The Care of Time (22 page)

‘Your name must not be publicly mentioned while the patron is here.’

‘Because Rasmuk might be listening in Italy?’

‘Because they might be listening
here
of course.’

The phone rang. I was going to suggest that she’d better
answer it, but she snatched it up before I could speak.

It was the desk to say that a car from Lindwurm had arrived for me. I told her to say that I would be down and then thought for a moment.

‘Where’s the patron?’ I asked finally. ‘Keeping discreetly to his room?’

‘No. He has already been summoned by The Ruler to report in advance of the conference.’ She took a folded envelope from her shirt pocket. ‘He left you a note with orders for tomorrow.’

I stuffed it away without reading it. ‘Will he be coming back tonight?’

‘I don’t think so. The Ruler has a chalet that he and the entourage use when he visits the Petrucher mine to meet the architects and engineers. The patron will stay there. We are instructed to meet him with the vehicles and crew at the Petrucher in the morning. Not later than ten, he said.’

‘Maybe it’s as well that he won’t be here. You and Jean-Pierre are going to have to handle the ORF people and any other media characters when they get here.’

‘You said that there is no way.’

‘There’s no way of dodging the problem. We may be able to postpone it. Jean-Pierre should begin by telling the ORF man
off the record
that I’m on a network assignment from New York to do an interview with The Ruler. Why me? I’m a political writer and interviewer who happened to be nearby in Italy working on a book. Which network? Jean-Pierre’s sorry but he’s not saying. Why? Because, although the network has been
promised
this interview, previous experience with The Ruler has made them cautious about accepting his word. The ORF people will certainly buy that. So, Jean-Pierre goes on, until he knows first-hand that The Ruler has actually kept this promise, his orders are to say nothing. And, in the same context, he should emphasize that any careless talk about the interview before it has actually taken place could kill the whole idea. If the interview
does
go according to plan, however,
then
he’ll be able to talk
business. He’ll have to clear it with New York, of course, but there seems to be no reason why, if they want to, ORF shouldn’t process the film themselves right here and run off their own print.’

‘Will they believe him?’

‘Probably, if you help. You must be acting as the research assistant on this project. You should have picked up the local interest story about the goings-on at the mine and be thoroughly enthusiastic about it. The network will
love
it, and you too for finding it. So, if you were really working on a story you’d just come across about a crazy oil sheikh who wants to build a desert palace in the Austrian alps, do you know what you’d be doing?’

‘Tell me.’

‘You’d be picking the ORF people’s brains. You’d be trying to get every last scrap of information that was going. You’d be greedy. You’d want to know in detail about this Austrian law. You’d want them to suggest awkward questions that you could feed me to ask instead of all the bland political stuff I have at present. You’d be going on and on. You’d be boring them. You’d also be making them start to worry. If you’re going to be feeding me their best questions, I’m going to be taking the credit too, see?’

She had brightened up. ‘Yes, I see. Counterattack where they keep their vanity. I will do my best. What time will you return?’

‘I don’t know. Not very late I would think. If they want to know where I am, say that I took a taxi and went off looking for a bar where they serve my favourite brand of American whisky. You could be bitter about me. You’re the one who’s been doing all the work. I’m just the slob who gets paid top money for asking the questions you write. They won’t mind believing that. With luck, they’ll have believed Jean-Pierre and simply be hoping to get their hands on the film. But let him do his talking first. I’m assuming he’ll go along. Do you think he will?’

‘Yes, if I tell him that these suggestions come from you. He
may possibly enjoy himself.’

‘As long as he doesn’t look defensive. You should look stern and suspicious.’

‘That I can do.’

I smiled. ‘Yes, I know.’

The car Schelm had sent for me from Velden was an Avis rental driven by a saturnine young man who spoke only six words during the trip. He asked me if I was Mr Halliday and then told me please to get in. I assumed that he was one of Schelm’s junior operators.

The forecourt of the hotel Schelm was staying at in Velden was entered through a splendid baroque archway. The hotel beyond, though, failed to live up to the promise of that approach. It was trying hard to look as if it had once been the noble house whose archway stood in front of it and still unwilling to admit that it had been a hotel from the start. It was, however, far more comfortable than the noble house would have been. It had a nice expensive feeling, and the people who ran it seemed not to have heard of the term ‘self-service’. Schelm’s room was large with space enough for comfortable armchairs as well as a bed and a drinks tray on a side table.

As he was mixing me a drink he motioned with his head towards a door connecting his room with the next. ‘The General will be joining us,’ he said. ‘If you don’t mind, Bob, I’d like him to hear what you have to tell us from the beginning. It’ll save you from having to say things twice and we do have a lot of ground to cover before the meeting tomorrow.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Charming, and I’d use a different word if I really meant that he was a light-weight charmer. You’ll get on well together. Zander had a dossier on him I assume?’

‘Published material only, and not very much of that.’

‘Did it mention that he spent a couple of years as an adviser in Oman and that he speaks fair Gulf Arabic?’

‘If it did, they didn’t read that bit out to me. All I was
actually shown was a black-and-white picture they had of him.’

‘I see.’

He went to the connecting door and opened it without troubling to knock first. ‘Bob’s here, Patrick, if you’d care to join us,’ he said.

General Newell in colour and out of uniform looked very different from the picture I had been shown the night before. He was of middling height with a swarthy complexion, greying, slightly untidy dark hair and, as Simone had been quick to note, an attractive pattern of laugh lines around his eyes. Clearly, unless you happened to have seen that other reading of his face, he was far too relaxed and kind-hearted a man to tear strips off anyone. He also looked remarkably healthy for his age. The suit he was wearing was at least fifteen years old and still fitted him well. It was one of those London suits, navy blue pin-stripe with vest, that always looks as if it may at some time have been slept in but never as if it has just been pressed. With it he wore a striped shirt a bit frayed at the collar points and a blue tie with a small knot.

As we shook hands he said: ‘Glad to meet you, Bob.’

‘Thank you, General.’

‘Heard a lot about you, of course. One thing though.’ He hesitated and then decided how he would say it. ‘I’m taking the liberty of calling you Bob because that’s your message name for this operation. But I have a suggestion. If you call me Patrick and we stick to first names all round, it’ll make it easier when we go downstairs to dinner. We can go on talking a little shop if we want to without the waiter taking too much of an interest because one of us is a general. What do you think, Dieter?’

‘Good idea. Now, first things first. Bob has been shown a photograph of you that they’re proposing to use for identification purposes. We don’t want any foul-ups, Bob. Would you have recognized Patrick from their picture of him?’

‘The upper part of the face looks the same. The lower part is nothing like. In the picture they have, Patrick, I’m sorry to
say, you look as though you are about to tear some unfortunate major to pieces with your bare teeth.’

He nodded amiably. ‘I know the picture you mean. Some press photographer took it up near Lauenburg. Bad habit losing your temper. I used to think I’d broken it, but it still creeps up on me again once in a while. Pity they had to get
that
picture. When there are photographers about these days I always try to keep my mouth shut.’

‘I’ll warn Chihani. She’s the security expert. She liked your eyes anyway. They are what she’s going to look at.’

‘Then that’s settled,’ said Schelm. ‘Now, Bob, we’ve only been here a couple of hours, but the word’s already around among the hotel staff here that there’s a French television unit in the neighbourhood and that The Ruler is to be interviewed in his old silver mine. It looks as if your request for a back-up crew was more than justified.’

‘Even
with
the back-up crew, this rendezvous tomorrow is going to be about as private and secure as Central Park,’ I said. ‘You’ve heard about the public row that’s going on over this clinic he wants to build?’

‘We’d picked that up before we came.’ He handed the General a drink. ‘We wanted the rendezvous changed, of course. We tried and were refused as late as Saturday morning, before you left for Geneva. Did they tell you that?’ ‘No, but that doesn’t surprise me. Zander feels that he’s
enlisted
me – his word – that I’m on his side now and working for his success. He wouldn’t want me to get worried at this stage, just before the battle.’

‘
Are
you worried? I mean we’d like success too, though not necessarily his version of it. Do you think you can cope with this PR complication? And, in particular, can you be sure of keeping us out of it?’

‘Your best way of keeping out of it would be to get yourselves a couple of press cards. The Austrians’ll be elbowing the foreign competition right out of it. This is their story. Can I cope? I guess I’ll have to. So far, the trouble all seems to be coming from the television people.’ I gave them a
quick run-down on what had happened at the Gasthaus and on the instructions I had left with Simone.

‘Will it work, do you think?’

‘If Vielle co-operates. Unfortunately, those two don’t get on well.’

‘You don’t know why?’

‘They’re both worriers, I guess. Vielle’s worrying about his dignity all the time. She’s worrying about security.’

‘Maybe, but it’s not just that, Bob. She’s the boss’s daughter.’

‘Zander’s?’

‘By his second wife, the one who was killed in the Algerian war. His name would have been Brochet then. Those young Berber hoodlums are his children too, but adopted. He trained them. I’d have given you this background stuff before, but it’s only just coming in. We’ve had a lot of people digging. The family in America, by the way, has Spanish as its second language.’

‘Well, at least you’ve explained Vielle and his jealousy.’ I drank some Scotch and decided that I had a need to know more. ‘On the TV situation,’ I said, ‘the best way out is for me to get an interview with The Ruler, turn it straight over to ORF and hope that they’ll be grateful enough to be nice about all the lies they’ve been told. What I’d like to hear about now is this Dutch back-up crew. Who are they? When do they get here?’

Schelm consulted a notebook. ‘The name of the company is Viser-Damrak TV Film’ – he spelt it out – ‘and they are based in Eindhoven. The director is Dick Kluvers. I don’t know exactly how that is spelt. They are night-stopping in Trieste and will be here by noon tomorrow. They will report to one of my people here in this hotel for instructions and guidance to the location. What you have told me, however, about the ORF situation makes me think that we may have further problems.’ He stood up. ‘Patrick, may I use the telephone in your room? There is something I must check.’

The General waved permission. Schelm shut the connecting door behind him when he left us.

The General eased himself lower in his chair and gave me a friendly smile. ‘Nice chap, Dieter. Gives one the impression that he’s good at his job. Probably is, too. You must find this Zander fellow professionally interesting. I know I do.’

‘You mean how did a good soldier like that get into the murky work of doing business for people like The Ruler?’

‘Oh heavens no! Good soldiers can get into all sorts of murky jobs. Like this one, for instance, the job I’m in. The good soldier Zander happened to get into a war of liberation on the winning side and made useful friends. That part’s easy. No. What I couldn’t see, at least at first, was how he ever
became
a good soldier. From Abwehr to senior Warrant Officer in the Legion is quite a long step. How did he take it? And
why
?’

Without thinking I parroted the explanation my agency friend had given me on the day I had received Zander’s letter. ‘All he knew was soldiering.’

The General stared as if I had taken leave of my senses. ‘Well, he couldn’t have learned it in the Abwehr.’

‘According to my sources he was sent to a special infantry training school.’

‘Special infantry training, my foot. It was a spit-and-polish unit that specialized in ceremonial drill for guards of honour. One of those places where they went poncing about in boned black-calfskin boots. You can see why he’d be thought suitable. He’s a Baltic German who’s proved his loyalty to Führer and Fatherland by escaping from the Soviets to join the fight for glory. He’s also, no doubt, a good-looking lad of the right Aryan complexion. You don’t learn soldiering in those places. Eventually, of course, they found a better use for him and his languages. That’s when they sent him for signals training. When he joined the Abwehr they put him to monitoring enemy signals traffic. Later he was used on POW interrogation. That’s not exactly a desk job, but it’s certainly a sit-down one. Care to hear my
theory about how he became transformed into a soldier? You might even be able to check with him on it if you get a chance.’

‘He’s not a man who likes talking about himself, or answering questions.’

‘If my theory’s correct, he wouldn’t mind talking about the Russian winter of ’forty-four and ’forty-five in the least. You don’t believe me? Think about it. The Wehrmacht was falling back all across their northern Russian front into Poland. The Russians were already in East Prussia. The Germans weren’t taking prisoners for interrogation, so what was Zander doing? Don’t forget, he’s still a youngster in his early twenties and he’s an NCO with a confirmed rank. After three years in his job on that front it would be
Feldwebel
I’d say. Well now, the German army was desperately short of reserves by then and the drafts that were being sent to them were of doubtful quality. There were the too-old and the too-young, returned wounded, tired men and demoralized men. Don’t forget, either, that the Russian front was a punishment posting by then for units accused of misbehaviour or insufficient enthusiasm for the war elsewhere. So, the German commanders did what army commanders always do when they get hard pressed for effective manpower. They weed out the young and the fit from specialist units, lines-of-communication troops and non-combatant services and use them as reinforcements, usually to fill out mixed drafts of old soldiers and new who haven’t yet had time to get to know each other. Know what I mean?’