Free The Intercom Conspiracy by Eric Ambler

financially responsible. The assurance I wish to give is that he is politically responsible, the kind of person who would not have been objectionable to the General.’
    ‘I see.’
    ‘Unfortunately, I know very little about Herr Bloch. He seems to be a thoughtful and considerate person. For instance, he has specifically requested me to assure you that he hopes to retain your services, and those of your staff, should his offer for the shares be accepted.’
    ‘Good for him. Then isn’t that your answer? If he likes
Intercom
as it is, he can’t be politically objectionable in the way you mean, can he? I take it that all he wants to do is slip in a few commercial plugs from time to time.’
    ‘I understand that. But …’
    ‘What sort of a man is he personally?’
    ‘That is the difficulty. I have corresponded with him and we have spoken on the telephone, but I have not actually had occasion to meet him. He is an educated man clearly. His German is fluent, though I think that he is not himself German-born.’
    ‘Austrian perhaps?’
    ‘Perhaps. I don’t know. I made preliminary inquiries about him through my Munich correspondent, but learned very little. He has an office at the address given on his business paper, and there is a plate on the door saying that he has offices also in Paris and Rome. That is also stated on the paper, but no addresses are given. Apparently he travels a great deal on his clients’ behalf. He employs no permanent staff in Munich. The office rent is paid by the bank.’
    ‘He sounds like what the Americans call an operator, or a front man. That’s not necessarily against him, of course.’
    ‘No.’ Dr Bruchner did his best not to sound dubious. ‘Before I send this cable,’ he went on, ‘will you try to find out more? You have files and dossiers, I know, and are experienced in these matters. I would like to be able to say in my cable that investigation has uncovered nothing to his discredit.’
    ‘I understand, Dr Bruchner. I’ll do what I can and call you back later.’
    What I could in fact do was very little. The files and dossiers to which he referred were mostly figments of the General’s imagination. We had some filing cabinets, true, and they were full of paper – files of old newspaper cuttings, roughly indexed – but it was all very ordinary stuff. We did have a fair reference library, and I kept special scrapbooks containing ideas and material for
Intercom
stories culled from the European newspapers and magazines to which we subscribed; but we had no proper morgue in the newspaper sense of the term. That sort of thing needs space and a trained staff; and it costs money.
    The last thing I wanted at that stage, of course, was to uncover anything to Herr Bloch’s discredit; and I assumed that Dr Bruchner was of the same mind. His fee as director of Intercom Publishing Enterprises A.G. wasn’t all that big, but obviously he would prefer not to lose it.
    I did make inquiries about Arnold Bloch, however.
    There was nothing about him in any of the standard reference books, so I looked him up in the list of
Intercom
subscribers. I did that because I thought that there might possibly be an address for him there different from the Munich address Dr Bruchner had given me.
    Big surprise. Arnold Bloch didn’t subscribe to
Intercom
and never had done.
    Well, you could scarcely count that as being to his discredit. Some people might even have said that it was an indication of good sense on his part. But, even allowing for the fact that this prospective purchaser was acting for unidentified French and German associates, it was, I thought, odd. After all,
he
was the publicity consultant who hoped to use
Intercom
to promote his associates’ commercial interests;
he
was the thoughtful and considerate man of affairs who wanted
Intercom
to stay in business as usual. How come he had never subscribed to it? The oddity made me curious enough to make a further inquiry. I put in a call to