The Secret Letters…

Folks,

As the following has almost no possibility of being published on paper, I figured that I might as well spill the words into the Cloud. Here's the beginning of something that I began writing some twenty years ago. I'll serialize.

The Secret Letters of Professor Anton Saurian,

Compiled & Edited by Steven Solomon © 1992


Table of Context, The Full Story


I: Those Bastards
II: God, Life, Death, Whatever
III: Politics & The Natural Order of Primate Organizations
IV: Future Evolution & What Passes for Intelligence
V: The Tragedy of Romance
VI: Years of Madness & Betrayal

Preface & Introduction

The year was 1955. The place, the Philippines. I had been dispatched by Real True Crime Magazine to report on the imminent execution of one Professor Anton Saurian at the hand of local authorities. He had been recently apprehended on multiple charges of drug trafficking, murder, necrophilia and espionage. 

Under the sweltering rays of a new rising tropical sun, in the town square of sleepy Laoag, I first laid eyes on him. I watched him walk, with armed escort but without assistance, to the top of the gallows. Handsome, tall and lean, he strode forward with a confident gait that gave not one hint that he considered these to be his last steps on Earth. They pulled the black hood over Saurian's head and the noose tight about his neck.


He refused Last Rites. He did not pray. He had no last words to offer and stood ramrod straight as the hangman's switch was pulled. The floor beneath Saurian's feet yawned open. His body dropped to the taunt end of the rope.


There he twisted, apparently dead, for some several minutes as the good folk of the Northern Province proceeded to pelt the corpse with spittle, stones and empty beer bottles. It was all the authorities could do to prevent them from setting the body afire. Women wailed and grown men cried. The priests called for calm as the police beat senseless those who would not desist and return quietly to their hovels.


There is no explanation, official or otherwise, to account for the subsequent disappearance of Saurian's corpse from the coroner's freezer. Nor can it be explained how someone using his identification booked passage on a banana boat leaving that region only hours later. I can tell you this, however: amazingly, I met Saurian once again. I was in Dallas, November 22, 1963, in a saloon not far from Dealey Plaza. More on that later.


Where Saurian is today, we do not know. He is believed to have last taken the identity of the fugitive Anton Baer, former Chief Financial Officer of the presently bankrupt Bundestbånk, German Federal Republic. At other times over the past half-century, he is thought to have variously assumed the guise of the Catholic Pope, John Paul I, pioneering French director and star, Antonin Artaud, and rock poet, Bob Dylan.


We know neither where nor when Saurian was born, but can deduce that it was in the first third of this century, somewhere in southeast Asia. His father is thought to have been French; his mother Vietnamese or Cambodian. He first came to the attention of the western intelligence community during the final days of the Second World War; his name appearing in American OSS files as a leading but highly controversial Soviet neurochemist.


Five years following the war, he briefly came over to the newly formed American CIA, only to defect yet again, this time into self-employment and freelance neurochemistry. While his great mind roamed the spectrum of human concerns, producing often startling insights into fields as far flung as literature and exo-biology, he was always most preoccupied with neurological inquiries.


It was this abiding concern, and the attendant ongoing need for anatomical specimens, that no doubt gave rise to persistent allegations of grave robbing, vampirism, and murder. Thus was destroyed an otherwise sterling reputation. In every generation, small minds ridicule and debase those they envy but do not understand.


What you are about to read are the most personal letters of Professor Anton Saurian, recovered from the dusty attics of lives lived in the shadow of true greatness. The words that follow are those written in utmost confidence, even conspiracy, to his most trusted and oft-times beloved confederates. It is to these individuals that I dedicate this effort. It is, however, to the man himself that I and you, dear reader, owe the greatest measure of gratitude. Read on and savor well this unfolding story of a life of the mind lived on the run.