Siege at the Villa Lipp

CHAPTER ONE

They stopped the car by the gateway in the wall on the lower coast road. Then, after a moment or two, the three of them climbed out stiffly, their shirts clinging to their backs. It had been a long, hot drive.

From the shade at the end of the terrace I could see them clearly through the binoculars.

Professor Krom, the older man, I already knew; there could be no doubt about him. The younger man and the woman, however, had to be identified from recent snapshots taken by private enquiry agencies on the subjects’ respective campuses. Although I can never take photographic identification quite seriously — I have seen, and used, too many false passports for that — these two, I decided, looked sufficiently like the persons they were supposed to be for me to assume that they were indeed those persons.

The car was a rented Fiat 127 with Milan registration plates. Their baggage, except for the hand stuff, was on a roof-rack. There was no unauthorized fourth person inside. They appeared, for the moment, to have adhered to the terms of the agreement I had worked out with Krom.

For several seconds they stood staring up at the Villa Lipp. Then, lips began to move and gestures were made. One did not have to be a skilled lip-reader to know what was being said.

‘Are we expected to carry our bags up all those steps?’ That was the woman, running sweaty fingers awkwardly through her hair as she spoke.

Krom, the leader of the expedition, gave her a fatherly pat on the shoulder. ‘I doubt it, my dear. But why don’t we go and find out?’ He looked up again, showing me his teeth this time; he had realized that I had to be watching. ‘I’m quite sure he’s there.’

‘And laughing his head off.’ Dr Connell, the younger man, was eyeing the house with dislike and massaging his aching neck muscles. He had done all the driving. ‘I’ll bet there’s an upper access road, too,’ he went on. ‘No one builds a villa like that without a driveway. This is pure one-upmanship. The son-of-a-bitch just wants us to arrive pooped.’

He was not entirely right. True, I had omitted the access road from the sketch-map I had sent Krom; but not simply in order to cause them discomfort. What I had wanted, too, was plenty of time in which to examine them and their belongings before they could examine too closely me and mine. Not that they would see many of my belongings in that expensively rented petit palais, but they would all see Yves and Melanie as well as me. There was no way of preventing their doing so — we had been rendered, to some extent, expendable — but the attendant risk could at least be minimized.

Evidence of the need for such precautions soon became visible.

Once they had decided that there was no point in their just standing there and that they had better start climbing, Connell took what at first looked like a portable radio from the car before he locked it. Then, when he turned, I saw that what he had in fact was a tape-recorder.

This flagrant violation of the agreed ground rules did not greatly surprise me. Dr Connell was, my sources had informed me, that sort of young man; the academic counterpart of the boardroom Wunderkind, always confident of being able to talk anyone misguided enough to disagree with him into seeing things his way.

Well, Yves would know how to deal with him. The one who had begun to interest me more, from a security point of view, was the woman, Dr Henson.

As they climbed the lower flight of stone steps and passed the fountain at the foot of the main stairway, she swung the embroidered satchel she had been carrying slung on her left shoulder over to her right one. The satchel looked ordinary enough, the sort of object that a slacks-and-shirt woman of her kind might normally carry. What bothered me was that, judging from the way she had to heft it across her body, the contents of the thing were much heavier than one would have expected them to be.

I spoke to Melanie as I went inside.

‘Before you go out to meet them, tell Yves that the woman may have something in her bag that shouldn’t be there. I’ll be in my room when he’s ready to report.’

While I waited, I went through the three dossiers again and reread my own notes on them.

The subjects, in order of both temporal and academic seniorities, were:

FRITS BÜHLER KROM, Professor of Sociology and Social

Administration

Nationality: Dutch

Age: 62

Civil Status: Married, two sons, one daughter.

My own office had turned up that information after a few minutes with standard reference books. The only additional information that I had been able to get about his personal life, as opposed to his professional life at the German university where he worked and about which every piddling little detail seemed to be known, was that he had eight grandchildren with a ninth on the way.

GEORGE KINGHAM CONNELL, Assistant Professor,

Department of Social Sciences

Nationality: USA

Age: 36

Civil Status: Married, one daughter (by first wife who divorced him), two sons (present marriage).

I had a note which said that he was currently in Europe to attend by invitation a seminar at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, West Germany, and that his family was at a Maine lakeside summer resort.

The American agency commissioned by me to carry out the Connell investigation had complained about the deadlines I had imposed on them. They had, however, managed to gather in the time available a surprisingly large amount of campus gossip. One item reported ‘a widespread belief that certain members of the university Board of Regents were objecting vigorously to any renewal of Dr Connell’s contract which might result in his promotion to associate rank and securing of tenure. The objectors were all, it was said, lawyers.

GERALDINE HOPE HENSON, Research Fellow, Faculty of

Social Sciences

Nationality: British

Age: 33

Civil Status: Divorced, no children.

At the end of a detailed account of her career and an estimate of her credit-worthiness, the British agency had added a cosy note. Henson had been her maiden name and after her divorce she had gone back to using it. To her many friends, however, she had always been known affectionately as ‘Hennie.’

Krom, Connell, Henson.

Social scientists all, but with not much else in common, apparently. Then, one looks at the titles of some of their published books and papers and the picture changes. All three of these scholars are not only criminologists, but criminologists of a new and peculiar breed; they all have the same kind of bee in their bonnets.

Krom’s The Lombroso Fallacy in Contemporary Criminology and Frontiers of Criminal Investigation may not be as conspicuously iconoclastic as Connell’s The Myth of Organized Crime or Henson’s The Professional Criminal — Six Studies in Incompetence, but his preface to the monumental Criminal Statistics 1965–1975, an Analytical Appraisal makes his position clear. Along with such authorities as John A. Mack of Glasgow and Hans-Jürgen Kerner of Tübingen, as well as younger scholars like Connell and Henson, he had joined the ranks of those criminological heretics who believe that most current ideas about criminal psychology, criminal biology and criminal psychiatry are either fallacious or irrelevant. They believe this because they hold that what criminologists have been studying so assiduously over the years is not the criminal as he or she may exist, but only those one or two species of the genus which are, and always have been, catchable.

They also believe, despite the angry merriment of old-school policemen, for whom the idea is naturally upsetting, in the existence of an entire criminal species of sub-genus about which little or nothing is as yet known: that of the Able Criminal.

Krom’s description of the species is one of the more celebrated. It was part of a lecture delivered at a meeting of the International Police Association in Berne. Although he himself, writing in German, prefers to identify his quarry as Der Kompetente Kriminelle, on this occasion he was, in deference to the majority among his polygot audience, speaking in English. Having uttered the phrase Able Criminal aloud on a lecture rostrum for the first time, he then went on: ‘I am not, my friends, in any way alluding to the Master Criminal of blessed memory, that beguiling figment of nineteenth-century fictional imaginations who so often fell prey to amateur detectives, but to a present-day occupant of the real world.

‘The Able Criminal, male or female, may be presumed to possess a high IQ, to be emotionally stable and ‘well adjusted,’ to exhibit none of the personality defects said to be characteristic of the accepted ‘criminal types’ and to belong to none of the much-publicized crime syndicates so dear to the romantics in some of our law-enforcement agencies. He will, except in the protective cover role of worthy citizen, be unknown to such agencies and unsuspected by them. He (or she — gender has no relevance here) has no discernible and hence no classifiable modus operandi, and unless disease or advancing age causes deterioration of his faculties, he is virtually uncatchable.

‘Of the kinds of crime he commits, fraud is naturally high on the list; yet fraud is not, for some of the species, the only, nor even a principal, source of revenue. Here in Berne it will be unnecessary to remind you that the laws on income tax evasion — not avoidance, evasion — vary widely between our different countries. In America and Britain evasion is a crime. In Switzerland it is not, in a great many other parts of the world, in places like Monaco, Grand Cayman, Bermuda and the New Hebrides, there are no income taxes to evade. Within the stratified complexities of international tax and corporation law the opportunities for the Able Criminal are boundless. On the evidence which has been available to me — unhappily not evidence of the quality upon which our democratic justice likes to depend — these opportunities include large-scale but non-prosecutable embezzlement and blackmail, plus undetectable forgery as well as property crime, chiefly connected with heavily-insured works of art, of the more traditional sort. I do not have to tell this audience that where there is crime for gain on that scale, however sophisticated it may be, there too will be found, sooner or later, its inevitable accompaniments, gangsterism and violence.’

Krom had gone on to list some of the technical difficulties to be overcome in researching the species, and had compared them with those which had confronted the physicists who first set out to investigate the behaviour of energized particles in a cyclotron.

‘The investigators might think that they knew what was going on inside, but until they had devised an exact way of knowing what was going on, the validity of their suppositions could not be assessed.’

Connell, in his doctoral thesis, had commented sadly on the comparison. ‘Professor Krom might have added that while physicists have long since solved those and many other sets of even more complex problems, we, the new criminologists, are still grappling with the most basic among ours. We have not yet learned to recognize source material as such even when we are staring at it.’

Dr Henson, writing in The New Sociologist, had been explicit about her difficulties.

‘No matter how ingenious the investigative techniques employed, the likelihood of the student learning anything that our able criminal would prefer to keep secret is small. The writer, and she does not think herself uniquely handicapped, has had to depend largely for her data-gathering upon methods of enquiry which only the charitable could call serious. To put it bluntly, they involve unscientific fumblings with minor strokes of luck; for example, the accidental unearthing of a conventional criminal informer who talked unwittingly of matters the real significance of which he himself had not even begun to grasp.’

She had made her point. She might have been wiser to have left it at that. Instead, she had gone on to lambast some of her critics.

‘Understandably, members of the older schools of criminology, recoiling from the difficulties, have chosen to deny the able criminal’s existence. They have preferred either to continue cultivating the already over-cultivated study fields of juvenile delinquency and Mafia-style organized crime, or to dabble in forensic medicine.’

The critics had hit back fiercely. Among the politer was one who reminded her that phenomena which are so very difficult to observe without ‘unscientific fumblings’ frequently turn out to exist only in the minds’ eyes of the committed few who claim to have observed them. The able criminal could well be compared in that context with such aberrations as the Unidentified Flying Object and the little green men from outer space. And were there not simple persons who still believed in ghosts?

Poor Dr Henson. With that truthful but unfortunate reference to fumbling she had handed her opponents the only weapon they could effectively use. Yet, her frankness did not go unrewarded, for the controversy it aroused brought her to the special attention of Professor Krom. He had known of her book, of course, but now he was reminded of her, and of the views she held, at a decisive moment.

Something remarkable had happened to him and he needed kindred spirits with whom to share the experience.

Connell has emphasized the difficulty for the new criminologists of recognizing a source when they see it. Henson has spoken of the remoteness of even that opportunity. Only Krom, with all his experience, having stumbled upon a major and reliable source, having recognized it as such and then decided patiently to wait and watch, may now know how lucky he has been.

I know of only two other similar cases of this magnitude. In both, the consequences for all concerned were most unpleasant. There were failures of nerve and regrettable lapses into primitive modes of behaviour, not quite as unexpected as those upon which I have to report but no less outrageous. In neither of those cases, however, were there any survivors.

So, whether he is prepared to admit it or not, Krom was lucky in a number of ways. The most important of them, undoubtedly, was the discovery of his windfall source in me.

By the failures of the world in which I move I have been accused in my time of possessing nearly all the anti-social qualities. It has been said that, both in my business and in my private lives, I have been consistently sly, treacherous, ruthless and rapacious, vindictive, devious, sadistic and generally vile. I could add to that list. But no one, no one, has ever yet suggested that I would even condone a resort to violence by others, much less promote or organize the use of it myself. Squeamishness? Timidity? Think what you please. I have seen enough of violence to convince me that even where it appears to succeed, as in some struggles for political power, the success usually proves in the end to have been more apparent than real.

I do not, of course, expect justice; that would be too much; but I believe that I am entitled to a fair trial before the only court I recognize, the only court whose judgements I now value; that is the court of public opinion.

Now that the real ‘Mr X’ has been identified by me and the full extent of his perfidy is no longer a secret, those who are prepared to consider the evidence with open and objective minds — evidence that proves beyond doubt and sans whitewash that far from being the villain of the piece I am his principal victim — should be allowed to do so.

If Krom is still reluctant to risk his precious reputation by disclosing in their proper perspective those facts which are known to him, but which he finds inconvenient, then I must do the job myself. Perhaps, too, Connell and Henson will be prompted by their integrity as scholars, to say nothing of common decency, to back me up. If they are not so prompted, well, for once, my own welfare and that of men of more conventional goodwill may be promoted together. For once, it is in nearly everyone’s interests that a whole truth be generally known.

The house-phone buzzed.

‘Paul?’ It was Yves.

‘We have complications,’ he said. ‘Dr Connell has protested at my taking his tape-recorder from him. Said that he had had no intention of using it without permission, and insists that taping is his normal way of setting down case notes. Would be lost without it. Pointed out that he had carried it openly, and after obtaining Krom’s reluctantly-given permission to do so.’

‘What did you decide?’

‘To let him have it, conditionally, because we might find it useful too, if you see what I mean.’

‘I think so. What conditions?’

‘I said that it would be placed in his room and must remain there. He could use it, but no voice tracks were to be made other than his own. I can easily wipe anything we find objectionable later on. Meanwhile, I’ll check it out for added circuits.’

‘Okay. Now, what about Dr Henson’s shoulder bag?’

‘Paul, that is far more serious. The heavy object you observed turned out to be one of those plastic cases which women use now when travelling to carry cosmetics in small quantities. They are fitted with leak-proof bottles and little jars to save weight.’

‘Then why was it heavy?’

‘Because of an arrangement of objects packed in the cavity below the main tray. They included a camera.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake! What kind?’

‘Special job, but based, I think, on a body belonging to that small underwater Nikon. Among the accessories with it we have green and infra-red filters and two lenses, one a close-up. A very classy outfit. Must have cost a fortune.’

‘What did Dr Henson have to say for herself?’

‘What one would expect, I suppose. No intention of using it without permission. Indignant when reminded that you had made a point of disallowing cameras in the protocol she signed. Hit back. Tape-recorders were also verboten. Connell was carrying one. Were we going to make an equal fuss about that?’

‘How did Krom and Connell react to all this?’

Yves sound surprised. ‘Oh, they weren’t present. I saw each separately.’ He paused. ‘But, Paul, she had more than just the camera stuff in that compartment.’

‘Not a gun, I hope.’

‘No, something perhaps a little more dangerous. A small aerosol spray. It had a printed label saying that it was a nail-varnish remover.’

‘Which you didn’t believe.’

‘The nail-varnish remover that the women I know normally use comes in bottles, not aerosols. The label didn’t look right either.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I asked her to show me how it worked on one of her fingernails.’

‘And?’

‘Refused. Why should she spoil a perfectly good manicure for my amusement?’

‘But you weren’t impressed.’

‘Paul, she doesn’t have a perfectly good manicure. I think the aerosol’s loaded with that Swedish chemical they are using these days for examining suspect documents like forged cheques, the stuff that reacts with amino acids to bring up latent fingerprints on paper so you can photograph them. They come up purple. Hence the green filter for the close-up lens.’

‘Hence also the fact that she wouldn’t spray it on her fingers. The stuff is called ninhydrin and it’s highly poisonous, even in solution. Someone must have warned her.’

‘Doesn’t surprise me. The whole compartment, the whole kit, looks as if it had been thought out and packed in a lab by some police or other intelligence-gathering outfit, for use in the field.’

I sighed. ‘How about Krom? Anything up his sleeves? Radio bleepers? Poisoned darts?’

‘No, he was clean. I’ve got the key of their car, I’m going down now to drive it up.’

He would also search the baggage thoroughly after it had been taken up to their rooms.

‘Where are they now?’

‘Melanie’s giving them soothing drinks.’

‘Let me know when you’ve cleared the baggage. I’ll go down then and introduce myself to our guests.’

With characteristic politeness he had refrained from commenting on the crass absurdity of the words I had just uttered.

There would be no need at all for me to introduce myself to Professor Krom.

Unfortunately, he and I had already met — and more than once.

That was the cause of the whole trouble.

I can still hear him pronouncing what could have been my death sentence, as well as his own.

‘You were too kind, Mr Firman. In future, when one of your employees is called to meet his Maker, I strongly advise you to send no flowers.’

That is what he actually said, not what he now claims that he said. At the time there was none of that rubbish about exploding flowers and blast areas; and the word ‘guilt’ was certainly not used, ‘smilingly’ or in any other way.

What guilt, anyway? Only an idiot would attribute a sense of guilt in this case to me.

I am not the defendant.

I am the plaintiff.