Unite!

Palma de Mallorca, Gecko Street

In the narrow alleys of Palma’s Old Town, beneath its vaulted gateways and within the hidden inner courtyards closed to strangers, in the jewellers’ workshops of the Jewish quarter and in the steam of the Arab baths, in the dim light of the Ukrainian church and the chapels of the confraternities, in the Basque taverns and the sailors’ bars, the threads of a strange and shadowy conspiracy are being woven, invisible to outsiders, just as in Ajvaz’s Prague. Only one or two seemingly random signs hint at the existence of a conspiracy of truly grand proportions, whose network, as Wang Wei discovered only the other day, stretches from Catalonia to Transylvania. And that discovery also sheds light on, and reinforces, another one that we stumbled upon only a few streets away.

Do you remember the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party? They ran in the 2006 parliamentary elections with their simple yet unbeatable campaign platform: “Eternal life. Free beer. Lower taxes.” Naturally, they won the election with 98% of the vote, but the powerful lobby of pathologists, funeral directors, brewers, and tax consultants annulled the result through electoral fraud, and the party’s website was hacked.

He looks so cute, surely he wouldn’t steal. – Two-Tailed Dog for President!
Relaxes. Looks deeply into my eyes. Votes for us. – Eternal life. Free beer. Lower taxes.

But the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party has not given up. It is preparing for the next election through a broad international alliance. Proof of this is the secret sign intended for initiates, which we discovered while climbing the Carrer Pietat in Palma de Mallorca. The sign can be seen on the signboard of the apparently closed Perfil Bar, proving that appearances are deceptive: the seemingly abandoned building is obviously the lodge of the party’s local cell.

Fellow traveller

Yet the threads of this conspiracy extend not only across space, but through time as well. We do not wish to reveal everything prematurely; suffice it to say that when we finally publish our discovery, even Dan Brown will envy it.

Prague, Old Jewish Cemetery. The tomb of Handel Bassevi