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Eugene Linden

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Posted Tuesday, June 26, 2001, at 9:00 PM ET

My last trip to Edinburgh was a long time ago, but the city has retained its beauty—the view from Princes Street across green, green lawns and up to Edinburgh Castle with the ancient buildings arrayed along the Royal Mile ranks as one of the most dramatic urban vistas in the world. The city has also lost some of its provincialism. I was last here as part of a U.K. book tour many years ago, and I remember a lot of drunks in restaurants. I vividly recall one dinner interrupted by an outburst of what seemed to be invective delivered in a thick burr by a gigantic man. Angered at the apparent insults directed at our table, I confronted the drunk and stupidly asked him to repeat what he had said (a clearly enunciated repetition of the words was probably not in my best interest). At this point, his more sober companion deftly stepped in, saying, "Whatever it was, you can be sure that it was polite."

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I'm looking forward to today in part because I have convinced my 19-year-old daughter, Gillian, to come up from Paris, where she has been working as a baby sitter while waiting for an internship to commence at a big French media conglomerate. Things start off with a misadventure, however, when she feels a terrible pain in her eye after cleaning her contact lenses with a fluid we purchased at a nearby pharmacy. We arrange a visit to an eye doctor a little later, and I leave her in the room nursing and washing her eye while I head off to the conference.

When I arrive, the day's session of the Global Forum for Law Enforcement and National Security has already begun. Almost immediately, my worries from the day before come back with a vengeance, only this time I'm back on Half Dome without equipment and wearing loafers rather than climbing shoes. The anxiety derives from a conversation with Robert Hall, a former director of Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service, who has organized the conference. He reminds me that apart from the keynote, I've agreed to fill in for a late cancellation in a session on international migration and crime. I'd only been paying half attention when I agreed, and did not focus on the word "crime."

Now it dawns on me that I'm supposed to be talking about the interaction of migration and crime to many of the top criminal intelligence officials in the developed world. Most of what I know about crime comes from reading thrillers. (Note to readers: One rule of thumb for such books, particularly the ones with the word "option" in the title, is that the number of long, technical descriptions of weaponry rises proportionally to the number of people mentioned in the acknowledgements with nicknames like "T-Bone" and "Butch.") Crime novels are probably not the best preparation for this crowd. Maybe I can convince Hall that the audience will be more interested in my thoughts on the Basque language or 19^th-century chromaticism.

Remembering that I have to get Gillian to the doctor, I head off to pick her up. There we learn that by removing her lenses from the solution prematurely, Gillian did not give the solution time to neutralize and inadvertently bathed her eye with peroxide. The woman doctor cheerfully says that the injury and pain are transitory, and that her mistake is not uncommon, although she adds, fixing my college-student daughter with a meaningful glance, most of her cases involve foreign visitors who can't read the English language instructions plainly written on the carton.

Reassured, we head over to the botanical garden. I always make a point to visit the botanical garden in a foreign city. Usually they offer an uncrowded, tranquil refuge (at the moment something I need badly). In the cab, Gillian interrupts her recurrent moans about "My poor eye" to assert that she should be entitled to a haircut. I ask her how this follows. "I deserve something for my pain," she argues, "and if it's bad, I won't be able to see it."

That night Gillian stays at the hotel to tend to her eye (and, undoubtedly, develop new strategies designed to make this self-inflicted wound work to her material advantage), while I head over to the gala dinner at the Royal Museum. Making the guests feel important are a gaggle of protesters across the street, behind police barricades, sporting literate signs: "Nuclear subs mean unseen fascism!"

Naturally, in a conference with more than one keynote speaker there are several head tables, and I am at one of them. Across from me is Chris Black, an Australian specialist on organized crime, who works for an international group called CIRCLE ("It's a perfect acronym since that's what we go around in."). I mention an issue raised earlier by Christopher Donnelly, a special adviser to NATO on Eastern and Central European affairs. He had said that in Ukraine, among other nations, corruption threatens the viability and very existence of the state. Chris Black says, well maybe, but does it matter? He notes that through history nations have come apart and come together, and that a good number of today's lawless states are artificial constructs anyway. He goes on to say (in a classic Australian dig at the Pommies) that a number of the cities in the U.K. were built on wealth from the slave trade or from officially granted licenses to plunder Spanish galleons, and that such examples show that societies in the grip of corruption can reimpose morality later on. I'm not sure how reassuring it is for someone in Sierra Leone to know that sometime in the distant future their nation might be a better place.

As a fitting coda to the evening, a drum and bugle corps from the Royal Marines provides a stirring mélange of marching and musical precision. Noticing that the bass drummer is wearing an ancient tiger skin over his shoulders, I think of Zaire's late dictator Mobuto and his leopard-skin hat, and also of a remark made earlier in the day by Commodore Patrick Tyrrell, deputy director of Britain's ministry of defense. He noted that we may have technological evolution, but we still have stone-age genes.

I begin to think about my keynote the next morning.