Eric Ambler - Siege at the Villa Lipp

‘No further problems, no. But the one I’m here about is quite enough, I assure you.’ I looked at Frank and then back at Mat and waited.

After a moment Mat gave me his lazy smile. ‘All right. Would you excuse us, Frank?’

Frank stood up. ‘Surely. Good to see you, Paul.’

With a nod he left. I was quite sure that he would listen to what Mat and I had to say to one another, but even so it was better without him there.

‘A drink, Paul?’ Mat motioned towards the sideboard.

‘A little later perhaps, Mat. We have that man Krom, the criminology professor, on our backs.’

He became very still. He knew who Krom was. All the stuff about the man and his views that had been passed by the researchers to me had been passed by me to Mat. He was now mentally reviewing it. After he had done so, he relaxed again.

‘Tell me, Paul.’

I told him about the first stage of the Krom encounter and waited.

‘A foolish man,’ he commented, ‘but you don’t consider him stupid, I gather. If you did you wouldn’t be here.’

‘No, he’s not stupid. He is, however, a little frightened by the step he has taken.’

‘Frightened of you?’

‘Of me, of us. He has friends in the Dutch Ministry of Justice sympathetic to his views on our business activities. He has friends of like mind in West German intelligence. The man under whose name he is attending the seminar is a rich Luxembourger with political connections. All were advised confidentially of Krom’s reasons for attending and of his professional intentions before he came. He has also left affidavits concerning the Kramer affair with university colleagues.’

I paused and again waited for comment. After a moment he began to whistle softly. According to Baden-Powell, the good Scout smiles and whistles under all difficulties. Mat had given up smiling under difficulties, but the habit, acquired as a boy, of whistling under them he had never lost. The tune was always the same, that of a treacly Victorian ballad entitled ‘Just a Song at Twilight’. He must have picked it up from some homesick Britishers. It sounded very odd coming from Mat’s lips. He says that Baden-Powell himself admitted to having sometimes had trouble over his whistling. Frequent use in public of this antidote to difficulty during the Boer War had given him in some quarters a reputation for eccentricity and callous indifference to the feelings of others.

The whistling stopped. ‘What leverage has he?’

‘He has been working on Symposia, and me, for a long time. He has identified me in the Oberholzer role. He knows other things. He can’t know all and publish it himself without naming names, he threatens to leak what he does know to an American or German news magazine with names.’

‘All he’s got is hearsay. He’s bluffing. You should have played polo with him, Paul.’

Another Baden-Powell prescription. To play polo with someone in this context is to outmanoeuvre him by edging him away from the direction in which you want to go. The metaphor was first used by B-P, I believe, in his essay on the joys of pig-sticking.

‘It didn’t work, Mat.’

‘You should have double-talked him.’

‘I did. I asked him to define crime. I asked him if he didn’t think that it was largely a fiction created by politicians posing as legislators and legislators pretending that their motives are free from political pollution. Didn’t he agree that ninety-five per cent of so-called crime is committed by governments against, and at the expense of, those citizens in whose names they pretend to govern?’

‘Yes, that’s double-talk all right. What did he say?’

‘That it was double-talk. You have to understand, Mat, that what he really wants now is to satisfy his professional vanity. You read his Berne paper. It amused us. Others, his professional peers, are not in the least amused when their lives’ work is dismissed as irrelevant. In many quarters he’s been attacked as a crank. He now wants us to help him demonstrate that, far from being a crank, he is the great innovator, a Darwin of criminology.’

‘By publishing a casebook without naming names? Oh, I know that medical textbooks do it. Patient X and patient Y. The identities don’t matter, not unless the doctor reporting the case is suspected of being a quack seeking to prove an untenable pet theory with invented evidence.’

‘Exactly. In such a case, he either has to produce the patient or qualified witnesses to substantiate his evidence. That’s what Krom proposes to do. He has his witnesses already picked, one American, one English, both qualified persons. We meet in private for a four-day period during which I give them the story of my life. Place of meeting to be of my choosing. Strict security to be observed by all, especially witnesses who will be given only the sketchiest of preliminary briefings, enough to engage their interest and ensure their co-operation, without giving anything substantial away. The text of this briefing will be agreed by Krom and me. All names, places and so on to be changed in order to protect the guilty. That’s what he wants, and in my opinion that’s what he means to get, no matter what it costs.’

He started whistling again, then abruptly stopped. ‘I think you’ve allowed yourself to be conned, Paul. I think you should tell him go jump under a train and that if he makes slanderous or libellous statements about you, or the Institute, or the Symposia Group, we’ll sue them and him till the pips squeak. Remind him that, in the circumstances, he will be a source no publisher can protect in the usual way. He’ll have uttered his threats to the plaintiff in advance. He wouldn’t have a hope.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s no good, Mat. I tried all that. I told you, he knows things. One of his juiciest suspicions is that Symposia is hooked into the Placid Island project. He only needs start a rumour to that effect to cause trouble. Do you still think I’m allowing myself to be conned?’

That did it, as I had known it would.

Mat’s cynicism about the Placid Island deal is a pretence; it, always has been, although he would never dream of admitting it. As a boy, he had heard of another phosphate island once called Pleasant, which had re-discovered its aboriginal name of Nauru. As a man, he had seen that same Nauru, whose whole history was so like that of Placid, cast off her old trust-territory shackles, achieve independence from the British Commonwealth and become the Republic of Nauru, with prospects as a tax-haven.

Now it was Placid’s turn. Placid had a better climate than Nauru and better port facilities than Nauru, which lacks a natural harbour. Placid was Mat’s birthplace. With Mat to preside over its fortunes and its future — poor old Chief Tebuke could have a whole floor to himself in the Placid Hilton if he lived long enough — with Mat to provide the inspired leadership that his people so eagerly awaited. Placid was destined to become the most remarkable, the most prosperous sovereign state in the entire South Pacific.

Is Mat an able criminal as defined by Professor Krom? Possibly, but he is certainly no anarchist. What he wants is a kingdom, and if the national flag has not yet been designed — a pandurus leaf on a field of gold? — the banknotes almost certainly have. If sociologists like Krom must paste labels on men and women in order to classify them, I would say that Mat is, as I am, an adventurer; that is, in the old pejorative sense of the term, a healthy and intelligent person who could labour usefully in the vineyard, but who prefers instead to live by his wits.

There was no more whistling from Mat. He stared at me now with cold dislike.

‘What does he know about Placid?’

‘That I went there last November. He knows that Symposia turned down the offer of an interest in Nauru. He knows that Symposia has stopped steering its clients towards the New Hebrides and has something else cooking. He knows that a Placid settlement is imminent because word has got round that our competitors are trying to get a foot in there through Anglo-Anzac’