Unfortunately, the cook’s husband, who had the temerity to call himself a butler, was convinced that the only proper way to chill any white wine was to refrigerate it, or even, I suspect, to give it an hour in the deep-freeze.
I had already warned the fool against such brutality, but that night, possibly because it was so warm outside, he ignored my orders and served it far too cold. The result was that it tasted very much like water.
And that was how Krom proceeded to drink it. Yes, I know he had had a long, hot day, had sweated a great deal and was probably a bit dehydrated; but the bottle of Evian provided for him in his room should have taken care of that. What he seemed not to realize was that the liquid he was swigging down so thirstily — he consumed well over a bottle before dinner — had the normal alcoholic content of other white wines from the region of about eleven per cent. Or perhaps he did realize it. Perhaps he would have been happier if we had all had a boozy pre-prandial session of double dry martinis or schnapps.
I don’t know. I can only say that before dinner he certainly drank too much, and that during dinner he continued to drink too much and ate, once the pâté had taken the edge off his appetite, practically nothing.
In a way, I can understand his not feeling hungry. That evening, as far as he was concerned, was the culmination of many years of dedicated labour. I happen to believe that the dedication has been misguided and that the labour will ultimately prove to be fruitless; but that is not how he sees things at present, nor how he saw them. He believed that he was within reach of a goal, physically within reach of it. The files Melanie had brought in just as dinner was announced now lay on an adjacent coffee table. If he had stood up and reached out, he could have touched them, and he was having trouble keeping himself from doing so. His eyes flickered towards them constantly to make sure that they were still there. The burgundy that came with the veal went down almost as quickly as the Cassis.
‘Nice wine, Mr Finnan,’ Dr Henson remarked.
‘Thank you.’ It was nice for a wine that had only been bought two weeks earlier from a local merchant, but I had not expected her to notice it. I had thought of her more as a claret drinker.
‘But not nice enough to impair our judgement, eh?’ Krom beamed glassily on his witnesses.
‘One would hope,’ said Connell pointedly, ‘that while we are on an important field expedition nothing should be allowed to impair our judgement.’
‘There you are wrong!’ Krom stabbed a forefinger at Connell and then began waggling it like the arm of a metronome. ‘I will tell you in advance something that you would later have had to discover for yourselves.’ The metronome stopped and the forefinger began stabbing at me. ‘Where this man is concerned, no unimpaired judgement can be made. Why not? Because he is like one of those creatures of the cephalopod family such as the octopus or squid, which, when attacked or threatened with attack, discharges an inky liquid to form a cloud in the water behind which it may retreat.’
Yves nodded appreciatively. ‘Calmar,’ he explained to Dr Henson. ‘Good to eat, but only when cooked in the Italian way.’
Krom ignored the interruption. ‘And what does this ink consist of? What is its composition when Mr Firman has brewed it? I will tell you.’
‘We know,’ said Connell. ‘The answer’s hog-wash.’
‘Pardon?’
‘You’re forgetting, Professor. You gave us this lecture on the way down. Every time Mr Firman feels that he is in any way, even marginally, threatened, up goes the defence that, if anything not quite kosher has been done by anyone, ever, and he’s been around at the time, it was never he who was basically responsible for what happened. He, it appears, has always been one of life’s number-two men, always putty in the hands of some ruthless, clever, wicked number-one. Right?’
‘Well. . ‘
‘I know I’m not putting it quite the way you did, Professor, but I think that’s roughly the way your readings on him come out when they’re processed. You call that sort of tactical fluid discharge octopus ink. I call it hog-wash. What do you call it, Mr Firman?’
‘In this case I think that I have to mix the metaphor a little and call it wishful thinking. Professor Krom clearly does not wish to believe that the cephalopod he caught was not the largest in the ocean. A natural reluctance on his part. But if he really believes that my version of the events which interest him is so little to be relied upon, I don’t understand why any of you is here.’
Connell said quickly: ‘Olé. Nicely fielded.’
Krom rumbled back into action. ‘Has it not yet come to your notice, Dr Connell, that when a structure of lies about a sequence of events is superimposed upon a schema composed of fixed points of known truth concerning those same events, more can be learnt about the liar by comparative analysis than can be learned by listening to and endeavouring to make sense of so-called confessions?’
‘I wonder, Professor,’ Dr Henson asked blandly, ‘if we could have a concrete example of that method of working in the case we are now discussing.’
‘Certainly. Mr Firman maintains that, at the time I identified him, he was not in control of a considerable organization running a small, but staggeringly lucrative, extortion racket. He also denies that his operation was based on information gained by the suborning of bank employees and others holding positions of trust. He claims instead, absurdly you may think, that he was the helpless agent of an Italian criminal named Carlo Lech.’
This was too much, even from Krom. I stopped him. ‘Just a minute, Professor. I have never said that I was anyone’s helpless agent, and I have never said that my friend Carlo Lech was a criminal. I did say that we were for a time in partnership and that he was the older and senior partner. I also said that he was an extremely capable business man and that he had other partners besides me. At the time, you may remember, you told me that Carlo Lech did not exist, that he was a figment of my fertile imagination. Didn’t you use those very words, Professor?’
‘I did and I was right to do so. The Carlo Lech of whom you spoke and are speaking now, your “friend”’, was and is a figment of your imagination. Oh yes, there used to be a Carlo Lech in Milan. No doubt about that. He was a highly respectable and respected corporation lawyer. That doesn’t mean that he was necessarily an honest man, of course, but after our talk in Brussels I made the most careful enquiries about him. Unfortunately, he died five years ago so we cannot ask him personally what he thought of you. He had, though, a son who is a priest. This son had never heard of you, or anyone like you. His second child, the daughter of Maria, wasn’t born until nineteen forty-six. Mrs Lech was, as you may or may not know, twenty years younger than her husband. The daughter married a young American orchestral musician, a cellist of talent whom she met in Milan, and now lives mostly in the United States. Shortly before Carlo Lech died, she gave birth to his first grandson, Mario. I wrote to her asking about you, but she knew nothing.’
‘Even the most doting Italian father would be unlikely to discuss his business associates with a young child, particularly associates who used assumed names.’
‘She wasn’t a young child when I saw you in Zurich. Were you her trustee in Vaduz? Ha! That left the widow, who seems always to have been a semi-invalid and who has been for the past two years in a sanatorium. She now suffers from Simmonds’ disease which is, I believe, something to do with the pituitary gland. She was not available for interview. Had she been available, though, I have little doubt that her reaction would have been the same as her son’s. She would never have heard of you.’