day was marred by the suffocating density of the crowds. Our activities involved a long walk down to visit the d’Orsay. It is breathtaking in its design and contains many extraordinary things, but my prior point about mega-museums stands: it would be better if it were half its size.

The day did have its more relaxed pleasures, though. Before the d’Orsay, we made a stop at Boulangerie-Pâtisserie Terroirs d’Avenir for their immaculate pastries. We followed this with a descent down the Rue Montorgueil, where you can find some of the most delightful culinary shops in Paris.

Superior to any of the monuments we saw that day, including the grand exterior of Notre Dame, is the Seine itself. I would return to Paris just to see it again.

The Eccentric Victor Hugo

One of the hidden treasures of Paris is the Maison de Victor Hugo, located on the elegant Place des Vosges in the Marais.

Victor Hugo is renowned as a writer, but he was far more than just a novelist. Indeed, Hugo may be one of the most interesting men to have ever lived, a true polymath who was an accomplished artist, designer, carpenter, as well as one of the greatest political leaders of his day. This museum was his abode in the latter years of his life, and among its chambers are the very room in which he died. Its detailed rooms offer a wonderful survey of his life and thoughtful, singular approach to design. The best interior designers of today could not compete with Hugo’s whimsical inventions and flourishes.

Nearby lie the shopping areas of the Marais, which was my favorite of the neighborhoods I visited in Paris. It was precisely the civilized, unhurried Paris I had hoped to find, and, if I return to Paris, it will likely be where I spend much of my time.

An Operatic Conclusion

Bringing the trip to a close was an afternoon performance of Tosca at the Opera Bastille. Unlike the glorious and grand Opera Garnier, which is now mostly reserved for ballet and concerts, the Opera Bastille is an architectural blight that ought to be demolished. Imagine the most unimaginative, dingy brutalist auditorium conceivable: that is the Bastille. It is utterly unworthy of Paris, and certainly unworthy of hosting Tosca.

Yet, Tosca remains Tosca, even in such a dire setting. It is one of the great operas, but a notoriously difficult one to stage, given the way it balances outrageous melodrama and psychological intimacy. Lean too heavily into grounded realism and you lose the sweeping majesty of the story; surrender to sheer abstraction and spectacle, and the characters evaporate. The Bastille’s production, resting comfortably in its repertoire for years, conservatively splits the difference.

Radvanovsky commanded the title role, backed by Eyvasov as Cavaradossi and Hakobyan as Scarpia. The performances were robust and satisfying, despite a slightly rocky, shrill first act. But once the performers found their groove, Tosca’s three major arias were presented with magnificent force, with Eyvasov’s emotive “E lucevan le stelle” serving as the highlight.

It was a fittingly dramatic climax to our excursion to Paris. From there, we would depart south, to Provence.

Recommendations

Attractions

• Maison de Victor Hugo - An intimate survey of a brilliantly eccentric individual. A fine starting point for a morning or afternoon in the Marais.

• Musée Gustave Moreau - A perfectly calibrated survey of a master Symbolist painter.

• The Catacombs of Paris - A singular, somber experience that is part mass grave, part art installation.

Food and Drink

• Boulangerie-Pâtisserie Terroirs d’Avenir - Immaculate pastries. Procure a Kouign-amann if you can.

• Passionné - A masterful, multi-course culinary symphony that represents the best of haute cuisine.

• Restaurant La Petite Charlotte - Honest, deeply satisfying French classics, executed with no pretension.

• Simple Coffee - Sublime espresso.

• Terres de Café - An outpost for those who prefer a constructed pour-over to the more commonly available espresso beverages.

Shopping

• Oriza L. Legrand - An intimate, charming resurrection of 18th-century olfactory history.

• Passage Jouffroy and Passage Verdoux (and surrounding streets) - Atmospheric, glass-roofed corridors harboring unique treasures, such as old books, vintage watches, and assorted antiquities.

• Rue Montorgueil - A densely packed boulevard dedicated to culinary delights.

• Serge Lutens (Palais Royal) - One of the most elaborate and intriguing perfume boutiques in all the world.

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The starting point of traveling well is this: nosce te ipsum. Know thyself.

To receive the pleasures of the world requires knowing what allows you to be open to them in the first place. It is a profound tragedy to travel halfway around the world and stand in front of one of the great marvels and find that your capacity for awe has been diminshed by exhaustion. So you must know your own instincts, both good and bad. You must identify what feeds your soul and what drains your capacity for curiosity.

After all, travel done for pleasure should ideally be an exercise in restoration rather than an endurance test (unless you are one of those brave, mad souls for whom an endurance test is, in its own way, an act of restoration; I am not one of you, so if this describes you, you might do better to seek advice from another source).

By restoration, I mean more than physical rest. Of course, physical comfort and rest is critical. A safe space, like a nice hotel room, can provide a needed sanctuary in the midst of adventure. Something as decadent as a spa visit may help compensate for days of walking and refresh you enough to open you back up to further exploration.

But the restoration I mean here is the the soul-restoring power of discovery or realization, which requires some measure of productive discomfort. The really transformative experiences of our life come at the cost of disorientation. So, if we want a transformative travel experience, one that leaves us a little different than we were before we began it, we need to be open to some friction. More than that, we need to purposefully create space for it.

Depth of experience is equally important. This runs counter to the impulses of the modern travel industry. It’s appallingly easy to find pieces like “How to do Rome in 48 hours” strewn across social media. Rome is one of the world’s richest cities, and a great experience can be had in 48 hours, but it won’t be if you try to survey all of its riches in a speedrun. There is very little value in the repetitive cycle of planting a flag, capturing a snapshot as proof, and then immediately moving on another location.

I recommend that you plan and research enough only to find your bearings. It it is all well and good to know the specific museum, historical site, or neighborhood you want to engage with on a given day. But do your best to let the remaining hours fall loosely around it. You owe yourself the luxury of exploration.

But exploration isn’t only for new spaces. In fact, I would argue there is substantial reward to be found in the act of returning to places you’ve already visited. Familiarity and repetition enables new kinds of discovery. In returning to the same restaurant multiple times, you can get to know its menu in full, or start to build a rapport with the staff. In revisiting a familiar neighborhood, you can start to wander down some of its lesser streets, perhaps finding some shop with treasures the likes of which you didn’t know existed. In revisiting a beloved city at different times of year, you may find the way in which certain seasons bring out new life in areas you had previously seen.

Finally, contemplation of the day’s events is as important as the events themselves. Without the time to process your experiences, for memories to settle, everything blurs into an indistinct montage. Rest is not a pause from the journey. It is the mechanism required to digest it. The space between the experiences is as necessary as the experience itself.

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Every once in a while I see a comment that the “spy,” taken not as a literal historical figure but a kind of narrative trope, has lost its usefulness in the age of perpetual digital surveillance. I have never felt that was so and continue to be disappointed by a corpus of modern spy fiction that feels afraid to take advantage of the malleability of the “spy” as a trope.

The “spy” is ultimately an existential figure. The spy is a human being in crisis, existing at the fringes of nation-states, where legal systems evaporate and power is the law of the land. A spy is adrift and alienated from society, lacking a clear sense of personal identity (in many cases, they are impersonating others). They maintain relationships that are often based on deceit on the part of both parties. Betrayal is expected. Death or failure is likely. Accordingly, the spy hero, even one who is largely indestructible and enduring (like James Bond, though even he was subject to mortality in his most recent adventure), is generally less a human being than an outline of a human being—something Christopher Nolan’s recent spy opus, Tenet, made altogether quite literal by simply naming its hero The Protagonist.

Spies, in some way, represent something about “civilization” that we know but often do not want to admit: that civilization has unstable boundaries, and requires force and sacrificial lambs to sustain itself. This sense that the boundaries of reality are malleable and unstable—and that one must adopt multiple contradictory identities to navigate it—describes not just the realm of the spy, but increasingly the modern human experience.

The boundaries of truth, fiction, and identity are blurred all around us. We inhabit not a landscape of nations, but an environment of virtual communities of malleable dimension that overlap in different ways. The suburban mom or dad of the American family in the 1950s might have had a few social circles, many of them local: the family itself, the religious community, the work community, and maybe some hobby group. But today, even your close friends may not know who you are in the wild, strange realm of cyberspace, where we all feel pressure to “present” digitally in proper ways, to maintain artificially clear professional and various personal profiles.

We are each, in our own way, improvising ourselves, tapdancing between performative identities. In a world of digital masks, we have seen the emergence of new threats. Even the mundane business of high school bullying has become nightmarishly complex. Consider how high schoolers may now “catfish” other high schoolers, impersonating people digitally to humiliate their peers.

In such a landscape, the spy, the figure without a stable identity who navigates a space where every relationship and even the future of nations feels uncertain, feels more valuable as a narrative vessel than ever.

But there is another sense in which the spy carries great weight for a rich story. The spy is a seeker of knowledge. The spy is both witness and detective, the one who uncovers the real story, the forbidden truth at the heart of systems that govern us. In the patterns of spy fiction, the spy is the figure who must uncover the conspiracy and expose it (or, if the secret is too horrible, bury it, lest all things crumble).

This access to the secret story is what empowers the spy to sometimes function as a more classical vigilante hero. Humanity has always found a great deal of satisfaction in the fantasy of vigilantes who might put things to rights, daydreamers vicariously living through these shadowy persons and indulging the temptation to believe that equilibrium can be restored through force. In the no man’s land beyond the law and order of nations, the spy finds the sinister figures otherwise hidden by position or obscurity. The spy alone has sufficient knowledge to sentence such villains.

Certain strands of spy storytelling, then, drift towards Manichaean battles of good and evil. The “virtuous spy” has been with us for a long time, and has perhaps reached its recent apex in the chronicles of Ethan Hunt, which treat their spy hero as a kind of messiah. But this sense of good and evil exists even when the spy is an antihero. James Bond is the most famous example here, and his adventures often lean towards a more abstracted, mercenary evil, of a kind of inhuman greed run by decadent schemers. Bond villains, like the mythic fairytale ogres and demons of old, dwell in great fortresses or caverns or volcanoes. These are figures of spiritual evil. Bond himself may be disreputable (he’s marked by a hedonism, a celebration of vice, that defies the puritanical impulses running through British and American culture), but he’s more of a scamp than a true antihero. Bond is a kind of trickster figure of folklore who gets mixed up with rather grotesque villains and puts things right.

Having been raised in a religious context (I considered going to seminary, in fact), I am fascinated by this notion of spiritual evil. One author who is preoccupied with spiritual evil is the great and singular G. K. Chesterton. As the fashioner of absurdist mysteries and thrillers, Chesterton knows it is always in his best interest to complicate things as much as possible. Chesterton sees paradox as something all-encompassing and inescapable, and he delights in creating labyrinths that embody these tensions.

One of his best works is The Man Who Was Thursday, a deliriously surreal novel about sinister secret societies in early 1900s London. It dramatizes the battle between anarchism and order in the Western world. Its protagonist, Gabriel Syme, is a kind of metaphysical detective investigating a metaphysical evil. In most espionage fiction, the “crime” is material: information is stolen, a person goes missing, a bomb goes off. For Gabriel Syme, those are symptoms of a greater philosophical disease. Syme hunts anarchists not because they break the law, but because he finds their philosophy to be an assault on existence.

Such a philosophical bent feels very relevant today, where a sense of global conspiracy seems at once omnipresent and immediate. The world is being shaped not just by geopolitics, but by a struggle between competing ideologies and technologies that both promise and threaten to radically reimagine what it means to be a human being. Persistent promises of utopia and threats of apocalypse fill every news digest. In such a din, we need people who can peer beyond the surface and isolate the signal in the noise.

So the spy, the mercenary, feels more relevant than ever. While there is much to be said about the potency of folklore heroes like the enduring 007, in such a cultural moment there may be even more to be said about the grubbier set of “thinking man’s” operators, like Harry Palmer, John Drake, and Quiller. These are working stiffs and observer-improvisers. They are scavengers and survivors. They scrape through the world, wise as serpents, preserved by their craftiness and intuition.

Craftiness and intuition are desperately needed now. This is what led me to create my own spy, Silas Thorn, the protagonist of my upcoming novel, Tomorrow Comes the Bullet. Thorn is yet another version of this “thinking man’s operator,” a man of no nation who stands on the knife’s edge of our digital future, bearing witness to the shadowy forces attempting to reorchestrate what it means to be human. I hope you will find him up to the task.