Siege at the Villa Lipp

CHAPTER TEN

The fireworks began soon after dinner.

When the first rockets went up from a boat along the coast off Monte Carlo, they seemed to act on Krom as a signal.

We had eaten simply, as Melanie had arranged, so that the servants could get off early to their local Quatorze juillet fête. While they were clearing the table we had moved to the terrace, though keeping close to the house in what even a sulkily nervous Yves had had to agree was an unexposed area. A drink tray had already been set up for us. I had opened a bottle of brandy.

As the popping sounds of the distant red-white-and-blue bursts arrived, Krom leaned forward and raised his glass. For a moment I thought absurdly that he must be about to propose a Bastille Day toast, but no; he had seen an insect drown itself in his brandy.

‘I am glad to tell you, Mr Firman,’ he said as he fished out the corpse with the tip of a napkin, ‘that I am now prepared to discuss your Paper Number Two and to receive your Paper Number Three as per our agreement.’

‘What agreement is that, Professor?’

I had avoided him after my talk with Connell and Henson. They might be allies now, but only allies of a sort. I couldn’t expect them, when it came to fresh haggling with Krom over the threats and promises made in Brussels, to ignore his just claims on their moral support. It had been important, therefore, that they had time to get used to the idea of helping me with what mattered without having to oppose me again over something that by then scarcely mattered at all. The solution had been to stay in my room, leaving Melanie to ply From with pre-dinner drinks. Mat wouldn’t, I knew, call unannounced. First, there would be a figurative rolling of drums or a clap or two of stage thunder calculated to strike fear into the hearts of us simple men. One could only wait for such a great moment. I had used the time to get all the tapes properly wrapped and hidden in the small bag I intended to take with me on the escape run, and to check out the local radio-taxi services. The bottle of frozen champagne brought to me by the cook’s husband had thawed out sufficiently for me to be able to drink two glasses and the burgundy with dinner had been good enough. The strain had been there all right, but it had been under control. When we had moved to the terrace I had been ready to be kind to Krom.

Now, he was showing me his teeth again, and not just in normal quantities.

‘I speak of our original agreement,’ he said, ‘and it is no use rolling your eyes, Mr Firman. I intend to enforce the original terms in all respects.’

‘Using what sanctions to enforce them, Professor?’

He gave me the wide-angle view of his bridgework. ‘Twenty per cent of what I could have used before, my friend. Twenty per cent of Symposia instead of one hundred per cent, plus the knowledge that, even if it were one per cent and we were dealing with a figurehead criminal, the Director of the Institute for International Investment and Trust Counselling still has to maintain the fiction that he is a man of probity.’

‘Any attempt on your part to contend that I’m not, Professor, will land you with actions for libel, slander and defamation of character, depending on how you make your allegations and where. Meanwhile, take my advice. You’re going to need all your strength before long, so don’t push yourself too hard. I have more files prepared for you and you shall have them in due course. Melanie has the copies ready and waiting. At the moment, however, she’s listening for the phone call I’m expecting, the one from Mat Williamson. You can hear it if you like. In fact, I think you should hear it, all of you.’ I had turned, as I spoke, to Yves. ‘That could be arranged, couldn’t it, with some of the equipment you have?’

Yves squirmed visibly, then tried to pull himself together. Sulkiness was succeeded by pomposity. ‘With respect, Patron, I think that with such a conversation, if it takes place, it would be wiser if you used your own recorder.’

‘Yves is sensitive about his special skills,’ I explained. ‘It was just an idea. I thought you might all like to hear it as it’s happening.’

‘I’m for that,’ Connell said. ‘More authentic, I’d say. Don’t you agree, Professor?’

‘If Mr Firman wishes us to hear a telephone conversation, the question of its authenticity doesn’t arise. It may be presumed false.’

I shrugged. ‘Well, it’s up to you. I thought I’d mention it.’

That was when Yves cracked. He suddenly stood up.

‘Patron, why trouble to wait? Why wait for bad news? Because it is polite to do so? I will have no part in it and I have told Melanie so. I think that she now feels the same.’

‘About what, Mr Boularis?’ Dr Henson was smiling up at him. ‘What would you like us to do?’

‘You?’ He looked down at her as if in surprise and then made a sweeping gesture of contempt. ‘You can do what you like, Mrs Doctor. You belong with your friends. You can die with your friends. Why should I. . ‘

He broke off. Something beyond the terrace had caught his eye. He stared, then turned again, bewildered. He had given up trying now to retain his dignity.

I got up, too, to see what it was that he hadn’t been expecting at that moment.

The big motor cruiser which, until then, had arrived only at breakfast time was gliding past the headland into the bay. She was carrying a lot of lights. Beneath the awning over the after deck, there was a dinner table set and awaiting a party of four. Around another table, with bottles and an ice bucket on it, were gathered two couples. The women wore denim jackets with their slacks and one of the men had put on a sweater. It was probably cool out there on the water. There was much animation. I had no binoculars handy, but I didn’t think I had seen any of them before.

‘I thought there were only three passengers,’ I said, ‘the one man and the two women who swim from the outer beach.’

‘The one in the pullover must be a guest or the other husband.’ He gave a strangled sort of laugh. ‘They all look drunk to me.’

And indeed they did, in a way; the falling-about, arm-waving way of film extras pretending to be drunk in the orgy sequence of a biblical silent. Sounds of the revelry came faintly across the water. Much louder was the sound of diesels suddenly going astern and the squawk of the chain as an anchor was let go.

To celebrate their arrival, the man in the sweater rose unsteadily to his feet from the cushion on which he had been sitting cross-legged and flung a hand in the air as if to call for three cheers. The next moment he had swooped on a long cardboard box lying on the deck by the table and was staggering forward with it to the bows. The crewman there securing the anchor took no notice at all when the man with the box dumped it beside him and began tearing at gummed-paper fastenings on the lid.

‘What the hell’s he got there?’ Connell demanded. ‘Bunting? Fairy lights?’

The guests were standing now too. After Yves’s outburst, I suppose, any diversion had been welcome. I saw the crewman walk quickly away. Henson’s eyes were the sharpest. Her exclamation was one of outrage.

‘Oh no!’

Then, I saw. For a swaying-about, fumbling drunk, the man in the bows was suddenly displaying remarkable dexterity. In the space of a few seconds he had lighted from a single match no less than three strings of Chinese jumping crackers and had them bursting simultaneously all over the deck around him. What’s more, he wasn’t even bothering to watch them. He was already rummaging in the box for fresh delights.

I could sympathize with Henson’s cry of protest. I remember thinking to myself as he lighted the first string that the motor cruiser had to be a chartered one with a bad crew easily bribed. No one who owned or had any other normal concern for such a boat would have allowed a good deck to be scarred in that way. Decks are sacred, and expensive surfaces. The Italian banker had kept sets of overshoes for guests ignorant or oafish enough to come on board wearing leather soles, and smokers on deck had always been required to carry ash-trays.

‘Paul!’ It was Melanie.

‘Telephone,’ she said. ‘An old friend. And I think it’s long distance.’

‘On which line?’

‘The listed number.’

To Krom I said: ‘If you want to hear this conversation with Mat Williamson, there’s an extension in the entrance hall. Melanie will show you where.’

I didn’t wait to see if he accepted the offer. As I turned away, though, a sudden glow from the sea made me look back.

The vandal on the boat had lighted a Roman candle. As he held it aloft, balls of red fire were spurting up and falling to the deck all around him. His friends began to applaud.

I went up the stairs slowly. Mat would wait and I didn’t want to seem even a little breathless when I took his call. After starting the recorder, I waited an extra moment or two before picking up the phone, and then began to speak immediately as if I had just snatched it up.

‘Mat? What a pleasant surprise!’

I tried to make my surprise, if not my pleasure, sound genuine, but of course he wasn’t fooled.

‘Sorry to take you away from the fireworks, Paul, but this is by way of being an emergency. Besides, I’m returning your call to me this morning.’

I had to think very quickly then. He was using the high pitched, nasal voice of one of the English missionaries who had taught at the school in Fiji. I had heard it first when he had told me about Placid Island. It was his anti-imperialist voice, and also the one he sometimes used to make the saying of a highly unpleasant thing seem as if it were funny. He was probably using it now, partly anyway, as a disguise, but it startled me and I knew that I would have to watch myself. I ought not have been startled by an English Birmingham accent. With the recorder going, though, it couldn’t be allowed to pass without comment.

‘What a strange voice you have, Grandma!’

It was a mistake. He came back promptly, sketching in, for the record, a portrait of the faithful henchman driven at last by mockery into a small loss of temper. ‘I said I was sorry to spoil your fireworks, Paul, and I’m sorry to disturb you when you have so much on your plate already, but this isn’t a bedtime story.’

‘That’s twice you’ve mentioned fireworks, Mat. Where are you? Along the road somewhere? Watching the fireworks too?’

‘You know where I am, Paul. There are always fireworks along the coast there on the Fourteenth of July. If I’m a bit upset, that’s because I’ve been speaking to Frank, so bear with me. I’ve also listened to your conversation with him earlier, and. . Paul? Are you still there?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Paul, what Frank said to you this morning was one long lie.’

‘You mean one continuous lie or a lot of separate lies strung together?’

‘I am not joking, Paul. From understandable motives, possibly, but with absolutely no authority from me, Frank has made a dangerous bloody fool of himself. In trying to be helpful by running interference for you, he’s done a number of things he ought not have done. He’s tried to be clever and only succeeded in being horribly stupid. As he’s my responsibility, the first thing I want to do is apologize.’

‘Apology accepted,’ I tried to throw him. So far, every word he’d uttered had been that of a loyal lieutenant addressing a capricious martinet. I tried to throw him by suddenly becoming a martinet, and by speaking to him in a way that he hadn’t been spoken to. I was sure, for a long time, if ever. ‘But,’ I snarled, ‘you said that apologizing was the first thing you wanted to do. How about the second and third? Or have you been sitting around on your black butt waiting for somebody else to do your thinking for you?’

He seemed not to have heard what I’d said. All he did was move calmly into his second-stage position. ‘Paul, do you remember that time some years ago when we — you, that is — were thinking of buying into that Malay-Chinese rubber syndicate? We went to stay with those people up near Kedah.’

‘No, I don’t remember that at all and I’ve never been to Kedah.’

‘Near Kedah, I said. You’ll remember when I tell you. It was just after that American went for a wall; in the jungle and disappeared. The American who’d built up that silk business in Thailand and was taking a vacation in Malaysia? Staying as a house-guest with friends? Remember now, Paul?’

‘How about getting to the point?’

‘But that is the point, that he disappeared and was certainly killed. The local theory was that after he told his friends that he was going for a wall; he was accidentally killed, not because he wasn’t used to the jungles — in fact he was very much at home in them — but because he fell into a tiger trap the village people had dug there on the path he took. It wasn’t the villagers’ fault, of course, but they were scared because he was an American and it was they who’d dug the trap and planted the bamboo spikes. So they buried the body and didn’t report it. That’s why our friends didn’t want us to go for any walks outside the compound while we were their guests. Our disappearance would have meant police enquiries, trouble. Besides, I think they liked us. I think they wanted our money, but I don’t think they wanted us killing ourselves on their doorsteps.’

‘Any more than you want me impaling myself on the bamboo stakes that Frank’s been so busily sharpening? That’s nice, Mat. I’m glad to know. Where’s Frank staying down here?’

‘It’s not nice for anyone, Paul. And I’m including your guests. I don’t know why. If anything should accidentally go wrong in spite of all you’ve done to protect them, they have to be the guilty parties. I hear through the grapevine, by the way, that two of them at least have intelligence links. I’ve asked friends about the Brit and they confirm. There’s nothing nice about any of it. Oh, I agree with you, that doesn’t excuse Frank. He’s made a prize idiot of himself. These people he used your private files to learn about and contact, these old acquaintances of yours, were never the simple-minded hayseeds he wanted them to be. He knows that now and he’s not staying in any one place. He’s buzzing about like crazy, because he also knows now that trying to win medals by relieving you of an unwanted presence was never a good idea anyway. Not without consultation. I’ve told him. He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t get the chop. But let’s be realistic, Paul. The fact that he knows all this, and that he’s doing his damnedest to put things right, doesn’t help with the immediate problem. Calling off the kind of people he’s had out digging traps for you isn’t as easy as setting them on.’

‘I don’t suppose it is, Mat. Frank’s advice, as you’ll know, was non-resistance. Yours appears to be a little different and slightly more reassuring — no walks in the jungle. Have I got that right?’

No plain answer, of course. I hadn’t really expected one.

It was time for that final, all-important move to the third stage of the ritual. The preliminary declaration that a moral authority was properly vested in him, along with its appropriate powers, had formally been made. In other, cruder words, the softening-up process was over. Now, it was time for the decisive incantation. I know of no simple way of describing that process accurately. The carnivorous plant treating inspect prey with enzymes before eating them is a clumsy comparison. Mat doesn’t want to eat his victims; he only wants them to oblige him.

He spoke slowly, and was probably tapping a table or desk in time with the words as he said them.

‘Paul, there’s something I’m going to remind you of now that I’m quite sure you haven’t forgotten. You won’t have forgotten this because it was something you once told me. You told me, too, in a moment of personal loss and sadness when you were trying to recall worse things you’d gone through. It was about when you were in the army in Italy, before you got to know Carlo up in the north. You recalled seeing another soldier, one of the men under your own personal command, go to obey an order you’d given. And then, a split second later, he’d stepped on a land mine — an S-mine, you called it — and been cut clean in two.’

A three-tap pause.

‘How far away was he from you? Only a few yards, wasn’t it? Close enough for you to be deaf for a few days, I know, and close enough for you to see what his guts looked like while his own eyes were still wondering what had happened. Less than a minute to die, though, with all those arteries severed. But the awful thing for you, aside from your having told the man to do something that killed him, came afterwards, didn’t it? I mean after the first physical shock, when you realized that, although you were still alive, there was death all around you. When you stood there with all that singing in your ears and knew that you’d strayed into a minefield, and that if you moved so much as a fraction of an inch in any direction, or maybe even leaned over a little and changed the weight distribution under one of your feet, your guts could be slopping about on the ground there too. So, you did what others have sometimes done when they’ve found they were in a minefield and seen what a mine can do to the soft human body. No disgrace, not when you’re in shock and looking at the results of making the wrong move. Some men would have turned and run blindly. Not you. You froze. And you stayed frozen until, eventually, someone from an engineer patrol came. Remember? He was a sergeant. He took you by the arm and persuaded you, and finally made you walk. It was a step at a time, much slower than a funeral march you said, left-and-right and left-and-right, until you both reached a piece of ground where tanks had been. The mark of their tracks were new, so from there you had places to put your feet where there couldn’t be unexploded S-mines. You walked back in the tank tracks. You listening, Paul?’

‘Yes.’

‘You asked for my advice. You don’t need it. You already know what to do. You’re in a minefield. Freeze. Right where you are. And stay frozen until I can get things straightened out and made safe; safe for you to walk away. Will you do that for me, Paul?’

‘Yes, Mat.’

It would have called for a serious effort on my part to have said anything else.

Besides, it would have been foolish to have said anything else. Better if he believed that the spell was cast; or, to use the jargon he probably now prefers, that I was correctly programmed.

‘I’ll be there to take your arm,’ he said.

The line went dead.

Green, orange and red lights glowed and flickered in the sky.

From my bedroom there was a good view of the bay, and I had brought Yves’s binoculars down with me from the attic floor. I took a closer look at the motor cruiser.

Most of the deck lights had been switched off now, as if to make the fireworks show up better; but there were several Roman candles burning at once and some of the orange balls from them stayed alight longer than the others on the way down to the water. I could see quite a lot of her.

The stern gave her name as Chanteuse, and her home port as Monrovia. She had Liberian registration. By the autumn she would be among the dozens of other boats just like her tied up along the yachting moles of Cannes and available for charter next year. It must have been expensive, I thought, to get hold of her at such short notice. Although there were always a few charterers who had their coronaries in June or early July, and so were obliged to forfeit their deposits, you had to be right in there with bundles of dollars or D-marks in both hands to buy your way on to the yacht-broker’s sucker lists of last-minute clients.

Mat must have hated that; but Frank wouldn’t have minded.

That Frank was on board the boat, I now had no doubt at all. I knew where he was, too. The people with the drinks on the after deck were merely set-dressing. There were lights on below. The only place in complete darkness was the bridge. It was a big all-glass affair like a greenhouse, with sloping sides that reflected the glare of the fireworks. He’d be there in the darkness with a walkie-talkie, where he could see and control but not be seen.

The man in charge of the fireworks was using a flashlight to set up a Catherine wheel on a plank lashed to the bow rails. As he stood back and felt for his matches again, the beam shone straight down on the rest of the entertainment, the fun-things still to come.

There was nothing more to see. I checked both phones. Then, I rewound the tape and took the recorder downstairs so that the others could hear what had been said.

Krom tried to stop me. He had been listening on the extension and was very agitated.

‘We must call the police,’ he said.

‘We can’t. And time’s running out. Keep still and listen.’

They listened. Krom seemed not to hear, though. A tic had started under his left eye, I watched the others. Yves especially. He kept catching my eyes on him and then looking past me over my shoulder. The cassette switched off.

Henson had a question. ‘Did the minefield thing really happen to you as he describes it?’

‘Not quite as he describes it. That’s a Camp Fire Yarn version for Scouts. Mat’s a prude, you see, and he has blind spots. He thinks that people are unalterable, for instance. It would never occur to him that the mere fact of my being able to tell him about that paralysing experience meant that the memory of it had become tolerable. After over thirty years, it can’t paralyse me any more, only make me curl my toes.’ I stood up. ‘It’s cooler outside and we can watch the fireworks.’

‘We must call the police,’ Krom said.

Connell had questions. ‘What’s Williamson think he’s doing? Sniping with field-guns?’

‘And disturbing the enemies’ sleep, too, I imagine. The accent he was using, by the way, came from Birmingham in England a long time ago. It came via Fiji and used to belong to an inoffensive missionary.’

‘We must …’ Krom began, and then paused. He put out his hands and gripped his knees tightly. ‘They’re there and he can’t stop them,’ he went on. ‘He won’t get here in time.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘he won’t, I’m afraid.’

There was no considerate way of explaining the position, either to him or to the others.

The Catherine wheel on the boat suddenly went haywire and flew off into the sea.

‘Mat’s telling me to freeze because his sorcerer’s calculations tell him that, after the softening up I’ve had and Frank Yamatoku’s warning, I’m going to behave irrationally. By talking about tiger-traps and minefields, he thinks he’s compelling me to run, head for the hills with most of you following. Herd instinct. He wants us to run the way we came, in two parties.’

‘Why us?’ asked Connell. ‘You’re the one who knows him. You’re the danger. And why in two parties?’

‘I’ve blown him to you. He knows that, just as he knows that Dr Henson came bearing gifts from a British intelligence branch. The same person will have told him. I’m sorry, but you asked me. It’s a special occasion. You get the truth. He just wants to do the killings quietly, with a minimum of fuss and expense. Two small parties are cheaper to kill than one big one. In this case, particularly, because separate explanations would be cheaper.’

‘Cheaper?’ Henson was indignant. ‘And what have explanations to do with. .?’

‘Killing can be very expensive these days, or it can be cheap. It all depends on what’s left behind and how difficult the mess is to explain. On the roads or just off them, they’re the easiest dumping grounds. All you need leave behind on them is either another ugly monument to our vulgar autoroute society or, if there are bullets to be found in any of the bodies, another tragic by-product of gangster-ridden monopoly capitalism. That’s as long as you don’t complicate things for the traffic police by mixing criminologists with the tax-consultants.’

Or by letting a victim talk before he dies. How thoughtfully I had been programmed! Should my final moments be unduly prolonged, I could spend them reminding myself sadly that dear old Mat had been right after all. He’d told me to stand still, and like a fool I hadn’t listened.

‘Are you saying the Professor’s right?’ demanded Melanie; ‘that we should freeze?’

‘No, dear, I’m not. Mat will be doing everything he can to make us run because that would give him what he wants for the lowest price. But he’s not too proud to have had a contingency plan prepared and ready. By using the agent in place he has here, he should be able to mount a quick two-birds-with-one-stone operation with no trouble at all. Cars with bodies in them aren’t news. A bunch of psychos rampaging through an expensive villa, and killing five foreign-visitor occupants, would made headlines. And think of the cost! With all that easy money going on the tycoon kidnap circuit, the reliable people want danger money and fringe benefits if there’s the remotest chance of their being caught, or even identified.’

No, better by far if I acted as programmed. Better for me. Better for our friendship. That was what he’d been telling me with the sob in his throat at the end.

Connell said: ‘The agent in place you’re talking about must be Yamatoku. Right?’

Wrong, and the look that Henson gave me said that she knew it was wrong, but Krom was suddenly emphatic.

‘We must stay,’ he insisted, ‘stay here. .’

That beautiful spell, woven to impose the sorcerer’s will upon me, had failed with me because its beauties had been too knowingly and lovingly displayed for my taste. However, with Krom, not a man to be put off by schmaltz if he found the tune familiar, it had succeeded remarkably; though not in producing the effect Mat had intended.

He hadn’t been telling Krom anything in particular, except possibly that this wasn’t the real Mat Williamson speaking; but Krom had listened and what he had heard had made the most exquisite sense to him. Mat had said freeze, so that was what Krom had found he wanted to do, all he wanted to do — stay absolutely still where he was, until some kind stranger came to take his arm and lead him to safety.

It wasn’t, I think, that he was over-susceptible to the brand of hypnotic suggestion that Mat favours and can use with such effect when dealing with the unwary, or even — since, as far as I know, Krom was never in his youth caught in a minefield — that the evocation of the intense fear experienced in the past triggered an irrational response to events occurring years later. What threw the man so completely was that set of facts which Mat had used to construct his Makefing-sur-Mer fantasies happened to be not only familiar to Krom but also essential to his own fantasies, those about that arch-liar and able criminal, Oberholzer-Firman. He had known for years that there was nothing imaginary about the two men code-named Kleister and Torten. His original Swiss police contacts had confirmed the men’s existence and their strange, psychotic retirement hobby. With those and other vengeful bogeymen like them crouching out there in the darkness, nursing pent-up hatreds and waiting, fingers on the triggers, to kill anyone who broke cover, what else was there to do but stay put and keep your head down until help came?

‘Stay here and telephone for the police,’ he repeated.

Connell glanced from Krom to me. ‘I can see, Mr Firman, why you might think it inadvisable to try busting out of here. I can also see why you’d consider this garrison a bit short on the arms and know-how needed to beat off an attack by trained assault troops. Unless you have guns as well as brandy to hand out I mean. I don’t see what’s wrong, though, with calling the police. If the Professor thinks it’s a good idea and we can figure out a way of requesting protection that they’ll take seriously — suspected prowlers, maybe — I say let’s do it. And in view of the other prospects and possibilities you’ve been outlining, I say let’s do it right now. Let’s call in the relief column, dammit!’

‘Yves will tell you why we can’t,’ I said. ‘Tell them, Yves.’

He stared out fixedly at the boat.

‘Yves has a gun,’ I went on; ‘he’s the only one amongst us who has, and he’s being very careful to sit where none of us can get behind him. He’s worried because he’s badly afraid of the consequences of failure at the moment. He couldn’t shoot more than two of us before the others jumped him, so he’s playing it cool, or trying to, and waiting for his friend Frank to tell him what to do next. We can’t use the phone because he cut both lines right after Mat’s call. I know because I checked. He’s not going to let us try finding the place and repairing the lines, I’m sure. The gun’s inside his shirt under his left arm. I think we’d like it to stay there.’

Krom nodded. ‘Status quo,’ he said, and reached for the brandy bottle.

Henson sighed. ‘Oh dear.’

‘Oh dear, indeed. Our forthright, no-nonsense Mr Boularis has been very busy here. Busy making booby-traps, busy reporting progress at the lower-road gate, thoughtfully recommending instant flight as the way out of all difficulties, even offering to drive Melanie and me to our own private holocaust in your car. Mr Williamson and Mr Yamatoku wanted us to leave in a particular way, so naturally Yves did his level best to see that we did. My goodness, how hard he’s been working. Not his fault that I’m nervous of drivers who tell you how good they are. Didn’t you wonder too, Dr Henson, how Mat had found out about your connection with British intelligence?’

‘Yes, I did. Especially as the only connection that exists is the one I told you about. Mr Boularis wasn’t present when I told you about it though.’

‘He must have been listening at the door.’

‘Or else. .’ Connell hesitated, wondering if what he had suddenly thought of saying might be tactless. About some things he could be very quick on the uptake. It had been he, I recalled, who had voiced aloud his doubt of modern man’s ability to spot a room-bug just by looking for it.

Melanie dealt with him firmly. ‘Well, it no longer matters. Look! His friends on the boat are sending him signals.’

A couple of cardboard volcanoes had begun to spout red lava and golden rain.

‘Signals to say what?’ Connell’s mind was still with the room-bug hypothesis, but he looked at Yves.

Yves didn’t answer. His face was shiny with sweat.

I answered for him. ‘Signals to say that the fun’s over. I would think. Now, he’s waiting for the bangs he’s been warned to expect. Mat Williamson is a great believer in the loud bang as an argument. Simple people respect it. Not-so-simple people can often be fooled by it. As a means of inducing sensible people to behave stupidly or irrationally there’s nothing to equal it.’

I was talking by then to keep my own courage up. I had seen the launching rack on the deck out there from the bedroom window. It looked like an office-furniture designer’s idea for an umbrella stand made out of a bundle of drain pipes. The firework man had been using the glare from the volcanoes to see by. He wanted no mistakes with that lot.

‘Coming back, if you don’t mind, to the subject of relief columns,’ said Henson; ‘you did say something about a need for concerted action when the right moment came and you gave the word. Aren’t you leaving it a bit late?’

‘No.’

I didn’t try to elaborate. It would have been silly to tell her that there wasn’t, after all, going to be any word. Allies are notoriously unable to understand why, when the time comes, they are quite often no longer needed.

Besides, at that moment the rockets were fired.

Visually, they had nothing to offer; no graceful arcs of coloured fire, no pretty second-stage bursts to surprise delighted onlookers, no candelabrum flares on parachutes, none of the ooh-aah stuff that was dished out in Monte Carlo. As the first salvo went up, all we saw were the jets of orange flame that lifted the things out of the umbrella stand.

Then, with apologetic plopping sounds, they seemed to give up and disappear.

The explosions on and near the terrace were not big, but they were far from apologetic. I doubt if there were more than a few ounces of HE in any of the charges. That’s about what there would be in a modern hand-grenade; just enough to create a really jolting anti-personnel blast-wave with a radius of three or four yards. The shallow hole gouged out of a patch of Bermuda grass could have been made by a dog burying a bone. The stonework of the terrace suffered no more than pock-marks. There were several broken windows though.

No one was hurt, but the effect on Krom was remarkable. With him, the noises seemed to act like the traditional snap of the fingers employed by a stage hypnotist to bring his subject out of a trance.

I must say, too, that for a man of his age with half a bottle of brandy in the bloodstream, his reflexes were amazing. When the first salvo exploded, he did a racing dive on to the flagstones. He had found cover behind the pedestal of a marble-topped table before I had even started to move. By the time the second lot arrived, he was already wriggling and rolling his way over the broken glass by the drawing-room windows towards the comparative safety of the room itself.

‘You see? You see?’ he was saying as he went.

We did see; at least, we saw that it was necessary to get off the terrace. The third salvo, which broke another pane of glass and left one of the outside chair-cushions smouldering, was followed by a brief silence. Melanie broke in.

‘Those people must be insane!’

‘Of course they are insane,’ Krom was lying curled up on the floor, busy searching the front of his shirt for slivers of glass. ‘They have been insane for years. They were driven insane by our host.’

He may have snapped out of a trance, but all spells were still in full working order.

‘Are you suggesting,’ Connell demanded in the most disrespectful tone I had yet heard him use to Krom, ‘that the middle-aged jerks playing with explosives on that boat are Kleister and Torten?’

‘Who else would fire mortar shells to maim or kill their tormentor?’

‘Those beer-bellied cretins out there are in their forties.’

‘And they are not firing mortar shells,’ said Melanie; ‘anyone who has ever been near a mortar bombardment would tell you that. Those were signal maroons, defective ones.’

‘Not defective,’ said Yves; ‘only modified for aiming. They have death there. That was a rehearsal. Do you want to wait for the real thing? Take no notice of what Firman says. Get up and go, while you still can!’

Yves was a tryer; no doubt of that. He had much to lose.

I had begun to move and was almost at the door when Henson noticed the fact. As it was important just then that I shouldn’t have further attention drawn to me, I gave her a meaning nod. I hoped that she would interpret it as the promised ‘word’ and as a sign that the time had come for a diversion.

She did not disappoint me.

‘How do we know that the telephone lines are cut?’ she asked Connell accusingly. ‘Have you tried them? Has anyone tried them? Because if they haven’t, I don’t feel like taking the man Firman’s unsupported word for it. There may be one line still working. If so, I think that Professor Krom should immediately call the police on all our behalfs.’

A good effort. Melanie moved in at once to cover the sound of my opening the door.

‘If anyone is to telephone the police it must be me. Professor, because I am the official tenant here in this villa. It is I also who must telephone the gérant acting for the owners so that the damage can be reported and assessed. Please remember, too, if there is a telephone working, which I doubt, that the name of the tenant and present occupier here is not Firman or Wickey-Frey. It is Oberholzer.’

‘Aha!’ said Krom happily. ‘Be sure I shall remember. Oberholzer! How could I forget?’

The jerrican was of metal and a real World War II veteran, not one of the plastic imitations they make nowadays. It had probably been sitting there in the corner of that garage for years; since one of those times when it had been thought prudent to keep a little gasoline put by for emergencies in case the local pumps ran dry. After which Middle East war had it been filled? The 73? The 67? The Suez fiasco of 56?

I hoped that it hadn’t been the Suez, because a top-sergeant who used to flog the stuff had once told me that gasoline stored for years gradually loses its potency: I also hoped that the man had merely been rationalizing his misconduct. Neither of the two cars had much left in its tank, and I wanted an event not an incident; it had to be a huge blaze, one that would quickly be seen and reported but not easily put out.

I was worried, too, about the roof problem. Before I had known that Mat was going to oblige me with fireworks, I had rigged the thing to look like a short-circuit following insulation failure in antique wiring. It wouldn’t have deceived an arson investigator, but I had been prepared to face that difficulty later in return for the presence, when needed, of some fire trucks and their crews along with a back-up force of police cars and gawking spectators. The fireworks had given me a cover story potentially better than the one about antique wiring; but would it in fact be better if there were no hole in the roof to show where the firework had smashed through? Wouldn’t that look fishier than a short-circuit? Even fishier than the remains of The Device?

I thought for a few moments of taking a hammer up to the loft and breaking one or two roof tiles. I didn’t in the end; partly because I couldn’t find a hammer, but mainly because I was, I have to admit, beginning to panic.

The rocket-firing could well have been accompanied by a signal to the waiting clean-up team. ‘That’s zero, kids. Start counting. Give them ten minutes to get themselves together. If the bastards haven’t begun to come out by then, you go right in and start earning your money.’

Or words to that effect. Besides, I didn’t even know if The Device I’d cobbled together would work. I might even have to waste valuable time finding out. Someone — Yves, for instance — might come looking for me while I was doing so. If, through having sweaty hands and being in too much of a hurry, I botched the job, I might end up having to go in there and try blowing myself to bits with lighted matches.

The passage that led to the garage ended at the inner door of what had obviously once been a cubby-hole, with lavatory adjoining, for chauffeurs. Now, it was cluttered with such things as water-skis, old schnorkel masks, a wickerwork chair with a broken seat and a set of golf clubs with hickory shafts. On the wall by the far door were two switches, one controlling the passage lights, the other the lights in the garage. That second switch was necessary because there were no windows or skylights in the garage. When the big outer doors were closed it was pitch-black inside. I made sure that the second switch was in the ‘off’ position.

To arm The Device, I had to enter the garage without the lights on and feel my way around the cars to a work-bench against the opposite wall. On the bench was a trickle charger with spring-clip connectors on long leads for attaching the thing to a run-down battery without removing the battery from the car. The Device was made out of the two spring-clips, three adhesive bandages and one of the cigar-lighters belonging to the Lincoln. It was fastened with a piece of string, just inside the unlatched lid of the jerrican — in the place where the most vapour would be.

Arming it meant connecting the mains lead of the charger to the light-bulb socket above the bench. That was its regular source of power. There was no wall outlet. Switching on the light would then do one of two things; either blow a fuse somewhere in the house or, more likely, cause the cigar-lighter filament to heat up and ignite the gasoline vapour.

I could smell the vapour as soon as I opened the door. If the stuff had deteriorated in storage, it still smelled like gasoline, almost overpoweringly so. But could one tell by the smell of it? On the way around the cars I was tempted to take the caps off the tanks or loosen them. I didn’t do either of those things though. A tank with no cap on it, or no signs of having burst under pressure, would be the sort of thing an arson man would spot instantly. Forget it.

Even if I’d had a flashlight, I doubt if I’d have used it. The night was very warm and the sun had been on the loft roof directly above for most of the day. The place fairly reeked of gas. I’d have been afraid of even the tiny little spark there might be inside the flashlight’s outer case. The faint light from the door into the house, although most of it was blocked off by the cars, gave some help. Memory and the touch of sweaty fingers had to do the rest.

Finding the light-bulb socket over the bench was the most difficult thing. Standing there with one hand above my head, groping for the damned thing, I began to feel disoriented. Twice, I had to stop and find the edge of the bench again to make sure that I was still facing the right way. Once, when I had found the light socket, I dropped the charger lead and had to start all over again. But it was done at last. Only halfway through my sigh of relief did I remember that, now, if Yves or Melanie came along the passage looking for me, and switched on the light by the door before I could stop them, The Device would. .

I scrambled out of there so fast that I bruised myself quite badly against the rear end of the Lincoln. I also gashed a shin in falling over the foot of the loft stairs. Panic. Bloody stupid panic.

Back outside the door again, with only a residual smell of gas still clinging to me and the pains in my left arm and right leg beginning to make themselves felt, I was suddenly quite sure that none of it was going to work, that I’d forgotten something of crucial importance.

Wearily, I leaned against the door and pressed the switch.

The passage light went out but nothing else happened. I had pressed the wrong switch.

I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and pressed the right one.

The whoof of the ignition felt like someone putting a shoulder to the door, not to try to force it open, just to see if it were latched.

Very gently, I unlatched it. It tried, equally gently, to close itself again. I used the handle of a ping-pong bat to keep it from closing completely, and then opened the lavatory window to make sure that there would be no shortage of oxygen inside.

I shut the inner door behind me as I left.

There were raised voices coming from the hall, but I had no way of getting up the stairs without being seen.

‘It is for Mr Firman and no one else,’ Melanie was saying, ‘to decide what shall be done and when it shall be done. He’s your host, and you, while you are his guests, must respect his wishes.’

Her defiant whine suggested that she was losing the argument. It was no surprise to find that she was losing it to Krom.

‘As we are in danger,’ he said acidly, ‘such niceties of etiquette hardly seem relevant.’

‘Quite right,’ I said.

They stared at me with understandable curiosity. As well as having torn slacks, I must also have looked filthy and my shirt was black with sweat.

The curiosity changed to suspicion.

‘What have you been trying to do?’ asked Connell. ‘Make it through the enemy lines?’

‘No. Looking for the cavalry.’

Melanie was holding my tape-recorder. I had left it in the dining-room earlier. I took it from her, then turned to Krom.

‘I have to tell you,’ I said, ‘that it will shortly become necessary for us to leave here. All of us. Any further meetings, if there should be any, will have to be held in another place.’

Krom started to open his mouth. I talked him down by raising my voice.

‘No argument. You have time, I think, to collect your passports, money, notebooks and other valuables from your rooms, but no time to pack anything. I must ask you to assemble here in no more than ten minutes.’

When Krom again opened his mouth, I let him speak.

‘May guests be permitted to know, what fresh disaster now postpones our detailed examination of your criminal past?’

‘Certainly. The house is on fire.’

For a moment I thought that his tic had returned. Then, a most curious muscular spasm flattened the circumflex of his upper lip and covered the teeth behind it.

He was trying to stop himself giving me a smile of resignation.

The departments of Var and Alpes-Maritimes in southern France have suffered much from forest fires involving buildings and lives. As a result, the regional fire services are well equipped and well trained. On the Fourteenth of July an exceptionally high state of readiness is always maintained.

Our fire was first spotted by a man in a villa up on the corniche to the east of us. He reported it promptly, no doubt, because there was a slight breeze blowing from us to him, and because we might have been out for the evening. Fire travels quickly in those parts.

The braying of the approaching fire trucks and police cars began as I was stepping out of the shower.

Yes, I showered. I put on clean clothes too. Anyone who believes that the best way of convincing the police that you’re not an arsonist is to look as if you’ve been in there fighting the flames with a wet towel and a garden hose, has to be mistaken.

By the time the leading truck turned into the driveway, I was ready to greet it. All I had had to do first was park my small bag with the tapes and other oddments I would be needing later in a safe place on the terrace. There was no point in lugging the recorder along too, so I opened it to remove the last cassette. Someone had already taken it.

Yves? That wasn’t the moment to ask. I went downstairs. When the first police car arrived, I was out there with Melanie, wringing my hands, getting in the firemen’s way and generally behaving just as any other right-minded person would have behaved in those circumstances.

My story was simple. Madmen on boat. Dud rockets. Old stabling converted for use as garage probably tinder dry. Hadn’t seen the fire start at back because dealing with burning cushions on terrace. Phones by then out of order. Witnesses, including distinguished Professor, would confirm. Thank God you’re here.

I named the boat and told them to look for burn marks on her deck. No, they wouldn’t be the kinds of burns you could wash off with soap and water. Power tools and much time would be needed to get rid of those scars. When they caught the villains, as they surely must, I would dearly like to be on hand with a shot-gun. Yes, I understood that one mustn’t take the law into one’s own hands and that I was overwrought, but no doubt they understood my feelings.

I needn’t have worried about there being no hole in the roof to show where the spent rocket had smashed through. When the firemen got there most of the roof had already fallen in. They concentrated on trying to contain the blaze and on confining it to the older, un-remodelled part of the building. The senior fireman thought they would succeed, but it would be a long job, and some of his men would have to stay with it to watch for flare-ups. No, he certainly wouldn’t advise anyone to sleep in the house. The fire had already got to the main electricity cable, and, when the pipes began to melt, the water would have to be turned off. Better start thinking about a hotel.

Since I didn’t intend to be available when the insurance investigators started wondering how best to avoid paying out on the owner’s claim, that left the cut phone lines as the likeliest source of trouble with local officialdom. If they could be seen to have been cut, there would be unpleasant questions asked and suspicion aroused prematurely. I consulted Yves.

‘It’s all right,’ he said; ‘the lines came in by the garage and that’s where I cut them. The fire won’t have left anything for anyone to see.’

‘Good. Now I’ll take that cassette.’

‘What cassette?’

‘The one that was in my recorder. The call from Mat.’

‘Krom took that. He thinks nobody saw him. It’s in his shirt pocket. You could try snatching it. I’ll bet he won’t give it to you.’ His eyes narrowed maliciously. ‘Did you know, Paul, that all that beautiful equipment of mine was charged to Symposia? You’ve lost that lot of tapes too. Bad luck.’

I tried to look as if he’d driven yet another nail into my coffin.

A gendarmerie radio van had arrived to handle communications with the various authorities along the coast who would be concerned with tracking down the Chanteuse and bringing in her passengers and crew for questioning.

The cook and her husband returned on their motor scooter, having heard in the village about the fire. The extension to the house that contained their apartment, though badly scorched on the outside, was otherwise undamaged. After preliminary lamentations, they set about malting a list of the valuable personal possessions they had left in the kitchen, the laundry, the wine-cellar, the pantry and one or two other rooms adjacent to the garage which had also suffered. A colour TV set, that they claimed to have bought themselves and installed in the pantry next to the freezer, was high on their list. The insurance investigator who diagnosed arson would have a choice of suspects.

The upper road had been closed by the police to nonessential traffic as soon as the alarm had been given. The coast road, however, became jammed with sightseers who had stopped their cars to watch the fun. Motor-cycle police had to be sent to move them on.

A television crew, who had seen the fire while covering a ‘folkorique’ happening up at La Turbie, were allowed in to get pictures for the regional news. Yves slipped away immediately, and so did I. Fortunately, the TV men didn’t stay long. The blaze was already under control. I avoided the cameras by taking refuge in my bedroom, and used the time, with the aid of a candle from one of the sconces in the hall, to pack the rest of my things. I also smudged those surfaces likely to yield clear fingerprints to anyone looking for such things. The cook’s husband and the daily woman would get around to cleaning up when we had gone; but, since the whole place wasn’t going to burn down after all, the less there was of me there to find the better.

Melanie had no problem with the cameras. She was closeted with the police. As the owner of a burned-out car, she had to file a separate report on that incident as well as making her statement as a tenant about the house fire. Connell too, the one who had signed the rental contract for the Fiat it appeared, would have to file a separate report to complete the paper work.

By then, it was eleven o’clock.

I could be certain of at least one thing. When the Chanteuse was picked up, Frank would not be among those found on board. It was also likely that, with all the police activity in and around the Villa Lipp, his squads of hired helpers on land had been withdrawn from the vicinity. Now, they would be waiting at assembly points farther out — waiting to see what my next move would be.

It was time I made it.

I found Krom sitting with Henson and Yves in the drawing-room, and set the ashtray I had been using as a candlestick down on the table nearest to them.

Krom was obviously very tired. However, my hope that fatigue would make him easier to deal with was a vain one.

‘We have no electricity,’ I began cheerfully; ‘and the fireman tells me that someone will shortly arrive to turn off the main water supply. There is still the swimming pool, of course, if you don’t mind the taste of chlorine and care to use buckets, but most of it has already been pumped on to the flames by one of the fire trucks.’

He flicked me away contemptuously. ‘Spare us. You meant to disperse our gathering. You still mean to disperse it. The enemies outside having been disposed of, you are now ready to dispose of the enemies within. Dr Henson agrees with me.’

Her eyes were unfriendly. ‘The relief of the beleaguered city having been completed,’ she said, ‘the garrison is ready to march out with colours flying. The cavalry are left in possession after their ride to the rescue.’

I knew then what the trouble with her was. The quip about cavalry riding to the rescue had been made by Connell while he was in her bed. By inadvertently throwing the word ‘cavalry’ back at him when he had accused me, facetiously, of trying to escape, I had let them both know that I had invaded their privacy. I could expect no more co-operation from them in dealing with Krom.

‘The garrison may march out,’ I said, ‘but I wouldn’t advise flying colours. You don’t think Mat Williamson’s going to give up just because of a little set-back here, do you?’

Krom’s teeth were back in service. ‘I too, think it unlikely that the person who made that telephone call to you will give up. Was he the ‘Vic’ we heard mentioned earlier? I think he must have been. So, he won’t give up any more than Kleister and Torten will give up. They want their revenge, and they have waited a long time. Now that someone has shown them how to find you, they can follow you to the ends of the earth if necessary. We are more fortunate.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that.’

‘Oh, but I am sure, and my witnesses agree with me. The truth about you will be our protection. All we have to do is publish it. It’s you that they want dead, not us. Mr Boularis has made that clear.’

I glanced at Yves. He smiled slightly. His closed session with them had been highly profitable. It was time for me to cut my losses.

I moved over and sat down by Krom. ‘I think you have something of mine, Professor,’ I pointed to the cassette in his shirt pocket, and then extended my hand as if to grab it. ‘That!’

He drew back, clutching it to his breast fiercely. ‘Ah, No! No, Mr Firman. If you want this back, you’ll have to buy it. And I’ll tell you what the price is. Don’t you want to hear?’

His protective embrace had been passionate enough to smudge beyond recognition any of my fingerprints that might have been left on the thing, but to please him I nodded.

‘How much?’

I want two things. I want the rest of the papers you had prepared for me, the ones I would have had if we hadn’t been interrupted, and I want a resumption of our meetings by this time next week at the latest. And they will be in Brussels, if you please. We have met discreetly there before, and in a public place. Why not again? I’m sure you know how to protect yourself there from fireworks, and your victims are used to waiting for satisfaction. Besides, they are obviously careful men. They are not likely to attack you in the lobby of the Brussels Westbury. So, in not more than a week’s time we can continue, eh? I shall be expecting you. What do you say?’

I stood up. ‘I think it’s time we thought about leaving, and I at any rate intend to be very careful how I leave. With luck, I may be able to persuade the gendarmerie to assist.’ I looked at Henson. ‘Melanie’s still with the local police. The Professor’s tired. I’d be glad of Some help, but it’s up to you.’

She followed me out to the gendarmerie van and stood by while I explained to the sergeant in charge what the fireman had said about going to an hotel.

He pulled a face. ‘At this time of year? You won’t find anything near here. Monte Carlo might have something of the kind you’re used to, but if you just want a place to sleep, Nice is your best chance. One of the commercial places near the central station.’

‘Would it be in any way possible, Sergeant, for you to use your radio to call us a taxi?’

Henson gave him a most appealing look. ‘Or even two taxis, Sergeant? There are six of us, as you see, and we have baggage.’

He said that taxis might be in short supply on the night of the Quatorze, but that he would use his influence with the radio dispatchers, those who were sober, and see what could be arranged.

The taxis came from Beaulieu, and were there within half an hour.

Melanie left the house keys with the cook’s husband before joining me in the back of the second taxi. Henson said that they would take the sergeant’s advice and head for Nice. No goodbyes were said. The whip had been cracked. Obviously, I was going to be sensible and safeguard what was left of my reputation by reporting for duty in Brussels the following week. They owed me no courtesies. Why should they pretend that they did?

As they were about to leave, I noticed that Yves wasn’t with them. At the same moment he slid into the front seat beside our driver. He had no bag with him, nothing.

‘I said, ‘Hallo.’

He didn’t turn his head. ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

I had already told the driver that we wanted to take a night train to Paris from Monte Carlo. There probably wasn’t one, but modern taxi drivers only know about planes. I had no intention of going anywhere by train in any case, only of losing that taxi in a convenient place.

‘Monte Carlo,’ I said. ‘The railway station.’

No more was said until we were up the hill by the Hotel de Paris. Then, Yves suddenly told the driver to stop.

‘Leaving us?’ I asked.

‘I have a bad migraine,’ he said as he got out, ‘and there’s an all-night pharmacy just over there. Won’t be a moment.’

I waited until he was out of sight inside the place, and then told the driver to go ahead.

Melanie looked surprised.

‘He isn’t coming back,’ I said, ‘just hoping to delay us a few extra minutes. He’s telephoning Frank, trying to re-establish credit. His rating must be pretty low at present. They may even believe that he knew I was setting the fire. A report that we’re on our way out by train may help him for a few hours. If it had been true, if we were going to be there at the station waiting to be picked off like sitting ducks, they could have ended up forgiving him.’

‘All this violence, I detest it! When did you suspect him?’

‘When he said that he knew people who had worked for Mat Williamson, and that Mat was one to stay away from because he had a habit of ditching them.’

‘You mean it’s not true?’

‘It’s true in a way, but “ditching” is Frank’s word, part of the formula he always uses when he’s briefing someone who mustn’t suspect that Mat’s the boss. You can see why. Who would ever believe that the man hiring you would talk against his own head man like that? So, I knew that Yves had been briefed by Frank. Incidentally, Mat never speaks of ditching people, even when they have caused him deep distress, only of losing them.’

‘Then what do you mean by “true in a way”? What way?’

‘When Mat loses someone, it’s because the person is being discarded or ditched. That’s true enough. But nobody ever talks about it, as a rule, because nobody ever knows it’s happened, the losing I mean.’

‘Not even the lost one?’

‘Least of all the lost one. He’s dead.’

‘Detestable!’

As we neared the station, I told the driver that we had changed our minds and now wanted to go to the Hotel Mirabeau.

I was quite sure that the Mirabeau wouldn’t have rooms for anyone arriving without reservations at that stage of the season, and at that time of night. The driver was of the same opinion. I silenced him by declaring in a lordly way that I would demand a suite, and paid him off the instant he had our bags out. Because he was now in Monaco, and so not allowed to pick up another fare, he was on his way back to Beaulieu even before the Mirabeau’s night man was out there to tell us we hadn’t a hope.

A hundred francs got us another taxi and we didn’t have long to wait. The Monagasque driver had a charming manner, and his price for taking us to Menton, ten minutes away, was only mildly exorbitant.

We stayed in a no-restaurant hotel in a back street near the Sacré Coeur; and we didn’t go out more than was necessary.

The only time we went near a main road was to buy a couple of cheap radios. We bought newspapers at a kiosk on the nearby quai. There was a café-restaurant at the corner of the street. We had our meals there, and used their pay-phone to make our calls rather than go through the hotel switchboard.

Yves had an apartment in Paris and, since he was a keen skier as well as a highly-paid technician, a chalet near Megève. We took it in turns to call both his phone numbers, and we called three times each day. There was no reply from either until the evening of the fourth day.

It had been Melanie’s turn to make the calls, and her blank look as she returned to our table told me that there’d been an answer.

‘Paris,’ she said as she sat down. ‘A man’s voice. I asked twice for Yves. He asked who wanted him, and then offered to have Yves call me back. Pressed most flatteringly for my name and number. I hung up.’

‘A police voice?’

‘An over-friendly, coaxing voice. I thought police. Why don’t you try him?’

‘I’ll take your word for it. They say dialled calls are hard to trace, but that was last year. Who knows how hard or easy it may be now?’

We ate our food because we had ordered it and because it would have looked odd if we’d suddenly paid the bill and left. We couldn’t risk drawing attention to ourselves just then.

In our rooms back at the hotel, we stayed glued to the radios. I switched between the hourly France-Inter news from the local transmitter and an Italian FM station. Melanie stayed with Radio Monte Carlo. The first announcement came through on France-Inter, at the end of the ten o’clock local news and before the sports round-up.

Earlier in the evening reports had been received of a bomb incident in the vicinity of Cagnes. They had since been confirmed, though detailed information was still awaited.

The incident involved a car found standing on the scrubland beside a drainage ditch a few metres from the west-bound access road to the autoroute. The driver, a man in the late thirties, appeared to have been ‘plastiqué’ inside the car.

A curious feature of the accident was that the car itself had scarcely been damaged at all, according to Jean-Pierre Something-or-other, the man who had found it. He was a night watchman employed by the contractors working on the adjacent building site. He had seen nothing of the car’s arrival. He had been led to it by his dog while making his hourly tour of the area he was there to guard.

The car was the property of an international rental service. It had been signed for earlier that day by a man with a credit card in the name of Yves Boularis and an address in Paris. Other papers found on the victim, along with the credit card in question, identified the dead man as Boularis. There was a description of the car and a request to anyone who had happened to notice it, either in the Cagnes district that evening or earlier in Nice, to contact the police.

At eleven there was a repetition of the same story, but with additional details.

Boularis was a Tunisian who was listed in the central file of foreign residents as an import-export dealer in electronic equipment. The possibility of his having also been involved in the narcotics traffic had not been overlooked. Friends of the dead man and business associates were being sought for questioning.

There was a cryptic tail-piece.

A police spokesman had said that a disquieting feature of the case was the bizarre method that seemed to have been employed by the killer or killers. The dead man had been sitting with his seat belt fastened. The ‘plastiqué’ had not been detonated by an ignition-key contact or by any of the other methods commonly used in these cases. A possible suicide? Certainly not. Out of the question.

The newspapers the following morning were a good deal more explicit, and one of them sickeningly so.

There was no doubt that Yves had been driven to the place of execution. He had been unconscious or semi-conscious at the time. There was evidence to suggest that force had been used to make him submit to an injection. The nature of the drug would doubtless be determined later.

He had then been placed in the driving seat of his rented car. The charge of ‘plastiqué’ that had killed him had been attached to the diagonal portion of the seat-belt where it crossed his stomach. Both his wrists had been lashed with baling-wire to the steering wheel. A time fuse had been used to explode the charge. It may have been intended that he should regain consciousness and know what was being done to him before he died. A murder of revenge was indicated. It seemed likely that more than one assassin, and certainly a second car, had been needed to commit the crime. The body, which had been eviscerated — indeed, almost cut in half — by the explosive charge, was undergoing the most thorough forensic examination. The autopsy findings, together with scientific investigation of the car’s interior, were expected to supply much-needed leads to the identity of those responsible.

‘Bestial!’ said Melanie. ‘They are vile gangsters.’

‘I dare say those who did it are. But what do we call those nice people, Mat and Frank, say, who specified exactly what was to be done, and paid for the doing of it? What do we call them?’

‘Ask Professor Krom. He always has a word for things. Ask him, Paul, and send me a postcard with the answer.’

‘You won’t be going to Brussels with me?’

‘Thank you. I prefer to keep my stomach.’ She gave me a sidelong look. ‘Will you go?’

I managed a thin smile. ‘Mr Williamson seems to have made his position very clear. Until the Placid Island negotiations are safely concluded, I am advised not to show my nose in any of the usual places. I must remain completely unavailable, physically unavailable, for questioning by any inquisitive journalist who may have heard rumours put about by Krom’s witnesses or listened to the great man’s schnapps-induced ramblings. The same applies to you. My work at Symposia will have to be delegated for a while.’

‘To whom? Frank Yamatoku?’

I actually chuckled. ‘We’ll have to see. Meanwhile I too would like to keep my stomach. We must both vanish. Of course I’m not going to Brussels.’

‘Krom won’t be pleased.’

‘Then I must learn to live with his displeasure.’

Why have I failed?

Possibly because the form taken by Krom’s displeasure hasn’t greatly encouraged me to try living with it.

Some things are too difficult for a man of my sort ever to learn. Among them is the art of living with the displeasure of a fool.

His anger at my failure to commit suicide — by joining him and his witnesses in Brussels — was promptly expressed.

Two months later, a whole Special Issue of The New Sociologist was devoted to a piece by Krom. Its title was: The Able Criminal, Notes for a Case-study.

I made no complaint about it at the time.

That wasn’t simply because, in order to oblige Mat Williamson, and discourage him from having me murdered, I was making myself scarce. I may have been incommunicado, but I wasn’t out of touch. I could have instructed lawyers if I’d wished to, or I could have told my people at Symposia to instruct lawyers. There were, indeed, some of them who urged me to do so. I didn’t because I thought it best to ignore the thing. Most international corporation lawyers and accountants are too busy trying to keep abreast of new tax legislation affecting their clients to bother their heads with publications like The New Sociologist.

I am not the first person to have made that sort of mistake, and I won’t be the last. However, it wasn’t until German publication of Krom’s book, Der kompetente Kriminelle, produced a whole crop of articles on the subject in the international news magazines and business journals, that I knew I had made a mistake.

So, it is against Krom’s irresponsible book, not his irresponsible article, that my formal complaint is made.

Not that there’s much to choose between them. The book, now being translated into four other languages, is essentially a revamped version of the article, padded to size with long winded footnotes, appendices, a bibliography and an index. There is little new material. The journalistic crossheads used to break the article up into digestible sections — phrases such as The Arnarchy of Extortion and The Criminal as Moral Philosopher — have become chapter headings.

Not many changes otherwise. The inaccuracy, falsity and total dishonesty of the original remain unqualified.

Frits Buhler Krom is a phony.

He came to see me in Brussels with his head full of preconceived notions. Nothing had been permitted to modify them. He knew what he had to say in order to prove his case. He has now said it.

Why, then, did he risk his skin on the battlefield of Cap d’ Ail? Though he couldn’t have known the kind of danger he would be running into, he was clearly prepared for trouble of some sort. The precautions he took in Brussels against the possibility of my being the kind of man who might like to have him killed tells us that. Why then?

So that he can now apply the respectable label of ‘case-study’ to the drivel he has written, of course. Why else? Now, he can pretend that, having journeyed bravely into the unknown and observed its wonders, he is simply reporting what he alone has seen for the enlightenment of scholars.

As poor Yves might have said, he is ‘all piss and wind’.

For what does this criminological Münchhausen have to tell us about his travels?

Well, once upon a time when he was in Zurich, he identified this man Oberholzer. Years later, he saw him again. Oberholzer, now, as then, the sole and supreme overlord of a vast international extortion conspiracy, agreed to talk and even make written statements about techniques used by able criminals in exchange for immunity from certain pressures Krom was in a position to apply. There were two victims of Oberholzer’s extortion racket who happened to be known to Krom. Their code-names were Kleister and Torten, and. .

And so on, and so. Until we get to the shrewd analysis of my ‘papers’.

Sample questions. Why, if the tax-avoidance consultancy service wasn’t a mere front, was it necessary to employ informers like the unfortunate Kramer? A genuine tax-consultant would naturally be given access to his clients’ banking accounts by the clients themselves. Isn’t it obvious that men like Kleister and Torten were never clients, only victims?

It doesn’t occur to him that men like K and T — men whom even he is prepared to describe in another part of the book, as ‘moneyed psychopaths’ — lie to the consultants they employ as readily as they lie to the revenue authorities they hope to cheat. When such clients tell you that they have three accounts, you naturally assume that they have six. For your own sake, if not for theirs, you’d better know for sure just where things stand.

His is a monochrome world of good-and-evil, innocence-and-guilt, truth-and-falsehood. If such a world exists, and perhaps it does exist in the privacy of some minds, then he is welcome to it. What he may not, must not, do is people it with real-life human beings such as Paul Oops-nearly-said-it Oberholzer, real-life business enterprises such as S. . a Inc., and real-life professional bodies such as the Institute of No-I-shouldn’t-mention-the-name.

There are some things he’s very good at not mentioning. They’re the things about which you’re not supposed to hear.

There’s no mention of Mat Williamson.

No mention of Placid Island.

No mention of Frank Yamatoku.

No mention of the murder of Yves Boularis.

No mention of the gift to us by his colleague, Professor Langridge, of an aerosol spray of ninhydrin and a camera.

There’s no mention of a lot of other things.

No one who has read Krom’s book, certainly no one who matters in the trust management field, has any doubt about the identity of the man and the Group he is indicting.

And it’s no good his retorting: ‘If the cap fits, wear it.’ As I told him at the Villa Lipp, no one concerned with the management of other people’s money can afford to ignore a smear. We’re too vulnerable.

I have the scars and mutilations to prove it.

What figure do I put on the damage?

Well, none of the cases against Professor Krom and his various publishers is yet sub judice so there can be no harm in my making a rough estimate. There’s still plenty of time to settle out of court after withdrawing the book.

To begin with, during a single month following the publication of Der kompetente Kriminelle, attendance at the two scheduled Symposia seminars was sixty per cent down. A temporary set-back? Far from it. During the month following, registrations for our big one of the year, the annual Paris get-together, were down seventy per cent. We also received polite notes of regret from all but one of our star speakers.

So, I decided to cancel.

Note that please, I decided.

I have spoken of ‘my people’ in Brussels. I was referring, of course, to my senior staff — the head of research, the internal security man, those I had hand-picked myself — to whom I had always delegated a certain amount of authority. The Mat Williamson ‘ultimatum’ had made it necessary for me to delegate more, but I had managed.

I had managed by going back to using the methods Carlo and I had used before I’d been fool enough to send those stupid roses to Kramer’s funeral.

I used an office accommodation service in a city where I wasn’t known. It was a good service, properly equipped with telephones, telex and trained operators, and efficiently run. That was how I kept in touch. That was how I went on making the important decisions. Some wouldn’t have called it delegating at all.

That, it seemed, was not what Mat had intended.

I used to go to the accommodation service office every day at noon and look at any telexes that had come in for me during the morning. Then, if I thought it necessary, I would call Brussels and talk to one or two of my people there.

Three months after the publication of Krom’s book we had quite a lot to talk about. The virtual boycotting of our seminars had been only the beginning of our troubles. An old and valued associate, a tax lawyer with whom we’d done a lot of business, had described the nature of our ultimate predicament in uncompromising terms.

‘No, I daren’t do business with Paul Firman any more, nor with anyone connected with him. The banks won’t have him. Nobody’ll have him. I don’t wonder. I’ve read the Krom book too.’

That’s when I decided to take action; after hearing what an intelligent man who knew me was prepared to accept from Krom, a man who didn’t know me at all.

It was Wednesday. I was impatient to hear what Symposia’s German lawyer had had to say at the meeting that morning. I called Brussels just before noon.

Neither of my people was there.

I waited twenty minutes and then called again. The operator knew my voice of course, but hers sounded odd. I soon understood why. The person she put me through to was Frank.

‘Hi, Paul.’

There was a tightening of muscles, but I managed to keep my voice level. ‘There seems to be something wrong with the line. I’m calling Brussels.’

‘Nothing wrong with the line, Paul, just with your thinking. I’m sitting in what used to be your office.’

‘I see.’

‘Well, now, that’s what seems to be at the heart of the problem. You don’t see.’

‘So you’re going to explain. Is that it?’

‘No, Paul, it isn’t. Nobody’s giving you any more explanations. You don’t listen to them. Nobody’s giving you any more advice. You don’t take it. So I have the job of telling you what you are going to get from now on.’

‘I can hear a squeaking noise, Frank. It isn’t just your voice. You must be rocking backwards and forwards in that chair of mine. I wouldn’t do that. I keep the spring adjustment on the tight side. If you lean too far back the whole thing’s liable to flip right over. You could hurt yourself.’

I tried to make my concern sound genuine. It sounded genuine enough to make him lose his temper.

‘Don’t get cute with me, Dad. Just shut up and try to listen. You were warned to keep a low profile. You didn’t. You blew it. If Krom had taken you seriously a lot of damage could have been done. Luckily, you didn’t impress him. But now you’ve had it. You were warned extra plainly last time. For a while, we thought we’d finally gotten through to you. But no. You’re like all the rest of the old farts. You’re told, you act like you’ve heard and then you forget what was said to you.’

‘What did I forget, Frank? To fasten my seat belt?’

‘Don’t joke about serious matters, Paul. You’ve had your chances and you’ve been lucky. The Krom situation was contained, no thanks to you. Now what happens? You want to start suing that big prick and open the whole can of worms again.’

‘You’re mixing metaphors on a open line, Frank.’

‘You don’t have anything left to hide, old-timer. It’s all hanging out for everyone to see, including the shareholders, and nobody likes the look of it. So, as of noon today, you’re out. No need for you to worry about the chair I’m sitting in. It’s been fixed and if you think it can still be unfixed, forget it. You’re out on your arse.’

That I could believe. Keeping in touch is never the same as being on the job and Frank has always been an ingenious accountant. He has other skills I’m told. When signatures are needed from persons not immediately available, or willing, to give them, he is able to produce excellent forgeries.

‘You’re not forgetting that I’m a major shareholder, myself, are you?’

‘Twenty per cent is what you have, and I’ll tell you what the deal is there. It’s been okayed from on high, so you can believe me. Right? Want to hear?’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Call off the dogs on Krom, buy that nice retirement home you’ve always dreamed of owning in dear old Senior City, and you get a golden handshake. We’ll buy that twenty per cent of yours at book valuation, your book valuation. So what do you say?’

‘Drop dead.’

There was a pause. Then: ‘Paul, that offer’s quite genuine. We mean it. Just lay off Krom.’ The effort he was having to make to remain civil was nearly audible.

‘Drop dead.’

‘Paul, I’d like you to reconsider that answer.’

‘Okay. I’ve reconsidered. The answer’s no.’

‘Because if anyone’s going to drop dead, it’s not going to be anyone here.’

‘Frank,’ I said, ‘you wasted your money on Yves. Why did you have to hire people to kill him? You should have just tied him down and kept talking to him. The way you’re talking to me. It wouldn’t have been a pleasant death, any more than the ‘plastiqué’ was, but it would have been a whole lot cheaper for Mat. And it would have left no traces. Well, scarcely any. Just the sort of rictus a man gets on his face when he’s been hit by a poisoned arrow or dies yawning.’

There was another pause. ‘I’m going to read out some numbers to you. You know about communications codes. Well, this is yours, your current one. It places you and your Kraut helper about four hours from here by road, and about three from the guys with the know-how that you tell me is so inefficient and over-priced. So, better take a deep breath. If you’re going to run again, this time, you’ll have a long way to go. Ready? Okay. This is your code. Prefix reads. . ‘

I listened to the first seven figures, just to make sure that my old security man hadn’t thought he owed it to me to make a slight error.

He hadn’t. The Brussels old-pals act had been repealed. It was time I got moving.

I hung up and called Melanie.

She always knows best how to make travel arrangements.