Siege at the Villa Lipp (27 page)

He meant that the dining-room wasn’t bugged. ‘Good idea,’ I said and stood up, motioning as I did so to Melanie.

‘Ah, no!’ Krom was levering himself out of his chair. ‘I refuse to be dismissed in this way.’

‘No one’s dismissing you,’ I said; ‘but it’s clearly impossible to talk seriously here.’

When I started to move, he stood in front of me. As I made to go round him, he grabbed me by the arm.

Connell was on his feet instantly, bleating, ‘No, no!’ as if I had been about to hit the old fool.

I said to Melanie: ‘Go ahead. I’ll see you in the dining-room.’ Then, I looked at the hand on my arm as I had looked at it the night before when it had been on Melanie. Like other compulsive arm-grabbers, Krom seemed not quite to realize that his habit could be objectionable. When I had to jerk my arm free, he looked cross, as if I had interrupted a chain of thought, and then wagged a reproving finger.

‘Your statement,’ he repeated, ‘was a lie, and, as you now admit, a pointless one. You
have
admitted that, yes? Very well. We don’t yet know what kind of man you are, but the evidence so far suggests that, although you may not be a criminal psychopath in any of the generally accepted senses of the word, you possess many of the characteristics often attributed to the so-called moral defective. Still, for the present we shall have to be content with an
ad hoc
classification, such as - oh, what shall we say? Variegated delinquent, perhaps?’ His eyes sought the witnesses’ approval. ‘There is, in any case, one thing of which we can now be certain. Our delinquent is an inveterate as well as a resourceful liar.’

I was weary enough to lose patience with him.

‘Where,’ I asked, ‘did you get this extraordinary idea that you have a prescriptive right to be told nothing but the truth? Does it come up through the seat of your academic chair? Or is there some tatty sociological saint who once taught that all who have to submit to your questioning are, by divine decree, automatically on oath? Of course, that must be it. And what happens when the poor souls perjure themselves? Obviously, burning at the stake would be too mild a punishment. Instead, we are slowly and brutally classified! Right, Professor?’

Connell chuckled, but Krom only nodded encouragingly.

‘Slowly and brutally? Yes, I expect you’re right, Mr Firman. And so?’

‘And so, the only time you’ll hear a truth from me is when it happens to suit me better than a lie or when none of the available lies is good enough to stand inspection. Truth games are dangerous, even for children. All I’m playing for is safety; safety for myself and my partners in what you choose to call crime.’

Krom beamed. ‘This candour is
most
refreshing.’ He switched the beam to Connell and Henson. ‘Clearly, this tantrum of Firman’s is a direct response to my diagnostic stimulations. We are making progress. If, as he says, defects in his cover arrangements have come to light, now might be the moment for us to probe his defences in depth.’

Although the witnesses could scarcely have failed to notice that Krom, with his third-person plurals, had suddenly conferred colleague-collaborator status on them, neither gave any sign of having done so. Knowing Krom as they did, they probably recognized that, from him, such courtesies could only be slips of the tongue.

‘I agree,’ said Connell; ‘it’s time we had a look at some of the nuts and bolts of this set-up. If he expects to persuade us that he’s basically incompetent, he’s going to have to produce something more convincing than a hunk of charred plywood.’

‘Bearing in mind,’ said Henson, ‘that, according to Mr Firman, Wicky-Frey is the nuts-and-bolts expert, I would feel that we should concentrate first on her.’ She flashed her appealing smile at Yves. ‘Now, what do
you
think, Mr Boularis?’

She had succeeded with him before; but that had been half an hour ago and he had learned a lot since. He glanced at her casually and then returned to watching the small birds that were hopping about beneath the chairs and feeding on the crumbs from breakfast.

After a moment he said: ‘I
now
think, Madame, that you are
all
full of piss and wind.’

In the silence that followed this further diagnostic stimulation, I left to join Melanie in the dining-room.

I found her sitting wreathed in tobacco smoke, at the head of the long table.

She rarely smoked except after dinner. The ashtray in front of her and the lighted cigarette in her hand were announcements of her need for relief from the intolerable pain of my displeasure. They also warned me that if I were not instantly apologetic and extremely kind to her, she might be driven to commit ritual suicide by inhaling.

As I
had nothing to apologize for, and no intention of being kinder than I felt just then, I made no move to sit down. I have always found it easier to keep my temper and to remain civil when standing.

Besides, my assumption was that, having had ample time in which to review the entire cover operation step by step, Melanie now knew where the leak had occurred, how it had occurred, and who might have had the impertinence to exploit it. Once I knew those things, I expected to be able, having shrugged away surprise and exasperation, to start figuring out ways of capitalizing on my misfortunes. Krom’s description of some of my tactical thinking as ‘octopus ink’ had not been all that fanciful; and yes, even in the dining-room on the morning of that second day, I was still thinking in terms of using the jokers outside the gates to neutralize the jokers within.

Call it the last minute of innocence.

‘Well?’ I asked.

Melanie stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I’ve drawn a blank, Paul. No, let me finish. I’ve been over it all as thoroughly as I know how, and several times, even while that horrible little lesbian was pretending to be nice to me. I’ve nothing to tell you that you don’t already know. Nobody was told except you.
Nobody!
And only the two communications codes were issued.’

‘Why two? What two?’

She sighed patiently. ‘Brussels office has one in their safe for emergency use. Usual safeguards. The other was requested by Mr Yamatoku in London. That was properly authorized. Standard procedure was followed in both cases.’

That was it. I suddenly felt quite peculiar, as if someone had stuffed wool in my ears and started to inflate my head with a foot-pump. Because I knew, almost at once, that if I didn’t sit down I would soon fall down. I gripped the back of the dining-chair nearest to me, eased it around slightly and sat.

Melanie says that I succeeded in making the move look as if I had simply become tired of standing, and that at the time she hadn’t any idea that I was nearly passing out. Most gratifying. In future, though, it may be advisable for me to carry one of those special medical ID cards with multilingual notices on them. I mean notices warning that the bearer has an implanted pace-maker or an allergy to penicillin, or is diabetic, things like that. In my case, the card should read,
Bearer May Refuse To Lie Down When Dead.

‘You say that the issue of this second communications code was properly authorized? What do you mean by that?’ I asked her. ‘Authorized by whom?
I
didn’t authorize it.’

‘It didn’t have to be authorized by you, Paul. Surely you know that? The cypher requesting confirmation was duly received.’

‘You didn’t think to ask me why London had a need to know our communications code for this operation?’

‘Certainly not. Both the request and the response to Brussels’ double-checked conformed strictly to the rules. It was all standard procedure. Why should I have asked you or anyone else? What are such procedures for if not to be acted upon?’

I could see then exactly why Mat had thought her a security risk. He had spotted something that the Gehlen organization had missed. Once a security procedure had been established, she would cease for ever to question any particular use of it. She was insufficiently paranoid.

Our communications code system had been devised originally by Carlo as a means of controlling the courier network when normal routines were interrupted. If, say, a courier had to divert, or be diverted, from his standard movement schedule, the first thing he did when he ceased moving was to call in or cable, via one of the answering services, a sixteen-figure message, dressed up to look like a price-range quotation. Decoded, the figures would give the courier’s cover name, the area of the country in which he was located, and a telephone number at which he could be reached. After Carlo’s death, of course, when the Symposia Group came into being and the old buccaneering ways had long been discarded, we had no need of courier networks or any other sort of covert-operations hanky-panky. If the decision had been left to me, I would have abolished the communications code system. A modern business ought not to need such toys. It had been Mat’s idea that we should keep that particular one.

The reasons he had given for our doing so had looked shrewd as well as sound. The code drill was simple, it had worked well for years, it was cheap to run and, above all, it encouraged personal initiative in our field men. It told them, in effect: ‘Don’t call us - except to leave your number, or tell us that there’s something too big for you to handle on your own - we’ll call you.’ His real reason for retaining the drill was that it enabled him to keep tabs on Brussels, and all those rich Symposia pies he had his fingers in, without anyone but me knowing of the connection. Even upper-echelon personnel like Melanie, who knew that Frank Yamatoku in London was a number-two man to someone, didn’t know that the someone was Mat Williamson.

For Mat, with our communications code and Frank to make the long-distance calls for him, pin-pointing us at the Villa Lipp would have been no trouble at all. If he had been in a hurry and had had access to an Alpes-Maritimes area phone-book with Yellow Pages, the trace job could have been done in an hour.

I now knew, then, who had been responsible for the presence of those objectionable people outside the house. It only remained to find out who they were and what orders they had been given. It says something, I suppose, about the quality of my former relationship with Mat when I record that, faced with an urgent need for answers to what the pit of my stomach told me were life-or-death questions, my first thought was still to ask
him
for them; to ask, moreover, knowing with reasonable certainty that I would receive. The answers wouldn’t be wholly untrue, of course, because Mat has always preferred to deal in ambiguities and half-truths rather than straightforward lies; but I knew that, if I listened carefully and ignored the literal meaning of the words, the kind of background music to make them sound convincing would probably tell me a lot of what I needed to know.

Melanie, still the injured party awaiting a well-earned apology, was studying her nail-polish. I sat back and clicked a thumb and third finger gently until she looked up.

‘Go back outside,’ I said. ‘Tell them I have to make some phone calls. I’ll let you know what’s happening as soon as I know myself.’

She stood up. ‘What about the second file?’

‘We’ll give it to them after lunch, perhaps. Not that it matters now, but the quieter they can be kept the better. I’ll see. On the subject of lunch, we’d better have it in here.’

‘There’s the space beside the swimming pool. That isn’t exposed.’

‘All right.’

‘We can dine there too. It’s a long way from the kitchen but dinner tonight’ll be cold anyway.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s the Quatorze today. The servants want to get finished early and go to the local fête. They asked, I said they could.’

When we occupied it, the Villa Lipp was still on a telephone exchange that hadn’t been fully integrated into the international direct-dialling system. This meant that, although we could be called direct by someone dialling from another country, we ourselves could initiate foreign calls only through an operator. You needed patience to keep dialling until one answered.

In that large house there were only three telephones: one in the entrance hall with an extension in the main bedroom, and, also in that bedroom, the one I was occupying, a phone on a second line with no extensions. I used this second one, having checked it for obvious bugs before doing so. There would have been no point in my calling Mat’s London hotel. Even if he had been in and available, he wouldn’t have taken an international call through the hotel switchboard. It took me twenty minutes to get through to the London cut-out.

The man on duty spoke very slowly and distinctly as if he distrusted the telephone and would have been happier with a short-wave radio. This was normal. Mat likes using radio hams as cut-outs, and does so in a number of countries; partly because hams are accustomed to staying awake at all hours and partly because some of them can be prevailed upon, in an emergency and for no longer than the few seconds needed to send a high-speed message track, to operate their transmitters illegally. Mostly, he chooses elderly men with pensions to supplement and a mild taste for conspiracy. If they are former Boy Scouts, so much the better.

I gave the number of the phone I was using along with my cover name and said that the matter was urgent. It would be thirty minutes, I was told, before I was called back.

I
had fitted induction stickers to both phones, and it was just as well that I’d done so because the return call came through on the other line.

It wasn’t Mat, though, but Frank Yamatoku.

‘Hi, Paul,’ he said, ‘still in the same place after all. Is that right? When you gave the other number, we thought you might have moved without telling us.’

‘And upset your planning?’

‘Oh, we knew you hadn’t done that.’

‘You did?’

‘Sure. We’d have had complaints if you hadn’t been in the target area. What’s that other number? A second line we didn’t know about?’

I’d already had enough of him. ‘It’s been great hearing your voice, Frank, but it was my old friend I called and my old friend I want to talk to. Is he there?’

‘Not right now, Paul. Later maybe. Meanwhile, I have messages. We’ve been expecting this call for hours, you see. Since last night. Why the delay? We were getting worried. What kept you?’