I have a prognathous upper jaw and what are commonly called ‘buck’ teeth. Because they are so prominent I try always to keep them very clean. I express disgust or disbelief by making a hawking sound in the throat. When we were young, my wife tried unsuccessfully to cure me of the habit which she thought unbecoming, and at times offensive. I also suffer from an arthritic condition of the spine that my doctor calls ‘parrot’s beak’ and is properly known as spondylitis. If afflicts many other people my age, causing discomfort or inconvenience in varying amounts. Long, hot journeys made in small, nervous cars on mountain roads are bad for parrot’s beak. In my case, such a journey will result in muscle spasm and lower back pain; and, until I can take recuperative rest, my gait will be affected.
What does Mr Firman make of all this?
A monster, naturally; a staring blue-eyed monster with gleaming white fangs and circumflected lip, a monster who slobbers down all that lovely wine as if it were water, sprays his flinching companions cheerfully with gobbets of saliva, insults the food and then reels away, supporting himself with practised ease on the furniture as he goes, to sleep it off. The monster does not speak, he only yelps, yaps and blares. The monster does not take a bath, as Dr Henson does for the benefit of the eavesdropping microphones, he only breaks wind.
As the monster’s creator himself would say, ‘And so on.’ Mr Firman must be taken with many grains of salt.
Where then, I may be asked, is the human being we were promised? Is there truth at all here? Is this merely dreamstuff, clinical casebook material that will only become useful when it has been processed and interpreted?
By no means. As Mr Firman admits, indeed claims, many of the conversations. he reports are transcribed from the tapes he took with him from the villa. I have consulted my colleagues, Henson and Connell, on the point and both agree with me. As long as one disregards Firman’s interpolated comments, though some of them have evidential merit of their own, his accounts of what was said are in the main accurate.
When he is reporting from memory, however, we have to be very much more careful.
The recollections of his adolescence have yet to be checked. The passages concerning his war experiences have been read by a German scholar, a friend of mine who served as an infantry soldier in the Italian theatre from 1943 to 1945. He reports one error. The only German army pistols he can remember as having been issued were the Walther and the Sauer. However, while a prisoner of the Americans, he had heard German pistols referred to as ‘Lugers’ as if the word were a generic term for every type of German automatic hand-gun. Firman’s reference to ‘Lugers or Walthers’ may be dismissed then as a mistake belonging to another time and place. It is not his memory that is at fault.
The same cannot be said of his mistakes over certain vital dates. All of a sudden he is grossly unreliable. He cannot even place correctly the year of my identification of him in Zürich!
Was the blunder intentional? I really don’t think it can have been. Firstly, because I had already published the correct date in my Notes for a Case-study, and I can’t see him passing up an opportunity to pour scorn on any factual statement: of mine with which he disagreed. Secondly, because Mr Firman is far too astute to make mistakes that lock as if they could have been intentional, unless he wished for some reason to draw special attention to them. But why should he? The Zürich date, for one, is among the ‘neutral’ facts that nobody disputes. A secretarial error then? No, because the rest of his typescript is singularly free of error. The editorial assistant must have accepted those wrong dates too, so presumably they were given him by Mr Firman.
I shall return to this problem. It touches one of Mr Firman’s basic contentions concerning the guilt of the man he calls ‘Williamson’. Among the charges levelled against me — other than those involving my teeth, my drunkenness, ray timidity under fire or my stubborn refusals to concede that black is white — is a list of some of my sins of omission.
In one case, his complaint is certainly justified.
Unfortunately, I did not hear about the murder of Yves Boularis until several months after the event. It was not, I understand, reported outside France. Dr Henson came across a reference to it in a French medico-legal journal that I normally only read in précis. She wrote to me drawing attention both to the oddity of the method employed and to the timing of the murder.
Was it possible after all that the Villa Lipp had really been besieged? And could there really be a wicked Mr Williamson? The political leader who, having gained power and been proclaimed his people’s saviour, wishes to obliterate all traces of his corrupt or criminal past is a familiar figure in the history of nations.
The possibility of my having done Mr Firman even a minor injustice was troubling. The true identity of the speaker whom he addresses as ‘Mat’ in the cassette of the telephone conversation that I took with me from the villa that night proved impossible to establish. I made every effort I could.
Through friends in London, I was able to obtain a copy of a BBC sound archive recording of Mathew Tuakana’s voice. It was part of an address of homage and welcome to Chief Tebuke on the occasion of the Chiefs inauguration as head of state at the Placid Island independence ceremony. It was in the Placid Island language.
A colleague who specializes in the techniques of ‘voice-print’ comparison reported to me on the two voices. He identified the man speaking with Firman on the cassette as being British from the English Midlands. Dr Henson had thought Coventry or Birmingham. The Tuakana recording, however, presented difficulties. This wasn’t because he couldn’t understand the language, but because it couldn’t be used for the purposes of comparison. It is the sounds of the voice specimens that are analysed and compared. These two lots of sounds were of two completely different orders: one for the most part labial and nasal, the other wholly glottal. One cannot compare a fingerprint with a palm print, even when they have been made by the same hand. There was no available and authenticated recording of Mr Tuakana speaking English or any other phonetically comparable language.
The doubt nagged at me, however, and, after the San Francisco conference two months ago, my wife agreed to my suggestion that we might spend the vacation due to me in seeing something of the South Pacific. We obtained a visa for Placid in Fiji, and went there, along with some cargo, on one of the biweekly island-hopping planes.
A hotel is nearly completed, but not yet in business. The old rest-house is primitive, but our reception there was warm.
As an outspoken critic of what Mr Firman calls the ‘tax-haven business,’ I am fairly well known by name among those who earn their livings in it. It did not at all surprise me that the Canadian lawyer, who acts as Placid vice-consul in Suva, and who issued our visas, had sent advance warning of our visit. Letters from Mr Tuakana and from a daughter of Chief Tebuke awaited us on arrival. Both were invitations to lunch the following day. My wife’s hostess would be the Principal of the Island’s new high school for girls. Mr Tuakana looked forward to meeting me for an informal discussion of matters of mutual interest to us. He hoped to prevail upon me and Krom to attend a reception by Chief Tebuke later in the week. Meanwhile, lunch at Government House would be à deux. A car and driver would be at my disposal during our stay.
Government House consists of one two-storey house and four bungalows, the accommodation used by the British Resident Commissioner and his senior officials in colonial days. Mr Tuakana, as Chief Minister, occupies the largest bungalow and has his offices in it as well as his private quarters. His domestic staff, I noted, seem to be exceptionally well-trained.