The Intercom Conspiracy (8 page)

Dr Bruchner knew too much about
Intercom
’s financial position, and mine, to comment on that suggestion. He did, though, ask whether I had any ideas about possible buyers. From the way he phrased that part of the letter I gathered that he hadn’t any ideas at all. He also said that there wasn’t much time. I didn’t have to be told that.
Intercom
had always lived a hand-to-mouth existence on subscriptions, and, since the General’s death, all we’d had in
were a few renewals from people who had probably forgotten to tell their secretaries or business managers to cancel. I gave it two months before Dr Bruchner decided to write to the executors recommending that Intercom Publishing Enterprises A.G. be placed in liquidation.

I talked it over with Val. That’s Valerie, my daughter.

She’s as beautiful as her mother was when I first met her; but there’s none of that bitchiness in Val. She works, as your assiduous legmen discovered, Mr L, as a librarian at the university. I won’t say more about her now. If you have any sense you’ll be letting her speak for herself. She won’t let me down. One word of warning, though. Val has some funny ideas. Don’t let that psychiatrist boyfriend of hers get into the act. He’s not a bad young man – just a nonswimmer working as a lifeguard.

No, better scrub that. He did at least try to help
.

As I say, I talked things over with Val.

To be truthful, I must say that I wasn’t looking for much more from her than daughterly sympathy and concern. All that about my wallowing in self-pity is for the birds, Mr L. I also felt that I had to let her know what the score was. If I had to get another job, I thought, it would almost certainly mean that I would have to leave Geneva. That would have affected her future. I felt that she ought to have time to think and make plans.

Somewhat to my surprise, she came up with a plan for me.

Geneva, of course, is the headquarters of all sorts of international organisations and there are always conferences going on. I don’t mean just the political junkets, but conferences concerned with international cooperation in technical fields. Since Val had been working for the university she had become aware of the shortage that existed of technical translators able to service such conferences. I don’t mean interpreters; there are plenty of those, though not many good verbatim technical interpreters; I mean people who can produce accurate and reliable translations of technical documents fast enough to keep a conference supplied with multilingual copies of minutes, papers read and so on while
it is still in session. Her idea was that, if Intercom Publishing Enterprises A.G. went into liquidation, I should buy up the pieces, selling the
Intercom
mailing list and the Addressograph machine to help finance the deal, but keeping the office lease and furniture, the typewriters and the mimeograph machines in order to set up a technical translation bureau.

It wasn’t a bad idea, I thought. I didn’t think it would work, but it was good to have something to hope for and speculate about. I only had two drinks that evening.

Ten days later I had a telephone call from Dr Bruchner.

‘I have received an offer for the General’s shareholding,’ he said. He sounded as if he could still hardly believe it.

‘A good offer, I hope.’ I tried not to echo his incredulity.

‘Good enough, I think, to submit to the executors.’

‘May I ask who has made the offer?’

‘Ah. That is why I am calling you. You may be able to help me. The prospective purchaser is Herr Arnold Bloch of Munich. His business paper states that he is an industrial public-relations consultant. In his initial letter inquiring about the availability of the shares he stated that he is acting in concert with French and West German associates with interests in arms and explosives. I gathered that his expectation is that he will be able to use
Intercom
to promote his associates’ commercial interests.’

‘That sounds good. It makes sense. If they are prepared to subsidise it out of their advertising appropriations, they’re obviously not counting on us to show a profit. They’re buying it with their eyes open and a policy in mind.’

‘That was my thought also.’

‘How can I help, Dr Bruchner?’

‘In cabling this offer to the executors, I would like to give some assurances that Herr Bloch is a responsible person.’

‘Can he back his offer with cash?’

‘Monsieur Carter, please!’ The question had hurt him; I should have known better than to ask it. ‘Naturally that was the first thing I established. I have a cashier’s draft on his Munich bank
already in my possession. He is certainly financially responsible. The assurance I wish to give is that he is politically responsible, the kind of person who would not have been objectionable to the General.’

‘I see.’

‘Unfortunately, I know very little about Herr Bloch. He seems to be a thoughtful and considerate person. For instance, he has specifically requested me to assure you that he hopes to retain your services, and those of your staff, should his offer for the shares be accepted.’

‘Good for him. Then isn’t that your answer? If he likes
Intercom
as it is, he can’t be politically objectionable in the way you mean, can he? I take it that all he wants to do is slip in a few commercial plugs from time to time.’

‘I understand that. But …’

‘What sort of a man is he personally?’

‘That is the difficulty. I have corresponded with him and we have spoken on the telephone, but I have not actually had occasion to meet him. He is an educated man clearly. His German is fluent, though I think that he is not himself German-born.’

‘Austrian perhaps?’

‘Perhaps. I don’t know. I made preliminary inquiries about him through my Munich correspondent, but learned very little. He has an office at the address given on his business paper, and there is a plate on the door saying that he has offices also in Paris and Rome. That is also stated on the paper, but no addresses are given. Apparently he travels a great deal on his clients’ behalf. He employs no permanent staff in Munich. The office rent is paid by the bank.’

‘He sounds like what the Americans call an operator, or a front man. That’s not necessarily against him, of course.’

‘No.’ Dr Bruchner did his best not to sound dubious. ‘Before I send this cable,’ he went on, ‘will you try to find out more? You have files and dossiers, I know, and are experienced in these matters. I would like to be able to say in my cable that investigation has uncovered nothing to his discredit.’

‘I understand, Dr Bruchner. I’ll do what I can and call you back later.’

What I could in fact do was very little. The files and dossiers to which he referred were mostly figments of the General’s imagination. We had some filing cabinets, true, and they were full of paper – files of old newspaper cuttings, roughly indexed – but it was all very ordinary stuff. We did have a fair reference library, and I kept special scrapbooks containing ideas and material for
Intercom
stories culled from the European newspapers and magazines to which we subscribed; but we had no proper morgue in the newspaper sense of the term. That sort of thing needs space and a trained staff; and it costs money.

The last thing I wanted at that stage, of course, was to uncover anything to Herr Bloch’s discredit; and I assumed that Dr Bruchner was of the same mind. His fee as director of Intercom Publishing Enterprises A.G. wasn’t all that big, but obviously he would prefer not to lose it.

I did make inquiries about Arnold Bloch, however.

There was nothing about him in any of the standard reference books, so I looked him up in the list of
Intercom
subscribers. I did that because I thought that there might possibly be an address for him there different from the Munich address Dr Bruchner had given me.

Big surprise. Arnold Bloch didn’t subscribe to
Intercom
and never had done.

Well, you could scarcely count that as being to his discredit. Some people might even have said that it was an indication of good sense on his part. But, even allowing for the fact that this prospective purchaser was acting for unidentified French and German associates, it was, I thought, odd. After all,
he
was the publicity consultant who hoped to use
Intercom
to promote his associates’ commercial interests;
he
was the thoughtful and considerate man of affairs who wanted
Intercom
to stay in business as usual. How come he had never subscribed to it? The oddity made me curious enough to make a further inquiry. I put in a call to Paris to the woman who ran the morgue at the news-agency
bureau I’d worked in there. We’d always got on well and she never minded doing me a favour. This favour didn’t take long to do. There were several Blochs listed in her file index, but none of them was an Arnold Bloch.

Again, nothing to his discredit.

There was one more source I could have tried. In most big cities there are agencies which make their livings by taking photographs of business executives for free and then holding the negatives in the expectation that, sooner or later, some of those men will become news. Then the agency sells ten-by-eight glossies to the newspapers and magazines. As an industrial public-relations consultant, Arnold Bloch would, I thought, have rated that sort of attention. Somewhere, no doubt, there was a picture of Herr Bloch ready to be pulled out and used if he ever distinguished himself by getting killed in an air crash, marrying a film star or becoming involved in a multimillion-dollar take-over bid. I didn’t think, though, that the picture, even if I could find it quickly, would tell me anything useful. Even the good guys sometimes have their eyes set far too closely together.

So, in the end, I just called Dr Bruchner back and told him that, as far as I could see, Herr Arnold Bloch was as clean as a whistle. He said that he would send off the cable to the executors that night.

The date was October 26.

Now, Mr L, I have news for you.

You’ve been so bloody secretive about your sources that it’s difficult to know how much credence can be given to the details of your reconstruction. But I will say this. If the last section of that lake-steamer conversation between the old buzzards is basically factual, you’re in for something of a shock. Better fasten your seat belt. There’s something you don’t know.

On November 1, one week after that cable to the executors went off, something peculiar happened in the office. Nicole was there and can confirm this. I had a strange visitor.

It was in the afternoon. When I got back from lunch I found this man waiting there. Nothing particularly unusual about that,
of course. We didn’t have many callers at the office, but we had some: office-supplies salesmen, bill collectors, odd characters looking for jobs and two-bit con men trying to flog secret documents cooked up in some Berlin kitchen. The unusual thing about this particular caller was that he was there to take out a subscription to
Intercom
.

Now that really
was
unusual. Certainly, it had never happened before while I was there.
Intercom
went out by mail and that’s how the subscriptions came in. We had a mimeographed subscription form giving the different rates to Europe and the Americas in the various currencies; and one of these forms was always tacked onto the newsletter, or enclosed with a renewal notice. From time to time we’d had promotional mailings using the same form; but even the Geneva subscribers, and there were one or two, had never come to the office in person.

Naturally, my first thought when he told me what he wanted was that this must be Arnold Bloch, or someone connected with him, there to give our little outfit a discreet onceover. True, if this
were
Bloch, he’d left things a bit late. Dr Bruchner already had his cheque, and if the written offer he’d made was accepted the deal was done. Even if he didn’t like what he saw it was too late for him to renege now. Still, whoever or whatever he was, the kid-glove treatment was clearly in order. Very politely I asked him into my office and told Nicole to bring in a subscription form.

What with the reference library, the scrapbooks and the stacks of magazines and newspapers in my office, there was scarcely room to move, but I did have a visitor’s chair. The General had insisted on that. It was piled high with junk, as usual. While I was clearing it the visitor stood in the doorway taking off his overcoat and folding it up neatly as if he were going to pack it.

He was of average height and thick-set with a very straight back. I put him in the middle fifties. A rather heavy face; I don’t mean flabby – there was nothing flabby about him; he looked as hard as nails – but big-boned, with prominent jaw muscles. ‘Craggy’ is probably the word. The eyes behind the acetate-rimmed bifocals were blue, the short, wiry hair was grey, the
complexion a faded summer tan; and on his wide, thin-lipped mouth there rested a regretful little smile. The smile, I soon found, was permanent and the regret it seemed to express illusory.

As he sat down in the chair I had cleared, Nicole brought in the subscription form. I handed him a ballpoint pen. He studied the form for a moment, then began to fill it in, in block letters as requested.

I could read the name he gave upside down. It was Werner Siepen. The address was a
Postfach
number in Hamburg. The separate spaces provided for business address and occupation he left blank. His signature was illegible.

Not Arnold Bloch, then, but he could conceivably be one of the West German clients for whom Bloch was acting. There was nothing unusual about his omitting to give his occupation. Few of our subscribers – the commonest exceptions were politicians, clergymen and, for some mysterious reason, dentists – chose or bothered to fill that line in. But I was, for obvious reasons, specially curious about this one. I tried to get him to open up a bit.

‘The yearly subscription rate for Germany is eighty marks,’ I said. ‘No doubt you would prefer to pay by cheque. Most of our subscribers do.’

He shrugged. ‘Cash would be simpler, I think –’ he reached for his wallet – ‘and Swiss francs simpler still.’ His French was quite good.