The car was the property of an international rental service. It had been signed for earlier that day by a man with a credit card in the name of Yves Boularis and an address in Paris. Other papers found on the victim, along with the credit card in question, identified the dead man as Boularis. There was a description of the car and a request to anyone who had happened to notice it, either in the Cagnes district that evening or earlier in Nice, to contact the police.
At eleven there was a repetition of the same story, but with additional details.
Boularis was a Tunisian who was listed in the central file of foreign residents as an import-export dealer in electronic equipment. The possibility of his having also been involved in the narcotics traffic had not been overlooked. Friends of the dead man and business associates were being sought for questioning.
There was a cryptic tail-piece.
A police spokesman had said that a disquieting feature of the case was the bizarre method that seemed to have been employed by the killer or killers. The dead man had been sitting with his seat belt fastened. The ‘plastiqué’ had not been detonated by an ignition-key contact or by any of the other methods commonly used in these cases. A possible suicide? Certainly not. Out of the question.
The newspapers the following morning were a good deal more explicit, and one of them sickeningly so.
There was no doubt that Yves had been driven to the place of execution. He had been unconscious or semi-conscious at the time. There was evidence to suggest that force had been used to make him submit to an injection. The nature of the drug would doubtless be determined later.
He had then been placed in the driving seat of his rented car. The charge of ‘plastiqué’ that had killed him had been attached to the diagonal portion of the seat-belt where it crossed his stomach. Both his wrists had been lashed with baling-wire to the steering wheel. A time fuse had been used to explode the charge. It may have been intended that he should regain consciousness and know what was being done to him before he died. A murder of revenge was indicated. It seemed likely that more than one assassin, and certainly a second car, had been needed to commit the crime. The body, which had been eviscerated — indeed, almost cut in half — by the explosive charge, was undergoing the most thorough forensic examination. The autopsy findings, together with scientific investigation of the car’s interior, were expected to supply much-needed leads to the identity of those responsible.
‘Bestial!’ said Melanie. ‘They are vile gangsters.’
‘I dare say those who did it are. But what do we call those nice people, Mat and Frank, say, who specified exactly what was to be done, and paid for the doing of it? What do we call them?’
‘Ask Professor Krom. He always has a word for things. Ask him, Paul, and send me a postcard with the answer.’
‘You won’t be going to Brussels with me?’
‘Thank you. I prefer to keep my stomach.’ She gave me a sidelong look. ‘Will you go?’
I managed a thin smile. ‘Mr Williamson seems to have made his position very clear. Until the Placid Island negotiations are safely concluded, I am advised not to show my nose in any of the usual places. I must remain completely unavailable, physically unavailable, for questioning by any inquisitive journalist who may have heard rumours put about by Krom’s witnesses or listened to the great man’s schnapps-induced ramblings. The same applies to you. My work at Symposia will have to be delegated for a while.’
‘To whom? Frank Yamatoku?’
I actually chuckled. ‘We’ll have to see. Meanwhile I too would like to keep my stomach. We must both vanish. Of course I’m not going to Brussels.’
‘Krom won’t be pleased.’
‘Then I must learn to live with his displeasure.’
Why have I failed?
Possibly because the form taken by Krom’s displeasure hasn’t greatly encouraged me to try living with it.
Some things are too difficult for a man of my sort ever to learn. Among them is the art of living with the displeasure of a fool.
His anger at my failure to commit suicide — by joining him and his witnesses in Brussels — was promptly expressed.
Two months later, a whole Special Issue of The New Sociologist was devoted to a piece by Krom. Its title was: The Able Criminal, Notes for a Case-study.
I made no complaint about it at the time.
That wasn’t simply because, in order to oblige Mat Williamson, and discourage him from having me murdered, I was making myself scarce. I may have been incommunicado, but I wasn’t out of touch. I could have instructed lawyers if I’d wished to, or I could have told my people at Symposia to instruct lawyers. There were, indeed, some of them who urged me to do so. I didn’t because I thought it best to ignore the thing. Most international corporation lawyers and accountants are too busy trying to keep abreast of new tax legislation affecting their clients to bother their heads with publications like The New Sociologist.
I am not the first person to have made that sort of mistake, and I won’t be the last. However, it wasn’t until German publication of Krom’s book, Der kompetente Kriminelle, produced a whole crop of articles on the subject in the international news magazines and business journals, that I knew I had made a mistake.
So, it is against Krom’s irresponsible book, not his irresponsible article, that my formal complaint is made.
Not that there’s much to choose between them. The book, now being translated into four other languages, is essentially a revamped version of the article, padded to size with long winded footnotes, appendices, a bibliography and an index. There is little new material. The journalistic crossheads used to break the article up into digestible sections — phrases such as The Arnarchy of Extortion and The Criminal as Moral Philosopher — have become chapter headings.
Not many changes otherwise. The inaccuracy, falsity and total dishonesty of the original remain unqualified.
Frits Buhler Krom is a phony.
He came to see me in Brussels with his head full of preconceived notions. Nothing had been permitted to modify them. He knew what he had to say in order to prove his case. He has now said it.
Why, then, did he risk his skin on the battlefield of Cap d’ Ail? Though he couldn’t have known the kind of danger he would be running into, he was clearly prepared for trouble of some sort. The precautions he took in Brussels against the possibility of my being the kind of man who might like to have him killed tells us that. Why then?
So that he can now apply the respectable label of ‘case-study’ to the drivel he has written, of course. Why else? Now, he can pretend that, having journeyed bravely into the unknown and observed its wonders, he is simply reporting what he alone has seen for the enlightenment of scholars.
As poor Yves might have said, he is ‘all piss and wind’.
For what does this criminological Münchhausen have to tell us about his travels?
Well, once upon a time when he was in Zurich, he identified this man Oberholzer. Years later, he saw him again. Oberholzer, now, as then, the sole and supreme overlord of a vast international extortion conspiracy, agreed to talk and even make written statements about techniques used by able criminals in exchange for immunity from certain pressures Krom was in a position to apply. There were two victims of Oberholzer’s extortion racket who happened to be known to Krom. Their code-names were Kleister and Torten, and. .
And so on, and so. Until we get to the shrewd analysis of my ‘papers’.
Sample questions. Why, if the tax-avoidance consultancy service wasn’t a mere front, was it necessary to employ informers like the unfortunate Kramer? A genuine tax-consultant would naturally be given access to his clients’ banking accounts by the clients themselves. Isn’t it obvious that men like Kleister and Torten were never clients, only victims?