The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  I felt that I was about to have a stroke. My heart was already thumping against my chest and I was as thirsty as I had ever been in my life. It’s impossible, I realized. I can’t pass it, and this is the end. When I asked a question, my own voice seemed to come from a great distance, as though it were floating in some far corner of the room, trying to hide from earshot.

  “How soon do you have the results?”

  “A preliminary report? Almost right away. There’s a written report, of course, but that takes a little time.”

  “How does this thing work? Are you allowed to tell me that?”

  He had not yet opened his suitcase inside which, I assumed, were his satanic devices.

  “It measures all sorts of things. Sweat, rate of respiration, and something like blood pressure — it’s called plythesmatic resistance. Has to do with the arteries. It’s an old art,” he explained. “The Chinese started it. Their theory was that a man’s mouth goes dry if he’s lying. They put rice in his mouth.”

  “My mouth is bone dry, and I haven’t even said a word.”

  I was finished, and I knew it. When it was over and the results were told to the waiting executives, I would tell the truth. What choice would I have? But I had to make one last effort.

  Caputo finally opened his suitcase and assembled his gear. A band was wrapped around my arm as though for a blood pressure test. A chain was looped around my chest, then tightened. Two electrodes were wound about the second two fingers of my left hand. The questions, he explained, should be answered by a simple yes or no. I sat in a chair with my back to Caputo. I couldn’t see him and I had no idea what he was doing. He just waited in silence — calculated, I assumed, to reduce me to pulp even before we began — while I stared at the wall. With each passing second I could feel my heart pounding and slamming with greater ferocity. Doggedly, in my mind, I began to recite the answers to a little catechism. I have met Howard Hughes. My name is Clifford Holmes. I have paid all the money to the man I know as Howard Hughes. I was born in Kabul, Afghanistan. I have met Howard Hughes. My name is Clifford Holmes.

  Suddenly, as if on cue, Caputo said: “Is your name Clifford Irving?”

  Instantly I thought Clifford Holmes and I replied: “Yes.” I felt my heart take a heave against my ribs that nearly knocked me out of the chair.

  “Have you taken any or all of the $650,000 meant to go to Howard Hughes?”

  “No.”

  The first heave of my heart had been gentle compared to the one that erupted after that question.

  “Have you conspired with anyone else to defraud McGraw-Hill of any sums of money?”

  “No,” I said, and nearly fainted. If I hadn’t been strapped to the chair I could have toppled to the floor.

  He asked three more questions of a similar nature and then said, “That’s it.”

  “Thanks,” I said. Unable to look him in the eye, I staggered from the room. Fisher, McCulloch, Jehle, Lambert, and Marty Ackerman were waiting for me. “Jesus God,” I whispered to Marty. “That’s inhuman …”

  A minute later Caputo followed me out of the room. I turned to him at the same time as Jehle, Ackerman, and the others. Caputo shrugged. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The results were really inconclusive. There just wasn’t enough time. But I’ll be sending in a written report.”

  “Make sure I get a copy,” I said to Jehle. “And thanks for the experience. I’m going to run or I’ll miss that plane.”

  I had to pack and then wait fifteen minutes for a taxi on Park Avenue. It was rush hour. When I got to Kennedy Airport the Iberia jet had been closed for boarding. I yelled hysterically for five minutes and finally was escorted privately to the 747, where I slumped into my seat like a man lately risen from a hospital bed. My heart was still pounding. I hadn’t passed the test. I couldn’t have passed it.

  For once in this story I must jump ahead, lest the reader be left with any lingering doubts and suffer the horrors of uncertainty as I suffered them. I would inflict that on no man. If there was a written report from Caputo, it was never shown to me by anyone at McGraw-Hill. And the subject of the polygraph, as well as the results, was never again mentioned in my presence.

  Chapter 16

  The Swans of the River Limatt

  The paintings were not on the plane with me when we landed in Ibiza. They had vanished somewhere en route. After a dozen telephone calls and cables, they turned up almost a month later in a warehouse in Palma de Mallorca, where we finally retrieved them.

  But that was the least of my problems. I had gone through a small hell in New York, but what awaited me in Ibiza was worse. Edith was upset about the missing paintings, but it was easy to see that other things were on her mind. We left the airport and on the way home, thinking I grasped the reason, I said: “Look, that business of Dick’s driving Nina’s car to London. I told him not to tell you. I knew you’d be angry, but there’s no reason to be. He needed a way to get to England and she needed someone to drive her car up there. They made their own arrangements. I had nothing to do with it.”

  Edith shrugged it off, which made me all the more wary. When we got home, sitting in the living room, I pulled her on to my lap — but she leaped to her feet, rushed into the bedroom and came out with a thick white packet. She tossed it on the table in front of me. Her eyes were filled with tears, but they were still ablaze with anger and pain.

  “You and that bitch,” she said. “Last May. And when I was in Zurich.”

  The packet contained the photographs of Nina that I had taken on the beach at Figueral and had had printed in Beverly Hills. Amid the mess that had accumulated over the summer in the studio, I had never been able to find them. When I had called Edith from the motel in Miami Beach I had asked her to go to the studio and unlock the file cabinet; I had wanted the “Dear Chester and Bill” letter for Dick. The packet of photographs, with the negatives, had been wedged at the back of the file cabinet, out of sight to myself and to anyone but a woman with a keen sense of smell.

  “I knew it,” Edith said, weeping. “I’ve always known it. I trusted you and I wanted to believe you, what makes me a fool. Look at them!” She grabbed the packet and jammed the photographs in front of my eyes. “Look at her face! You both lied to me and said it was platonic. Platonic! Naked on the beach, and the look on her face of a woman in love.”

  Throwing herself on the couch, she curled into a fetal ball and began to sob.

  I tried to protest, to explain, but there was nothing to say. In my heart, since Thanksgiving in Los Angeles, I had known that it was over between Nina and myself, but it was impossible to do anything, after trying to comfort her and being thrust aside, other than shed tears of my own. I was guilty. I had been found out through an absurdity. That the photographs had no meaning to me, that my obsession with Nina was dying and that I was free to give to Edith what she had always given to me, was an irony that offered no comfort.

  “I stay with you now,” she said quietly, hours later, after she had calmed down, “because of the children. But I don’t want to go to Zurich. This Hughes thing is no more a joke. You should tell them the truth now — give them back the money.”

  “After the book’s published,” I said. “In April, probably.” I convinced her — and myself as well — that I meant it; and she agreed, however reluctantly, to go.

  If Edith had been frightened on her previous clandestine trips to Switzerland, she was nearly terrified on the morning of December 28th. But she held her feelings successfully in check. I attributed her nervousness to the problems of the previous week: our failing marriage and Nina. But Edith imagined sinister figures from Intertel, wearing trenchcoats and with their hands stuffed deep in their pockets like spies from an Eric Ambler novel, waiting for her at Zurich Airport or in the marble lobby of the Credit Suisse. A dozen times already, in her mind, she had felt the rough grip of a hand on her elbow and heard the harsh voice say triumphantly: “Come along, Edith-Helga-Hanne-Sommer-Rosenkranz-Irving-Hughes. The ga
me is up. No, don’t try to throw away the wig — you’re caught.”

  Edith was always a child playing an adult game and there was little reality for her in her missions to Zurich. Someone had to go. She had been asked, and she had agreed, like a little girl when the boys decide to steal apples from the orchard and say, “We need your help. You stand watch.”

  “But I am the weak link,” she had said later, long after the game had begun.

  We drove to Ibiza airport through the blackness of an early morning drizzle. Edith was a tiny, hurt figure huddled against the door of the Mercedes, twisting the strap of her flight bag round and round in her hands. Her face looked haggard and drawn, the dark circles under the eyes only partially hidden by pancake makeup. She had been sleeping badly for the past two weeks, ever since she had discovered the semi-nude photographs of Nina hidden in the file cabinet. Eugen’s death had been another kind of blow. She had loved the tiny monkey too much. We had buried Eugen in a shoebox on land that overlooked the bay of Ibiza.

  At the airport parking lot I reached across to open the door for her. I kept my hand there a moment, pinning Edith in the seat. “I’m positive there’s nothing to worry about,” I repeated, “and if I thought there was, I wouldn’t let you go. McGraw-Hill told me the check has cleared. You won’t have any problems. But if I’m wrong — if anything happens and someone tries to grab you — forget about the money. Save yourself. The money doesn’t matter a damn. Throw it up in the air and let them all scramble for it. You just run like hell.”

  She didn’t answer, only looked at me searchingly with tired, sad eyes. I leaned over to kiss her. She pulled away and my lips just brushed her cheek. “Do you want some marzipan from Zurich?” she asked.

  The flight was bumpy but Edith passed through Zurich customs and immigration without so much as a lifted eyebrow, and at 3:30 that afternoon she was hurrying down to the safe-deposit boxes in the Swiss Bank Corporation’s main branch on the Paradeplatz. She removed the H. R. Hughes passport and bank documents from the box. As she stepped out of the bank she ducked to one side, into a stone alcove, quickly put on her spectacles, shoved the corn plasters into her cheeks to make them appear rounder, and tightened the flowered scarf under her chin to distort her voice. She crossed through the traffic of the Paradeplatz to the Credit Suisse.

  The teller, a middle-aged woman with graying brown hair pulled back into a bun, recognized her at once. “Ah, Frau Hoogus. How nice to see you again. I hope you had a pleasant journey from Paris.” She escorted Edith behind the teller’s cage into a private counting room. “Your check cleared last week. You intend to withdraw all the money this time as well?”

  “I want to keep the account open,” Edith replied, as I had instructed. “But just the minimum balance.”

  The woman left the room, returning with $325,000 in neatly bound bundles of thousand-franc Swiss notes. It was a normal, everyday transaction for a big Swiss bank; the currency of all nations flowed in and out of Zurich with a minimum of questions asked. Edith began stuffing the cash into her airline bag. The teller frowned.

  “But, Frau Hoogus, you haven’t counted it.”

  “If I didn’t trust the Credit Suisse,” Edith explained, “I wouldn’t bank here.”

  “And so much cash. Even to walk across the street with so much is very dangerous.”

  Across the street! What did the woman mean? Did the Credit Suisse know about the Rosenkranz account? Was this a subtle warning that Hughes’s men were posted outside, mingling unobtrusively with the customers, waiting to catch her in flagrante?

  “There was a robbery last week in Zurich,” the teller said. “Imagine! Right here in Zurich.”

  Outside in the gathering gloom, she spat out the corn plasters, stuffed the spectacles in her pocket, wiped off her lipstick and loosened her scarf so that she could breathe normally again. With the bag of money clutched under her arm, she recrossed the Paradeplatz to the Swiss Bank Corporation.

  A sleek, dapper man in his middle thirties — very Swiss and therefore very correct — greeted her respectfully and led the way into his office on the second floor. As on her previous visits, Edith waded across the thick red carpet and sat down in the hard leather chair beside the desk, facing an original Klee drawing. She unzipped the airline bag and spilled the bundles of francs onto the desk.

  “How much have you brought today?” the banker asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  He peered at her uncertainly. “You don’t know?”

  “Oh, I didn’t count it,” Edith explained. “Could you do that for me?”

  The banker sighed in wonder, flipped an intercom switch, spoke briefly, and a moment later a younger man entered the room and swiftly began counting the banknotes, skimming through them with professional expertise. He spoke into the intercom again, then said to Edith: “One moment, Frau Rosenkranz, while I send for your file.” Edith took out the second list of stocks and bonds that Dick and I had prepared. The banker nodded his solemn approval as he read it. “You have an excellent and well-informed broker, Frau Rosenkranz. A very fine portfolio, if I may be so bold. Your investments are making good profit.”

  Edith smiled gratefully. A minute later another young man brought two folders into the room, dropping them on the desk. The senior official frowned. “I want only Frau Rosenkranz’s file,” he said.

  “But there are two, mein Herr.”

  The banker flipped back and forth between them, his frown deepening. “But … but … I don’t understand, Frau Rosenkranz. You have two accounts with us now?”

  “Do I?” Edith asked.

  Fischer waved his assistants from the room. “Yes, of course. Look, here. Ah … yes.” His frown partially cleared. “You were here three weeks ago with your son, Marcus, to open the trust account. I served you personally. I remember that you …” Then he halted.

  Edith felt the blood drain from her face. The whole Hughes affair had twisted, turned and gathered momentum from a series of bizarre coincidences that no novelist would have dared to string together in one book. And now, here in the Swiss Bank Corporation, had come the final coincidence — and disaster. Hanne Rosenkranz had apparently gone to Zurich to open a trust account for Marcus, choosing the prestigious Swiss Bank Corporation to handle the details.

  The banker looked once again at the two files, then back at Edith, and stammered on. “Wait … no … yes … wait a moment. It wasn’t you, then, who opened this other account … there cannot be two Hanne Rosenkranzes with the same address and same birthdate. This is patently impossible. Could she be a relation of some kind?”

  “That’s it,” Edith said with relief. “Hanne Rosenkranz is my sister.”

  “And you …”

  “And I am Hanne Rosenkranz’s sister, too.”

  He looked triumphant. “Then your name is not even Rosenkranz, since Rosenkranz is her married name.”

  “That’s true.”

  “What is your name?”

  “I won’t tell you,” Edith said petulantly.

  The banker made a tent of his fingers and peered across the desk, uncertain of his ground. “But you used her identification to open this account for yourself.”

  “It’s so complicated …” After glancing behind her to make sure no one could overhear, Edith lowered her voice. “Family problems … I don’t want it known that I have this account. My sister Hanne is the only one who knows. She’s the only one I trust. If something happens to me, she can take the money out, because she is also Hanne Rosenkranz. Do you understand?”

  The banker frowned, trying to concentrate. “You must understand,” he said at last, making his decision, “that I am a very serious man, and knowing that you opened your account with false identification papers, even though they belong to your sister — I cannot keep you as a customer.”

  “I understand and respect your decision. Then please give me back the money I just brought in, and please sell all my stocks and bonds, and give me all the cash, and I’l
l go.”

  He coughed delicately. “But besides being a serious man,” he explained, “I am also a serious banker, and I don’t want to lose such a good customer as yourself. That,” he said, “would be a very irresponsible act. Of course, if I let you go, you will take the money to another bank. That would be natural … but a pity. I think the best thing is to transfer your account to our branch on Bellevueplatz.” He leaned back, satisfied. “Would that suit you?”

  Edith considered, then said: “Why not? You’re very kind …”

  He picked up the telephone and dialed his opposite number in the Bellevueplatz branch. Threading his way through an explanation of the circumstances, he neglected to mention that Edith had used her “sister’s” identity card to open the account; he said only that there was “too much family traffic” in the Paradeplatz branch. Hanging up, he smiled at Edith and said: “If you hurry you’ll have time to fill in the forms and arrange all the details today.”

  Thanking him, Edith swiftly left the bank and took a taxi to Bellevueplatz, where another bank official helped her through the formalities of transferring the account. Finally the official cleared his throat. “I understand,” he said, “that there are family problems. Naturally I don’t wish to inquire into their nature. I do think however, that it would be wise …” he hesitated; Edith waited, beginning to worry again, “ … to have a code name for the account, which you could use to keep matters more, ah, discreet. Do you have a preference?”

  Edith considered “Helga Hughes,” then decided that might be going too far.

  “Erika Schwartz,” she said, giving the name of the cleaning woman in a friend’s home in Germany.

  That evening, in her room at the Savoy Hotel on the Paradeplatz, Edith sank down on the edge of the bed, too tired even to take off her coat. I had told her, when her business in Zurich was finished, to destroy all the unnecessary bank documents — and, above all, the H. R. Hughes passport. It had served its purpose: the account would never again be used.