‘But in your case the charge wasn’t false or baseless,’ Henson again, with Krom nodding his blessing. ‘Your first paper admits as much, not just frankly, but brazenly. Oh yes, you’re careful to point out that Oberholzer belonged to your pre-Symposia days, but surely that’s mere nit-picking.’
I was finding it difficult to remain cool and had to make a conscious effort. ‘Let’s be clear about this. What I have admitted is that I once committed offences against the Swiss bank secrecy laws by obtaining confidential information from a bank employee. That offence is, as you well know, one that has been committed time and time again over the years by agents and officials acting for non-Swiss governments. Among them have been the governments of most of the developed nations and a good many from the Third World as well. Within the international communities of income-tax gatherers, fraud-squad investigators and exchange-control enforcers outside Switzerland, the offence is regarded about as seriously as a parking violation. You seem also to need reminding that I have never been arrested in Switzerland or anywhere else, nor even detained for questioning, much less convicted in a court of law.’
Connell went into a world-weary, cut-the-cackle routine. ‘Please, Mr Firman. We’ve seen the bleeding. Now, how about showing us the wound? All you’ve been given, you say, is a parking ticket. And yet, for the honour of dear old Symposia, you act as if you’d been busted for murder-one. Come on! The Symposia Conspiracy isn’t about parking violations. It’s about an extortion racket that relies for the fingering of likely victims on an intelligence set-up pretending to be a tax-haven consultancy service, and, for the raking in of its blood money, on a network of illegal debt-collection agencies making undercover use of international communications systems. That’s what Professor Krom was proposing to shed light on, and that’s what he still intends to shed light on. All he did to you was to offer the sort of deal that the law offers crooks all the time and all over the world. ‘Turn informer and we won’t press charges. Tough it out, or try to, and we’ll throw the book at you.’ You started by going along with the deal and now you’re trying to renege. No need to apologize. We understand how it is. But don’t bore us with crap about parking tickets. Okay?’
With almost no effort I was able to laugh. ‘When you wrote your book about organized crime, Dr Connell, chat was the sort of talk you put in the mouths of the stupider DA's and the more reactionary policemen. You disappoint me.’
‘A nice try, Mr Firman,’ said Henson; ‘but we already knew that you could read.’
In spite of her confident tone, she was by then having several second thoughts and Krom had spotted the fact.
‘He’s only digging his own grave, my dear. Don’t let us do the job for him.’ He tried to sound as if he were at ease, but he was showing scarcely any teeth and his eyes had the wary look I had first seen in Brussels when he had been afraid of me. Now, he was afraid of me again; not afraid this time though, of what I might be going to do, but of what he had sensed that I might be going to say.
He had had two months in which to forget the euphoria of his Brussels victory over me and to start wondering why that success had been so easy.
I found it meanly satisfying now to ignore him and give his witnesses the answers he so anxiously awaited. Besides, they were pleasanter to look at.
I said: ‘You asked me why, if this threatened smear were baseless, I didn’t tell Krom, the author of it, to publish and be damned. I’ve given you one answer. All smears that start no-smoke-without-fire talk can be expensive in one way or another. You pay off for the same reason that big corporations often settle nuisance actions against them out of court. It may be cheaper in the long run to pay rather than to argue rights and wrongs. I have given you a second answer. If pushed, we could have called the Professor’s bluff and then warned the publisher he went to that this was a source that couldn’t be protected by the anonymity custom because this source had already tried to sell us the story. That way, ordinarily, we would have been on fairly safe ground. We didn’t adopt that solution because to have done so would have been to take an unacceptable risk.’
‘Aha!’ said Krom.
I didn’t bother to tell him that his relief was premature, but went on addressing the witnesses. ‘In amongst all the hearsay, gossip, innuendo and straight falsehood that had been assembled to support the conspiracy nonsense, there were one or two sets of facts. Most were unimportant or irrelevant. One wasn’t. I refer to the Placid Island material.’
‘What’s so remarkable about that?’ demanded Connell. ‘Placid’s typical. It’s been stripped of most of its natural assets. The only future it has is as a tax-haven outpost with a few high-rise office buildings. Its one extra asset seems to be this Williamson you mentioned — a banker, and an economist too, with a good academic background, who also happens to be a native of the wretched place. Professor Krom noted that Symposia had made overtures to Placid and was trying to establish a monopoly position there. Was that what you didn’t like?’
‘That’s what Mat Williamson didn’t like. He didn’t like it because Symposia wasn’t just trying to establish a monopoly in advance, it already had it established. The Symposia Group is eighty per cent owned by Mat Williamson and always has been.’
‘But I didn’t know that!’ Krom yelped. It wasn’t that he was dim-witted, just that a bit of his mind was still refusing to listen to the disaster warning that had begun to paralyse the higher centres.
‘Of course you didn’t know,’ I said. ‘Practically nobody knew, or knows now. The Canadian bank for whom Mat acts as a consultant in such matters certainly doesn’t know. Neither do the officials with whom Placid Island independence is being negotiated. Others in ignorance include Chief Tebuke and the lawyers for the phosphate company which is being squeezed by Mat for compensation. Dr Connell asked why we are here. Well, I’ll tell you why I thought we were here, if that’s still of interest to anyone but the birds. We were here, Professor, so that.yon wouldn’t rock the boat, of which I’ll admit to owning twenty per cent, by revealing the Williamson-Symposia relationship.’
‘How could I have revealed it? As you have said, I didn’t know about it.’
No doubt he was still in shock, but it was hard to remain civil. ‘I can’t believe, Professor, that you are as unworldly as all that. You must suffer from the delusion that only scholars are capable of doing research. You think that the corporate entities which make up the Symposia Group are an open book to you because you’ve looked at all the available records. They show me as a stockholder and also as a nominee for other voting stockholders. That’s as far as you’ve gone because, thanks to the fact that you once saw me years ago in Zurich, you made an assumption about me that you weren’t prepared to modify or even reconsider. From Mat’s point of view, that was fine — while it lasted. But would it always last? The first thing any newspaperman worth his salt would do would be to question all your assumptions however pretty they looked. And, having questioned, he’d find ways of getting answers that satisfied his professional standards. They wouldn’t be your ways, because he’d have to work a lot faster than you people. He’d dig patiently, yes, but he’d use those techniques that governments call espionage or intelligence-gathering, depending on whose side is doing what, and newspaper proprietors call investigative reporting. It doesn’t matter what we call it. The point is that, if you’d been allowed to hand your Symposia rag-bag to the financial editor of a news magazine, the information connecting Mat Williamson with Symposia would have been found within days and the result wouldn’t have been called a conspiracy. It would have been called a ‘caper’, or worse. It would have been the Placid Island Rip-Off. Now do you understand?’