Siege at the Villa Lipp (40 page)

Let us take a closer look at the material of Firman’s outer defences. At the Villa Lipp, I compared his clouds of verbiage with octopus ink, a comparison which the octopus himself faithfully reports. It is surprising, however, to find the comparison holding good for his written word. Any spoken one - its meaning so easily changed by the voice and body-language of its speaker at the moment - lends itself naturally to deception. Comedians, evangelists, fortune-tellers, demagogues, all who traffic in the human personality, know and depend upon the fact. The written word is usually less obliging. It can be examined more than once. It can be analysed and parsed. Doubters suspecting soft spots may prod and poke at it. Only those accustomed to appealing to the semi-literate, or those as full of bile and adverbs as Mr Firman, can make the mistake of believing that, if a statement is made with sufficient vehemence and a neat turn of phrase, the conviction it seems to carry will always be unquestioned.

At one point in the book, Mr Firman has much to say about the technique of the ‘smear’. By no means all of it was said, as he claims at the Villa Lipp, but no matter. To anything Mr Firman has to say about ways of smearing an adversary, I am prepared to listen. He is an expert on the subject.

Consider, for a moment, his descriptions of me and the way that I behave, socially as well as professionally.

Few men are without their vanities, idiosyncrasies and petty weaknesses. Many, I among them, possess visible physical peculiarities as well, although I am in no way abnormally handicapped. About his appearance, a sensible man of my age will have only vestigial illusions; and, if he has been much photographed at conferences and heard his platform voice coming back at him through television and radio, he will probably have dispensed with even those vestiges.

I have a prognathous upper jaw and what are commonly called ‘buck’ teeth. Because they are so prominent I
try always to keep them very clean. I express disgust or disbelief by making a hawking sound in the throat. When we were young, my wife tried unsuccessfully to cure me of the habit which she thought unbecoming, and at times offensive. I also suffer from an arthritic condition of the spine that my doctor calls ‘parrot’s beak’ and is properly known as spondylitis. If
afflicts many other people my age, causing discomfort or inconvenience in varying amounts. Long, hot journeys made in small, nervous cars
on
mountain roads are bad for parrot’s beak. In my case, such a journey will result in muscle spasm and lower back pain; and, until I can take recuperative rest, my gait will be affected.

What does Mr Firman make of all this?

A monster, naturally; a staring blue-eyed monster with gleaming white fangs and circumflected lip, a monster who slobbers down all that lovely wine as if it were water, sprays his flinching companions cheerfully with gobbets of saliva, insults the food and then reels away, supporting himself with practised ease on the furniture as he goes, to sleep it off. The monster does not speak, he only yelps, yaps and blares. The monster does not take a bath, as Dr Henson does for the benefit of the eavesdropping microphones, he only breaks wind.

As the monster’s creator himself would say, ‘And so on.’ Mr Firman must be taken with many grains of salt.

Where then, I may be asked, is the human being we were promised? Is there truth at all here? Is this merely dreamstuff, clinical casebook material that will only become useful when it has been processed and interpreted?

By no means. As Mr Firman admits, indeed claims, many of the conversations. he reports are transcribed from the tapes he took with him from the villa. I have consulted my colleagues, Henson and Connell, on the point and both agree with me. As long as one disregards Firman’s interpolated comments, though some of them have evidential merit of their own, his accounts of what was said are in the main accurate.

When he is reporting from memory, however, we have to be very much more careful.

The recollections of his adolescence have yet to be checked. The passages concerning his war experiences have been read by a German scholar, a friend of mine who served as an infantry soldier in the Italian theatre from 1943 to 1945. He reports one error. The only German army pistols he can remember as having been issued were the Walther and the Sauer. However, while a prisoner of the Americans, he had heard German pistols referred to as ‘Lugers’ as if the word were a generic term for every type of German
automatic hand-gun. Firman’s reference to ‘Lugers or Walthers’ may be dismissed then as a mistake belonging to another time and place. It is not his memory that is at fault.

The same cannot be said of his mistakes over certain vital dates. All of a sudden he is grossly unreliable. He cannot even place correctly the year of my identification of him in Zürich!

Was the blunder intentional? I really don’t think it can have been. Firstly, because I had already published the correct date in my Notes for a Case-study, and I can’t see him passing up an opportunity to pour scorn on any factual statement: of mine with which he disagreed. Secondly, because Mr Firman is far too astute to make mistakes that lock as if they could have been intentional, unless he wished for some reason to draw special attention to them. But why should he? The Zürich date, for one, is among the ‘neutral’ facts that nobody disputes. A secretarial error then? No, because the rest of his typescript is singularly free of error. The editorial assistant must have accepted those wrong dates too, so presumably they were given him by Mr Firman.

I
shall return to this problem. It touches one of Mr Firman’s basic contentions concerning the guilt of the man he calls ‘Williamson’. Among the charges levelled against me - other than those involving my teeth, my drunkenness, ray timidity under fire or my stubborn refusals to concede that black is white - is a list of some of my sins of omission.

In one case, his complaint is certainly justified.

Unfortunately, I did not hear about the murder of Yves Boularis until several months after the event. It was not, I
understand, reported outside France. Dr Henson came across a reference to it in a French medico-legal journal that I normally only read in précis. She wrote to me drawing attention both to the oddity of the method employed and to the timing of the murder.

Was it possible after all that the Villa Lipp had really been besieged? And could there really be a wicked Mr Williamson? The political leader who, having gained power and been proclaimed his people’s saviour, wishes to obliterate all traces of his corrupt or criminal past is a familiar figure in the history of nations.

The possibility of my having done Mr Firman even a minor injustice was troubling. The true identity of the speaker whom he addresses as ‘Mat’ in the cassette of the telephone conversation that I took with me from the villa that night proved impossible to establish. I made every effort I could.

Through friends in London, I was able to obtain a copy of a BBC sound archive recording of Mathew Tuakana’s voice. It was part of an address of homage and welcome to Chief Tebuke on the occasion of the Chiefs inauguration as head of state at the Placid Island independence ceremony. It was in the Placid Island language.

A colleague who specializes in the techniques of ‘voice-print’ comparison reported to me on the two voices. He identified the man speaking with Firman on the cassette as being British from the English Midlands. Dr Henson had thought Coventry or Birmingham. The Tuakana recording, however, presented difficulties. This wasn’t because he couldn’t understand the language, but because it couldn’t be used for the purposes of comparison. It is the
sounds
of the voice specimens that are analysed and compared. These two lots of sounds were of two completely different orders: one for the most part labial and nasal, the other wholly glottal. One cannot compare a fingerprint with a palm print, even when they have been made by the same hand. There was no available and authenticated recording of Mr Tuakana speaking English or any other phonetically comparable language.

The doubt nagged at me, however, and, after the San Francisco conference two months ago, my wife agreed to my suggestion that we might spend the vacation due to me in seeing something of the South Pacific. We obtained a visa for Placid in Fiji, and went there, along with some cargo, on one of the biweekly island-hopping planes.

A hotel is nearly completed, but not yet in business. The old rest-house is primitive, but our reception there was warm.

As an outspoken critic of what Mr Firman calls the ‘tax-haven business,’ I am fairly well known by name among those who earn their livings in it. It did not at all surprise me that the Canadian lawyer, who acts as Placid vice-consul in Suva, and who issued our visas, had sent advance warning of our visit. Letters from Mr Tuakana and from a daughter of Chief Tebuke awaited us on arrival. Both were invitations to lunch the following day. My wife’s hostess would be the Principal of the Island’s new high school for girls. Mr Tuakana looked forward to meeting me for an informal discussion of matters of mutual interest to us. He hoped to prevail upon me and Krom to attend a reception by Chief Tebuke later in the week. Meanwhile, lunch at Government House would be
à deux.
A car and driver would be at my disposal during our stay.

Government House consists of one two-storey house and four bungalows, the accommodation used by the British Resident Commissioner and his senior officials in colonial days. Mr Tuakana, as Chief Minister, occupies the largest bungalow and has his offices in it as well as his private quarters. His domestic staff, I noted, seem to be exceptionally well-trained.

In studying Mr Firman’s book, I have tried from the start to remain objective, and to remind myself at regular intervals that all statements in it must be presumed false until there is evidence to the contrary. When I say, then, that the Firman description of Mat Williamson fits Mathew Tuakana like a glove, I mean that the description is not only visually correct - there may be two names but there is only one man - but that it also gives an impression I found recognizable, that of a man somewhat too well aware of his ability to deal with subordinates.

The way in which he introduced himself, however, had little of the charm Firman’s account had led me to expect.

‘I am the Tuakana whose baptismal name is Mathew Williamson,’ he said. ‘I am not the Williamson in this man Firman’s book, any more than you, I imagine, consider yourself to be the Professor Krom he caricatures. As long as that is clearly understood, I see no reason why we shouldn’t talk fairly freely and frankly.’ He rang a small glass bell standing on the table beside him. ‘What would you like to drink? Schnapps?’

‘No, thank you, Minister.’

When the servant appeared he ordered iced water. I should record that his voice was quite unlike that on the cassette. I can usually tell the difference between American and British spoken English. His
sounded
more American, but I really don’t know. Firman’s assertion that the man is a clever mimic was obviously uncheckable.

After ascertaining that the rest-house had made us comfortable, he went on: ‘Professor, tell me something. You and your wife went for a drive this morning. You saw mainly the port and the old phosphate-company workings. What did you think of the little you were able to see of us?’

‘Somewhere in our friend’s book this place is described as like a lunar landscape. That seemed a fair description of the mining area. Though I also saw what looked like efforts being made to improve things. Are they yours?’

His fleeting smile of satisfaction suggested that what I had seen had been a show put on for my benefit, and that our driver had been briefed. ‘Not mine alone, Professor, As helpers I have a number of those persons of whom you so steadfastly disapprove.’ He poured me a glass of water from the jug that had been brought. ‘I mean the ones you call tax-dodgers.’

I was willfully dense. ‘The men operating the earth-moving equipment looked like Islanders to me.’

‘They were. But do you know the procedures for registering a corporation or creating a trust on Placid?’

‘I could recite the exempt company and trust laws of half a dozen of your competitors in the field, Minister. I would be surprised if yours were much different.’

‘Not much different, no, but a little. Part of our corporation and trust registration fees must be paid in kind.’

‘A nice gimmick. Plant and machinery?’

‘Topsoil. Most of Placid’s was stripped away and lost by the mining company. A delivery of five thousand metric tons of good, black topsoil ensures the best of everything here for a newly arrived corporation. In subsequent years we’ll take a thousand tons annually as long as the quality remains good. I’ll take no sub-soil fill. The only clock we mean to put back here is the ecological one. And I think we have just enough time in which to do it.’

‘You have a deadline, Minister?’

I received a cool look. ‘People who think as you do are our deadline, Professor. There is writing on the wall. Tax authorities everywhere, especially in the high-tax jurisdictions, are getting tougher every day. And the writing is not only on walls. In the European Common Market Official Journal, the sin we are committing, the crime you so deplore has been given a name of its own - Incitement to Anti-Social Tax-Avoidance! Doesn’t that sound wicked? Ten years from now we’ll have been legislated out of our economic existence if a career of crime is the only one we’re trained to follow. We have no illusions, I can assure you. If the western powers prefer to have us as neo-colonial Third World pensioners rather than as self-respecting exporters of fiscal services, we must look elsewhere for salvation. But where? Yes, we could sell our port facilities to the highest bidder and become somebody’s nuclear naval base. Or we could lease ourselves as sites for missile-tracking or microwave stations. Fates worse than death, I’m afraid. No! With sufficient topsoil and a well-researched development programme, surely we can use our sinful tax-avoidance years to purchase a better future. What do you think, Professor?’