‘Not what I wanted, but what I expected. I didn’t notice until the second time I played the tape.’
‘Most people don’t hear it at all. The counter normally starts during the time it takes to pick up the phone and put it to your ear. You asked for anything that occurred to me. I also recognize the caller’s voice. It’s the man I know as Mr Yamatoku.’
He was watching me narrowly for a reaction. I nodded. ‘I’m going to ask you to listen to the rest of the conversation, but let’s wait a moment until Melanie gets here.’
We had to wait several minutes.
‘Questions,’ she explained peevishly. ‘Paul, you should not have so spoken about me in the ambience of such persons. They are incapable of maintaining the moderations of polite usage.’
The sudden deterioration of her English suggested that the questions had been inconveniently searching.
‘Didn’t the second file divert them at all?’
‘Do you divert lions with carrion when there is fresh meat to be had? These people are most ill-mannered.’
‘You’re being too fussy,’ I said. ‘I’ll be surprised if those other people with us, the ones we weren’t expecting, have any manners at all.’
Yves shoved a bentwood chair against the back of her legs and she sat down abruptly.
‘What do you know,’ I asked, ‘about a man named Mathew
Tuakana? He sometimes calls himself Mat Williamson. Mean anything to you?’
I was looking at Yves as I spoke simply to notify Melanie that I had called the meeting to order and wanted no more of her nonsense. I hadn’t really expected him to answer. In his line of work, he was unlikely to have become involved in any of the futile attempts already made to penetrate the dense covers concealing Mat’s operations; but I had been mistaken. After a moment’s thought, he nodded.
‘Yes, I’ve heard of him. A Polynesian métis. Homosexual. A banker of some sort. Ultra rich. Is that the man?’
‘Where did you hear that gossip?’
‘I know someone who did some work for him. It’s all wrong, I suppose.’
‘It’s right about his being half-caste, but wrong about the non-white component. His mother was Melanesian, not Polynesian. Also, he’s had women as lovers as well as men. Who was your informant?’
An impertinent question that ought not to have been asked. Yves didn’t apologize for ignoring it.
‘I was also told,’ he said, ‘that Williamson was one to stay away from if you were free to choose. Some of these ultra rich have a habit of ditching things when they’ve finished with them, even if the things have only been used once. I’m told Williamson does that with people. Was I wrong there too?’
I hesitated, so naturally he had to pounce.
‘Is he the one you’re covering for here?’
I didn’t have a chance of deciding how fully or frankly I would reply. Before I could draw breath, Melanie was talking across to me to answer Yves.
‘Of course,’ she told him, ‘it must be Williamson. I should have thought of him before. He’s the Placid Island man, the one negotiating on behalf of the natives over the compensation to be paid out by the phosphate interests. He’s an economist with unorthodox ideas. You know? The kind of ideas that sound fascinating while they are being used to sell something, but that no one ever hears of again after the deal is set. He also acts for a Canadian bank. If that man had needed protection from Krom, I should have thought the bank would have provided it. Why trouble poor little Symposia?’
By bitching me with that snide reference to Symposia she was trying to recover the dignity lost minutes earlier when her buttocks had hit the seat of the chair.
‘He doesn’t control the Canadian bank,’ I said, ‘though his association with it is common knowledge. He does control Symposia, however, and he controls it through me. That is very far from being common knowledge and the thing that was to have been hidden at all costs from those with prying eyes and publishing voices, especially from Krom. News that there existed a backstairs financial arrangement between Symposia, the trendy fast-buck artists’ favourite tax-haven advisory service, and His Excellency Mat Tuakana, man of the people, King’s Scout and patron saint of Placid Island, would kill for ever his chance of getting that international licence to print money he’s always yearned for. And he’d never get another chance.’
I turned to Yves again. ‘I’m the one whose cover was blown by Krom, so I’m the one who has to make good the loss, hold the fort, stick the finger in the dyke, fall on the exploding grenade or do whatever else is necessary to keep His Excellency’s reputation safe, sound and spotless. Yes, he does like scrapping people when he’s used them. Let’s hope he hasn’t succeeded with us.’
‘Us, Paul?’ Melanie again.
The look I gave her was as sour as her own. ‘I think it’s time I revealed, in case you didn’t know, that both of you were hand-picked for this operation by Mat Williamson himself. And if you think that being chosen by the great man personally for this assignment isn’t much of a distinction, you’re mistaken. In your case certainly, Melanie, the choice was made with immense care. To prove it I’m going to play back a phone conversation I’ve just had with Frank Yamatoku. He’s Williamson’s left-hand man, Melanie. That’s why I was a little upset when you told me that you’d given him our communications code.’
Yves whispered, ‘Merde’ as if it were a prayer.
She stared coldly at my chin. ‘A capable operations director would have reviewed the standard security procedures before committing the team.’
I wasn’t going to argue about that with her. ‘When I called Williamson’s London cut-out from here, I asked him to return my call personally. It was returned instead by Yamatoku, and it sounds as if he’s calling from a local phone not far from here. Listen.’
They listened. They listened to the whole thing three times. Between play-backs I answered questions as truthfully as seemed prudent in the circumstances.
Who, for instance, were Kleister, Torten and Vic?
‘No, they’re not, much as they may sound like it, a slack-wire baggy-pants act out of a third-rate circus. There’s nothing even marginally comical about these three. They’re old business rivals still nursing their grudges against me for the defeats they once suffered in a couple of big deals. They said I tricked them. You know how it is with losers, some losers anyway. They think that winners only win through skulduggery, and that makes it all right for losers to use skulduggery if it’ll give them their revenge. We should try to feel sorry for the poor slobs.’
Of course, neither Yves nor Melanie believed a word of that soap-opera version of the facts; but they accepted its essential element. It was more than likely that I should have former victims gunning for me. But gunning for me with what?
How real was the threat implicit in Yamatoku’s reference to the possibility of K, T and V’s merry men ‘overstepping the mark’? Was such sinister moustache-twirling to be taken seriously?
I told them that, when dealing with Mat Williamson, everything ought to be taken seriously, but nothing at its face value. However, for the purpose of our council of war, a few assumptions could safely be made.
Among those old acquaintances of mine with reasons for disliking me, K, T and V had been chosen not for their ability to exercise restraint where I was concerned — it was known that K and T had once threatened to kill me — but because, in spite of earlier misfortunes, they were wealthy enough as well as crazy enough to pay a team of professional hard men to carry out orders of which Mat approved. When implementing any policy of his involving even a modest cash outlay, Mat always arranged for someone else to foot the bill. He had known of K, T and V because their dossiers had figured in the inventory of Carlo’s consultancy accounts which I had inherited; dossiers that I had later transferred to Mat as part of our overall deal.