FROM THEODORE CARTER
transcribed dictation tape
I think I’ll call you Mr L. L for Latimer, Lewison, lubricious and louche.
Well, Mr L, you’d better watch yourself; your sheep’s clothing is slipping. When I agreed to cooperate with you I had to listen to a lot of sanctimonious jazz about probity, good faith and strict adherence to proven fact. I thought at the time that it smelt a bit of overcompensation, but I didn’t think the gilt would wear off the gingerbread quite so soon. I gave it a month. But no: two weeks.
Mr L, I don’t very much mind your appropriating a privately dictated tape from my former secretary, Nicole Deladoey, and transcribing it without my permission; after all, you’re paying the cow’s wages now, and so presumably have purchased her loyalty along with her services. That was a bitchy trick, Nicole. I don’t even mind your wide-eyed and patently dishonest contention that, in reproducing that tape unedited, you were merely honouring retroactively a term of our agreement that I had insisted upon; that’s the kind of probity and good faith we men of the world can all understand. What I do object to, and object strongly, is your slipping in flagrant distortions of fact.
We’d better get this straight. I don’t know what half-baked sources you’ve been tapping for this gossip and hearsay. You can’t tell me that you got it all out of ‘Colonel Jost’, though I suppose that some of it must be hard or not even you would dare.
By the way, I will admit that the scene where those two old buzzards are mumbling over the evening paper and thinking about play material and pension plans still reads as if it could have happened. Schadenfreude is the word you wanted for their kind of bloodymindedness, but maybe it eluded you. Cut down on the adjectives and adverbs, Mr L; purple is out this season.
Where was I?
Oh yes. Facts. Now look. As I say, I don’t know anything about these sources of yours or how much you’ve paid them, but if that little character-assassination vignette of me which you’ve now added is a fair sample of what you’ve been getting, I’ll tell you something. You’re stuck with a bag of lemons. I was taught always to check and double-check information received before starting to think of it as fact. I think you should have checked with me first, Mr L. Maybe I don’t know everything about myself, but I do know a few things. Or was it too tasty as it was to risk spoiling with a dash of truth?
Cooperation is a two-way street, Mr L. I do not like that reference to my drinking. It is not only untrue but damaging to my reputation. I want it deleted from the text. Get it right, Mr L, get it right. I do not drink heavily. I drink what I need to drink. The need varies from time to time. It’s that simple.
The night the General turned in his chips is a case in point. As what happened that night had a distinct effect on the attitudes of the police and security people towards me later, you’d better know about it.
The General got into Geneva at about five-thirty that afternoon on a delayed Swissair flight from New York. As usual, I met him at the airport and drove him to his hotel.
I always got on well with the General. You say, or make one of those old bastards say, that I put on an act with him. Well, of course I did. With him you couldn’t do anything else but put on an act. Talking to him was like talking to a kid who’s playing a game of cowboys and Indians; unless you want to spoil the fun you have to go along with him. The name of the General’s game wasn’t cowboys and Indians but something a little more complicated; let’s say, ‘good spies, bad spies and international plots’. The effect, though, was the same. He wasn’t interested in reality. No, that’s wrong. He believed that the game he played was reality and that anyone who doubted this was either a good guy living in a dream world or a bad guy trying to lull the good guys into a sense of false security. He was a crackpot, of course, a nut, but in his way a very impressive one. I only heard him lecture once; it was at the American Club here. He was a terrible ham; he waved dossiers and quoted phony facts and figures by the yard; everything he said was complete balls; but, my God, he was effective. You see, he really believed what he was saying.
He was great at starting hares. For him, anything that happened, simply anything, could be part of a plot or conspiracy. The smallest thing would set him off. Then away he’d go, piling suspicion on suspicion, twisting the facts if there were any, imagining them if there weren’t, until he had arrived at what he decided was the truth of the matter. Then I’d write it up and we’d print it.
No wonder they got mad at us in Washington. Every Senator and every Congressman – every Canadian and British M.P., too, for that matter – got a copy of Intercom, whether they paid their subscriptions or not. You’d be surprised how many of those hares we started ran and kept on running. Well, maybe you wouldn’t be surprised. You know a bit about politicians. They got so steamed up in Washington about one story we ran – some crap we’d cooked up about the range of a new Red Chinese nuclear missile delivery system – that the President himself had to issue a denial. That didn’t faze the General, of course. He loved denials. All he did was cable me to run the story again along with additional supporting evidence. He didn’t say where this additional supporting evidence was to come from, of course; that wasn’t his way. And, of course, I didn’t waste time asking questions. As the whole of the original supporting evidence had been dreamed up, obviously any additional supporting evidence would have to be dreamed up, too. Naturally, I’d never have used a phrase like ‘dreamed up’ to him. That would have been like saying that good guys rode black horses. He believed what he wanted to believe, and he always knew that whatever he imagined counted as evidence.
He was still imagining when he died. That last time I drove him from the airport he started talking about an item he’d read in a magazine on the plane. The item said that there was an outfit called the World Meteorological Organisation and that they had an advisory committee examining the consequences of large-scale interference with the atmosphere.
‘How do you like that, Ted?’ he said darkly.
I played it down; I knew the signs and I didn’t want to be up all night. ‘Something to do with cloud-seeding, isn’t it, General?’ I said. ‘A plane drops dry ice or some chemical into a cloud and that makes it rain. Nice for the farmer whose land’s underneath, not so good for the farmer who’d have had that cloud later.’
But he wasn’t put off. ‘No, Ted. There’s more to it than that. Large-scale interference with our atmosphere, that’s what it said. I want the inside stuff on this World Meteorological Organisation and the way it operates, and I want it fast. I think we ought to dig deep here.’
Once he’d started talking about digging deep there was no holding him. Usually, when we got to the hotel, we’d have a few drinks in his suite before dinner, but that evening he was high on the WMO and I had to go chasing off to see what we had on it in the office.
I found a piece about rainmaking and the WMO in a scientific yearbook. There wasn’t much to it. A paper had been prepared discussing the possibilities for international cooperation in research in the field of cloud and precipitation physics. As a result of this paper, the WMO Commission for Aerology (whatever that is) had created a working group of scientists to take the thing a stage further. An international conference under the auspices of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics was to be held shortly.
Not much, as I say, but enough for the General. Repetition of the word ‘international’ always stirred him up. Once his eagle eye had noted that the author of the discussion paper was Professor L. Krastanov of Bulgaria and that the working group included not only Krastanov but also V. T. Nilandrov of the Soviet Union, he was off and running. The fact that the group also included professors from Arizona, India and Japan was brushed aside with the instruction that we should run checks on their personal histories and political backgrounds. By nine o’clock that night the General was all set to expose yet another communist plot to destroy the free world, this time by changing its climate and lousing up its weather, so that all those rich farmlands – heartlands’, he called them – would be turned into dust bowls and deserts.
Go easy on the water this time, Val.
It was about then that he complained of indigestion. Shortly afterwards he went to the bathroom and threw up. He came out looking very bad and said that something was squeezing his chest. He was obviously in pain and said that he had been poisoned. I made him lie down in the bedroom, then rang down to the concierge and told him to call the hotel doctor. I was thinking that he might have a duodenal ulcer that was acting up.
The General was well known at that hotel and the doctor came promptly. He diagnosed a heart attack and called for an ambulance. By nine-thirty that evening the General was in a polyclinique bed wearing an oxygen mask. According to the hospital doctor I spoke to, his condition was critical.
‘How critical?’ I asked.
Doctors hate questions like that. ‘It is too early to say yet,’ he said, ‘but serious damage has been done. It would be wise perhaps to notify his relatives.’
That put me in a quandary. I told him, ‘The only relative I know of, Doctor, is a daughter in America. I’ll cable her, naturally, but I can’t just tell her he’s had a heart attack and leave it at that. Maybe I can telephone her. But what do I say? Should she get on the first plane out or what?’
He hesitated before he answered. ‘We will know more later, in an hour or two perhaps when his condition is stabilised. I suggest you wait or, better, come back later.’
I told him I would come back later.
I had travelled in the ambulance to the hospital, so my car was still parked back at the hotel. If I’d had it with me I might have gone home for a while. As it was, I walked back to the hotel, got the car, drove back to the hospital, parked and went into a bar to wait.
I did have quite a few brandies there, I don’t mind admitting it. I had them because I needed them.
In my trade you learn to listen not just to what people say, but also to how they are saying it – the music as well as the words, so to speak. Doctors are not always as good at covering up as they think. I’d already guessed that the General’s chances of lasting the night were not much better than evens. Which meant, in turn, that my chances of being out of a job in the near future were not much better than evens.
‘Colonel Brand’, as you call him, was quite right when he said that Intercom didn’t show a profit. Not many of these newsletter-type ‘personalised intelligence services’ do – not directly, that is. Most of them are in business for reasons other than the ostensible one of giving inside information. All kinds of reasons: to make enemies and influence people, to smear political opponents – try suing a newsletter – to rig stock prices, to plant misinformation from a paper mill – all kinds: rational, irrational, sinister and plain stupid. But, when the reason goes, the newsletter usually goes with it.
In the case of Intercom the reason was that the General wanted to bug the people who had made him resign from the Army and, at the same time, jack up his lecture-tour fees by publicising himself as the great anti-communist Free World crusader. My guess was, then, that if the General were to die, Intercom would not long survive him. I didn’t see the foundation taking over. The General had always kept them well out of the Geneva picture. They didn’t even know that I ghosted the whole thing for him; they had started off believing that he wrote it all himself and he had let them go on believing that he did. Even if I could have set them straight on that score, I doubted if they would have been interested in keeping me on. One of those old oil-money weirdos had once turned up in Geneva on a European tour, and in an expansive moment I had told him that the name Interform Foundation sounded to me like an ad for women’s girdles. It hadn’t gone down well and word had been passed on to the other weirdos. Back at the foundation I was bad news.
So I sat in the bar near the hospital, contemplating my uncertain future and drinking brandy.
I returned to the hospital just before midnight. In case I had to wait about there, I took along a couple of nip-size bottles with me.
It was two o’clock in the morning when a nurse came to me in the waiting room and asked me to go with her to the administration office. There, the doctor I had seen earlier told me that the General had died.
There was another, younger white-smock in the office, too, and a man in civilian clothes whom I took to be a hospital official. All three of them were looking very formal and starchy. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why. After all, when a death in a hospital emergency ward is announced, you don’t expect a lot of merry smiles and back-slapping. I was feeling lousy, of course, but I tried to be businesslike.
‘I will cable the news to his daughter immediately,’ I said. ‘She will have to be consulted about the funeral arrangements, too. I will also notify his lawyer. As the General was a United States citizen, an American consul should probably be told, too. The nearest one’s in Bern, I think. I don’t know if you do that or whether you want me to. I can, of course. In the meantime …’
I ran out of gas for a moment there. What I had really been getting round to asking him was whether he could just hold everything until someone who knew what you did in Geneva with the bodies of retired American brigadier-generals could take over; but he didn’t give me a chance to finish.
‘In the meantime, Monsieur,’ he said stiffly, ‘there has been a question raised as to the cause of death.’
‘A question? I thought you said he had a heart attack.’
‘An acute myocardial infarction. Yes, that was our diagnosis.’
‘Well, then, who’s questioned it?’
‘The deceased questioned it himself. Twice.’ He looked at the other white-smock for confirmation and got a nod. ‘He was under sedation, of course, but during the periods of consciousness perfectly lucid. He twice stated that someone had poisoned him.’
That was the moment when I should have mentioned the indigestion he’d complained of after dinner, suggested diffidently that what the General had obviously been talking about was food poisoning, and thereafter kept my mouth shut.
I did none of these things; and I didn’t do them (a) because I was upset, (b) because I disliked the doctor’s manner, (c) because I was a mite loaded and (d) because I was curious. I wanted to know who it was that the General in extremis had fingered as the bad guy. My money was on the World Meteorological Organisation.
So I thought I’d ask. ‘Did he accuse anyone in particular?’
He gave me a beady look. ‘You do not seem surprised that he should make such statements.’
‘Why should I be surprised?’ I said. ‘He’d already made that statement about being poisoned twice before we got here, once after he’d been taken ill and then later in the ambulance.’
That did it. He stiffened up as if I had goosed him. ‘Why did you not report this when the patient was received here?’
‘Because he obviously didn’t know what he was talking about. The hotel doctor had diagnosed a heart attack. Why should I question it? What is all this nonsense?’
He didn’t like that. ‘This nonsense, as you call it, is a serious matter, Monsieur. You must realise that it will now be necessary for us to perform an autopsy.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ I had had no great sentimental regard for the General, but the idea of his being disembowelled merely in order to clear up an idiotic misunderstanding was too much. I said so in no uncertain terms. I dare say I wasn’t very polite.
The doctor bridled. ‘In cases where doubts have been raised as to the cause of a sudden death,’ he said loudly, ‘we have no choice. An autopsy becomes mandatory and we are required to inform the police.’
‘Even when the doubts are irrational?’
‘Who can say at this moment whether they are irrational or not?’ The man in the civilian suit had chipped in now. He was fortyish, thin, with a narrow head and fish-blue eyes.
‘This,’ said the doctor grimly, ‘is Monsieur Vauban of the judiciary police.’
If I had had the sense then to keep quiet and let things take their course, I might, even at that late stage, have emerged as a fairly okay character – tetchy and lacking in tact, perhaps, but basically sane and accountable. But I was too exasperated to keep quiet. I had an irresistible urge to explain to those fatheads what had made the General tick.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I know it’s difficult for people like you to understand anything outside your own immediate experience, but I’ll try and spell it out for you. Nil nisi bonum and all that, but the General was, to put it mildly, a bit eccentric. He subscribed to the conspiratorial theory of history, if you know what that is – all history, including his own. If you want to be medical about it you might say that his attitude was consistently paranoid. I’ll ask you a question. When there’s a flu epidemic, do you start suspecting the Russians of waging biological warfare? No? Well, he did. Has it ever occurred to you that the current attempts to develop electric and steam-driven automobiles are all part of an international plot to destroy the capitalist system? No? Well, the General could make out a very good case for it. He had not one bee in his bonnet, but hundreds. If he were here now, do you know what he’d be saying? I’ll tell you. He’d say that there had been a plot to murder him and that it had triumphantly succeeded.’
There was a dead silence. The policeman looked at me as if I’d been pleading guilty to indecent exposure. Obviously, he wasn’t receiving the message I was trying to send, or else misunderstanding it. I tried again, using an analogy that I thought might get through to him.
‘Don’t you see what I mean? Common sense suggests that the murder was an inside job and that the killers were high blood pressure, cholesterol, hypertension and so on. A mundane theory, I’m afraid. The General wouldn’t have given it the time of day. How can it have been an inside job when there are all those cunning devils creeping about outside, plotting, planning, with phials of little-known poisons in their pockets along with their CP membership cards? And who did these fiends want to destroy most? Who else but their arch-enemy, that great Free World crusader for truth, your friend and mine, Luther B. Novak? That’s how his mind worked. You see?’
From the blank stares it was clear that they did not see. It took me a few moments to realise that, without thinking, I had at some point switched from French to English. I back-tracked and started to give them the last bit again in French, but the policeman stopped me.
‘Please, Monsieur. You are wasting time – your own, mine, and certainly the hospital’s. I believe that you were with the deceased continually from the time he arrived in Geneva until he was taken ill.’
‘I was.’
‘Then I would have thought that, in view of the allegations of poisoning that have been made, you would certainly not oppose an autopsy and might even welcome it.’
I could have hit him. ‘Are you saying now that I am a suspect?’
‘Until the results of the autopsy are known, the question of suspicion does not arise.’ He smiled unpleasantly. ‘However, I note that your late employer was not alone in his eccentricity.’
That got a short laugh from the doctor. I turned to go. By that time I no longer cared what they did with the General. I just wanted to get out of that place.
‘One moment, Monsieur.’ It was the policeman again. ‘Your papers, please.’
I gave him my residence permit. He thumbed the pages slowly. He didn’t take notes, but he was obviously memorising. He handed it back reluctantly as if disappointed that there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with it. His nod of dismissal was reluctant too. He wouldn’t forget about me. In Monsieur Vauban’s book I was trouble.
It was Dr Bruchner, the General’s lawyer in Bâle, who told me the result of the autopsy.
The General had died of ‘congestive heart failure following acute myocardial infarction due to coronary occlusion’. A death certificate was issued by the hospital, and a few hours later the body was flown to America for burial. A man from the American consulate was there when Dr Bruchner and I saw the coffin off at the freight department of the airport.
Before he returned to Bâle, Dr Bruchner told me that he was in touch with the General’s executors in America and that until he heard further from them I was to carry on. He knew, of course, that I had always written the Intercom newsletter practically singlehanded; but he also knew, as I did, that without the General’s name on the thing, it wouldn’t amount to much. We agreed on a formula to cover the new situation. In place of the General’s signature there would be the words: From INTERCOM World Intelligence Network, Novak Editorial Unit, Geneva. In the obituary I was to do on the General I would try to sell the idea that, although he might be dead, the network he had founded was still very much alive, and that Intercom would continue to bear aloft the torch of freedom. Dr Bruchner didn’t actually advise me in so many words to start looking for another job, but his kindly smile as he told me to use my own judgment and do the best I could had much the same effect.
Two weeks Went by. Then I had a letter from Dr Bruchner saying that the American executors had decided to sell out. They had also stated that, as the General had thought so highly of me, an offer from me personally for the shares would receive specially sympathetic consideration.
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.
‘As you please. I will have the German rate converted and a receipt made out.’ I pressed the buzzer for Nicole and offered him a cigarette.
He refused the cigarette with a graceful twitch of the hundred-franc note he had produced and then placed the note on top of the subscription form. While I was giving Nicole the necessary instructions he took a Dutch panatella from his pocket and lit that. He seemed to be in no hurry. That was fine with me.
‘It is not often,’ I said, ‘that we have the opportunity of meeting our subscribers face to face. Many write to us, of course, but …
‘Of course. But Intercom is a far-flung enterprise, not a parish magazine.’ He had suddenly started to speak English. It was strongly accented, but the intonation was English-English, not North American.
‘Nevertheless –’ I went into English too –‘we are always interested in our correspondents’ views and suggestions. They are often of great value to us. I take it, sir, that you are in Geneva on business.’
He nodded vaguely. ‘Yes, business.’ He was peering over my shoulder at the bookshelves now.
‘Would you mind telling me how you came to hear about Intercom?’
I had his wandering attention again. ‘Not at all, Mr Carter. I have a friend who subscribes.’ His smile sweetened. ‘However, since I was careless enough to lose one issue that he gave me to read he has become an unwilling lender. So, you gain a subscriber.’
‘And you retain a friend. I see.’ I made a mental note to check on other subscribers in the Hamburg area. ‘Of course, we have always known that many copies of Intercom are read by more than one person,’ I said. ‘We are glad that they are. We have never been interested in big circulation figures. Influence, in our case, is measured in terms of quality, not quantity.’
It sounded phony to me even as I said it. I might have been an advertisement-space salesman from some new shiny-paper magazine venture trying to gouge a little action out of Rolls-Royce. I saw his eyebrows go up.
‘But we like to know these things,’ I added lamely.
‘And understandably.’ His hands spread out over my desk in a kind of benediction. ‘You are performing an invaluable public service and so are always on the alert for ways of enlarging and extending it.’
It was said far too solemnly. For a moment I had a nasty suspicion that he was putting me on. Still, I could only play it straight.
‘Just so,’ I said.
He leaned forward intently. ‘May I ask you a question, Mr Carter?’
‘By all means.’
‘Have you ever been threatened?’
‘Our American attorneys have been kept quite busy from time to time.’
He shook his head. ‘I was not thinking of legal action, Mr Carter. After all, Intercom’s persistent questing after truth must have made it powerful enemies, enemies who would stop at nothing to silence it.’ The regretful smile was still in place but the eyes were wide and anxious. I decided that I had been wrong about his trying to put me on. He was just another nut like the rest of Intercom’s fans.
Still, he was entitled to value for his money. I gave him the stern, no-nonsense editor look.
‘Mr Siepen, anyone who came here making threats or looking for any other sort of trouble would be out of luck.’
‘But what would you do?’
‘That would depend on the circumstances.’
‘Let us say that you are approached by someone who demands to know the source of some information you have published. What would be your attitude?’
‘We never reveal sources. I’d tell him to go to hell.’
‘You have a pistol?’
‘No, I don’t have a pistol.’ This one, I thought, was really wacky.
‘Suppose there is pressure, a threat of personal violence perhaps.’
‘It hasn’t come to that yet, Mr Siepen.’
‘But if it should come, Mr Carter, how would you respond?’
He was looking at me very earnestly now. He really wanted to know. I suddenly had the feeling that this was some sort of test question for him, so I thought before I answered. Intercom was supposed to be as tough on pacifism as it was on communism, and I didn’t want this idiot reporting back to Bloch’s arms-dealing pals that I was unreliable. On the other hand I wasn’t prepared to talk the bombastic he-man nonsense that I assumed he wanted to hear. I know my limitations; in the he-man area I am just not convincing. I tried laughing the question off.
‘That would depend on who is applying the pressure or making the threat, Mr Siepen. If he were smaller than I am I might try throwing him out myself. Otherwise I dare say I’d get the concierge up to help.’
He was not amused. ‘Do you not feel, Mr Carter, that violence or threats of violence are best dealt with by those whose business it is?’
‘You mean by armies and police forces? Certainly.’
His pals couldn’t object to that, I thought; but he hadn’t finished with me yet, he still hadn’t made his point.
‘Then the threatened or pressured person should call for help?’
‘Obviously he should, if he needs it.’
‘And if he is in no position to call for help or if no help is available, what then? What then does he do?’
I was tired of this fooling around by then. ‘Mr Siepen,’ I said, ‘I’m not very good with hypothetical questions. You tell me what he does.’
He really smiled then, and I noticed that he had had bridge-work done on the left upper jaw. ‘Mr Carter,’ he said, ‘the man of sense submits to the pressure with good grace and does as he is told. As a man of sense yourself, would you not agree?’
How do you reply to that? Start talking about Galileo, or stand to attention and give him Henley’s ‘Invictus’? Luckily I didn’t have to reply because Nicole came back then with his receipt and change. He immediately got up and left. He just said goodbye. He didn’t wait to hear whether I agreed with him or not.
I’ll tell you what I thought then, Mr L. I thought that I’d been at the wrong end of a sounding-out and softening-up process. In that I think I was right. Where I got it wrong was in concluding that the pressures to which the man of sense was going to be subjected and to which he should, with good grace, submit would be coming from Mr Siepen’s direction. An understandable error, in my opinion.
Mr L, I think that I met Colonel Jost before you did.
I think that ‘Mr Siepen’ was Colonel Jost and that the bastard stopped by that day just to let me know in advance that I couldn’t win and, for his own comfort and convenience, to leave me with the thought that it would be better not to try.
So, my physical description of ‘Mr Siepen’ tallies with that of Colonel Jost.
Thank you, Mr L, for letting me know. Your congratulatory pat on the head is also appreciated, although I must say that I find your contention that the gallant Colonel’s visit to me was ‘a kindly gesture of concern’ for my welfare on his part hard to stomach. As I see it, that gesture was about as kindly as the slap on the rump the lamb gets from the farmer when it’s being loaded into the truck for the slaughterhouse. All Colonel Jost was interested in – if you’ve got your facts right, that is – was in seeing that his ‘part of the operation’ ran smoothly and quickly. The attempt to soften me up in advance was just a little oil in the works. You say that he took ‘a certain risk’ in coming to my office. What risk, for God’s sake? Even supposing that one of the bogeymen had come to me later with a photograph of him – none of them ever did, of course, but let’s suppose – and asked if I recognised the face, what could I have said to compromise him? ‘Yes, I’ve seen that man. He took out a subscription under the name of Siepen.’ So what? They know he’s Jost, but what does that prove? Just that there’s one more secret-service bigwig who didn’t like Intercom and that this one gave it the personal onceover.
Kindly gesture, my foot!
On November 4, Dr Bruchner called to tell me that the executors had accepted Arnold Bloch’s offer for the Intercom shares. Because the executors were in America, he said, the legal transfer would take some days to complete, but I could now proceed as if it were an accomplished fact. In due course, no doubt, Herr Bloch would be communicating with me directly.
That was on a Friday. The first communication from Arnold Bloch was a letter which arrived the following Tuesday. It was written in English on his Munich office paper, but airmailed, I happened to notice, from Brussels. It was addressed to me personally at the Intercom office and was set out in the form of a memorandum.
| TO: | Theodore Carter, Geneva |
| FROM: | Arnold Bloch, Munich |
| SUBJECT: | ‘Intercom’ editorial policy |
CONFIDENTIAL
You will have been advised by the Director of Intercom Publishing Enterprises A.G., Dr Martin Bruchner of Bâle, of my organisation’s acquisition of a controlling interest in the publication Intercom Newsletter.
The character of this publication is already well known to me and my associates, and Dr Bruchner has informed you that no changes in its present character and editorial aims are either contemplated or desired. This decision I confirm.
We will, however, from time to time be furnishing you with items of news and information for inclusion in the publication. Such items will in all cases be of a type entirely suitable for inclusion, and will consist of technical bulletins likely to be of special interest to readers employed in government service. These bulletins will generally be brief and it is particularly requested that they are published exactly as they are received by you without elaboration or comment. Their predominantly technical character makes it necessary for us to insist upon this point.
As a conscientious editor you must naturally be at all times concerned that the material you publish is authentic. Special information bulletins coming from me or from my associates may be communicated to you by mail, telegram, Telex and, on occasion, telephone. In order that their source may in all cases be authenticated to you personally, and so accepted by you with complete confidence for immediate publication, the code designation SESAME will precede all such bulletins. If the designation SESAME is absent, this will mean that the bulletin is not authentic and that it should therefore be ignored.
No acknowledgement of SESAME bulletins need be made. Bulletins arriving too late for inclusion in the issue of the newsletter normally airmailed on Tuesdays should be included in the issue of the following week. Any questions arising out of the receipt or publication of SESAME bulletins should be addressed to me personally by telegram, though if the procedure outlined here is carefully followed such a necessity is unlikely to arise.
A final word concerning your own position. I am glad to confirm formally your tenure of the post of Managing Editor pro tern of this publication. However, in the near future I and my associates may wish to discuss with you the possibility of changing the title of your post to that of ‘Managing Editor and Publisher’. At that time, it is thought that a discussion of the corporation’s financial arrangements with you and the possibility of their improvement at an early date may also be appropriate.
A brief acknowledgement by telegram of this memorandum would be appreciated.
It was signed Bloch.
When I say that this memorandum made me feel uneasy I am not indulging in hindsight.
I knew one thing for certain. The only way to keep Intercom afloat without a total subsidy was to see that it continued to be pretty outrageous and, above all, lively. The vision, which the memorandum conjured up, of commercial plugs by the dozen pouring in by mail, telegram and Telex was a depressing one. The promise that they would generally be brief I just couldn’t believe. In my experience businessmen with things to sell can almost never bring themselves to be brief. Unless these ‘technical bulletins’ were going to be written by professional admen, an unlikely prospect, they were bound, I thought, to be long-winded and dull. With much of that sort of stuff to carry, Intercom would soon be about as outrageous and lively as a mail-order catalogue.
The ‘code designation’ SESAME thing bothered me for a different reason. Not only did it seem to me to be a piece of childish hanky-panky – ‘open Sesame’ and the treasure house is revealed – it also suggested that Mr Bloch and his associates took themselves and their investment so seriously that they feared that their competitors might try to muscle in on the act by sending in technical bulletins of their own. That argued delusions of grandeur. It also implied that they were counting on their Intercom promotion campaign to produce business results on a really important scale. Which meant in turn that if their grandiose expectations were to be disappointed – and I thought they probably would be – I could say goodbye to subsidies and my job.
The bit at the end about my new title and the improved financial arrangements only made me laugh. ‘Be a good boy and you may get another cooky.’ Even for a public-relations consultant, that, I thought, was a trifle crude.
I was right to be uneasy. I just picked the wrong reasons for uneasiness and assigned them the wrong priorities.
I sent a brief telegram acknowledging the memorandum. ‘Received and understood,’ I said.
Only the first part of that statement can now be considered true.
Two days later I received, by mail postmarked Bonn, on Bloch’s Munich paper, the first SESAME bulletin.
It was anything but brief. It was also, as I had expected, dreary.
You can look all this up in the Intercom file, Mr L, but I remember that it started something like this:
Inquiries have been received recently about the assembly completion date of the new NATO FG115 fighter-reconnaissance aircraft. We are now able to inform our readers that test flights of the first assembled aircraft were carried out in Belgium two months ago during the week ending September 14. The speeds attained during these tests are, of course, classified ‘NATO SECRET’, but on reliable authority we are able to say that they were in the vicinity of Mach 2.2. This was regarded as disappointing, as the prototypes attained the design speed of Mach 2.5. Difficulty was also experienced with the extremely high take-off speed at full load, and instability of the aircraft at subsonic speeds. Serious delays in delivery of the FG115 are regarded as certain.
If he had left it there it wouldn’t have been too bad, though I itched to do a rewrite job on it; but he then went on to list the contractors involved in the manufacture of the plane. I don’t mean just the air-frame and engine people, but all the contractors and subcontractors – undercarriage, hydraulics, automatic control equipment, fuel system, parachute braking release, ejection modules, the lot – with full names, head-office addresses and the locations of their plants. That bulletin took up a whole page single-spaced.
I assumed, naturally, that it was a smear job hashed up to discredit one or another of his clients’ competitors. It went out in the Intercom issue dated November 15. That was the day the second SESAME bulletin arrived – too late for inclusion that week, so held over, as per instructions, until the following week.
The second bulletin was barely comprehensible, at least to me. It was a chatty little item about Soviet rocket fuels and at least half of it was taken up with chemical symbols set out in complicated diagrammatic arrangements. Ask Nicole about it. She had a terrible time cutting the stencils on that one and had to put in a lot of the lines by hand.
The general idea of it seemed to be that Soviet Army tactical nuclear missile units were reported to be in trouble because of the deterioration of certain missile fuels in storage. Red Army scientists were having a hard time solving the problem. The types of missile affected were given and the quantities thought to be involved. The chemical nature of the problem was described. With diagrams the bulletin took up a page and a half.
Aside from its length, total unreadability and the fact that I couldn’t figure out the public-relations angle intended, what bothered me about that one was the policy question it raised. In the General’s day the only kind of Soviet difficulties we had played up had been the political ones – China, revisionism, trouble with satellites, Ukrainian nationalism, stuff like that. The idea that Soviet missiles might not always be 100 per cent efficient would not have appealed to the General. If bugs had been found in our missiles, that would have been fine with him; that would have meant that there was treachery afoot and a conspiracy to expose; but word of bugs in Soviet missiles would merely have served to encourage a slackening in the anti-communist Free World effort and to play into the hands of liberals, coexisters and pseudo-intellectuals. In the General’s day I would have killed the story automatically without reference to him. Now, despite Herr Bloch’s assurances, the character of Intercom was being made to change. There were a good many subscribers who still thought the way the General had. If they could understand what that bulletin was about I didn’t think they would like it. I would get stern letters warning of the dangers of underrating a ruthless opponent and even hinting that we have been taken in by a cunning Soviet propaganda trick. That sort of thing was always bad for subscription renewals.
The third SESAME bulletin seemed relatively harmless. It was headed ‘Operation Triangle’, though it didn’t say what that was. It began by reporting a recent order, placed with an Italian firm by an American defence procurement agency in Brussels, for prefabricated concrete structures ‘of a new and interesting type’. The question now, it went on, was to decide who would supply the ‘sensitive equipment’ which had been designed to go inside these structures. There were many possibilities – here followed another ghastly list of names, addresses and plant locations – of which two (names again and presumably these were Bloch associates) were favoured by the scientific advisers on Operation Triangle.
We published that in the issue dated November 29.
Four days later another of the technical block-busters arrived. The envelope it came in was postmarked Copenhagen.
This bulletin was a detailed description of a new portable seismograph ‘constructed on the variable reluctance principle’. It had been designed by a professor of physics in a Soviet university (name and address supplied) for the detection of low-yield underground atomic explosions at ranges up to five thousand kilometres. It was on the Soviet General Staff secret list.
The technical description itself was gibberish to me. The only thing that I could understand in that bulletin, apart from the preamble, was a footnote. This said that the technical information had been supplied by N. V. Skriabin, a member of the Soviet trade mission in Oslo.
That footnote really made me jump. Up to that point I had been prepared to take Herr Bloch more or less at his face value. Two of the bulletins so far published had been easily construable as attempts to influence government defence contract awards, in one way or another, for the benefit of his associates. The rocket-fuel story was more difficult to place, but I was prepared to attribute the difficulty to my ignorance of the subject matter and background. Talking about technical problems with Soviet rocket fuels could have been a subtle way of drawing attention to the existence of similar problems with our own. It was conceivable that one of Bloch’s associates or clients had specialised know-how to sell and that this was the round-about way Bloch had chosen to interest the concerned parties in his man.
With Bulletin Four, however, no such possibility existed. All that Bloch was trying to do in that one, it seemed to me, was a hatchet job on Comrade Skriabin.
I thought about it a bit and then decided to wire for confirmation. This was the telegram I sent to Munich:
SESAME BULLETIN FOUR. IN LINE ESTABLISHED INTERCOM POLICY QUESTION ADVISABILITY OF REVEALING SOURCE OF INFORMATION AS GIVEN YOUR TEXT. PLEASE ADVISE.
For forty-eight hours I heard nothing. Then a telegram arrived from Brussels.
SESAME BULLETIN FOUR PUBLISH COMPLETE AS RECEIVED.
But from that moment on I disliked Herr Bloch. My sympathies were with N. V. Skriabin. It seemed to me that he had been put on the wrong end of a very dirty deal.
It wasn’t long before I began to suspect that I might be in the same position.
Tuesdays, when we went to press, were noisy, with the Addressograph and mimeo machines going and the part-time help who came in to do the collating, folding and enclosing all chattering away at the tops of their voices; but Monday was my really busy day. That was when I put Intercom to bed. On Mondays I rarely left the office much before ten.
In the mornings I used to park my car in a side street near the church of St Gervais and then walk across the river to the office. There was no easy parking nearer. By ten at night, though, the bridge I used to walk back over the river wasn’t carrying much traffic and the streets beyond it were quiet, almost deserted.
I don’t know when the surveillance began or which lot started it, but it was on a Monday night – Monday, December 12, just six days after the publication of SESAME Bulletin Four – that I first realised that I was being followed.