The Intercom Conspiracy (15 page)

I didn’t even know what an electret was. Since the Royal Navy evidently did know, I tried looking it up in the thirteen-volume Oxford dictionary. It wasn’t there. I found it, though, in the big Webster. An electret is, I quote, ‘a dielectric body in which a permanent state of electric polarization has been set up’. If that means anything to you, Mr Latimer, congratulations.

All it meant to me was that Bloch was apparently still convinced that his associates’ interests were best served by blowing military secrets and that he didn’t seem to mind whose secrets he blew. The NATO boys were having the pin pulled on them just as often as the Warsaw Pact lot. As a way of making friends in high places, unless the high places you happened to be thinking of were in Red China or the Organisation of African Unity, I couldn’t see it. If Arnold Bloch weren’t a complete nut, he obviously had to know something I didn’t.

I turned to the memorandum again and, as I reread it, became more and more confused. I also became angry. It was that paragraph of exhortation that needled me.

I know, Mr L, you say that that’s why it was put there – to needle me into acting against my better Judgment. Well, I disagree. Don’t forget, I’ve met your ‘Colonel Jost’, and he didn’t strike me as having the kind of subtlety you claim for him. In fact, what needled me about that paragraph was the crude impertinence of it. ‘We must show no weakness, display no disposition to compromise and refuse to be intimidated.’ Pompous bastard! For me, remember, this was Arnold Bloch speaking, and that was the thing that really stuck in my throat. I may not have always been Mr Valiant-for-Truth, but I wasn’t taking lectures on the freedom of the press and the obligation to publish without fear or favour from a bloody PR man.

Rereading that memorandum didn’t change my mind about a
thing. It only made me more determined than ever to meet with Bloch personally, or at least talk to him. There were questions I meant to have answered. I also wanted his reaction to the news that it was the CIA and not the BND (West German intelligence to you, Mr L) who were after our blood, and that I, for one, was beginning to see their point.

That’s when I started telephoning.

When I found that I couldn’t raise Munich, I drafted a telegram.

Polite but firm, I thought. I had made it plain (a) that his pious admonitions were not only belated but also unnecessary, and (b) I had served notice on him that, although I had so far obeyed his orders without asking too many questions, I was not prepared to go on doing so indefinitely.

When I had given Nicole the telegram to send off I felt better.

Lunch is my main meal of the day and usually I go to a brasserie near the office in the rue du Rhône. The food there is good, it is not too expensive and there is no formica or chromium plating visible. At lunchtime it is patronised mostly by businessmen with offices in the quarter; not the Chase Manhattan–Du Pont–Chrysler set, but middle-income managerial Genevese with growing
families and houses in the south-bank suburbs. It is not a hangout for newsmen. I was surprised then when I saw Emil Stryer come in, and even more surprised when, catching sight of me, he came across and asked if he could join me at my table.

Stryer has an Austrian passport but is said to have been born in Pomerania. He first came to Geneva to cover the 1963 Disarmament Conference for the Bulgarian Telegraphic and Radio News Agency. He had returned, after covering the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signing in Moscow, to head the agency’s small Central European bureau and had since then supplemented his income from that source by acting as a stringer for several East German, Austrian and Italian newspapers. He takes a keen interest in East-West cultural exchange programmes and has been responsible for inflicting on patient Swiss audiences a troupe of Bulgarian folk dancers, a Ruthenian puppeteer and an East German string ensemble. At the time I am speaking of he was regarded by most other members of the foreign-press corps in Geneva as something of a joke. He is a skinny little man with dark brown eyes, sallow pendulant cheeks and the perplexed, insecure look of an elderly dachshund. I did not regard him as a joke; I did, though, find him personally a very tiresome bore and generally tried to avoid him. His belief that I was an enthusiastic ideological adherent of the American imperialistic hyena Novak had helped to keep him at a distance, and I always tried to foster it.

As he sat down I said: ‘The General may no longer be with us, Stryer, but his soul goes marching on. Isn’t it rather dangerous for you to be seen hobnobbing with me?’

He gave me an uneasy smile. ‘Hobnobbing?’

I paraphrased it for him in German.

He looked reproachful. ‘Several of our colleagues,’ he said, ‘have felt that since your proprietors death you have been avoiding them. There has been concern for you lately, and many solicitous inquiries.’

‘Well, that’s nice to know. As you see, I’m still managing to eat.’

‘The hope was expressed, and more than once, that you would return to news work of a more conventional kind.’

‘Less disreputable you mean? More respectable?’

‘The words are yours, but, since you have employed them, why not? You have many good friends in the profession.’

‘But as it is, while I may not be very respectable, I am still virtually my own boss.’

His eyebrows shot up. ‘Are you indeed? That is interesting. There has been much curiosity about your late proprietor’s successor.’

The waitress came up at that moment to take his order and I wondered if the interruption would break his train of thought. I didn’t really expect it to do so – once started on the subject bores can never let go – but one always hopes.

He ordered
Bundnerfleisch
, a choucroute and beer and returned to the charge. ‘Nobody seems to know anything about him,’ he said.

‘About who?’ I wasn’t going to help him out.

‘I speak of Arnold Bloch, of course.’

It didn’t surprise me that he knew Bloch’s name. Reporters gossip amongst themselves and, since Novak had died in Geneva and
Intercom
, disreputable though it might be, was published there, curiosity about his successor would be natural. Goodman’s knowledge had disconcerted me because he had obtained it the hard way by going to Bâle and interviewing Dr Bruchner. He could probably have learned as much over drinks in the Intercontinental bar.

‘Oh well,’ I said, ‘there’s nothing very much to know. He’s a PR man.’

‘Public relations? Is that all?’ He sounded disappointed.

‘Industrial public relations. Offices in Munich, Paris and Rome.

‘I see,’ he said and nodded thoughtfully.

I was glad he saw, because at that point, Mr L, I was beginning to feel rather like you described Dr Bruchner as feeling when Goodman was quizzing him – reluctant to admit that I didn’t know a thing about the man I was supposed to be working for and acutely conscious of the fact that
I
hadn’t even spoken to him on the telephone. Dr Bruchner had at least done that.

I was wondering how best to field the next batch of questions when Stryer suddenly began waving frantically across the room as if he had just caught sight of a long-lost friend.

I looked up. A man and a woman had entered the restaurant and now, seeing Stryer, they headed towards us.

Okay, Mr Latimer, I know. It was a planned encounter, a put-up job. Stryer had gone to the brasserie knowing that he would find me there (he probably followed me from my office to make sure) and for the express purpose of introducing those two persons to me under circumstances which would make them appear inoffensive and harmless.

The attempt was only partially successful. Stryer made mistakes. For example, when he first came in he asked me if he might join me before he sat down. As I was alone at a table for four I couldn’t very well say no. But when those two came over and joined us, he didn’t even think of asking. Maybe he was nervous, too eager to get the job over and done with. Suddenly it was his table and he was the host. I remember thinking that, if it was going to be his party, he could bloody well pay for my lunch as well. However, the real snag from his point of view was the woman. Nothing he could have said or done would have made her appear inoffensive and harmless where I was concerned.

Madame Coursaux was somewhere in her forties, a junoesque welterweight with greying black hair, a muddy complexion and the smouldering eyes of a martinet. Her mirthless smile issued the challenge, her tip-tilted nose was poised to detect the answering smell of fear and her overdeveloped jaw muscles proclaimed that any attempt to defend yourself would be mercilessly punished. She wore a military-looking blue cloth coat with massive brass buttons and she walked like a grenadier. A ball-crusher if ever I saw one.

Pierre Morin, the man with her, was a burly fellow with an untidy brown beard, half-glasses and a heavy deposit of cigar ash on his waistcoat. In one large freckled hand he carried with ease a bulging pigskin briefcase which shook the floor when he dumped it beside my chair. He had bushy eyebrows, long, tobacco-stained
teeth and an expression, which seemed permanent, of amused disbelief.

Both of them spoke Parisian French.

‘Madame Coursaux,’ Stryer explained breathlessly when he had performed the introductions, ‘is the distinguished French expert on rare and ancient manuscripts.’

She cooed at him as she removed her gloves. ‘You must try to get it right, Emil dear.’ Her eyes shifted to me. ‘Monsieur Carter, is it? Well, Monsieur Carter, Emil is maintaining his reputation as a journalist. Only three errors of fact in one sentence.’

She ignored Stayer’s whimpers of protest. She was zeroed in on me now.

‘Unhappily,’ she went on, ‘I cannot claim to be an expert. The expert is Pierre Morin here. I am only a poor dealer. And the manuscripts I deal in mostly are not ancient. That is, of course, unless you call the nineteenth century ancient.’

Morin joined in the game.

‘While when you speak of rarity,’ he said, ‘you introduce a contradiction in terms. A book can be rare, a piece of fine porcelain can be rare. But a holograph manuscript can never be. If it is genuine it is unique, whether it was written yesterday or a hundred years ago.’ He grinned suddenly. ‘Don’t let us spoil your lunch, Monsieur. Emil is used to our nonsense, eh, Emil?’

Stryer was beaming as if they had been paying him compliments. ‘I am always willing to be educated. But tell me –’ he lowered his voice – ‘have you been successful in your mission? Or is too early yet to say?’

Madame Coursaux frowned repressively and her eyes flickered in the direction of the waitress hovering behind them with menus. ‘We have hopes,’ she said curtly.

They ordered enormous meals and a Valais wine. I asked for coffee.

The moment the waitress had gone Stryer returned to the subject of the Coursaux–Morin mission.

‘Carter is a journalist, as I am, but he too knows how to be
discreet,’ he said. ‘May I tell him about your mission in Geneva, Madame? It is fascinating. A detective story.’

His persistence seemed suicidal to me, but it earned him no more than a light cuff.

‘If you tell it, dear Emil, I am sure that none of the essential facts will be correctly stated. No discretion on Monsieur Carter’s part should be necessary.’

He sniggered ingratiatingly. ‘Then correct me if I am wrong, Madame. As I understand it, you heard a few months ago and from a confidential source here in Switzerland of the existence of a hitherto unknown correspondence between the nineteenth-century anarchists Alexander Herzen and Sergei Nechaev. Such a correspondence –’

‘Herzen was certainly not an anarchist,’ Morin broke in sharply, ‘and Nechaev can only vulgarly be so described. Herzen was a liberal socialist and the founder of Populism. Nechaev was many things – a terrorist, a criminal, an idealist and a mountebank – but you cannot compare him with such men as Proudhon, Bakunin and Malatesta.’

‘I did not mean to compare them. I only wished …’

He got no further. Madame Coursaux took over again. ‘The importance of this correspondence, if it is genuine,’ she said, ‘is the light that it purports to throw on the true authorship of the Revolutionary Action Programme of eighteen sixty-eight. That is also the year of this alleged correspondence. And I say “alleged” advisedly. Morin has his doubts about it. I, too, am undecided. True, the correspondence between them which survives and which we know to be genuine is of a very different character, but Nechaev was a man with many faces. For you, Monsieur Carter, it is doubtless difficult to understand the historical importance of a few old letters written by men of whom you have probably never heard, but to scholars and –’

I wasn’t taking any more of that; I interrupted her. ‘What about Herzen’s memoirs?’ I asked. ‘In eighteen sixty-eight he was working on them here in Geneva. He kept a diary too. I know he didn’t think much of Nechaev. He even warned Bakunin that the man
was a crook. But if this correspondence that you’ve found is as important as you say, I can’t believe that Herzen would have made no reference to it. You’ve checked, of course?’

She gave me a deadly smile. ‘Of course,’ she said. But I had stopped her. It was Morin who picked up the ball.

‘Herzen’s memoirs were extensively edited after his death,’ he said, ‘and family feeling influenced much of that editing. There was reason at the time for deleting references to Nechaev, especially friendly or respectful references.’

‘Because he had seduced Herzen’s daughter, you mean?’

‘
Tried
to seduce her.’ He grinned. ‘Nechaev was rarely successful in his undertakings. It was amusing in a way.’