Siege at the Villa Lipp

CHAPTER TWO

Professor Krom’s account of the events I am describing differs radically from mine; and it does so, I believe, chiefly because his was written while he was still too disturbed by his experiences at the Villa Lipp to think clearly. He is, after all, an elderly man unaccustomed to explosions. It is likely that, in all important respects, my account is the more balanced of the two.

That said, however, his initial achievement remains and should be recognized for what it is: a triumph of chance over all reasonable probabilities and, from his point of view at any rate, evidence that some of his theories may ultimately be capable of proof. His single-minded professional persistence aided by a photographic memory produced a moment at which two apparently dissimilar persons seen in totally different and unrelated contexts were suddenly identified as one and the same.

I was the person thus identified, and news of the identification had been given to me two months earlier during one of the tax-haven seminars organized by Symposia S.A.

The place was Brussels.

That much admitted, the record may now be wiped clean of some of the mud with which it has been so freely bespattered. I wish to state categorically that neither the Symposia group of companies — specifically: Symposia AG, Symposia SA, Symposia NV and Symposia (Bermuda) Ltd — nor its connected consultative body, the Institute for International Investment and Trust Counselling, are in any country or in any way contravening or subverting established law. Not even our keenest competitors in the field of trust counselling have, however eager they may have been to take advantage of Krom’s so-called ‘revelations’, dared to suggest otherwise. The idea is preposterous; and anyone who still doubts this has only to look at the long list of those bankers, trust officers, international lawyers and tax accountants who attended the April seminar, and at the names, all famous in the international business world, of the experts they came to hear. Men of that calibre understand and respect the law. The last thing they wish to do is to consort with criminals.

The subject of that particular seminar was of fairly general interest, a survey of the various pieces of anti-avoidance legislation currently being introduced by some ill-natured western governments, and the number of registrants was high. There were one hundred and twenty-three of them; and anyone foolish enough to suppose that organizing such affairs is in itself a road to riches may like to know that Symposia’s net reward for that week’s work was a mere twenty thousand dollars. Nobody can say that that part of the tax-avoidance business yields high profits. Without its fringe benefits the game would simply not be worth playing. Through organizing these affairs we get to know people and we get to know things.

Not that we ever spied on anyone; I don’t mean that. If anything, as I now realize, we were too easy-going. Naturally, we always took an interest in the identities of those who attended our seminars, in their countries of origin, the passports they carried and the fields of their specializations; but those little dossiers we compiled were primarily for the benefit of our faculty lecturers. From the start it was always Symposia policy to admit to our seminars, however delicate the subject matter, all who were prepared to remit with their applications cheques for the registration fees. We expect the major government revenue services to be represented and they usually are, often adding — especially when the lecturer is himself a former revenue official — a certain liveliness to the discussion periods. The atmosphere, though, is essentially one of friendly rivalry and mutual respect. Both sides are simply doing their jobs as best they can and with pretty clear ideas about one another’s strengths and weaknesses. Discretion is practised, of course, but almost never to the point of play-acting. I know of only two cases of persons registering under false names.

One was a journalist working for a French left-wing scandal sheet. The seminar he attended was devoted mainly to the subject of discretionary and exempt trust concepts. He pretended to be a lawyer. In the article he wrote following this masquerade, he managed not only to mount a totally irrelevant attack on multinational corporations but also to reveal that he did not quite know what a trust was.

The other case was, as we shall see, different.

The journalist had been spotted immediately. Krom was not spotted at all; chiefly because the name under which he registered was not false enough. It had been borrowed, with its owner’s knowledge and consent, so that the usual intelligence cross-check turned up nothing to alert us.

In my official capacity as Director of the Institute it was natural that I should take the chair and introduce the speakers at one or two sessions. The first of those I presided over was in the afternoon of the second day. It ended at five: An hour later Krom introduced himself to me.

His method of doing so had an unpleasant touch of the macabre in it and was for me, I freely admit, highly disturbing. No doubt he intended it to be.

The receptionist telephoned me in my room.

He was a man who knew me and my voice well. He still asked carefully if he was speaking to Mr Firman.

‘Certainly you are. What is it?’

We usually spoke French. Now he began speaking in English. He was obviously reading what he had to say.

‘I am asked to state, Mr Firman, that Mr Kramer and Mr Oberholzer of Zürich are waiting in the lobby here to see you.’

Since they were both dead men — Kramer being literally dead and Oberholzer figuratively so — the announcement gave me quite a jolt.

I said: ‘I see. Both these gentlemen are there?’

‘That is what I am instructed to say, sir.’ The tone of his voice was unnaturally formal. I thought it possible that he believed he was dealing with a police matter.

As we were in Brussels, I knew that possibility to be remote. We were on excellent terms with the authorities there. In fact, if I could have assumed that it was only a police matter, I would, at that moment, have been much relieved.

‘I’ll be down in a few minutes, Jules.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Still very formal, painfully so.

I didn’t wait a few minutes. I went down straight away and by the emergency stairs. This enabled me to get a look at the vicinity of Jules’s reception desk without crossing the lobby.

There were some new arrivals at the hotel checking in, or waiting to do so, and there was quite a crowd by the desk. None among them was known to me or looked in the least like a person who could have intimidated an experienced hotel receptionist.

Jules was pretending to study his reservation plot-board on the wall behind the counter, and I could see, even at that distance, that he was in a state of shock. I had another, more careful, look around, then went over quickly and elbowed my way through to him. The indignant looks his two assistants gave me were easy to ignore. I tapped him on the shoulder. It was as if he had been expecting arrest and was now resigned to it. He leaned wearily against the wall before he turned.

He was, I knew, in his sixties. Now, grey and sweating, he looked eighty and unlikely to last much longer. When he recognized me he fluttered his hands and started to protest weakly against my invasion of his territory. I cut him short.

‘Stop yammering. Where are they?’

‘There’s only one, the man in three-two-six. But. . ‘

‘Name?’

‘Dopff. He is over in the corner by the big flower arrangement, and he is watching us speak. I beg you, Mr Firman, please. . ‘

I did not wait to hear what he was begging me to do, or not do, but turned and walked straight across to where the man was sitting.

My memory for names and faces is good, very good, but it has its limits. I could remember that a person named Dopff was registered for the seminar and that he was from Luxembourg, but I couldn’t recall his profession. That meant only one thing: whatever he was — lawyer, banker, amateur tax-evader, or government spy — he had been checked out as a potential client and, as such, found wanting.

As I approached, I recognized him; he was the elderly man who had been sitting in the middle of the third row an hour or so earlier, listening with rapt attention to my introduction of the main speaker. I had noticed him partly because he had actually seemed interested in my ritual listing of the speaker’s qualifications — they were all there printed in the official programme he had in his hand — but mostly because he appeared to wear a permanent smile. The smile, I had noted later as we were all leaving the conference room, was an optical illusion which vanished when you came closer to him. It was produced by the combination of an upper lip shaped like a circumflex accent and a mouthful of large, very white teeth, the kind that look like cheap dentures even when they are not.

He was showing them to me now as I approached him; only this was no illusory smile; it was a blatantly triumphant grin. Had I not needed badly to know who he really was, what he wanted and what sort of threat he constituted, I would have walked straight on past him just for the pleasure of watching the result through the mirror on the adjacent wall. I took refuge instead in courtesy. The really heavy-handed, old-world stuff can make it possible for one to discharge an enormous amount of anger without the object of the anger becoming fully aware of it. He may suspect but he cannot be certain. With luck, one will cause him considerable unease without giving him any excuse to take offence.

Unfortunately, with a man as sure of himself as Krom, this form of attack can never be wholly effective.

The common language of our seminar has always been English, so it was in English that I addressed him.

‘Mr Dopff, is it? I understand that you wish to see me.’

To the grin he added an insolent stare. ‘No, Mr Firman, that is not at all what I wish. I have already seen you, clearly and unmistakably, before. That was in Zürich five years ago when you were calling yourself Oberholzer.’

‘My name is Firman, sir.’

He went on as if I had not spoken. ‘So, I have seen you twice. What I intend to do from now on is to talk with you.’ He patted the arm of the empty chair beside him. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

I remained standing. ‘I am sure that you will understand that I am a busy man, Mr Dopff. I simply came to tell you that the receptionist here gave me a strange message, from you he tells me, about two persons of whom I have never heard. It seemed proper and sensible to let you know that the message was either garbled or misdirected. That is all.’

He showed his teeth again. ‘That garbled message brought you pretty quickly, Mr Oberholzer.’

‘The name, I repeat, is Firman.’

‘At the moment it is, yes. But it used to be Oberholzer, and I have no doubt that there have been, and still are, a great many other identities in your repertoire. How annoying it must be for you to realize that this time you can’t just run for it.’

I gave him my little bow. ‘Except to escape the acute boredom of this conversation, Mr Dopff, why on earth should I run anywhere?’

He was unruffled. ‘You ran in Zurich. Here, as you have obviously realized, you must try to bluff your way out. No head-start possible, no suitable cut-outs available and no inconspicuous exits handy. Agreed? So why not sit down and join me in a little whisky? In spite of your impressive outer calm, I am sure that you would find it helpful.’

At that moment I had almost decided that he was some sort of private detective, a retired fraud-squad type. Anyway, it was time to counter-attack.

I sighed and sat down in the chair beside him. ‘Very well, Mr Dopff. You want to talk. May I suggest a subject?’

‘Why not?’ He snapped his fingers for the waiter. ‘We can always change it.’

‘Then, since the subject of identity seems to interest you so much, why don’t we have a look at the one you’re using?’

‘By all means.’

The waiter came then and took the order for more whisky. It was given in what sounded to me like Flemish.

‘For a start,’ I said, ‘I don’t think you’re a Luxembourger.’

‘Absolutely right!’ Beaming smile. He might have been playing a guessing game with a favourite grandchild.

‘And your name is not Dopff.’

‘Right again. My good friend Maurice Dopff, who lives and works in the Grand Duchy, registered for this affair and then found himself unable to attend. He kindly allowed me to come in his stead.’

‘Do you really expect me to believe that?’

‘Of course I don’t. He allowed himself to be used as cover.’ He fished out a visiting card and handed it to me. ‘Permit me to introduce myself formally. The name is Krom.’

I knew at once exactly who he was. In the tax-avoidance game our coverage of legal and financial publications of all sorts and nationalities is as comprehensive as we can make it. The Institute and Symposia between them employed a multilingual, and very expensive, full-time research staff of eight as well as numerous part-timers. With us, good intelligence is as essential for survival as discipline and foresight. Our coverage of specialized technical journals dealing with law enforcement at policy-making levels is extremely thorough. Krom’s allusions to tax avoidance and evasion in the published version of his Berne lecture had been sufficient to ensure its being brought to my attention flagged with a red sticker. Even if he had not initiated our acquaintance by playing games with dead men’s names, I would have known enough about Krom to be wary of him.

My first ploy, then, was to pretend that I knew nothing while working to find out more.

I gave the card a perplexed look. ‘Well, Professor, this is all a bit surprising. As you can imagine, we get lots of peculiar characters at these seminars of ours, all sorts of nosey-parkers, including, I have to say, some of our competitors in the tax haven area. We don’t object. If we can teach them something, well that is what we are here for, to teach. It is though a trifle irksome, I admit, when they make fools of themselves by wearing disguises.’ I contrived a sudden look of anxiety. ‘You really are Professor Krom, I hope? This — ’ I held up the card — ‘is not, by any chance, a disguise within a disguise?’

He had been watching me intently and with a certain air of disbelief. Now he shook his head slowly. ‘No, I am Krom. Why? Were you hoping that I wasn’t?’

‘On the contrary, I was hoping that you were. You see, this is the first time we have had the pleasure of entertaining a Professor of Sociology. This is an occasion. Still — ‘ perplexity again — ‘I’m afraid I don’t yet see the connection between your field and ours. Unless, that is, you are seeking advice on how best a good Dutchman may avoid those onerous Netherlands taxes.’

He suddenly grinned again and clapped his hands softly. ‘An excellent performance,’ he said, ‘really excellent. Just for a moment there you nearly made me forget. Forget Oberholzer and Kramer, I mean. You see, Mr Firman, my field is criminology.’

It was time to show my teeth. I said: ‘You’ll find no able criminals here, Professor Krom.’

He positively giggled. ‘From defence to attack, eh? The pretence of ignorance is abruptly discarded in order to disconcert. Splendid impertinence!’

I went on as if he had not spoken. ‘So I’m afraid your little fishing expedition will have to be written off as a waste of time. Sorry.’

Protesting hands. ‘Oh, but it has got off to a most successful, a most promising, start!’

The drink arrived just then. I was glad of the diversion. The man was proving hard to handle, and I needed time to think. I could have done with more. It was necessary to find out from him what he considered success without actually asking, and I made a complete hash of it.

When the waiter had gone again I said: ‘Then you must be easily satisfied.’

He read me instantly. ‘I can well understand, Mr Firman, that you are curious.’

‘I’m surprised, certainly.’ No point in letting the adversary see your discomfiture even if he must have sensed it. I kept going. ‘You bait your hook with some mysterious substance labelled Oberholzer and Kramer, and catch an empty beer can. If you think that’s good fishing, naturally I’m surprised.’

The teeth flashed triumphantly. ‘You’ve missed a trick, Mr Firman!’

‘I am sure that you intend to tell me which.’

‘Of course I do. You fell into the trap of failing to ask yourself an obvious question.’

I smiled. ‘How do you know what questions I ask myself, Professor?’

‘I know you haven’t asked yourself this one because you haven’t asked me for the answer. Consider. You are told that Oberholzer and Kramer are waiting to see you. Correct?’

‘I am told that two persons of whom I have never heard are waiting to see me.’

An upraised forefinger flicked the quibble aside contemptuously. ‘Yet, in your anxiety to set eyes instantly upon the person who uses these unknown names, you quite overlook the oddity of the channel of communication he has chosen to use.’ He paused before going on. ‘Do you usually in this hotel receive messages about visitors from the receptionist? Doesn’t the concierge’s, the hall-porter’s, department function here?’

I managed, not without difficulty, a careless shrug. ‘It functions, yes, and quite efficiently. I presume you thought that a busy receptionist was less likely to remember your face than the concierge who gives you your room-key and who might also be unsympathetic to practical jokes.’

He gave me a kindly look. ‘Not bad for a spur-of-the moment invention, but it won’t do, will it? Hindsight content far too high. If you had never heard of Oberholzer and Kramer why would the possibility of a practical joke occur to you? No, you failed to ask yourself why I had gone to the receptionist because the questions uppermost in your mind just then were — who is this joker, what does he want and how dangerous is he?’

I drank some whisky. I had begun to need it. As if to humour him, I put the question: ‘Well, why did you use the receptionist to send me your message?’

He gave me a nod for good behaviour, but no immediate answer to his question.

‘In spite of his being one of the more active members of your private espionage organization,’ he said, ‘I think I may know more about that receptionist than you do. Naturally, all your known associates have interested me for some time. Where possible J have built up dossiers on them. However, once I had decided that the birthplace of our collaboration would be here in Brussels, work on all your local contacts was intensified.’ A peculiar twitching of his facial muscles began as he added: ‘The possibility of an abortion occurring was, to this fond parent, a totally unacceptable risk.’

As his face went on twitching and he gazed at me expectantly, I realized that he thought he had said something funny and was waiting for a laugh.

When all he got was a blank stare, the twitching ceased and he said tolerantly: ‘Perhaps you would find a military analogue more to your taste.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Well then, this was the kind of operation in which success can only be won by immaculate preparation leading to the achievement of tactical surprise. A note delivered to your room, or left in your mail-box downstairs here, would not have worked. You would have had time to think, time to investigate and prepare defences, possibly time to make arrangements for my discomfiture. Or even,’ he added coyly, ‘not knowing of the precautions I had taken to safeguard myself, time to organize my removal from the scene.’

I looked suitably offended by the insinuation. ‘For a criminologist you have a somewhat lurid imagination, Professor.’

‘I was not, of course, being entirely serious, Mr Firman.’ The teeth made a jovial showing, but the wariness in the pale-blue eyes told a different story. He believed not only that I was an able criminal but also a person capable of murder. I made a note of the fact. That sort of belief, senseless though it may be, can sometimes be quite useful.

‘But,’ he was saying, ‘you are right about one thing.’

‘Good.’

‘The concierge might, as you say, have found the verbal message strange. There could have been several possible consequences of his doing so. You might, as we have seen, have been in some way forewarned and thus forearmed. Even more important, he might, without thinking, have talked, gossiped, and so compromised the entire operation. I had long perceived, you see, that if our collaboration was to be fruitful, absolute secrecy, in the early stages especially, was essential. That is why I chose the receptionist to deliver my message. He will not, I assure you, repeat a word of it, or of your subsequent questioning of him, to any third party. The poor fellow is far too frightened to disobey me.’

‘I noticed that he had been frightened. What did you threaten him with?’

‘Threaten him, Mr Firman? It wasn’t necessary to threaten him.’ He found the accusation quite astounding. ‘As I told you, I have done, and had done for me, much intensive work on your people. This man spied on you, so it occurred to me to wonder if, perhaps, he spied, or had once spied, for someone else. I was simply looking in a routine fashion, you understand, for parallel associations. Well, I have friends in Bonn who are interested in my work and they have access to the BND and its archive of Nazi SD files. And what do you think? During the Nazi occupation here our receptionist avoided forced labour recruitment by becoming an SD informer. Naturally, since he had never been exposed here — the victorious Allies couldn’t be bothered with the non-German small fry and the Belgian Resistance never had free access to the files — he had come to believe that the past, or that little bit of his particular past, was buried for ever. Did you know about it?’

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 on 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.

When he first told me about Placid we were sitting on the verandah of a hotel in the New Hebrides’ capital, Port Vila, having breakfast. He was in his middle thirties then, an imposingly handsome, dark-skinned man with russet hair. I had assumed that the hair colour was a product of his mixed blood, but found later that in some of the islands it was quite common. However, eyes as blue as his were not. I found them disconcerting. They have had the same effect on others I could name.

I was not too disconcerted to ask questions, though. That, after all, was what I was there for, to ask questions. So, I asked him where he came from and so received the first of many lectures.

‘As we were taught at the mission school,’ he began, ‘the great Captain James Cook gave English names to many of the places he discovered or explored in the wide Pacific Ocean. So good of him, so kind.’

It was said in a high-pitched, nasal voice, startlingly unlike his own, and further distorted by a regional English accent that he later attributed to Birmingham. He has an excellent ear. I am sure that if I had ever met the missionary whose voice he was imitating that day I would have recognized the man instantly.

The voice was discarded as abruptly as it had been assumed when Mat went on, ‘You know what I think, Mr Smythson? I think that by the time of his last voyage he was becoming bored with the problem of finding all those new names. I also think that he had a copy of Dr Johnson’s dictionary with him and was just going through it page by page. You smile? I’m serious. Fiji had its own native name, of course, even then, but north-west of it what do we find? Ocean Island, Placid Island, Pleasant Island. You see? Successive discoveries all in alphabetical order, even though they’re separated by a thousand miles. Placid and Pleasant are, anyway.’

‘And very different, I imagine.’

‘Oh, not at all different. In fact, very much the same.’ He cut a slice of papaya. ‘Neither of them was ever placid or in the least pleasant. Both, however, used to possess millions of tons of phosphate deposits. Most of these, naturally, have long been strip-mined and removed, leaving us with lunar landscapes of unlovely grey coral. We were both occupied briefly by Imperial Germany before becoming British colonies. En ‘forty-two we were both occupied by the Japanese, who used us as communication centres, and later heavily bombed by the Americans. Both of us subsequently became UN trust territories administered jointly by Britain, Australia and New Zealand, who still wanted what was left of the phosphate. I was born on Placid.’

‘I can understand your feeling bitter.’

‘Bitter?’ He grinned. ‘Why on earth should I feel bitter? We were barbarians. You will note that I say “we”. I include myself. What would we in our ignorance have done with so much old bird-crap, so much phosphate? Nothing. Our exploitation by the Powers was the best thing that ever happened to us. Even the American bombing was good. Simple people enjoy loud bangs. Unfortunately I was not there to hear them. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, my father was considerate enough to leave me to be educated in Fiji while he took his ship off to fight for the British Empire.’

The Methodist missionaries who received him had been in for some surprising experiences.

At ten, Mat had had no education other than that provided by his parents and by his travels with them in the ship. From his father he had learned to read and write English and the mathematics of navigation; on his travels he had picked up smatterings of several island languages; from the ship’s crew he had learned about the recreational facilities available in Australasian seaports; and, of most importance to him at the time, from his mother he had learned the pagan legends of her forebears. From her too, he had learned about the power and practice of magic; above all, he had learned the secrets of death-spells and other rituals, defensive as well as offensive, through which personal safety or power over others might be achieved.

In the summer of 1942 news came that Mat’s father had gone down with his ship, and a number of refugees from Singapore, off the coast of Java. Later that year his mother died of a kidney disease. It was at the time of his becoming an orphan that Mat was baptized.

The staff at the mission school, delighted to find that they had a gifted child to teach — in mathematics he was considered a prodigy — cannot, however, have deeply regretted the death of his mother. Having fought the good fight against pagan superstition with the weapons of Christian superstition for so long, they must have been disheartened to find out their gifted child could frighten the living daylights out of his wretched classmates with an ancient death-curse. He had shown no interest in the religion he was now being taught. His sudden enthusiasm for Scouting, strange though it may have seemed at the time, was undoubtedly accepted with considerable relief.

I once talked to a retired colonial officer who had served in Fiji for the last three of the seven years that Mat spent there. He had known about Mat chiefly because he had been concerned as an official with the arrangements of the boy’s higher education; but that had not been the only reason. He had recalled with amusement that, even as Mat was winning a scholarship and applying, with the help of Government House, for the grants which would enable him to live as a student in London, his name was being submitted for the honour of King’s Scout.

‘I’ll bet they didn’t know that at the London School of Economics,’ he said, then chuckled again. ‘Do you know, there was a time when that boy was actually accused publicly by the parents of another, older boy of sorcery and weaving spells. It wasn’t a proper court case because they were both minors and because there was no law dealing with junior witch doctors, but there had to be an investigation of the complaint and I was told off to handle it. Know what the cheeky young bugger did?’

‘Mat Williamson you mean?’

‘Yes. At the enquiry, he handed me, very respectfully, a list of the questions that he would have addressed to the other boy’s parents had he been the defendant in an adult court of law. As, under the circumstances, he was not allowed to ask them, would I please do so? Well, it sounded such a reasonable request and he looked so solemn and upset that, like a bloody fool, I agreed. Should have looked more carefully at the questions first, of course. The parents’ complaint was that, as a result of the spell, their boy had suffered agonizing stomach cramps for a week and that the spell had defeated all medical attempts to relieve the pain. That list of questions was like a medical cross-examination, only worse because it gradually became like a parody of a real one. Began all right or I wouldn’t have started on it. What had been the diagnosis of the District Nurse? Colic. Had she prescribed medicine? Yes, but it hadn’t worked, and so on. Then he really cut loose. What about bowel movements? What had the faeces looked like? Liquid or solid? Small or large? Round or sausage-shaped? Was there accompanying wind? What did it smell like? I wouldn’t have gone on but for one thing. Every other question made evidential sense. Had the boy had such attacks before? How often? Real questions. But it was the others that counted. You know, those people have rather a broad sense of humour. They began to laugh and that was that. Nothing much I could do. It wasn’t a court of law, but whenever I hear of a case being laughed out of court, I think of that list of questions. If I could have found the little monster guilty of something, I’d have done so cheerfully.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘Of course not. I was too busy trying not to laugh myself. But afterwards I gave him a ticking-off. Not that he cared. Too clever by half, young Williamson. And I’m not saying that just because he made an ass of me and also won a scholarship. Lots of those very bright teacher’s pets are emotionally immature. He wasn’t. He had the sort of insights that a great many so-called adults never begin to acquire. He was also a bit cruel. He’d know exactly what was going through some other fellow’s mind and use the knowledge to frighten him by dressing it up in that magical hocus-pocus of his. Cruel, as I say, but funny. As for the Boy Scout stuff, that was funny, too, if you looked at it from where he stood. Tribalism, that’s what he saw, with lots of stern rituals and the chance to exercise a natural talent for leadership. A very spry lad, and a very deep one, that.’

‘As a matter of fact he still quotes Baden-Powell.’

He sniffed. ‘They say that the Devil still quotes the scriptures, I believe. I’d say that Mathew Williamson’s idea of a good deed for the day now would be lending his best friend a pound and getting an IOU from him for two.’

In fact, Mat Tuakana, as he was calling himself then, made his first million not by using his own money, but by arranging for other persons to spend theirs.

He was twenty-two when he graduated from the LSE. One of his student friends there was a native of what had formerly been the Dutch East Indies and was then emerging as the Republic of Indonesia. The friend’s father had long been a Sukarno man, was close to the new President and had valuable patronage at his disposal. American aid to the new state was being given generously. In Djakarta educated men of ability who were neither Dutch nor Chinese were in short supply. When Mat and his friend arrived they had no trouble at all in making themselves useful. In a country where the average life expectancy was then no more than thirty years and the number of university graduates as a percentage of the population was approximately zero, their youth was no handicap. Within weeks they were in positions of authority and responsibility that in most other countries could only have been reached after years of determined in-fighting and conspicuous dedication. In Indonesia, too, positions of authority and responsibility were also, then, positions of considerable personal profit for those who held them. Mat’s job in the Ministry of Trade and Industry was to act as a purchasing agent. The money he used was allocated from the millions of dollars of US aid which arrived in the form of American bank credits, and what he bought was what American advisers to the new regime appeared to believe the Indonesian people most needed: useful things like refrigerators, room air-conditioners, radio sets, modern plumbing and cars that would make the place more like home.

Of the millions of dollars that Mat spent on buying such things, some, naturally, stuck to his own fingers. He got two commissions on each deal, one from the agent selling the merchandise for its US manufacturer and another from the merchant to whom he allocated the stuff when it arrived. He made his million in a little under two years and then, sensing that change was in the air and knowing that, while it is always a mistake to be greedy, in Djakarta at the time it was often a fatal mistake, he got out.

He had many American contacts now, so it was to America that he went. He was also given much advice on how best to multiply his million. This he ignored. The advice he took concerned his education. From Americans whose judgement he had come to respect he had learned that the great American law schools are not simply places where men and women are taught to practise law, but places where excellence in other kinds of social and political management is nurtured and developed. Believing his education to be in many such respects incomplete, he had applied to Stanford and, on the basis of his excellent showing at LSE, had been accepted. With the million sensibly invested, I am sure that he had no trouble at all in enjoying his spare time there.

Whether or nor he enjoyed the rest of it I have never discovered. The only time I ever asked him he evaded the question. It may have been that those who assessed him there ultimately saw through him a little too clearly, and allowed him to know that they had done so.

The Kensington hotel was made up of two large, Victorian, terraced houses joined together and given a revolving-door entrance. The night porter was obviously a tippler, but still more or less sober when I arrived. Mat’s name sobered him still further and, after telephoning up to announce me, he managed to operate a curious old lift. The hotel may have been sleazy, but Mat had made the best of it. Since I had last been there he had taken over most of the second floor with, according to the porter, four rooms en suite.

The largest had been made into a sitting-room and Max was waiting for me there. So was Frank Yamatoku his boyfriend.

Frank is a Japanese-American whizz-kid from California who made a killing in the porn trade there before Mat found him. Frank’s innovation had been in movie theatres. He had started in Los Angeles with the one house, a couples-only place in which there were water-beds instead of seats and triple-X films showing around the clock. When he had had six of these places going, he had sold out to a syndicate, thoughtfully giving the Vice Squad a list of the syndicate’s members as soon as he had cleared their cheque and was in the overseas departure complex of the airport. Frank has a lot of imagination and is an absolutely brilliant accountant, but until Mat found him he often took risks and lived dangerously.

Mat had cured him of those tendencies, I thought, but I would still have found it difficult ever to like Frank. He knew it, too, and the feeling was mutual. Even though I knew that he was working on the fine print of the Placid Island settlement with the Anglo-Anzac accountant, I was not pleased to see him there with Mat.

‘You made good time, Paul,’ Mat said. ‘No further problems?’

‘No further problems, no. But the one I’m here about is quite enough, I assure you.’ I looked at Frank and then back at Mat and waited.

After a moment Mat gave me his lazy smile. ‘All right. Would you excuse us, Frank?’

Frank stood up. ‘Surely. Good to see you, Paul.’

With a nod he left. I was quite sure that he would listen to what Mat and I had to say to one another, but even so it was better without him there.

‘A drink, Paul?’ Mat motioned towards the sideboard.

‘A little later perhaps, Mat. We have that man Krom, the criminology professor, on our backs.’

He became very still. He knew who Krom was. All the stuff about the man and his views that had been passed by the researchers to me had been passed by me to Mat. He was now mentally reviewing it. After he had done so, he relaxed again.

‘Tell me, Paul.’

I told him about the first stage of the Krom encounter and waited.

‘A foolish man,’ he commented, ‘but you don’t consider him stupid, I gather. If you did you wouldn’t be here.’

‘No, he’s not stupid. He is, however, a little frightened by the step he has taken.’

‘Frightened of you?’

‘Of me, of us. He has friends in the Dutch Ministry of Justice sympathetic to his views on our business activities. He has friends of like mind in West German intelligence. The man under whose name he is attending the seminar is a rich Luxembourger with political connections. All were advised confidentially of Krom’s reasons for attending and of his professional intentions before he came. He has also left affidavits concerning the Kramer affair with university colleagues.’

I paused and again waited for comment. After a moment he began to whistle softly. According to Baden-Powell, the good Scout smiles and whistles under all difficulties. Mat had given up smiling under difficulties, but the habit, acquired as a boy, of whistling under them he had never lost. The tune was always the same, that of a treacly Victorian ballad entitled ‘Just a Song at Twilight’. He must have picked it up from some homesick Britishers. It sounded very odd coming from Mat’s lips. He says that Baden-Powell himself admitted to having sometimes had trouble over his whistling. Frequent use in public of this antidote to difficulty during the Boer War had given him in some quarters a reputation for eccentricity and callous indifference to the feelings of others.

The whistling stopped. ‘What leverage has he?’

‘He has been working on Symposia, and me, for a long time. He has identified me in the Oberholzer role. He knows other things. He can’t know all and publish it himself without naming names, he threatens to leak what he does know to an American or German news magazine with names.’

‘All he’s got is hearsay. He’s bluffing. You should have played polo with him, Paul.’

Another Baden-Powell prescription. To play polo with someone in this context is to outmanoeuvre him by edging him away from the direction in which you want to go. The metaphor was first used by B-P, I believe, in his essay on the joys of pig-sticking.

‘It didn’t work, Mat.’

‘You should have double-talked him.’

‘I did. I asked him to define crime. I asked him if he didn’t think that it was largely a fiction created by politicians posing as legislators and legislators pretending that their motives are free from political pollution. Didn’t he agree that ninety-five per cent of so-called crime is committed by governments against, and at the expense of, those citizens in whose names they pretend to govern?’

‘Yes, that’s double-talk all right. What did he say?’

‘That it was double-talk. You have to understand, Mat, that what he really wants now is to satisfy his professional vanity. You read his Berne paper. It amused us. Others, his professional peers, are not in the least amused when their lives’ work is dismissed as irrelevant. In many quarters he’s been attacked as a crank. He now wants us to help him demonstrate that, far from being a crank, he is the great innovator, a Darwin of criminology.’

‘By publishing a casebook without naming names? Oh, I know that medical textbooks do it. Patient X and patient Y. The identities don’t matter, not unless the doctor reporting the case is suspected of being a quack seeking to prove an untenable pet theory with invented evidence.’

‘Exactly. In such a case, he either has to produce the patient or qualified witnesses to substantiate his evidence. That’s what Krom proposes to do. He has his witnesses already picked, one American, one English, both qualified persons. We meet in private for a four-day period during which I give them the story of my life. Place of meeting to be of my choosing. Strict security to be observed by all, especially witnesses who will be given only the sketchiest of preliminary briefings, enough to engage their interest and ensure their co-operation, without giving anything substantial away. The text of this briefing will be agreed by Krom and me. All names, places and so on to be changed in order to protect the guilty. That’s what he wants, and in my opinion that’s what he means to get, no matter what it costs.’

He started whistling again, then abruptly stopped. ‘I think you’ve allowed yourself to be conned, Paul. I think you should tell him go jump under a train and that if he makes slanderous or libellous statements about you, or the Institute, or the Symposia Group, we’ll sue them and him till the pips squeak. Remind him that, in the circumstances, he will be a source no publisher can protect in the usual way. He’ll have uttered his threats to the plaintiff in advance. He wouldn’t have a hope.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s no good, Mat. I tried all that. I told you, he knows things. One of his juiciest suspicions is that Symposia is hooked into the Placid Island project. He only needs start a rumour to that effect to cause trouble. Do you still think I’m allowing myself to be conned?’

That did it, as I had known it would.

Mat’s cynicism about the Placid Island deal is a pretence; it, always has been, although he would never dream of admitting it. As a boy, he had heard of another phosphate island once called Pleasant, which had re-discovered its aboriginal name of Nauru. As a man, he had seen that same Nauru, whose whole history was so like that of Placid, cast off her old trust-territory shackles, achieve independence from the British Commonwealth and become the Republic of Nauru, with prospects as a tax-haven.

Now it was Placid’s turn. Placid had a better climate than Nauru and better port facilities than Nauru, which lacks a natural harbour. Placid was Mat’s birthplace. With Mat to preside over its fortunes and its future — poor old Chief Tebuke could have a whole floor to himself in the Placid Hilton if he lived long enough — with Mat to provide the inspired leadership that his people so eagerly awaited. Placid was destined to become the most remarkable, the most prosperous sovereign state in the entire South Pacific.

Is Mat an able criminal as defined by Professor Krom? Possibly, but he is certainly no anarchist. What he wants is a kingdom, and if the national flag has not yet been designed — a pandurus leaf on a field of gold? — the banknotes almost certainly have. If sociologists like Krom must paste labels on men and women in order to classify them, I would say that Mat is, as I am, an adventurer; that is, in the old pejorative sense of the term, a healthy and intelligent person who could labour usefully in the vineyard, but who prefers instead to live by his wits.

There was no more whistling from Mat. He stared at me now with cold dislike.

‘What does he know about Placid?’

‘That I went there last November. He knows that Symposia turned down the offer of an interest in Nauru. He knows that Symposia has stopped steering its clients towards the New Hebrides and has something else cooking. He knows that a Placid settlement is imminent because word has got round that our competitors are trying to get a foot in there through Anglo-Anzac’

‘You said that he was frightened of us. Did you discuss me?’

I had, in fact, tried hinting at his existence. Why, I had asked Krom, should he assume that in what he called ‘the Symposia conspiracy’ I was number one? How did he know that I wasn’t just a figurehead, part of an elaborate cover-story designed to protect someone else? My intention had been to shake his confidence a little. All I had succeeded in doing was making him laugh. He knew that I was number one, so would I please stop trying to talk my way out of the situation.

I had no intention, however, of telling Mat all that.

‘No, Mat, we didn’t discuss you. Your name wasn’t even mentioned. Obviously, he must know of you, the eminence grise of the Placid Island lobby. If he reads the financial papers I mean. That PR outfit Anglo-Anzac have working for them will have seen to that. But as for your personal connection with Symposia, he couldn’t have a clue. If he had, he’d certainly have said so.’

There was a long silence, and then he quite visibly relaxed. ‘So, Paul, you’re the only one who’s been blown so far. It’s not us he’s dealing with, but you. And all that he’s looking for is dirt about operators like you and old Carlo Lech. Is that right?’

‘You might have put it a little more delicately, but yes, I suppose that’s about right.’

‘Then you’d better go along with him, hadn’t you? Throw him an old bone or two and hope that he keeps faith, eh?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that his witnesses keep faith. You’re going to have to do rather a lot of trusting, aren’t you, Paul?’

‘That had occurred to me. I’m going to have to take out quite a lot of insurance too.’

‘Well, we can afford it. You’ll need team help too. Yves would be your best bet on the technical side, I think. And Melanie I know you like.’

I should have guessed then what was in his mind. Yves, we had both agreed in the past, was a first-rate man; but we had disagreed about Melanie. Although he is sexually double-gated, Mat’s judgements about women are rarely sound. I considered, and still do consider, Melanie to be one of the best cover-builders and analysers there is. She learned her craft with the Gehlen organization and is brilliant. For some reason — perhaps because she is as brilliant at penetrating the most complex covers of others as she is at erecting full-proof lie-structures for her own side — Mat had never trusted her. He suspected her, he said, of being a security risk.

I should have asked him whether he had changed his mind about her, whether he had forgotten that he had told me of his suspicions or whether he was, in his tortuous way, giving me fair warning of what I could expect.

I did not guess, so I did not ask. He would not have answered anyway, but asked who I would like instead of Melanie. There would have been a reminder, too, that once he had delegated responsibility he never interfered. He might also have started quoting Baden-Powell on a Scout’s honour.

Instead, we discussed which old bones could best be used to satisfy Professor Krom’s appetite.