Doctor Frigo (14 page)

‘If it is possible I would like to see specimens of his handwriting. Any handwriting, short notes, even signatures if there is nothing longer.’

‘For what purpose?’

‘To test a vague hypothesis. I would like to compare his writing of a year ago with his writing now.’

‘You wouldn’t like to explain a little further?’

‘As I say, it’s only a vague hypothesis.’

‘All right. I’ll see what I can arrange.’

‘Photocopies would be acceptable.’

‘Thank you for the drink, Doctor.’

I went down with him to show him out. I was regretting the remark about the photocopies. It had been unnecessarily bitchy. After all, he had been a guest of a kind. Feeling guilty and slightly stupid, I proceeded to become totally inane.

As I opened the outer door I said: ‘About my father. You know he could never be a folk hero. The idea’s preposterous. He was a lawyer and a politician.’

He shrugged. ‘Not many of those who heard the Gettysburg address thought much of it at the time. Look at that cloud.’

He appeared to have lost interest in me and was pointing up at the sky.

There was a long streak of black cloud smeared at the edges with red and gold by the setting sun.

‘Pretty,’ he remarked and walked away.

I went back upstairs. Delvert had left two thirds of his rum and lime. I threw it down the sink and added some rum to my own.

After a while, when I had calmed down a bit, I decided to have an early dinner at Chez Lafcadio. I knew that Elizabeth and Delvert would not be going there.

Although the nineteenth-century writer Lafcadio Hearn is best known for his prettifying of the Japanese people and their culture, his most accomplished work is an earlier account of the Lesser Antilles. A first edition of
Two Years in the French West Indies
fetches a good price and the house in which he is said to have lived while in St Paul is mentioned in the official guide. It contains a restaurant now, and although the framed mementoes of his brief visit which decorate the walls are probably bogus, the food is good. Bernard, the patron-chef, comes from Périgord.

At that time of the evening I had no trouble getting a table; there were only a few other diners there. I ordered the Langouste Lafcadio and a bottle of the Heritage blanc they like to serve with it, and was looking forward to an hour of peace when I saw the man Rosier, Elizabeth’s ‘spy’, approaching from the bar.

He beamed at me. ‘Dr Castillo, I thought it was you I saw coming in through the garden. We met this afternoon at the Martens Gallery. Remember?’

He was speaking his peculiar French. I nodded, not very affably. ‘Monsieur Rosier, isn’t it?’

‘Bob Rosier, yes. This is a very pleasant surprise, Doctor.’
He looked at the single couvert on my table as we shook hands. ‘On your own I see. Mind if I sit down a moment?’

He was already easing a chair into position. The bar waiter was already there bearing a half-consumed Campari-soda. If my presence there had been a surprise to spy Rosier he was recovering from it with remarkable speed.

‘Cocktail, Doctor?’

‘No thank you. I’m drinking wine.’

He dismissed the bar waiter with a flick of the wrist and a five-franc piece.

‘A surprise, as I said, and a coincidence too.’ He shook his head wonderingly at the strange workings of fate. ‘As a matter of fact, Doctor, I tried to call at your house earlier. Around five thirty. No reply.’

‘I wasn’t there. Stomach trouble, Mr Rosier?’

He chuckled. ‘You’ve heard of the Mayo clinic? I guess everyone has. They once told me I had the digestive powers of a goat. No, Doctor – ’ he flipped a wallet from his hip pocket, slid out a card and placed it beside my plate – ‘just a little matter of business.’

The card said that he was Robert L. Rosier, a Senior Assessor, Actuarial Division, with ATP-Globe Insurance Inc. of Montreal. Address: ATP-Globe Building. There was a cable address, too, and a spattering of telephone and telex numbers.

‘You’re Canadian, Monsieur Rosier?’

‘My mother was.’

That accounted for the accent. He hadn’t said what his father’s nationality had been or what his was now. An evasion? Possibly CIA had been Elizabeth’s diagnosis. Oh well … Try him in Spanish.

‘What can I do for you?’ I asked.

‘You prefer to speak Spanish, Doctor?’ His had evidently been learnt in Mexico.

‘My father was a lawyer. He told me never to discuss business in any language except my own. You said you had a matter of business to discuss.’

‘Yes.’

At that moment my food arrived, steaming and delicious.

‘Smells good,’ he said.

‘It is.’

‘Mind if I join you, Doctor?’

‘All right.’

As he was already sitting there, nothing short of an insulting ‘yes’ plus an appeal to Bernard would have removed him. Besides, I was curious. If he were a spy – and although Elizabeth’s judgements on friends and acquaintances are apt to be wild, she does with strangers have a certain flair – it might be interesting to discover what he wanted from me and to see how he would go about getting it.

In any case, he took my acquiescence for granted. Almost before I had given it he was ordering Langouste Lafcadio too, though with that wretched Languedoc instead of Hermitage. I reflected that if, after all, he wasn’t a spy, but a bona fide French-Canadian insurance man out to sell me an endowment policy ‘specially tailored for the up-and-coming young doctor’ – I had had that before – I was in for a very boring hour.

‘I’ll bet,’ he said, ‘that you think I’m here to try to sell you insurance.’

‘Yes.’

He shook his head sadly. ‘We’ve brought it on ourselves. Too many hard-sell artists with last year’s record figures to beat. My card there says I’m an assessor. Naturally, you don’t believe it. Having suffered already, you think that’s just tactical, a kind of foot in the door to keep it from closing before I can make the sales pitch.’

‘Possibly.’

‘It’s the same all over, Doctor, and not only in insurance. Salesmen give themselves fancy titles – area service adviser, complaints investigator, customer survey coordinator – because if they come out and say what they really are that’ll
be the end of the friendship. They’ll be blown before they start.’

If, I thought, he were indeed a spy masquerading as an insurance man he was certainly not without a sense of humour. For a moment, I thought of challenging him, but only for a moment. Whatever he really was, all I would get by way of an answer would be a lot of injured innocence and a shower of ATP-Globe credentials. Both would spoil my dinner and I wasn’t going to let him do that. So I just nodded and began to eat.

‘Know anything about insurance, Doctor?’ he asked. ‘About the actuarial side of it, I mean.’

‘Only what everyone knows. Insurance is gambling. Someone has to calculate the odds. On a race course, parimutuel or bookmakers do the work. In an insurance office there are actuaries and the stake money is called a premium.’

‘Well – ’ he grinned indulgently – ‘that’s one way of putting it.’

His wine came. When he had tasted it he returned to the attack. ‘All right, let’s talk about it in terms of gambling and odds. Example – a man gives his wife a fur coat worth ten thousand dollars. The value’s agreed. What are the odds against her losing it? That depends. Main risks are theft, destruction by fire and, say, accidental damage. But how serious are they? How many times has this couple’s apartment been burglarized? Do they travel a lot? Abroad too? Does she take the coat along? Is it vault-stored during the summer? And so on. Okay, we have actuarial data on fur-coat risk. They’re our guide-lines. But they don’t give a whole answer to our question. This particular man with this particular wife and life-style wants to bet that she won’t lose this ten thousand dollar equity. How much should his bet be? A fellow like me looks at the deal and comes up with a figure. He hopes he’s right.’

He was still speaking Spanish but adulterating it now with snatches of North American business jargon.

‘You must know a lot about fur coats,’ I said.

‘Me, Doctor? Not a thing. That was just an example.’ He drank a little of his wine. ‘I’m an assessor. I assess. But the equity I’m concerned with is life.’

‘Then you must know a lot about life.’

He gave me a coy look. ‘More about the other thing really.’

His langouste arrived. He surveyed it for a moment or two, assessing it no doubt, then went to work with care as if it were a small-boned fish that should have been filleted. As he picked away, probing the sauce suspiciously before every mouthful, he told me about life.

‘It’s not like a fur coat,’ he explained. ‘You can put a precise market valuation on that, or rather a licensed appraiser can. But with life the sky’s the limit. A husband buys insurance on himself for his wife’s benefit, say. How much he buys will depend on his earnings, actual or potential, his tax situation, how many children or other dependants they have and maybe on how much or how little he likes the lady. Many variables there, but so long as our medical examiner gives him a clean bill and he’s not an amateur free-fall parachutist, things like that, he can have more or less what he’s prepared to pay for at reasonably low rates. Actuarial life-expectancy tables are fairly definitive. That sort of insurance is easy to write.’

‘They don’t need you.’

‘Exactly.’ He looked faintly surprised that he had made himself clear so quickly. ‘It’s when you get outside the family relationship, the domestic field, that my problems start. They say that in business nobody’s indispensable. Well that may be true. But take a big electronic corporation with a lot riding on an R and D programme for some new type miniaturized circuitry. The man in charge of it will be pretty special. Ten to one they had to bribe him away from a competitor in the first place. One way or another they have a lot of shareholders’ dough invested in him and the project. Okay, he’s hit by a drunk driver running a red
light and killed. The widow gets his personal insurance and maybe a slice of cake from the drunk’s insurance carrier. What does the corporation get? A headache. Nobody’s indispensable, but being compelled to dispense with a key man suddenly because of some stupid accident can cost plenty. So, if it has any sense, the corporation covers the risk. In some situations, sense or no sense, they’re obliged to cover. Take a movie producer. He borrows money from a bank to make a three-million dollar picture. To do that he’s had to come up with a star who can carry it at the box-office. What happens if, halfway through production, the star falls off a rostrum and cracks his skull? Does the bank lose its dough? It does not, because part of the loan deal will have been that the star is covered by insurance. No cover, no loan.’

‘What about the actuarial tables? Don’t they work just as well for the research and development man or the film star as they do for anyone else?’

‘Not quite in the same way. In the first place you’re nearly always dealing in big amounts, millions of dollars. Second, the person insured is not himself paying the premiums. Third, and most important, it’s not his loved ones who are going to benefit if there’s a claim, but a corporate third party.’

‘You mean there’s room for dishonesty?’

‘Well there’s always plenty of room for that, isn’t there? I mean that there’s a greater disposition to it in some of these cases. A man who wouldn’t dream of making a false statement on a proposal if it might invalidate his personal life policy and so deprive his family, could maybe shrug off the prospect of depriving a corporation when he won’t be around to take the consequences anyway. Contrary to popular belief insurance companies like ATP-Globe don’t enjoy disputing claims. It’s bad for business as well as messy and expensive. So before we write this sort of cover we take care that we know what the score is. The
whole
score. Okay, the R and D man passes his physical, but
what if he makes a habit of running red lights himself? He may figure that, since all the moving violation tickets he’s got were acquired in another state, they don’t count when he’s answering the questions about his driving record here and now. As for that movie star, how do you know he isn’t on pep pills? Except on the day of the medical, of course, because he’s no fool. But how do you know? You check.’

‘It sounds more like private-eye work than assessing.’

I had thought that the jibe might irritate him. It did; although, as he was now on the point of getting down to brass tacks, he managed to conceal his irritation within a further offering of rhetorical questions.

‘Isn’t all research private-eye work, Doctor? Isn’t an enquiry into the possible relationship between virus infections and cancer a detective process?’ He put down his fork. ‘Isn’t every judgement made on a basis of information received in its essence a form of assessment?’

‘I suppose so, Señor Rosier. Does it matter much what you call it?’

He swallowed his annoyance with the unchewed food still in his mouth and pushed his plate away. ‘Too much tarragon for me in this sauce,’ he said fretfully.

‘But you didn’t come to St Paul to find out about sauces. Why did you come, Señor Rosier?’

He wiped his mouth, drank some wine and lit a cigarette. ‘Right now, Doctor, we have a proposal from a multi-national corporation for fifty million dollars worth of cover on the life of one Manuel Villegas or Manuel Villegas Lopez.’ He gave me a sidelong glance. ‘Surprise you?’

It did. I don’t quite know what I had been expecting, but it hadn’t been that. I shrugged.

‘It’s certainly a lot of money. What will you be quoting them in the way of odds?’

‘That depends on how we assess the risk. And, like I said, before we can do that we need information. That’s where we think you can help us, Doctor.’

‘I?’

‘Well you’re his doctor, aren’t you?’

‘He happens to have been my patient for the last three or four days, yes. I don’t see how …’

‘Word gets around.’

‘I dare say it does, but what I was about to say was that I don’t see how I could possibly be of help to you.’

‘Oh come now, Doctor!’