The Care of Time

ONE

The warning message arrived on Monday, the bomb itself on Wednesday. It became a busy week.

The message came in an ordinary business envelope that had been mailed in New York but had no return address on it. Inside, folded in three, was one of those outsize picture postcards that are offered to tourists in some places nowadays. This one was of a hotel with palm trees and carried an ornate caption proclaiming that it was the HOTEL MANSOUR, Baghdad, Republic of Iraq. On the back had been pasted a typed strip of paper.

Dear Mr Halliday,

On its way to you by post there is a parcel wrapped in ordinary brown paper. However, in order to distinguish it from any other parcel you might happen to receive at about the same time, this one is sealed with black electrical tape. The consequences of your trying to open this parcel yourself would be disastrous for both of us. You would die instantly and I would lose someone I hope soon to call a friend and to meet as a collaborator. You should take the parcel to the nearest police bomb-disposal unit and let them deal with it. Providing that they are thoroughly experienced in the work, they should have no difficulty.

Why do I send a bomb to a man whose friendship I seek and whose services I need? For three reasons. First, to make it clear that I am someone to be taken most seriously. Second, to demonstrate my personal integrity. Third, to ensure, with my unorthodox approach, your careful consideration of proposals that will be put to you later on my behalf.

I sign myself with a nom de guerre. It is one that I have used rarely in the past, but still sufficiently, I believe, to have earned it a place in any newspaper morgue cross-reference index to which you are likely to go in search of further information about me. You will not find much of that, but what you may find should whet your appetite for a whole and larger truth, as well as the taste of sweeter things.

Yours sincerely,

KARLIS ZANDER

He hadn’t in fact signed it, but printed the name in block letters with a felt-point pen.

Use of the term ‘ghost-writer’ to describe the job I now do for a living always irritates me; not, though, because I find it disparaging but because it is inaccurate. There are times when I wish it weren’t. When, for instance, I am reading the publisher’s proofs of one of my ‘autobiographies’ after the subject has revised them and incorporated his, or her, second thoughts and personal syntax. Then, the state of ghostly anonymity enjoyed by some of my colleagues can seem very appealing. In my case, the name always appears. It is put after that of the supposed author and in smaller type. ‘As told to Robert Halliday’ or ‘With Robert Halliday’ are the standard credits; and they are there not just to satisfy my ego, but to record the fact that I am part-owner of a copyright. They may also act, incidentally, as advertisements for my professional services. Some publishers have even assured me, with apparent sincerity, that my name on a book may, by serving as some sort of guarantee that it will not be wholly unreadable, actually help to sell the thing in hardcover and raise the paperback ante. I doubt that myself. If the books with which I am concerned usually sell well, I think that is because I choose my subjects carefully. Light non-fiction tends to be ephemeral; but, since I nearly always get a percentage of the royalty take as well as a fee for the initial work, I try to choose subjects with at least some promise of staying power.

Motion picture stars I take on only if they have had very long careers, are still working and remain in sufficiently good shape, mentally as well as physically, to be interviewed about the book on television. I have learned to stay away from comedians. Too many of them are manic-depressives; and their recollections of the past are often drenched in self-pity. Musicians, though, can be good value; as can captains of industry, retired generals and politicians. With the generals some caution is necessary. Most have axes to grind and they can be disturbingly generous with classified information. Generals also tend to feel that, once they have retired, they have automatically become free to ignore the laws of libel. On the whole I like politicians best. True, there is usually trouble with them over the credits. They really do want their books ghosted. Even men who have been openly employing speech-writers all their political lives seem to find it demeaning to admit that they cannot write publishable books without help. There are, of course, accepted ways of overcoming this difficulty. ‘Editorial assistance’ can usually be acknowledged without serious loss of face. And for the one assisting there can be long-term compensations. If plenty of hitherto unpublished letters and documents, however trivial their content, are included in the book, there will be a substantial hardcover sale to libraries as well as listings in bibliographies. Political memoirs have been known to stay in print for years. Moreover, as I happen to find politics and politicians interesting, I usually enjoy the work.

However, I do have some hard and fast general rules about choosing my subjects. I will, for example, have nothing to do with pop stars, boxers, baseball managers or persons claiming to have belonged to secret intelligence agencies. Those with drink or drug problems I avoid because, however distinguished they may once have been, or may even still be, for me they will always constitute an unacceptable risk. And not only because they are likely to waste a great deal of time. The major occupational hazard of my trade is the temptation to practise amateur psychiatry. If the opportunities for doing so are to be reduced to a minimum, you have to make rules for yourself and stick to them.

At that time, though, I had no rule – hard, fast, or of any other kind – about jokers who claimed to have mailed bombs to me. I had had no need of one before.

My first impression of the message was, of course, that it was a hoax perpetrated by some acquaintance with a defective and unpleasant sense of humour – that postcard of the Hotel Mansour was a nasty little touch – but I couldn’t think of anyone to fit. Next, I began to wonder what kind of man it would be who could think that the way to establish his personal integrity and a friendly relationship with a stranger was to mail the stranger a bomb and then warn him not to open the package. If there was a bomb, such a man had to be totally deranged.

Totally? After a couple of re-readings, I began to have doubts. There was nothing deranged and something curiously confident and knowledgeable about that end paragraph. He knew enough not only to guess rightly how a person with my newspaper background would go about checking him out, but also enough about his own record to choose an alias that would show up if I did check. When I did, rather. He was in no doubt about my curiosity. Well-informed, then, and all too cute, but not totally deranged.

Suddenly, reading the first two paragraphs again, I understood. The style was the man. This was the message of a vain man, a racketeer of some sort or other no doubt, but one who liked the sound of his own voice and had pretensions to gentility. A simpler man would have said: ‘Halliday, I could easily kill you. Instead, I’m telling you how to avoid getting killed. But, in return, I want something from you. So, when you hear what it is, don’t try to argue. Just do as I ask, and at once.’

On the assumption that there was in fact a live bomb addressed to me in the mail – and not a tape-sealed package containing some prankish object put there to make me look foolish when I took it to the police – I had to regard that chatty little warning as a threat.

Curiosity, not unmixed with anxiety, promptly triumphed over my plans for the day’s work and I began calling New York. Before long I had found out a little about Karlis Zander, but, as his message had predicted, not much. Moreover, the little there was had not come easily. The news agency librarian I knew best had at first been unexpectedly reluctant to oblige an old friend from way back.

‘Bob,’ he said plaintively, ‘this is what some of your spook pals might call sensitive material.’

‘I don’t have any spook pals. You mean someone upstairs at your place once took an interest? It’s his baby?’

‘No, that’s not what I mean. It’s nobody’s baby for the moment, but that doesn’t mean that I can give it away for free. Why the sudden interest in Zander? What’s the story?’

‘He’s just sent a letter making a package-bomb threat. Okay?’

‘Can’t you give me more than that? Threatening whom? The Mayor? The President?’

‘Me.’

‘You?’ He coughed up a laugh. ‘When did this happen?’

‘This morning. He says he needs my friendship and collaboration.’

‘Bob, someone’s putting you on.’ When I said nothing to that he went on. ‘All right, so how about reading me the letter?’

I read him the letter, but without giving the last eight words of it and without mentioning the postcard to which it was attached. There was a long silence. Finally, he sighed. ‘Bob, will you believe me if I tell you that you’re the last person in the world this guy Zander would want anything to do with?’

‘I believe you. But why?’

‘Well, to begin with, Zander only exists now as one of a bunch of old aliases.’

‘He’s dead?’

‘No, he’s not dead, but I’ll bet he’d like us to believe he was. When he was an up-and-coming undercover fixer in a revolutionary cause he didn’t care who or how many knew what a clever one he was, how smart and how quick. Nowadays it’s all different. Now he’s all for heavily-protected anonymity.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Acting as a contract management consultant. Yes, that’s what it says here and that’s how his clients are advised by him to describe his services when the government auditors come around. To put it less delicately, he’s a high-level go-between, a slush-fund manager with a multi-million-dollar business run out of three briefcases and permanent luxury hotel suites in all major capitals. You want the contract to build a new port facility east of Suez? You want your group to supply those excitable Third-Worlders with that brand-new air-defence system they seem to think they need? Well, he’s your man. Or, rather, he’s your middleman, the one who has everyone else’s private set of game rules and religious prejudices all in his head. He’s the one who knows exactly who has to be paid off and exactly how much each of them rates. What’s more, he’ll handle every last one of those payments in such a way that no Congressional Committee yet invented can ever point the pudgy finger at you and say bribery. Get the idea?’

‘What’s he call the consultancy and where’s his base?’

‘Bob, he has so many different corporate names in so many places that I won’t bother listing them. He travels on a number of passports, mostly Lebanese but that was a while ago. As for his base, that’s wherever the briefcases happen to be. You see why that bomb-threat has to be a put-on? You’re the last person an operator like that would want to know. You don’t want to know him either. There’s nothing in him for you. Forget it.’

‘You say that Zander is an old alias of his. It sounds northern European. Do you know where he’s from?’

‘Sure. Born in Tallinn, Estonia. A German-speaking family though. When the Soviets invaded the Baltic states after the Nazi attack on Poland he was a university student. The records are either destroyed or unavailable, of course, but he’d have been about eighteen. They grow up young there, and tough too. Though the Russians netted his family he managed to get away. He was one of a party of refugees who made it by sea to Danzig. There he volunteered for the Wehrmacht and after boot camp was sent to a special infantry training school, then to a signals outfit. No field-force posting of the ordinary kind though. He was a fluent Russian speaker as well as having an anti-Soviet background. They were saving him. When Hitler invaded Russia young Zander was transferred to the Abwehr as an interpreter. You know about the Abwehr?’

‘Army intelligence and contra-espionage weren’t they? Not to be confused with the Gestapo.’

‘That’s right. Good guys, or goodish anyway. All the same, the Russian-front Abwehr wasn’t the sort of outfit you boasted about having served with, certainly not in March ’forty-five. Besides, at war’s end he was a displaced person without a home state to go back to. Estonia was in the Soviet Union for keeps. So he used some of the know-how he’d picked up in the Abwehr and bluffed his way out via France and Spain to Algeria.’

‘Very resourceful. Why Algeria?’

‘All he knew was soldiering. Would you believe me if I tell you that he enlisted in a para unit of the French Foreign Legion?’

‘Why not? A lot of the Legionnaires who fought the battle of Dien Bien Phu were German.’

‘Dien Bien Phu, yes. That’s where he was wounded. But he was lucky. It was in the early weeks of the battle that he got hit. He was one of those evacuated. His last year in the Legion he spent back in Sidi-bel-Abbès as a weapons instructor. He’d enlisted, by the way, as Carl Hecht.’

‘When did you open a file on him?’ I asked.

‘Oh, not until later, not until …’ He broke off and I thought that he might be wondering again whether he was giving away too much for too little. But no; it was just that he was an archivist who liked things set out in chronological order.

‘We’re reasonably sure,’ he went on, ‘that the two years following were spent in either the Lebanon or Jordan or both. With his hitch in the Legion, his wound and honourable discharge, he was entitled to apply for French naturalization. So he changed his name again. He became Charles Brochet. As a French weapons instructor, with some kitchen Arabic picked up in Algeria, he’d have been welcomed with open arms in the PLO training camps.’

‘You say you’re reasonably sure. Only reasonably?’

‘Well, that was just his subsequent story. We had no simple way of checking it out. He’s a skilled liar apparently. Good at figuring out what you hope or expect to be told. You asked when we opened this file on him. It was later, in ’fifty-nine, when he began to make a name for himself in Tunisia. A conspiratorial, partisanish name I mean.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Running an import-export business for the FLN. The French had effective trade embargoes operating in North Africa on pretty well everything the Algerian rebels needed to go on fighting. Zander’s office, which he called C. Brochet Transports SA, acted as a secret purchasing agent for them and ran the stuff overland to the Tunisian border.’

‘Arms?’

‘Chiefly medical supplies – drugs, antibiotics. That was what made him important. To evade the French embargoes he bought through a dummy corporation called Zander Pharmaceuticals that he set up in Miami, Florida.’

‘Using Arab money?’

‘He wasn’t using his own, that’s for sure. His backers had to be Arab, though we never found out exactly who they were. We tried, naturally. The French were internationally unpopular at the time and every item coming out of Algeria was considered important. We had a guy there who spent a lot of time on the Brochet-Hecht-Zander story. One of the first things he did, of course, was to look Zander up in the reference books. Guess what.’

‘He found zander in the dictionary. It’s some sort of fish. Like Hecht in German and brochet in French?’

‘You got it. Zander is a variety of wall-eyed pike.’

‘Not very smart of him, was it, to use cover names which were that easy to blow? I’ll bet he didn’t pick up that habit in the Abwehr.’

‘Our man said much the same thing at the time. Monsieur Brochet told him he didn’t understand the Arab mind. A respected hero figure boldly defying threats of death and torture was safer than a nonentity. In fact, he said, French intelligence knew all about him and had tried more than once to have him killed. The gallant and well-loved El Brochet had always been given ample protection by solicitous Arab friends. A deep cover John Doe type wouldn’t have lasted a week. Which thought brings me back, Bob, to this quaint little letter you’ve received. Twenty years ago in Tunisia, maybe, the head of Zander Pharmaceuticals could have used your image-building skills to rewrite Robin Hood for the North African market. Now? No way. What did you say he says he wants from you?’

‘Friendship and collaboration. If he makes me a firm offer for either, I’ll let you know. What about his sex life?’

‘Our story speaks of catholic tastes, but there’s nothing recent on that.’

We talked a bit more before I thanked him and hung up. Almost immediately the phone rang. It was Barbara Reynolds, my agent, calling.

‘Robert, your phone has been busy all afternoon.’

‘The changes on the Williams typescript are in hand and I’ll be delivering this week.’

‘They’ll be glad to hear it, but that’s not the reason I’m calling. We’ve had rather an interesting approach from an Italian publisher. Some people named Casa Editrice Pacioli in Milan.’

‘Which book is it they want?’

‘None in particular. I mean they’re not after translation rights. That’s what’s interesting. They want to talk to you about doing a book for them on a subject of their choice. Not in Italian, of course. They’d take care of the translation later. They want world rights and their first deal would be for English language publication here, then British, Italian, German, Spanish and all the rest. It’s rather unusual.’

‘What’s the subject?’

‘They want to put that to you personally. I gather they don’t want it talked about in the trade until the deal’s set and the book’s in work. If it’s the sort of idea that can be stolen, you can’t blame them. They won’t even tell me. They just want to talk to you.’

‘In Milan?’

‘No, right here in New York. They’re represented by a law office.’ She mentioned the name of the firm. It was one of those respectable Wall Street partnerships with three or four impressive surnames on the shingle and a string of a dozen or more somewhat younger, but still distinguished, members listed in a column on the letter paper. The member who handled Casa Editrice Pacioli was a man named McGuire. He was, according to Barbara, number three on the list of active partners.

I noticed that I felt reassured by that information and wondered why. It took me a second or two to get the answer. You didn’t find men like McGuire acting for the likes of Karlis Zander. I pulled myself together sharply.

‘Have you dealt with Pacioli before?’

‘Through our Italian sub-agent, of course. Well-established publishers with a healthy educational department and a good back list. They’re owned by a conglomerate now, I seem to recall, which may explain their readiness to make this kind of an offer.’ Her voice took on the tone of studied calm she always used when speaking of money. ‘Robert, they are offering a flat fee, plus eighty percent of paperback, plus forty percent of serializations. The fee would be fifty thousand, dollars not lire, and would be payable half on signature and half on delivery. Now get this. The fee would not, repeat not, be an advance against royalties. You earn it simply by doing the job. The half not paid on signature would be paid into escrow here along with five thousand more against your travelling expenses. It’s a dreamy deal.’

‘Dream-like anyway.’

‘Robert, the only way you’re going to find out whether the subject’s for you is to let Mr McGuire tell you what it is. I said I’d call him back by Wednesday at the latest.’

‘What’s the hurry? I’m not doing any more of those marathon rush jobs.’

‘My dear, I know alimony is deductible, but you have to have something to deduct it from and there are no other irons in the fire. That fifty thousand would be practically found money.’ She always calls me ‘my dear’ when she feels that I am being uncooperative, I guessed that my accountant had been talking to her. The Internal Revenue had been auditing my last three years’ returns and were thought to be about to slap a supplementary assessment on me.

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘My dear, you think about it while you’re finishing those Williams changes, and then you call me Wednesday morning so I can set up a date for you with Mr McGuire. All right?’

‘All right.’

I didn’t call her Wednesday morning because that was when the bomb arrived.

It was about the size and weight of a hardcover book of average length. The brown paper wrapping had been neatly sealed with electrician’s black tape of the kind that can be bought in the hardware section of a supermarket. My name and address on the label were typed, as was the address of the fender. He gave himself a PO box number in Miami, where the package had been mailed, but no name.

When the delivery man who had brought it had gone, and I had finished standing there stupidly looking at it as if I were waiting for it to start talking, I very carefully put it down on the nearest table. I sat down then and was surprised to find how cold and sweaty I had suddenly become. The daily who takes care of me was due any minute. I waited there by the front door until she arrived, told her not to touch the package and then went back to my workroom.

There can’t be a big demand for bomb disposal in our part of Pennsylvania. Anyway, I could find nothing under that heading in the phone-book police department listings so I called my part-time secretary, who takes an interest in local politics, and asked her for the name of our senior lawman. I didn’t tell her about the package. I said that I wanted to check on some aspects of police procedure for the Williams typescript changes. As Williams was an acquitted murderer, the excuse was convincing. She told me that I should talk to Captain Boyle who was new and the most helpful of men.

After a tussle with a protective desk sergeant I managed to get through to Boyle, who began by sounding hostile rather than helpful. He refrained pointedly from asking what he could do for me and had clearly assumed that I was hoping to get a traffic ticket fixed. No doubt he was all set to tell me that, with his coming, times had changed in the county. So I said, calmly, that I didn’t know whether I should be calling him or the FBI, but that I had received a bomb-threat. That seemed to interest him a little so I read it out to him. Then, before he had time to comment, I reported reception of the bomb itself.

‘This morning, you say, Mr Halliday?’ He was now quite affable.

‘That’s right. It’s ticking away in the next room.’

The facetiousness was a mistake.

‘Ticking, you say?’

‘I was speaking figuratively, Captain. It’s not making any actual sound. Look, I don’t want to make too much of this, but I’d just like someone from a bomb-disposal unit to find out fairly quickly if it’s a hoax or not.’

‘We don’t have a bomb-disposal unit, Mr Halliday, not here, but I think there’s one in Allentown. Give me your number and I’ll get right back to you.’

He was back in five minutes. ‘Allentown has a police bomb-squad manned by detectives, Mr Halliday, and they’re sending a couple of men over with all their equipment right away. They’ll want to see the letter as well as the package. Now, this package came to you through the mail, right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Is it in good shape or is the wrapping paper torn?’

‘The wrapping’s okay. Why?’

‘Well, what I mean, Mr Halliday, is this. Do you want us to send a patrol car all the way out to you, or do you want to save time and drive the package and the letter in to us yourself?’

I considered rejecting this unhelpful suggestion, but, short of declaring that I was scared stiff of the package, could think of no reasonable way of doing so. ‘Okay, Captain, I’ll drive it into town. But just in case anything unexpected happens on the way, you’ll find the letter on my desk here. I’ll make a photocopy and bring that.’

He chuckled. ‘If it came safely through the mails, Mr Halliday, it’ll travel safely in the trunk of your car.’

It did, though I noticed that the bomb-squad detectives who removed it from my car in the police parking lot an hour or so later were less casual in their approach. They wore massive body protectors that came down to their knees and slit-eyed steel helmets that rested on their shoulders like medieval tilting casques. They carried the package in a padded metal basket slung between them on a long pole.

We watched from a distance as they took it to the armoured truck they had brought with them. Then I went with Boyle and one of his detectives to an office. There, I made a simple statement to the effect that I had received both message and package through the mail before turning them over to the police.

After that, I was given a cup of coffee and asked if I minded waiting until the bomb-squad men had used their portable X-ray and come up with some kind of preliminary finding. It seemed that, in cases where bombs were sent through the mail across state lines, the FBI as well as the Postal Service had to be informed. Then both of them, as well as the police, could become involved in investigating the surprisingly large number of felonies and misdemeanours that Zander would have committed. And I would be a material witness to them all. Graciously, I agreed to await the bomb-squad’s verdict. There was no point in telling them that, until at least some of the mounting pressure of curiosity I was suffering had been relieved, they would have had to use force to persuade me to leave.

After nearly an hour, negative reports began to come in. The PO box number in Miami did not exist. The FBI had no record of any Zander. Shortly afterwards, Captain Boyle sent for me so that I could hear the bomb-squad report.

The man in charge of the squad was Detective First-Grade Lampeter. A tall, black, melancholy man, he nodded in a perfunctory way when Boyle introduced us. He was holding an X-ray picture by a pair of clips and seemed to be as disgusted with himself as he was bored by the rest of us. I wondered if that could be a state of mind that went with his job. He had a white partner whose name I didn’t catch.

‘There’s your bomb, Mr Halliday,’ Boyle said with a wave at the picture.

All I could see on the X-ray was a lot of grey fuzz, a slightly darker rectangular shadow and something that looked like the silhouette of an old-fashioned mouse-trap.

‘Was there any explosive in it?’ I asked.

Lampeter pointed to the dark rectangle. ‘Regular dynamite,’ he said, ‘the sort farmers use for clearing tree stumps. Six sticks taped together. No fingerprints on the tape or anywhere else. Standard blasting caps. It’s a highly professional job done by, or on the instructions of, someone who knows about bomb-disposal techniques. See that?’ He tapped the mouse-trap shape.

‘Looks like a mouse-trap.’

‘It is, more or less. The idea is that when the package arrives the person it’s addressed to opens it up by tearing off the wrapping. That takes the pressure off the piece of cardboard holding the spring down underneath. So, snap it goes like any other mouse-trap. Only what it snaps into isn’t a mouse but a detonator. So, bang, you’ve lost both arms and an eye or worse. So, the moment we see an X-ray with that sort of break-back gadget showing, we know how to open the package and render it harmless. We do it like this. Excuse me, Captain.’

He took a law book out of the case behind the Captain’s chair and put it on the edge of the desk.

‘That’s the package, say. Now, I put the flat of my left hand right on top of the place where I know the break-back spring is and I press down firmly. Then, with my right hand, I take a knife with a sharpened hook at the end, like you can buy for cutting linoleum or shoe-leather, and I slit open the package around the edges of the long narrow side. Then, I can gradually slide out what’s inside while continuing to maintain pressure on the break-back to stop it flipping over. When it’s far enough out for me to see, I can get hold of the break-back itself. Then, all I have to do is remove the detonator. When we had that miners’ union trouble and