Free The Intercom Conspiracy by Eric Ambler Page A

Paris to the woman who ran the morgue at the news-agencybureau I’d worked in there. We’d always got on well and she never minded doing me a favour. This favour didn’t take long to do. There were several Blochs listed in her file index, but none of them was an Arnold Bloch.
    Again, nothing to his discredit.
    There was one more source I could have tried. In most big cities there are agencies which make their livings by taking photographs of business executives for free and then holding the negatives in the expectation that, sooner or later, some of those men will become news. Then the agency sells ten-by-eight glossies to the newspapers and magazines. As an industrial public-relations consultant, Arnold Bloch would, I thought, have rated that sort of attention. Somewhere, no doubt, there was a picture of Herr Bloch ready to be pulled out and used if he ever distinguished himself by getting killed in an air crash, marrying a film star or becoming involved in a multimillion-dollar take-over bid. I didn’t think, though, that the picture, even if I could find it quickly, would tell me anything useful. Even the good guys sometimes have their eyes set far too closely together.
    So, in the end, I just called Dr Bruchner back and told him that, as far as I could see, Herr Arnold Bloch was as clean as a whistle. He said that he would send off the cable to the executors that night.
    The date was October 26.
    Now, Mr L, I have news for you.
    You’ve been so bloody secretive about your sources that it’s difficult to know how much credence can be given to the details of your reconstruction. But I will say this. If the last section of that lake-steamer conversation between the old buzzards is basically factual, you’re in for something of a shock. Better fasten your seat belt. There’s something you don’t know.
    On November 1, one week after that cable to the executors went off, something peculiar happened in the office. Nicole was there and can confirm this. I had a strange visitor.
    It was in the afternoon. When I got back from lunch I found this man waiting there. Nothing particularly unusual about that,of course. We didn’t have many callers at the office, but we had some: office-supplies salesmen, bill collectors, odd characters looking for jobs and two-bit con men trying to flog secret documents cooked up in some Berlin kitchen. The unusual thing about this particular caller was that he was there to take out a subscription to
Intercom
.
    Now that really
was
unusual. Certainly, it had never happened before while I was there.
Intercom
went out by mail and that’s how the subscriptions came in. We had a mimeographed subscription form giving the different rates to Europe and the Americas in the various currencies; and one of these forms was always tacked onto the newsletter, or enclosed with a renewal notice. From time to time we’d had promotional mailings using the same form; but even the Geneva subscribers, and there were one or two, had never come to the office in person.
    Naturally, my first thought when he told me what he wanted was that this must be Arnold Bloch, or someone connected with him, there to give our little outfit a discreet onceover. True, if this
were
Bloch, he’d left things a bit late. Dr Bruchner already had his cheque, and if the written offer he’d made was accepted the deal was done. Even if he didn’t like what he saw it was too late for him to renege now. Still, whoever or whatever he was, the kid-glove treatment was clearly in order. Very politely I asked him into my office and told Nicole to bring in a subscription form.
    What with the reference library, the scrapbooks and the stacks of magazines and newspapers in my office, there was scarcely room to move, but I did have a visitor’s chair. The General had insisted on that. It was piled high with junk, as usual. While I was clearing it the visitor stood in the doorway taking off his overcoat and folding it up neatly as if he were going to