‘Drop dead.’
There was a pause. Then: ‘Paul, that offer’s quite genuine. We mean it. Just lay off Krom.’ The effort he was having to make to remain civil was nearly audible.
‘Drop dead.’
‘Paul, I’d like you to reconsider that answer.’
‘Okay. I’ve reconsidered. The answer’s no.’
‘Because if anyone’s going to drop dead, it’s not going to be anyone here.’
‘Frank,’ I said, ‘you wasted your money on Yves. Why did you have to hire people to kill him? You should have just tied him down and kept talking to him. The way you’re talking to me. It wouldn’t have been a pleasant death, any more than the ‘plastiqué’ was, but it would have been a whole lot cheaper for Mat. And it would have left no traces. Well, scarcely any. Just the sort of rictus a man gets on his face when he’s been hit by a poisoned arrow or dies yawning.’
There was another pause. ‘I’m going to read out some numbers to you. You know about communications codes. Well, this is yours, your current one. It places you and your Kraut helper about four hours from here by road, and about three from the guys with the know-how that you tell me is so inefficient and over-priced. So, better take a deep breath. If you’re going to run again, this time, you’ll have a long way to go. Ready? Okay. This is your code. Prefix reads. . ‘
I listened to the first seven figures, just to make sure that my old security man hadn’t thought he owed it to me to make a slight error.
He hadn’t. The Brussels old-pals act had been repealed. It was time I got moving.
I hung up and called Melanie.
She always knows best how to make travel arrangements.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Carlo’s house smells like a handkerchief out of an old drawer. Even when it was newly built one had been aware of a certain mustiness. Carlo had attributed it then to the brackish water used in mixing the concrete and said that it would gradually go away. It never has gone away; instead, it has ripened. That verbena-scented anti-mildew spray which Melanie gets at the general store on the Out Island only makes it worse.
She does the trip on our boat, with Jake to navigate and nurse the engine, every week; and, every week, she returns with our mail and our groceries and our drinks and a denunciation of the Out Island hairdresser. Every week, too, she says that that is the last time and that next week, no matter what the risk, she is leaving for Nassau or Miami and the joys of Elizabeth Arden. She adds that bad food can kill you just as surely as ‘plastiqué’.
She has my sympathy. Tonight, though, when I’ve thought everything through again and treble-checked it, it is possible that I may at last have an escape plan to submit to her.
Yesterday, the mail brought back with her consisted of two letters.
One was from a real-estate agent in Kingston, and it was to tell me that my asking price for the island was a bit too high. We get lots of letters like that. I mention it only to explain how we’ve been operating. Just in case somebody working for Mat and Frank somehow, somewhere, accidentally got on to the fact that I had access, as one of Carlo’s trustees, to a Caribbean island, we have an early-warning system. There are hundreds of small island properties around here; and, since the real-estate people know more than the government records office about who really owns what, they’re the ones who always know first if anyone starts making enquiries. Who but a prospective buyer would make enquiries? So, although I haven’t the slightest right to be, I am a prospective seller. In that way, I get the benefit of the real-estate agents’ intelligence network. Thus far, only one prospective buyer has actually reached our dreamy lagoon. After a lunch prepared by Carlo’s cook — getting a little old now but still resolutely awful — he left and we heard no more.
We have been reasonably secure against everything except excruciating boredom, malnutrition and the possibility of those conditions becoming permanent features of what’s left of our lives.
That’s why the second letter was so important.
It was from the man who has helped me prepare this account of the ‘siege of the Villa Lipp’ for publication.
I had sought him out because I had liked something he had written and deduced from it that he was a person who would be unlikely to strike high-minded or other tedious attitudes. My approach was made by sending him a copy of Krom’s book and a commentary I had written on the original New Sociologist piece. At the same time I had him vetted as a security risk.
At our first meeting on the Out Island we reached an understanding. Neither of us, I am happy to say, has since had reason to remind the other of the terms of it. Our relationship has developed remarkably. From being my amanuensis, he has become my literary mentor, then a business intermediary dealing on my behalf with publishers, and finally, my trusted legal adviser.
He anticipated that final role on several occasions during the writing of the book by sending me warnings — ‘You can’t say things like that,’ or ‘Nobody’s going to stand for this’ — that I had simply ignored. Then, when the first English language text was submitted to our publisher, the blow fell. The publisher made his acceptance conditional on legal waivers being obtained from those persons whom his lawyers said were libelled in the book as it stood; namely, Connell, Henson, Langridge, Williamson, Yamatoku, Symposia SA and, of course, Krom.
For me, that could have finished it. I was tired and unusually depressed. Indeed, at a gloomy last meeting on the Out Island with my adviser, I told him to have all those expensive typescripts — expensive because they had been done on that special paper that goes black if anyone tries to photograph or photocopy it — retrieved and destroyed.
He persuaded me not to be hasty. Let the publisher, who was willing to persevere with the book, try to get the waivers. If massive deletions or other vital changes were required, we could decide then whether or not they were acceptable. Possibly some name changes would be sufficient. There was nothing to be lost by finding out.
I told him to go ahead and see what happened. He gets a percentage of any royalties that the book may earn, so I could see his point of view. Mine was that, providing the book wasn’t totally emasculated, he and the publisher had better be left to do the best they could for what they have been polite enough to refer to as my Cause.
The first reaction we had was encouraging though somewhat surprising. It was from Connell and said simply: ‘Publish and be damned.’
An accompanying letter from my adviser explained that Dr Connell was now teaching in a different university and also being divorced by his second wife. However, the lawyer seemed to think that his brief note constituted a waiver.
Dr Henson’s reply puzzled me.
‘Publish by all means,’ she wrote, ‘recent school-leavers and college drop-outs should find some passages in the book heartening as well as instructive. Funnier than Smiles’s Self help and likely to be preferred by modern teenage readers. Probation officers everywhere will love it.’
I wondered if she had been sent the wrong book, but was assured that she hadn’t. It was thought that her reply may have been designed to cause annoyance to the head of her department.
He objected strongly to the use of his name and the attribution to him of certain statements. His name was changed to ‘Langridge’ and some deletions of references to British security service personnel were made.
The response from Mat was most strange. I was sent a photocopy.
The letter came, beautifully typed, on paper with the heading, GOVERNMENT HOUSE, PLACID ISLAND, in discreet capitals. It was signed by a Personal Assistant.
‘I am directed by His Excellency Mathew Tuakana to present his compliments. He has read the manuscript of the book described as the edited recollections of Mr Paul Firman. It may, he agrees, be of some sociological interest to specialists, particularly in the field of psychiatric social work. It is not a field with which His Excellency has had occasion to become familiar. On Placid Island psychiatric illness, even in its milder forms, is virtually unknown. Mr Firman’s account of a western criminal sub-culture seems, possibly for that reason, as far fetched as the one he would like to give of Placid and its people. It is to be hoped that his recollections of the former are as unreliably based on hearsay as his speculations about the latter.