Siege at the Villa Lipp (24 page)

‘Full of holes,’ Connell explained.

‘And doth protest too much,’ said Henson in her Langridge’s voice, ‘against accusations that, as far as I know, haven’t yet been made.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you should all try reading it again, and more carefully.’

Krom swallowed the rest of his coffee and reached for more. ‘I myself have read it three times,’ he said; ‘and with each reading it has seemed less and less illuminating, except in one respect.’

‘I am relieved to hear that my failure has not been total.’

‘Sarcasm will not help you. What is illuminated so brilliantly is your determination to disclaim all responsibility for anything and everything concerned with this large-scale criminal activity except the humble part you played in it as a kind of superior, but none too competent, messenger boy.’

‘Incompetent, yes. Humble? I sincerely hope not. The last thing I want to do is give false impressions.’

‘Flippancy is even more tiresome than sarcasm, Mr Firman, so let us have no more of either. We at any rate are serious, and – ’ he whipped a folded sheet of notes from his shirt pocket - ‘to begin with, I propose to ask you a series of questions.’

‘As long as you understand that I may decline to answer those I don’t like, go ahead.’

‘You said that you had prepared a number of discussion papers and that you could be questioned on them. You did not say how many papers, only that they would cover your activities as Oberholzer for a period of three years. My first question is, what is the scope of the activities described? How is the material as a whole organized?’

‘It’s mostly anecdotal, I am afraid, like the first paper. So much is hearsay, of course. I can’t help that.’

‘No, not if you persist in trying to convince us of the existence of senior partners whose orders you meekly obeyed, or separate groups of evil men who did any dirty work that your leader might deem necessary. If you could abandon that pretence it would be helpful.’

‘I said that I would try to answer your questions, Professor, not debate your assertions. You asked about the scope of the activities described in the other papers. I have tried to answer your question. Dr Connell complains that the first paper has holes in it. Do you agree with him?’

‘I go farther. For me, it is in all respects unsatisfactory.’

‘Not exciting enough do you mean, Professor? Not enough murder and mayhem?’

Connell tried to take over. ‘He means that there’s too much shadow and not enough substance. For example . . .’

Krom stopped him with a look.

‘Dr Connell was about to raise a question which we all seem to have asked ourselves. Accepting for a moment the fiction that you were never a principal, only an agent, what about this debt-collection agency that you say was or is employed by your employers to extort their fees? Where is it based? How does it work? Please tell us all about this remarkable institution, Mr Firman.’

I smiled. ‘That is the subject of one of the papers you were asking me about.’

‘An entire paper?’

‘It was a complex organization. And please note that it no longer exists. It was originally based in Luxembourg, with branches in Hanover, Rome, Paris and London. It went out of business years ago.’

‘Soon after I saw you in Zürich, in fact.’

‘The two events were not related, Professor. In any case I’m sure you would prefer to read what I’ve written on the subject rather than have it piecemeal.’

Dr Connell stuck his neck out again. ‘Does what you’ve written about explain how you, that is they, got the money without the victims’ knowing where it went?’

I waited expectantly for Krom to intervene, but this time he let the question through without protest. No doubt he was curious himself.

‘I don’t think I understand,’ I said. ‘By victims you mean debtors, I take it.’

‘Call them what you like. I call them victims. Now, how did it function? I guess the process of collection would start with a letter saying that the Luxembourg Finance Corporation, or whatever you called it, had taken over the debt and so kindly pay up without further ado or get clobbered. Right?’

‘
I
didn’t call the agency anything, and the Lech-Firman partnership was very far from being its major client. Its name, by the way, was Agence Euro-Fiduciare.’

‘Meaningless, but looks respectable I guess. Okay. Now, how about that first move?’

‘It would be of the kind you described. It sometimes produced results.’

‘But not often?’

‘Not often, I would say, no.’

‘So then you got tough. Yes, I know.
They
got tough.’

‘When the agency purchased the debt from us they would naturally receive an account of the services we had rendered the client. This account would include a complete statement of the client’s financial situation according to our records.’

‘Everything
not
on record back home, you mean?’

‘A
complete
statement, as I said. This would include all assets, however held and where held, sometimes together with a summary of the last official tax return made by the client to his domestic revenue authority. Where exchange controls had been evaded, copies of the relevant documents would be provided instead. If, say, from some fringe of the sterling area, money had been transferred to finance a transaction in real-estate or gold, this would be documented as a reminder.’

‘Oh boy!’

‘At the same time new instructions about the way the debt was to be paid would be issued.’

‘I’ll bet they would. That was one of the holes I wanted to see filled in. How was it arranged so that Kleister, an
d
others like him who strongly resented and resisted being screwed, didn’t know, when they’d finally decided that they
had
to pay up, who’d been screwing them? Their first thought would have been you as the tax-consultant. Right?’

‘The partnership always dealt at arm’s length.’

‘You mean through cut-outs, I take it. Okay, so when things got tough, they weren’t able to find you. Right? But they
could
find Euro-Fiduciare, eh?’

‘The agency had its own methods,’ I
said austerely. The pieces of real meat I had to give were not going to be tossed over in response to the first yaps.

Connell didn’t like being told to wait. He tried jumping for it. ‘So do kidnappers-for-ransom,’ he said; ‘have their own methods, I mean. So do blackmailers and extortionists. But there is a moment all of them have to face. That’s the moment when they pick up the money. Okay, they tell the mark to leave it in the middle of a desert in used twenties and a transparent bag with “Don’t Fence Me In” painted on it in red, but they still have to go there and pick it up. That’s when things usually start going wrong. Their helicopter has engine trouble or the pilot turns out to be a gamma-minus navigator who puts down nowhere near the loot. The police have been brought in by the victim or his family after all. The bills have been chemically marked and are, used or not, traceable. Some cop or FBI man hidden behind a rock there watching the pickup gets bitten by a rattlesnake and yells. A gun goes off accidentally. Anything and everything can happen. How did the agency make sure that, whoever else got hurt, they didn’t?’

‘In my paper on the subject I give examples to show how the whole thing worked.’

I stopped there and poured myself the last of the coffee. Henson was sitting motionless with an unlit cigarette in one hand and her lighter poised in the other. Krom and Connell were both leaning forward expectantly. All three were now, metaphorically speaking, and indeed almost literally, slavering.

‘Tell us about it,’ ordered Krom.

I shrugged submissively but with no thought of obeying.

I knew that if they were allowed to gobble up all the food that had been prepared for them, just because the smell of it had reached their nostrils, there would be none left for tomorrow.

Yes, that’s how I was still thinking. I still hadn’t realized even then that, for me as host at the Villa Lipp, there wasn’t going to be a tomorrow.

‘It isn’t really all that difficult, Professor,’ I said. ‘Look at it this way. The popular jargon now calls those services Carlo gave the old black marketeers, ‘laundering money’. All the debt-collection people did was set up another sanitary process to suit their own special needs. In my paper on the whole subject, I call it, ‘waste-disposal’. Laundered money is money cleansed of its associations with pockets it has been in. Waste-disposal money just disappears into a sewage system, one with so many outfalls that no particular deposit can ever, once it has left the sink, be followed or traced to its ultimate destination.’

Krom looked sour. ‘Your metaphor is appropriately anal, Mr Firman, but I didn’t ask for metaphors. I want specifics, facts of the kind that a banker or a police accountant can get his teeth into.’

‘And facts you shall have,’ I said. ‘You’ll find them all in my next paper. For now, though, you’ll just have to be satisfied with paper number one and metaphors. Unless, that is, any of you would like to try solving the money-transfer problem that seems to worry Dr Connell. As a technical exercise, I mean. I don’t mind giving friendly advice.’

Krom’s lips tightened and he remained silent; but Connell wasn’t so fussy about his dignity.

‘What sort of friendly advice?’ he asked.

‘You know that banks all over the world transfer money to one another by means of what’s called the “tested-cable” system? You do? Good. Then you’ll also know that crooks have used tested-cables to swindle banks, often via their computers, out of millions of dollars which have proved to be untraceable. Well, if crooks can make untraceable transfers, think how much easier it must be when the payers are thought of as honest men and the payees are simple debt collectors.’

Henson made a cooing sound. ‘What an absolutely
brilliant
idea!’ she exclaimed.

‘No, Dr Henson.’

‘No what, Mr Firman?’

‘I will not be flattered into accepting with only a token murmur or protest the suggestion that using tested-cables was my idea. It wasn’t. The head of the collection agency thought it up.’

‘Oh? And who was he?’

I wasn’t falling for that one either. ‘He? It may have been a woman. I don’t know, Doctor.’

Krom gave his witnesses meaning looks. ‘You see, Mr Firman is a slippery fellow. Do you know that, in Brussels, he actually had the impertinence to tell me that most crime is committed by government, and that delinquency is a function of the class struggle?’

‘Oh dear!’ Dr Henson choked slightly on the cigarette she had at last lighted. ‘That sounds more like cut-price Trotskyism than anarchy.’

‘It’s double-talk,’ said Krom, ‘and I told him so. Quite unnecessarily, of course, because he is intelligent enough to know that himself.’ He turned his attention to me again. ‘We have heard the divided responsibility claim
ad nauseam,
Mr Firman. It is not accepted. You thought everything up.
You
were at the controls of the extortion machine you call a collection agency as well as those of the so-called tax-consultancy which kept it fed with information. Your version of the Oberholzer conspiracy is nothing but a pack of lies. What do you say to that?’

‘That you are impolite, Professor, as well as mistaken.’

‘Would you prefer me to call it the Firman conspiracy? What does the name matter? However you choose to masquerade now, you were the figure around which it all pivoted. Yours were the controlling hands, yours the organizing mind. That is the central, the essential, fact.’

‘Central and essential to your case it may be, Professor. That does not make it a fact. To a man of your academic standing and repute I hesitate to use harsh language in a discussion of this kind, and at the breakfast table too, but I must tell you, and in front of your witnesses, that at the centre of your case is what used to be known as an
idée fixe.
Nowadays, it’s called a hang-up.’

He said something loudly about my personal character. What he said was probably quite unpleasant and it may even have been true; but, as he said it in Dutch, I can’t be sure. I was about to ask him to translate, when we were interrupted by Melanie.

She did not come out on to the terrace, but called to me from a drawing-room window. I turned and she beckoned. Obviously, what she had to say was not to be overheard. I excused myself and went to the window.

‘What is it?’

‘Yves wants to see you. He didn’t want to show himself because he was rather dirty. He’s up in his room.’

‘Is it urgent?’ I didn’t want to leave just then in case they thought I was running away.

‘Yes, Paul. I think it is urgent.’

‘All right. You go over and tell them that I’ll be back in a minute.’

I went up to Yves’s room. He had been in the shower and was drying himself. He greeted me with the glum phrase that had begun to irritate me. Only this time he varied it slightly for emphasis.

‘Nous sommes vraiment foutus,’
he said.

‘Just tell me what’s happened. I’ll draw my own conclusions, Yves.’

He gave me the mournfully threatening look that had reminded Connell of a termite inspector he had known. ‘I have not forgotten that I am under your orders, Patron.’

‘Good. What’s happened?’

He smiled disagreeably. ‘What has happened is, Patron, that I am becoming more nervous every minute. Have you been all over this house?’

‘Most of it. Why?’

‘Then you will know that on the attic floor there are two windows from which, if one keeps moving from one to the other, one can in daylight see practically all the land surrounding this house.’

‘Yes.’

‘At sunrise I moved up there to keep watch with binoculars. At about six-thirty, I saw something I didn’t like. It was on that piece of land beyond the lower road to the right of the bay.’

‘You mean the headland with the tamarisks on it?’

‘Those small trees? Yes. There are bushes too. There was a person there.’

‘That land isn’t on this property. It belongs to the commune, I think. What sort of person?’