Silence. Krom looked like death.
‘Well,’ said Connell eventually, ‘none of that’s happened and no one’s yet rocked the boat. So what’s changed since you and the Professor made your deal? Our appraisal of the situation was faulty from the start, according to you. All right. So what?’
‘Unfortunately, my appraisal of the situation has become faulty. That’s what’s changed. In London, the risk represented by the Professor’s decision to use blackmail in his quest for information seems, after all, to have been judged uninsurable. That phone call was to tell us so, tell all of us.’
‘I see. The best way of making sure that no one rocks a boat is to have no people in it. Then your revised appraisal is, I take it, that those friends of yours outside this place now intend to kill us all. Correct? Or is this to be a selective massacre? Just you? Just us? Some of each? What’s the new ouija board starting to say?’
Melanie said brightly: ‘It’s nearly time for lunch.’
The cook’s husband was at the door asking if he should bring the ice for the drinks in there or whether we would be moving out to the swimming-pool area.
I said that we would have the drinks inside. By the time we moved out to lunch by the swimming pool, a lot more had been said and the guests were thoughtful. Connell hadn’t pressed me for an answer to his questions. He had probably decided that I had no answers.
CHAPTER NINE
For a few minutes they seemed to have stopped wondering how much truth there was in me, and to be asking themselves a question that their books had always said was irrelevant. Was there or wasn’t there honour among thieves?
Could criminal relationships be like those to be found in trade and industry? Were comparisons drawn from what was known of marriages or ménages appropriate? Or was the ‘standard’ criminal relationship one of convenience and collusion only, like a contract between politicians cancellable without warning by either party the moment it became in any way embarrassing?
No one was very hungry. Henson soon gave up on the soup. I had already done so. It is an overrated fish.
‘From what you now tell us, Mr Firman,’ she said, ‘one would almost believe that, once upon a time, you and Mr Williamson were really quite good friends.’
‘We have had a long and profitable business association. Obviously, our relationship had a friendly element to it.’
‘Friendly enough for you to compromise your own cover to protect his against the Professor’s enquiries. That was very friendly, surely?’
‘Back in May, it seemed to be in both our interests that I should cover for him. Remember, I have twenty per cent. Maybe that clouded my judgement.’
‘Yet now, you don’t seem to be very much surprised or upset by the fact that he’s betraying you, and telling you so, moreover. He is betraying you, I suppose. That tape we heard wasn’t by any chance a fake?’
Two stiff gins-and-tonic had almost restored Krom’s self esteem. ‘You’re learning, my dear. I’ve been wondering the same thing.’ He cocked an eye at me. ‘Is it a fake?’
‘I wish it were.’
Connell’s hostility towards me had returned to normal. ‘You don’t think much of our right to the truth,’ he said. ‘How do you feel about associates like Mr Williamson? I mean, after that call we heard, what’s the word now about the usefulness of truth?’
‘Carlo Lech and I always told one another the truth. To do so was part of our mutual respect. With Mat Williamson, mutual respect is based on insights of a different order. When a question is asked there, you consider, first, not what the exactly truthful answer would be, but what the questioner wishes to hear from you. No, I’m not surprised by his betraying me, nor by his telling me, in that oblique way, that he’s doing so. When you deal with Mat, there’s always a chance that he may try to deceive or betray you. What you should do is make sure that he can’t. I thought I had made sure. Upset? More annoyed, I think. Mat’s a complex creature, difficult to explain.’
He and I had been in Singapore when I had heard of Carlo’s death.
My reports on the Pacific tax-havens, existing and potential, had been written. I was waiting for Carlo’s acknowledgment of the last one, and with it, the words pronouncing my absolution and telling me that my exile was at an end.
He died of heart failure following a virus infection, according to the Vaduz lawyer who acted for our various corporate set-ups there. The man’s vagueness was understandable. There was legislation against Liechtenstein Anstalts pending in Italy as well as moves afoot to clamp down on citizens holding large amounts of their capital abroad. It would have been indiscreet of him even to have visited Carlo’s Milan office, and highly dangerous to have communicated with the family. There would have been no business reason for him to do so anyway. Carlo’s stashed-away fortune was, and still is, in trusts administered jointly by the Vaduz man, with his partners as successors, and me. Carlo’s invalid wife, his son and his daughter all benefited, in accordance with Italian inheritance laws, under the formal will he had made there. The trusts benefit only the daughter, her musician husband and, above all, Carlo’s grandson Mario. When he comes of age, that boy will be very rich.
However, according to the first letter from Vaduz, Carlo had, in addition, bequeathed me a piece of valuable real-estate.
This news had surprised me. My own holdings in our joint enterprises were already worth several million and I had discussed the whole subject with Carlo long before. We both had plenty of money, earned by our joint efforts but apportioned in accordance with an agreement made when Carlo had been convalescing after his gall-bladder trouble. Aside from the agreement, neither of us owned the other anything except good faith and a single duty. When one of us died, the other would see, as best he could, that the dead man’s family and other private obligations were taken care of in a proper fashion. For the sake of official appearances, the survivor would receive the fees and expenses normally payable to a trustee.
A second letter from Vaduz told me that the piece of valuable real-estate aforementioned was Carlo’s island.
Surprise had then become confusion. In spite of my occasional white lies on the subject, Carlo had always known that the island bored me. That was why he had sent me to stew there after the Zurich fiasco. Bequeathing the place to me could have been the kind of stupid gesture that wealthy dotards have sometimes made in order to get the last word in some old and silly argument; but Carlo had not been stupid, far from it, nor had he been the kind of man who would give away a tropical island he had loved to a tropic-hater who would at once proceed to sell it.
The third letter explained all. Carlo’s island was the property of a Netherland Antilles real-estate company, the shares in which would go to Mario when he was twenty-one. Meanwhile, I was asked to hold them in trust for him. To compensate me for the time and trouble of maintaining the place, as it had been maintained during Carlo’s lifetime — and as I had known it, complete with staff — I would, until Mario was old enough to take possession, have free and unfettered use of the island and its installations at all times, for my own personal enjoyment. Our man in Vaduz suggested thoughtfully that it might be a good idea if, on my way back to Europe, I called in at the island and took stock of the current situation there.
Carlo, an innovator to the last, had found a way of getting the last word in an old argument, and of making a ribald gesture from the grave, at the expense of no one but a cornered trustee. Vaduz would have thought it foolish of me as well as petty if I had refused the task. Everyone loved islands in the Caribbean, surely. They must do. Otherwise, why did all those tourists go there?