The Care of Time (6 page)

He nodded affably. ‘Ah yes. Harriette Wilson.’ He didn’t wait to see whether or not I had understood the allusion before explaining it for me. ‘She was a nineteenth-century English lady of easy virtue. Later on in her life, when her clientele had thinned, she made a business out of writing her
memoirs and naming names. One of those she attempted to blackmail in that way was the great Duke of Wellington. His reply was “publish and be damned” if I remember correctly.’

‘That’s the reply attributed to him, yes. But quite a number of her other old friends did buy their way out of her memoirs. Harriette made a good thing out of them. She went on for years.’

‘The libel laws are stricter now.’

‘But victims of that sort of blackmail have always been reluctant to use the law, Mr McGuire. They still are. The memoir threat is still effective, believe me.’

‘Why should you suppose that Dr Luccio is a blackmailer?’

‘I don’t suppose anything about him. I only know what you’ve told me. He is some sort of expert on terrorism. Presumably, then, he knows a lot of terrorists personally. As I said, the consideration or favour asked need not necessarily be financial. His price for not naming some names could be that he is given protection against those whom he
does
name. I don’t know. I’m not making accusations. I am merely saying that, while I am prepared to be employed, I am not prepared to assist in the operation of a racket. As my agent will tell you, I have asked for and received undertakings to take care of this hazard quite often. Usually the publishers are more than willing to co-operate. My agent will, if it would help, give you the wording of a clause that both sides have found acceptable.’

He made a note in his file. ‘Very well. We will see what Pacioli has to say. I gather that I may tell them that, subject to the inclusion of these two escape clauses you have asked for, you are ready to enter into an agreement?’

‘Oh yes, I think so.’

My car was in a parking lot a few blocks from the Holland Tunnel, but instead of setting off at once for home I took a cab up town to Barbara’s office. It wasn’t only that I felt guilty about her. There was something else I had to do that couldn’t be postponed.

She was reasonably pleased to see me and cheered up a little when I described the meeting with McGuire. However, as I had expected, my concession of the second instalment of the fee in the event of an adverse report on the Nechayev memoir did not please her.

‘I take your point about the authenticity of this Russian memoir. Can’t afford to have you mixed up with anything that’s not according to Hoyle. But why, if it turns out to be phony, should
you
be penalized?’

‘It slipped out. I was trying to make him feel ungenerous.’

‘That kind of man never feels ungenerous.’

‘Can’t you fix it by pointing out that I could very easily have done all my work in good faith
before
the experts finally got around to blowing the whistle?’

‘Maybe. But you do sometimes tend to make things unnecessarily difficult, Robert.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Well, how was it left?’

‘He’ll talk to Milan first thing in the morning because it’s the middle of the night there now, and then, if they’re agreeable as he expects them to be, he’ll call you about the draft wording on the additional clauses.’

‘All right. If you want to give me a few minutes to clear my desk, I’ll buy you a drink.’

‘I have to go into Brentano’s anyway.’

‘Meet you downstairs in a quarter of an hour then.’

The reference section in most large bookstores is generally one of the quieter areas. You rarely find more than the odd browser or two there. On that occasion, late in the afternoon, I had it all to myself.

What I was looking for was an Italian dictionary; not one of those pocket-size glossaries designed for tourists, but the real thing. I found what I wanted immediately.

I also found immediately the word that I had been half-hoping not to find there. It was in the Italian-English part of the book.

lùccio
m. pike (
Esox lucius
) or other fish of same family.

I decided not to buy the dictionary. Zander wrote very good English. I was sure that he spoke it too.

I had been told that I would be met at Milan’s Linate airport, but assumed that this courtesy would be delegated to some junior in the Pacioli offices. To my surprise I was greeted by their senior editor.

His name was Renaldo Pacioli and he was a board director as well as a son of the founder. Having identified himself to me, he asked me to show him my passport. He examined it carefully before handing it back.

‘Thank you, Mr Halliday,’ he said; ‘I will explain the reason for that curious discourtesy on our way to your hotel. There is a suite with a small sitting room reserved for you at the Duchi. It’s a little away from the centre out of the restricted traffic zone. If you need to rent a car you may find that useful. Now, if you will let me know when you see your bags coming off we’ll get a porter.’

I had spoken to him on the telephone two days previously and, foolishly, tried to draw a mind’s-eye picture of a person from the sound of a voice. As usual I had failed. The voice had seemed to me dark and on the plump side. The man himself was straw-coloured, tall and thin. The weight I had imagined came from the quiet baritone assurance with which he spoke. He was in his forties and, according to Barbara, the father of six children.

There was a large car with a beefy young driver waiting for us. As soon as we were installed in the back seat Pacioli pressed the button which raised the glass partition behind the front seats.

‘This is one of our special drivers,’ he said, ‘and I have never heard him utter a word of English, but we shall pretend that he might understand. How was the flight?’

‘I slept as far as Paris. The plane change there was a bit tiring.’

‘Well, I don’t think that you will be disturbed this evening. I can’t be sure of course. The intermediary preferred not to inform me in advance of her plans. You will be hearing from her direct.’

There were thunderclouds still overhead and it had been raining heavily. The fluorescent lighting along the airport exit road glared on the wet pavement. His head was only half-turned towards me, but there was light enough for me to see that he was waiting intently for my reaction to what he had said.

‘Intermediary? Dr Luccio has an agent now?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘an intermediary, and you may well raise your eyebrows. I will be frank with you. If I had had my way you would not be here.’ He held up a quick hand. ‘Please, that is no reflection on you. We know and respect the quality of your work. But the house of Pacioli are serious publishers. We would not in former days have accepted to do this Luccio book under the proposed absurd conditions, or perhaps any conditions at all, not absurd. You must excuse me. When I am angry my English becomes confused.’

‘I understand you perfectly. But you haven’t yet told me what the set-up is.’

‘No, I haven’t. When my father originally proposed to us that we accept the participation of Syncom-Sentinel in the affairs of our house, we all of us agreed that it was a wise move. With the new electronic machinery, we have been able to produce our intermediate-format education books in our own plant. We have also earned good profits from what you call trade books. At the Frankfurt Book Fair these last two years we have made good showings and been much complimented. We are leaders in the field. Now, suddenly, we are obliged by Syncom to behave in a most undignified as well as a most unbusinesslike manner.’

‘They pressured you?’

‘I would not call it pressure. That can be resisted. No, they
simply gave us orders. They had Arab friends whom it was necessary to oblige by publishing a book. So, we had been chosen. May we read it? No, because it is not yet completely written. What you will do is commission it from Dr Luccio and employ an American editorial adviser, Robert Halliday, to assist in the work. May we meet Dr Luccio and discuss the proposed book with him? No, that will not be necessary. You will be sent a synopsis of the book in due course. It concerns the phenomenon of terrorism and will include a hitherto unpublished memoir of the nineteenth-century terrorist Sergei Nechayev. Your immediate task will be to secure expert appraisals of these old papers which must establish conclusively that they are indeed Nechayev’s work. No expense will be spared in securing favourable appraisals. Our lawyers in New York will act for you in hiring Mr Halliday. Acting for Dr Luccio will be an intermediary, Miss Simone Chihani. She is authorized to make day-to-day decisions on all matters of detail, particularly where security is concerned. Dr Luccio is a very private person and Miss Chihani’s security orders must be obeyed at all times and without question.’ He paused. ‘In asking to see your passport, Mr Halliday, I was obeying orders, as I was when I reserved a suite for you at the Duchi.’

For a moment I considered telling him about Karlis Zander and the package-bomb incident. Then, luckily, I decided to hear first the rest of what he might have to say.

‘But in the beginning, Mr Pacioli, when all those peculiar orders about the book were given, how did you react?’

‘Very strongly, I assure you.’

‘But what sort of Syncom-Sentinel executive was it who could behave in such a clumsy way? If, in order to please their Arab friends, they needed to use the Pacioli name, surely they would have done better to ask apologetically for your help in a way that you would have found hard to refuse. Why give orders? Who could be so foolish?’

‘Their man in Rome. We know him well and had always liked him. He is very far from being foolish, but where this
book was concerned I think that he was for some reason frightened. In the conversations we had, very angry conversations they were, he seemed to me to be saying only what he had been told to say.’

‘Can a corporation as big as Syncom-Sentinel be frightened?’

‘I think the man was personally frightened.’

‘For his job, you mean?’

‘It was possible. I thought that at first anyway.’

‘But you changed your mind?’

‘We responded to these demands, these orders, reasonably I think, but firmly. We said that when we had read the book we would be able to decide whether or not we would publish it. If Syncom wished to make use of our experience in commissioning non-fiction works by asking us to make the preliminary arrangements, we would gladly help. If, in the end, we decided not to publish the work ourselves, however, we would expect to be reimbursed by Syncom for all expenses incurred on their behalf.’

‘And, with provisos about security measures, they accepted that?’

‘I don’t know whether Syncom accepted or not. Our letter has still not been answered. But someone, Dr Luccio’s Arab patron perhaps, objected strongly to our disobedience. Whoever it was, the method chosen to punish us for our independence was cowardly and vicious.’

I watched his face flickering in the lights of oncoming traffic and waited for him to decide how best to tell me. Finally, he tapped the door window beside him. ‘A new kind of plastic,’ he said. ‘It is supposed to be nearly bullet-proof. Not quite, but nearly. The body of this car is armoured too. Why? Well, our family is not what in America would be called rich, I think, but here in Italy we could be thought of as rich. In other words, we the family, and the part of our family business that we still own, could together raise enough cash from our bankers, and Syncom, to make the kidnapping of one of us worthwhile to a professional gang. So, we are all
very careful and we buy as much security as we can afford. Our household staffs have been specially vetted. We retain the services of a security organization and we employ drivers expressly trained not only in bodyguard work but also in counter-ambush car-handling techniques. They have been to a school which teaches nothing else. Alfredo is driving us tonight. If he were to see anything even remotely like a roadblock ahead, we would have to hold on very tight because we would either find ourselves suddenly going backwards almost as fast as we are now going forwards, or we would be ramming the obstruction. As there is armour built into the front fenders we would have nothing to lose but a little paint. We have two other drivers like Alfredo and they work in turn to a roster. The men of the family are taken to their offices, the children to their schools and so on. The routes are changed constantly. My wife has been on this madman’s driving course herself so that she can have a little independence in her own car. But mostly it is Alfredo, Franco and Bernardo who do the driving. That is, it was until two weeks ago.’

He paused to stare out at the city we were entering as if he expected to see something new in the rain. Then he shrugged slightly and went on.

‘From here to Rome we use a courier service for our mail, so we know exactly when Syncom received our letter about the Luccio book. It was on the Tuesday. On the Friday, three days later, Bernardo was on the day shift that ended at seven o’clock. At that time it was his turn for the weekly thirty-six-hour break that they all have. So he picked up his Lambretta from my garage and took off. Near the apartment house block where he lives with his wife and family, he was knocked down by a car. He was only slightly hurt then, but as he began to get to his feet two persons ran over to him from the car, which had stopped, and proceeded to beat him. The attack was witnessed by neighbours who said that the attackers used heavy sticks and their feet. They also said that one of the attackers may have been a woman, a girl. It was
quickly over. One of the attackers was seen to put something in a pocket of Bernardo’s anorak just before they ran off. Bernardo was still unconscious when the ambulance arrived. His injuries included a broken jaw. We must hope that he will make a complete recovery.’

‘What was it they put in his pocket?’ I asked.

He looked at me sharply. ‘You don’t want to know who did it, or if any of them has been caught?’

I could have answered that I was becoming used to Zander’s quaint little ways of capturing attention when he had a message to deliver. He might send you a bomb from Miami, or he might give himself a see-through alias for an unsuspecting Wall Street lawyer to pass on to you, or he might put one of your employees into hospital. I didn’t answer so callously, though, because just then I was feeling not only sorry for Bernardo but thankful that I had not regaled the man beside me with my now most unfunny bomb story. Instead, I said: ‘That sort of thug is almost never caught. The car used was probably stolen and later found abandoned. It’s a nasty story but not unusual.’