Siege at the Villa Lipp (7 page)

‘Tell me, Paul.’

I told him about the first stage of the Krom encounter and waited.

‘A foolish man,’ he commented, ‘but you don’t consider him stupid, I gather. If you did you wouldn’t be here.’

‘No, he’s not stupid. He is, however, a little frightened by the step he has taken.’

‘Frightened of you?’

‘Of me, of us. He has friends in the Dutch Ministry of Justice sympathetic to his views on our business activities. He has friends of like mind in West German intelligence. The man under whose name he is attending the seminar is a rich Luxembourger with political connections. All were advised confidentially of Krom’s reasons for attending and of his professional intentions before he came. He has also left affidavits concerning the Kramer affair with university colleagues.’

I paused and again waited for comment. After a moment he began to whistle softly. According to Baden-Powell, the good Scout smiles and whistles under all difficulties. Mat had given up smiling under difficulties, but the habit, acquired as a boy, of whistling under them he had never lost. The tune was always the same, that of a treacly Victorian ballad entitled ‘Just a Song at Twilight’. He must have picked it up from some homesick Britishers. It sounded very odd coming from Mat’s lips. He says that Baden-Powell himself admitted to having sometimes had trouble over his whistling. Frequent use in public of this antidote to difficulty during the Boer War had given him in some quarters a reputation for eccentricity and callous indifference to the feelings of others.

The whistling stopped. ‘What leverage has he?’

‘He has been working on Symposia, and me, for a long time. He has identified me in the Oberholzer role. He knows other things. He can’t know all and publish it himself
without
naming names, he threatens to leak what he does know to an American or German news magazine
with
names.’

‘All he’s got is hearsay. He’s bluffing. You should have played polo with him, Paul.’

Another Baden-Powell prescription. To play polo with someone in this context is to outmanoeuvre him by edging him away from the direction in which you want to go. The metaphor was first used by B-P, I believe, in his essay on the joys of pig-sticking.

‘It didn’t work, Mat.’

‘You should have double-talked him.’

‘I did. I asked him to define crime. I asked him if he didn’t think that it was largely a fiction created by politicians posing as legislators and legislators pretending that their motives are free from political pollution. Didn’t he agree that ninety-five per cent of so-called crime is committed by governments against, and at the expense of, those citizens in whose names they pretend to govern?’

‘Yes, that’s double-talk all right. What did he say?’

‘That it was double-talk. You have to understand, Mat, that what he really wants now is to satisfy his professional vanity. You read his Berne paper. It amused us. Others, his professional peers, are not in the least amused when their lives’ work is dismissed as irrelevant. In many quarters he’s been attacked as a crank. He now wants us to help him demonstrate that, far from being a crank, he is the great innovator, a Darwin of criminology.’

‘By publishing a casebook
without
naming names? Oh, I know that medical textbooks do it. Patient X and patient Y. The identities don’t matter, not unless the doctor reporting the case is suspected of being a quack seeking to prove an untenable pet theory with invented evidence.’

‘Exactly. In such a case, he either has to produce the patient or qualified witnesses to substantiate his evidence. That’s what Krom proposes to do. He has his witnesses already picked, one American, one English, both qualified persons. We meet in private for a four-day period during which I give them the story of my life. Place of meeting to be of my choosing. Strict security to be observed by all, especially witnesses who will be given only the sketchiest of preliminary briefings, enough to engage their interest and ensure their co-operation, without giving anything substantial away. The text of this briefing will be agreed by Krom and me. All names, places and so on to be changed in order to protect the guilty. That’s what he wants, and in my opinion that’s what he means to get, no matter what it costs.’

He started whistling again, then abruptly stopped. ‘I think you’ve allowed yourself to be conned, Paul. I think you should tell him go jump under a train and that if he makes slanderous or libellous statements about you, or the Institute, or the Symposia Group, we’ll sue them
and
him till the pips squeak. Remind him that, in the circumstances, he will be a source no publisher can protect in the usual way. He’ll have uttered his threats to the plaintiff in advance. He wouldn’t have a hope.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s no good, Mat. I tried all that. I told you, he knows things. One of his juiciest suspicions is that Symposia is hooked into the Placid Island project. He only needs start a rumour to that effect to cause trouble. Do you still think I’m allowing myself to be conned?’

That did it, as I had known it would.

Mat’s cynicism about the Placid Island deal is a pretence; it, always has been, although he would never dream of admitting it. As a boy, he had heard of another phosphate island once called Pleasant, which had re-discovered its aboriginal name of Nauru. As a man, he had seen that same Nauru, whose whole history was so like that of Placid, cast off her old trust-territory shackles, achieve independence from the British Commonwealth and become the Republic of Nauru, with prospects as a tax-haven.

Now it was Placid’s turn. Placid had a better climate than Nauru and better port facilities than Nauru, which lacks a natural harbour. Placid was Mat’s birthplace. With Mat to preside over its fortunes and its future - poor old Chief Tebuke could have a whole floor to himself in the Placid Hilton if he lived long enough - with Mat to provide the inspired leadership that his people so eagerly awaited. Placid was destined to become the most remarkable, the most prosperous sovereign state in the entire South Pacific.

Is Mat an able criminal as defined by Professor Krom? Possibly, but he is certainly no anarchist. What he wants is a kingdom, and if the national flag has not yet been designed - a pandurus leaf on a field of gold? - the banknotes almost certainly have. If sociologists like Krom must paste labels on men and women in order to classify them, I would say that Mat is, as I am, an adventurer; that is, in the old pejorative sense of the term, a healthy and intelligent person who could labour usefully in the vineyard, but who prefers instead to live by his wits.

There was no more whistling from Mat. He stared at me now with cold dislike.

‘What does he know about Placid?’

‘That I went there last November. He knows that Symposia turned down the offer of an interest in Nauru. He knows that Symposia has stopped steering its clients towards the New Hebrides and has something else cooking. He knows that a Placid settlement is imminent because word has got round that our competitors are trying to get a foot in there through Anglo-Anzac’

‘You said that he was frightened of
us.
Did you discuss me?’

I had, in fact, tried hinting at his existence. Why, I had asked Krom, should he assume that in what he called ‘the Symposia conspiracy’
I
was number one? How did he know that I wasn’t just a figurehead, part of an elaborate cover-story designed to protect someone else? My intention had been to shake his confidence a little. All I had succeeded in doing was making him laugh. He
knew
that I was number one, so would I please stop trying to talk my way out of the situation.

I had no intention, however, of telling Mat all that.

‘No, Mat, we didn’t discuss you. Your name wasn’t even mentioned. Obviously, he must know of you, the
eminence grise
of the Placid Island lobby. If he reads the financial papers I mean. That PR outfit Anglo-Anzac have working for them will have seen to that. But as for your personal connection with Symposia, he couldn’t have a clue. If he had, he’d certainly have said so.’

There was a long silence, and then he quite visibly relaxed. ‘So, Paul, you’re the only one who’s been blown so far. It’s not
us
he’s dealing with, but you. And all that he’s looking for is dirt about operators like you and old Carlo Lech. Is that right?’

‘You might have put it a little more delicately, but yes, I suppose that’s about right.’

‘Then you’d better go along with him, hadn’t you? Throw him an old bone or two and hope that he keeps faith, eh?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that his witnesses keep faith. You’re going to have to do rather a lot of trusting, aren’t you, Paul?’

‘That
had
occurred to me. I’m going to have to take out quite a lot of insurance too.’

‘Well, we can afford it. You’ll need team help too. Yves would be your best bet on the technical side, I think. And Melanie I know you like.’

I should have guessed then what was in his mind. Yves, we had both agreed in the past, was a first-rate man; but we had disagreed about Melanie. Although he is sexually double-gated, Mat’s judgements about women are rarely sound. I considered, and still do consider, Melanie to be one of the best cover-builders and analysers there is. She learned her craft with the Gehlen organization and is brilliant. For some reason - perhaps because she is as brilliant at penetrating the most complex covers of others as she is at erecting full-proof lie-structures for her own side - Mat had never trusted her. He suspected her, he said, of being a security risk.

I should have asked him whether he had changed his mind about her, whether he had forgotten that he had told me of his suspicions or whether he was, in his tortuous way, giving me fair warning of what I could expect.

I did not guess, so I did not ask. He would not have answered anyway, but asked who I would like instead of Melanie. There would have been a reminder, too, that once he had delegated responsibility he never interfered. He might also have started quoting Baden-Powell on a Scout’s honour.

Instead, we discussed which old bones could best be used to satisfy Professor Krom’s appetite.

By the time Yves had cleared the visitors’ baggage, the sun was down behind the tamarisks on the headland; and, for the first time since Brussels, I was feeling something like my normal self.

Yves’s first report had made me too angry to think sensibly. It had not been until I had cooled off that I had perceived the obvious: that I had been presented with an opportunity of improving my position; not of escaping completely from the predicament I was in, but of improving my chances of surviving it without suffering permanent damage. I was certainly better off than I had been an hour earlier. How much better off would depend on how skilfully I could manipulate the modified situation.

Mat had spoken of tossing Krom some old bones as if all we had to do was to open some handy closet and dismantle one or two of the skeletons that had been hidden in it. I had gone along with the pretence, and he had let me do so; but we had both known that what Krom would expect and insist on getting was not a bag of old bones but his pound of raw, red flesh. It had also been tacitly understood that the only place from which the stuff could safely be extracted - safely, that is, from Mat’s point of view - was my own personal deep-freeze. As he had so charmingly pointed out, I was the one who was blown, not he.

That Krom might himself somehow make things easier for me, even unintentionally, was a possibility I had not even considered before.

Among the ground rules I had agreed with him in Brussels had been one that gave me the final say on all matters concerned with the security arrangements at our subsequent ‘conference’, and another that laid it down, as a precondition of my giving him any information in the presence of witnesses, that the witnesses would be bound in all respects by the same security restrictions as those he himself had accepted.

I had not needed Mat to tell me that I would have to do an awful lot of trusting. Well, I had trusted and at once I had been let down. Krom’s witnesses had turned out to be about as trustworthy as that legendary Lebanese scorpion. So what about Krom himself? Was it likely,
really
likely, that he, when it came later to publishing my confidences, would prove to be any more reliable? Perhaps, in the end, I would be less seriously injured if I simply called his bluff and told him to do his worst without my willing co-operation.

I could not really do that, of course, out of loyalty to Mat; but Krom could not be sure that I wouldn’t; he might well feel that he would be wise not to drive me too hard.

Anyway, I
now had him in the wrong and would shortly rub his nose in the fact. If he wanted his pieces of raw flesh he was going to have to sit up and beg. That meant that he would get tired sooner and possibly be more easily and uncritically satisfied. If my luck held, I might not have to throw him any of the juicier bits at all.

At least I now had a bargaining position, or thought that I had.

They were in the cool of the drawing-room off the terrace and sitting in a stiff little semi-circle. Melanie, petrified by having to pretend for an hour to be the hostess, was doing her impersonation of a grande-dame. I had warned her when we had worked together before that it made her sound like a retired
poule-de-luxe
hankering after the good old days, especially in her rather peculiar English, but she had convinced herself in the end that I had only been joking. It is odd that someone who can build up with such marvellous ingenuity roles for other persons to play should perform so dismally when called upon to act a little herself.

She was in the middle of an anecdote about Coco Chanel which she had picked up from a women’s magazine. Krom’s eyes were glassy with boredom. Dr Connell was glowering at her. Dr Henson was holding an empty tumbler in cupped hands and staring into it as if it were a crystal ball.

In the doorway I paused and clicked my heels slightly.