The Care of Time (7 page)

He sighed, ‘I note that you automatically assume that the attackers were not personal enemies of Bernardo’s. The police took longer to reach that conclusion. You are right, of course. The car was stolen. What they put in his pocket was an envelope. Inside was a sheet of the Syncom internal memorandum paper used by them for business regarded as confidential. It is a pale yellow colour. On this sheet was typed a single sentence in capital letters. It said: “
DIRECTIVES WILL NOT IN FUTURE BE TREATED AS NEGOTIABLE REQUESTS
.” ’

‘In English?’

‘No, in Italian. The police took charge of it and sent it to Rome. The Syncom offices both there and in London co-operated fully with the police. England was involved because Syncom’s European division happens to buy all its stationery there. They reported that, although the sheet of paper used was quite genuine, it was of a quality that hadn’t
been used for two years. Executives had complained that it was too flimsy. The last batch of it had gone to the Syncom office in Mozambique. The trouble the police had was with the wording of the message. Who would say such a thing to Bernardo? Why the elaborate bureaucratic language? Who could it have been that Bernardo had offended? It was very difficult to convince them that the message had really been for us.’

‘Did you ask the intermediary, Miss What’s-her-name, why she herself hadn’t delivered it on the great man’s behalf?’

An attempt at a smile quivered for a moment in one corner of his mouth. ‘Miss Chihani, you mean? As you will soon be finding out for yourself, that young woman is very well able to deal with inconvenient questions. She simply ignores them. By the way, she claims to be Lebanese. One of our staff, though, who knows some Arabic and heard her speaking on the telephone to Luccio in that language says that she sounds Algerian. It seems that there is a big difference between the two accents. But you would know all about that of course.’ He peered forward. ‘Ah, nearly there.’ He pressed the button to roll down the partition between us and the driver. ‘Please let me know personally, won’t you, if you are not absolutely comfortable here?’

I don’t believe he really thought that I could be so easily brushed off. He just disliked talking about the work I was there to do. Anyway, I persisted.

‘About the Nechayev manuscript, Mr Pacioli. There must surely be some preliminary findings by now, and it’s really quite important from my point of view.’

‘Because of the clause in your contract that entitles you to leave at once if it’s a fake?’ He said it without reproach but a little wearily.

‘I should have thought you’d be fairly interested too.’

‘You’re forgetting, Mr Halliday. Fake or not, we have had our orders. In any case, I am going to have to disappoint you. We have had two opinions about the material so far. Each
completely contradicts the other in almost every respect. And, as I can already see another unanswerable question trembling on your lips and certain to be asked before your baggage is out of the car, I will save you the trouble of asking it. No, I am afraid that I
don’t
know, any more than you do, why they were so insistent on having you in particular to work on this book. You would be the first to agree, I think, that there are other qualified persons in the field.’

‘Sure there are. But in that case …’

‘I can only say,’ he said firmly, ‘that when I put the question to Miss Chihani she replied that Dr Luccio had seen you on television.’

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘Yes, it surprised me too. She must have misunderstood him. You have my office number? Good. Then we must keep in touch.’

It was not among the more auspicious first meetings that I have had with a publisher.

A few minutes later, when I had been installed in the suite and was waiting for my bags to be brought up, an unpleasant train of thought arrived to spoil the moment of discovery that I had a marble bathroom. It was the word ‘television’ that had started it running.

My brief career in television is among those misfortunes of my working life that I try hardest to forget. It began, deceptively, with a petty triumph. In the course of promoting a book in which I had a half share, I appeared on a number of local late-night talk shows of the ‘open-ended’ kind then in vogue. Produced in imitation of their big-city, big-name counterparts, they went out live, were easily interrupted for commercials and cost less than the batch of old movies then on offer. The moderators were usually local news anchor-men eager to demonstrate that they possessed wit and wisdom as well as good looks and the ability to read from a teleprompter. With one of them I lost my temper and for nearly a minute, until a hastily inserted station-break cut me off, said exactly what I thought of him. What I said in that
minute, however, was trenchant enough to be reported, and a current-affairs programmer for the network to which the local station was affiliated became sufficiently interested to call for a tape of the incident. He liked my display of bad manners and I was offered a deal.

It was an election year and he needed a current-affairs show to fill a late-evening slot during the campaign doldrums of the summer months. It would go out on Mondays and be called
First of the Week
. The official idea was that I would interview party leaders in certain key states where the pollsters were predicting upsets. But that was only the official idea. The unofficial one was that I would be as offensive and unpleasant to these respected party leaders as I had been to the moderator of the talk show. That way, it was thought, I would cause my victims to lose their cool, answer back and commit indiscretions. Thus, the network would appear to be serving the public by educating and informing while, at the same time, be doing its higher duty to its advertisers by providing entertainment for morons.

What the programmer had failed to understand, and I in my ignorance of the medium had failed to perceive, was that the sarcasms with which I had assailed the moderator of the talk show had merely been my last-ditch desperate response to a chattering, maddening imbecile who didn’t know that ‘literary’ and ‘literacy’ are words with different meanings. The trouble with
First of the Week
was that none of the men and women I interviewed was an imbecile, all had been interviewed many times before by radio and TV people who really knew their jobs and most were practised debaters who could run rings around me. The fact that their arguments were very often specious and their supporting evidence plainly dreamed up on the spur of the moment seemed never to matter. They always scored. None of my experience with politicians had prepared me for that sort of rough-and-tumble and my wild attempts to assert myself were brushed aside with careless ease. They were as used to swatting hecklers as they were to scoring phony points.

After the first three shows had been taped, the producer held an inquest. ‘Bob,’ he said, ‘you’re letting these guys walk all over you. You’re letting them come on strong and stay that way. You’ve been fully briefed. Most of these people are crooks and at least a couple of them are heading for perjury indictments. You know things they don’t want anyone else to hear. You’ve got to get in there and catch them off balance, put them on the defensive. We know what’s going to sell this show – plenty of blood on the floor. Right? But let’s make sure it’s their blood, not yours. Okay, killer?’

But it never was okay. I was trying to do a job for which I had no talent, and all the clever editing that was later done couldn’t conceal the fact. What you saw was a series of affable politicians humouring an ill-tempered and at times impertinent interviewer who never seemed to have any facts to back up the irresponsible allegations he was making. The politicians all came out looking good. The interviewer, of whom you saw less as time went on, tended to come out looking either petulant or sheepish. The blood on the floor was always mine and I supplied pints of it.

I didn’t waste time wondering how Zander-Luccio could have seen any of those interviews – if he could recruit bomb-makers in Miami he could, presumably, watch tapes of American network television – but there was no escaping the likeliest reason for his interest in them. My incompetence as a TV interviewer could very well have appealed to someone thinking of hiring a collaborator dim-witted enough to be used later as a scapegoat.

I heard a knock on the sitting-room door and then the sound of the door opening. A voice said, ‘Prego,’ and something bumped. I gathered that my bags were being brought in. I was in the bathroom drying my hands and admiring the veining of the marble around the washbasin, so I called through, ‘In camera da letto, per favore,’ hoping to convey that I wanted the bags brought into the bedroom. When there was no answer, I put the towel down, picked up my jacket which had in it the Italian money I would need for
the tip and went through into the sitting room.

There, in addition to my bags stacked on a porter’s trolley, stood a big hotel linen wagon and two persons in porters’ work-coats with the hotel name and crest embroidered on them. The pair could have been Italian but did not look like hotel porters. One was a slim, smiling young man, the other a husky teenage girl. A third person was locking the door to the corridor on the inside. She was tall, dark, and strikingly handsome. As she turned away from the door I saw that she was pointing a revolver at me. With the gun and in her unisex black sweater-and-pants outfit she looked like the lead character in a comic strip to be called
SUPERPERSON
.

‘Good evening, Mr Halliday.’ She spoke faintly-accented, elocution-class English. ‘Do absolutely nothing, please, and you will be quite safe.’

As she put the gun away in her shoulder bag the other two began to move. They were very fast. Before I could open my mouth to ask a question, the young man had me bent double with an armlock and was forcing me to lurch forward so that the husky girl could kick my legs from under me. I hit the floor face downwards, the impact converting the cry of rage that I had been about to utter into a muted yelp. The armlock expert, sitting on my back, at once grabbed one of my feet and did something with one of his knees that immobilized me completely. I knew that the woman was now kneeling beside me on the floor because she had started giving orders to the girl. They were in a language that sounded a bit like Arabic but wasn’t, though I have to say that I did not listen very carefully. I was preoccupied by my awareness of strong fingers busily rolling up my left shirtsleeve.

A final explosion of orders, then the shoulder bag appeared on the rug about eighteen inches from my left eye. She began to take things from it. A disposable hypodermic syringe pack was followed in my field of vision by a plastic vial with a printed label on it and her fingers unscrewing the cap from a small bottle. As the cap came off there was a smell of surgical spirit.

With an effort I managed to get enough air into my lungs to make speech possible. ‘What the hell’s this?’ I croaked.

‘This, Mr Halliday?’ She picked up the vial. ‘Thiopental sodium.’

I said: ‘If it’s kidnapping you’d better know the score right now. Nobody’s going to pay a cent for me.’

She produced a cotton-wool swab from the bag and tilted the spirit bottle against it. ‘My name is Simone Chihani,’ she said, ‘and you have a choice. You know who I am because Mr Pacioli will have told you. Now, you can either come with us quietly, walking for yourself, co-operating, or we can put you to sleep and take you downstairs covered with dirty sheets before driving you to keep your appointment with Dr Luccio. But we have no time to waste. So, make up your mind please. Co-operation or dirty sheets. Which is it to be?’

Co-operation meant walking between Chihani and her armlock specialist to the service elevator, descending to the basement area and then walking to the door where the hotel staff clocked in and out. On our way we passed a room-service kitchen, then a laundry before we came to the time-card rack. Just beyond was a little glassed-in office with a fox-faced doorman inside to check the comings and goings. He had his radio tuned to a soccer match commentary and, though he looked straight at me as we approached, all he did when I glared at him was to give Chihani a blank stare.

‘Friendly or blind?’ I asked.

‘One of several paid helpers here. His wife is in charge of the room maids on your floor. His brother is a senior porter.’

‘And
you
chose this hotel for me. I begin to see.’

‘I’m glad of that, Mr Halliday. The more security-conscious you become, the easier things will be.’

We were outside now in a delivery area. Ahead there was a steep ramp up to street level bordered by a narrow sidewalk for pedestrians and a parking bay for motor scooters. Blocking the sidewalk immediately in front of us was a beige Volkswagen minibus with its nearside wheels up on the kerb and a sliding side-door that was open.

‘Get in quickly, please.’

I did as I was told and she followed. A dim roof-light showed that all except one row of the rear seats had been removed, the windows covered with flowered cretonne curtains and a screen of the same material stretched tightly across the space behind the driver. No one travelling in the back would be able to see where he was going.

‘You sit in the middle, Mr Halliday.’

She took the seat by the nearside window. The boy slid the
door to behind him and sat across the aisle from me. There was to be no chance of my peeking around the corners of the curtains.

‘How long is this going to take?’ I asked.

‘The journey? Less than an hour. If you are tired you could have a little nap.’

I didn’t bother to reject that idiot suggestion. I was still acutely aware of the bruising on my knees and shins. The pain in my right shoulder hadn’t eased either. The expensive scent she used was beginning to give me a headache. Delayed shock can produce odd side-effects.

The door slid open again and the teenage girl climbed in. She had my raincoat with her and tossed it to me before shutting the door and saying something to the invisible driver. He said something back and started up. Moments later the minibus bumped down off the sidewalk and ground up the ramp. As it turned into the traffic on the street above, the two junior thugs took off their porters’ coats and dropped them on the floor behind. Their own clothes were matching flower-patterned shirts and plastic windbreakers. The boy produced candy bars for them both and they began to chatter quietly in their own language as they chewed. About what? About how easy I had been? About how good they were? Or about the greater job satisfaction they experienced when the assignment was more straightforward, as the attack on Pacioli’s driver must have been? Hard to tell, but they both had that peculiar wide-eyed impassivity so often to be seen on the faces of those for whom violence is easy. It is an expression that tends to sweeten with age, eventually giving its wearers an appearance of kindliness and good humour that can be dangerously misleading.