Siege at the Villa Lipp (20 page)

At the same moment several other things happened.

A blunt instrument hit me quite hard on the right shoulder. It was the edge of a brief-case wielded by the daughter. The brief-case must have been the object she had taken from the back seat of their car.

‘There are your papers, Herr Oberholzer,’ she snarled, and let go of the brief-case.’

As I caught it, I heard in the sudden silence that had fallen the clack of an SLR camera shutter. Almost at the same moment, a second photographer let fly with electronic flash. Both of them immediately moved in on me for more pictures.

Krom says that he was right behind the photographer with the flashgun, though I
didn’t see him.
I
don’t say he wasn’t there, just that I didn’t see him; and the fact that I didn’t see him doesn’t surprise me in the least.

He says that I looked stunned. I
was
stunned, I have a mind that is capable of working quite quickly to solve reasonably simple equations and, as I caught the brief-case, my mind had informed me with breathtaking clarity that I was in some danger and - though I deplore the vulgarity there are times when one must be forthright - perilously close to finding myself up shit creek.

After the brief, horrified silence from everyone, except the cameramen who went on taking pictures, I decided that it was time to go. So I put the brief-case under my arm and then, with a little bow to Frieda, turned and walked over to my hired car.

The driver had neither heard nor understood what had happened but he had seen the photographers at work. That meant only one thing to him. He grinned as he opened the car door for me.

‘I see that the gentleman is a person of importance,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

All
I
saw was a police car parked thirty metres away with a plain-clothes man leaning through the window to use the radio. His eyes were on the car I was in and he was obviously calling in its registration number.
I
have never been in a police identification line-up and been tapped by witnesses as the guilty party, but at that moment I learned exactly how it must feel to be in that predicament.

‘Get moving,’ I said.

‘To Hottingen, sir?’

‘No. There is no need for that now. Just go, but go slowly for a moment.’

He was going slowly anyway down the long crematorium driveway, but I still had to have some time in which to think.

I had been set up by the Kramer women and publicly identified as Oberholzer. Photographs had been taken of me, but of no one else at the funeral. The police had been in on the deal. I had been given a brief-case. It was new and nasty, the kind of thing that could be bought for a few francs at a cheap stationers, and I did not think that there were papers or anything else in it. There had to have been a reason for their having given it to me, but any attempt at analysis of the
kind
of reason would raise questions that I couldn’t possibly answer at that moment. I had too many questions to cope with already. The brief-case could wait. The over-riding factor was the police involvement. What offence had I committed under the Swiss Criminal Code?

Well, I could be said to have induced a bank employee to breach the secrecy laws. That was an offence. But where was the witness to support a case against me? Kramer was dead. Frieda? She was co-operating with the police, it appeared, but why? And what would her evidence against me be worth in court? Nothing, because I would simply maintain that Kramer had approached me. What lies he may later have told his wife were no concern of mine. On the other hand, the Swiss police had a way of putting a foreign suspect in jail and leaving him there for a few months while the judicial authorities mulled over the possible charges that might be brought against him.

The first priority, then, was to get rid of the car with which I was associated, the one in which I was riding, the one with a driver who would both talk and invent. Next, I had to get out of the canton of Zurich and then out of Switzerland itself as quickly and as unobtrusively as possible.

‘We’ll go direct to the airport,’ I said.

‘At once, six.’

Only then did I open the brief-case.

I had been right about there being no papers in it, but it was not empty, inside, were two of those transparent plastic slip-covers that many European businessmen use to keep loose papers or small amounts of correspondence tidily together without too many paper-clips. I knew that Kramer had used them because, on one of the rare occasions after our first meeting when we had met outside Switzerland, he had shown me how he kept the various sets of document copies that he thought I should see, after he had returned the originals to their proper places.

The volume of useful paper - statements of account, buy and sell orders in respect of investments, yearly audit sheets - had been small and those relating to the persons or corporations in which we were interested at any one time he had been able to keep in a single attache-case. It had been fitted out with one of those concertina-like contraptions that turned it into a miniature filing-cabinet. Into each division went one of the plastic slip-overs. Along the outer edge of each was stuck an identifying strip of Dymo embossing tape with his own code name for the account holder printed on it.

He had always, for ‘sensitive accounts’, used blue tape instead of the normal black. Sensitive accounts were those belonging to clients of the bank who had been judged ‘unpredictable’ - that is to say, marginally insane by ordinary standards - and who remained clients only by virtue of the size of their funds and the voting power of their shareholdings.

Both the empty slip-covers in the brief-case his daughter had given me still had their code name tapes on them, and both were blue. One was kleister and the other torten. Kramer had had a love-hate thing about cakes and pastry - he had always been overweight - and his choice of blue names had invariably been used as a reminder that, for him, such things were bad. I knew Kleister and Torten all too well. The former was a Spanish land-owner, the latter the founder and board chairman of an American pet-food manufacturing outfit with European subsidiaries. They had in common two things: both were exceedingly rich and both suffered from that kind of obsessional madness which has been called, when it has affected whole families, vendetta or feuding, but which in their case may best be described as acute personalized revanchism. Or, to put things more simply, pure bloody hatred of one particular group of their creditors.

Those two had been the most persistently difficult of the clients monitored by Kramer, and in the end Carlo had felt obliged to discipline Torten. With the Spaniard, Kleister, the threat of discipline had been sufficient because he was more vulnerable. The mere possession of a foreign banking account of the kind he had was a serious offence under the Franco regime. Torten had chosen to do battle with the Internal Revenue Service, but Kleister had paid our fees. On the other hand, Kleister had also employed an expensive international private enquiry agent to identify his ‘persecutors’. By one of those strokes of ill-luck against which not even a Carlo Lech can insure himself, the enquiry agent discovered - not because he was all that clever, but because Torten, when drunk, could be monumentally indiscreet - that the method of paying his fees that Torten had been instructed to employ was the same as the one his client Kleister had described. So, he brought the two men together.

Kleister went to America - the terms of Torten’s bail pending his final appeal had involved surrendering his passport - and an alliance was concluded. A council of war followed at which it was decided that as soon as they had discovered who we really were and where we were to be found, they would have us killed.

The expensive enquiry agent had hastily washed his hands of those particular clients. Carlo’s response, when word of the threat had filtered through to him, had been to demand a bonus payment from Kleister and to furnish the IRS with a supplementary dossier on Torten.

That had been over a year earlier. Kleister had paid the bonus and Torten was serving a prison sentence of three years for tax evasion, having already paid a heavy fine for the same offence. It was expected that he would be put on probation after serving a little over a third of his sentence. We had heard no more talk of our being sought out and lulled. It had seemed likely that K and T were at last beginning to behave rationally.

The sight of those two names in that brief-case, though, gave me a peculiar feeling, chiefly one of anger. I had no doubt that they were there with the knowledge of the police. What was I supposed to do? Panic and throw myself under a bus? Tell them what the words really meant? Give them the missing recipes for Kleister and Torten a la Kramer? Beg for mercy? Confess to some unspecified crime? Drop dead?

I shoved the things back in the brief-case and very nearly wound down the window with the idea of throwing the whole lot out. Then I thought of how upsetting that would be to the driver, and calmed down. Anyway, we were nearing the airport.

When we got there I told him to go to the Departure area and murmured something about the urgent necessity of my getting a plane that would, if I changed at Frankfurt or Munich, get me to Hamburg that afternoon. Then I paid him liberally, saw him drive away and went through to Arrivals.

I had to assume that the police had put out some sort of alert on me, so I hadn’t much time; but there were two things that had to be done before I started running.

In the Arrivals area among the rental car company desks was one belonging to the company I had used for the car from Frankfurt the previous day. So I told them where the car was on the park, gave them the ticket for it, turned in the keys and paid with my Oberholzer credit card. The police could make what they liked of that. I hoped it would tend to confirm what the driver would tell them, that I was on my way to Hamburg. It would take them ten more minutes or so to find out that there was no Oberholzer booked on any of the flights out to West Germany destinations.

The other thing I had to do was contact Carlo, or at least get an urgent message to him. I put the call through to Milan with the help of the restaurant telephonist, who didn’t mind earning twenty francs for pressing a few buttons on her new PBX. It was just before noon and Carlo hadn’t yet gone to lunch. I told him cryptically as much of the bad news as he needed to know at that moment and what I proposed to do about it. I then asked for immediate courier assistance and specified a rendezvous. Carlo did not argue or question, but said that I might have to wait a little. Then he hung up.

I went back outside to the bus stand. There was one just leaving. I rode, as I had done the day before, as far as the Haupt-Bahnhof; but this time I took a train from there, the one that left just after one o’clock for Geneva via Lausanne. There was a restaurant car but I stayed away from it. The man who clipped my ticket between stops along the way might remember me if asked, but there was no point in adding a waiter to the list of those who had seen the last of Reinhardt Oberholzer.

At Geneva the wind was even colder than that in Zurich, but there was no snow and the sun was shining. I walked to the rendezvous, an English tea-room in the rue des Alpes.

I had to wait an hour before the courier arrived. She was a small, stocky Frenchwoman in her mid-sixties, very lady-like but also quite formidable. A few months earlier two louts had attempted to snatch her handbag in the Paris Metro. Both had had to receive hospital attention for severe cuts and bruises before being charged by the police. The cuts appeared to have been inflicted with a razor blade.

She came into the tea-room, paused for a split second to locate me and then beckoned.

‘You’d better come now,’ she said. ‘I’m double-parked.’ With that she left.

I had the money to pay the bill ready on the table. All I had to do was get my coat from the rack by the door and follow.

She had a Renault with Paris registration, and the moment I was in the passenger seat beside her she was off. There was no conversation; she just drove, quickly and carefully, until she came to a main crossing where she turned on to the Avenue Henri-Dunant. Unless you drive north or north-east to Lausanne or the Jura, practically every main road out of Geneva will very soon take you out of Switzerland and into France. The Avenue Henri-Dunant joins the road to Annecy and I thought she was going to take that. Instead, she turned suddenly into a big filling-station with an automatic car-wash.

It was one of the men couriers, who, when those things began to be introduced, first pointed out what an excellent security device they could be. For the space of about a minute and a half it was possible to cut yourself off completely from the world outside. There was no bug yet invented that could penetrate the defences of a car going through a tunnel of steel and concrete to the accompaniment of the sounds of huge brushes spinning against a car body and water being sprayed through dozens of high-pressure jets.

So, for a time, even though the chances of a courier’s car having been bugged were small, all message exchanges of a confidential nature were delivered, whenever possible, inside cars travelling through car-washes. Silly really, because the message either had to be shouted above the din or written out and handed over. After one or two mistakes had occurred messages were always written and, since no bug was going to pick them up anyway, the use of car-washes for security purposes died out. One of the fringe benefits of the experiment, though, was that for the year or two it lasted, the trade-value of couriers’ cars showed a slight increase.

This courier had written the message out before we got to the car-wash.

Carlo had been brief:
Phase out entire Paris operation, repeat entire, then come and see me soonest.

Before the car was under the blast of the hot-air dryer she had retrieved the message, put a match to it and mashed the remains in the ashtray.

We left Switzerland and entered France in the early-evening commuter traffic. Nobody on either side bothered with passports or anything else. Once over the frontier, the courier made a right turn and drove via Bourg to Chalon. From there I went by train to Paris.