The Care of Time

The warning message arrived on Monday, the bomb itself on Wednesday. It became a busy week.

The message came in an ordinary business envelope that had been mailed in New York but had no return address on it. Inside, folded in three, was one of those outsize picture postcards that are offered to tourists in some places nowadays. This one was of a hotel with palm trees and carried an ornate caption proclaiming that it was the
HOTEL MANSOUR, Baghdad, Republic of Iraq
. On the back had been pasted a typed strip of paper.

He hadn’t in fact signed it, but printed the name in block letters with a felt-point pen.

Use of the term ‘ghost-writer’ to describe the job I now do for a living always irritates me; not, though, because I find it disparaging but because it is inaccurate. There are times when I wish it weren’t. When, for instance, I am reading the publisher’s proofs of one of my ‘autobiographies’ after the subject has revised them and incorporated his, or her, second thoughts and personal syntax. Then, the state of ghostly anonymity enjoyed by some of my colleagues can seem very appealing. In my case, the name always appears. It is put after that of the supposed author and in smaller type. ‘As told to Robert Halliday’ or ‘With Robert Halliday’ are the standard credits; and they are there not just to satisfy my ego, but to record the fact that I am part-owner of a copyright. They may also act, incidentally, as advertisements for my professional services. Some publishers have even assured me, with apparent sincerity, that my name on a book may, by serving as some sort of guarantee that it will not be wholly unreadable, actually help to sell the thing in hardcover and raise the paperback ante. I doubt that myself. If the books with which I am concerned usually sell well, I think that is because I choose my subjects carefully. Light non-fiction tends to be ephemeral; but, since I nearly always get a percentage of the royalty take as well as a fee for the initial work, I try to choose subjects with at least some promise of staying power.

Motion picture stars I take on only if they have had very long careers, are still working and remain in sufficiently good shape, mentally as well as physically, to be interviewed about the book on television. I have learned to stay away from comedians. Too many of them are manic-depressives; and their recollections of the past are often drenched in self-pity. Musicians, though, can be good value; as can captains of industry, retired generals and politicians. With the generals some caution is necessary. Most have axes to grind and they can be disturbingly generous with classified information. Generals also tend to feel that, once they have retired, they have automatically become free to ignore the laws of libel. On the whole I like politicians best. True, there is usually trouble with them over the credits. They really do want their books ghosted. Even men who have been openly employing speech-writers all their political lives seem to find it demeaning to admit that they cannot write publishable books without help. There are, of course, accepted ways of overcoming this difficulty. ‘Editorial assistance’ can usually be acknowledged without serious loss of face. And for the one assisting there can be long-term compensations. If plenty of hitherto unpublished letters and documents, however trivial their content, are included in the book, there will be a substantial hardcover sale to libraries as well as listings in bibliographies. Political memoirs have been known to stay in print for years. Moreover, as I happen to find politics and politicians interesting, I usually enjoy the work.

However, I do have some hard and fast general rules about choosing my subjects. I will, for example, have nothing to do with pop stars, boxers, baseball managers or persons claiming to have belonged to secret intelligence agencies. Those with drink or drug problems I avoid because, however distinguished they may once have been, or may even still be, for me they will always constitute an unacceptable risk. And not only because they are likely to waste a great deal of time. The major occupational hazard of my trade is the temptation to practise amateur psychiatry. If the opportunities for doing
so are to be reduced to a minimum, you have to make rules for yourself and stick to them.

At that time, though, I had no rule – hard, fast, or of any other kind – about jokers who claimed to have mailed bombs to me. I had had no need of one before.

My first impression of the message was, of course, that it was a hoax perpetrated by some acquaintance with a defective and unpleasant sense of humour – that postcard of the Hotel Mansour was a nasty little touch – but I couldn’t think of anyone to fit. Next, I began to wonder what kind of man it would be who could think that the way to establish his personal integrity and a friendly relationship with a stranger was to mail the stranger a bomb and then warn him not to open the package. If there was a bomb, such a man had to be totally deranged.

Totally? After a couple of re-readings, I began to have doubts. There was nothing deranged and something curiously confident and knowledgeable about that end paragraph. He knew enough not only to guess rightly how a person with my newspaper background would go about checking him out, but also enough about his own record to choose an alias that would show up if I did check.
When
I did, rather. He was in no doubt about my curiosity. Well-informed, then, and all too cute, but not totally deranged.

Suddenly, reading the first two paragraphs again, I understood. The style was the man. This was the message of a vain man, a racketeer of some sort or other no doubt, but one who liked the sound of his own voice and had pretensions to gentility. A simpler man would have said: ‘Halliday, I could easily kill you. Instead, I’m telling you how to avoid getting killed. But, in return, I want something from you. So, when you hear what it is, don’t try to argue. Just do as I ask, and at once.’

On the assumption that there was in fact a live bomb addressed to me in the mail – and not a tape-sealed package containing some prankish object put there to make me look foolish when I took it to the police – I had to regard that chatty little warning as a threat.

Curiosity, not unmixed with anxiety, promptly triumphed over my plans for the day’s work and I began calling New York. Before long I had found out a little about Karlis Zander, but, as his message had predicted, not much. Moreover, the little there was had not come easily. The news agency librarian I knew best had at first been unexpectedly reluctant to oblige an old friend from way back.

‘Bob,’ he said plaintively, ‘this is what some of your spook pals might call sensitive material.’

‘I don’t have any spook pals. You mean someone upstairs at your place once took an interest? It’s his baby?’

‘No, that’s not what I mean. It’s nobody’s baby for the moment, but that doesn’t mean that I can give it away for free. Why the sudden interest in Zander? What’s the story?’

‘He’s just sent a letter making a package-bomb threat. Okay?’

‘Can’t you give me more than that? Threatening whom? The Mayor? The President?’

‘Me.’

‘You?’ He coughed up a laugh. ‘When did this happen?’

‘This morning. He says he needs my friendship and collaboration.’

‘Bob, someone’s putting you on.’ When I said nothing to that he went on. ‘All right, so how about reading me the letter?’

I read him the letter, but without giving the last eight words of it and without mentioning the postcard to which it was attached. There was a long silence. Finally, he sighed. ‘Bob, will you believe me if I tell you that you’re the last person in the world this guy Zander would want anything to do with?’

‘I believe you. But why?’

‘Well, to begin with, Zander only exists now as one of a bunch of old aliases.’

‘He’s dead?’

‘No, he’s not dead, but I’ll bet he’d like us to
believe
he was. When he was an up-and-coming undercover fixer in a
revolutionary cause he didn’t care who or how many knew what a clever one he was, how smart and how quick. Nowadays it’s all different. Now he’s all for heavily-protected anonymity.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Acting as a contract management consultant. Yes, that’s what it says here and that’s how his clients are advised by him to describe his services when the government auditors come around. To put it less delicately, he’s a high-level go-between, a slush-fund manager with a multi-million-dollar business run out of three briefcases and permanent luxury hotel suites in all major capitals. You want the contract to build a new port facility east of Suez? You want your group to supply those excitable Third-Worlders with that brand-new air-defence system they seem to think they need? Well, he’s your man. Or, rather, he’s your middleman, the one who has everyone else’s private set of game rules and religious prejudices all in his head. He’s the one who knows exactly who has to be paid off and exactly how much each of them rates. What’s more, he’ll handle every last one of those payments in such a way that no Congressional Committee yet invented can ever point the pudgy finger at you and say “bribery”. Get the idea?’