The Hoax

by Clifford Irving

  But the descriptions of Helga Hughes that flowed in from Zurich had no consistency. Helga was first a 35-year-old blonde, then a 42-year-old brunette, then black-haired in her late twenties, then a blonde again. She had slim, well-manicured hands; later she wore gloves. She spoke German badly, then fluently, then not at all. She weighed 100 pounds; an hour later she miraculously had become “plump.” Of equal absurdity were the reports from New York. McGraw-Hill had postponed publication of the book, canceled it, and at the same time advanced the date of publication.

  It grew wearying after a while and we sent everyone home, except for the Swiss reporter, Rudy Rohr. He was the most knowledgeable about the Zurich situation, and that was what concerned us. Edith spoke to him in German. I was drifting off to sleep in the armchair when she poked me. “Tell Cliff what you told me,” she instructed Rudy.

  He was a pleasant, pink-faced police reporter from the Schweizer Illustrierte. He knew the Zurich police personally and had considerable dealings with them. “Something funny is happening in Zurich,” he said. “I can’t really explain it. Always the police wait until they have real information before they say anything. But in this case they’re talking all the time and contradicting themselves. And there are men in Zurich, Americans, who are trying to put pressure on them. A man named Peloquin. You know him?”

  “He’s the head of Intertel. That’s Hughes’s security service.”

  “I can’t say more,” Rudy concluded, “except that I don’t like what I hear. Let me telephone my colleague in Zurich, and then the police.”

  One thought had occurred to me, and it troubled me more than anything else. The more the banking situation in Zurich became public, the deeper the investigators would probe. On her first trip to Zurich, last May, Edith had stayed overnight in a hotel using the name Helga Hughes. On the next four trips — in late May, September, October, and December — she had traveled with the Hanne Rosenkranz kennkarte. It had seemed a safe thing to do, granted Swiss bank secrecy. But that secrecy was splitting at the seams. Once the dates of deposits and withdrawals were known — and for all I knew, they were known already — the Swiss police, as a matter of routine, would check hotel registrations. They would come up with a Helga Hughes on the night of May 14th. They would search hotel registries for the other nights and find no Helga Hughes. It was no job to be accomplished in a few hours, but if all the names of all the hotel guests in Zurich on the nights of May 27th, September 28th, October 19th, and December 28th were fed into a computer, one name would appear four times: Hanne Rosenkranz. Edith, in presenting the kennkarte, had always registered with the correct address in Germany. Hanne Rosenkranz would be investigated. And who was she? The wife of Edith Irving’s first husband. The next and inexorable step was to check Spanish immigration cards. Leaving Spain each time, Edith had had to fill out an exit card as Hanne Rosenkranz.

  She had always said, referring to crossing the borders of Switzerland: “I am the weak link.” She had been right — not about the border crossings, but about the nights spent in the Zurich hotels. It was a small detail, something we had never considered. And now I saw that it was the one thing that could give us away.

  I said nothing to Edith at first. I wanted to hear what Rudy Rohr could find out in Zurich. He drove out to the house just before lunch. He had spoken to his colleague, who had told him that the bank teller in the Credit Suisse had been shown photographs of Edith. At first she had identified Edith as Helga Hughes. A second set of photographs were then shown to her and reportedly she had said: “Now I’m not so sure.”

  “Then I spoke to a man I know at the Zurich police.” Rudy continued. “They would like you to come voluntarily to Zurich.”

  “All right,” Edith said bravely. “I’ll go.”

  After Rudy had gone I said: “No, you won’t. Or if you do I’m going with you. But let me call Marty Ackerman first.”

  I was as much confused as apprehensive. Some time during that day the Newsweek correspondent confided to me that the photographs of Edith had been shown to the bank employees the previous week, on a Tuesday, while I was still in New York. He refused to say how he knew, but his statement wasn’t hedged. He knew, he said. I called Marty Ackerman in New York late that afternoon, a Sunday, and spelled it out for him.

  “Don’t let her go to Zurich,” Marty said sharply. “Come to New York, both of you.”

  I balked. “I just got here.”

  “Well, come back. This thing’s getting out of hand, and there are some weird twists. I keep calling McGraw-Hill, and they won’t even return my calls.”

  That night, with Rudy Rohr, we went to a hotel in Ibiza and placed a call to his police contact in Zurich. Rudy spoke first, rapidly, in Schweizerdeutsch, and I couldn’t understand a word. Finally he handed the telephone to Edith. She talked for several minutes to a police official named Lack. When she handed the telephone back to Rudy, she was pale.

  “I told him I’d come to Zurich,” she said to me, “but first I had to go to New York with you. He said in that case he was going to put out a warrant for my arrest in half an hour. They won’t let me leave Spain.”

  “Let’s go home,” I said.

  I hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since returning from New York. The world of the hoax seemed to be toppling. For a long time, for almost a year, we had had some very good luck. When it left us, it was not replaced by a vacuum. It was replaced by some very bad luck. Concepts had been thrust at me which I had never considered, with which I was unable to cope. A warrant for Edith’s arrest? It was as incomprehensible as it was horrifying, and for the first time since I conceived the Hughes autobiography I knew that I had completely lost control of events.

  A few days before my arrival in Ibiza, Edith had been approached in a cafe by two Frenchmen who told her: “We want information. We’ve got a job to do, and it involves murder. We don’t want to do it, but we’ll have to if we don’t get the information.” She had refused to speak to them, but everywhere she moved now she looked over her shoulder. And early Monday morning I went to my studio and discovered that someone had broken in. The studio had been messy before I left, but now it was ripped apart. If anything was missing or had been planted, I had no way of knowing and no time to investigate. When I got back to the finca I found a gaggle of reporters and two television crews from CBS and NBC, flown in from Madrid and Paris. Bob Kirsch and Gerry Albertini were there too, asking us if there was anything they could do to help.

  The television crews were clamoring for an interview — the last thing in the world I wanted at that moment. I wanted to get out and nothing more. But what would happen at the airport? I imagined Edith, the kids, and myself stopped at any of three airports — Ibiza, Barcelona, or Madrid — and placed, without the children, on the next plane to Switzerland.

  A man named Kaplan headed the NBC television crew. “Look,” I said to him, “I’ll give you the interview on one condition. We want to leave the island tomorrow morning and fly to New York. Can your camera crew come with us as far as Madrid. If there’s any trouble, I want you to film it.”

  He thought it over for a few seconds and said: “It’s a deal.”

  Gerry Albertini drove into town and bought the air tickets. Sitting outside the finca in the chill, windswept morning, Edith and I talked to the TV microphones while the camera silently turned. Afterward, I thanked Bob Kirsch for all his help. I tried to apologize for having drawn him in, but there was no way.

  At five o’clock on Tuesday morning we climbed groggily out of bed, packed two suitcases full of clothes and one with books and toys for Nedsky and Barney. We woke them, got them dressed, and at seven o’clock Kaplan and the NBC crew arrived.

  At eight o’clock, with a guard of twenty men from the television and newspaper media, we boarded the plane for Barcelona. We waited there and then boarded the Iberia jet to New York. No police stopped us or even questioned us. At Madrid airport the newsmen wished us luck and disembarked. The children, who had been whini
ng and fussing all the way, finally fell asleep an hour after we had taken off from Madrid; and so did I.

  Half an hour later I woke suddenly, aware that I had been in the grip of a nightmare, and turned to Edith to say something. But what came from my mouth was only a croak. I tried to speak. I couldn’t.

  “I’ve lost my voice,” I whispered.

  And I knew why. I knew it immediately. There was simply nothing more that I wanted to say. The fountainhead of all the lies was drying up; something in me was saying, “No more.”

  But there was more. There was one last, desperate effort. I had always been a gambler, not at the gaming tables but in life. Without risk, no battle could be won; whatever the nature of the goal, whatever its greatness or paucity of vision, it could never be attained by letting one’s spirit crumble into pudding. I had never in my life been able to cut along the dotted line and feel alive, aware. The whole Hughes affair had been a venture into the unknown, a testing of myself, a constant gauntlet of challenge and response.

  I was down to my last chip, but it never occurred to me not to put it on the line, bet it, and roll the dice one more time.

  No one had prepared me for what awaited us at Kennedy Airport. Marty Ackerman was there to meet us. A limousine had been hired and we were to be driven straight to his home in Lakeville, Connecticut. “There are two hundred reporters here,” Marty said. “Waiting for you. They’re going to tear you limb from limb if you try to get out of this airport without making a statement.”

  “I’ve lost my voice,” I whispered, bending close to his ear.

  “Where’s Nedsky?” Edith cried. We had just passed through immigration; I had Barney and a stuffed panda in one arm and my straw basket, overflowing with toys and toilet articles and odd bits of clothing, slung over the other shoulder. I had seen my face in the mirror before we disembarked from the plane; it was gray with fatigue, pouches sagged under my eyes and the capillaries had risen like red spiderwebs to my cheekbones. Nedsky was gone. We chased back and forth from immigration to customs and back again to immigration, and then out to the edge of the runway again. Edith was on the edge of tears. Her son had been kidnapped.

  An airport guard found him outside in the cold evening air, watching the luggage carts come rumbling toward the terminal. He was laughing. Edith snatched him up and began to cry.

  “Someone take her and the kids to the car,” Marty ordered. “Come on,” he said to me.

  I faced the two hundred newsmen: blinding lights, whirring cameras, howls, and curses — not yet at me. “Get down, you sonofabitch! … You’re in my way! … Goddammit, look out! …” Crammed into the small press room, the gentlemen of the press snarled like wolves and tigers stuffed into the same cage. I had no emotions left other than a mild sense of horror, and gratitude that my family was elsewhere. And I felt that the last strand that linked me to reality was about to snap. I can only remember one question that was fired at me, a question to which I had decided to offer no comment; but I lacked voice and Marty, with whom I hadn’t yet spoken, was the only one who could answer.

  “Mr. Irving,” the reporter shouted above the din, “is your wife Helga Hughes?”

  “Categorically no!” Marty Ackerman shouted back. I wanted to stop him as I had wanted to stop Bob Kirsch on Ibiza, but again there was no way.

  We fought our way through the pack, out through the terminal and the gaping crowd, to the limousine. It was a cold January night. Edith and the children were snugly tucked away in the back seat. “The driver knows the way,” Marty said. “Don’t talk to anyone. Get some sleep. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Thanks,” I gasped.

  We stopped once en route to buy disposable diapers and then, through the long drive into the snowy darkness of Connecticut, while the children slept and occasionally whimpered, we whispered together in the back seat — trying to think and trying to plan. We felt like refugees in wartime, fleeing the battlefield but with no hope that we could even outdistance the enemy troops. It was ten o’clock at night — 4 A.M. our time — when we reached the house and unloaded the car with the help of Marty’s servants. Edith slipped once on the ice outside the front steps. The children were put to bed, crying. During dinner there was a terrible thump, followed by a loud howl, from upstairs. Barney, who had always slept in a crib, had fallen out of bed.

  Before morning came he fell out three more times. Edith and I were in bed at midnight, still whispering, as though surrounded by unseen enemies. And we were surrounded — I knew it even then, as we lay in the cold darkness and I made our plan. Finally, worn out to the point where we felt we could die from exhaustion, we drifted off to sleep. But we woke constantly during the night, when Barney fell out of bed and other times when there was only silence. And each time we clung to each other, chilled and frightened — looking for warmth, looking for hope. It was a night of true terror.

  Chapter 19

  “Arrest Me? For What?”

  I called Marty in the morning — a cold, cheerfully blue winter morning. “I’ve got to see you,” I said. “How do I get down to New York?” He gave me instructions and I telephoned to the Lakeville taxi service. At three o’clock that afternoon I kissed Edith and the children goodbye. Both Nedsky and Barney were crying.

  The driver was a local man, friendly and full of chatter. “I know who you are,” he said. “Name rang a bell immediately.”

  “You know the name? How come?”

  “Jesus, you can’t turn on the TV without hearing about it. I’ve seen you on that island, whatever its name is, and last night at the airport, too.”

  “I guess I forgot to watch,” I whispered. I was still practically voiceless.

  “You got two beautiful kids,” he said, and I could do no more than nod, thinking of them back in Lakeville, whimpering. What next? And where?

  It was dark when we reached the house on Park Avenue. I still had a set of keys and I let myself in. Marty threw an arm around my shoulder and I said: “I’ve got to talk to you. Alone.” Worried that the house might have been bugged, he took me downstairs to the part of the basement that had been converted into a small cinema. I slumped into one of the soft reclining chairs.

  “McCulloch and John Goldman have been calling all day,” Marty said. “They want to come over. They think they’ve found George Gordon Holmes. They’ve got photographs and they want …”

  “Marty!” I cut him off. “I’ve got to tell you something. If you throw me out of the house afterwards, I’ll understand, because I’ve abused your hospitality and your trust.” His lips tightened and a worried look came into his eyes. Plucking a pencil from his pocket, he twisted it nervously between his fingers.

  “Marty, listen. I wanted to tell you at the airport, but there was no time, and I was scared. Edith is Helga Hughes.”

  I threw it at him without frills. He nodded slowly; he said nothing.

  The rest of it was the devilishly complicated story that I had concocted on the plane and refined — as much as it was possible to refine a tale out of Irving’s Hughesian Nights — during the ride to Connecticut and through that sleepless, terrifying night. Hughes had told me in the beginning that no one in his organization was to know he was working with me on his autobiography. But he faced the problem of the checks clearing through one of his bank accounts; he had accountants who went over his books for tax purposes. He had made the proposition to me in March, in Puerto Rico. In April, in Nassau, I had agreed and he had implemented it. Through George Gordon Holmes, he had provided a false Swiss passport for Edith in the name of Helga Hughes. We were to keep the money for him until after the book’s publication. Then he would tell me what to do with it. In return for the favor, he was paying me an additional $100,000 above my $100,000 share called for in our contract.

  “That’s why I told you the loyal servant theory was the right one,” I finished. “Because Edith was the loyal servant.”

  Marty still twisted the pencil. He put one hand to his face, pinching the
skin between his eyes. When he finally looked me in the eye, his skin was as gray as mine had been at the airport.

  “You ought to know two things,” he said shakily. “I’ve asked the U.S. Postal Inspectors to make an investigation of this whole affair. And you and I have an appointment with Lenny Newman at the District Attorney’s office.” He looked at his watch. “At six o’clock — in half an hour.”

  “Call it off,” I blurted. “I can’t go.”

  Marty shook his head. “They’ll have your ass in a sling if you don’t show up. You’ve got to go. If you’ll take my advice,” Marty said dully, “you’ll tell them everything. Oh, Jesus.”

  We arrived at the Criminal Courts Building soon after six o’clock and we were there until just after ten. Leonard Newman, Assistant District Attorney and head of the frauds bureau, was a rough-hewn, gray-haired man in his fifties. Oscar Cohen, another Assistant District Attorney, was small, dapper, alternately friendly and cold-eyed. Three other men of the bureau were there, too, and a detective. “Tell your story,” Marty instructed me, and I did, in a hoarse whisper that must have been occasionally inaudible. I was sure of only two things: they didn’t believe I had laryngitis, and my story made no sense to them. Halfway through, Newman made a brief speech to me.