Siege at the Villa Lipp (13 page)

‘What makes you think I’ll let it through, Mr Lech?’

‘Unless you are attempting to solicit a bribe, which I doubt, why should you even think of stopping it? Tell me, Sergeant-Major, how do you define this new term or phrase you use, this “black marketeer”?’

‘One who has authorized dealings in goods that are rationed or otherwise in short supply.’

‘Is dealing with pre-war French brandy unauthorized? I hope you are not one of those socialists, Sergeant-Major, who object to the law of supply and demand controlling prices merely because persons like me risk their capital in order to make a fair profit.’

‘What is a fair profit?’

‘If I succeed in buying this brandy, I shall add forty per cent to the price I have to pay. Bearing in mind the fact that, in addition to my normal overheads in a transaction of this kind, I must suffer the mental strain of trying to convince a suspicious British Field Security policeman that I am not a crook, is that excessive? I shall be glad to let you have a bottle for the same price as that which I shall charge the General. Is that what you call black-market dealing?’

I had, after all, been warned that he was a lawyer. ‘All right, Mr Lech,’ I said, ‘let’s try a different commodity. Two nights ago, twenty thousand cigarettes were stolen off an American truck somewhere between Caserta and Venafro. How would you describe the acting of selling them?’

‘In civilized countries, Sergeant-Major, and in some uncivilized ones, dealing in stolen property has always been an offence.’

‘But one which you would never commit yourself.’

‘Certainly not. I have no need to commit it.’

‘You wouldn’t know, by any chance, who stole those cigarettes?’

‘No, but I know
how
they were stolen.’ He waited for me to ask him how.

‘Well?’

‘Would the knowledge be of use to you here in your area, Sergeant-Major, or are you thinking unselfishly more of your colleague in Venafro?’

He could not have made his meaning plainer. If I wanted to hear more, he expected a clear run to Bari and back, with no ‘technical’ obstacles in his path. It wasn’t a bad deal, so I nodded.

‘I’m thinking of both us now, Mr Lech, so your information had better be good.’

On his private island, ten years later, we analysed that part of the conversation as if it had been a game, a form of exercise.

‘I watched you very closely,’ he said. ‘You were throwing away an apparent advantage because you knew that it was essentially worthless. I could have had you in trouble with your own people within hours, and you must have known that too. Yet, you hung on by switching currencies. Sterling was out, but there was still the dollar. Your reply, reminding me of the more lasting penalties to be incurred by arousing American displeasure, could not have been bettered.’

The verdict of a bridge-player enjoying the benefits of hindsight. At the time he had protested vigorously.

‘Of course my information is good, Sergeant-Major. Indeed, it is impeccable. Most petty professional crooks share the same weaknesses. One of them is that they can never refrain from boasting of their successes. In the matter of the cigarettes, it was arranged in advance with the military policeman on the truck that the driver, his accomplice, would stop on the way and leave the load unattended for five minutes in order to deal with a sudden call of nature. The place arranged for the stop was near the village of Galleno. There is no soft shoulder on the road just there, so it would be an easy place for a truck to pull off, and then get back on again, without getting stuck in the mud. I dare say that a very quick search might find some of the cigarettes still in the village.’

‘Thank you, Mr Lech.’

I gave him back his AMGOT papers and then filled in one of the duplicated pro-formas we used for civilian vehicle movement control in the Bari area. While I was doing the filling-in I thought that I might as well see what his reactions would be to the question about anti-Fascists.

To my surprise, he did not laugh.

‘Here in the south,’ he said, ‘you will find only three kinds of person who will claim seriously that they have long been anti-Fascist. First, there are the village priests, or most of them, as you must know well. Then, there are the very few real Communists, getting old by now. They are mostly still underground awaiting their moment. And finally there are the madmen.’

‘Madmen?’

He stood up. ‘Who, unless he was a priest or a Communist or in some other way mad, would have resisted Party pressure to conform for twenty years? And who but madmen, could look around them now at the destruction of what little had been built up in this pitiful country and declare that it is better so or that the punishment was necessary?’ He brushed the thought away as if it were a cobweb across his face. ‘In the north, we shall no doubt find things very different. You will see. We will both see. There are Communists who will be less old and better organized. I am at present cut off from my family in Milan, but even when I last heard from my wife, before the arrest of Mussolini, the situation had already begun to change radically. The partisans had begun to organize themselves instead of talking.’

He took the pro-forma from me, examined my signature and then spelled out my name. ‘Is that right, Sergeant-Major? Good. I have no doubt that we shall be meeting again and I
wanted to be sure. May I ask, I
wonder, where you learned to speak Italian so well?’

‘If we ever meet again, Mr Lech, I
will be glad to tell you.’

‘Oh, we shall certainly meet again, Sergeant-Major.’ The smile had finally broken through. ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’

With a stiff little bow he turned and went up the stairs. By the time the racket of his car had died away and the corporal had been told why his prisoner had been sprung, signals had got me Venafro again.

My colleague was pleased with what I had to tell him and looked forward keenly to passing it on to the MPs commanding officer, whom he disliked. I did not trouble to tell him, though, about Carlo’s views on anti-Fascists. He would not have liked them and might even have considered such talk subversive.

Two days later I returned from a session at Corps to find a package on my table. The orderly on duty said that it had been delivered by an Italian in a car holding a movement permit signed by me. Inside the package was a bottle of Martell V.S.O.P. and a bill for two thousand lire made out on paper with a printed heeding in English.
CARLO LECH Doctor of Jurisprudence,
followed by a Naples address.

I wasn’t going to pay two thousand lire for a bottle of brandy even though it was certainly worth more than that at the time, and it would have been most inadvisable to keep the bottle without paying at all. The prissy corporal who had arrested Carlo would be sure to hear of it and start telling everyone that I had accepted a bribe. On the other hand, the idea of sending the bottle back seemed offensively high-minded. So, I went to the senior Divisional HQ warrant-officer and asked his advice. He agreed that the price made it look like a bribe but also thought it too good a thing to miss. His suggestion was that the bottle be raffled in the HQ mess with tickets at fifty lire apiece, all monies in excess of two thousand lire to go to the Mess Comforts Fund. The bottle was won by an Ordnance Corps staff-sergeant. We had an air courier service to Naples which I used to send Carlo his two thousand lire, in AMGOT notes, together with a typed receipt for his signature.

The receipt was eventually returned. Under his signature Carlo had written: ‘Many thanks. See you soon.’

I have said that I gave Krom and the witnesses a white Provençal wine before dinner. That is quite true. What I failed to mention was that this was no ordinary Provençal white. I mean the kind that may be drunk with, say, a fiercely garlicked bouillabaisse and survive the ordeal.

What I gave them was the very light-bodied, dry white that comes from the immediate vicinity of the small port of Cassis near Marseilles. There is not a lot of it to be had, and it is very good in its unobtrusive way. It is, though, quite delicate - a bouillabaisse would kill it stone dead - and has to be treated gently.

Unfortunately, the cook’s husband, who had the temerity to call himself a butler, was convinced that the only proper way to chill any white wine was to refrigerate it, or even, I suspect, to give it an hour in the deep-freeze.

I had already warned the fool against such brutality, but that night, possibly because it was so warm outside, he ignored my orders and served it far too cold. The result was that it tasted very much like water.

And that was how Krom proceeded to drink it. Yes, I know he had had a long, hot day, had sweated a great deal and was probably a bit dehydrated; but the bottle of Evian provided for him in his room should have taken care of that. What he seemed not to realize was that the liquid he was swigging down so thirstily - he consumed well over a bottle before dinner - had the normal alcoholic content of other white wines from the region of about eleven per cent. Or perhaps he did realize it. Perhaps he would have been happier if we had all had a boozy pre-prandial session of double dry martinis or schnapps.

I don’t know. I can only say that before dinner he certainly drank too much, and that during dinner he continued to drink too much and ate, once the pâté had taken the edge off his appetite, practically nothing.

In a way, I can understand his not feeling hungry. That evening, as far as he was concerned, was the culmination of many years of dedicated labour. I happen to believe that the dedication has been misguided and that the labour will ultimately prove to be fruitless; but that is not how he sees things at present, nor how he saw them. He believed that he was within reach of a goal, physically within reach of it. The files Melanie had brought in just as dinner was announced now lay on an adjacent coffee table. If he had stood up and reached out, he could have touched them, and he was having trouble keeping himself from doing so. His eyes flickered towards them constantly to make sure that they were still there. The burgundy that came with the veal went down almost as quickly as the Cassis.

‘Nice wine, Mr Finnan,’ Dr Henson remarked.

‘Thank you.’ It
was
nice for a wine that had only been bought two weeks earlier from a local merchant, but I had not expected her to notice it. I had thought of her more as a claret drinker.

‘But not nice enough to impair our judgement, eh?’ Krom beamed glassily on his witnesses.

‘One would hope,’ said Connell pointedly, ‘that while we are on an important field expedition nothing should be allowed to impair our judgement.’

‘There you are wrong!’ Krom stabbed a forefinger at Connell and then began waggling it like the arm of a metronome. ‘I will tell you in advance something that you would later have had to discover for yourselves.’ The metronome stopped and the forefinger began stabbing at me. ‘Where this man is concerned, no unimpaired judgement can be made. Why not? Because he is like one of those creatures of the cephalopod family such as the octopus or squid, which, when attacked or threatened with attack, discharges an inky liquid to form a cloud in the water behind which it may retreat.’

Yves nodded appreciatively. ‘Calmar,’ he explained to Dr Henson. ‘Good to eat, but only when cooked in the Italian way.’

Krom ignored the interruption. ‘And what does this ink consist of? What is its composition when Mr Firman has brewed it? I will tell you.’

‘We know,’ said Connell. ‘The answer’s hog-wash.’

‘Pardon?’

‘You’re forgetting, Professor. You gave us this lecture on the way down. Every time Mr Firman feels that he is in any way, even marginally, threatened, up goes the defence that, if anything not quite kosher has been done by anyone, ever, and he’s been around at the time, it was never he who was basically responsible for what happened. He, it appears, has always been one of life’s number-two men, always putty in the hands of some ruthless, clever, wicked number-one. Right?’

‘Well . . . ‘

‘I know I’m not putting it quite the way you did, Professor, but I think that’s roughly the way your readings on him come out when they’re processed. You call that sort of tactical fluid discharge octopus ink. I call it hog-wash. What do you call it, Mr Firman?’

‘In this case I think that I have to mix the metaphor a little and call it wishful thinking. Professor Krom clearly does not wish to believe that the cephalopod he caught was not the largest in the ocean. A natural reluctance on his part. But if he really believes that my version of the events which interest him is so little to be relied upon, I don’t understand why any of you is here.’

Connell said quickly: ‘Olé. Nicely fielded.’

Krom rumbled back into action. ‘Has it not yet come to your notice, Dr Connell, that when a structure of lies about a sequence of events is superimposed upon a schema composed of fixed points of known truth concerning those same events, more can be learnt about the liar by comparative analysis than can be learned by listening to and endeavouring to make sense of so-called confessions?’

‘I wonder, Professor,’ Dr Henson asked blandly, ‘if we could have a concrete example of that method of working in the case we are now discussing.’

‘Certainly. Mr Firman maintains that, at the time I identified him, he was
not
in control of a considerable organization running a small, but staggeringly lucrative, extortion racket. He also denies that his operation was based on information gained by the suborning of bank employees and others holding positions of trust. He claims instead, absurdly you may think, that he was the helpless agent of an Italian criminal named Carlo Lech.’

This was too much, even from Krom. I
stopped him. ‘Just a minute, Professor. I have never said that I was anyone’s helpless agent, and I have never said that my friend Carlo Lech was a criminal. I did say that we were for a time in partnership and that he was the older and senior partner. I also said that he was an extremely capable business man and that he had other partners besides me. At the time, you may remember, you told me that Carlo Lech did not exist, that he was a figment of my fertile imagination. Didn’t you use those very words, Professor?’