‘Could you be specific?’
‘Certainly. The death of Carlo Lech was a great blow to him, I know, because I was with him when he heard the news.’ He held up a defensive hand as if I had started to interrupt him. ‘Bear with me, please. Lech was never the father-figure whom Firman portrays. There, I’m completely with you. But, Firman always chose to believe that he was. The child blames a suitable alter ego for its own misdeeds. That is natural. The neurotic adult, the boy who will never grow up, continues to project, but he does so on a different scale and uses different mechanisms. One such mechanism is called role-reversal, I believe.’
‘Please go on, Minister.’ The amateur psychiatrist is rarely as dangerous as he is often made out to be. As long as he has no patients, the injuries he inflicts are usually more painful than serious, like blows on the elbow. The kind of rubbish he talks, however, can tell you a lot about him.
‘The Lech you dismiss, rightly, as a figment of the imagination was desperately real to Firman. Is that your emotionally stable, well-adjusted man, Professor?’
‘It doesn’t sound like him, no. Have you any other examples of this instability?’
‘There are other examples staring at us from the pages of his book. He quotes you as saying that Lech had died five years previously. Wrong. He himself says that you saw him at the Zürich funeral five years previously. Wrong again. But why?’
‘Those dating mistakes puzzled me too, Minister. Lech had died seven years previously, not five. I identified Firman in Zürich eight months before Lech’s death. Those facts have never been in dispute. What was so special about the number five? Why the mistake?’
‘Shall we call them Freudian slips, Professor?’
‘Unintentional mistakes can be made by a copy typist who needs new glasses or an editorial adviser who can’t be bothered with details.’
‘But not these mistakes, Professor.’ He was glad of my stuffiness; it made me a better audience. ‘I know for a fact that the five-years-ago we are talking about now was of deep psychological significance to him. I’m no coffee-house analyst, Professor, and I only know what I’ve read about abnormal behaviour. But no one could have made a mistake about Mr Paul Firman then. It’s not the sort of thing you forget. He went nowhere near Zürich or anywhere else in Europe. He spent the year shuttling between Singapore, Sydney and Hong Kong. That was the year his own mysterious Mat Williamson, the man on the telephone speaking with a Birmingham accent, seems to be talking about. He refers to a moment of personal loss and sadness, or sadness and loss. I made a note somewhere. It’s on page. .’
‘Thank you, Minister. I know the place you mean. How did you come to see so much of him that year? Was that when your partnership began?’
‘Partnership?’ He didn’t like the word. It occurred to me suddenly that Mr Tuakana was in a position to have me arrested, jailed and charged with insulting his government if he felt like it. ‘That’s what he calls it now. I was working for him as what he called a talent-spotter. I had no money worth talking about, and lobbying a company like Anglo-Anzac into facing the inevitable, even in a place like this, takes plenty. Firman paid me well, but I had to work for it. He had a short list of companies, corporations, that interested him. Usually they were in trouble. I investigated them for him. He was what some people call an operator. Quickly in, quickly out. Sometimes there were assets to be stripped. Sometimes there was a loss position to be parlayed. Sometimes there were other things. Partnership? I never saw it in that light. I was his hot-shot auditor. We never got around to discussing any of my long-term plans. That was the year of his crack-up.’
‘A physical crack-up or a mental one, Minister?’
He placed his smoothed and folded napkin neatly beside his plate.
The hand that had held it twitched for a moment and then was still. He may have decided against rapping the table in time with the words.
‘Professor, surely we can see now. Isn’t it plain enough how those date mistakes came to be made? Five was the evil-magic number because five years before had been the evil-magic time. That was the year of the most terrible death and of the catastrophic disaster. As a result, it ends up as the year of all death and all disaster — Lech’s death, the Kramer folly, the encounter with you, the exile from Europe, everything. The year of ultimate misfortune! And, by the way, that was the year he got himself into trouble with the New South Wales police. In Sydney, at one point, there was serious talk of starting extradition proceedings to winkle him out of Hong Kong.’
‘Do you know what for, Minister?’
‘Indeed I do. You asked for other examples of his instability. I can given you a perfect one. It’s another of his role-switching ploys. Do you remember the long lecture he says he gave to that mythical Mr Williamson? Remember, Professor? The one about the perils of international fraud and the terrible fate that awaited those who didn’t obey the laws?’
‘I remember.’
‘Professor, that was a lecture I gave him.’
He paused, shrugged slightly and then gazed into my eyes with the peculiar look of engaging frankness that I have learned to associate with guilt sure of its defences and completely at its ease.
‘My job,’ he went on, ‘was investigation and I could see the overall picture. Some corners of it were pretty murky, believe me. What provoked the lecture was a kind of multinational thimble-rigging scheme he had going. This was a chain of twenty different corporations, all having what looked like serious assets — mining properties, real estate, palm-nut plantations — and all making paper profits. That chain was just the debris left from his asset-stripping deals. So, he’s given the mess a coat of paint. Why? Well, it seems he’s acquired this little ex-British insurance company registered in ex-British Singapore and still operating under the old British free-for-all rules. That means minimal regulation by American standards. Most of its business is done in Malaysia and the Islands and it has a cosy Chinese name that means ‘faithful tiger’. So guess who ends up owning all those paper corporations. Yes, the faithful tiger, only now he’s called Fidelity Lion and does his investigating through nominees. The only mistake Firman made there was to let that mangy lion write annuity business in Australia. He’ll never go back there again. They don’t like insurance grifters, especially when they can’t pin anything on them.’
‘No country likes them. But you spoke of a terrible death and a catastrophic disaster, Minister. Was that what you meant? The collapse of a fraudulent insurance scheme?’
‘Oh no. His Chinese directors nearly had him in trouble, but he moved fast enough to get out from under that. It was the business of his son that hit him so hard.’
‘He mentioned a child by his second marriage.’
‘That was a daughter. The son was by his first wife. Brilliant boy, handsome, great charmer. Snapped up by one of the Ivy League colleges. Firman doted. Terribly proud of him. Actually used to carry a photograph of the lad in his wallet.’
‘What happened?’
‘He died suddenly. All very unfortunate it was.’
‘Drugs? Alcohol? A car crash?’
‘Nothing as simple. The boy committed suicide, hanged himself. It destroyed Firman completely for a while. I’ve never seen a crack-up like it. Almost total withdrawal. He’d just sit.’
‘Was there any explanation?’
‘Of the suicide? The college had one. Overwork, examination pressures, unjustified fears of not meeting the high expectations of others. Most of these places must have a form letter they send out. But Firman thought that he’d been the only one at fault. When he spoke at all then it was always to say the same thing. ‘I seem to have made a habit of failing the people who love me.’ No arguing with him. I for one would never be surprised if Firman decided to kill himself. There’s a suicidal streak somewhere there.’