I drank some whisky. I had begun to need it. As if to humour him, I put the question: ‘Well, why did you use the receptionist to send me your message?’
He gave me a nod for good behaviour, but no immediate answer to his question.
‘In spite of his being one of the more active members of your private espionage organization,’ he said, ‘I think I may know more about that receptionist than you do. Naturally, all your known associates have interested me for some time. Where possible J have built up dossiers on them. However, once I had decided that the birthplace of our collaboration would be here in Brussels, work on all your local contacts was intensified.’ A peculiar twitching of his facial muscles began as he added: ‘The possibility of an abortion occurring was, to this fond parent, a totally unacceptable risk.’
As his face went on twitching and he gazed at me expectantly, I realized that he thought he had said something funny and was waiting for a laugh.
When all he got was a blank stare, the twitching ceased and he said tolerantly: ‘Perhaps you would find a military analogue more to your taste.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Well then, this was the kind of operation in which success can only be won by immaculate preparation leading to the achievement of tactical surprise. A note delivered to your room, or left in your mail-box downstairs here, would not have worked. You would have had time to think, time to investigate and prepare defences, possibly time to make arrangements for my discomfiture. Or even,’ he added coyly, ‘not knowing of the precautions I had taken to safeguard myself, time to organize my removal from the scene.’
I looked suitably offended by the insinuation. ‘For a criminologist you have a somewhat lurid imagination, Professor.’
‘I was not, of course, being entirely serious, Mr Firman.’ The teeth made a jovial showing, but the wariness in the pale-blue eyes told a different story. He believed not only that I was an able criminal but also a person capable of murder. I made a note of the fact. That sort of belief, senseless though it may be, can sometimes be quite useful.
‘But,’ he was saying, ‘you are right about one thing.’
‘Good.’
‘The concierge might, as you say, have found the verbal message strange. There could have been several possible consequences of his doing so. You might, as we have seen, have been in some way forewarned and thus forearmed. Even more important, he might, without thinking, have talked, gossiped, and so compromised the entire operation. I had long perceived, you see, that if our collaboration was to be fruitful, absolute secrecy, in the early stages especially, was essential. That is why I chose the receptionist to deliver my message. He will not, I assure you, repeat a word of it, or of your subsequent questioning of him, to any third party. The poor fellow is far too frightened to disobey me.’
‘I noticed that he had been frightened. What did you threaten him with?’
‘Threaten him, Mr Firman? It wasn’t necessary to threaten him.’ He found the accusation quite astounding. ‘As I told you, I have done, and had done for me, much intensive work on your people. This man spied on you, so it occurred to me to wonder if, perhaps, he spied, or had once spied, for someone else. I was simply looking in a routine fashion, you understand, for parallel associations. Well, I have friends in Bonn who are interested in my work and they have access to the BND and its archive of Nazi SD files. And what do you think? During the Nazi occupation here our receptionist avoided forced labour recruitment by becoming an SD informer. Naturally, since he had never been exposed here — the victorious Allies couldn’t be bothered with the non-German small fry and the Belgian Resistance never had free access to the files — he had come to believe that the past, or that little bit of his particular past, was buried for ever. Did you know about it?’
He was still trying to sell me the proposition that, no matter what game we ended up playing, he would hold a winning hand.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘So it was unnecessary to use threats. All I had to do was speak to him using his old German code-name.’
‘I see. And you didn’t consider that a threat?’
He swallowed most of his drink — talking had made him thirsty — and savoured it with a genteel little smack of the lips before he answered.
‘No,’ he said finally, ‘I didn’t consider it a threat. Nor, by the same token, would I consider that the conflicting interests which will be the basis of our collaboration need be thought of as threats by either of us. We are both sensible men, are we not?’
‘I am beginning to have doubts, Professor. That is the third time you have spoken of our collaborating. Collaborating in what, for heaven’s sake?’
This time he showed me all his teeth and a stretch of molar bridgework as well.
‘I intend,’ he said, ‘to make a complete, full-scale case study of both you and your remarkable career, Mr Firman. For that, I shall require your close collaboration. Total anonymity will, of course, be guaranteed so that nothing need be left unsaid. You will be the great Mr X.’ He gave a little snicker. ‘In other words, I intend to make your craft and its associated skills as well understood by, and as recognizable in, the law-enforcement agencies of the world as common-or-garden burglary is now. Yes, Mr Firman, I intend to make you famous!’
Mat was in London, negotiating, on behalf of Chief Tebuke and the native population of Placid Island, the final settlement of their claim against the Anglo-Anzac Phosphate Company; or rather he was going through the motions of negotiating on their behalf. Everyone who counted knew that he was in fact negotiating more for his own ultimate benefit than anyone else’s. They also thought that they knew what he wanted for himself out of the settlement. His connection with, then amounting to control of, the Symposia Group was at that time a very well-kept secret.
We maintained a fully-staffed office in Brussels. With its help, I was able to reach him by telephone soon after seven.
The emergency routine in use at the time involved sending a preliminary alert through a London cut-out via telex. That brought him to a safe phone to receive the call. Inevitably, though, there was some delay. I filled it by re-examining the file on Krom.
It had been his Berne lecture that had brought him to my attention, and it was to the lecture that I now returned.
One of the things that had struck me about it at the time had been his casual use of the word ‘criminal’. In my opinion and, I think, in that of most modern lexicographers, a criminal is one who commits a serious act generally considered injurious to the public welfare and usually punishable by law. Krom seemed to believe that anyone possessing the imagination and business planning skills needed to evolve a new way of investing time and money in order to make a profit, was automatically a criminal. The wretch need not have committed any illegal act to earn him the distinction. If he had been original and his originality had succeeded, that was enough. For Krom he stood condemned.
This is Krom on my old friend Carlo Lech’s last fling: ‘The classic coup by Able Criminals — we do not know exactly how many were involved, but it is believed that there were four partners in the venture — is, of course, the famous butter affair. For the benefit of those delegates here whose governments have seen fit to abstain from or avoid, membership of the EEC, I should explain that between member states there is an elaborate system of import-export subsidies. What these clever rogues did was to buy a large consignment of butter, a trainload of the stuff, and send it on a European tour, claiming each time it crossed a frontier, subsidies for its fictional transformation into some other butter-fat product. At the end of the tour they sold off the butter for what they had paid for it and pocketed between them ten million Deutschmarks in subsidies. Later operators in this field have not even troubled to buy the goods they manipulate in this way. Their transactions exist only on paper. Value-added tax rebates of nonexistent but thoroughly-documented export transactions are currently in vogue. EEC regulations are constantly being changed, of course, to stop up the holes in them, but new holes continue to appear. Needless to say, even when such a criminal, or the corporate cover behind which he works, has supposedly been identified, there is no effective means of instituting a prosecution.’