Ivan Muskanvaar, The Russian Assassin

It is strange how we summon demons of the past through reminiscence. Having remembered the absurd figure of one old enemy, Lord Lobster, I met another this morning in Fortnum & Mason.

Mange Tout carried me through the aisles of the venerable purveyor of luxury comestibles, looking for Gentleman’s Relish for my housekeeper (she adores a salty treat with her breakfast). Suddenly I espied a shadowy figure I hadn’t encountered since 1964. He was wearing the face of a soldier who had died during the Siege of Stalingrad and a Savile Row suit, but I recognised his puissance instantly.

“Well well well, if it isn’t Ivan Muskanvaar,” I said as he examined a pot of marmalade in his gloved hand. “It’s been an age since we last had the pleasure of your presence on these shores.”
Unlike most people unaccustomed to my present state, he didn’t look at Mange Tout before noticing that the skull in my chauffeur’s palm was the one who had spoken. He looked straight down at me and replied wistfully:

“Tristan Fawkes MBE. The years have not been kind.”

This immediately gave me the hump, as was intended. I clacked my teeth and laughed.
“Fame went to my head, I’m afraid. What brings the Russian Assassin to London?”

This particular soubriquet was, strictly speaking, inaccurate, as Muskanvaar had originally hailed from Belorussia, now an independent state. However, that was what everyone had called him at the time, when the Soviet Bloc was just one big hostile mass. It annoyed him as much as his observation about my maundering state had irked me.

“Oh, I’m just a tourist these days, Tristan. The decadence of this ancient city has its charms. Do you still perform in the West End? Perhaps I will come and see your act…” he purred.

“No, I retired some time ago. I merely host séances for those in need and,” I gave the assassin a significant look, “the occasional exorcism.”

Behind the disguise, I caught a glimpse of Muskanvaar’s true self. Those red eyes like dying suns.
“I see. I too have retired. The world, ultimately, does not want to be made better.”

This would have produced a wry smile if I had been capable of facial expression. Muskanvaar had always claimed to be motivated by a utopian vision. The last time I saw him, he had attempted to kill Harold Wilson and reduce the UK to anarchy. I had only foiled his schemes with the help of The Beatles. The memory haunts me still…

“Quite. Well, if you ever want to spend a few idle hours in the company of another old relic, please do drop by. I believe you know my home in Holland Park?”

“I may well do so. After all, when most of one’s old friends are dead, old enemies become infinitely better company. ”

I could only agree, but having politely bid adieu to the Cold War’s most deadly hitman, my mind was abuzz with suspicion. After all, it can hardly have been coincidence that we met today, the man is just too Machiavellian for that.

Back at home, after appeasing my housekeeper with her Gentlemen’s Relish and having Una lightly beaten with a paddle by Mange Tout, I now brood over the ominous significance of my encounter with Ivan Muskanvaar. It feels like the end of the quiet demi-life for me…

The Voice of a Gentleman. The Soul of a Pauper.

I was born in 1898, to Archibald and Maeve, in a less than salubrious backstreet in Bermondsey, a short stroll from the Thames. My father, despite his lack of education (or indeed anti-Semitism) was a rampant Wagnerian. He insisted that I be called Tristan and my younger sister Isolde. Clearly, the incestuous implications of this escaped him. My mother, being a meek woman, tiny, pale and tired as a spent matchstick, accepted his eccentricities without fully comprehending them.

We were only intermittently shod and often went hungry on his stevedore’s wages. Yet he would occasionally swagger through the door bearing tickets to Das Rheingold or Parsifal at the Royal Opera House in his vast calloused paws. Whisked off into a realm of limelight and glamour in my Sunday best, I would marvel to gigantic men and women with even bigger voices. I was humbled by the ‘quality’ around us and they were contemptuous of the threadbare poor, yet I would dream of bestriding the stage in armour, belting out German to an enthralled public.

It’s obvious that these operatic fancies led to my life threading the warped, scuffed boards of the English stage. I wonder whether those nights in the thrall of the rich, all dazzling elegance and champagne-fuelled arrogance, also led to my adoption of an aristocratic air and a weakness for mixing in royal circles. In a sense, I often ponder my assimilation into a class of people I should heartily loathe.

I remember thinking that very thing even as I was thoroughly captivated by Princess Margaret. I have the voice of a gentleman, but the soul of a pauper. This tortured me for many years. Naturally, now I’m reduced to my present cadaverous state, I really couldn’t give a fiddler’s fuck…

The Return of Lord Lobster?

I was going to begin my story today, casting what remains of my mind back to the blackened lanes of Bermondsey. Sadly, I was interrupted by a telephone call. My ancient bakerlite phone rang in its half-hearted fashion until Mange-Tout answered, for although blind he knows exactly where the phone is situated in my dreer wood-panelled study (except for when Una, the mischieveous Swedish minx, deliberately moves it to a remote corner of the room after dusting. She swears she merely forgets to put it back, but I know she loves to tease my chauffeur for he is the one who delivers her thrashings on my behalf).

When he held the earpiece to my empty aural socket, I rattled with shock. As the voice greeted me, I thought ‘could it be? Has my crustacean nemesis, the demented Lord Lobster returned from the clutches of the Grim Reaper once more?’

Lord Lobster, that oceanic aristocrat with a penchant for perversity. Once the ladies of London were bedevilled by his blue pincers and beady eye-stalks. He had the voice of James Mason, but the mind of the Marquis de Sade (though with less literary merit). Once my rival in mysterious theatrical marvels, he was afflicted by his bizarre deformity after a pact with Artigaal, the Demon Duke of Caina.

Of course, this cast him from the theatres of London into the freakshows of the provinces. The blue mottled skin, the claws, the fear of boiling water. From there, he turned to crime. We fought many a battle in the stygian depths of the Big Smoke’s underworld.

Could Lord Lobster have survived our last encounter? Did I, after years of fruitless retirement, have a worthy adversary?

The answer was no. It was Carphone Warehouse, asking whether I wanted a mobile deal to complement my Talk Talk landline.

I knew I should never have left BT…

And so we begin...

Having recently been introduced to the realm of the ecto-web by my au pair, Una, (just before I had her locked in the cellar for willfully doodling a phallus one of my original Khnopff), I have decided to record the events of my exceptional life in this digital journal.

Of course, one would be perfectly entitled to ask how a disembodied skull could possibly write a blog. Am I laboriously tapping the keys with my cigarette-holder? Have I perhaps summoned an imp from the faery kingdom to act as my PA? Certainly not. What are servants for if not being dictated to?

My trusty chauffeur and batman Mange-Tout is typing these words with his over-sized mitts as I speak. He is somewhat impaired by the fact that his eyes were removed and eyelids sewn up by the Lost Priests of Hurrrk (yes, that does have 3 rs, Mange-Tout. Do carry on, dear love), but that is another story, what?

So who am I? Who is this mystical fellow, reduced to a shadowy undead existence, tethered to his last mortal remnant, this bony brain-ball that is both my prison and refuge?

Well, I was once Tarot-reader to the court of Edward VIII after a long career as a stage psychic in the music halls of this Sceptred Isle. Regularly consulted by the aristocracy and stars alike as a medium, I was the one who first sneaked a fag to a very young Princess Margaret.

And now here I am in this mouldering pile in Holland Park, being attended to by a sadistic Housekeeper, a blind polynesian manservant and an au pair with biro Tourettes.

How did demi-life end up like this? Well, I may just begin to paint that particularly melancholy picture very soon…