Siege at the Villa Lipp (41 page)

‘There’s a lot in what you say, Minister.’

The arrogance of his answering smile was insufferable. I made a decision. If he could test Firman’s verdict on me by making impertinent offerings of schnapps, I could test Firman’s gossip about him by asking impertinent questions.

‘How active is the Boy Scout movement here on Placid, Minister?’

Not an eyelid flickered. ‘There is no Boy Scout movement here as yet. The Legislative Assembly has been asked to authorize the establishment of the movement here. The new Protestant chaplain is interested, I’m told, but we have more important things to do with our time at present.’

Over lunch - canned ham, salad, instant coffee - he told me about the public-works programmes he had scheduled and the problems of getting low-interest loans.

I asked if Mr Yamatoku advised him at all on such matters.

He looked mystified. ‘Mr Yamatoku is with our mission at the UN in New York.’

‘Minister, I shall be returning home via New York. Would it be possible for me to meet Mr Yamatoku?’

‘If you were to call his secretary, I dare say he would try to make time to see you. He is a busy man of course.’

My patience ran out there. I made detailed notes on the conversation that follows as soon as I returned to the rest-house.

‘But not as busy as you, Minister, I’m sure. Where and when did you first meet Mr Firman?’

He stared over my right shoulder for a moment in a way that nearly had me turning to see who might be there. Such well-worn interviewing tricks sit oddly on so pretentious a man. When he saw that I wasn’t going to respond, he played at folding his napkin carefully as he answered.

‘The place of meeting was the one he gives,’ he said. ‘Port Vila in the New Hebrides. He was calling himself Perry Smythson. Almost everything else he says is, either wholly or in part, a pack of lies. If it were not we wouldn’t be talking. I’m quite sure you don’t believe that we are sitting here privately like this because I am eager to hear your views on the methodology of international tax planning.’

‘No, Minister, but you might be curious about my intentions where Firman’s book is concerned. I am naturally curious about yours. I’m hoping that they may help me to make up my mind. For a man in your position, public controversy of the kind that libel actions can generate is a thing to be avoided I imagine.’

‘Avoided like the plague, Professor. The same goes for book-banning by injunction, or censorship through legal blackmail. My intention is to do nothing, and I will tell you why. After reading the Firman script, I
sent off at once both for your book and the
New Sociologist
essay. The German of the book was a little beyond my understanding, but the essay fascinated me. Yes, fascinated! It confirmed something that I had long suspected.’

‘Essays that do that are always fascinating.’

I earned only a fleeting smile. ‘Tell me something, Professor. Firman quotes a definition of the able criminal which he says is yours. Is it?’

‘It’s the simplified, lecture-platform definition I normally give.’

‘Then I’m afraid it can’t be applied to Smythson-Oberholzer.’

‘Shall we just call him Firman, Minister?’

‘By all means. He’s had too many aliases, I agree. But, whatever name you use, you can’t call him the well-adjusted emotionally stable man of your definition. That, Firman certainly is not. It was one of the first things I came to understand about him.’

‘Could you be specific?’

‘Certainly. The death of Carlo Lech was a great blow to him, I know, because I was with him when he heard the news.’ He held up a defensive hand as if I had started to interrupt him. ‘Bear with me, please. Lech was never the father-figure whom Firman portrays. There, I’m completely with you.
But,
Firman always chose to
believe
that he was. The child blames a suitable
alter ego
for its own misdeeds. That is natural. The neurotic adult, the boy who will never grow up, continues to project, but he does so on a different scale and uses different mechanisms. One such mechanism is called role-reversal, I believe.’

‘Please go on, Minister.’ The amateur psychiatrist is rarely as dangerous as he is often made out to be. As long as he has no patients, the injuries he inflicts are usually more painful than serious, like blows on the elbow. The kind of rubbish he talks, however, can tell you a lot about him.

‘The Lech you dismiss, rightly, as a figment of the imagination was desperately real to Firman. Is
that
your emotionally stable, well-adjusted man, Professor?’

‘It doesn’t sound like him, no. Have you any other examples of this instability?’

‘There are other examples staring at us from the pages of his book. He quotes you as saying that Lech had died five years previously. Wrong. He himself says that you saw him at the Zürich funeral five years previously. Wrong again. But why?’

‘Those dating mistakes puzzled me too, Minister. Lech had died seven years previously, not five. I identified Firman in Zürich eight months before Lech’s death. Those facts have never been in dispute. What was so special about the number five? Why the mistake?’

‘Shall we call them Freudian slips, Professor?’

‘Unintentional mistakes can be made by a copy typist who needs new glasses or an editorial adviser who can’t be bothered with details.’

‘But not these mistakes, Professor.’ He was glad of my stuffiness; it made me a better audience. ‘I know for a fact that the five-years-ago we are talking about now was of deep psychological significance to him. I’m no coffee-house analyst, Professor, and I only know what I’ve read about abnormal behaviour. But no one could have made a mistake about Mr Paul Firman then. It’s not the sort of thing you forget. He went nowhere near Zürich or anywhere else in Europe. He spent the year shuttling between Singapore, Sydney and Hong Kong. That was the year his own mysterious Mat Williamson, the man on the telephone speaking with a Birmingham accent, seems to be talking about. He refers to a moment of personal loss and sadness, or sadness and loss. I made a note somewhere. It’s on page . . .’

‘Thank you, Minister. I know the place you mean. How did you come to see so much of him that year? Was that when your partnership began?’

‘Partnership?’ He didn’t like the word. It occurred to me suddenly that Mr Tuakana was in a position to have me arrested, jailed and charged with insulting his government if he felt like it. ‘That’s what he calls it now. I was working for him as what he called a talent-spotter. I had no money worth talking about, and lobbying a company like Anglo-Anzac into facing the inevitable, even in a place like this, takes plenty. Firman paid me well, but I had to work for it. He had a short list of companies, corporations, that interested him. Usually they were in trouble. I investigated them for him. He was what some people call an operator. Quickly in, quickly out. Sometimes there were assets to be stripped. Sometimes there was a loss position to be parlayed. Sometimes there were other things. Partnership? I
never saw it in that light. I was his hot-shot auditor. We never got around to discussing any of my long-term plans. That was the year of his crack-up.’

‘A physical crack-up or a mental one, Minister?’

He placed his smoothed and folded napkin neatly beside his plate.

The hand that had held it twitched for a moment and then was still. He may have decided against rapping the table in time with the words.

‘Professor, surely we can see now. Isn’t it plain enough how those date mistakes came to be made? Five was the evil-magic number because five years before had been the evil-magic time. That was the year of the most terrible death and of the catastrophic disaster. As a result, it ends up as the year of
all
death and
all
disaster - Lech’s death, the Kramer folly, the encounter with you, the exile from Europe,
everything.
The year of ultimate misfortune! And, by the way, that was the year he got himself into trouble with the New South Wales police. In Sydney, at one point, there was serious talk of starting extradition proceedings to winkle him out of Hong Kong.’

‘Do you know what for, Minister?’

‘Indeed I do. You asked for other examples of his instability. I can given you a perfect one. It’s another of his role-switching ploys. Do you remember the long lecture he says he gave to that mythical Mr Williamson? Remember, Professor? The one about the perils of international fraud and the terrible fate that awaited those who didn’t obey the laws?’

‘I remember.’

‘Professor, that was a lecture
I gave him.
’

He paused, shrugged slightly and then gazed into my eyes with the peculiar look of engaging frankness that I have learned to associate with guilt sure of its defences and completely at its ease.

‘My job,’ he went on, ‘was investigation and I could see the overall picture. Some corners of it were pretty murky, believe me. What provoked the lecture was a kind of multinational thimble-rigging scheme he had going. This was a chain of twenty different corporations, all having what looked like serious assets - mining properties, real estate, palm-nut plantations - and all making paper profits. That chain was just the debris left from his asset-stripping deals. So, he’s given the mess a coat of paint. Why? Well, it seems he’s acquired this little ex-British insurance company registered in ex-British Singapore and still operating under the old British free-for-all rules. That means minimal regulation by American standards. Most of its business is done in Malaysia and the Islands and it has a cosy Chinese name that means ‘faithful tiger’. So guess who ends up owning all those paper corporations. Yes, the faithful tiger, only now he’s called Fidelity Lion and does his investigating through nominees. The only mistake Firman made there was to let that mangy lion write annuity business in Australia. He’ll never go back there again. They don’t like insurance grifters, especially when they can’t pin anything on them.’

‘No country likes them. But you spoke of a terrible death and a catastrophic disaster, Minister. Was that what you meant? The collapse of a fraudulent insurance scheme?’

‘Oh no. His Chinese directors nearly had him in trouble, but he moved fast enough to get out from under that. It was the business of his son that hit him so hard.’

‘He mentioned a child by his second marriage.’

‘That was a daughter. The son was by his first wife. Brilliant boy, handsome, great charmer. Snapped up by one of the Ivy League colleges. Firman doted. Terribly proud of him. Actually used to carry a photograph of the lad in his wallet.’

‘What happened?’

‘He died suddenly. All very unfortunate it was.’

‘Drugs? Alcohol? A car crash?’

‘Nothing as simple. The boy committed suicide, hanged himself. It destroyed Firman completely for a while. I’ve never seen a crack-up like it. Almost total withdrawal. He’d just sit.’

‘Was there any explanation?’

‘Of the suicide? The college had one. Overwork, examination pressures, unjustified fears of not meeting the high expectations of others. Most of these places must have a form letter they send out. But Firman thought that he’d been the only one at fault. When he spoke at all then it was always to say the same thing. ‘I seem to have made a habit of failing the people who love me.’ No arguing with him. I for one would never be surprised if Firman decided to kill himself. There’s a suicidal streak somewhere there.’

He stood up. It was time for me to leave. I asked if I could have copies of some of his speeches. A Personal Assistant was instructed to take me to the Office of Information.

I asked for tapes.

Later that day two envelopes were delivered to the rest-house. In one there was a number of Mr Tuakana’s speeches translated into English. A covering note from the Information Officer explained that there were no taped recordings of the speeches available in a language I would understand.

The second envelope contained the promised invitations to a reception by Chief Tebuke later in the week.

I had nothing more to do on Placid. There was a plane leaving the following day. With my wife’s agreement, I answered the invitation with an apologetic letter explaining that we were expected back in Suva and much regretted our inability to attend the reception.

Firman’s Mr Williamson cannot, in my opinion, be described as able.

He is not even a good liar.

Melanie finished reading the Commentary in a state of high excitement.

‘If you still have those company accounts,’ she said, ‘this is a wonderful gift that Krom has sent you.’

Bedtime on the Island had usually been nine-thirty; but that night, with Melanie smoking to keep the insects at bay, we sat up later.

‘It’s not only a gift,’ I said, ‘it’s a gift horse with a mouth I’m looking into. Oh yes, I have those company accounts all right. I had them all microfilmed in Hong Kong at the time. Mat’s accounts were very good, but not to anyone who’d been trained to read figures by Carlo. The only thing I could never discover was the name of the suckers using his nominees. Now, we have the name - Fidelity Lion. No wonder the Australians were treading on Mat’s tail.’

Doubts assailed her. ‘It’s several years ago now. What about statutes of limitations?’

‘With our knowledge we could get him in trouble any time we wanted, and he’ll know it.’

‘The uncrowned king of Placid?’

‘
Especially
the uncrowned King of Placid. He’s totally vulnerable. There’d be no more topsoil for a man suspected of fraud. No more anything else. All we do is what Professor Krom did in Brussels. We leave copies of all the evidence in sealed envelopes to be opened in case of either of our sudden deaths, particularly if my sudden death looked like a suicide. Then, we just tell Mat. Perfect!’

‘If it’s perfect, why aren’t you happier?’

‘Because along with the gift, there comes a disturbing message. Krom has finally confirmed beyond doubt the truth of something that I have resolutely denied. He is telling me again that I have been Number One all the time. The Number One anarchist!’