Fear and Loathing in Lisbon

I am writing this from a hotel room I cannot describe, in a city I am permitted to name, while a man two doors down the hall cleans a knife I will pretend I did not see. The man’s name is Ray. Ray is not actually his name. He has not corrected me when I use it, which is what I have learned, in the last seventy-two hours, to count as trust.

It is 4:47 a.m. The Tagus is doing whatever the Tagus does at this hour and I have a glass of Bairrada white in front of me that has, in the last six minutes, become room temperature. I have not slept since Tuesday. I have not eaten since the airport. I have, however, in the last seventy-two hours, walked into rooms I have no business walking into, on the arm of an institution that does not officially exist, in pursuit of a story my editor in New York will refuse to publish and my publisher in London will publish anyway because the publisher in London is dying of stage-four pancreatic and does not care.

So that is where we are. That is the dateline.

Let me try to be useful.

The thing I have been given access to has been called many things across many languages over twenty-three centuries, and at this exact moment in history its English name is THE BLACK CIRCLE. I am told this is not what its members call it. I am told its members call it nothing — that names belong to outsiders and amateurs and the kind of fraternal orders that wear hats and design their own ceremonial swords. I am told a great deal I am not allowed to verify. I write it all down anyway. I am here as a witness and a stenographer and what they want to call me, I think, but have not yet been brave enough to ask, is a vector.

What I have seen in seventy-two hours:

ONE. A kitchen, which I was told to enter and not look at directly. I looked. There was a woman in the kitchen who was older than my mother and younger than my mother’s mother and she was cleaning a fish with a knife that, I was told later, her great-great-grandmother had used to clean the same kind of fish in the same room. When I asked her, through a translator I was instructed not to name, whether anyone in her family had ever worked for the Circle, she did not look up. She said, in Arabic: Everyone in my family has been a Circle member. Ray ate the fish. I did not.

TWO. A hotel bar in the Bairro Alto where a man whose suit cost more than my apartment told me, over a bottle of port that was older than Portugal as a country, what he called the First Principle. He said: A great army is a poor weapon. The right hand in the right room is the only weapon that has ever mattered. I wrote it down. He watched me write it down. He smiled. I asked him whether I was permitted to print it. He said: We have been waiting twenty-three centuries for someone to print it. We are not waiting because we are afraid of the consequences. We are waiting to see what you do with it.

THREE. A room — a small one, in a building that does not appear on any map I can find — where I was shown a single object on a square of black velvet. It was a poisoner’s vial. Greek. Third century BC. The vial was the size of a fingernail. The Circle person who showed it to me — a woman whose age I could not estimate within forty years and whose hands were the steadiest hands I have ever seen on a living person — said it was the founding artifact of an organization that, by its own records, has shaped every major civilizational transition in human history since the death of Alexander the Great. When I asked her how the vial had come into the Circle’s keeping, she did not answer. She looked at Ray. Ray looked at the wall.

I looked at this fingernail-sized object on a piece of velvet in a room that did not exist in a city I had landed in two days earlier, and I had a thought I am going to share with you now and never share with anyone again.

I am in the wrong room.

I am in the wrong room and I am not going to leave.

That is the entire situation. That is the story. That is what I am here to file.

Ray is still working on the knife in the next room. I can hear him through the wall. He does not hurry. He is the calmest professional I have ever met and the most boring, and these two facts are, I am beginning to understand, the same fact. The men I have written about in eight years of foreign reporting — warlords in Sudan, oligarchs in Riga, Pentecostal arms dealers operating out of an evangelical mega-warehouse in Mexico City — all of them wore their work as a costume. Some of them wore the costume well. Ray does not own a costume. Ray is wearing a clean white t-shirt and cleaning a knife at four in the morning the way a plumber cleans a wrench. He is going to kill someone tomorrow. He has not told me who. I am not going to ask.

I have to file this in three hours. The wine is gone. The publisher in London is in fourth-stage. The Tagus is doing the thing it does at sunrise where it pretends to be a river and not a piece of the Atlantic the Romans tried to map twice and gave up on.

More to come.

Don’t write me. Don’t subscribe to the wrong newsletter. If you have found this, you found it for a reason.

— W. D.