Complications and Other Stories, page 13
“He was wearing a gabardine raincoat” he said. “That won’t blend in terribly well with the mid-day shopping crowd. And he’s driving a black BMW with a Hertz sticker in the rear window.”
The tall man raised a half-respectful eyebrow. “License number?” he asked, hopefully.
“Didn’t notice,” Simon admitted. “But you can probably get it from Hertz. He’s gone to see one of our testees—Tommy Ferris. I take it that he isn’t from Interpol.”
“You take it right, Dr. Sweetland,” said Tarquin, while the tall man gestured to one of his henchmen. The henchman exited, presumably to call Hertz.
The tall man turned back, opening his mouth to ask another question, but Tarquin was by now in full theatrical flow: “You said that you have been—chatting was the word, wasn’t it?—with this impostor, and that you steered him in the right direction?” He seemed to be laying down the groundwork for a full-blown scapegoating exercise.
“He showed me his ID,” Simon protested.
The tall man produced an ID card of his own. The photograph was not a good likeness. It identified him as Commander Dieter Lenz. “Like this?” he asked.
“Pretty much,” said Simon.
“Did you make any attempt to verify it?”
“No. How was I supposed to do that?”
“I suppose, Dr. Sweetland,” said Tarquin, nastily, “that it didn’t occur to you that an authentic Interpol agent would go through the proper channels instead of approaching you directly.”
“Actually,” said Simon, defensively, “no.”
The Director opened his mouth to speak again, but Lenz held up his hand. “Never mind that,” he said. “French accent, you say? Genuine, do you think?”
“It sounded genuine,” said Simon, suddenly wondering whether it had been just a little too much like a caricature.
“Probably Union Corse,” said Lenz, speaking to the remaining gunman, who had come forward to stand beside him.
“Or some mafioso who thinks it’s witty to pretend to be Union Corse,” said the gunman. “Or maybe a hitman for the gnomes.”
Simon stared at them, wondering if he had somehow strayed on to the set of a surreal comedy film.
“What exactly did you tell him?” asked Lenz. “And what’s the address he went to?”
“I told him that sujet Ash—I mean subject H—was Tommy Ferris. He went to see Tommy, and Carol went with him to act as chaperone.”
Lenz looked completely blank. “Subject H?” he repeated, uncomprehendingly.
“That’s right. In ‘Sortilege and Serendipity’—our paper.”
“What the hell are sortilege and serendipity?” demanded Tarquin, with unreasonable asperity. The deputy director was evidently not academically-minded.
“They’re the names that British parapsychologists have given to two different sorts of Talent,” Simon explained. “Sortilege is the class of Talents which involve finding things by some kind of direct association of ideas or goal-orientated searching; serendipitous Talents are more perverse—people gifted with serendipity can only find things when they’re not actually looking for them.”
“And you have written a paper on this subject?” asked Lenz.
“That’s right. We presented it in Paris a couple of weeks ago, at the EEC Symposium.”
“And subject H?”
“That was one of the case-studies we cited. Tommy Ferris. He has this knack for locating people who’ve used telephones. Put a receiver in his hand and give him map, and he’s dynamite—provided that the phone and the person he’s trying to locate are within seven miles of his home, give or take a few hundred yards.”
While he was speaking, Simon saw looks of comprehension dawn on the four grim faces arrayed before him. “You publish these things?” said the gunman, incredulously. “You shout them from the top of the Eiffel tower? Are you mad?”
Lenz gestured impatiently. “We should have known this,” he said. “We should not have had to rely on good luck—and it was good luck, was it not? When I asked your Director and his Mission Controllers whether any of the Temps on your books could help us, they spent fully half an hour making ridiculous suggestions. If it had not been for that stupid secretary coming in with some irrelevant message about your expenses it would never have occurred to me to wonder whether your expertise as a Tester might be worth consulting. We may have missed this enemy agent, but we must count ourselves lucky that we discovered his existence at all—what was that word again? The word you used to describe such coincidences?”
“Serendipity,” said Simon, dully. It had just dawned on him that Carol might be in danger. The man she was with was not an Interpol agent at all, and whatever he was, he was the kind of people that real Interpol agents went after with their guns at the ready.
“We may yet be able to trap him,” said Lenz. “The address, please, to which he has gone.”
“I can call in the local police,” said Tarquin, helpfully, while Simon tapped the keyboard of his desktop terminal, instructing it to call up the Ferris file.
“No,” said Lenz, quickly. “The man is too dangerous, and the matter is too delicate. Special Branch only may be involved, and only on a ‘need to know’ basis.”
Simon sighed with relief as the computer displayed Tommy Ferris’s record. The system had been remarkably well-behaved of late, since the loathsome Ramsbottom had condescended to lend his expertise to the removal of some awkward bugs.
“13 Corporation Road,” he said. “I’ll come with you. I know where it is.”
“No,” said Lenz. “You stay here. I mean here. This office.” He had already turned on his heel, and his remaining henchman hurried too open the door for him.
“But...” Simon began.
“No buts, Sweetland,” said Tarquin, acidly, remaining where he was while Lenz and his two companions left. “If this operation goes awry, I want you here for ritual disemboweling.” The voice rose in volume as the three men departed, but once they were out of earshot it sank again to a whisper. “You’d better pray that your stupidity doesn’t land me in hot water, Sweetland,” the deputy director said, leaning forward to make his point. “If there’s any comeback on this, from London or Brussels, your neck is the one that’s going to be on the chopping block. Savvy?”
“But...” Simon began again.
“No buts,” the Director repeated. “You can consider yourself under office arrest until further notice.” And with that, he turned on his heel and marched out.
Simon knew that there was no use trying to demand an explanation. Even if the deputy director knew what was going on, he certainly wouldn’t pass on the information. The fact that he would never even be told why his career had gone down the toilet, if indeed that was to be the outcome of his innocent mistake, added an abundance of insult to the probability of injury. For the moment, his resentment of Roland Tarquin even outweighed his resentment of the appalling Ramsbottom.
It was not merely a bitch of day, he decided, but an absolute double-dyed bugger of a day—quite possibly the worst in his entire life. And it wasn’t even half past eleven yet.
Staggered by shell-shock, and for want of something better to do, he picked up his newspaper. He tried to resume where he’d left off, but his heart simply wasn’t in it. He speculated furiously, instead, as to what could possibly be in Coventry that would interest not only Interpol but also the Union Corse—whoever they were—and the mafia. It was obviously something that involved making telephone calls, to trigger something...and it was apparently something that was important enough to make gnomes hire a hitman....
His mind slowly boggled, in its own quiet and relatively dignified fashion.
Then the phone rang again, and when he picked it up his confusion rapidly increased by several more orders of magnitude.
“Monsieur Sweetland,” said a soft, accented voice which somehow sounded almost reverent. “Are you playing games wiz me?”
“Certainly,” said Simon, bitterly. “Playing games with fake Interpol operatives is my favorite hobby.” It was not until he had said it that he realized, uncomfortably, that the powers that be might think it very undiplomatic of him to let Croupion know that he had been rumbled. For a moment, he felt guilty, but only for a moment.
If they keep me in the dark, he thought, they can’t expect me to produce the right answers off the cuff.
“I ’ave to ’and it to you,” said Croupion, wonderingly. “You are ze coolest customer I ’ave ever dealt with. Eizer zat, or ze craziest. Why did you no’ place an ad in ze Times, hein? Why do you lay down zis silly patchwork of clues? I admit it, I am ver’ confused. But now we know one anozer, oui? You want me to make you an offer, n’est-ce pas?”
Simon stared at the receiver, utterly bewildered. “What kind of offer?” he said, because he simply did not know what else to say.
“Your assistant, she is ver’ surprised,” the voice continued. “Eizer she is great actress, or she ’ad no idea what sujet Ash would tell me. She says she is not your accomplice, and I am inclined to believe her...but I must keep her wiz me, must I not? Until we can meet, and settle zis matter. I do not understand zis game we are playing, mon ami, but we are ver’ reasonable men. We can give you ze protection you need, and anyzing you desire. Zat is what you want, no?”
It dawned on Simon, slowly and painfully, that Tommy Ferris must have told Croupion that he, Simon, was the person that Croupion was trying to identify. It was just the kind of stroke the little bastard would pull. The idea of feeding duff information to a person with a funny accent was exactly the sort of thing that would tickle his fancy, and the idea of fingering Simon Sweetland must have seemed absolutely perfect to the brat. If Carol had tried to explain, the man who wasn’t from Interpol had obviously not believed her.
But what on earth was it, Simon wondered, that Croupion thought that he had done? Exactly what sort of skulduggery was involved here? How much trouble was he in? Ought he to try to explain that Tommy was just playing silly buggers, or what?
He decided to play it cool—or, at any rate, as cool as he could. “Who, exactly, is we?” he asked, warily.
“Who do you zink?” countered Croupion, equally warily.
Simon studied the cracks in his office ceiling, considered the situation as carefully as he was able, then shrugged his shoulders and thought what the hell. “I figure that you’re probably Union Corse,” he said, casually. “Unless you’re mafia putting on a funny accent to confuse us all. Or maybe—just maybe—you’re a hitman for the gnomes.”
Croupion laughed. “So you do know the score, Monsieur Sweetland—or should I say, Monsieur Taxman. Don’t worry, mon ami, we always prefer talking to shooting. You ‘ave made your point, I zink. Say ze word, an’ you are on our team. You must tell me where ze money is, of course....a matter of good faith, comprenez? An’ you must tell me jus’ what your Talent is...but then everyzing will be on ze table. You only ’ave to name your terms.”
“Where exactly are you?” Simon asked, trying to sound casually confident, like a man in complete control of his destiny. “We have to discuss this face to face...man to man. Do you want to come back here?”
“I don’t zink so,” said the man whose name was presumably not Croupion at all. “I zink you better come to me, hein? I will meet you in ze Cazedral, if you please. Madame Cloxeter and Tommy will be not with me, so we can ’ave a cosy chat. But if anyzing should go wrong...I must ’ave a little insurance, comprenez? If anyzing should happen to me....somezing also will happen to zem. We are men of ze world, are we not? We understand zese things?”
It was on the tip of Simon’s tongue to blurt out a confession of his complete and utter lack of understanding, but he kept himself in check. It was far too late for that.
“I’ll be there,” he promised.
He waited to hear the click at the other end before he put his own receiver down. Only then did he permit himself the luxury of panicking at the thought of what he had done.
His first impulse, on realizing that he had thrown himself in at the deep end without knowing whether or not he could swim, was to call the deputy director and ask how he could get in touch with Lenz, but he quashed it. It wasn’t so much the thought that if Lenz and his friends showed up at the Cathedral Croupion would simply fade into the background and might then carry out the threat he had made against Carol, though that was certainly an uncomfortable thought; it was more his resentment of the fact that everyone had been, and still remained, so absolutely determined not to tell him what was going on. He wanted desperately to find out what he’d got caught up in, and he felt that whatever happened from now until midnight, the day couldn’t possibly get any worse than it already was.
And when I have found out, he thought, I’ll kill that little bastard Tommy Ferris. I’ll teach the little sod not to play his stupid practical jokes on me.
* * * * * * *
Simon had never liked Coventry Cathedral. In fact, he didn’t like cathedrals in general. They seemed to him to reek of the Middle Ages: of the burning of witches and the vile sanctity of tyranny. Nor were they particularly convenient as meeting-places. Easy to locate they might be, but once inside there were too many little coverts and too many stone pillars. He wandered round for several minutes, wishing that he had at least the glimmer of a talent for sortilege, knowing that he had no chance whatsoever of recognizing Croupion’s face. After ten minutes of expecting a tap on the shoulder, however, he spotted a gabardine raincoat in a quiet side-chapel.
The chameleon was slumped quietly in one of the stalls in which the landed gentry had once been privileged to sit. At first, Simon thought that the Frenchman had simply become tired of waiting and had closed his eyes for a moment, but as soon as he touched the shoulder of the gabardine raincoat he knew that what was beneath it was inert.
Somebody tapped him gently on the back of the neck with something cold and hard and metallic. He had no trouble at all deducing that it must be a gun.
“Lenz?” he said, hopefully.
“Not so loud,” whispered a cultured voice, with just the hint of an accent. Simon couldn’t quite place it—it wasn’t Italian or French, although it just might have been German. Could this, he wondered, be the hitman for the gnomes?
He turned around slowly. The man threatening him with the pistol was not one of Lenz’s men, nor was he a chameleon. He was slender, blond and outrageously handsome.
“He’s not dead,” said the man with the gun, reaching into Simon’s inside jacket pocket in order to remove his wallet. “Just sleeping. I probably hit him a bit too hard, but one has to be careful.” Simon waited patiently while his Access card, his Switch card, his DPR ID card, his public library borrower’s card and his organ-donor’s card were carefully inspected. He hoped that he wasn’t going to need the last one in the near future.
“A DPR scientist,” mused the blond man. “It makes sense, I suppose, that the Taxman would hold some such post. Do you work solo, or have you a little team of Talents at your disposal.”
“I have a team of Talents,” Simon said. “Kids mostly, but top class. A lot of kids have raw Talent in abundance, but they don’t have the brains to apply it, so they need a Fagin-figure like me. They’re very protective too. Every word we say is being monitored, and I’ve got PKs with power enough to make you eat that gun. I only pass the duds on to the Temp register, you see—I keep all the best ones for my own private practice, as the Taxman.”
He rather enjoyed spinning out the fantasy. Although he was making it up as he went along it sounded like a really good idea. He wondered why he’d never thought of doing something of the sort. Probably because kids with Talent were mostly a bunch of delinquent no-hopers, like Tommy Ferris.
The blond man put his gun away, and looked at Simon quizzically.
“Very good, Dr. Sweetland,” he murmured. “But we live in a world of competing philosophies. Some organizations send out chameleons to do their dirty work, others send out martial arts experts....and others send out lie-detectors.”
“Ah,” said Simon, feeling slightly foolish.
“Bruno Wyss,” said the other, holding out his hand to be shaken. “At least, that’s what it says on my passport. Wyss with a y, not an ei. After the writer, you know.”
Simon inclined his head towards the unconscious Croupion. “I suppose you wouldn’t care to tell me who he really is?” he asked, hopefully.
“He’s pretending to be mafia pretending to be Union Corse,” said Wyss, sitting down in the stall behind Croupion and gesturing an invitation to Simon to join him. “Actually, it’s a double bluff. He really is Union Corse.”
“Exactly what is the Union Corse?” asked Simon.
Wyss clucked his tongue. “You really are out of your depth, Dr. Sweetland. The Union Corse is a semi-mythical organization, much like the mafia, which runs all the rackets in the south of France. They supposedly originated in Corsica and now base most of their operations in Marseilles.”
“Semi-mythical?” Simon queried.
Wyss smiled. He had perfect pearly-white teeth. “Every petty bully-boy from Perpignan to Monaco claims to belong to it in order to make himself seem more dangerous. Because of that, the real members can claim that it’s only a legend. But it isn’t, as our friend the Taxman clearly knows.”
“You don’t happen to know where Carol is, I suppose?” said Simon. “Carol Cloxeter—my assistant. He...sort of kidnapped her. There’s a boy with her—I suppose we’d better rescue him too, if we can.”
“All in good time” said Wyss. “But I thought sortilege was supposed to be your strong point. Isn’t that why our friend sought you out? I was following him, as you must have guessed. Such a pity that chameleons can’t make their clothes blend in as readily as their faces, isn’t it? What exactly are you doing here, Dr. Sweetland? Didn’t he get enough information from you when he called at your office?”
Simon had met lie-detectors before, and knew that the best way to deal with them was steadfastly to ignore their questions. “Actually, sortilege is just a sideline,” he said, conversationally. “I only got into it because I got into a bit of trouble with my last line of research. Anyway, I just try to make up theories about it. I can’t actually do it. I thought I couldn’t do serendipity either, but serendipity is one of those Cinderella Talents that people don’t necessarily notice. Two hours ago, I was of the opinion that today’s big drama would be losing out on my expenses, but now I seem to have discovered something much more exciting. You are the hitman for the gnomes, aren’t you, Mr. Wyss?”
