Siege at the Villa Lipp (17 page)

‘A deposit account.’

He made his spitting noise again. ‘Now, I
know
you’re lying. If you had opened anything at all in my behalf, it would have been a discretionary investment account. No, let’s cut the crap now, eh, Pauly? I’ve done my homework, I figure that, over the last eight years you’ve had them to play with, you and Mr Lech have made a cool million out of my seventy-three thousand. That would be par for the course. Now, you tell me you’ve doubled my money plus a few bucks, less your fees of course, and ask me what my complaint is. Are you serious?’

What did he think we were? Nice guys about to vote him a pension as sucker of the year? He had indeed done some homework, but not as much as he thought. In fact, thanks to the Lugano bank’s post-war policy of investment in German industry, we had made over two million dollars out of his particular nest-egg. Now, it remained only to get rid of the man.

‘How would you like your money, Mr Vic?’ I asked. ‘A draft on the Chase-Manhattan in Geneva? A telex transfer to your own bank in the United States? Cash?’

He examined us both carefully for a moment or two without answering. Carlo began tapping on the desk-top with his ruler.

Then, Vic broke his own silence with a short laugh. ‘The shyster and his shill!’ he said.

Carlo stopped tapping and I saw that he had gone quite pale. His colloquial English was not good, but it was good enough to understand the word ‘shyster’. Rather than let him say something he might regret, I got in first.

‘Don’t push your luck, Vic,’ I said. ‘We could always ship it back as truck tyres. It’s cash, I
take it. Dollars in century bills?’

‘Fifties or centuries, but I want them right now.’

Carlo reached for the intercom and told the matriarch to get the bank on the phone. That was unnecessary because we kept a cash float of half a million dollars in a safe deposit box. He was playing for time; to think, presumably, though what there was to think about just then I did not immediately understand. When the bank was put through, he said first that I would shortly be requiring access to the safe deposit vault. Then he told the procurator at the other end to wait and, looking at Vic, asked him in Italian if, in view of the large sum of money he would be carrying, he would like a bank escort to his hotel.

I gathered, correctly, that this was a test question to see if Vic understood Italian. When it was evident that he did not, Carlo repeated the question in English.

No, Vic did not need an escort, thank you very much; he could take care of himself.

Carlo said goodbye to the procurator and then went on speaking in Italian to me.

‘Paul, I want the receipt from him for the money to be witnessed by someone at the bank. Make a ceremony of it. And I particularly want those old notarized receipts of mine back. Then, I want to know as soon as possible which hotel he’s in. Offer to share a taxi with him and drop him off. Then phone me the name of the hotel immediately. Unless it’s within a couple of minutes of here don’t wait until you get back.’

It was not the moment to ask him what he was up to, so I went ahead and did exactly as I had been told.

Vic made difficulties about signing for the money, but the actual sight of it and the solemnity of the bank officials quietened him down eventually. The old receipts he handed over without a murmur. Only about half the money was in hundreds and he had trouble stuffing it all into his nice new brief-case. He rejected my suggestion that we share a taxi - now that he had the money he seemed scared of me - but he let me flag one down for him and tell the driver where to go.

I called Carlo from the nearest cafe and reported.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘You have all the receipts? Splendid. Now please bring them back here, Paul.’

When he had the originals spread out on the desk he looked at them as if they were old and much-loved friends.

‘How could such an otherwise cautious man be so stupid?’ he asked. ‘If they had been mine, I would have set light to every single one myself before I handed you its ashes.’

‘He was too worried about the receipt that
he
had to sign.’

‘That is why I asked for it. Oh yes, it will be useful, but it will be the first ones which will count. Look at the dates! How interesting, and how devastatingly conclusive.’

‘Conclusive of what?’

He did not answer straightaway. ‘What is that name he called you, Paul?’

‘Shill?’

‘Yes. What does it mean?’

‘Mostly it’s the slang word for a professional gambler’s accomplice who is there to make winning look easy, but con-men and other crooks also use shills. A shill is a person, man or woman, who persuades the victims to come and try their luck, to let themselves be swindled.’

He sighed. ‘One would think we had
lost
this foolish man’s money, instead of doubling it. Well, he must pay for his insolence. As soon as you phoned me I arranged to have him tailed from his hotel.’ He responded to my raised eyebrows, ‘I wish to know what he does with the money.’

‘If he has any sense he’ll put it in a bank.’

‘Yes, but which bank and where? It is too late today, but perhaps he will travel overnight. Where to? Lausanne? Basle?’

A wild thought occurred to me. ‘You’re not thinking of taking it back off him, Carlo?’

‘It would serve him right, but we are not thieves. No, I simply wish to know which branch of which bank he chooses.’

Then what?’

‘The American Internal Revenue Service pays a ten per cent reward to informers who give them proof that a US citizen has failed to declare income.’

‘You’d inform on Vic?’

‘I? Great heavens, no! I have an associate in New York who will do that. I will just send him the evidence. Think of the wringing hands when the IRS descends on our friend Mr Vic with their demands for back audits. What was the source of these large sums obtained while you were serving in the army and for which we hold receipts? Why did you no report them? You refuse to answer because to do so might incriminate you? Then answer this. We have evidence here of a capital gain by you of over eighty thousand dollars. Why was that not reported? Where is it? We’ll tell you. It’s in such-and-such a bank. And before you add perjury to the rest of the crimes you’re going to be charged with, let us remind you of this. Swiss bank secrecy doesn’t protect persons who can be shown to have committed criminal offences like stealing US army property. What a fine time they will have!’

I was beginning to feel sorry for Vic. ‘You’d do that to him for a ten per cent pay-off?’

‘Of that pathetic reward I shall not accept one cent,’ he said contemptuously. ‘My reward will be the satisfaction of
my
sense of the fitness of things. He insulted me. He insulted you. He will be punished, as a criminal, such as he, deserves to be punished, for his crimes against his country’s laws.’ He sat up very straight in his chair and gazed fixedly at the Moretto landscape on the wall behind me. Finally, he made the cobweb-brushing gesture he still used to punctuate thought processes. ‘All this has taught me a lesson, Paul,’ he added.

‘You mean that, if we’re going to blow him to the IRS, he’s liable to blow us too?’

‘Certainly not! What crimes have
we
committed? I was merely reflecting that it might be time for us to spread our wings again and to fly in a new direction.’ He raised his elbows sideways, dropped his hands, then tensed his fingers into talons as if he were a bird of prey about to kill.

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. In future, Paul, we will have no more dealings with illegitimate money. It is contagious, it carries infection.’ One of the talons brushed away yet another cobweb. ‘By devoting ourselves diligently to the new arts of tax avoidance, I think that we may be able to create for our clients, and certain others, impenetrable and indestructible shields against the rapacity of governments.’

He went on to explain in detail what he had in mind.

I have admitted that, after he had recovered physically from his illness, I sometimes found Carlo a little frightening. The revenge he had taken on Vic, simply because the man had been foolish enough to speak his mind, worried me quite a bit, but the plan of action he then proceeded to lay out was wholly rational.

The idea derived from his belief - a widely-held belief, I know, but one that was in his case based on special knowledge - that the very rich are always also very stingy.

Thus, if you were able to show a rich man how he could avoid paying large amounts of money to the government which presumed to tax him and his corporate enterprises, he, in his turn, would be ready to pay a much, much smaller amount of money to you in the shape of a fee.

At least, he would be ready to do so for a time. That, sooner or later, he would become reluctant to pay you as he had previously been reluctant to pay the tax collector, was inevitable. Ultimately, he would probably try to cheat you as, once upon a time, he had tried to cheat the tax man. Therefore, you bore that possibility in mind from the start, armed yourself with appropriate sanctions and made sure that, if or when the attempts to cheat you were made, simple mechanisms to ensure their failure were triggered automatically. Ideally, Carlo thought, our relationship with our clients should be one of mutual, and permanent, trust.

Who but Krom could have had the breathtaking audacity to speak in this context of ‘international parasitism’ and make wild allegations about a ‘multi-million-dollar extortion racket’?

I am not the only one who has found Krom hard to take.

Had our stay at the Villa Lipp not been cut short so suddenly, Connell and Henson would surely have ended by quarrelling with him. Obviously, they respected his earlier work and so were prepared to put up with a certain amount of his nonsense, including a lot of tipsy pontificating; otherwise, they would not have been there; but even on that first night, before we knew that things had gone seriously wrong and that we were in danger, there were signs of strain.

Krom had objected strongly to Connell’s asking me questions; and I had made a bet with myself that, in due course, I would hear him insisting just as strongly that only he was entitled to receive my ‘papers’, and that only he would have the right thereafter to decide who saw how much of what was in them. I won the bet too.

When the coffee had been served, I told Melanie to pass round file number one to our guests. Krom stopped her instantly by clutching at one of her arms. He was as stricken as a child who has just been told that the bright new toy which was to have been his alone must, after all, be shared.

‘I think, Mr Firman,’ he said with a show of teeth, ‘that, in your own interests as well as ours, the distribution of all documents ought to be strictly limited.’

‘I quite agree, Professor,’ I stared hard at Melanie’s arm until he released it. ‘There are only three copies of that document, one for you and one each for your witnesses. I shall insist that the last two be returned to me to destroy as soon as they have been read and compared with your text.’

He tried to think of an inoffensive way of saying that he did not want his witnesses having access to material that was really his, and his alone, in case they stole bits of it from him. Naturally, he failed; there is no inoffensive way of saying such a thing. He tried stepping around the difficulty.

‘Notes should be taken.’

‘Of course. And I am sure that they
will
be taken,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Dr Connell has a tape-recorder and Dr Henson has a shorthand-writer’s notebook in her suitcase. I dare say she also has an excellent memory.’

Henson suddenly laughed and received a glare from Krom.

She at once raised both hands in apology. ‘Sorry, but I had an unworthy thought,’ she explained. ‘It crossed my mind, only for an instant but quite distinctly, that Mr Firman couldn’t care less how many notes are taken because he has no intention of letting us see or hear anything that could in any way compromise him.’

Yves broke in angrily. ‘There, Doctor, you are greatly mistaken. This meeting alone compromises him, and us.’ His outstretched hand included Melanie.

‘Don’t worry, Mr Boularis,’ Krom tried clumsily to pat him on the knee and seemed to resent Yves’s instinctively flinching sway. ‘But don’t deceive yourself either, or let him deceive you,’ he went on with one of his saliva sprays. ‘Your friend Firman was compromised years ago when I saw him in Zurich.’

Connell stifled what might have been the start of a low moan. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘we’re back to the celebrated Oberholzer-Firman identification. Are we now going to be allowed to hear exactly what was so compromising about it, or is that still “pas devant les enfants”, Professor?’

He sounded as if he had become as tired of Krom as I had. Before the elder statesman had time to do more than glare and show teeth again, I had signalled to Melanie.

This time she went the other way round the table so that the witnesses received their copies of the file first.

‘Read all about it,’ I said to Connell.

The witnesses’ behaviour towards me since then has left much to be desired, inevitably perhaps; but I still regret that security considerations, now known to have been irrelevant, prevented my giving them more of the truth than I did. They might have learned something, not only to their own advantage, but, of more immediate consequence in this time of trial, to mine.

This is how it really came about that Krom saw me in Zurich.

The warning telegram did not reach me until late on Tuesday, over twenty-four hours after Kramer had been taken ill.

The text of it said only that he was in the emergency heart unit of the Kantonsspital in Zurich. The signature, however, was in a code form meaning that not only was there material urgently awaiting collection but also that the strictest security precautions should be taken. Use of the code signature showed that, ill or not, he had written or dictated the telegram himself and that his mind was still functioning.

I was in Lisbon at the time and the message had been re-transmitted from Milan by Carlo; and
I
mean by Carlo personally, not by some trusted underling to whom the job had been delegated. If that sounds an odd way to run a business making net profits in the five-million-dollar-plus region I shall have to agree, it was odd; but that was because the business was odd.