Authors: Eric Ambler
Pacioli had been fidgeting. Now he broke in sharply. ‘You tell us, Herr Schelm, that this man’s motive for blackmailing us into this situation is to establish communications with you through the CIA? It makes no sense! What would a gangster of this type want with government agencies such as yours?’
‘A sensible question,’ Schelm replied, but he kept his eyes on me. ‘What do you think, Mr Halliday?’
I had been thinking of Chihani’s references to me as an ‘experienced’ person. Now I knew what she had meant. I shrugged.
‘You may be right about his wanting a sort of special messenger,’ I said, ‘but what messages can he possibly want to send? A man with something to sell to Nato or the CIA – something
they could really want to buy I mean – doesn’t need special messengers. If it’s something worth buying, he’ll most likely be a pro who already has contacts. Anyway, Zander’s a man used to dealing in billions, according to what I was told. If he has something to sell it must be something quite unusual.’
Schelm nodded. ‘It is unusual, for him. And so’s the asking price.’ He swung around suddenly to face Pacioli.
‘Sir,’ he said, while we were waiting for Mr Halliday to return I suggested that, once you had satisfied yourself that he was safe, you might prefer to leave us. We have, as I am sure you will now understand, confidential matters to discuss.’
Pacioli’s face tightened. ‘Are you ordering me to go?’
‘I am trying to spare your feelings, Sir. You have heard a description of the persons who attacked Mr Halliday here in this room. You said nothing, but your face told me that the description fitted also the persons who were seen to attack your driver and injure him so shamefully. So, you have confirmation that they work for Zander. You would like, naturally, to give this evidence to your police and set them on to Zander. It is my duty to advise you that you would be wasting your time. From what you have also heard in this room you will realize that I am here with the knowledge and permission of Italian colleagues in Nato intelligence. We have at present no intention of disturbing the gentleman in his safe house, even if we could find it. You see, Sir? There is nothing that I shall be saying here that would not distress you.’
Pacioli hesitated, then stood up. He took no more notice of Schelm. To me he said: ‘As I was leaving the office my secretary handed me English translations of all the expert opinions on the subject of the Nechayev memoirs that we have received to date. The latest has just come in.’ He drew a folded wad of papers from an inside pocket and handed them to me. ‘You may find them instructive. Goodnight, Mr Halliday.’
I saw him to the door, helped him on with his coat and said that I would call him in the morning. He was too polite to tell me not to bother.
Schelm was clipping the end of a Petit Corona when I rejoined him. ‘A good man, that,’ he said, ‘a kind-hearted man. In my trade, unfortunately, kindness of heart is not a quality for which there is much demand. It tends to hinder rather than help.’ He held the cigar up so that I could see the length of it. ‘This won’t take long to smoke and I’ll try to be gone before it’s finished.’
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Not if you have to order again from below. Just let me tell you where we stand with Zander.’ He paused, to light the cigar, and also probably to decide how best to make what he had to say sound bland and matter-of-fact. Finally, he pointed with the cigar at the papers Pacioli had given me. ‘Let’s start there,’ he said, ‘with opinions, expert and not so expert, of the Nechayev memoir. For Zander it served a multiple purpose. It backed up his operational cover story that he was writing a definitive work on the subject of terrorism. It gave Syncom-Sentinel and Mr McGuire something tangible, something that sounded academically interesting, with which to approach you through your agent. And, most important of all, it provided the means of making a long, complex and highly secret proposal to the United States government without going through State Department channels and without compromising the proposer.’
‘Then the memoir is definitely both a fake and a forgery?’
‘Parts of it are certainly faked. Parts of it are certainly forged. Whether or not the whole thing is faked and forged is another matter. Both paper and inks as well as writing styles are right for the period from which they pretend to come. Pacioli’s museum friends and their laboratory findings were definite about that from the start. But that applies also to the parts that are known to be faked. It seems likely that fly-leaves from old books were used as stationery. That’s a common trick in these cases apparently. But neither the
faking nor the forging was the work of amateurs. The people Zander employed knew their jobs. When you come to the text of the main body of the memoir, well, I found it difficult to arrive at a decision. I think you may too, if you ever get around to reading it.’
‘In what way difficult?’
‘Well, it’s so very boring. That makes it feasible, I suppose. If faked, it’s ingenious. At least I thought so, but then I’m not a literary man. You probably know that Dostoevski based a lot of his novel
The Possessed
on Nechayev’s life and on the evidence given at his trial for murder. What the faker has done, according to the CIA’s expert, is to paraphrase Dostoevski, borrow from the writings of Bakunin and Ogarev and mix it all together with a pseudo-romantic love story. It fooled the first expert, again according to the CIA, because he put too little weight on Dostoevski’s known fascination with Nechayev and too much on the fact that there was a period of months during which Bakunin and Nechayev collaborated. In a collaboration, as you know only too well I’m sure, the question of who wrote what can always be debatable. The second expert was more cautious. He didn’t say that it was a fake, but he couldn’t quite believe in the mixture. So, he called it a contemporary pastiche. Only the CIA expert, the one called in to examine Mr McGuire’s photocopy, spotted the anachronism that was the key to the document as a whole. It lies in the six passages written in Fayet shorthand. They constitute the document within a document, the hidden message. They are the bits you couldn’t read.’
‘They’re in some sort of code or cypher?’
‘No, they’re in Esperanto. That particular shorthand is ideal for rendering Latin phonetics and they’re the kind that Esperanto uses. Yes, you can say that Esperanto in an old French shorthand is in effect a code, but it is a code that is very easy to break.’
‘Those first two so-called experts didn’t break it.’
‘Be fair. If you’re an expert on nineteenth-century Russian
manuscripts under pressure to authenticate what looks like, and really may be, a very interesting find, why should you start thinking about Esperanto? The CIA expert had a different brief. He’d been told to treat the whole document as suspect and look for hidden messages. The first thing he spotted was the anachronism.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t get it.’
‘Esperanto didn’t exist as a language until eighteen-eighty-seven, five years after Nechayev died in prison. So, he wouldn’t have known it. So, we take all these shorthand passages, add them together, transcribe them, translate them and we have a long message from Karlis Zander.’
‘Saying what?’
‘In the copy Zander chose to give you tonight, not very much of interest. From the little Esperanto I’ve picked up in the last few days, I’d say that your copy’s padded out with nursery rhymes. Mr McGuire’s copy had Esperanto passages that were totally different. It’s more than possible, we think, that his was the only copy with the real message text in it.’
‘The real message being what?’
The ash dropped from his cigar and he scooped it away tidily. ‘Well, let me see. It begins with what soldiers call an appreciation, that is an analysis of a military situation, and then it goes on to make certain proposals for solving the problems that have been shown to exist.’
‘Couldn’t you be a little more specific?’
He smiled pleasantly. ‘That depends on whether or not you’re going to telephone your agent in New York and tell her the deal’s off. Before you make up your mind, however, there are one or two things I should point out. Under your existing agreement you were to be paid fifty thousand Syncom dollars for doing a piece of work that was never worth doing. The nature of the work has now completely changed. It has become well worth doing. It would be well worth doing, let me tell you, even if you were being asked to abandon your editorial cover and do it for nothing. I must also tell you that, for reasons that are probably obvious to you
by now, you are, for the few days we are asking you to help us, in a key position.
Zander
chose you, we didn’t. If
we’d
asked you, you’d have refused. But Zander asked, in his roundabout and dishonest way, and you accepted. Now, you can invoke the forgery clause in your contract, shrug your shoulders and walk away. We hope you won’t do that. I’m not begging you to co-operate because I think that would embarrass both of us, but I am most seriously asking you to do so.’
The smile I gave him was polite I think. ‘I don’t have many finer feelings, Herr Schelm. You can’t be appealing to my patriotic instincts. Why shouldn’t I walk away?’
He stared at me blankly for a moment, then he said: ‘I see. Fifty thousand dollars and the thanks of people you have been taught by experience to dislike and despise are not enough. Unfortunately we have nothing more to offer.’
‘You could try me with a little information. No, I don’t mean secret information. Call it job description. For instance, how dangerous could this be? And, if you’re claiming that it’s not dangerous at all, who’s the enemy Chihani’s so worried about?’
He hesitated, wondering how truthful he might have to be, before he answered. ‘Very well. I’ll tell you about the people who have contracted to kill Zander. They call themselves Mukhabarat Zentrum. As you probably know only too well,
mukhabarat
is the Arabic word for a secret intelligence service. The
zentrum
, I suppose, is a cosmetic addition intended to suggest that this is a legal group with an official headquarters. For the sake of convenience, most European police forces and Interpol bureaux use the code abbreviation Rasmuk and record its activities in their files on organized crime. How would I describe Rasmuk? Well, it is secret, or tries to be, and it is an intelligence service of sorts. In truth, it is an international gang, working only under contract and for big money, in the fields of extortion, intimidation and murder. The code name for it is a reference to its history. When you worked as a newspaper man in the Middle East did
you ever hear of a strong-arm organization called Rasd?’
‘The Palestinian Mafia, you mean?’
‘Originally it was mostly Palestinian, but it wasn’t to begin with a Mafia-style thing. Rasd came fresh and raw from the refugee camps. It began as an undercover disciplinary force of zealots set up to track down and punish those who had been sent on missions abroad and then betrayed the cause. Most of these betrayals involved stealing or otherwise misusing funds contributed by the faithful. Some of the traitors were executed. Others were forced to repay more than they had stolen. Then, quite logically, Rasd itself took to fund-raising. Ultimately, it too became corrupt. It bought into nightclubs, gambling casinos and brothels. All in the decadent west, you understand. Soon it was making huge profits and spending them on high living. Naturally, this was very bad for the Palestinian image and morale. Eventually, the PLO cracked down. Some heads rolled. Rasd was denounced and discredited.’
‘But not entirely disbanded, I seem to remember.’
‘Not entirely, no. After the purge it ceased to be an accepted Palestinian group and most of the liquid assets were seized by the PLO accountants. However, not all the assets were taken because ownership of some things was effectively concealed. There was real estate for instance. This remained in the hands of the elite, if I may call them that, of the non-Palestinian dirty-job staff. During the mid-seventies Rasd had managed to recruit undesirables of a dozen nationalities. There were Cypriots, refugee Hungarians, Maltese, Moroccans, Egyptians, a very cosmopolitan collection. One
Paris Match
writer called it “a devil’s brew of all the talents”. The only thing they now lacked was skilled top management. The new team came to them from my country.’
‘Does that trouble you?’
He smiled. ‘I should have said
via
my country, not
from
it. The two men in question are Croatians. They came to West Germany some years ago to work. Their permits
described them as skilled welders. In truth, they were skilled black-marketeers and smugglers. Where those two came from in Yugoslavia criminals have to be highly skilled or they don’t survive. My country must have seemed easy for them at first. When it became less easy they moved south, taking their German women with them. In Rome they found the remains of Rasd waiting to be picked up by men of ability and imagination. They saw the possibilities. Rasd became Mukhabarat Zentrum and started looking for a new class of business.’
‘In the Middle East?’
‘That’s where the market is,
and
the kind of money their services command. They had two changes of name in fact. For a while they called themselves the Democratic Liberation Executive, but they must have soon been told, or realized from prospective customer reactions, that the name sounded too idealistic and unbusinesslike for the market they were in. So, they settled on Mukhabarat Zentrum. We prefer our six-letter code name Rasmuk. To Rasmuk, I will tell you, the contract to kill Zander is worth twenty million Swiss francs.’
‘Who’s paying?’ I asked.
He stubbed his cigar out. ‘Unfortunately, Mr Halliday, that we don’t know.’
‘Even though you know the contract price?’
‘That’s right. The Italians have managed to penetrate Rasmuk, but not yet as deeply as they would like. These things take time. So, Mr Halliday, I am sorry.
I
can’t promise you anything like the joys Zander was hinting at when he sent you that postcard of the Hotel Mansour.’
‘I don’t think I follow you.’