Mr. Beardstead

“Schulmann came not to Bonn but to Munich, and not as Schulmann either, and neither Alexis nor his Silesian successor was aware of his arrival, which was what he intended. His name, if he had one, was Kurtz, though he used it so seldom he might have been forgiven if one day he forgot it altogether. Kurtz meaning short; Kurtz of the short cut, said some; his victims—Kurtz of the short fuse. Others made laborious comparisons with Joseph Conrad’s hero. Whereas the bald truth was that the name was Moravian and was originally Kurz, till a British police officer of the Mandate, in his wisdom, had added a “t”—and Kurtz, in his, had kept it, a sharp little dagger jabbed into the bulk of his identity, and left there as some kind of goad.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl