The Intercom Conspiracy (7 page)

Not much, as I say, but enough for the General. Repetition of the word ‘international’ always stirred him up. Once his eagle eye had noted that the author of the discussion paper was Professor L. Krastanov of Bulgaria and that the working group included not only Krastanov but also V. T. Nilandrov of the Soviet Union, he was off and running. The fact that the group also included professors from Arizona, India and Japan was brushed
aside with the instruction that we should run checks on their personal histories and political backgrounds. By nine o’clock that night the General was all set to expose yet another communist plot to destroy the free world, this time by changing its climate and lousing up its weather, so that all those rich farmlands – heartlands’, he called them – would be turned into dust bowls and deserts.

Go easy on the water this time, Val.

It was about then that he complained of indigestion. Shortly afterwards he went to the bathroom and threw up. He came out looking very bad and said that something was squeezing his chest. He was obviously in pain and said that he had been poisoned. I made him lie down in the bedroom, then rang down to the concierge and told him to call the hotel doctor. I was thinking that he might have a duodenal ulcer that was acting up.

The General was well known at that hotel and the doctor came promptly. He diagnosed a heart attack and called for an ambulance. By nine-thirty that evening the General was in a
polyclinique
bed wearing an oxygen mask. According to the hospital doctor I spoke to, his condition was critical.

‘How critical?’ I asked.

Doctors hate questions like that. ‘It is too early to say yet,’ he said, ‘but serious damage has been done. It would be wise perhaps to notify his relatives.’

That put me in a quandary. I told him, ‘The only relative I know of, Doctor, is a daughter in America. I’ll cable her, naturally, but I can’t just tell her he’s had a heart attack and leave it at that. Maybe I can telephone her. But what do I say? Should she get on the first plane out or what?’

He hesitated before he answered. ‘We will know more later, in an hour or two perhaps when his condition is stabilised. I suggest you wait or, better, come back later.’

I told him I would come back later.

I had travelled in the ambulance to the hospital, so my car was still parked back at the hotel. If I’d had it with me I might have gone home for a while. As it was, I walked back to the hotel,
got the car, drove back to the hospital, parked and went into a bar to wait.

I did have quite a few brandies there, I don’t mind admitting it. I had them because I needed them.

In my trade you learn to listen not just to what people say, but also to how they are saying it – the music as well as the words, so to speak. Doctors are not always as good at covering up as they think. I’d already guessed that the General’s chances of lasting the night were not much better than evens. Which meant, in turn, that my chances of being out of a job in the near future were not much better than evens.

‘Colonel Brand’, as you call him, was quite right when he said that
Intercom
didn’t show a profit. Not many of these newsletter-type ‘personalised intelligence services’ do – not directly, that is. Most of them are in business for reasons other than the ostensible one of giving inside information. All kinds of reasons: to make enemies and influence people, to smear political opponents – try suing a newsletter – to rig stock prices, to plant misinformation from a paper mill – all kinds: rational, irrational, sinister and plain stupid. But, when the reason goes, the newsletter usually goes with it.

In the case of
Intercom
the reason was that the General wanted to bug the people who had made him resign from the Army and, at the same time, jack up his lecture-tour fees by publicising himself as the great anti-communist Free World crusader. My guess was, then, that if the General were to die,
Intercom
would not long survive him. I didn’t see the foundation taking over. The General had always kept them well out of the Geneva picture. They didn’t even know that I ghosted the whole thing for him; they had started off believing that he wrote it all himself and he had let them go on believing that he did. Even if I could have set them straight on that score, I doubted if they would have been interested in keeping
me
on. One of those old oil-money weirdos had once turned up in Geneva on a European tour, and in an expansive moment I had told him that the name Interform Foundation sounded to me like an ad for women’s girdles. It
hadn’t gone down well and word had been passed on to the other weirdos. Back at the foundation I was bad news.

So I sat in the bar near the hospital, contemplating my uncertain future and drinking brandy.

I returned to the hospital just before midnight. In case I had to wait about there, I took along a couple of nip-size bottles with me.

It was two o’clock in the morning when a nurse came to me in the waiting room and asked me to go with her to the administration office. There, the doctor I had seen earlier told me that the General had died.

There was another, younger white-smock in the office, too, and a man in civilian clothes whom I took to be a hospital official. All three of them were looking very formal and starchy. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why. After all, when a death in a hospital emergency ward is announced, you don’t expect a lot of merry smiles and back-slapping. I was feeling lousy, of course, but I tried to be businesslike.

‘I will cable the news to his daughter immediately,’ I said. ‘She will have to be consulted about the funeral arrangements, too. I will also notify his lawyer. As the General was a United States citizen, an American consul should probably be told, too. The nearest one’s in Bern, I think. I don’t know if you do that or whether you want me to. I can, of course. In the meantime …’

I ran out of gas for a moment there. What I had really been getting round to asking him was whether he could just hold everything until someone who knew what you did in Geneva with the bodies of retired American brigadier-generals could take over; but he didn’t give me a chance to finish.

‘In the meantime, Monsieur,’ he said stiffly, ‘there has been a question raised as to the cause of death.’

‘A question? I thought you said he had a heart attack.’

‘An acute myocardial infarction. Yes, that was our diagnosis.’

‘Well, then, who’s questioned it?’

‘The deceased questioned it himself. Twice.’ He looked at the other white-smock for confirmation and got a nod. ‘He was under
sedation, of course, but during the periods of consciousness perfectly lucid. He twice stated that someone had poisoned him.’

That was the moment when I should have mentioned the indigestion he’d complained of after dinner, suggested diffidently that what the General had obviously been talking about was
food
poisoning, and thereafter kept my mouth shut.

I did none of these things; and I didn’t do them (a) because I was upset, (b) because I disliked the doctor’s manner, (c) because I was a mite loaded and (d) because I was curious. I wanted to know who it was that the General
in extremis
had fingered as the bad guy. My money was on the World Meteorological Organisation.

So I thought I’d ask. ‘Did he accuse anyone in particular?’

He gave me a beady look. ‘You do not seem surprised that he should make such statements.’

‘Why should I be surprised?’ I said. ‘He’d already made that statement about being poisoned twice before we got here, once after he’d been taken ill and then later in the ambulance.’

That did it. He stiffened up as if I had goosed him. ‘Why did you not report this when the patient was received here?’

‘Because he obviously didn’t know what he was talking about. The hotel doctor had diagnosed a heart attack. Why should I question it? What is all this nonsense?’

He didn’t like that. ‘This nonsense, as you call it, is a serious matter, Monsieur. You must realise that it will now be necessary for us to perform an autopsy.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ I had had no great sentimental regard for the General, but the idea of his being disembowelled merely in order to clear up an idiotic misunderstanding was too much. I said so in no uncertain terms. I dare say I wasn’t very polite.

The doctor bridled. ‘In cases where doubts have been raised as to the cause of a sudden death,’ he said loudly, ‘we have no choice. An autopsy becomes mandatory and we are required to inform the police.’

‘Even when the doubts are irrational?’

‘Who can say at this moment whether they are irrational or
not?’ The man in the civilian suit had chipped in now. He was fortyish, thin, with a narrow head and fish-blue eyes.

‘This,’ said the doctor grimly, ‘is Monsieur Vauban of the judiciary police.’

If I had had the sense then to keep quiet and let things take their course, I might, even at that late stage, have emerged as a fairly okay character – tetchy and lacking in tact, perhaps, but basically sane and accountable. But I was too exasperated to keep quiet. I had an irresistible urge to explain to those fatheads what had made the General tick.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I know it’s difficult for people like you to understand anything outside your own immediate experience, but I’ll try and spell it out for you.
Nil nisi bonum
and all that, but the General was, to put it mildly, a bit eccentric. He subscribed to the conspiratorial theory of history, if you know what that is –
all
history, including his own. If you want to be medical about it you might say that his attitude was consistently paranoid. I’ll ask you a question. When there’s a flu epidemic, do you start suspecting the Russians of waging biological warfare? No? Well, he did. Has it ever occurred to you that the current attempts to develop electric and steam-driven automobiles are all part of an international plot to destroy the capitalist system? No? Well, the General could make out a very good case for it. He had not one bee in his bonnet, but hundreds. If he were here now, do you know what he’d be saying? I’ll tell you. He’d say that there had been a plot to murder him and that it had triumphantly succeeded.’

There was a dead silence. The policeman looked at me as if I’d been pleading guilty to indecent exposure. Obviously, he wasn’t receiving the message I was trying to send, or else misunderstanding it. I tried again, using an analogy that I thought might get through to him.

‘Don’t you see what I mean? Common sense suggests that the murder was an inside job and that the killers were high blood pressure, cholesterol, hypertension and so on. A mundane theory, I’m afraid. The General wouldn’t have given it the time of day. How can it have been an inside job when there are all those
cunning devils creeping about
outside
, plotting, planning, with phials of little-known poisons in their pockets along with their CP membership cards? And who did these fiends want to destroy most? Who else but their arch-enemy, that great Free World crusader for truth, your friend and mine, Luther B. Novak? That’s how his mind worked. You see?’

From the blank stares it was clear that they did not see. It took me a few moments to realise that, without thinking, I had at some point switched from French to English. I back-tracked and started to give them the last bit again in French, but the policeman stopped me.

‘Please, Monsieur. You are wasting time – your own, mine, and certainly the hospital’s. I believe that you were with the deceased continually from the time he arrived in Geneva until he was taken ill.’

‘I was.’

‘Then I would have thought that, in view of the allegations of poisoning that have been made, you would certainly not oppose an autopsy and might even welcome it.’

I could have hit him. ‘Are you saying now that
I
am a suspect?’

‘Until the results of the autopsy are known, the question of suspicion does not arise.’ He smiled unpleasantly. ‘However, I note that your late employer was not alone in his eccentricity.’

That got a short laugh from the doctor. I turned to go. By that time I no longer cared what they did with the General. I just wanted to get out of that place.

‘One moment, Monsieur.’ It was the policeman again. ‘Your papers, please.’

I gave him my residence permit. He thumbed the pages slowly. He didn’t take notes, but he was obviously memorising. He handed it back reluctantly as if disappointed that there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with it. His nod of dismissal was reluctant too. He wouldn’t forget about me. In Monsieur Vauban’s book I was trouble.

It was Dr Bruchner, the General’s lawyer in Bâle, who told me the result of the autopsy.

The General had died of ‘congestive heart failure following acute myocardial infarction due to coronary occlusion’. A death certificate was issued by the hospital, and a few hours later the body was flown to America for burial. A man from the American consulate was there when Dr Bruchner and I saw the coffin off at the freight department of the airport.

Before he returned to Bâle, Dr Bruchner told me that he was in touch with the General’s executors in America and that until he heard further from them I was to carry on. He knew, of course, that I had always written the
Intercom
newsletter practically singlehanded; but he also knew, as I did, that without the General’s name on the thing, it wouldn’t amount to much. We agreed on a formula to cover the new situation. In place of the General’s signature there would be the words:
From
INTERCOM
World Intelligence Network
, Novak Editorial Unit, Geneva. In the obituary I was to do on the General I would try to sell the idea that, although
he
might be dead, the network he had founded was still very much alive, and that
Intercom
would continue to bear aloft the torch of freedom. Dr Bruchner didn’t actually advise me in so many words to start looking for another job, but his kindly smile as he told me to use my own judgment and do the best I could had much the same effect.

Two weeks Went by. Then I had a letter from Dr Bruchner saying that the American executors had decided to sell out. They had also stated that, as the General had thought so highly of me, an offer from me personally for the shares would receive specially sympathetic consideration.