The Liar

act of remembering is literally just that: the act of reassembling the members of something. If the members are illusory it is naturally more difficult to enact this mental reconstruction.'

'So your friend Szabo discovered what happens in the brains of people when they lie and has invented some kind of lie-detector, is that it?'

'No, no. He did much more than that. He discovered a lie-deftector!'

Adrian watched the smoke from his cigarette being sucked through the quarter-light of the car. He had an awful feeling, deep down inside him, that he was somehow more than a passenger on this journey, more than an observer.

'A lie-deflector?' he said.

'Let us suppose that all true things are connected in the brain by pathways called A-type pathways and all untrue things are connected by B-type pathways.'

'Okay.'

'Imagine a machine which inhibits the brain from making any B-type connections. When under the influence of such a machine, the subject is simply unable to lie.'

'And this is what your friend Szabo has come up with?'

'Such is his claim.'

Adrian thought for a moment.

'There are some lies,' he said, 'which you tell . . . which people tell ... so often that they believe them themselves. What about those?'

'However much you may consciously believe what you are saying, your brain knows the truth, and has made connections accordingly. You may imagine, for instance, that on holiday in Sardinia you witnessed a gang of twelve bandits robbing a bank with machine guns and hand grenades, you may repeat this story to the dismay of all your acquaintances at every dinner party to which those friends have made the rash mistake of inviting you, such that you believe it surely and wholly. Nonetheless, buried under the dead neural weight of all these convictions, your brain knows perfectly well that in fact there were only two bandits with nothing more than a water-pistol and a spud-gun between them. Your brain was there too, you see, and it has registered the truth.'

'I do see. I do.'

'Szabo claims the machine is in fact as much a memory-retrieval device as a lie-inhibitor. It can just as easily make the subject disinter the German for 'chive' as disgorge the details of his true whereabouts on the night in question.'

'Wow.'

'W, as you rightly remark, ow. Or, as they say in Poland, 'Vov'.'

'And where do you fit into all this?'

'Nowhere in the development of the machine. Bela and I have corresponded over the decades, and a little over a year ago he began to include in his letters to me references to his development of Mendax, as he has fancifully dubbed this fruit of his intellectual loins. Last July Istvan Moltaj, a violinist friend of his, left Hungary to take part in the Salzburg Festival. Bela entrusted him with a sheaf of papers relating to Mendax. The idea was that Moltaj should give the papers to me. We had an appointment to meet at Mozart's Geburtshaus in the Getreide-gasse. It is apparent that someone had either been following Moltaj or had intercepted Bela's letter to me arranging the rendezvous. He was there most unpleasantly killed, not ten yards away from us, as we both have cause to remember.'

'And he never got to give you the papers?'

'Moltaj had taken the sensible precaution of leaving a package for my collection at the reception desk of the Goldener Hirsch Hotel. The package contained a sheaf of musical manuscript paper. A duet for piano and violin. The music was cacophonous in the extreme but the notes corresponded to letters which spelt out a text in classical Volapuk.'

'So you got it?'

'You may remember that on our return to England last year we were robbed?'

'They took your briefcase!'

'They did indeed.'

'But, Donald, if I may say so . . .'

'Yes?'

'Why didn't you post the papers or something? If they were willing to cut a man's throat in broad daylight ... I mean just to go round with them in a briefcase in your car! Not exactly tradecraft, old man.'

Tradecraft?'

'You know. Not how Sarratt would train Circus men to operate in the field.'

'Adrian, I'm rather afraid that you are gibbering.'

'Le Carre. Operational procedures. A good field man would have taken the papers and shoved them in a DLB or DLD.'

'A what?'

'A Dead Letter Box or Dead Letter Drop.'

'Oh.'

'Moscow Rules, George, old boy. Moscow Rules all the way.'