The Intercom Conspiracy (11 page)

‘But why? And who could they be?’

‘That’s what I’ve been trying to figure.’ He got up and retrieved his drink from the side table. ‘I’ve got this far. Someone wants to know where I live. I’m not in the phone directory at this address, so I’m followed when I leave the office. When I lock my car and enter this building they wait a few minutes outside, then one of them comes across and checks the names on the mailboxes. Mission accomplished, they leave.’ He downed the drink. ‘Who
are they? What do they want? I haven’t a clue. It can’t be the police or anyone connected with them. I’m registered at the Bureau des Etrangers. The police know where I live and all about me.’ He pushed his empty glass across. ‘Freshen it up for me, will you, Val?’

‘All right.’ He was obviously very tired and I always tried to get him to go to bed early when he’d been working late. In the ordinary way I would have cleared the table then, washed the dishes, said good night and gone to my room. He usually went to his own soon after. But that night I didn’t think he would. When he had things on his mind he was more likely to stay up and go on drinking.

I, too, had things on my mind.

I poured another drink and took it over to him. ‘Who is Comrade Skriabin?’ I asked.

That was when he told me about the
SESAME
bulletins.

I had always hated
Intercom
. Writing that poisonous nonsense week after week, month in, month out, did something to my father. Oh, I know he didn’t believe a word of what he wrote and that it was all done tongue in cheek. That was the way he excused it to himself. He would sometimes argue, too, that what he was doing for that old horror Novak was no worse than playing Tartuffe for an audience of half-wits; but he never argued it with much conviction, not with me at any rate. The truth was that for him
Intercom
became a way of thumbing his nose at the world, and in the end he grew to enjoy it, but at the expense of his self-respect.

I was glad when the General died and it looked as though
Intercom
was finished. Naturally, I realised that my father might have a hard time finding another job. That was why I suggested the translation-bureau idea. I was sure that it could be made to work, and at least he would be his own master. It wasn’t journalism, of course; but then neither was
Intercom
unless you were prepared to give the word a new degraded meaning. When he told me about this man in Munich who was prepared to buy
Intercom
and wanted it to go on as before, I felt sick.

But not as sick as I felt when he told me about the
SESAME
bulletins on the night he was followed. I had known from the first that, in their dealings with this Arnold Bloch person, Dr Bruchner and my father had been guided by little more than wishful thinking. What I had
not
realised until then was that they really knew absolutely nothing about the man.

I didn’t sleep well that night. Next day I took a copy of the Skriabin bulletin with me to the university library and did some work on it.

The first thing to establish, it seemed to me, was the merit, or lack of it, of the technical description of the seismograph. If it consisted of serious, original information, then N. V. Skriabin was certainly in trouble; if, on the other hand, it was merely a pageful of pretentious rubbish, then the ‘hiatchet job,’ as my father called it, wasn’t going to do much damage to anyone.

I found out that ‘variable reluctance’ was a magnetic phenomenon and that it had indeed been applied in the design of some types of seismographs or seismometers. Such designs were associated mainly with the name of an American seismologist, H. Benioff, and variable-reluctance instruments were widely used. They were not, however, normally regarded as portable. Their weight was usually in the region of two hundred kilograms. Since the instrument described in the bulletin had a weight of only seventy kilograms, and since the method used to achieve this reduction in weight was specified in detail, I concluded that the technical material could well be genuine. I was able to check up, too, on the Russian geophysicist who had been credited with the design. He was certainly genuine and highly respected.

With N. V. Skriabin I had more difficulty. There was nothing in the seismological literature about him.

That didn’t surprise me. A member of a Soviet trade mission might well have technical knowledge, but he was unlikely to be a scientist of the kind whose name appears in the indices of scientific journals. He was clearly a specialist of some kind; but the Soviet government doesn’t publish lists of their departmental personnel as freely as some other countries, and such lists as are
available generally cover only the senior bureaucrats. I couldn’t find him in any of the lists we had. As I didn’t know what his speciality was – it could have been anything from herring fishery to machine tools – I knew that I would get no further on my own. If I wanted a lead I would have to go to a diplomatic source. In the end I called up a friend in the library of the UN European office at the Palais des Nations and told him a lie. I told him that we had had an inquiry from a foreign consulate-general about N. V. Skriabin of the Soviet trade mission in Oslo and asked if he could help me.

‘That’s funny,’ he said; ‘we had an inquiry here about that man a few days ago. Ours wasn’t from a consulate-general, though, it was from the counsellor of a foreign embassy in Bern. Who is the consul-general?’

This man in the UN library was, I say, a friend. In fact we’d been students together and one year he’d taken me to concerts. It had been one of those things for a while. Then we had found that we were in basic disagreement – about Bartók or sex, I can’t remember which now – and had called it off. We were still on good terms, though, and I very nearly told him the truth; but then I thought that I had better not.

‘It was a confidential inquiry,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘Well, so was ours, but I suppose there’s no harm in my telling you how we replied. I can remember most of it, I think. Skriabin, Nikolay Viktorovich, is fifty-eight and a graduate of the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature. He joined the Party in thirty-two and later entered the Soviet diplomatic service. During the Hitler war he served in the army. Security duties of some kind. He has one order of Lenin, two orders of the Red Banner and one order of Survorov, second class. Something like that anyway. I may have got the numbers wrong. In recent years he has served, diplomatic service again, in Stockholm, the Hague, Brussels and Copenhagen. His highest diplomatic rank has been that of First Secretary. His appointment to the Oslo trade mission was made last year. Doesn’t sound as if he’s done very well lately, does it?’

‘No.’

‘In fact with a record like that it’s highly probable that he is no longer a diplomat and hasn’t been one for years. The informed guess here is that he is an officer of the Foreign Directorate of the Soviet Committee of State Security, otherwise known as the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti, or KGB, and that this trade-mission appointment is just another cover. Judging from the decorations he has, his rank is probably equivalent to that of colonel. He’d be quite an important person, a resident director most likely.’

‘Oh.’

‘I wouldn’t pass the KGB thought on to your consulate-general. Better let them work that one out for themselves.’

‘Yes. Thank you. I’m grateful to you.’

He asked me to have dinner later that week, and to get rid of him I agreed. I forgot about the dinner date, I’m afraid, because so many other things had begun happening by then. At the time, though, I just wanted to think about what he had told me.

You see, Mr Latimer, it was all very confusing – confusing to me anyway. I had been sure from the start that my father had the wrong idea. He had decided that this man Skriabin was some poor, wretched underling who had been cajoled by Bloch into selling technical secrets and that Bloch, having got the secrets, had chosen to betray him through
Intercom
rather than pay him off. I couldn’t see that. I mean, if you’re getting technical or trade secrets from someone, secrets you hope to make money out of, you might cheat the person you got them from by informing on him to his employers, but you wouldn’t publish the secrets as well. That would be silly. Now that I knew that Skriabin wasn’t a poor, wretched underling, things were even sillier. If you’re Bloch the double-crossing promoter, you don’t publish information of value to your competitors; and if you’re Bloch the proud new owner of anti-communist
Intercom
, you certainly don’t publish the name of a potential KGB defector so that the Russians can whisk him back to the Soviet Union before he gets away. So none of it made sense.

I couldn’t make up my mind whether to tell my father what I had found out about N. V. Skriabin or not. I decided to wait and see what kind of a mood he was in.

The private researches I had been doing that day had put me behind with my normal work in the library, so I was late home. When I got there I found that we had guests. I saw their overcoats and hats lying on a chair in the hall when I opened the outer door.

I didn’t go in immediately. It was rare for us to have unexpected guests – the Swiss prefer to order their social lives with a certain formality – so I concluded that these were foreigners. The overcoats and hats had no apparent nationality and the murmur of voices from the living room was indistinct, but there was an attaché case beside the coats that looked American, and one of those soft leather carrying bags that professional photographers use for their cameras. Both case and bag had Air France cabin baggage tags on the handles. Americans from Paris perhaps.

I had had a tiring day. I hoped to God that my father, inclined over drinks to become too hospitable, wouldn’t invite them to stay to dinner. I went to my room and ran a comb through my hair before presenting myself.

One of them was tall, the other short. The short man was doing the talking when I went in.

‘But isn’t all this hard-line stuff a bit old hat these days?’ he was saying. ‘I mean …’

Then he saw me, broke off and got to his feet.

He was a plump, hair-receding forty with a round fleshy face, an Edgar Allan Poe moustache and heavily lidded eyes. His complexion was what my father would call flounder-belly beige. He wore a dark business suit and a Charvet tie the colour of Squashed beetroot. He cocked his head slightly and gave me a toothy smile.

When my father turned towards me I saw that he had his suppressed white-rage look. That was some comfort, I knew at once that these particular guests would not be asked to stay to dinner. On the other hand, he was quite capable of plying them with more drinks simply in order to keep them there until he
had decided which would be the most wounding method of insulting them.

He made a ceremony of the introductions.

‘Ah, Val dear –’ he kissed me lightly on the cheek, a thing he never does when we are alone – ‘this is Mr Goodman. His accomplice in crime, there –’ he pointed his glass at the tall man gangling awkwardly by the sofa – ‘is Mr Rich. Gentlemen, my daughter Valerie.’

I received an ‘
Enchanté, Mademoiselle
’ from Mr Goodman and a baritone ‘Miss Carter’ from the accomplice.

I said, ‘Good evening.’

‘Mr Goodman and Mr Rich are Americans,’ my father went on, ‘and they have come all the way from the Paris bureau of
World Reporter
magazine. They are making a study – I beg their pardon, an In-Depth Study –’ his tone supplied derisory capitals – ‘of the international personalised intelligence services. And they actually believe that I may be able to help them. So they are interviewing me. Or rather Mr Goodman is interviewing me, while Mr Rich, the photographer of the party, fingers his camera hopefully and looks for openings. Isn’t that exciting, my dear?’

He made it sound as if they were assaulting him.

‘Very exciting,’ I said. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

‘No, no, Val.’ He pressed me into a chair. ‘I’d like you to stay. Mr Rich would, too, I can see. You are so much prettier to look at than I am, and he is after all a photographer, an artist. Eh, Mr Rich? As for Mr Goodman, I’m sure he won’t mind an addition to his audience.’

‘Delighted,’ said Mr Goodman.

‘Yes.’ My father gave him a grim smile. ‘Mr Goodman plumbing the depths of his subject is really worth listening to. As long, that is, as you remember that depth is a relative term and that our Mr Goodman takes his soundings with nothing longer than a chewed toothpick.’ He spat out the last two words quite venomously.

Mr Goodman chuckled and glanced at Mr Rich. ‘See what I mean?’ he said. ‘I told you. There’s no mistaking Theo Carter’s
style. Trenchant, hard-hitting, with club in one hand and rapier in the other – pure
Intercom
. He writes it all. Always has done. Every word. Isn’t that right, Miss Carter?’

‘I thought that it was my father you were interviewing.’ I went across to the Side table and poured myself a glass of Dézaley.

He ignored me from then on.

‘How about it, Theo? The whole letter is your work, right?’

‘I edit it, yes.’

‘That wasn’t quite what I asked, but never mind. Let’s go back to the General for a moment. Did he okay every story that went in?’

‘Of course not. There was an editorial policy. I carried that policy out, applied it. I still do.’

‘I want to come to that. Just let’s get just this thing clear. The policy was always hard-line anti-communist. Right?’

‘Right’

‘And hard-line anti-Administration, too, eh?’

‘You know the General’s history as well as I do.’

‘Anti-Administration, is that your answer?’

‘Yes.’

‘But never anti-American?’

‘You asked me that before. You’re repeating yourself, Mr Goodman.’

‘Tell me again, Theo.’

I had thought at first that what had so annoyed my father was Mr Goodman’s calling him ‘Theo’; now I saw that there was more to it than that; there was Mr Goodman’s hectoring manner. This was not just a journalist conducting an interview; this was an interrogator with a suspect, an inquisitor seeking out heresy.