‘More scepticism, I fear, Mr Firman.’
No cackling now, no raucous sarcasms. Something had happened to Krom while we had been away. My guess was that the witnesses, impressed by Yves’s outburst on the terrace earlier, had ganged up on their leader and persuaded him that he would get more out of us if he made less noise himself.
Henson was pretending coyly to have had a sudden inspiration. ‘I wonder now! Wait a minute! If Mr Firman could telephone London and have his call returned promptly like that, surely we could do the same. Naturally, we couldn’t be certain that the Mr Yamatoku we were talking to — have I got the name right? — was the genuine article, but we ought to be able to test the actor theory. Only a very good one could improvise in that turgid neo-revivalist manner.’
‘I thought one of you experts might have noticed that the call was a local one,’ I said. ‘Would you explain to them, Yves?’
Yves explained.
They listened quietly and attentively in a way that I didn’t like. Krom’s natural rudeness and the witnesses’ sycophancy had been infuriating, and probably bad for my blood pressure, but they had their psychological uses. They had enabled me, for one thing, to view the prospect of him and his witnesses dying violent deaths in the near future with only a token regret. So, I had been left reasonably free to concentrate on avoiding the same fate. The new politeness was not only disconcerting, and thus destructive, but also insidiously depressing. It would have to be countered. As Yves began going into detail, I cut him short.
‘You’re quite right, of course, Dr Henson,’ I said; ‘talking to Mr Yamatoku, even if you could, wouldn’t help you all that much. Besides, my object in asking you to listen to that highly compromising conversation wasn’t to prove anything to any of you. It was to save myself trouble. If you’ll just accept for a moment that the man to whom I’m speaking on that tape is Yamatoku and that the “our friend” he’s referring to is his employer Mat Williamson, I’ll try to explain to you what’s happened to change things here without wasting any more time. Agreed?’
Connell talked across me to Krom. ‘You have to hand it to our host, Professor. He gives that Number-Two status claim of his everything he’s got. He really does try harder. Secret watchers and bombs in the night didn’t work, so now it’s threatening calls from sinister Orientals and sudden cracks of hypothetical whips — all great stuff. But it does make you wonder, I find, about the kind of therapy he’s been in, and the quality of it too. Some of these cruelty-is-kinder organismic groups we’re seeing around nowadays can do the mind permanent damage.’
Krom squirmed with the agony of keeping a straight face, and then showed me his teeth as if they had all suddenly begun to hurt him. ‘You must see our difficulty, Mr Firman.
If we do not take you as seriously as you would wish, you have only yourself to blame.’
‘That’s quite all right,’ I said evenly; ‘I’m glad that you’re in such high spirits. They may help to make the news I have to give you more palatable.’
‘The whip-cracks I could forgive,’ remarked Henson; ‘it’s the false bonhomie that I found tedious.’
Krom covered an involuntary snicker by clucking in mock disapproval. ‘With Mr Firman working so ingeniously to avoid keeping our agreement, we should be applauding him rather than poking fun. You must be good, my children, please!’
Yves stirred and I guessed that he was about to say something obscene enough to disgust even the ‘children’. He had my sympathy, but I didn’t need his support and snapped my fingers to let him know it. At the same moment, I stood up as if about to leave and then stopped where Krom would be forced to lean back awkwardly if he wanted to see my face.
‘I spoke, when I asked you to listen to that tape, of re-negotiating our agreement,’ I said. ‘Clearly, I was being over tactful. Perhaps it will help you to contain your amusement, Professor, if I tell you that we no longer have an agreement. The one made in Brussels is now completely null and void. What we can still discuss, if you wish, is what remains of your ability to blackmail me, and what is left of my ability to give you protection.’
‘Protection from what?’
‘The consequences of threatening Mathew Williamson. He’s not as tolerant of common blackmailers as I am.’
‘I’ve heard of your Mr Williamson, as I’ve already told you, but I’m not acquainted with him. Nor am I, as you perfectly well know, a common blackmailer.’
‘Exactly what you are, Professor, and where, as a result, you now stand are matters that must be re-examined. Do you want to send your witnesses out, or don’t you mind if they hear us talking about the messier details of our bargain?’
He showed a few more teeth. ‘You’re wasting your breath, Mr Firman. I refuse to be provoked. My young friends have experience of the problems of doing research in this field. Why shouldn’t they hear the details?’
‘Very well. The basic threat you made was that, unless I did and said the various things you wanted me to do and say, you would expose, I quote, the Symposia Conspiracy. That’s what you called it. Right?’
“That’s what I still call it.’
‘Then you must still be, Professor, as big an intellectual and academic phony as you were when you dreamed up the phrase.’
I didn’t wait for a reaction, but turned and went through into the drawing-room. It was well-bugged in there — and when an adversary is under pressure it’s always better to have a tape, even when there seems to be no way of its ever being used. Besides, it was necessary: to have him off balance. That’s why I’d walked away after insulting him. A double goosing like that is really painful.
He certainly found it so. He came running. The others followed but he didn’t wait for them before counter-attacking. He was too angry to wait.
‘You won’t get rid of your corruption by trying to hang it on me,’ he snapped. ‘Ask any policeman! Defence by projection is common among criminals.’
‘It’s common among all sections of the populace, Professor, including criminologists. I accused you of being a phony. With or without your permission, I intend to explain to your witnesses why I did so.’
I paused to dismiss his unspoken protest before going on. ‘Symposia is an organization concerned with tax avoidance by strictly legal means. By coupling its name with the word ‘conspiracy’, an imprecise but emotive term loaded with associations of illegality, you created an essentially meaningless but potentially lethal smear. You’ve wasted your talents, Professor. You should have been a politician.’
His martyred God-give-me-patience look brought in Henson for the defence. ‘If it was meaningless, why should it have upset you so much?’
I gave her my best smile. ‘How did your Professor Langridge put it? “More to do with journalism than with scholarship,” was it? Something like that, I think. What would he have said, I wonder, if he’d actually heard his colleague, Krom, threatening to leak the whole smear package to the financial journals and news magazines if I didn’t collaborate?’ “Collaborate” was the chosen euphemism. Moral blackmail and extortion were the realities.’ I faced Krom again. ‘Last night you allowed that you were an extortionist. Of course, as you have explained today, you were tired last night. But tired of what? Only of travelling, or of hypocrisy too?’
Connell rallied to the cause. ‘You still haven’t answered the question, Firman. If the charge was baseless, why are we here? Why didn’t you tell him to drop dead?’
‘I can’t believe, Doctor, that you are simple enough to suppose that a smear can always be defeated by ignoring it. Only the invulnerable few, or those past caring what happens to their reputations, can afford to adopt that attitude. I would also remind you that institutions handling, or advising on the handling of, other people’s money are among the most vulnerable to this kind of false charge, however baseless it may be.’