With a bite daintily nibbled and gone, Phoebe made so bold as to speak again. “I saw it, too, you know. On television. The afternoon news. Your leaving ...”
“Jail,” I supplied.
“I don’t know if it was art, as Stephen says. I’m not very clever about those things. But I think it was wonderfully brave.”
“All I had to do was walk down a flight of steps.”
“But the attention. The notoriety. I don’t think I could bear it.”
I shrugged. “In this case the notoriety was unavoidable. All Roxanne did was to try to shape it in my favor. I think she succeeded.”
“Forgive me, Mr. Cobb, but why are you here? Pamela usually runs from scandal. Why does she have you to tea the very day something like this happens? Stephen doesn’t show it, but he’s very worried. What’s going on?”
Lady Arking’s imperious voice cut through like a guillotine blade. “That, Phoebe, is precisely what we are here to discuss.”
10
“And now let’s play The Generation Game!”
Bruce Forsythe
Bruce Forsythe’s Generation Game, BBC
LADY ARKING WENT INTO executive mode.
The maids were told to leave the trays and the tea and depart. The butler was summoned.
“Banbridge,” she said, “no calls. No interruptions of any kind.”
Banbridge bowed his pink-and-purple head and said, “Very good, mum,” and (not for the first time) I wanted to go up to him and pinch him and make sure he was real.
Stephen cleared his throat and adjusted his ascot. “I say, then, Pamela, Phoebe and I should be running along, too.”
“No, Stephen, I wish you to stay. I know you have often said you have no interest in the running of your father’s business, but the time may now have come when you wish to change your mind.”
“Pamela, don’t be daft. Father wanted you running the company, and so do I.”
“My point,” Lady Arking said, “is that after you hear what I have to say, you may not feel that way any longer.”
She turned to me. “The first thing I want to do, Mr. Cobb, is apologize to you. I hope you can believe me when I say that when I asked you for what I thought was a simple favor, I had no idea it would turn out to be a nightmare for you.”
“It wasn’t the best night I ever spent,” I said, “but nightmare is a little strong. Let’s call it an inconvenience.”
“You are very kind.” She sipped tea, “More than kind. Sitting there in jail, you certainly had no reason to protect me, but you did.”
“Just looking after my investment in the Network,” I told her.
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you. After what had happened, you had no reason to think protecting Pamela Arking was the same as protecting your investment.”
Stephen’s brow furrowed under the Byronic lock of hair that fell over it. “Pamela,” he said, “do you mean to say you had something to do with that African’s death?”
“Yes,” she said, then thought about it a second. “No.” Further reflection led her to an “I don’t know.”
The amazing thing about that was that all three answers were accurate.
“What she had to do with,” I said, “was my being there.”
I turned to her ladyship. “All right, I protected you—for the time being, pending this talk.”
“Fair enough,” she conceded.
“I knew there was some kind of mess-up, but I just didn’t think you could be behind it.”
“Why not?”
“Forgive me, Lady Arking, but this was—and is—a horribly haphazard business. If it was an intended frame, it would fall apart the second they tested my hands for firearms. Even as a straight rubout, it was pretty lame. Not only was the real killer seen, I came within a half second of catching him with the gun in his pocket. It just seemed to me that with your money and your connections, you could have bought a much better job.”
“But I still don’t understand,” Stephen said. His brow hadn’t smoothed out yet. His furrowing muscles must have been magnificently developed. “What did Pamela have to do with the fellow at all? And where do you come into it?”
“That,” I said, “is the very question I’ve come here to ask.”
Lady Arking took another sip of tea, put the cup down, and sighed. “There’s no mystery about where you come into it, Mr. Cobb. I wanted someone reliable and discreet, who wouldn’t immediately be associated with me. It was just as I told you when I asked you to meet Aliou in the first place.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m associated with you now. Bristow undoubtedly made the connection as soon as Williams walked into the police station.”
“He did indeed. I was questioned yesterday afternoon and again, this morning.”
This was news.
I waited until Stephen and Phoebe stopped gasping, and I said, “What did you say?”
“I told him any questions about me and my solicitors were highly improper, and that any questions about you and your solicitors should be asked of you.”
I nodded. “Where it would also be highly improper. Did he ask how you knew me?”
“I told him only by way of a business relationship—what’s the matter?”
She’d seen my frown.
“Well,” I said, “don’t take it back now, but don’t play it up, either.”
“Why not? We did meet in Bernard Levering’s office, didn’t we?”
“Yeah. But Roxanne and I are here on Independent Means visas. We can stay as long as we like, but we’re not allowed to work. After this mess yesterday, the last thing I need is trouble with the Home Office for violating my visa.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “You see, Stephen, I’ve been making a right botch of things, and you haven’t heard the worst of it yet.”
She was harder on herself than she needed to be. I could see it was a natural mistake for her to have made. She was the kind of person who’d find it incomprehensible that anyone would deliberately set himself up not to work.
It was evident in the way she related to her stepson. She was being deferential to him now, because she’d put her foot in something (I still didn’t know what), and he, having inherited a block of stock from Daddy, was in a position to cause trouble for her if he could work up the energy.
But she had no respect for him.
Even if Stephen Arking the poet slaved night and day and sweated blood to turn out his stuff, his stepmother didn’t think of that as work. Even though he would have been a threat to her hegemony at BIC, something, word was, she protected only slightly more zealously than a wolverine protects her young, I got the feeling she would have liked Stephen a lot better if he had been out and about his father’s business, poking his nose into things like newspapers and satellite TV networks.
It hadn’t sunk into her yet that I was more or less retired, and for all she (or I) knew, was going to stay that way. Right now I was her fair-haired boy, but when she put it all together, my standing in the Christieland ratings would drop through the floor.
The idea was to work (in a non-visa-violating way, of course) fast.
“Tell me about Joseph Aliou,” I said.
Again, she began with a sigh. It wasn’t a fatalistic sigh, or a defeated one. It was more a sign of impatience with a world unwilling to run the way she had decided it ought to. “Joseph Aliou was a journalist.” She tilted her head to one side, weighing it. “Yes,” she said. “He had always wanted to be a journalist, and he died while working on a story. He was the finest kind of journalist.”
Roxanne leaned over and whispered to me, “Yeah, he never hit her up for a raise.” Despite her being a major owner of the Network, and therefore of Network News, Rox’s personal experiences with the press have been less than rewarding. It’s tended to warp her outlook.
“I first met him a few years ago. You see, he had worked as a stringer for Wolfrey Hawkesworth.”
“Excuse me,” I said, “who?�
�
“Wolfrey Hawkesworth,” she said, the way she might have said, “Margaret Thatcher, you dunce.” When I still didn’t get it, she went on, “for many years the West African correspondent for the Journal.”
I should have known. The Journal was BIC’s other national newspaper in Britain, as respectable and staid as its sister paper, the Orbit, was wild and raunchy. It was hard to see how one person could own both without going completely schizo, but Pamela Arking managed it, as far as anyone could tell.
All the writers on the Journal have names like “Wolfrey Hawkesworth” and “Simon Purest” and “Cadwalader St. Buffing-ton III.” The name leads the jaded reader such as myself into the supposition the reporters who bear them are somehow classier than the ordinary run of journalists.
It might even be true.
Lady Arking went on to tell the tale of Joseph Aliou. He was a bright young man who’d grown up speaking French, pidgin, and a tribal language in Bafut, in Cameroon. A missionary school taught him English, by way of day-old copies of the Journal that came in the mail to satisfy the missionary’s hunger to keep up with the news and cricket scores from England.
Joseph became entranced with the strange land described in the paper and decided he wanted to be a journalist himself. One day, the missionary took him to the capital (Joseph had never been there before) and introduced him to Wolfrey Hawkesworth, one of the legendary beings whose names appeared regularly on the good gray pages.
Joseph confessed his ambition in his ever-improving English, and the correspondent was so impressed, he gave the boy his business card and told him to contact him if he came across a good story.
Hawkesworth heard from him within a week, and it was a good story—tribal unrest; a plot to unseat the current Fon; possible bloodshed. It checked out, and Hawkesworth had a scoop.
Joseph Aliou proved particularly good at getting around and hearing things, and hardly a month went by without the boy tipping the reporter to a good, solid lead.
Hawkesworth paid the going rate for stringers. The missionary banked it for him. By the time he was twenty, Joseph had made himself a nice little pile, by hometown standards. But he had bigger ambitions. He wanted to go to university, in France, because as good as his English was, he didn’t want to depend on getting his education in a language not his own. He would work on his English in his spare time.
“Which he did,” Lady Arking said. “When I met him, two years ago, his English was only slightly accented. I was in Paris arranging for the European distribution of decoders for TVStrato, and taking the opportunity while I was there to meet with some of BIC’s top foreign correspondents. Wolfrey had arranged a scholarship for Aliou; then, when he had his heart attack, he left Joseph enough money to finish his studies.
“Joseph had made a strong impression on me, as he did on virtually everyone he met. Wolfrey Hawkesworth had vouched for his journalistic instincts. I resolved to hire him as soon as his studies were done. But then, something came up. Something very unsettling.”
“What was that?” I asked.
She shifted uneasily in her chair. It was the first time I’d seen anything from her that was less than queenly. Obviously, we were cutting close to the bone.
“Do you know anything about visa mills, Mr. Cobb?”
“A little,” I said, as reality began to pull aside the curtain of Christieland. “There was a flurry about it in the papers when Roxanne and I first arrived.”
I’d remembered what I’d learned.
As far as immigration to find a better life is concerned, America is still the Promised Land. But in the realities of the world economy at the end of the twentieth century, Mother England had become something of a Land of Opportunity herself, for people from countries with worse economies—i.e., virtually all of them, except the United States and Japan.
There are lots of ways to get permission to come and live in Britain. Some of them are so simple as to be nonexistent. If you’re a citizen of another European Community country, you simply show up. A lot of them show up and sign up for public assistance. In my humble opinion, the United Kingdom has been played for a sucker in all the Common Market treaties it has ever been a party to, but as a mere visitor, I suppose that’s none of my business, so I’ll go on.
If you’re a rich American, say, like Roxanne, or even me, you can get a long-term visa because of the dough you will be importing from home. This gives you most of the privileges of residence, but forbids you to work, on the theory that you might be taking a job away from a citizen. Fair enough.
Even if you’re a relatively poor American, you can automatically get a visitor’s visa for six months (twice what most other countries in Western Europe will give you), again, as long as you don’t work.
If you want or need to go into the job market, though, things start getting a little tight. There are special provisions for people like writers (who create their own jobs, after all) and scientists.
But, as with all of life, the more you need permission to come to a free country and work to make a decent life for yourself, the harder it is to get.
So, while it’s a snap for a successful American writer, say, to get permission to come to the United Kingdom and write and do whatever he likes, a poor African auto mechanic will go through hell for the same privilege.
There are, however, some loopholes.
One of the major loopholes is the student visa. Young William Jefferson Clinton, Rhodes scholar, had one of those years ago. A student visa carries with it National Health Insurance. It also carries a work permit.
The thing is, one does not need to be a Rhodes scholar to get one of them. One can go to the Hackney Wick School of Beauty Science and get one. One can, especially, go to the schools of English. You can find at least one, one flight up, in every high street in London.
Most of them are strictly legit. The Third Worlder (or Non-EC European) comes to England on a visitor’s visa and enrolls in the school. The school then vouches for the enrollment, the pupil applies for a student visa, enabling him or her to work to pay for the classes, and proceeds to attend classes and learn the language.
A significant minority, though, are phonies. Visa mills. The so-called students pay the money, all right, but they never show up for classes. They couldn’t if they wanted to, because the visa mill (a) probably doesn’t have any actual teachers, just an office staff, and (b) they wouldn’t have enough room to hold the classes, anyway, since they sign up many times more students than they could possible accommodate. They spend the rest of their time making fake visa certifications and counting money.
“So you brought Aliou over to do some undercover work in the visa-mill story?”
“That’s right,” Lady Arking said. “I figured he’d be perfect. He’d be totally unknown in Britain, he was keen to do the work and had a talent for it, and he was legitimately from a Third World country, with the passport to match.”
“When did he start?”
“The beginning of September.”
“Wasn’t the story a little stale by then? In fact, I think the Journal and the Orbit had already run stories on it.”
“I remember that myself,” Stephen said.
Lady Arking showed us a wry smile.
“It may have been stale. It was freshened for me when I got this.”
She walked to an old ebony secretary, unlocked it, popped a secret drawer and took out a folded yellowish piece of cheap typing paper.
There was writing on it, or rather hand printing. Block capitals done in smeary ballpoint pen. It read:
Hypocrite: You write about our only hope as “Visa Mills” and say you will put them out of business. You use the power of lies and false publicity. I know your dirty game. You’re worse than all of them, and when all is known, you will be tarred by the same brush, you and your precious Sir Richard, the biggest visa racketeers of all.
Remember
At a nod from Lady Arking, I passed it around. It made a big impression.
Phoebe began trembling when she read it.
She looked up with tears in her eyes, from fear or anger, I couldn’t tell which.
“This ... this is horrid!” she announced to anybody hanging around who might be thinking otherwise. “Pamela, who sent this?”
“I don’t know,” Lady Arking said. “It’s anonymous and, I’m afraid, untraceable. I had an independent laboratory examine it. The paper is ordinary Basildon bond, available at any newsagent in the country; the ink is generic Biro.”
“What about the handwriting?” Stephen asked. He seemed concerned.
“The handwriting expert decided that the printing is the work of a right-handed person using his—or her, they couldn’t even tell that much—left hand. And it’s disguised as well. As I said, untraceable.”
“Rats,” I said. “I was hoping you were hanging on to a cream-colored monographed envelope.”
Lady Arking smiled ruefully. “The envelope is more of the same, I’m afraid. I do have it. It was mailed in London.”
“Wonderful,” Roxanne said. “All you have to do is look for a right-handed person in London. There can’t be more than nine million of them.”
“Don’t forget the commuters,” I said.
“True,” Rox replied.
“I took your point quite some time ago,” Lady Arking said. “There was no point in pursuing the identity of the anonymous letter writer any further.”
“But you took the suggestion of the letter seriously,” I said.
“I had to. I am in a position of some responsibility as the Managing Director of BIC—”
“Caesar’s wife was a slut by comparison,” Stephen put in.
“That will be enough, Stephen.” Lady Arking turned to me. “The joke was tasteless, Mr. Cobb, but accurate. How am I to crusade against victimizations of the visa-mill variety if I am liable to a charge of corruption myself?”
She spoke with real passion. Then she caught herself at it and harrumphed it off.
“When I say ‘myself’ in this context, I mean me, or any of my staff, or anyone connected with British International Communications. Malfeasance on anyone’s part can destroy our effectiveness.”
Killed in the Fog Page 8
