Kutscka Series

The H. James Kutscka series

For the past six months I have been translating Brazilian writer Hilton James Kutscka's trilogy from the Portuguese into English. The results that were already a literary gold mine in Portuguese of alternate reality are now going to be available to the English reading audience.

The first of the trilogy is Lailah: God's Divorce from Her, which is action packed with woman on her most seductive, deadly, and vengeful crusade against man who has wronged her.

The second book of the trilogy is Lives: Mortal Fun, where Father Jacques takes in a homeless drunk from the streets of Chicago only to discover he knows things that were told him he shouldn't know, and least of all from long gone stiffs. The priest's brother has friends in the CIA who consult a triggered file that brings the CIA down on them and the need for Divine intervention.

The last of the Kutscka trilogy is God Throws Dice, in which this alternate reality God who now calls himself Rick Hammad, who takes his private secretary Yu-Ling with him everywhere, must intervene to stop an ambitious North Korean general to keep him from putting all the world players at North Korea's world status, so this sub-standard nation can complete on equal basis. Divine intervention has a whole new way of resolving problems of great magnitude.

Below are extracts from each of the books that make up the trilogy. Be prepared to enter an alternate reality where what you think is, may not be at all.

Book 1. Lailah: God's Divorce from Her 

1.      TEMPTATIONS IN THE DESERT

WASHINGTON, D.C. July 30^th, 1990. Monday (Three days before the invasion in Kuwait.)

It was almost seven in the evening in Washington, or almost four in the morning in Iraq. At that hour in Langley, in the Middle East division of the CIA, shift supervisor Jim Garrison leaned over a monitor, as he watched the images transmitted from the south of Iraq by FSE 19 (Flying Spy Eye), better known as the “Whistle Blower”. The orbital spy had initiated its transmissions two minutes previously. At this exact moment Garrison lit a cigarette. The glow from the lighter flame blurred his vision for a second. It was just enough time so that he missed noticing a small greenish flash that glowed, as if it had been programmed, in a place where there should have been only the naked darkness of the desert. When his pupils that had contracted by the blaze of the lighter’s flame returned to being dilated, they adapted to the penumbra of the room, where there was nothing more to be seen, except the tedious landscape of the desert. It very well could have been the gates of hell opening and purging itself of all its demons; nobody would have even noticed. Not even the most powerful nation on earth with all its espionage technology.

Iraq

Three Hundred and Eighty Clicks to the East of Baghdad.

Crossing the desert, Kammil Haddad was returning alone to his home in Baghdad. Since he held a high position in the intelligence service of his country, it was not normal to travel without his bodyguards. This position had cost him very much, among other things, his intimacy. Habitually, his bodyguards were all recruited among members of his family and of his wife’s. This measure had as a prime objective to reduce any possibility of betrayal to the maximum. Nevertheless, as the history of the East proved in an unsparing way, the risk never disappeared entirely.

Perhaps for this reason Haddad felt pleasantly relaxed in his rare solitary moments, and this was no exception, under the desert stars. His sight reached far beyond what the headlights of his Nissan Patrol could light up. It was a night with a full Moon, and the air was charged from that enchantment and beauty, which, most certainly, was responsible for inspiring writers to write stories about magicians, flying carpets, genies from lamps. There were sufficient stories to fill a thousand and one nights. This was his country, a magical place in the desert, where imagination compensated a hard reality with advantages.   

Off he went, a miniscule and despicable dot that moved in the middle of nothingness. He was his own man. After an arduous day examining secret installation of a chemical arms factory, he relished this small moment of solitude, which had cost him a lot of arguing, for he had to convince his bodyguards that nothing bad could happen in approximately fifty clicks of desert that separated him from a region where a micro climate totally changed the landscape into an area filled with plantations and marshes.

Sixty clicks further ahead and he would reach the security of the main road that would take him three hundred and fifty clicks farther, to the door of his house in Baghdad. Everything was fine. In case of any problem, there was always the short wave radio installed in his car, with encoded signals that would bring him help almost immediately, without alerting anybody. The use of cellular phones was completely out of the question: Kammil knew (after all, this was part of his work) that the Americans had sufficient technology to intercept any connection that comes to them on the tile, as long as it is done with a cellular device. The Medellin cartel paid a high price for ignoring his fact.

Now, the short wave radio, though it seemed outdated, was equipped with a scrambler and a compressor. All one had to do was turn it on to send his message securely: the device took charge of substituting the original words for others through a predetermined program. This way, it totally eliminated the meaning of the phrase that would only become intelligible when it was decoded with the use of the matrix in possession of his security guards. As if this were not enough, the gadget compressed the message, as it accelerated it until it was transformed into a simple electronic dot that could easily be confused with static by possible clandestine listeners.

This solitary trip gave him time to reorganize his thoughts. His marriage to Yasmin had obeyed his objectives, much more than to romantic impulses. Constantly watched by her brothers—his bodyguards—there was no space for escapades where he could satisfy his desire for sexual adventures. The few moments he had of privacy were appreciated as much as a good wine.

Turning his sight away from the sand-beaten moonlight, Kammil looked at the odometer of his Patrol. Baghdad was still three hundred and seventy-four clicks away. Then, with an almost automatic gesture, he pressed a button on his watch that served to light up a small blue light they had called “Indiglow” for its bluish gleam. It was three minutes to three in the morning. This small distraction was responsible for making him miss two happenings that, in a few minutes, would change his life and possibly that of millions of people forever. 

The first event was a small luminous dot that crossed the sky, headed toward the west. It could have easily been mistaken for a star, if not for its speed and constant course. Differently from a star, this object had been created by human hands and baptized “the Whistle Blower” for its capacity to not miss a thing it passed over through its lenses, even with a cloudy sky. The second was a greenish glow that for a fraction of a second flared up in the desert a few clicks in front of him.

A few minutes later, Kammil Haddad saw her.

She stood at the side of the road, though the wind and the sand made it difficult to see clearly where the road ended and the desert started. When the headlights of the vehicle revealed her presence, Kammil shuddered. There should not have been anybody around there at that hour, much less the woman of his most secret dreams. Instinctively, he immediately changed to a lower gear, as he forgot all the security rules that reigned over his behavior twenty-four hours a day.

The closer he came to her, the more he thought he had lost his sense of judgment. That could not be real. That woman, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nothing, was a live incarnation of his dreams of love and eroticism that were preciously hidden inside his Muslim soul.

It was as if life were going by in slow motion. He stopped the vehicle beside her, as he gave up his struggle against the phantasy. If that was something of the demon, then it was worth risking his soul, he thought as he opened the passenger door.

“I’m Yamilla,” she said, and she sat down beside him without the characteristic humility of the women of the region. Without saying a word, Kammil forced himself to believe what his eyes saw, and asked Allah earnestly that that vision not be a bout of delirium provoked by a drug put in his water or food, which would have been more plausible than what was happening.

Yamilla dressed in Western fashion, but upon pronouncing her name, she made it clear to Kammil’s ears that Arabic was her native language. 

Book 2. Lives: Mortal Fun

CHAPTER 2

LAZARUS AND MOTHER TERESA DU LOIRE

James Brady was in a coma for two long years, when one fine day, out of the blue, he woke up.

All remembrances of the accident had disappeared. Nevertheless, strange images during his period in a coma began to unfold frequently in his brain, like pieces of a past that was too mad to be told to anybody at all. And that’s the way it was.

He had never confided everything he knew, or thought he knew, to anybody. Not even during the long therapy sessions that followed his recuperation from the coma; neither afterward, when his life began to hopelessly come undone, and he took up drinking.

Ten years after the accident, the few friends he had left had nicknamed him Jim “Brandy” in a spiteful reference to his constant ethyl “content”.

On Friday night, when Father Jacques, a Frenchman who never passed up a good wine and who looked more like a movie actor out of a nouvelle vague film, found Jim Brady slumped over in the doorway of a bar in Chicago. He was nothing more than a failure in life who was leaving through the back door, so as not to call attention.

Father Jacques Vartin was not a fervent Catholic. He was aware his work was necessary, that human beings needed something to give them inspiration (a type of psychology that needed no payment for the consultation), so as not to fall into barbarism. But from here to the Pope forbidding prophylactics, while AIDS threatened humanity as a whole, was a very long way, and it was this same long way that Jacques felt with respect to the Vatican.

He could not deny his faith, but he also liked to believe he was too smart a man to deny science and the advances humanity had made, as in the field of science, as well as in the philosophical and social. Maybe he was not a complete atheist for being, above all, honest with himself. He knew he did not possess enough strength or courage to cut off a mystical lifesaver that had kept him afloat in life up to then. He repudiated the idea of an afterlife, where the good would be rewarded and the bad punished. Just the same, he kept this to himself.

On that night, as he complied with his brother’s invitation, he watched a Chicago Bulls game on the TV at his brother’s place. He had taken a bottle of good French wine, and now he was returning to his parochial abode behind the church. He walked along lightheadedly, looking up, mesmerized by the choreography of the snowflakes that had begun to fall and that danced, as they twirled to the pleasure of the winds, and were blown about through the corridors that were formed by the streets. He was fully aware the wine he had drunk helped sufficiently to see all this beauty in simple things.

He intended to take advantage of this perception to the maximum, when he tripped over James, who, completely inebriated, slept on the sidewalk next to the door of a bar. There he had fallen upon being put out, and there he remained for lack of strength or sheer will to get up.

            “Ooops! A thousand pardons,” said Jacques, even before he had seen whom he had tripped over.

For a reply he got a mumble, which could only be human that came from the sidewalk.

            “Oh, my God,” exclaimed Jacques at seeing the state of the man on the ground.

Jacques did not have the habit of going around and taking in drunks off the street. For this, the sisters of charity existed and an endless number of associations, but with a snowstorm threatening to come down any minute, it seemed more prudent to him, as a good servant of the Lord, to give shelter to that creature, even if it were only for a night. Extending his hand with the best smile he could muster at that moment, he said:

            “I’m Father Jacques. Please help me get you up. Otherwise, I will lie down here with you, and I warn you I snore!”

James opened his eyes.

            “Well! So this is Father Jacques,” he exclaimed. A child’s song came to mind, and he smiled sweetly, before he threw up.

            “Lord, help me get him up,” said Jacques looking up, as if he were speaking to the Creator. “If I can’t manage to do this before daybreak, he’s going to be in Your hands, and I believe You are not going to like the smell of this servant of Yours one bit when he is in front of You,” he added.

After much effort and a few slips on the frozen sidewalks from the wind coming from Canada by way of Lake Michigan, they managed to arrive at his parochial abode.

Book 3. God Throws Dice

Chapter 1

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Pyongyang — Monday 10 September 2001

8:30 PM

Kim Hoon was naked from the waist up when his eyes meet his own image in the large mirror in his dressing room. What he saw did not disappoint him.

A mixture of his mother’s Korean genes with those of his father, a French career diplomat, had resulted in a tall, light brown-compected man with transparent blue feline eyes that brought to mind tropical beaches.

His perfect muscles and his bronze skin were the result of his labor.

He was the newest general in the North Korean Regular Army.

His features, strange for those of his mother’s race, were extraordinarily attractive when seen through Western eyes.

This was a reality that Kim Hoon was totally aware of, and felt so comfortable with it that he had transformed it into a resource he handled with grace and resourcefulness to meet his objectives, be they in the fulfillment of his official duties, or simply to massage his Eastern macho ego.

Though the number of Western women in Pyongyang was ridiculous for a city of its size, the majority of them that deserved a second look in any world capital had already passed at least once through his bed.

The record holders almost always were Russian diplomatic women, who, after the Gorbachev era, had gotten much better, so much so in the question of age as in their sophistication. The Communists had discovered that power didn’t go well with ugly women, and this acknowledgment had set off an irrepressible wave of divorces in which they traded in women who brought to mind Vincent Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters for models and professional prostitutes who, most of the time, weren’t as old as their oldest daughters, an occurrence Kim Hoon would daily thank the gods for, granted the state would let him have them.

Something in his ancestry made him immune to local women whom he wasn’t attracted to, in the same way they weren’t attracted to him. It might have been because they reminded him of his mother whom he respected with the Eastern side of his personality and with everything it involved. He loved her very much, but it was always prudent to keep his distance.

When his father died, he was fifteen years old. It was in the seventies, with everyone acting crazy, except for Kim Hoon Carpentier. It happened that when his mother went back to her hometown of Kae Song, which now, because of a treaty and a few kilometers, was located in the wrong Korea. It was the one in the north.

His maternal grandfather was a general in the newly formed Regular Army of the new country. The man had a strong personality and in short time he had total dominion over his grandson whom he saw for the first time. His mother, a pacifist, tried at all costs to avoid the unavoidable. So as not to lose her son, she ended up accepting her father’s demands that the first thing to go would be the Carpentier name. Then he showed him the way to a military career. In this way Kim Hoon was protected from disco music and bell bottom pants, an occurrence that he as much as his mother hadn’t regretted.

She put up with everything without complaining, and kept her adolescent son and habits in tow by keeping him on a short leash.

“The old woman isn’t a push-over,” he thought to himself, “but I think if she knew what I’m ready to do in order to make this world more just, she would be happy with my career.”

His mother went on living in Kae Song. Elderly people such as she were encouraged to leave Pyongyang, where, until very recently, the elderly, beggars, and pregnant women were forbidden. The position Kim Hoon held with a certain ease would make it so that the people responsible for these cares of the city’s appearance gave it a merchant look in its streets and squares.

The problem was her. She would never agree to leave the old block that was squeezed in with its old pagodas between the main road and the river, like an impregnable bastion that resisted bravely at the advance of wide avenues in the modern city that held approximately two hundred thousand inhabitants.

To her, Kim Jong-il, known as “the beloved leader” was nothing more than a moron. A burlesque imitation of Kim il-sung, he was a scoundrel who was surely burning in hell. This was an opinion that she shared secretly—which showed him that the brainwashing his grandfather had practiced on her hadn’t come close to being a success—, but if it weren’t for them with their absolute power, in what other way would somebody like Kim Hoon be able to have within his reach the means to bring the world to its knees and punish it for the arrogance that the richest countries imposed upon the poorest ones?

“Fucking globalization!” he thought out loud.

That shitty dictatorship was finally going to serve for something. And the best part is that the tormentor on duty didn’t even suspect what was about to come.

He put on a shirt and an austere tie. Anelice Binot, a reporter from Paris Match would certainly appreciate his kindness to attend the dinner that had been arranged by wearing civilian dress. He tried to describe her mentally, but this was based on the lousy airport security videos he had seen quickly, with the image of Catharine Deneuve that had come to mind in the film Indochina.

She was perhaps a bit younger than the actress, but with charm and a stunning presence the majority of mortals only find in their dreams.

She had arrived in Pyongyang on Friday afternoon, only three days earlier.

Though he was a person of renown with important connections, he had spent the weekend in state installations trying to comply with the endless demands of the local bureaucracy; and while at those state installations he had been informed about her the entire day. During the week the state was terrible; on Saturday and Sunday anyone who would need his services would rather have strolled on foot through the seventh hell. It was that, according to the state, he didn’t exist. The idea formed a smile on Kim Hoon’s face.

The dinner was to search for a solution to the young woman’s troubles.

Her company had made the necessary contacts through the embassy in order to obtain a few comforts that were indispensable when dealing with North Korea, so that she could do the photo shoot. The reportage would use some city scenes and the surrounding area as background for clothes of Asiatic inspiration that has been designed by some European faggot whose name he didn’t remember. As usual after arriving it became clear to them that nobody knew anything about it, and the authorizations came out on time without the intervention of some local authority. At this point Kim Hoon came into play.

With her were five French models, a Chilean photographer who seemed to be bedding all of them, a French gay make-up artist who seemed to be in love with the photographer’s assistant who was a black Brazilian about twenty-five years old, and last, there was a fifty year old lady, the seamstress. All of them were guests at the Ko Ryo Hotel, a stately construction with forty-five floors that enabled a view of the entire city from the majority of its five hundred rooms.

Since over half of the rooms—all on the lowest floors—had never been fully occupied, the possibility of any guests not having a stunning panoramic view was nonsense, but the tourists did not need to know this, and paid more for this obligatory privilege.

They had agreed to meet at 9 PM, and it would be better that they dined in the revolving restaurant at the top of the hotel—the place always made such an impression on visitors so that they forgot temporarily where they were; and from the kitchen that, despite it being of quality for Asiatic standards, it was far from any good Western restaurant, and it only served Western dishes—a decision made by some genius in the hotel’s marketing. Any option not from the local menu would only fill his companion’s eyes with tears that evening, since she would not have the opportunity to compare it to any other meal that, in all certainty, she had tasted in some better place before; but in order for this to have been possible, the hotel had to have at least a three day notice, time that he had not been given. Among other comforts was the one that made it possible to go by her room, where he could pass by without being seen from the lobby, which was always compromising, even for him. On the other hand, in all of Pyongyang they would find nothing better on a Monday. For a long time the country had been suffering a lack of food. Whatever there was of the best was in the hotel for the scarce tourists and eventual businessmen with most of them being European. It’s clear that the government’s objective wasn’t to make it appear to outsiders that everything ran well in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. After all, anyone averagely enlightened knew about the shitty place his country currently was. The idea was to give some comfort to them so that eventually they would come back. Dollars were always welcome. Outside the hotel, the best that could be had was Tong Ir duck (on Unification Street) with Pong Hak, the only available beer.  Yet, at the Ko Ryo, with a bit of luck, even a Budweiser could be had.

The fact he spoke perfect French designated him for a series of intelligence services, where language and the refinement of a blue blood were necessary in order to make up a pristine image of North Korea’s good intentions to the world.

Members of the eclectic group of guests had been investigated one by one by the secret service, and nothing had arisen that could call into question the past of any one of them other than a traffic violation. The truth be known, they were so genuine and such good people they could only be spies.

Copyright 2013 by H. James Kutscka and Darian Land.  All rights reserved.