Siege at the Villa Lipp (5 page)

He was still trying to sell me the proposition that, no matter what game we ended up playing, he would hold a winning hand.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘So it was unnecessary to use threats. All I had to do was speak to him using his old German code-name.’

‘I see. And you didn’t consider that a threat?’

He swallowed most of his drink - talking had made him thirsty - and savoured it with a genteel little smack of the lips before he answered.

‘No,’ he said finally, ‘I didn’t consider it a threat. Nor, by the same token, would I consider that the conflicting interests which will be the basis of our collaboration need be thought of as threats by either of us. We are both sensible men, are we not?’

‘I am beginning to have doubts, Professor. That is the third time you have spoken of our collaborating. Collaborating in
what,
for heaven’s sake?’

This time he showed me all his teeth and a stretch of molar bridgework as well.

‘I intend,’ he said, ‘to make a complete, full-scale case study of both you and your remarkable career, Mr Firman. For that, I shall require your close collaboration. Total anonymity will, of course, be guaranteed so that nothing need be left unsaid. You will be the great Mr X.’ He gave a little snicker. ‘In other words, I intend to make your craft and its associated skills as well understood by, and as recognizable in, the law-enforcement agencies of the world as common-or-garden burglary is now. Yes, Mr Firman, I intend to make you famous!’

Mat was in London, negotiating, on behalf of Chief Tebuke and the native population of Placid Island, the final settlement of their claim against the Anglo-Anzac Phosphate Company; or rather he was going through the motions of negotiating on their behalf. Everyone who counted knew that he was in fact negotiating more for his own ultimate benefit than anyone else’s. They also thought that they knew what he wanted for himself out of the settlement. His connection with, then amounting to control of, the Symposia Group was at that time a very well-kept secret.

We maintained a fully-staffed office in Brussels. With its help, I was able to reach him by telephone soon after seven.

The emergency routine in use at the time involved sending a preliminary alert through a London cut-out via telex. That brought him to a safe phone to receive the call. Inevitably, though, there was some delay. I filled it by re-examining the file on Krom.

It had been his Berne lecture that had brought him to my attention, and it was to the lecture that I now returned.

One of the things that had struck me about it at the time had been his casual use of the word ‘criminal’. In my opinion and, I think, in that of most modern lexicographers, a criminal is one who commits a serious act generally considered injurious to the public welfare and usually punishable by law. Krom seemed to believe that anyone possessing the imagination and business planning skills needed to evolve a new way of investing time and money in order to make a profit, was automatically a criminal. The wretch need not have committed any illegal act to earn him the distinction. If he had been original and his originality had succeeded, that was enough. For Krom he stood condemned.

This is Krom on my old friend Carlo Lech’s last fling: ‘The classic coup by Able Criminals - we do not know exactly how many were involved, but it is believed that there were four partners in the venture - is, of course, the famous butter affair. For the benefit of those delegates here whose governments have seen fit to abstain from or avoid, membership of the EEC, I should explain that between member states there is an elaborate system of import-export subsidies. What these clever rogues did was to buy a large consignment of butter, a trainload of the stuff, and send it on a European tour, claiming each time it crossed a frontier, subsidies for its fictional transformation into some other butter-fat product. At the end of the tour they sold off the butter for what they had paid for it and pocketed between them ten million Deutschmarks in subsidies. Later operators in this field have not even troubled to buy the goods they manipulate in this way. Their transactions exist
only o
n paper. Value-added tax rebates of nonexistent but thoroughly-documented export transactions are currently in vogue. EEC regulations are constantly being changed, of course, to stop up the holes in them, but new holes continue to appear. Needless to say, even when such a criminal, or the corporate cover behind which he works, has supposedly been identified, there is no effective means of instituting a prosecution.’

Well of course there isn’t. No criminal law has been broken, and nothing injurious to the public welfare has occurred; not, that is, unless you consider the spectacle of EEC bureaucrats going about with egg on their faces injurious to the public welfare. There are, in fact, large sections of the European public who find such sights highly beneficial, and worth every centime or pfennig of their cost.

And not even Krom, by the way, had been altogether unaware of the inconvenient questions which his theories invited. He had dealt with them, cutely, by asking them before his audience could do so.

‘Why, I may be asked, should the word “Able” be used to categorize this well-adapted but minor sub-genus within the human race? Would not the term Successful Crook be at once more accurate and more suitable? My answer must be that it would not. The word “crook” is imprecise and the word “successful” would in this context be misleading, for it could be taken to mean “fortunate”.’ The Able Criminal is, no doubt, fortunate in that he is successful; but he is successful not through some happy series of accidents or because the police authority concerned with him is incompetent; he is successful always and only because he
is
able.

‘Why, then, is he a criminal at all? What, if he really exists, can possibly motivate him? The desire for wealth and the power that goes, or is said to go, with it? Hardly. Men capable of planning and executing the butter coup or having the fiscal wit to create illusory businesses which make real profits could surely become multi-millionaires quite - I was about to say “legitimately” - perhaps I should say instead “legally”‘. As legally, anyway, as unit trust managers or currency speculators are said to conduct their respective operations.

‘But our Mr X is not attracted by the blessings of legitimacy and legality, only by the extent to which the appearances of them may be put to use. He is a white-collar criminal in the sense that he is an educated one, yes; but his crimes are the products not of breaches of trust - the hand in the till, the falsified accounts - but of breaches of faith. And the faith he breaches is that of faith in established patterns of order. He is, in short, an anarchist.

‘What kind of anarchist? Well, of one thing we can be certain. He will not be stupid. He will not have taken to his heart the works of the ineffable Marcuse, nor troubled himself with the ravings of those hapless social philosophers, those paladins of the lollipop set, Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord. He will believe neither in the Spectacular Society nor in Situationist Intervention. He will not be a carrier of bombs in plastic shopping-bags. But his tactical thinking will have much in common with that of some of the better disciplined urban guerrilla groups - those who work by confounding bureaucratic controls and exploiting the resultant confusion for profit. Whether that profit be ideological or solely financial is a matter which need not concern us here. The first step is to recognize the nature of the difficulties facing us. In the jungles of international bureaucracy, including those of the multinational corporations, there is always plenty of dense undergrowth in which able men may conceal themselves and from which they may mount attacks. The task of those attempting to flush them out will never be easy.’

We had one room in the office suite which was regularly checked for bugs. I sat in there to take the call to Mat.

Our conversation lasted less than a minute. Most of it consisted of code-words suggesting that we were in the fertilizer business. They conveyed, however, first a top priority blown-cover alert from me with a request for orders. From Mat came an instruction to go to London forthwith by the company plane, and be prepared to return to Brussels that same night. The journey was to be made unobtrusively. If possible it should not be known that I had left the hotel at all.

Finding the pilot took time because he was in bed with some girl; but he had obeyed standing orders, which ensured that he was always on call in an emergency, and, once found, he responded promptly. For the salaries we paid we expected efficiency. When I got to the airport he had already obtained a clearance to land at Southend and filed a flight plan. Customs clearances presented no problem. The only baggage I carried was my Brussels room-key with its heavy brass number-tag. By eleven-thirty I was in London.

Mat usually stayed at Claridge’s, but this time he had chosen to hole up in a rather seedy Kensington hotel.

I had twitted him about it when I had seen him some weeks earlier. What, I had asked, had he been trying to prove? That he was just a simple island wog being victimized by the wicked monopoly capitalists who had stolen his forefathers’ birthright? And whom did he hope to impress with this nonsense? The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office people he was dealing with, who knew to a man that he was a graduate of the London School of Economics and had attended Stanford Law School? Or Anglo-Anzac Phosphate who thought of him chiefly as the expert on Pacific tax-haven trust laws appointed by a Canadian bank to make sure that many mangy old Chief kept his nose clean and got his sums right?

There had been no answering smile. About some things one no longer makes jokes.

‘Paul, there is only one person I have to impress at the movement, Chief Tebuke. You ought to know why, without my having to spell it out for you. If we want real power in an independent Placid Island with a dollar-linked currency and beneficent corporation laws, the appearance of that power must be vested initially in the historically acceptable indigenous figure who can give it a glaze of respectability. The granting of independence must seem, especially in North America, to be a belated act of simple justice to which no honest man, whatever his race, creed or colour, could possibly object. For how long did the Australian Government tolerate the fiscal independence of Norfolk Island when they found that it was taking a slice our of their tax cake? Just as long as it took to pass the legislation cancelling Norfolk’s right to take it. No effective right of appeal existed because there was no indisputably valid claim to sovereignty. Any rich fool can buy an island and proclaim it a sovereign state. On the mainland he need not even be so very rich. All he needs to do there is back an up-and-coming separatist movement, or a bunch of dissident army officers, and play it patiently by ear. But how or what he buys into is unimportant. It’s getting the recognition that counts. Not just a tolerated measure of autonomy, but
de facto, de jure,
UN-approved, copper-bottomed sovereignty, the works.’

‘I only asked you why you weren’t staying at Claridge’s.’

‘And I’m telling you. In this case the key to recognition lies in Chief Tebuke, our symbol of both legitimacy and self-determination. In order to control him I must retain his trust and affection. In the islands, trust and affection are based on the strict observance of certain social rules, which you might choose to call etiquette but which I prefer to call a code of manners. I am not the Chief, but an adviser. Therefore, I must live in a lesser place. He happens to be impressed by the Hilton. So, I must not live in Claridge’s where heads of state are known to stay. I could live on a lower floor of the Hilton, of course, but the less I see of him the better. This is well out of his way. What’s the matter with it anyhow? I’ve lived in worse hotels and so have you. You’re getting soft, Paul.’

That one had been rather more long-winded than usual, probably because he had thought it necessary to mix some falsehood in with the truth; but, apart from that, you could call it a typically sanctimonious Mat reproof.

It has been said that the vision of the apocalyptic horsemen reveals only that St John must have had poor eyesight. Just
four
horsemen? For heaven’s sake! Listen man, even
twenty-four
would have been too few.

The suggestion is, of course, that the consequences of war are of infinite variety and by no means always evil. Like many other platitudes, this one, too, has an element of truth in it.

Among the consequences of World War II in the Pacific, for example, the accident of Mathew Williamson’s exposure to the world Boy Scout movement, and subsequently to the works and philosophy of Lord Baden-Powell of Gilwell, would probably be accounted by most right-thinking persons a good thing; and if there are those, more familiar perhaps with the ideological content of the works, who feel inclined to question that verdict, let them keep their thoughts to themselves. One thing is virtually certain: without the benefit of the Chief Scout’s teachings, Mat - he was given a Christian name and baptized at the Methodist mission while he was in Fiji - would never have become the extraordinary businessman he is.

In view of the
kind
of businessman he is, that may seem odd; but I doubt if the author of
Life’s Snags and How to Meet Them, Sport in War, Scouting for Boys
and
Lessons from the Varsity of Life
could ever, even in one of his least humourless moments, have envisaged the effects that his homespun pragmatism might have upon the mind of a lad of Mat’s peculiar antecedents, natural talents and disposition. His books were, in a sense, gospels, but they were not designed to withstand interpretation by a half-caste Melanesian sorcerer.

Mat’s father was an Australian sea captain named Williamson, his mother the daughter of a village headman in one of the Gilbert Islands. There is no record of the pair ever having been married. She had lived on board Williamson’s ship, a freighter owned by one of the phosphate companies, and Mat, whom she called Tuakana because it meant ‘eldest’, was born in the company dispensary on Placid Island. She had, though, no more children after him.