Siege at the Villa Lipp (19 page)

Once the bargain was struck, though, and I was seated at a little table writing conventional words of sympathy on a card to go with the flowers, and sealing it into one of the envelopes provided, she became curious. She knew from my accent that I was neither Swiss or Austrian, but she couldn’t decide whether I was a north or south German, nor could she figure out my relationship with the dead. When I had declined her offer of a receipt and she was ringing up the sale on the cash register, she remarked that they didn’t have many foreign visitors, buying flowers up there and asked me where I was staying. When I told her she looked genuinely concerned, but at once said bravely, but with even less conviction, what the receptionist had said, that lots of people liked the sound of the bells. She was no longer curious about which part of Germany I came from. She knew now that I would not be back, not in that quarter of Zurich certainly. When I left the shop, she was putting my condolences to the family Kramer into a little plastic bag that would protect them from the weather.

I lunched well, far away from the hotel, spent the afternoon in a cinema and had a good, early, dinner. The night, though, was dreadful.

The ear-plugs did little to help and the whisky less. Every time the clock struck, the windows rattled and you could feel vibrations through the bedsprings, or at least I fancied that
I
could; and, of course, after a bit you ceased to think of sleep and simply lay there waiting for the next assault.

At three in the morning I took a chair-cushion, the duvet and all the pillows and blankets I could find, and made up a sort of bed in the bathroom where, I had noticed, the sounds from the clock tower were slightly muted. There, I managed to doze through two lots of quarter-hour chimes before the bathroom floor made itself felt and four o’clock shattered the last hope of sleep. I sat up for the rest of the night in the one armchair, with the duvet over my head.

Excuses, it may be said. The man makes a fool of himself. Clearly, he has to blame someone or something, so he picks on a church clock and a sleepless night.

Not so. My mistakes on that occasion had all been made the day before. What is remarkable is that, having suffered the sort of sleepless night after which a man normally needs tranquillizers if he is to function at all, I succeeded in behaving with such decision and efficiency.

I sat in the armchair until five-thirty. Then, I shaved, bathed, put on my new white shirt and black tie and waited for daylight. At six-thirty, while it was still dark, I went down and consulted the night-duty concierge about the possibility of getting a taxi. He said that it might take a while, but that he would phone for one. When he had done so, I asked him about getting some coffee. The kitchen did not open until seven. Casting about in my mind for other ways of killing time, I thought of my bill and asked if I could pay it. Yes, I could. A surprise, until I caught the look of resignation on the concierge’s face. I was evidently not the first guest in the place who had been in a hurry to get away. Nor would I be the last. Very early departures were normal.

So, I paid the bill and said that I would return later for my bag. That was my first piece of luck.

A taxi came eventually and I went to the Carlton-Elite Hotel. There, in the restaurant, I ate a large American breakfast and read the German-language papers. Later, in the lobby, I read the Italian papers and did the Paris
Herald-Tribune
crossword. By then it was nearly time to go to the funeral.

To the doorman I
explained my wants; a taxi or a hire car with a driver who would take me to the crematorium, wait and then drive me to an apartment in the Hottingen district. That was where the Kramer apartment was. The doorman said that a hire car would cost no more for that sort of journey and would be more comfortable. He could have one there in five minutes.

It was a black four-door Taunus and the driver was an elderly man with beautiful iron-grey hair and a thin, sad face. He knew exactly where the crematorium was and obviously enjoyed funeral work, of which, he told me gently, he did a great deal.

‘Was the departed a close relative of the gentleman?’ he asked as he fought his way out of the central traffic.

‘No. He wasn’t a relation of any kind.’

‘A close friend of the gentlemen perhaps?’

‘A friend, a business friend.’

‘Ah.’ He cheered up at once and proceeded to give me some man-to-man advice. ‘Then the gentleman will probably be wise to sit at the back of the chapel during the service. That way, one is able to avoid at the conclusion too much involvement with the close relatives if one does not wish it. A brief word of sympathy to the chief mourner in order to show that one has been present is all that is necessary then before leaving.’

‘I expect you’re right.’

I spoke distantly and he got the message. I heard no more about the theory and practice of funeral attendance. Unfortunately, he had made me think.

I had, in fact, been ‘close’ to Kramer and his wife for several years. But was I a friend? Even a business friend? A more accurate description, and one that Krom may smack his lips over if he wishes, would be ‘co-conspirator’.

I recruited Kramer at an Interfiscal Society Congress in Monaco.

A director of one of the big-three Swiss banks had been there to give a lecture on his country’s bank secrecy laws. It was a good lecture, neither as defensive nor as plaintive as such public-relations exercises usually are, and I said so to a man from the same bank who had accompanied the director to the Congress. That was Kramer and he was strictly middle management. He was there, I gathered, partly so that the director should be seen to have some sort of ADC in attendance, and partly to latch on to any worthwhile business that might be floating around among the delegates to the Congress.

The director was the man with the personality, the financial mastermind. Kramer had his dignity, too, but it was that of the good soldier. He would rise no higher in the bank hierarchy. He obviously knew this and was, for an otherwise sensible man, surprisingly bitter over what he saw as an injustice. He spoke over-respectfully of his superiors in the bank. The sardonic smile, of which he made much use, was the final give-away. He was, I decided, open to an approach.

I made it over a drink in the Hotel de Paris.

‘What I
don’t understand,’ I said, ‘is the nature of the penalties that your secrecy laws impose. They seem so light.’

‘You think so, Mr Firman?’

‘Well, supposing an officer of your bank, a man in the head office where you work, is approached by a stranger who is - oh, what shall we say? - an agent of the American Internal Revenue Service? Not impossible?’

He restrained his inner amusement. ‘It has been known,’ he said solemnly.

‘Right. Now, supposing the agent offers this officer of yours three thousand dollars for the name of each and every American citizen on your books and the size of his account with you. What is to stop your man accepting?’

‘Assuming that our man, as you call him, has management status in the bank sufficient to give him access to the information requested, what would be most likely to stop him, leaving aside the question of how law-abiding he might be, would be the risk he takes if he accepts.’

‘A twenty-thousand franc fine and six months in jail maximum? With a hundred thousand dollars, and most likely much more, in an entirely different bank, what’s he got to lose?’

‘I don’t think our director made it quite clear, Mr Firman, that the penalty of fine and imprisonment you mention may be applied for every single offence proved against the accused and that the sentences would run consecutively. Ten offences against the secrecy law would mean five years in prison, twenty offences ten years.’

‘But with zero risk the question hardly arises, does it? Do you mean to tell me that it doesn’t happen all the time? I can tell you of a dozen cases. In one, the British Treasury got all they wanted on a dozen accounts for a measly two thousand dollars.’

He was drinking a silver-fizz, a long drink made of gin and egg-whites mostly. Some women like it and barmen usually provide a straw to drink it with to save the lipstick. He now removed the straw from his glass before he answered.

‘There is no such thing as zero risk, Mr Firman.’ He folded the straw in two and put it in an ash-tray. ‘And what I mean is that, for the kind of information of which you speak, three thousand dollars per item is too little by half.’

It was so easy that Carlo became convinced that Kramer was a provocateur and had to be persuaded that there was no risk on our side. Above all, he said, I must not put myself in the dangerous position of pretending to be an IRS agent. I asked Kramer once whether he thought I was from the IRS, and it was the only time I ever heard him laugh. He said that I was not the IRS agent type. I was never able to decide whether he had intended that as a compliment or not. In time he must have arrived at a very clear understanding of the ways in which the information he supplied me with was used.

One thing I can state with confidence. During the years of our association, Kramer received from us, and in my opinion earned, considerably more than that notional one hundred thousand dollars we had discussed in the Hotel de Paris.

When we reached the crematorium chapel where the service for Kramer was to be held, the tail-end of a procession of mourners was just mounting the steps to go inside.

‘Excellent timing,’ said the driver.

In front of the chapel entrance there was quite a large semi-circular forecourt with cars parked around the rim of it. A black Cadillac limousine with a driver waited by itself in front of the chapel steps. This was obviously the car that had brought the chief mourners and would presently take them away. There was, I noticed, a group of three men draped with cameras and camera equipment huddled by the entrance. I assumed that, since at least one senior bank official would be there to pay last respects to an employee, one photographer would be from the bank’s PR agency, with the other two covering or hoping to cover for local papers.

As I got out, the driver showed me where he intended to park. I followed the last of the mourners inside and was allowed by an usher to take a back seat. There was taped organ music - Bach, of course - coming through loudspeakers, and on a stone catafalque at the far end of the chapel was Kramer’s coffin. There was a single wreath of flowers on the coffin itself but the floor around the catafalque was covered with wreaths and flowers. I couldn’t see my roses but assumed that they would be somewhere there. It is difficult to be certain about numbers, but I would say that the searing capacity of the chapel was a hundred, more or less, end that over half the seats were occupied, mostly by business-suited men. A good turn-out.

The service was conducted by a Protestant pastor and was brief. Then, sliding doors rolled slowly into place, hiding the catafalque, so that the removal of the expendable inner shell of the coffin, the part with the corpse in it, to the functional section of the crematorium could take place unobserved by the mourners. The piped music began again. It went on for about ten minutes. When it ceased, the pastor went to Frieda Kramer in the front row of seats and said something to her. After a moment she stood up and, on the arm of a man who was probably her son-in-law, began to walk slowly back along the chapel aisle. The funeral was over.

The others started to follow. After a bit I joined the procession. A man near me told his companion that one collected an urn with the ashes in it a couple of days later.

Outside, Frieda was standing by an open rear door of the Cadillac as, one after the other, the business-suited men and the women in peculiarly awful hats came to commiserate and express solidarity.

I joined the reception line not because I wanted to but because I saw that she had spotted me. Since there was something I wanted from her, there seemed no point in giving offence by going direct to her apartment without uttering a word of sympathy there in public with everyone else. So, hat in hand, I went forward.

As I did so, Frieda said a word out of the corner of her mouth to the daughter who immediately reached inside the car and picked up something from the back seat. The people still between me and the Cadillac made it impossible to see what it was. The payers-of-respects shuffled forward once more.

I heard a woman mumbling to Frieda something about the deep sense of loss that everyone who had known her dear Johann was experiencing and hastily composed a similar speech for myself.

Finally, the man immediately in front of me sidled out of the way and my turn had come.

Until then, Frieda had been standing there stiffly with her elbows at her sides and both hands clasping her handbag just below her breasts as if she were afraid that someone there was going to try to snatch it. She had looped back her black veil and had her double chins held high ready for the attack. I found myself wondering if she already knew how surprisingly rich she was. As she acknowledged the mourners, you could tell who were friends or family and who were acquaintances she scarcely recognized. With the former she would allow herself to be embraced, with the latter she would incline her head stiffly, ignoring the proffered hands and simply saying, ‘Thank you, thank you.’ But always, so far, she had kept her handbag pressed against her solar plexus.

It was I who broke the spell. There could have been no question of my embracing her, so I did what the other acquaintances had done and proffered a hand for rejection.

That is to say, I
started
to proffer a hand. It was already on its way to her and the preliminary ‘My dear friend’ was already on my lips, when her handbag shot outwards and upwards, grazing my knuckles.

She was not, in fact, trying to hit me. She was simply using her handbag to point with so that there should be no doubt in any of the spectators’ minds about whom she was pointing at. She was pointing at me and, still pointing, when she spoke.

‘This,’ she said loudly and clearly to those present, ‘is Reinhardt Oberholzer.’