Liars and Tyrants and People Who Turn Blue (14 page)

“In other words, a nut.”

“That's where the trouble comes in. Men have been willing to kill for ideas before. Do we judge Schlimmermann insane because his idea is such a repugnant one?”

“Yes.”

The walrus looked startled, and then laughed. “You sound very positive.”

“I'm not, really.” A moment passed. Then Shelby said, “I think I ought to tell you I'm beginning to develop the ability to read a new aura—one that reveals anxiety and depression.”

Martel's eyebrows shot up. “A new aura? Will it interfere with—?”

“No, not at all. There's no confusion between the two. The new one is a different color entirely. For instance, you've been glowing light blue during this entire conversation. All that means is that you're worried—hardly surprising, considering the line of work you're in. But by the time this new power is fully developed, I may be able to diagnose cases of extreme anxiety that result in mental illness. But I'm not to that point yet.”

“How long until you are? In time to help us decide about Schlimmermann and the other two?”

Shelby shook her head. “My lie-detecting ability took fourteen years to reach its peak. I was a child when I first saw an aura—in the form of a faint pink ring around my father's body. But it wasn't until a few years ago that it became totally reliable. But Dr. Wedner says it will probably go faster this time—”

“Wedner? Oh yes, the Rutgers man, right. Go on.”

“He says the fact that I started off seeing different shades of blue indicates a shorter development time. But don't count on anything—the testing procedures alone take more time than this inquiry will be in session. Right now all the blue aura tells me is when people are worried or upset. Even when they hide it as well as you do.”

A walrus-smile. “My dear, I hope I'm still around when you can ‘read' mental illness. You'll solve a lot of problems for us.”

“Or create them,” Shelby said glumly.

He laughed. “I'll bet you're giving off a blue aura yourself.” He glanced at his watch. “Time for the circus to begin. Let's go hear what our murderous peer has to tell us today.”

CHAPTER 33

SPRINGES TO CATCH WOODCOCKS

P. J. Martel sat silent, immobile, his eyes closed. Content to let the Indian member of the commission carry the ball for a while.

“Ambassador Schlimmermann,” said the Indian, “do you deny arranging the purchase of two hundred pounds of gelignite through a Zurich distributor named Franz Meier?”

“One moment please.” Schlimmermann leaned forward in his chair. “Before I answer any more questions, I have a demand to make of this commission. I want that woman removed from this hearing chamber.” And he pointed at Shelby.

“Who, me?” Shelby whispered to the lawyer sitting next to her.

Martel opened one eye at the word “demand” but said nothing.

“Mrs. Kent is part of our staff,” the Indian said. “She has every legal right to be here.”

“She has no legal right to call me an egomaniac,” Schlimmermann barked. “I want her out of here.”

The Indian looked toward Martel. The walrus stirred. “Herr Schlimmermann. May I remind you that you are not the one to lay down the conditions of this inquiry? Mrs. Kent stays. But you are quite correct in one thing—she had no right to call you an egomaniac. I think an apology is in order. Before you object”—cutting off the German before he could say anything—“perhaps I should remind you this inquiry is providing you with the only public forum you will have. If you wish to explain your position
publicly
, I suggest you accept Mrs. Kent's apology.”

Schlimmermann glared at Martel a moment and then said, “I haven't heard any apology yet.”

The walrus leaned back in his chair, looked over his shoulder at Shelby, and cocked a bushy eyebrow at her.

“Uh, yes, well,” Shelby stammered. “I apologize for calling you an egomaniac, Ambassador.”

“There you are,” said the walrus, and went back into his coma.

Schlimmermann didn't deign to answer either of them. Shelby noticed Li Xijuan watching the exchange with amusement in her eyes. Aguirrez, slumped in his chair, glowing blue, hadn't heard a word that was said.

The Indian started to repeat his question about the gelignite but Schlimmermann interrupted him impatiently. “Yes, yes, I ordered it. Why keep going on about it? I arranged the bombing of the Militia Supply Headquarters in Athens and the garrison near the Albanian border.”

“As part of the, ah,
contained
rebellion you were telling us about.”

“Precisely. There has long been much unco-ordinated guerrilla activity in Greece. I provided the rebels with a focus for their hostility. With no further explosives or arms available to them, they will live on the so-called glory of their two-pronged attack on the Militia for years to come. They are temporarily purged. Greece will be quiescent now—for as long, it is to be hoped, as it takes the Militia to establish its authority beyond challenge.”

“No guerrillas died in those attacks that we know of. All the casualties were Militiamen and UN employees, and some passersby.”

“I believe that is correct.”

“A strange way to ‘help' the Militia.”

A shrug. “Your opinion.”

“Over thirty-two hundred people died in Greece.
Thirty-two hundred
. Do you fully understand, Herr Schlimmermann, that you caused the deaths of thirty-two hundred innocent people?”

Schlimmermann looked the Indian straight in the eye. “I understand perfectly.”

“And it means nothing to you?”

The German's mouth twitched. “I'd say it means more to me than it does to you. I see it as an accurate gauge of the extent of the difficulties facing us—by us, I mean the UN. In an efficiently run society such extreme corrective measures would not be necessary. You want me to say I'm sorry? Very well, I'm sorry their deaths were necessary. But they
were
necessary.”

“Would you do the same thing again?”

“Without a moment's hesitation.”

The Indian's voice softened. “Ambassador, your cavalier attitude toward human life is totally beyond my comprehension. You come before the eyes of the world and admit to being a mass murderer—and in the service of what?
Efficiency?
”

“Mass murderer?” Schlimmermann didn't laugh, but he looked as if he wanted to. “Yes, you need these little labels, don't you? To sanction your own feeling of righteousness. I prefer to think of myself as a physician, practicing preventive medicine.”

“Arrogant goddamned egomaniac,” Shelby muttered under her breath.

“Hush,” whispered the lawyer next to her.

The Indian decided on a new tack. “Ambassador Aguirrez has testified that the plan was to supply insurgents with defective weapons, to avoid endangering the lives of the UN peacekeeping forces involved in the action. Yet you supplied the Greek guerrillas with live explosives. Can you explain that?”

Schlimmermann shrugged. “This business of supplying defective weapons—that's only playing at rebellion. In order for the plan to work, the threat to the world's security had to be a real one. Old grenades with faulty firing pins just wouldn't do the job. Providing that kind of weapon is too tentative, too half-hearted. Even cowardly.”

“So you disagreed with Ambassador Aguirrez and Ambassador Li as to the best way of staging contained rebellions.”

“I disagreed from the start. I agreed to the idea of controlling rebellions, but I disagreed as to the most effective method of doing so.”

Schlimmermann talked on, expounding on his theory for maintaining authority by manipulating those who would rebel against it. Occasionally a light on Shelby's machine would flash on.
Yes
, she'd signal; the Ambassador from West Germany wasn't lying about his motives. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a movement and unconsciously turned her head to see what caused it. What she saw made her gasp.

Aguirrez—surrounded by a depression-aura that
moved
. Not the mild pulsations of the red aura of deceit, but blue-black waves rushing away from his body, faster and faster and darker and darker.

Shelby jumped up from her chair and ran to the walrus's side. “Aguirrez has gone into a deep depression,” she said in a low voice. “I think he's suicidal—he might do something desperate unless he gets help
right now
.”

Martel didn't have to be told twice. He muttered instructions to one of his aides. Almost immediately two security guards hurried to Aguirrez and led him gently but firmly from the hearing chamber. The Mexican moved like a sleepwalker—sluggish, oblivious to everything around him. Martel declared a recess.

“Tell me what it looked like,” he commanded.

Shelby described the aura the best she could. “I've never seen anything like it,” she concluded, shaken.

The walrus looked at her in sudden sympathy. “This isn't going to be easy for you, is it? This new aura. Has it appeared around Schlimmermann?”

“No.” All around her, people were gathering up papers, speculating quietly over Aguirrez's unexpected departure, departing themselves. Shelby started to leave too when she felt eyes burning into the back of her head. She turned to find Heinrich Schlimmermann staring at her.

With undisguised hatred.

She'd jumped up and run to the walrus in her concern for Aguirrez, ignoring everything else that was going on in the hearing chamber. She'd caused Martel to take action that disrupted the inquiry, cutting off the German's metaphysical musings in midsentence. Of course Schlimmermann hated her.

She'd killed his act.

CHAPTER 34

WARNER OLAND OR SIDNEY TOLER?

FRANCISCO: All my plots

Turn back upon myself; but I am in
,

And must go on …

One deadly sin, then, help to cure another
.

—Philip Massinger,
The Duke of Milan

“Catatonic,” Sir John Dudley said. “The man's withdrawn completely.”

P. J. Martel blew out air through his thick lips. “Responsibility too much for him. So he just resigned.” Mañuel Aguirrez was in a private clinic in upstate New York—isolated, incommunicado,
gone
. “He saw the deaths of the Honduran rebels as beneficent—they were the bad guys, no two ways about it, period. But Schlimmermann's slaughter of three thousand innocent people—that must have brought home to Aguirrez exactly what he was involved in. Even though Aguirrez was a mass murderer himself, he still had more conscience than his two co-conspirators put together. A believer in instant solutions, Señor Aguirrez! Foolish, foolish man. What do the doctors say?”

“As little as possible. They certainly hold out no hope for a recovery.”

“Well, that settles one-third of our problem. We can't vote to indict a catatonic—which means the inquiry will have to be open-ended, in case Aguirrez does manage to pull out of it. The doctors didn't rule out the possibility altogether, did they?”

“They just don't know,” Sir John said. “There's no way of telling. But the message they were sending was don't count on it.”

Martel wagged his big head back and forth. “You reach a point in your life when you think you can't be shocked any further. Nothing human beings do surprises you any longer. But their motives! Their motives get you every time.”

The two old men sat quietly a moment, musing. Then Martel continued, “I still don't know why any of this happened. Aguirrez says he wanted to sabotage insurgents to protect the Militia. Schlimmermann says he wanted to aid the insurgents as a way of dramatizing the Militia's authority. Li Xijuan says she agrees with Aguirrez, but Shelby Kent says she's lying. Does that mean Li Xijuan agrees with Schlimmermann after all? Then why send
defective
weapons to the Burmese? I think we're going to have to recall Ambassador Li.”

Sir John nodded. “For the record.”

Martel glanced at him sharply. “Meaning we won't learn anything new? Possibly. But I'm interested in finding out how Li Xijuan happened to settle on those two—Aguirrez thinking social ills can be cured with force and Schlimmermann ego-tripping on some private power game in which he's the only player. Strange choices.”

“But they did the job, didn't they?”

“I'm still not sure what the job was. Protecting the Militia? Attacking it?”

“Ambassador,” said Sir John, “have you considered the possibility that these attacks on the Militia were not the ultimate end of Li Xijuan's scheming? That they were, perhaps, the means to a different end?”

Martel looked dubious. “What end?”

“I don't know. But she doesn't seem overly concerned whether the attacks succeeded or not. Only that they took place. She may have selected Aguirrez and Schlimmermann as her confederates solely because they were willing to co-operate—the fact that the two men disagreed on method may not have been important. We don't know these two were the only delegates she approached.”

“Oh, surely not! Any ambassador who had a clue of what she was intending would have spoken up about it.”

“Would he have?” Sir John said quietly.

Martel's face changed. “Guilt by association, you mean?”

“Mmm. Say Ambassador Li approaches Ambassador X and drops a hint or two about ‘helping' the Militia in certain unorthodox ways. What if word of that got back to Ambassador X's superiors? Might they not begin to wonder what there was in Ambassador X to make Li Xijuan think he might be willing to co-operate in such a venture? Would Ambassador X speak up and denounce Ambassador Li?”

“Depends on who Ambassador X is,” Martel said heavily. “Some of them probably would want to keep it quiet.”

“Especially when they're not quite sure what Li Xijuan was getting at. Her approach would have been oblique, enigmatic. Vague enough that she could deny everything if someone were foolhardy enough to speak up. Oh, she would manage that all right. Li Xijuan is an even more skillful manipulator of people than Schlimmermann. No, Ambassador X wouldn't know what to do. So he'd end up just keeping his mouth shut.”