Siege at the Villa Lipp

CHAPTER EIGHT

Krom and Connell both looked startled. Henson was the only one amused by that odd laugh.

She offered Melanie a cigarette. ‘Is Mr Finnan denouncing you?’ she asked.

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ Melanie declined the cigarette with a graceful hand movement. ‘It’s just that, having reminded himself that he and I are the only persons who were supposed to know in advance that this was to be the meeting place, he now finds it convenient to think aloud.’

‘He doesn’t pause to wonder if he himself could conceivably be the culprit? Two persons were supposed to know in advance, but only one of them could possibly have leaked the information — you. Can that be right?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Of course? You mean that you really accept that verdict or that you have no choice?’

‘Oh, I accept.’

“The master is infallible?’

‘Naturally.’

Melanie was displeased with me, and her innate bitchiness, usually well hidden beneath the surface appearance of bright-eyed stupidity, was beginning to show through. Had I not intervened then, she would soon have been talking nonsense of a less acceptable kind.

‘You mustn’t take Melanie too seriously,’ I said. ‘She has a weakness for ornate overstatement. I am always warning her against it, aren’t I, my dear?’

Her instant over-anxious nod aroused Krom’s paternal instincts. ‘Are you always warning her, too,’ he demanded, ‘that, as your secretary, she must expect to be used as a scapegoat?’

‘No, Professor, I am not. No such warning would be necessary. As an acknowledged expert in the organization of undercover work, Melanie Wicky-Frey knows a great deal more about the selection and management of scapegoats than I do.’

Henson started to say something, but I shut her up by raising my voice as I went on: ‘For your further information, she chose this place herself, composed all the cover stories we are using, and advised me on general security matters at all planning stages. What she is complaining of now is that I am not treating her as if she were infallible. I don’t blame her. As you people should know very well, experts always tend to award themselves immunity from criticism.’

Krom looked expectantly at Melanie, ready to welcome and swallow whole any denials of my dastardly charges she cared to make. When all he drew from her was an empty stare, he sighed and returned heavily to me.

‘So, when you introduced her as your secretary, that was a lie.’

‘Don’t be absurd, Professor. Why should I need a secretary here? I was surprised that you didn’t ask. The idea’s so obviously preposterous. Actually, Melanie is a wholly special kind of PR expert.’

‘A wholly special kind of liar, you must mean. It’s hard to believe, though, that there could be anyone more special in that field than yourself.’

Yves cleared his throat. ‘Patron, I thought that these people were going to take a walk. If they are not, I suggest that you and Melanie talk in the dining-room. You won’t be overheard there.’

He meant that the dining-room wasn’t bugged. ‘Good idea,’ I said and stood up, motioning as I did so to Melanie.

‘Ah, no!’ Krom was levering himself out of his chair. ‘I refuse to be dismissed in this way.’

‘No one’s dismissing you,’ I said; ‘but it’s clearly impossible to talk seriously here.’

When I started to move, he stood in front of me. As I made to go round him, he grabbed me by the arm.

Connell was on his feet instantly, bleating, ‘No, no!’ as if I had been about to hit the old fool.

I said to Melanie: ‘Go ahead. I’ll see you in the dining-room.’ Then, I looked at the hand on my arm as I had looked at it the night before when it had been on Melanie. Like other compulsive arm-grabbers, Krom seemed not quite to realize that his habit could be objectionable. When I had to jerk my arm free, he looked cross, as if I had interrupted a chain of thought, and then wagged a reproving finger.

‘Your statement,’ he repeated, ‘was a lie, and, as you now admit, a pointless one. You have admitted that, yes? Very well. We don’t yet know what kind of man you are, but the evidence so far suggests that, although you may not be a criminal psychopath in any of the generally accepted senses of the word, you possess many of the characteristics often attributed to the so-called moral defective. Still, for the present we shall have to be content with an ad hoc classification, such as — oh, what shall we say? Variegated delinquent, perhaps?’ His eyes sought the witnesses’ approval. ‘There is, in any case, one thing of which we can now be certain. Our delinquent is an inveterate as well as a resourceful liar.’

I was weary enough to lose patience with him.

‘Where,’ I asked, ‘did you get this extraordinary idea that you have a prescriptive right to be told nothing but the truth? Does it come up through the seat of your academic chair? Or is there some tatty sociological saint who once taught that all who have to submit to your questioning are, by divine decree, automatically on oath? Of course, that must be it. And what happens when the poor souls perjure themselves? Obviously, burning at the stake would be too mild a punishment. Instead, we are slowly and brutally classified! Right, Professor?’

Connell chuckled, but Krom only nodded encouragingly.

‘Slowly and brutally? Yes, I expect you’re right, Mr Firman. And so?’

‘And so, the only time you’ll hear a truth from me is when it happens to suit me better than a lie or when none of the available lies is good enough to stand inspection. Truth games are dangerous, even for children. All I’m playing for is safety; safety for myself and my partners in what you choose to call crime.’

Krom beamed. ‘This candour is most refreshing.’ He switched the beam to Connell and Henson. ‘Clearly, this tantrum of Firman’s is a direct response to my diagnostic stimulations. We are making progress. If, as he says, defects in his cover arrangements have come to light, now might be the moment for us to probe his defences in depth.’

Although the witnesses could scarcely have failed to notice that Krom, with his third-person plurals, had suddenly conferred colleague-collaborator status on them, neither gave any sign of having done so. Knowing Krom as they did, they probably recognized that, from him, such courtesies could only be slips of the tongue.

‘I agree,’ said Connell; ‘it’s time we had a look at some of the nuts and bolts of this set-up. If he expects to persuade us that he’s basically incompetent, he’s going to have to produce something more convincing than a hunk of charred plywood.’

‘Bearing in mind,’ said Henson, ‘that, according to Mr Firman, Wicky-Frey is the nuts-and-bolts expert, I would feel that we should concentrate first on her.’ She flashed her appealing smile at Yves. ‘Now, what do you think, Mr Boularis?’

She had succeeded with him before; but that had been half an hour ago and he had learned a lot since. He glanced at her casually and then returned to watching the small birds that were hopping about beneath the chairs and feeding on the crumbs from breakfast.

After a moment he said: ‘I now think, Madame, that you are all full of piss and wind.’

In the silence that followed this further diagnostic stimulation, I left to join Melanie in the dining-room.

I found her sitting wreathed in tobacco smoke, at the head of the long table.

She rarely smoked except after dinner. The ashtray in front of her and the lighted cigarette in her hand were announcements of her need for relief from the intolerable pain of my displeasure. They also warned me that if I were not instantly apologetic and extremely kind to her, she might be driven to commit ritual suicide by inhaling.

As I had nothing to apologize for, and no intention of being kinder than I felt just then, I made no move to sit down. I have always found it easier to keep my temper and to remain civil when standing.

Besides, my assumption was that, having had ample time in which to review the entire cover operation step by step, Melanie now knew where the leak had occurred, how it had occurred, and who might have had the impertinence to exploit it. Once I knew those things, I expected to be able, having shrugged away surprise and exasperation, to start figuring out ways of capitalizing on my misfortunes. Krom’s description of some of my tactical thinking as ‘octopus ink’ had not been all that fanciful; and yes, even in the dining-room on the morning of that second day, I was still thinking in terms of using the jokers outside the gates to neutralize the jokers within.

Call it the last minute of innocence.

‘Well?’ I asked.

Melanie stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I’ve drawn a blank, Paul. No, let me finish. I’ve been over it all as thoroughly as I know how, and several times, even while that horrible little lesbian was pretending to be nice to me. I’ve nothing to tell you that you don’t already know. Nobody was told except you. Nobody! And only the two communications codes were issued.’

‘Why two? What two?’

She sighed patiently. ‘Brussels office has one in their safe for emergency use. Usual safeguards. The other was requested by Mr Yamatoku in London. That was properly authorized. Standard procedure was followed in both cases.’

That was it. I suddenly felt quite peculiar, as if someone had stuffed wool in my ears and started to inflate my head with a foot-pump. Because I knew, almost at once, that if I didn’t sit down I would soon fall down. I gripped the back of the dining-chair nearest to me, eased it around slightly and sat.

Melanie says that I succeeded in making the move look as if I had simply become tired of standing, and that at the time she hadn’t any idea that I was nearly passing out. Most gratifying. In future, though, it may be advisable for me to carry one of those special medical ID cards with multilingual notices on them. I mean notices warning that the bearer has an implanted pace-maker or an allergy to penicillin, or is diabetic, things like that. In my case, the card should read, Bearer May Refuse To Lie Down When Dead.

‘You say that the issue of this second communications code was properly authorized? What do you mean by that?’ I asked her. ‘Authorized by whom? I didn’t authorize it.’

‘It didn’t have to be authorized by you, Paul. Surely you know that? The cypher requesting confirmation was duly received.’

‘You didn’t think to ask me why London had a need to know our communications code for this operation?’

‘Certainly not. Both the request and the response to Brussels’ double-checked conformed strictly to the rules. It was all standard procedure. Why should I have asked you or anyone else? What are such procedures for if not to be acted upon?’

I could see then exactly why Mat had thought her a security risk. He had spotted something that the Gehlen organization had missed. Once a security procedure had been established, she would cease for ever to question any particular use of it. She was insufficiently paranoid.

Our communications code system had been devised originally by Carlo as a means of controlling the courier network when normal routines were interrupted. If, say, a courier had to divert, or be diverted, from his standard movement schedule, the first thing he did when he ceased moving was to call in or cable, via one of the answering services, a sixteen-figure message, dressed up to look like a price-range quotation. Decoded, the figures would give the courier’s cover name, the area of the country in which he was located, and a telephone number at which he could be reached. After Carlo’s death, of course, when the Symposia Group came into being and the old buccaneering ways had long been discarded, we had no need of courier networks or any other sort of covert-operations hanky-panky. If the decision had been left to me, I would have abolished the communications code system. A modern business ought not to need such toys. It had been Mat’s idea that we should keep that particular one.

The reasons he had given for our doing so had looked shrewd as well as sound. The code drill was simple, it had worked well for years, it was cheap to run and, above all, it encouraged personal initiative in our field men. It told them, in effect: ‘Don’t call us — except to leave your number, or tell us that there’s something too big for you to handle on your own — we’ll call you.’ His real reason for retaining the drill was that it enabled him to keep tabs on Brussels, and all those rich Symposia pies he had his fingers in, without anyone but me knowing of the connection. Even upper-echelon personnel like Melanie, who knew that Frank Yamatoku in London was a number-two man to someone, didn’t know that the someone was Mat Williamson.

For Mat, with our communications code and Frank to make the long-distance calls for him, pin-pointing us at the Villa Lipp would have been no trouble at all. If he had been in a hurry and had had access to an Alpes-Maritimes area phone-book with Yellow Pages, the trace job could have been done in an hour.

I now knew, then, who had been responsible for the presence of those objectionable people outside the house. It only remained to find out who they were and what orders they had been given. It says something, I suppose, about the quality of my former relationship with Mat when I record that, faced with an urgent need for answers to what the pit of my stomach told me were life-or-death questions, my first thought was still to ask him for them; to ask, moreover, knowing with reasonable certainty that I would receive. The answers wouldn’t be wholly untrue, of course, because Mat has always preferred to deal in ambiguities and half-truths rather than straightforward lies; but I knew that, if I listened carefully and ignored the literal meaning of the words, the kind of background music to make them sound convincing would probably tell me a lot of what I needed to know.

Melanie, still the injured party awaiting a well-earned apology, was studying her nail-polish. I sat back and clicked a thumb and third finger gently until she looked up.

‘Go back outside,’ I said. ‘Tell them I have to make some phone calls. I’ll let you know what’s happening as soon as I know myself.’

She stood up. ‘What about the second file?’

‘We’ll give it to them after lunch, perhaps. Not that it matters now, but the quieter they can be kept the better. I’ll see. On the subject of lunch, we’d better have it in here.’

‘There’s the space beside the swimming pool. That isn’t exposed.’

‘All right.’

‘We can dine there too. It’s a long way from the kitchen but dinner tonight’ll be cold anyway.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s the Quatorze today. The servants want to get finished early and go to the local fête. They asked, I said they could.’

When we occupied it, the Villa Lipp was still on a telephone exchange that hadn’t been fully integrated into the international direct-dialling system. This meant that, although we could be called direct by someone dialling from another country, we ourselves could initiate foreign calls only through an operator. You needed patience to keep dialling until one answered.

In that large house there were only three telephones: one in the entrance hall with an extension in the main bedroom, and, also in that bedroom, the one I was occupying, a phone on a second line with no extensions. I used this second one, having checked it for obvious bugs before doing so. There would have been no point in my calling Mat’s London hotel. Even if he had been in and available, he wouldn’t have taken an international call through the hotel switchboard. It took me twenty minutes to get through to the London cut-out.

The man on duty spoke very slowly and distinctly as if he distrusted the telephone and would have been happier with a short-wave radio. This was normal. Mat likes using radio hams as cut-outs, and does so in a number of countries; partly because hams are accustomed to staying awake at all hours and partly because some of them can be prevailed upon, in an emergency and for no longer than the few seconds needed to send a high-speed message track, to operate their transmitters illegally. Mostly, he chooses elderly men with pensions to supplement and a mild taste for conspiracy. If they are former Boy Scouts, so much the better.

I gave the number of the phone I was using along with my cover name and said that the matter was urgent. It would be thirty minutes, I was told, before I was called back.

I had fitted induction stickers to both phones, and it was just as well that I’d done so because the return call came through on the other line.

It wasn’t Mat, though, but Frank Yamatoku.

‘Hi, Paul,’ he said, ‘still in the same place after all. Is that right? When you gave the other number, we thought you might have moved without telling us.’

‘And upset your planning?’

‘Oh, we knew you hadn’t done that.’

‘You did?’

‘Sure. We’d have had complaints if you hadn’t been in the target area. What’s that other number? A second line we didn’t know about?’

I’d already had enough of him. ‘It’s been great hearing your voice, Frank, but it was my old friend I called and my old friend I want to talk to. Is he there?’

‘Not right now, Paul. Later maybe. Meanwhile, I have messages. We’ve been expecting this call for hours, you see. Since last night. Why the delay? We were getting worried. What kept you?’

‘Reaction times must be slowing down.’

He chuckled. ‘Happens to us all, they say. But you’re here now, so never mind. I’ll get to the messages. He says you’ll want various questions answered, and that the first will be, ‘Who?’ After that comes, ‘Why?’. Finally, there’s, ‘What shall we do to be saved?’ That one must be religious, I think, from the way he said it. You still with me?’

‘Listening carefully.’

‘Then I’ll get straight to the why of it. I don’t have to tell you, Paul, that we’ve both been worried. Not about how you’d handle yourself, naturally, because we both of us know and respect you, but worried for and with you. So, we began wondering what we back home could do. We wanted you to feel that, when you were fighting that lonely battle of yours out there, you weren’t alone. We wanted you to know that you had friends right behind you ready to give a helping hand when you needed it. You understand me, Paul?’

‘Frank, it’s those friends right behind me, and what they might do before I can turn around and stop them, that I called about.’

‘Bear with me, Paul, and let me share our thinking with you. Our first thought was that you were, we all were, in bigger trouble than you wanted to admit, and that you were going to need more than a paper towel to clean off all that shit you stepped in. I mean clean if off so there’d be no lingering odour. What you needed, we figured, was one of those deodorants that does more than just freshen up the air. You needed one that would destroy the opposition’s sense of smell. Right?’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘Look at it another way. What happens when one of these penny-ante Third-World governments has big trouble on the home front? You know what happens. It looks around for some foreign enemy who’ll take the people’s minds off all the troubles at home by standing up outside the gates and drawing fire. Xenophobia, right? Baddies from outside?’

‘I see.’

‘Of course you do. And you’ll also see that, with the kind of non-belligerents you have there with you right inside the city walls, we couldn’t take chances. You’re not going to fool social scientists of that calibre with Hallowe’en masks and hi-fi scream tracks. They’re serious investigators. You have to give them a taste of the real thing or they don’t believe, do they?’

‘Don’t believe what?’

“That this investigation they’re making is dangerous, physically dangerous. Dangerous for you, dangerous for your employees, and, thus, dangerous for them. In fact, so god-damned dangerous for everybody there, that the quicker they get their asses out the less likely they are to share the terrible fate planned for you. Death through proximity, that’s what they have to fear, Paul.’

‘They’re not going to buy it.’

‘You don’t know yet what you’ll be selling, friend. I’m trying to tell you. That is where we come to the “who” bit. Are you still with me? This is important.’

‘Still with you.’

‘Now, I’m not personally acquainted with the outfit that’s been hired, but I’ve heard of it and I understand that it’s talented enough to rate top money. Can’t say more because I’ve been told to stay with hard fact. The word to you from our friend, though, is that the tab for the operation’s been picked up by three guys acting in concert, three guys whose names he says you’ll know. I have them written down. Let’s see. Yes, here we are. The names are Kleister, Torten and Vic. Vic who, it doesn’t say. Maybe you know.’

‘Yes I know.’ The foot-pump connected to my head was being worked again.

‘Good. Then you’ll also know, Paul, that these three gentlemen are all, as far as you’re concerned, somewhat prejudiced. That means that, although our friend made it very clear to them that harassment was authorized only insofar as it was needed to carry conviction, the possibility of these nuts over-stepping the mark if provoked ought to be borne in mind. He asked me to mention that specially.’

‘I appreciate his concern.’

‘I hope you mean, that, Paul, because it’s something you should appreciate. He’s still fond of you, in spite of everything, and he still wants to protect you if you’ll let him. He says that before you went over the hill you played polo real good, and that if you found yourself in an emergency predicament you might still give these characters more trouble and make them real mad.’

‘I might, yes.’

‘The word is, don’t. You’ll only get hurt a lot instead of a little. That’s only advice, mind. He still has too much respect for you as his old bossman, Paul, to presume to tell you. He’s only asking you to accept a piece of friendly advice.’

‘Is there anything else that I should accept?’

‘He said to tell you that he’ll be thinking of you all the time. He meant it too. All the time.’

‘I’ll be thinking of him.’

‘Have a good day, Paul.’

He hung up.

I switched off and immediately pressed the rewind button. After I had played the whole tape through twice, I listened to the beginning of it a third time before writing a note to Yves and Melanie.

Yves, please meet me at CP now after passing this to Melanie, please distribute File No. 2 and then join us.

I found the cook’s husband and gave him the note to deliver. Then, I took the recorder from my bedroom and went to our ‘Command Post’ in the garage loft.

When Yves joined me everything was set up and ready.

I pointed to the recorder. ‘I’ve just taped a call from London on this. First, I want you to listen to the beginning and tell me if anything occurs to you, anything at all.’

He asked no questions, just nodded and sat down.

I started the play-back. After the first couple of sentences I stopped it and looked at him.

‘Again, please,’ he said, ‘and this time as loudly as possible. The speech quality doesn’t matter.’

I couldn’t get it much louder because induction suckers aren’t all that efficient and the recorder’s amplifier hadn’t much left to give, but I did my best. Oddly enough, Frank’s voice quacking away through the tape-hiss was, though still intelligible, less offensive than it had been with the volume lower. I let it run on for a moment or two longer before switching off.

Yves pursed his lips. ‘Anything that occurs to me?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘You said that the call was from London. I don’t think it was.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘Calls from London to here are dialled. With long-distance direct-dialling, an electronic time-and-distance charge counter is activated as soon as the answering phone is picked up. It’s connected to a computer that bills the customer. I don’t know exactly how long it takes to start running — only a small fraction of a second I would think — but if you already have the phone to your ear when the circuit is completed you always hear it. It’s like a sound of a stick being dragged for an instant along iron railings. Your recording here begins while the phone is still ringing. If the call had come from London, or Bonn or Amsterdam, we’d have heard the charge counter coming into action when you picked up the phone. The sound’s not there. That call was made locally from no farther away than Nice or Menton. And it wasn’t made from a pay-phone either. You’d have heard a charge counter start with that too. The sound would have been different from the long-distance counter, but you’d have heard it.’ He paused, then added: ‘Is that what you wanted to hear?’

‘Not what I wanted, but what I expected. I didn’t notice until the second time I played the tape.’

‘Most people don’t hear it at all. The counter normally starts during the time it takes to pick up the phone and put it to your ear. You asked for anything that occurred to me. I also recognize the caller’s voice. It’s the man I know as Mr Yamatoku.’

He was watching me narrowly for a reaction. I nodded. ‘I’m going to ask you to listen to the rest of the conversation, but let’s wait a moment until Melanie gets here.’

We had to wait several minutes.

‘Questions,’ she explained peevishly. ‘Paul, you should not have so spoken about me in the ambience of such persons. They are incapable of maintaining the moderations of polite usage.’

The sudden deterioration of her English suggested that the questions had been inconveniently searching.

‘Didn’t the second file divert them at all?’

‘Do you divert lions with carrion when there is fresh meat to be had? These people are most ill-mannered.’

‘You’re being too fussy,’ I said. ‘I’ll be surprised if those other people with us, the ones we weren’t expecting, have any manners at all.’

Yves shoved a bentwood chair against the back of her legs and she sat down abruptly.

‘What do you know,’ I asked, ‘about a man named Mathew

Tuakana? He sometimes calls himself Mat Williamson. Mean anything to you?’

I was looking at Yves as I spoke simply to notify Melanie that I had called the meeting to order and wanted no more of her nonsense. I hadn’t really expected him to answer. In his line of work, he was unlikely to have become involved in any of the futile attempts already made to penetrate the dense covers concealing Mat’s operations; but I had been mistaken. After a moment’s thought, he nodded.

‘Yes, I’ve heard of him. A Polynesian métis. Homosexual. A banker of some sort. Ultra rich. Is that the man?’

‘Where did you hear that gossip?’

‘I know someone who did some work for him. It’s all wrong, I suppose.’

‘It’s right about his being half-caste, but wrong about the non-white component. His mother was Melanesian, not Polynesian. Also, he’s had women as lovers as well as men. Who was your informant?’

An impertinent question that ought not to have been asked. Yves didn’t apologize for ignoring it.

‘I was also told,’ he said, ‘that Williamson was one to stay away from if you were free to choose. Some of these ultra rich have a habit of ditching things when they’ve finished with them, even if the things have only been used once. I’m told Williamson does that with people. Was I wrong there too?’

I hesitated, so naturally he had to pounce.

‘Is he the one you’re covering for here?’

I didn’t have a chance of deciding how fully or frankly I would reply. Before I could draw breath, Melanie was talking across to me to answer Yves.

‘Of course,’ she told him, ‘it must be Williamson. I should have thought of him before. He’s the Placid Island man, the one negotiating on behalf of the natives over the compensation to be paid out by the phosphate interests. He’s an economist with unorthodox ideas. You know? The kind of ideas that sound fascinating while they are being used to sell something, but that no one ever hears of again after the deal is set. He also acts for a Canadian bank. If that man had needed protection from Krom, I should have thought the bank would have provided it. Why trouble poor little Symposia?’

By bitching me with that snide reference to Symposia she was trying to recover the dignity lost minutes earlier when her buttocks had hit the seat of the chair.

‘He doesn’t control the Canadian bank,’ I said, ‘though his association with it is common knowledge. He does control Symposia, however, and he controls it through me. That is very far from being common knowledge and the thing that was to have been hidden at all costs from those with prying eyes and publishing voices, especially from Krom. News that there existed a backstairs financial arrangement between Symposia, the trendy fast-buck artists’ favourite tax-haven advisory service, and His Excellency Mat Tuakana, man of the people, King’s Scout and patron saint of Placid Island, would kill for ever his chance of getting that international licence to print money he’s always yearned for. And he’d never get another chance.’

I turned to Yves again. ‘I’m the one whose cover was blown by Krom, so I’m the one who has to make good the loss, hold the fort, stick the finger in the dyke, fall on the exploding grenade or do whatever else is necessary to keep His Excellency’s reputation safe, sound and spotless. Yes, he does like scrapping people when he’s used them. Let’s hope he hasn’t succeeded with us.’

‘Us, Paul?’ Melanie again.

The look I gave her was as sour as her own. ‘I think it’s time I revealed, in case you didn’t know, that both of you were hand-picked for this operation by Mat Williamson himself. And if you think that being chosen by the great man personally for this assignment isn’t much of a distinction, you’re mistaken. In your case certainly, Melanie, the choice was made with immense care. To prove it I’m going to play back a phone conversation I’ve just had with Frank Yamatoku. He’s Williamson’s left-hand man, Melanie. That’s why I was a little upset when you told me that you’d given him our communications code.’

Yves whispered, ‘Merde’ as if it were a prayer.

She stared coldly at my chin. ‘A capable operations director would have reviewed the standard security procedures before committing the team.’

I wasn’t going to argue about that with her. ‘When I called Williamson’s London cut-out from here, I asked him to return my call personally. It was returned instead by Yamatoku, and it sounds as if he’s calling from a local phone not far from here. Listen.’

They listened. They listened to the whole thing three times. Between play-backs I answered questions as truthfully as seemed prudent in the circumstances.

Who, for instance, were Kleister, Torten and Vic?

‘No, they’re not, much as they may sound like it, a slack-wire baggy-pants act out of a third-rate circus. There’s nothing even marginally comical about these three. They’re old business rivals still nursing their grudges against me for the defeats they once suffered in a couple of big deals. They said I tricked them. You know how it is with losers, some losers anyway. They think that winners only win through skulduggery, and that makes it all right for losers to use skulduggery if it’ll give them their revenge. We should try to feel sorry for the poor slobs.’

Of course, neither Yves nor Melanie believed a word of that soap-opera version of the facts; but they accepted its essential element. It was more than likely that I should have former victims gunning for me. But gunning for me with what?

How real was the threat implicit in Yamatoku’s reference to the possibility of K, T and V’s merry men ‘overstepping the mark’? Was such sinister moustache-twirling to be taken seriously?

I told them that, when dealing with Mat Williamson, everything ought to be taken seriously, but nothing at its face value. However, for the purpose of our council of war, a few assumptions could safely be made.

Among those old acquaintances of mine with reasons for disliking me, K, T and V had been chosen not for their ability to exercise restraint where I was concerned — it was known that K and T had once threatened to kill me — but because, in spite of earlier misfortunes, they were wealthy enough as well as crazy enough to pay a team of professional hard men to carry out orders of which Mat approved. When implementing any policy of his involving even a modest cash outlay, Mat always arranged for someone else to foot the bill. He had known of K, T and V because their dossiers had figured in the inventory of Carlo’s consultancy accounts which I had inherited; dossiers that I had later transferred to Mat as part of our overall deal.

Yes, Mr Yamatoku’s hostility was plainly audible. Unfortunately, the idea, comforting though it might have been, that Frank had merely been indulging his personal dislike of me must be put aside. No doubt he had enjoyed giving me his bad news; but he hadn’t invented it. He would certainly have taped our conversation, as I had, but his tape would have to be played back to Mat. With that hypercritical audience in mind, an audience prepared to evaluate every intonation, Frank Yamatoku wouldn’t have dared to depart from the brief he had been given.

In my own mind the conviction was growing that Frank had a well-prepared, all-eventuality script in front of him when he had been talking to me; but I wasn’t quite ready then to start explaining, or trying to explain, Mat Williamson to anyone except myself.

There was something else I had to be sure of first.

Meanwhile, I thought, it might be advisable to get Melanie on my side again.

‘You were right,’ I told her; ‘I ought to have reviewed the standard security procedures before committing them to your care. I apologize. But now, I think, it’s time we started formulating decisions.’

‘Decisions on whether or not you take his friendly advice, Patron?’ Yves had hooked up the small tape-deck to the bugging amplifier and had been replaying my conversation with Frank through the earphones. He flipped a switch. ‘What does this bit mean?’

Frank’s voice came through the monitor speaker. ‘He’s still fond of you, in spite of everything, and he still wants to protect you if you’ll let him.’

Yves switched off. ‘In spite of everything, Patron? What is this everything?’

‘He means that he forgives me the inconvenience I have caused him by allowing myself to be seen years ago by a Dutch criminologist in a Swiss crematorium.’

‘I am being serious, Patron.’

‘I wasn’t joking. That’s simply Mat Williamson’s way of informing me that I am what you call ditched.’

‘And this?’ He had wound the tape on. ‘What does this mean?’

Frank’s voice again. ‘That’s only advice, mind. He still has too much respect for you as his old bossman, Paul, to presume to tell you. He’s only asking you to accept a piece of friendly advice.’

‘That was put in,’ I said, ‘with the idea of making it difficult for me to play the tape to Krom. Frank’s idea, probably. I’d say Mat let it go through to humour him. He himself wouldn’t have bothered. He knows I’ll let Krom hear the tape.’

Melanie almost squealed her protest. ‘And give him one more excuse to call you a liar? While you were upstairs with Yves, they were talking about you as if I had not been there. You have not convinced them of anything that we hoped and planned for them to believe. Do you know what Dr Connell calls you? “Mr Kingpin”, that is what! Paul, you will never succeed now with Krom and these others. You have cut off your own nose with your denials of truth and spit in your own face. You have boasted of your amorality, that everything you say is a lie, and they are virtuously ready to believe that there, at least, you tell the truth. They have made up their minds, and nothing you can now do will change them.’

In an effort to keep my temper, I corrected her before answering. ‘You cut off your own nose to spite your face, not spit in it, Melanie,’ I paused to swallow a bit more anger. ‘The situation’s completely different now. Can’t you see it? Hasn’t the penny dropped?’

Yves gave her no chance to reply. He was having trouble with a different anxiety. ‘You haven’t yet answered the question I asked you, Paul. Do you or do you not take this friendly advice of Mr Williamson? Oh yes, the situation is a little different now, but there is still only one way out of it. Those bastards outside were not put there just to make you call London. We’re being set up for a kill, I feel it.’

‘You may be right.’

‘Well then, Paul, let’s do what I said. Let’s forget about the guests. This was their idea anyway, and they don’t matter now. We should think of ourselves. No consultation. No argument. We choose the right moment, we take the rental car, we head for the safe-house and then stay there until this place has been disinfected by paid bastards of your own.’

I tried to say what had to be said. ‘It doesn’t work, Yves. There’s no right moment for us to choose. For one thing, it’s too easy for them around here, too easy to stage an accident. You know? One of those accidents in which all the occupants of a small car are killed when it runs off the road on the corniche? It’s happening every day for real. No one would even notice.’

He slapped his right elbow with the palm of his left hand, and then stabbed a forefinger at me. ‘Paul, I give you a guarantee! If I am driving, anyone who tries to run us off the road — anyone, even if he is an Italian kidnap driver — will kill himself before he can scratch our paintwork. That little buzz-box is not heavy, but she steers well and on these roads that is good enough. Good enough, with me driving, to get us away from this fly-trap, free and clear to the safe-house. Paul, I guarantee it!’

I glanced at Melanie.

She shrugged sullenly.

My eyes went back to Yves. He thought I was still trying to make up my mind and out came the forefinger again, moving stiffly from side to side this time, to dispel lingering doubt.

‘You think I can’t do it, eh?’

I said: ‘Our cut-out point was the hotel in Turin. Remember?’

‘What of it?’

He hadn’t even begun to understand. It was possible that his mind was still doing immaculate skid turns on the hairpin bends of the corniche while the opposition cartwheeled down the hillside in flames. A good technician, Yves, but unreliably romantic. There was nothing left to do but speak plainly.

‘Yves,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, but this fly-trap is the safe-house.’

His look of anguish was of the predictable kind and I didn’t waste time consoling him. I knew at this point where the score stood. I also knew, more or less, what I would have to do to change it.

‘A remarkable man,’ Krom said, ‘remarkable by any standards.’

He knew, or thought he knew, all about Mat Williamson and had instructed his witnesses on the subject. He had never heard of Frank though. I spelled Yamatoku for him. They wrote it down, and then we all went into the dining-room.

I played the tape through twice. During the second playback both Krom and the witnesses took notes. Finally, Krom sat back and looked questioningly at Henson.

‘Any comments, my dear?’

She stubbed out a cigarette. ‘Only obvious ones, I’m afraid. A shadowy figure named Vic has been added to the supporting cast headed by Kleister and Torten. I shan’t be at all surprised if we find this Vic popping up again, wearing a devil’s suit and a smell of brimstone next time, in a later discussion paper.’

‘A note of scepticism is sounded.’ He nodded sympathetically and looked at Connell.

‘I had that very same thought, Professor. And one or two others.’ Connell consulted his notes. ‘This Mr Yamatoku, for instance. His speech sounds American — could be from my own home state — and I’m sure we’ll find when we check it out that the Placid Island banker, Williamson, has a Nisei accountant of that name on his staff. But that still leaves us with the question of provenance. In this Frank-and-Paul show we’ve been listening to, is the Frank character the real Yamatoku or is he some bit player hired by the old bossman here to read lines? I am assuming, by the way, that the lines contain hidden meanings that are going to be revealed to us later. To give one example, there is an allusion to the game of polo which at present makes no sense at all.’

‘More scepticism, I fear, Mr Firman.’

No cackling now, no raucous sarcasms. Something had happened to Krom while we had been away. My guess was that the witnesses, impressed by Yves’s outburst on the terrace earlier, had ganged up on their leader and persuaded him that he would get more out of us if he made less noise himself.

Henson was pretending coyly to have had a sudden inspiration. ‘I wonder now! Wait a minute! If Mr Firman could telephone London and have his call returned promptly like that, surely we could do the same. Naturally, we couldn’t be certain that the Mr Yamatoku we were talking to — have I got the name right? — was the genuine article, but we ought to be able to test the actor theory. Only a very good one could improvise in that turgid neo-revivalist manner.’

‘I thought one of you experts might have noticed that the call was a local one,’ I said. ‘Would you explain to them, Yves?’

Yves explained.

They listened quietly and attentively in a way that I didn’t like. Krom’s natural rudeness and the witnesses’ sycophancy had been infuriating, and probably bad for my blood pressure, but they had their psychological uses. They had enabled me, for one thing, to view the prospect of him and his witnesses dying violent deaths in the near future with only a token regret. So, I had been left reasonably free to concentrate on avoiding the same fate. The new politeness was not only disconcerting, and thus destructive, but also insidiously depressing. It would have to be countered. As Yves began going into detail, I cut him short.

‘You’re quite right, of course, Dr Henson,’ I said; ‘talking to Mr Yamatoku, even if you could, wouldn’t help you all that much. Besides, my object in asking you to listen to that highly compromising conversation wasn’t to prove anything to any of you. It was to save myself trouble. If you’ll just accept for a moment that the man to whom I’m speaking on that tape is Yamatoku and that the “our friend” he’s referring to is his employer Mat Williamson, I’ll try to explain to you what’s happened to change things here without wasting any more time. Agreed?’

Connell talked across me to Krom. ‘You have to hand it to our host, Professor. He gives that Number-Two status claim of his everything he’s got. He really does try harder. Secret watchers and bombs in the night didn’t work, so now it’s threatening calls from sinister Orientals and sudden cracks of hypothetical whips — all great stuff. But it does make you wonder, I find, about the kind of therapy he’s been in, and the quality of it too. Some of these cruelty-is-kinder organismic groups we’re seeing around nowadays can do the mind permanent damage.’

Krom squirmed with the agony of keeping a straight face, and then showed me his teeth as if they had all suddenly begun to hurt him. ‘You must see our difficulty, Mr Firman.

If we do not take you as seriously as you would wish, you have only yourself to blame.’

‘That’s quite all right,’ I said evenly; ‘I’m glad that you’re in such high spirits. They may help to make the news I have to give you more palatable.’

‘The whip-cracks I could forgive,’ remarked Henson; ‘it’s the false bonhomie that I found tedious.’

Krom covered an involuntary snicker by clucking in mock disapproval. ‘With Mr Firman working so ingeniously to avoid keeping our agreement, we should be applauding him rather than poking fun. You must be good, my children, please!’

Yves stirred and I guessed that he was about to say something obscene enough to disgust even the ‘children’. He had my sympathy, but I didn’t need his support and snapped my fingers to let him know it. At the same moment, I stood up as if about to leave and then stopped where Krom would be forced to lean back awkwardly if he wanted to see my face.

‘I spoke, when I asked you to listen to that tape, of re-negotiating our agreement,’ I said. ‘Clearly, I was being over tactful. Perhaps it will help you to contain your amusement, Professor, if I tell you that we no longer have an agreement. The one made in Brussels is now completely null and void. What we can still discuss, if you wish, is what remains of your ability to blackmail me, and what is left of my ability to give you protection.’

‘Protection from what?’

‘The consequences of threatening Mathew Williamson. He’s not as tolerant of common blackmailers as I am.’

‘I’ve heard of your Mr Williamson, as I’ve already told you, but I’m not acquainted with him. Nor am I, as you perfectly well know, a common blackmailer.’

‘Exactly what you are, Professor, and where, as a result, you now stand are matters that must be re-examined. Do you want to send your witnesses out, or don’t you mind if they hear us talking about the messier details of our bargain?’

He showed a few more teeth. ‘You’re wasting your breath, Mr Firman. I refuse to be provoked. My young friends have experience of the problems of doing research in this field. Why shouldn’t they hear the details?’

‘Very well. The basic threat you made was that, unless I did and said the various things you wanted me to do and say, you would expose, I quote, the Symposia Conspiracy. That’s what you called it. Right?’

“That’s what I still call it.’

‘Then you must still be, Professor, as big an intellectual and academic phony as you were when you dreamed up the phrase.’

I didn’t wait for a reaction, but turned and went through into the drawing-room. It was well-bugged in there — and when an adversary is under pressure it’s always better to have a tape, even when there seems to be no way of its ever being used. Besides, it was necessary: to have him off balance. That’s why I’d walked away after insulting him. A double goosing like that is really painful.

He certainly found it so. He came running. The others followed but he didn’t wait for them before counter-attacking. He was too angry to wait.

‘You won’t get rid of your corruption by trying to hang it on me,’ he snapped. ‘Ask any policeman! Defence by projection is common among criminals.’

‘It’s common among all sections of the populace, Professor, including criminologists. I accused you of being a phony. With or without your permission, I intend to explain to your witnesses why I did so.’

I paused to dismiss his unspoken protest before going on. ‘Symposia is an organization concerned with tax avoidance by strictly legal means. By coupling its name with the word ‘conspiracy’, an imprecise but emotive term loaded with associations of illegality, you created an essentially meaningless but potentially lethal smear. You’ve wasted your talents, Professor. You should have been a politician.’

His martyred God-give-me-patience look brought in Henson for the defence. ‘If it was meaningless, why should it have upset you so much?’

I gave her my best smile. ‘How did your Professor Langridge put it? “More to do with journalism than with scholarship,” was it? Something like that, I think. What would he have said, I wonder, if he’d actually heard his colleague, Krom, threatening to leak the whole smear package to the financial journals and news magazines if I didn’t collaborate?’ “Collaborate” was the chosen euphemism. Moral blackmail and extortion were the realities.’ I faced Krom again. ‘Last night you allowed that you were an extortionist. Of course, as you have explained today, you were tired last night. But tired of what? Only of travelling, or of hypocrisy too?’

Connell rallied to the cause. ‘You still haven’t answered the question, Firman. If the charge was baseless, why are we here? Why didn’t you tell him to drop dead?’

‘I can’t believe, Doctor, that you are simple enough to suppose that a smear can always be defeated by ignoring it. Only the invulnerable few, or those past caring what happens to their reputations, can afford to adopt that attitude. I would also remind you that institutions handling, or advising on the handling of, other people’s money are among the most vulnerable to this kind of false charge, however baseless it may be.’

‘But in your case the charge wasn’t false or baseless,’ Henson again, with Krom nodding his blessing. ‘Your first paper admits as much, not just frankly, but brazenly. Oh yes, you’re careful to point out that Oberholzer belonged to your pre-Symposia days, but surely that’s mere nit-picking.’

I was finding it difficult to remain cool and had to make a conscious effort. ‘Let’s be clear about this. What I have admitted is that I once committed offences against the Swiss bank secrecy laws by obtaining confidential information from a bank employee. That offence is, as you well know, one that has been committed time and time again over the years by agents and officials acting for non-Swiss governments. Among them have been the governments of most of the developed nations and a good many from the Third World as well. Within the international communities of income-tax gatherers, fraud-squad investigators and exchange-control enforcers outside Switzerland, the offence is regarded about as seriously as a parking violation. You seem also to need reminding that I have never been arrested in Switzerland or anywhere else, nor even detained for questioning, much less convicted in a court of law.’

Connell went into a world-weary, cut-the-cackle routine. ‘Please, Mr Firman. We’ve seen the bleeding. Now, how about showing us the wound? All you’ve been given, you say, is a parking ticket. And yet, for the honour of dear old Symposia, you act as if you’d been busted for murder-one. Come on! The Symposia Conspiracy isn’t about parking violations. It’s about an extortion racket that relies for the fingering of likely victims on an intelligence set-up pretending to be a tax-haven consultancy service, and, for the raking in of its blood money, on a network of illegal debt-collection agencies making undercover use of international communications systems. That’s what Professor Krom was proposing to shed light on, and that’s what he still intends to shed light on. All he did to you was to offer the sort of deal that the law offers crooks all the time and all over the world. ‘Turn informer and we won’t press charges. Tough it out, or try to, and we’ll throw the book at you.’ You started by going along with the deal and now you’re trying to renege. No need to apologize. We understand how it is. But don’t bore us with crap about parking tickets. Okay?’

With almost no effort I was able to laugh. ‘When you wrote your book about organized crime, Dr Connell, chat was the sort of talk you put in the mouths of the stupider DA's and the more reactionary policemen. You disappoint me.’

‘A nice try, Mr Firman,’ said Henson; ‘but we already knew that you could read.’

In spite of her confident tone, she was by then having several second thoughts and Krom had spotted the fact.

‘He’s only digging his own grave, my dear. Don’t let us do the job for him.’ He tried to sound as if he were at ease, but he was showing scarcely any teeth and his eyes had the wary look I had first seen in Brussels when he had been afraid of me. Now, he was afraid of me again; not afraid this time though, of what I might be going to do, but of what he had sensed that I might be going to say.

He had had two months in which to forget the euphoria of his Brussels victory over me and to start wondering why that success had been so easy.

I found it meanly satisfying now to ignore him and give his witnesses the answers he so anxiously awaited. Besides, they were pleasanter to look at.

I said: ‘You asked me why, if this threatened smear were baseless, I didn’t tell Krom, the author of it, to publish and be damned. I’ve given you one answer. All smears that start no-smoke-without-fire talk can be expensive in one way or another. You pay off for the same reason that big corporations often settle nuisance actions against them out of court. It may be cheaper in the long run to pay rather than to argue rights and wrongs. I have given you a second answer. If pushed, we could have called the Professor’s bluff and then warned the publisher he went to that this was a source that couldn’t be protected by the anonymity custom because this source had already tried to sell us the story. That way, ordinarily, we would have been on fairly safe ground. We didn’t adopt that solution because to have done so would have been to take an unacceptable risk.’

‘Aha!’ said Krom.

I didn’t bother to tell him that his relief was premature, but went on addressing the witnesses. ‘In amongst all the hearsay, gossip, innuendo and straight falsehood that had been assembled to support the conspiracy nonsense, there were one or two sets of facts. Most were unimportant or irrelevant. One wasn’t. I refer to the Placid Island material.’

‘What’s so remarkable about that?’ demanded Connell. ‘Placid’s typical. It’s been stripped of most of its natural assets. The only future it has is as a tax-haven outpost with a few high-rise office buildings. Its one extra asset seems to be this Williamson you mentioned — a banker, and an economist too, with a good academic background, who also happens to be a native of the wretched place. Professor Krom noted that Symposia had made overtures to Placid and was trying to establish a monopoly position there. Was that what you didn’t like?’

‘That’s what Mat Williamson didn’t like. He didn’t like it because Symposia wasn’t just trying to establish a monopoly in advance, it already had it established. The Symposia Group is eighty per cent owned by Mat Williamson and always has been.’

‘But I didn’t know that!’ Krom yelped. It wasn’t that he was dim-witted, just that a bit of his mind was still refusing to listen to the disaster warning that had begun to paralyse the higher centres.

‘Of course you didn’t know,’ I said. ‘Practically nobody knew, or knows now. The Canadian bank for whom Mat acts as a consultant in such matters certainly doesn’t know. Neither do the officials with whom Placid Island independence is being negotiated. Others in ignorance include Chief Tebuke and the lawyers for the phosphate company which is being squeezed by Mat for compensation. Dr Connell asked why we are here. Well, I’ll tell you why I thought we were here, if that’s still of interest to anyone but the birds. We were here, Professor, so that.yon wouldn’t rock the boat, of which I’ll admit to owning twenty per cent, by revealing the Williamson-Symposia relationship.’

‘How could I have revealed it? As you have said, I didn’t know about it.’

No doubt he was still in shock, but it was hard to remain civil. ‘I can’t believe, Professor, that you are as unworldly as all that. You must suffer from the delusion that only scholars are capable of doing research. You think that the corporate entities which make up the Symposia Group are an open book to you because you’ve looked at all the available records. They show me as a stockholder and also as a nominee for other voting stockholders. That’s as far as you’ve gone because, thanks to the fact that you once saw me years ago in Zurich, you made an assumption about me that you weren’t prepared to modify or even reconsider. From Mat’s point of view, that was fine — while it lasted. But would it always last? The first thing any newspaperman worth his salt would do would be to question all your assumptions however pretty they looked. And, having questioned, he’d find ways of getting answers that satisfied his professional standards. They wouldn’t be your ways, because he’d have to work a lot faster than you people. He’d dig patiently, yes, but he’d use those techniques that governments call espionage or intelligence-gathering, depending on whose side is doing what, and newspaper proprietors call investigative reporting. It doesn’t matter what we call it. The point is that, if you’d been allowed to hand your Symposia rag-bag to the financial editor of a news magazine, the information connecting Mat Williamson with Symposia would have been found within days and the result wouldn’t have been called a conspiracy. It would have been called a ‘caper’, or worse. It would have been the Placid Island Rip-Off. Now do you understand?’

Silence. Krom looked like death.

‘Well,’ said Connell eventually, ‘none of that’s happened and no one’s yet rocked the boat. So what’s changed since you and the Professor made your deal? Our appraisal of the situation was faulty from the start, according to you. All right. So what?’

‘Unfortunately, my appraisal of the situation has become faulty. That’s what’s changed. In London, the risk represented by the Professor’s decision to use blackmail in his quest for information seems, after all, to have been judged uninsurable. That phone call was to tell us so, tell all of us.’

‘I see. The best way of making sure that no one rocks a boat is to have no people in it. Then your revised appraisal is, I take it, that those friends of yours outside this place now intend to kill us all. Correct? Or is this to be a selective massacre? Just you? Just us? Some of each? What’s the new ouija board starting to say?’

Melanie said brightly: ‘It’s nearly time for lunch.’

The cook’s husband was at the door asking if he should bring the ice for the drinks in there or whether we would be moving out to the swimming-pool area.

I said that we would have the drinks inside. By the time we moved out to lunch by the swimming pool, a lot more had been said and the guests were thoughtful. Connell hadn’t pressed me for an answer to his questions. He had probably decided that I had no answers.