‘No,’ he said, ‘I’d rather not. I don’t think I could bear it. You see, they look so much alike.’
There was nothing more to be said after that. I never expected to see him again. I took it for granted that he had recovered this time, though his death would not have appeared in any paper. He was not a millionaire.
I repeated to Anna-Luise what he had told me. She said, ‘Poor mother. But it was only a little lie. If it only happened once.’
‘I wonder how he found out.’ It was odd how seldom we named names. It was generally ‘he’ or ‘she’, but there was no confusion. Perhaps it was part of the telepathy that exists between lovers.
‘She said that when he began to suspect - he put a thing on his telephone to record conversations. He told her so himself, so when that conversation took place he must have known. Anyway it wouldn’t surprise me if she told him herself - and told him that it wouldn’t happen again. Perhaps she lied to me because I was too young to understand. Holding hands and listening to Mozart together would have been almost the same as making love to me then - as it was to him - I mean my father.’
‘I wonder if he really wept at the funeral.’
‘I don’t believe that - unless he wept to see his victim disappear. Or perhaps it was hay fever. She died in the hay fever season.’
12
Christmas came down and covered the land in snow up to the edge of the lake - one of the coldest Christmases for many years, enjoyed by dogs and children and skiers, but I didn’t belong to any of those categories. My office was very warmly heated, but the garden outside looked blue through the tinted glass and chilled me all the same. I felt much too old for my job - to deal with chocolates all the time, milk and plain, almond and hazel, seemed work more suitable to a younger man or a girl.
I was surprised when one of my chiefs opened the door of my office and let in Mr Kips. It was as if a cartoon had come to life; bent almost double, Mr Kips advanced with his hand held out, as though it was in search of that lost dollar rather than in welcome. My colleague said, in a tone of respect I was unaccustomed to hear, ‘I believe you have met Mr Kips.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘at Doctor Fischer’s.’
‘I didn’t know that you knew Doctor Fischer.’
‘Mr Jones is married to his daughter,’ Mr Kips said. I thought I saw a look of fear on the face of my chief. I had been up till now far beneath his notice and suddenly I represented a danger - for a son-in-law of Doctor Fischer’s, might he not, with that influence behind him, find a place on the board?
Unwisely I couldn’t help teasing him a little. ‘Dentophil Bouquet,’ I said, ‘tries to undo the damage we do in this building to the teeth.’ It was a very rash remark: it could be classed as disloyalty. Big business, like a secret service, demands loyalty from its employees more than honesty.
‘Mr Kips,’ my chief said, ‘is a friend of the managing director. He has a little problem of translation and the managing director would like you to help him.’
‘A letter I wish to send to Ankara,’ Mr Kips said. ‘I want to attach a copy in Turkish to prevent misunderstanding.’
‘I will leave you together,’ my chief said, and when the door closed, Mr Kips told me, ‘This is confidential, of course.’
‘I can see that.’
Indeed I had seen it at the very first glance. There were references to Prague and Skoda, and Skoda to all the world means armaments. Switzerland is a land of strangely knotted business affiliations: a great deal of political as well as financial laundering goes on in that little harmless neutral state. The technical terms which had to be translated were all connected I could see with weapons. (For a short while I was in a world far removed from chocolates.) Apparently there was a firm called I. CF. C. Inc. which was American and it was purchasing weapons, on behalf of a Turkish company, from Czechoslovakia. The final destination of the weapons - all small arms - was very unclear. A name which sounded as if it might be Palestinian or Iranian was somehow involved.
My Turkish is more rusty than my Spanish because I have less practice (we don’t do much business with the land of Turkish Delight), and the letter took me quite a long while to translate. ‘I will get a fair copy typed,’ I told Mr Kips.
‘I would rather you did it yourself,’ Mr Kips said. ‘The secretary can’t read Turkish.’
‘All the same…’
When I had finished typing, Mr Kips said, ‘I realize you have done this in office time, but all the same perhaps a little present…?’
‘Quite unnecessary.’
‘Might I perhaps send a box of chocolates to your wife? Perhaps liqueur chocolates?’
‘Oh, but you know, Mr Kips, in this business we are never short of chocolates.’
Mr Kips, still bent nearly double so that his nose approached the desk, as though he were trying to find the elusive dollar by the smell, folded the letter and the original and tucked them away in his notecase. He said, ‘When we meet at Doctor Fischer’s, you won’t, of course, mention… This affair is most confidential.’
‘I don’t think we’ll ever meet there again.’
‘But why? At this season of the year, if the weather is fine, never mind the snow, he usually gives the most magnificent party of all the year. Soon, I expect, we shall be getting our invitations.’
‘I’ve seen one party and that is enough for me.’
‘I must admit that the last party was perhaps a little crude. All the same it will go down in the memory of his friends as the Porridge Party. The Lobster Party was a good deal more entertaining. But then you never know what to expect with Doctor Fischer. There was the Quail Party which rather upset Madame Faverjon…’ He sighed. ‘She was very attached to birds. You can’t please everybody.’
‘But I suppose his presents always do, please I mean.’
‘He’s very, very generous.’
Mr Kips began to make his bent-pin way to the door: it was as though the grey moquette were a map printed with the route which he had to follow. I called after him, ‘I met an old employee of yours. He works in a music shop. Called Steiner.’
He said, ‘I don’t remember the name,’ and continued without pausing along the route which had been traced for him on the moquette.
That night I told Anna-Luise of my encounter. ‘You can’t get away from them,’ she said. ‘First poor Steiner and then Mr Kips.’
‘Mr Kips’s business had nothing to do with your father. In fact he asked me not to mention our meeting if I saw your father.’
‘And you promised?’
‘Of course. I don’t intend ever to see him again.’
‘But now they’ve attached you to him by a secret, haven’t they? They don’t intend to let you go. They want you to be one of them. Otherwise they won’t feel safe.’
‘Safe?’
‘Safe from being laughed at by someone on the outside.’
‘Well, the fear of being laughed at doesn’t seem to deter them much.’
‘I know. Greed wins every time.’
‘I wonder what the Quail Party can have been that so upset Madame Faverjon.’
‘Something beastly. You may be sure of that.’
The snow continued to fall. It was going to be a very white Christmas. There were blocks even on the auto-route and Cointrin airport was closed for twenty-four hours. It mattered nothing to us. It was the first Christmas we had ever had together, and we celebrated it like children with all the trimmings. Anna-Luise bought a tree and we laid our presents for each other at its foot, gift-wrapped in the shops with gay paper and ribbons. I felt more like a father than a lover or a husband. That didn’t worry me - a father dies first.
On the eve of Christmas the snow stopped and we went to the old abbey at Saint Maurice for midnight Mass and listened to that still more ancient story of the Emperor Augustus’s personal decree and how all the world came to be taxed. We were neither of us Roman Catholics, but this was the universal feast of childhood. It seemed quite suitable to see Belmont there, listening carefully to the decree of the Emperor, all by himself, as he had been at our wedding. Perhaps the Holy Family should have taken his advice and somehow evaded registration at Bethlehem.