The Intercom Conspiracy (26 page)

‘Brandy or Scotch whisky?’ he asked.

‘Brandy, please.’

The girl went back inside the house and presently an old maidservant brought us a bottle and some glasses on a tray.

Jost had motioned me to a chair, but he made no attempt at small talk. Neither did I. He lit one of his panatellas and we sat there in silence until the old woman had gone. Then he poured two drinks and pushed one towards me.

‘Let us understand one another,’ he said. ‘We met once, briefly,
when I purchased a subscription to a publication you edited. We have a mutual acquaintance, a writer named Lewison or Latimer, who seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. That is the extent of our connection. I know nothing of this Arnold Bloch of whom you spoke. If you choose to ask hypothetical questions, my answers will be equally hypothetical. If you care to believe them, that is your affair. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Quite clear, Colonel. You know nothing, you admit nothing.’

He blew a cloud of smoke and eyed me through it. ‘Addressing me as Colonel, Mr Carter, will get you nowhere,’ he said; ‘and if you think that that sort of knowingness impresses me, you are very much mistaken.’

‘It wasn’t intended to impress you,’ I said untruthfully. ‘Since this is a hypothetical discussion, I assumed that a hypothetical courtesy would be in order. In his last book, the book I am now employed by his publishers to complete, Latimer said that you were a colonel. I accepted that. If he was wrong, of course …’

He flicked the subject away with his cigar ash. ‘It is unimportant.’

‘He also wrote that you liked to talk.’

His mouth hardened. ‘I know only too well what he wrote.’

‘You’ve read his manuscript then?’

‘Part of it, yes.’

‘He gave it to you to read?’

‘No, Mr Carter, he did not. When it was learned that he was writing a book on the subject of what the newspapers called ‘the
Intercom
affair’, an interested party decided to look at the contents.’

‘Without Latimer’s knowledge?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Was the interested party you or Colonel Brand?’

‘I know no one of that name.’ He shrugged. ‘Let us say it was Brand.’

‘And he passed it on. I see. It must have come as an unpleasant shock to both of you.’

He took a sip of brandy and gave me a sombre look. ‘Mr Latimer
was a very clever man,’ he said; ‘he was also, I regret to say, completely irresponsible. Because of those things he wrote I was accused of betraying a valued friend.’

‘You mean you didn’t tell Latimer the things he says you told him?’

‘Of course I didn’t. What do you take me for?’ He was indignant now and jabbed the air with his cigar as he went on. ‘Because I thought I liked him, I told him a few stories, anecdotes about intelligence work. I knew he’d been in British intelligence during the war, an adviser in SOE or some such thing. We would sometimes – how do you say? – swap yarns. And then one day I told him about the Mexican forger. That was the only mistake I made.’

‘But there was nothing secret about that story,’ I said. ‘It was reported. There are published accounts of it. It is common knowledge.’

‘It is, now. But he hadn’t heard of it and I told him, and I used the phrase “nuisance value”. One afternoon a few days later he came to me and began talking about the
Intercom
affair.’

‘You mean he’d put two and two together?’

Jost dropped his cigar on the stone paving and ground it out with his heel. ‘He had made one or two shrewd guesses,’ he said bitterly. ‘Like a cheap fortune-teller. Of course he told it to me as a story that he’d invented. It was a great joke for him. At times he could scarcely get the words out for laughing. He had even found out the date I bought this property and added that to the indictment.’

There was nothing hypothetical about the discussion now. He was reliving that afternoon.

‘What did you do, Colonel?’

‘What could I do? I, too, treated it as a joke. What else could I have done?’

‘You didn’t deny it?’

‘Of course not. I told you. It
had
to be treated as a joke and shared as one. Most of it was a joke – pure rubbish.’

‘Except for the dangerous bits he’d guessed right about. I see.’

He frowned. ‘I couldn’t be sure, you see, what he really believed. Did he believe the story itself or only that he had invented it? I thought that if I shared the joke he would become tired of it.’

‘But he didn’t. Why do you call him irresponsible, Colonel?’

He bristled. ‘To distort a man’s idle confidences and then use the distortions against him without his knowledge – you call that responsible? Or honourable?’

I felt like saying that Arnold Bloch could answer that question better than I, but refrained. I was there to listen, not score debating points.

‘When he went away,’ Jost went on, ‘I was at first relieved. It meant that I no longer had to see him and listen to his nonsense. Then I heard that he was working in Switzerland and became anxious. Not on my own account so much as on Brand’s. He is a sick man, you know, and still in his own country. He also has a family there.’

‘How did Latimer know that Brand had a kidney disease?’ I asked. ‘You must have told him that.’

He shook his head impatiently. ‘I once told him about a clandestine meeting with a colleague who had been to Evian to consult a kidney specialist. That’s all. I didn’t identify the colleague. Latimer did.’ He pushed the brandy bottle towards me and motioned to me to help myself. ‘That was one of his most dangerous guesses.’

‘Perhaps you told him more than you realised,’ I said. ‘After all, Colonel, you’d kept it all bottled up a long time. They say that the unconscious can play strange tricks on a man.’

He looked at me with distaste. ‘Psychological mumbojumbo has never impressed me, Mr Carter. Latimer was shrewd, I grant you, and I should have known better than to tell him about the Mexican forger. I’ve admitted that. It put the idea into his head. But all the rest was guesswork on his part.’ He took out a fresh cigar and pointed it at me. ‘Guesswork, pure and simple.’

‘Don’t forget,’ I said, ‘that he’d read about the
Intercom
affair in the newspapers. When you see two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle
that may fit, you put them together, If they do fit, you start looking for the other pieces nearby. That’s not guesswork.’

‘Call it what you like. That fairy story of his was dangerous – dangerous for Brand anyway.’

‘What did you do about Brand?’

‘I wrote alerting him to the situation.’

‘Using a French ten-franc note?’

He ignored that. ‘He wrote back sending me a clipping from some magazine, a booksellers’ guide. It was about the book Latimer was writing. Brand wanted to know if I knew Latimer. I told him I did.’ He paused. ‘And then he wrote me this letter accusing me of betraying him. I made allowances, of course. A sick man …’ He broke off with a shrug and reached for his matches.

‘What happened to Latimer?’ I asked.

He took his time lighting the cigar. ‘I don’t know,’ he said finally; ‘I can only speculate. As I said, Brand was a sick man and no longer able to think clearly. He believed that it was possible to silence Latimer by – ’ he made little circular motions with the spent match – ‘by disposing of him. I warned him that that was not the way, that there would be records inaccessible to us, documents left behind, other persons involved. I was right, or you would not be here. I proposed instead that we should approach him, separately or together, and reason with him, persuade, pay him off if necessary.’

‘You wouldn’t have succeeded in paying him off.’

‘Perhaps not. But we might have persuaded him to eliminate the dangerous material. However, Brand no longer trusted me. He wouldn’t listen. He said that he was more vulnerable than I was and would make his own decisions. I tried to argue with him, but by then it was too late.’

‘What happened to Latimer?’ I asked again.

He poured himself another drink. ‘I would guess that Brand wrote to Latimer in Geneva saying that he was willing to meet with him if Latimer was interested in further material for his book. But the meeting would have to be in a place of Brand’s
choosing and under conditions of extreme secrecy. He probably gave him that cover story about the NATO interview in Evere along with other instructions.’ He smiled grimly. ‘I am sure that Latimer enjoyed participating for once in a little of what he chose to call “this cloak-and-dagger foolishness”.’

‘What kind of other instructions?’

‘You know Cointrin airport. That new arrival-and-departure building is a big place. Until you have handed in your ticket and gone through passport control no one checks or controls your movements. Once Latimer had delivered the key of his car and walked away from the Avis counter he was as good as lost. Brand probably told him to go through the building and out to one of the other car parks where there would be someone waiting to drive him to a meeting place in France.’

‘You think he was taken via Ferney-Voltaire? There is, as you may know, some evidence that he was seen there.’

‘I think it probable.’

‘And then what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you can speculate.’

He sighed. ‘I have speculated a great deal. I will tell you what I believe. It can make no difference now. Brand is very ill. By the time this book of yours and Latimer’s is published he will be dead.’

He was silent for a moment. I waited

‘When it comes to killing,’ he went on slowly, ‘every man is a specialist. The one who can use a knife will always prefer it to a pistol. The poisoner never strangles, and the strangler does not carry a bludgeon. In time of war, when there is a wider choice of weapons and the killing is legal, it is the same. The combat soldier favours the weapon that best suits his temperament; the field commander tends to employ the arms and tactics that best suit his, usually those with which he has had an earlier success. Brand was no exception to the rule. He always thought tactically in terms of ambush and burial.’

‘Burial?’

‘Brand,’ he said, ‘was trained originally as an engineer officer. He knew a great deal about the use of dynamite and high explosives. Quite early in the German occupation he succeeded in burying some enemy supply trucks by dynamiting a hillside above them. The terrain he fought over was suitable for that kind of operation and he was able to repeat that first success a number of times. On one occasion he derailed and partly buried a train by dynamiting a cutting. When he spoke of the need to deal with an opponent, he never spoke of defeating him but always of digging his grave.’

‘It’s a common enough figure of speech.’

He shook his head. ‘With Brand it wasn’t just a figure of speech. That was the way he thought. I should know. Once, a few years ago, when we were driving together from Brussels to Cologne, we were held up on the road by some construction work. They were building a crossing for a new autoroute, and we saw them pouring concrete to make one of the supports. The caisson went deep into the earth and there was a big cage of steel reinforcing rods. We stopped to watch. It was an impressive thing to see the concrete pouring in – tons and tons of it. Brand was fascinated. When we moved on he said something I afterwards remembered. “If I ever wished to dispose of an unwanted person I would have him taken to a construction site.” ’ He gave me a meaning look. ‘I have thought about that more than once since Latimer disappeared. Between Ferney-Voltaire and Strasbourg there must be many construction sites, I would say, and many deep graves ready to be filled.’

I said nothing; I was feeling rather sick.

I must have looked it, too. He made clucking sounds. ‘Don’t worry about it, Mr Carter. Brand was never a barbarian. He would use experienced operatives. However it was done, I am sure that it was done quickly and that Latimer suffered no pain.’

The girl came out of the house wearing a towelling beach jacket and carrying a flashlight. She announced that she was going for a swim. Jost reached out a hand as she went by and caught her by the
sleeve of the jacket. From the way she held the front of it I guessed that that was all she was wearing.

‘I’ll be down in a few minutes, my treasure,’ he said. ‘On this fine night I am sure that Herr Carter will not mind walking back to the inn.’

‘Not in the least,’ I said, and I meant it. I couldn’t have taken much more of Colonel Jost. But there were still questions I had to ask.

When the girl had gone I said: ‘Why did you involve Skriabin in that bulletin about the seismograph? Was that Brand digging his grave?’

He chuckled. ‘Oh, that was my idea. Skriabin was the KGB
residentura
in Oslo and he had become a source of great irritation to our Norwegian friends. It occurred to me that a public embarrassment might quieten him down a bit. His masters transferred him to Syria. They must have been quite annoyed.’

‘They were,’ I said. ‘I should know. They worked off some of their annoyance on me.’

His eyes widened. ‘Surely, Mr Carter, you are not complaining.’ He spread out his hands in the gesture of benediction I had seen once before. ‘Think how much you have benefited from our association.’

‘Benefited!’ I had the last of my brandy in my throat and I choked on it.

‘Certainly.’ He leaned forward and tapped my knee. ‘You are a different man from the one I met a year ago. Then you were tired and contemptuous of the work that you did. You disliked yourself. Now, I detect a new confidence in you. Think. You are engaged in completing a book for the late, respected and much lamented Mr Latimer. Would his publishers have employed the man you were a year ago? I doubt it. You have come to terms with yourself. If you are wise and take care of your health, happier years may lie ahead of you, a whole new future.’

‘Or to put it another way,’ I said sourly, ‘watch your step, Carter, and don’t try double-crossing me. If my anonymity and privacy are threatened by anything you write, you and your
future will find a grave like Latimer’s. Is that the message, Colonel?’

He stood up, his smile firmly in place. ‘I’m glad we understand one another. Before you go, perhaps you will satisfy my own curiosity on one point. Did Latimer ever find out who it was who bought our shares?’