Siege at the Villa Lipp (35 page)

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!’