Siege at the Villa Lipp (29 page)

Of course, neither Yves nor Melanie believed a word of that soap-opera version of the facts; but they accepted its essential element. It was more than likely that I should have former victims gunning for me. But gunning for me with what?

How real was the threat implicit in Yamatoku’s reference to the possibility of K, T and V’s merry men ‘overstepping the mark’? Was such sinister moustache-twirling to be taken seriously?

I told them that, when dealing with Mat Williamson, everything ought to be taken seriously, but nothing at its face value. However, for the purpose of our council of war, a few assumptions could safely be made.

Among those old acquaintances of mine with reasons for disliking me, K, T and V had been chosen not for their ability to exercise restraint where I was concerned - it was known that K and T had once threatened to kill me - but because, in spite of earlier misfortunes, they were wealthy enough as well as crazy enough to pay a team of professional hard men to carry out orders of which Mat approved. When implementing any policy of his involving even a modest cash outlay, Mat always arranged for someone else to foot the bill. He had known of K, T and V because their dossiers had figured in the inventory of Carlo’s consultancy accounts which I had inherited; dossiers that I had later transferred to Mat as part of our overall deal.

Yes, Mr Yamatoku’s hostility was plainly audible. Unfortunately, the idea, comforting though it might have been, that Frank had merely been indulging his personal dislike of me must be put aside. No doubt he had enjoyed giving me his bad news; but he hadn’t invented it. He would certainly have taped our conversation, as I had, but
his
tape would have to be played back to Mat. With that hypercritical audience in mind, an audience prepared to evaluate every intonation, Frank Yamatoku wouldn’t have dared to depart from the brief he had been given.

In my own mind the conviction was growing that Frank had a well-prepared, all-eventuality script in front of him when he had been talking to me; but I wasn’t quite ready then to start explaining, or trying to explain, Mat Williamson to anyone except myself.

There was something else I had to be sure of first.

Meanwhile, I thought, it might be advisable to get Melanie on my side again.

‘You were right,’ I told her; ‘I ought to have reviewed the standard security procedures before committing them to your care. I apologize. But now, I think, it’s time we started formulating decisions.’

‘Decisions on whether or not you take his friendly advice, Patron?’ Yves had hooked up the small tape-deck to the bugging amplifier and had been replaying my conversation with Frank through the earphones. He flipped a switch. ‘What does this bit mean?’

Frank’s voice came through the monitor speaker.
‘He’s still fond of you, in spite of everything, and he still wants to protect you if you’ll let him.’

Yves switched off. ‘In spite of
everything,
Patron? What is this everything?’

‘He means that he forgives me the inconvenience I have caused him by allowing myself to be seen years ago by a Dutch criminologist in a Swiss crematorium.’

‘I am being serious, Patron.’

‘I wasn’t joking. That’s simply Mat Williamson’s way of informing me that I am what you call ditched.’

‘And
this?’
He had wound the tape on. ‘What does this mean?’

Frank’s voice again.
‘That’s only advice, mind. He still has too much respect for you as his old bossman, Paul, to presume to tell you. He’s only asking you to accept a piece of friendly advice.’

‘That was put in,’ I said, ‘with the idea of making it difficult for me to play the tape to Krom. Frank’s idea, probably. I’d say Mat let it go through to humour him. He himself wouldn’t have bothered. He knows I’ll let Krom hear the tape.’

Melanie almost squealed her protest. ‘And give him one more excuse to call you a liar? While you were upstairs with Yves, they were talking about you as if I had not been there. You have not convinced them of anything that we hoped and planned for them to believe. Do you know what Dr Connell calls you? “Mr Kingpin”, that is what! Paul, you will never succeed now with Krom and these others. You have cut off your own nose with your denials of truth and spit in your own face. You have boasted of your amorality, that everything you say is a lie, and they are virtuously ready to believe that there, at least, you tell the truth. They have made up their minds, and nothing you can now do will change them.’

In an effort to keep my temper, I corrected her before answering. ‘You cut off your own nose to
spite
your face, not spit in it, Melanie,’ I paused to swallow a bit more anger. ‘The situation’s completely different now. Can’t you see it? Hasn’t the penny dropped?’

Yves gave her no chance to reply. He was having trouble with a different anxiety. ‘You haven’t yet answered the question I asked you, Paul. Do you or do you not take this friendly advice of Mr Williamson? Oh yes, the situation is a little different now, but there is still only one way out of it. Those bastards outside were not put there just to make you call London. We’re being set up for a kill, I feel it.’

‘You may be right.’

‘Well then, Paul, let’s do what I said. Let’s forget about the guests. This was their idea anyway, and they don’t matter now. We should think of ourselves. No consultation. No argument. We choose the right moment, we take the rental car, we head for the safe-house and then stay there until this place has been disinfected by paid bastards of your own.’

I tried to say what had to be said. ‘It doesn’t work, Yves. There’s no right moment for us to choose. For one thing, it’s too easy for them around here, too easy to stage an accident. You know? One of those accidents in which all the occupants of a small car are killed when it runs off the road on the corniche? It’s happening every day for real. No one would even notice.’

He slapped his right elbow with the palm of his left hand, and then stabbed a forefinger at me. ‘Paul, I give you a guarantee! If
I
am driving, anyone who tries to run us off the road -
anyone,
even if he is an Italian kidnap driver - will kill himself before he can scratch our paintwork. That little buzz-box is not heavy, but she steers well and on these roads that is good enough. Good enough, with me driving, to get us away from this fly-trap, free and clear to the safe-house. Paul, I
guarantee
it!’

I
glanced at Melanie.

She shrugged sullenly.

My eyes went back to Yves. He thought I was still trying to make up my mind and out came the forefinger again, moving stiffly from side to side this time, to dispel lingering doubt.

‘You think I can’t do it, eh?’

I said: ‘Our cut-out point was the hotel in Turin. Remember?’

‘What of it?’

He hadn’t even begun to understand. It was possible that his mind was still doing immaculate skid turns on the hairpin bends of the corniche while the opposition cartwheeled down the hillside in flames. A good technician, Yves, but unreliably romantic. There was nothing left to do but speak plainly.

‘Yves,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, but this fly-trap
is
the safe-house.’

His look of anguish was of the predictable kind and I didn’t waste time consoling him. I knew at this point where the score stood. I also knew, more or less, what I would have to do to change it.

‘A remarkable man,’ Krom said, ‘remarkable by any standards.’

He knew, or thought he knew, all about Mat Williamson and had instructed his witnesses on the subject. He had never heard of Frank though. I spelled Yamatoku for him. They wrote it down, and then we all went into the dining-room.

I played the tape through twice. During the second playback both Krom and the witnesses took notes. Finally, Krom sat back and looked questioningly at Henson.

‘Any comments, my dear?’

She stubbed out a cigarette. ‘Only obvious ones, I’m afraid. A shadowy figure named Vic has been added to the supporting cast headed by Kleister and Torten. I shan’t be at all surprised if we find this Vic popping up again, wearing a devil’s suit and a smell of brimstone next time, in a later discussion paper.’

‘A note of scepticism is sounded.’ He nodded sympathetically and looked at Connell.

‘I had that very same thought, Professor. And one or two others.’ Connell consulted his notes. ‘This Mr Yamatoku, for instance. His speech sounds American - could be from my own home state - and I’m sure we’ll find when we check it out that the Placid Island banker, Williamson, has a Nisei accountant of that name on his staff. But that still leaves us with the question of provenance. In this Frank-and-Paul show we’ve been listening to, is the Frank character the real Yamatoku or is he some bit player hired by the old bossman here to read lines? I am assuming, by the way, that the lines contain hidden meanings that are going to be revealed to us later. To give one example, there is an allusion to the game of polo which at present makes no sense at all.’

‘More scepticism, I fear, Mr Firman.’

No cackling now, no raucous sarcasms. Something had happened to Krom while we had been away. My guess was that the witnesses, impressed by Yves’s outburst on the terrace earlier, had ganged up on their leader and persuaded him that he would get more out of us if he made less noise himself.

Henson was pretending coyly to have had a sudden inspiration. ‘I wonder now! Wait a minute! If Mr Firman could telephone London and have his call returned promptly like that, surely we could do the same. Naturally, we couldn’t be certain that the Mr Yamatoku we were talking to - have I got the name right? - was the genuine article, but we ought to be able to test the actor theory. Only a very good one could improvise in that turgid neo-revivalist manner.’

‘I thought one of you experts might have noticed that the call was a local one,’ I said. ‘Would you explain to them, Yves?’

Yves explained.

They listened quietly and attentively in a way that I didn’t like. Krom’s natural rudeness and the witnesses’ sycophancy had been infuriating, and probably bad for my blood pressure, but they had their psychological uses. They had enabled me, for one thing, to view the prospect of him and his witnesses dying violent deaths in the near future with only a token regret. So, I had been left reasonably free to concentrate on avoiding the same fate. The new politeness was not only disconcerting, and thus destructive, but also insidiously depressing. It would have to be countered. As Yves began going into detail, I cut him short.

‘You’re quite right, of course, Dr Henson,’ I said; ‘talking to Mr Yamatoku, even if you could, wouldn’t help you all that much. Besides, my object in asking you to listen to that highly compromising conversation wasn’t to prove anything to any of you. It was to save myself trouble. If you’ll just accept for a moment that the man to whom I’m speaking on that tape is Yamatoku and that the “our friend” he’s referring to is his employer Mat Williamson, I’ll try to explain to you what’s happened to change things here without wasting any more time. Agreed?’

Connell talked across me to Krom. ‘You have to hand it to our host, Professor. He gives that Number-Two status claim of his everything he’s got. He really
does
try harder. Secret watchers and bombs in the night didn’t work, so now it’s threatening calls from sinister Orientals and sudden cracks of hypothetical whips - all great stuff. But it does make you wonder, I find, about the kind of therapy he’s been in, and the quality of it too. Some of these cruelty-is-kinder organismic groups we’re seeing around nowadays can do the mind permanent damage.’

Krom squirmed with the agony of keeping a straight face, and then showed me his teeth as if they had all suddenly begun to hurt him. ‘You must see our difficulty, Mr Firman.

If we do not take you as seriously as you would wish, you have only yourself to blame.’

‘That’s quite all right,’ I said evenly; ‘I’m glad that you’re in such high spirits. They may help to make the news I have to give you more palatable.’

‘The whip-cracks I could forgive,’ remarked Henson; ‘it’s the false bonhomie that
I
found tedious.’

Krom covered an involuntary snicker by clucking in mock disapproval. ‘With Mr Firman working so ingeniously to avoid keeping our agreement, we should be applauding him rather than poking fun. You must be good, my children,
please!’

Yves stirred and I guessed that he was about to say something obscene enough to disgust even the ‘children’. He had my sympathy, but I didn’t need his support and snapped my fingers to let him know it. At the same moment, I stood up as if about to leave and then stopped where Krom would be forced to lean back awkwardly if he wanted to see my face.

‘I spoke, when I asked you to listen to that tape, of re-negotiating our agreement,’ I said. ‘Clearly, I was being over tactful. Perhaps it will help you to contain your amusement, Professor, if I tell you that we no longer
have
an agreement. The one made in Brussels is now completely null and void. What we can still discuss, if you wish, is what remains of your ability to blackmail me, and what is left of my ability to give you protection.’

‘Protection from what?’

‘The consequences of threatening Mathew Williamson. He’s not as tolerant of common blackmailers as I am.’

‘I’ve heard of your Mr Williamson, as I’ve already told you, but I’m not acquainted with him. Nor am I, as you perfectly well know, a common blackmailer.’

‘Exactly what you are, Professor, and where, as a result, you now stand are matters that must be re-examined. Do you want to send your witnesses out, or don’t you mind if they hear us talking about the messier details of our bargain?’

He showed a few more teeth. ‘You’re wasting your breath, Mr Firman. I refuse to be provoked. My young friends have experience of the problems of doing research in this field. Why shouldn’t they hear the details?’

‘Very well. The basic threat you made was that, unless I did and said the various things you wanted me to do and say, you would expose, I quote, the Symposia Conspiracy. That’s what you called it. Right?’