The Ringmaster

by Morris West

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t do that! You’ve got to stay in place until we see where Tanaka stands in all this. You’re the only one close enough to him to make a sound judgment.’

  ‘I don’t think Tanaka will want any part of Leibig’s political pretensions.’

  ‘I’m not so sure.’ His tone was sombre. ‘I’m wondering, in fact, whether Tanaka encouraged them. The Japanese have always been very clever at kite-flying.’

  Three

  After an indifferent lunch and a contentious conference, the thoughts I took back to my office were gloomy ones. I had been long enough in business to know that every deal, large or small, brings out a little more of the bad in people; greed, anger, ambition, envy. Even the conventional deceits of the bargaining table – the concealments, the half-truths, the downright lies – erode the foundations of public and private morality. In politics there is no morality anyway. The nature of the game precludes it. A politician’s career depends upon the fickle wind of public opinion. He is forced to trim his conscience to catch every shift of the breeze. It was an ironic coincidence that the day’s motto on my desk pad was a quotation from that amiable cleric, Sydney Smith; ‘No man, I fear, can effect great benefits to his country without some sacrifice of the minor virtues.’ I had sacrificed a few in my time, so I could not plead pristine innocence.

  If Laszlo’s suspicions were correct, then I was taking very large money to serve two very dubious masters. On the other hand, Laszlo himself was no plaster saint. One of his well-known techniques was to spread suspicion and dismay in the barnyard, and then buy the eggs and the chickens and the farm itself at a discount. Besides, there was in Carl Leibig a certain pardonable simplicity, the arrogance of a successful young man who had inherited a prosperous business and now was anxious to see how far his own legs would carry him. He was suffering, as Tanaka had suffered, as we all do to some degree, from selective education and selective social amnesia. History is always written by the victors, and the defeated create a new set of myths to explain the past and gild the future. Still, I could not spend a whole afternoon scratching an itchy conscience. There was work piled on my desk: colour proofs to be checked, contracts to be studied, an editorial conference to consider three new projects. It was nearly five thirty before I was able to talk to Kenji Tanaka on his private line. He was brisk and businesslike.

  ‘Carl Leibig called. He told me you did not like his presentation.’

  ‘None of us did.’

  ‘He told me that, too. He has sent me a tape recording of the conference.’

  ‘The sonofabitch!’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  ‘I said he was a sonofabitch. I meant it. Nobody records a meeting without the knowledge and consent of the participants.’

  ‘And he did not request it?’

  ‘He did not.’

  ‘Then when he is made aware of his mistake, I am sure he will apologise.’

  ‘And he should either erase the tape or send authentic copies to all parties.’

  ‘I shall suggest he does that.’

  ‘Does Laszlo know about this?’

  ‘Probably not. He spoke with me before Carl Leibig called.’

  ‘Then I believe you should call him at his hotel before he leaves for the airport. He of all of us is the most vulnerable to press gossip and misreport.’

  ‘I shall. I cannot tell you, Gil, how much this has upset me.’

  ‘It’s upset me too Kenji. I’m not sure I can work with Mr Leibig. I’m thinking quite seriously of quitting.’

  ‘Please Gil, don’t do that! At least give me the chance to persuade you to stay. I am sure Carl Leibig meant no harm, no insult. He is a young blood with dreams of glory in his head. Believe me, I shall intervene very strongly to ensure that nothing like this happens again. Promise that you will talk to me before you decide.’

  ‘All right. We’ll talk.’

  ‘Thank you my friend. When next we meet – which I suggest should be tomorrow morning at eight in my office – I shall provide you with a complete history of the Leibig enterprises. My research people have discovered that they had connections with my family back in Meiji times. Interesting, no?’

  Interesting? Hell! It was downright unbelievable that Tanaka was only now making discoveries about a company to which he was committing so much. In fact it made a nonsense until you put it into Japanese. Then you had to use two words: ‘tatemae’ which means the way things should look and ‘honne’ the way things are. In these terms, truth is relative and not absolute. By consenting to accept the relative, you absolve yourself from any charge of lying. You are simply arranging ‘a correct image’, an acceptable definition of an unacceptable contradiction. In short, my friend Tanaka was doing a snow job on me. So I gave up the debate for the day and thought about my dinner date with Marta Boysen.

  I do not keep an apartment in Tokyo. City rents are so high and my visits so widely spaced that it is more convenient to take a suite at the Seiyo Ginza. They treat me like a prince, and charge me accordingly; but the service is impeccable and the chef an international master, so I wallow in the luxury and write it off to the business.

  At six thirty my driver met me at the entrance and we set off to pick up Marta Boysen at the Okura. The traffic was, as usual, a nightmare. I used the car phone to call Marta and tell her I might be fifteen minutes late. On an impulse I asked whether Laszlo was staying in the same hotel. She told me she had just had a drink with him. He was checking out at eight o’clock for the night flight to Sydney.

  I called again and was lucky enough to find him still in his room. I told him of my call to Tanaka. He told me that Tanaka had called him a second time to report our conversation. Laszlo sounded worn out. For an overweight hypertensive in his mid-sixties he drove himself dangerously hard.

  ‘I tell you, Gil, I’m getting too old for these capers. Long-haul flights play hell with my metabolism. I run a damned good airline, but if I could spare the time I’d travel by ship … I know! You want to talk about Leibig and Tanaka. Let me give you a quick reading. Leibig has a strong business in the Orient and in South Africa. In America he’s a token presence. In Germany he’s small compared with the giants, but the company is highly respected because of its long family tradition. What is important is that he’s got a big idea, the one he borrowed from Haushofer: Germany and Japan as bookends to European and Asiatic Russia: Tanaka seized on it because it was something he could sell to all the big boys in the keiretsu. It fits their historic fictions as well as it does those of the Germans. I bought it because I don’t give a damn about politics, only about business. Sooner or later we traders own the politicians because we’re the ones who make the tax-money and keep the proletariat working. Tanaka knows that. You know it, too, because you have a sense of history and this extraordinary gift of tongues. Tanaka wants to keep us both. As for Leibig, he’s young, he’s arrogant and he’s got a ramrod up his arse. But in the end Tanaka will bend him or break him. He’ll make his apologies. You can afford to be generous. Pat his hand, take him out to play – though I’m still not sure what games he likes. Maybe he’ll tell you. You’re a very persuasive fellow. The lady is very taken with you.’

  ‘You haven’t told me where she fits in.’

  ‘I’m sure she’s bursting to tell you herself. Good luck, Gil. See you in Bangkok.’

  He cut the connection. We continued to crawl at a snail’s pace through the traffic towards the Okura hotel.

  There are two ways to cope with business life in Japan. You can scurry about like all the other ants, frantic and industrious. Or, like the ancient sage, you can hide yourself in a cloud of unknowing, sink yourself so deep in contemplation that the ants will swarm around you and over you and you will not feel them. In the legend, of course, the sage was totally devoured by the little beasts and no trace of him was left at all. I had no intention of being eaten alive, but on that slow-motion trip to pick up Marta Boysen I thought deeply about what Laszlo had told me.
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  Of all the tribes in the world, the Hungarians were the most adept in the art of survival, smelling the winds of change, reading the cloud patterns, sensing the shocks before the earthquakes began. Pavel Laszlo had money invested in transport systems all round the world. There was no way he was going to stay out of Russia. Already he was standing on the doorstep. If Carl Leibig or Kenji Tanaka could lift him over the threshold and get his planes and his heavy transports moving, fine. If the devil was prepared to be a gentleman there was no reason to banish him from the dinner table. You just had to be sure you had the longer spoon.

  Conclusion for Gilbert Anselm Langton? If he stayed, he would be on the game like everyone else. He would be a whore; but he had set a high price and listed all the things he would not do. All that was left was to make sure he got the money before the client got near the bed.

  It was a sour and cynical thought, a poor prelude to an evening with a beautiful woman. I tried to dismiss it. I was twenty minutes late. Marta Boysen was waiting in the foyer, dressed in a very simple, very expensive black cocktail dress with a shawl to shield her bare shoulders against the autumn cold. I apologised for being late. She hushed me with a finger laid against my lips. She assured me it would be quicker going back to the Ginza, and besides, we had the whole evening ahead of us. She was not making theatre of it. She was simply cordial, warm, welcoming.

  I did not ask myself why, even in my head, I used three adjectives to describe a woman I was taking to dinner. I was a widower married now to business. I took a lot of women to dinner. Sometimes I took them to bed. But I did not sing paeans about them. Paeans are hymns of praise, joy and exultation, and it was a long time since I had been lifted so high.

  We had run out of small talk before we reached the hotel. We ordered cocktails while we studied the menu. As soon as the waiter had taken our orders I dived, head-first, into deep water.

  ‘Let’s get the bad news over. You said you were disappointed in me. Why?’

  ‘Because you didn’t remember me.’

  ‘My dear Marta, until today I’d never seen you in my life.’

  ‘Are you sure of that?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  She gave me a small, mocking smile, opened her handbag and took out an envelope. It contained a series of faded snapshots, all taken with an old-fashioned Rolleiflex camera. There were four people in each picture; a woman who might have passed for Marta herself, my father as I remembered him in his vigorous forties, a tiny flaxen haired girl, and myself as a gangling young man. We were all dressed in holiday clothes, the woman and the child in dirndl, my father and I in slacks, woodsmen’s shirts and heavy walking boots.

  The scenes were the outside of a stuberl in Grinzing, the entrance to the Burgtheater in Vienna and a couple of woodland settings, obviously in the Wienerwald. The legends on the backs of the photographs were written in a woman’s hand in German. ‘Anna and Anselm, Marta and Gil. Summer 1957.’

  I felt a sudden odd sensation of detachment, as though I were looking at myself looking at the photographs. From somewhere very far away I heard Marta’s voice asking: ‘Do you remember now?’

  ‘Some of it. Yes. That was the year I went up to Oxford. My father took me to Austria for a walking vacation. He said he had a friend there, a singer. He took me to see her at the Burgtheater. While in Vienna we went out on picnics together.’

  ‘And when I got tired you carried me on your shoulders. I was four years old at the time.’

  ‘So Anna was your mother.’

  ‘Still is. She’s in her mid-sixties now. Still vigorous. She teaches singing in Salzburg.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘He was a singer too, a baritone. He was killed in a skiing accident the year after I was born. You will laugh at this, but after your visit I used to dream about having you as my big brother. After that summer, you could have been. My mother and your father became lovers. They corresponded for years, almost up to the time of his death. My mother has kept all his letters. It’s strange you didn’t find hers among your father’s papers.’

  ‘Not so strange. In the last months of his illness he burned all his private correspondence. All that he kept were his scholarly papers, which he left to me. I knew he had a lot of women friends but he never gossiped about his affairs. He was a man who loved women and needed them in his life. He wasn’t secretive about it. In a way he shared them with me, as surrogate aunts or big sisters. He used to say that what lovers shared was a precious and private currency. One shouldn’t debase it by public commerce … Well, what do I say? Thank you for the memory! But your mother’s name wasn’t Boysen.’

  ‘No. It was Lovins-Gruber. Boysen is my married name. My husband and I divorced seven years ago. I kept my married name because all my academic honours are recorded in it.’

  She pushed the photographs towards me. ‘My mother and I thought you might like to have these.’

  ‘I would. My thanks to you both.’

  At that moment I felt a sudden surge of grief and loss. I was very near to tears. Marta Boysen reached out to touch my hand.

  ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. It was supposed to be a pleasant surprise.’

  ‘It was, I promise.’ I made a poor attempt at a joke. ‘It gives me the opera without the boring bits in the overture. My father, your mother, all those years ago! Now perhaps you can tell me how you came to be working with Leibig?’

  ‘That’s another story altogether.’ She was obviously happy to change the subject. ‘I did my doctoral thesis on the geopolitical theories of Karl Haushofer. I had access to all the archives which are preserved in Koblenz. The curator became a personal friend. It was he who told me of Leibig’s interest in the subject, and who passed my name on to Leibig as an expert. He contacted me at the FAO in Rome and offered me a part in this project. Leibig mentioned your name as one of the people involved. So here we are!’ The waiter laid the first course in front of us. ‘Good appetite, schatzi!’

  The endearment slipped casually from her lips. I raised my glass in a nostalgic toast.

  To absent lovers. Prost!’

  After that, we were content to be comfortable together, savouring the wine and the food, each filling out for the other the blank pages of our biographies. She had travelled widely with the FAO. She had worked in Russia itself after the Chernobyl disaster. She had found distant relatives among the surviving German stock in the Ukraine. It pleased me that she seemed to have a compassionate understanding of the human condition and the wit to know how many of its miseries were incurable. Of her marriage she said simply:

  ‘It was disaster for both of us. He had an old name, and old money. He farmed his estates in Carinthia, collected antiques and hated to be more than one day’s journey from home. I was ambitious, mobile, hellbent on a career. There wasn’t enough love or understanding to hold us together. Fortunately we had no family. The divorce was less painful than the marriage. Do you have children, Gil?’

  ‘Three. Two boys and a girl. She’s married and expecting her first child. Both boys work in the company, one in London, the other in New York. They’re good kids. They look out for each other, and for the old man.’

  ‘Don’t you ever get lonely?’

  ‘Who doesn’t? We’re all pretty primitive and tribal. We go out to hunt among the predators. Afterwards we need the cave and familiar bodies round firelight and the magical drawings on the walls.’

  ‘That’s how I feel tonight. I have to say I found this afternoon a rather shocking experience. It was so calculated, so harshly commercial and political. Carl Leibig’s performance troubled me very much. When I first met him I liked him. Today he was like a cruel young prince suddenly confronted by bullies stronger than himself.’

  ‘And I was one of them?’

  ‘I didn’t think you were bullying him. I thought you were trying very hard to be polite. But he was lying. You know that.’

  ‘I suspected it. I’m not sure I can or want to prove it.’

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nbsp; ‘I can, and since you’re the mediator I think you should at least have the proof in your hands. The day may come when you’ll need to use it.’

  Suddenly, this was another Marta, the one who had scribbled the imperative note, who had commanded me to dinner, who had taken possession of me by the oldest magic of all – my image held in her hands. As we ate I questioned her closely.

  ‘Assume I know nothing about Haushofer and his theories. Instruct me. Show me where a military scholar, long dead, fits into our enterprise.’

  She was all professional. She marshalled the information quickly and delivered it briskly. ‘Karl Haushofer was born in Munich in 1869, the son of a civil servant. He enlisted as a career officer in the Bavarian army and became a lecturer at the Academy of War. In 1909 he was sent to Japan as an artillery instructor to the Japanese army. You will remember that the Meiji emperors enlisted the Germans to teach them trade, war and the legal systems of the West. But mark the year, Gil, 1909. That was when Prince Ito was assassinated by a Korean nationalist and the Japanese established a military dictatorship over Korea. Note something else, too. In the small foreign community it was the most natural thing in the world for the Leibig family to welcome Haushofer into the house. It was equally natural for Haushofer to establish a professional friendship with Tanaka’s grandfather, who was a senior officer on the general staff. Now do you see how it begins to come together?’

  ‘How long have Tanaka and Leibig known of these old connections with Haushofer?’

  ‘It’s at least six months since I supplied Leibig with the documents. He told me he had passed them on immediately to Tanaka.’

  ‘So when you challenged Leibig at the meeting this morning, he knew you were calling him a liar.’

  ‘He certainly did.’

  ‘But he’s your boss, the man who’s paying your salary. Why call him out in public?’