Siege at the Villa Lipp

CHAPTER FIVE

I have said that I gave Krom and the witnesses a white Provençal wine before dinner. That is quite true. What I failed to mention was that this was no ordinary Provençal white. I mean the kind that may be drunk with, say, a fiercely garlicked bouillabaisse and survive the ordeal.

What I gave them was the very light-bodied, dry white that comes from the immediate vicinity of the small port of Cassis near Marseilles. There is not a lot of it to be had, and it is very good in its unobtrusive way. It is, though, quite delicate — a bouillabaisse would kill it stone dead — and has to be treated gently.

Unfortunately, the cook’s husband, who had the temerity to call himself a butler, was convinced that the only proper way to chill any white wine was to refrigerate it, or even, I suspect, to give it an hour in the deep-freeze.

I had already warned the fool against such brutality, but that night, possibly because it was so warm outside, he ignored my orders and served it far too cold. The result was that it tasted very much like water.

And that was how Krom proceeded to drink it. Yes, I know he had had a long, hot day, had sweated a great deal and was probably a bit dehydrated; but the bottle of Evian provided for him in his room should have taken care of that. What he seemed not to realize was that the liquid he was swigging down so thirstily — he consumed well over a bottle before dinner — had the normal alcoholic content of other white wines from the region of about eleven per cent. Or perhaps he did realize it. Perhaps he would have been happier if we had all had a boozy pre-prandial session of double dry martinis or schnapps.

I don’t know. I can only say that before dinner he certainly drank too much, and that during dinner he continued to drink too much and ate, once the pâté had taken the edge off his appetite, practically nothing.

In a way, I can understand his not feeling hungry. That evening, as far as he was concerned, was the culmination of many years of dedicated labour. I happen to believe that the dedication has been misguided and that the labour will ultimately prove to be fruitless; but that is not how he sees things at present, nor how he saw them. He believed that he was within reach of a goal, physically within reach of it. The files Melanie had brought in just as dinner was announced now lay on an adjacent coffee table. If he had stood up and reached out, he could have touched them, and he was having trouble keeping himself from doing so. His eyes flickered towards them constantly to make sure that they were still there. The burgundy that came with the veal went down almost as quickly as the Cassis.

‘Nice wine, Mr Finnan,’ Dr Henson remarked.

‘Thank you.’ It was nice for a wine that had only been bought two weeks earlier from a local merchant, but I had not expected her to notice it. I had thought of her more as a claret drinker.

‘But not nice enough to impair our judgement, eh?’ Krom beamed glassily on his witnesses.

‘One would hope,’ said Connell pointedly, ‘that while we are on an important field expedition nothing should be allowed to impair our judgement.’

‘There you are wrong!’ Krom stabbed a forefinger at Connell and then began waggling it like the arm of a metronome. ‘I will tell you in advance something that you would later have had to discover for yourselves.’ The metronome stopped and the forefinger began stabbing at me. ‘Where this man is concerned, no unimpaired judgement can be made. Why not? Because he is like one of those creatures of the cephalopod family such as the octopus or squid, which, when attacked or threatened with attack, discharges an inky liquid to form a cloud in the water behind which it may retreat.’

Yves nodded appreciatively. ‘Calmar,’ he explained to Dr Henson. ‘Good to eat, but only when cooked in the Italian way.’

Krom ignored the interruption. ‘And what does this ink consist of? What is its composition when Mr Firman has brewed it? I will tell you.’

‘We know,’ said Connell. ‘The answer’s hog-wash.’

‘Pardon?’

‘You’re forgetting, Professor. You gave us this lecture on the way down. Every time Mr Firman feels that he is in any way, even marginally, threatened, up goes the defence that, if anything not quite kosher has been done by anyone, ever, and he’s been around at the time, it was never he who was basically responsible for what happened. He, it appears, has always been one of life’s number-two men, always putty in the hands of some ruthless, clever, wicked number-one. Right?’

‘Well. . ‘

‘I know I’m not putting it quite the way you did, Professor, but I think that’s roughly the way your readings on him come out when they’re processed. You call that sort of tactical fluid discharge octopus ink. I call it hog-wash. What do you call it, Mr Firman?’

‘In this case I think that I have to mix the metaphor a little and call it wishful thinking. Professor Krom clearly does not wish to believe that the cephalopod he caught was not the largest in the ocean. A natural reluctance on his part. But if he really believes that my version of the events which interest him is so little to be relied upon, I don’t understand why any of you is here.’

Connell said quickly: ‘Olé. Nicely fielded.’

Krom rumbled back into action. ‘Has it not yet come to your notice, Dr Connell, that when a structure of lies about a sequence of events is superimposed upon a schema composed of fixed points of known truth concerning those same events, more can be learnt about the liar by comparative analysis than can be learned by listening to and endeavouring to make sense of so-called confessions?’

‘I wonder, Professor,’ Dr Henson asked blandly, ‘if we could have a concrete example of that method of working in the case we are now discussing.’

‘Certainly. Mr Firman maintains that, at the time I identified him, he was not in control of a considerable organization running a small, but staggeringly lucrative, extortion racket. He also denies that his operation was based on information gained by the suborning of bank employees and others holding positions of trust. He claims instead, absurdly you may think, that he was the helpless agent of an Italian criminal named Carlo Lech.’

This was too much, even from Krom. I stopped him. ‘Just a minute, Professor. I have never said that I was anyone’s helpless agent, and I have never said that my friend Carlo Lech was a criminal. I did say that we were for a time in partnership and that he was the older and senior partner. I also said that he was an extremely capable business man and that he had other partners besides me. At the time, you may remember, you told me that Carlo Lech did not exist, that he was a figment of my fertile imagination. Didn’t you use those very words, Professor?’

‘I did and I was right to do so. The Carlo Lech of whom you spoke and are speaking now, your “friend”’, was and is a figment of your imagination. Oh yes, there used to be a Carlo Lech in Milan. No doubt about that. He was a highly respectable and respected corporation lawyer. That doesn’t mean that he was necessarily an honest man, of course, but after our talk in Brussels I made the most careful enquiries about him. Unfortunately, he died five years ago so we cannot ask him personally what he thought of you. He had, though, a son who is a priest. This son had never heard of you, or anyone like you. His second child, the daughter of Maria, wasn’t born until nineteen forty-six. Mrs Lech was, as you may or may not know, twenty years younger than her husband. The daughter married a young American orchestral musician, a cellist of talent whom she met in Milan, and now lives mostly in the United States. Shortly before Carlo Lech died, she gave birth to his first grandson, Mario. I wrote to her asking about you, but she knew nothing.’

‘Even the most doting Italian father would be unlikely to discuss his business associates with a young child, particularly associates who used assumed names.’

‘She wasn’t a young child when I saw you in Zurich. Were you her trustee in Vaduz? Ha! That left the widow, who seems always to have been a semi-invalid and who has been for the past two years in a sanatorium. She now suffers from Simmonds’ disease which is, I believe, something to do with the pituitary gland. She was not available for interview. Had she been available, though, I have little doubt that her reaction would have been the same as her son’s. She would never have heard of you.’

He paused to let it all sink in, and to empty his glass again, before he delivered the coup de grâce.

‘The Carlo Lech you described to me,’ he said, ‘never existed.’ And then, perhaps to convince himself as well as his witnesses, he repeated the word that mattered to him most and thumped the table with his fist as he did so.

‘Never!’

In spite of the note I had received after our first meeting saying ‘See you soon’, it was, in fact, nearly two years before I saw Carlo again.

A lot had happened in the interval and, as far as I was concerned, not a moment of it had been pleasant. Crawling up the leg of Italy with an army which had gradually been stripped of its best British divisions so that they could be used in the battles for France would have been, for me, a lowering experience anyway. Specialist units like the one to which I belonged did not go with their divisions. We were part of the Italian front, for eternity it seemed. The succession of east-west defensive lines which it is so easy to build in that country, where the mountains and the rivers lay them out for all the world to see, let alone German generals, ensured that the attackers, no matter how brave they were, no matter how well and skilfully led, had to suffer repeatedly the despair and frustration of having to pay exorbitantly for every minor success. And the reward for a minor success was always the same; your first glimpse of the next obstacle to a major one. I have heard of no campaign in modern war that was accounted enjoyable by any of those engaged in it, but the Italian must, in terms of futility as well as ordinary beastliness, have been among the nastier. In war’s forward areas, the sights of the dead unburied and of the wounded before they have been cleaned up are not always the worst; and the battlefield depression that follows a hard-fought victory is often, no matter what the staged press pictures like to pretend, indistinguishable from that which follows a defeat.

It was just after we reached the Gothic line and I was quartered in yet another wrecked house, north of Ravenna this time, when Carlo came to see me again.

I almost failed to recognize him. Gone were the long leather coat and the greasy felt hat. He was dressed in what would now, I suppose, be described as a para-military uniform. He wore GI ankle boots, the kind that British officers were always trying to get hold of, those made of an inside-out leather that looked a bit like suéde and had rubber soles; and on his head was a black beret. It was his topcoat that impressed me most, though. This was the short turned-sheepksin job that was issued to some of the units operating in the mountains above the snow-line. It was also worn by some of the more dress-conscious senior officers among those of the fourteen nationalities then serving on the Fifth and Eighth Army fronts. On the otherwise badgeless Carlo, the coat bestowed field rank at least.

‘I’ve tracked you down, you see,’ he said by way of greeting, and handed me a bottle wrapped in a copy of the Stars and Stripes. ‘Whisky,’ he added, ‘but there’s no bill this time.’

It was late afternoon and getting dark. I lit a pressure lamp, got two beer glasses out of the mortar-bomb box used for mess stores, and opened the bottle.

We raised our glasses to one another in silence and drank. Then he said: ‘You are looking older, Sergeant-Major.’

‘I am. A year and a half.’

‘I was merely observing, not offering a shoulder to cry on that you neither want nor need.’

‘What can I do for you this time, Mr Lech?’

His near-smile twitched a bit. ‘For the present, thank you, nothing. 3 had meant to visit you again before this, but events and my work made it impossible.’

He went on to give me a rough idea of what had happened to him. He was now based in Rome and working for the reformed Military Government, mostly in his professional capacity as a lawyer.

When war travels slowly and devastatingly from one end of a country to the other, it is obvious that in its wake a multiplicity of legal problems, few simple and many highly complex, are going to have to be solved. Most, of course, will concern damaged property, often, except for the land it once stood on, totally destroyed. Who used to own it? What has happened to him or her, or, if the owner was a corporation, it? If the one-time owner is now defunct does a known successor exist?

He had seen and heard a lot on his travels about the country.

About his wife and family, he said only that he had been in direct touch with his wife, and that she was well. I gathered from other things he said that he had been in some way assisting British and American liaison officers in coordinating partisan activity behind the Gothic line. Questioned about it, though, he at once changed the subject.

‘Last time I saw you,’ he said, ‘I asked you where you had learned to speak Italian. Later, I tried to find out about you from the British Adjutant-General’s department at army headquarters, but they preserved security most ingeniously by pretending not to understand their own filing system.’

‘It was probably no pretence. But yes, I did say I’d tell you all if I saw you again. You mean you’re still curious?’

‘More than just curious. Interested.’

So, I gave him a reasonably full, though in parts censored, curriculum vitae.

I soon found that the censorship had been unnecessary. He was not in the least concerned with my moral character, about which, he told me later, he had already come to a firm conclusion. This was, that I could be counted upon never to do anything which it was not in my own best interests to do, and that my direction as to where those interests lay at any specific moment would always be swiftly, as well as shrewdly, reached. Tripoli, except for the name of the banker on whose yacht I had served, was waved away as of no consequence. He did not want to hear about adventures. It was far more important to learn that I spoke Spanish. How about French?

‘I get along. Schoolboy grammar, plus additions to my vocabulary picked up in Cannes and St-Germain-des-Prés.’

But you learn languages easily, it seems.’

‘Learning Italian when you already speak Spanish isn’t difficult. I think there is a book that makes it easier both ways. Do you want to learn Spanish?’

‘No, no, no. You speak English. You should have little trouble learning German.’

‘Why should I learn German?’

‘Because I think that it is soon going to be a very useful language to have.’

‘Don’t you mean Russian?’

‘No, German.’

I must have looked blank. You have to remember that this was February 1945 and the Western Allies and Russia between them were tearing Germany apart. Anyway, Carlo saw that explanation was needed.

‘As soon as this is over, Sergeant-Major, I intend to go into business. Oh, I shall re-establish my legal practice too. That is necessary to the business as well as important in other respects.’ He looked into his half-empty glass. ‘You see, I intend to go into the business of managing other people’s money.’

This, in itself, did not seem to me to have much to do with German being a useful language for me to learn, so I said nothing. Then, suddenly, he leaned right back in his chair and raising one hand to shade his eyes from the glare of the pressure lamp, stared intently at me for a long time, several seconds.

Finally, he said, ‘Paul, what are your plans for when this is over?’

It was the first time he had called me anything but Sergeant-Major. I remember noting the fact and also being extremely puzzled. It seemed to me that I was about to be offered some sort of job; but what, in God’s name, could an Italian lawyer contemplating going into the arcane business of managing other people’s money want with a man of not quite twenty-five? The young man spoke three languages, true, but was he not totally inexperienced in any business other than that of acting as a security policeman during a war? Obviously, I had been mistaken. He was not about to offer me a job. Therefore, he must want something else from me. Play it straight, then; that is to say, cagily.

‘Well, I said. ‘I suppose that I shall go home and see my family. There’s a job there, if I want it.’

‘But in the meantime, what?’

‘I don’t think there’s going to be much meantime.’

‘There, I fancy, you are wrong,’ he said. ‘For you, there may be more than you think. I expect that you have heard talk of demobilization plans.’

‘Of course. There’ll still be Japan to be finished off, but not for the old sweats. I hear they’ve already started sending the long-service men home from Burma. It’s to be first in, first out, with a points bonus for every month of overseas service. On that basis, I should be home three months after it’s over, even going by a slow boat.’

He shook his head. ‘I intend no disrespect, but if you had been a fighting soldier, an infantryman, an engineer, a gunner, that might have been a reasonable expectation on your part; but you are not in those categories. I believe that, even after the Nazis are finished here, Allied troops will still be needed. There will be problems with the Yugoslavs about Trieste and other places, there will no doubt be problems with the French. Above all there will be immediate internal problems, social, economic, and political, which will not be solved without the presence for a time of occupation forces. With partisans in absolute control of vital areas in the north, we could not even administer a direct economic-aid programme without armed help. Your governments may choose to replace what you call the old sweats — I suppose you mean the experienced men — with younger conscripts or those who have seen less service, but specialists like you will have to stay on. You will be asked to volunteer.’

‘Or else?’

‘That’s right. Or else stay on anyway, but forgo the rewards that would have been yours as volunteers.’

‘Thanks for warning me. One our people managed to get sent home and given a psychiatric discharge a month or two ago, I was surprised how easy it was, once he’d really decided.’

‘Baby talk doesn’t become you, Paul. I think that you would prefer to stay in Italy for a year or eighteen months and make your fortune.’

‘In the army? That sounds as if we’re back to black marketeering.’

He sighed irritably. ‘It is absolutely essential that you rid yourself of this absurd idea that I am a criminal or that I have criminal instincts. I am a lawyer who respects the law. Illegality is for the immature and the foolish. The wise man has no need of it.’

‘Sorry.’ He seemed genuinely put out, so I poured him some more of his own whisky. ‘But,’ I went on, ‘you must admit that when anyone speaks of making a fortune out of the army, the mind instantly turns to thoughts of … ‘

‘No, no!’ he protested. ‘While in the army, not from or out of the army.’ He made one of his brushing-away-a-cobweb gestures. ‘The kind of cheating you are thinking of is already being done on a scale that you could not possibly emulate, even if you wanted to. And the scale is increasing. I told you, I have seen and heard a lot on my travels. There is an American quartermaster, for example, who is at present, according to my estimates, over thirty thousand dollars ahead in canned-food deals.’

‘Then we are talking about the black market.’

‘No, we are considering a problem that arises out of it. In a nutshell it is this. What does the quartermaster do with his money when the time comes for him to go home? Does he carry it in his musette bag? Does he?’

‘I gather that you think that to do so would be unwise.’

‘From his point of view, catastrophic. I can tell you that the Judge-Advocate’s department is already preparing court-martials against two splendid old soldiers, regular army veterans, who were simple enough to do just that. Given the opportunity, any fool can steal money. It’s accounting for the possession of it later that is difficult. Do you know that one of those fellows was stupid enough to claim that he had won it all in crap games? The trouble was that he couldn’t remember any of the other players. I can tell you this. When the time comes for the rest of these lines-of-communcation and base-area bandits to go home, or even be transferred to other theatres, they are going to find that there are obstacle courses for them to run that they never knew about and that they can neither beat nor avoid.’

‘So what would you advise the quartermaster to do with his thirty thousand dollars?’

‘Advise him to give them all to me, so that I can take care of them for him.’

He himself obviously found nothing strange about what he was saying. It called, consequently, for a careful reply.

‘Carlo, you are, as I have reason to know, a trustworthy man. But, with respect, I don’t see how you are going to persuade a man who has made thirty thousand dollars by cheating to believe that you, to say nothing of the rest of his fellow men, aren’t just as crooked as he is. Isn’t that the way the crook’s mind works?’

‘Certainly, it is. For that precise reason he must be sold new ideas. First, if he is an American, he must be made aware of the various hostile moves that can be made against his thirty thousand by the United States Government and its Internal Revenue Service. For instance, that part of his nest egg which is in occupation money will be made worthless after a certain date unless it is declared beforehand. In order to declare large sums he must be able satisfactorily to explain them. That part of the whole which is in Italian currency cannot be converted outside the country except by payment through his own home bank. Once more he must explain. In the same way if he remits dollars in amounts which exceed his accumulated base pay, he will also be required to explain. In other words, he must either lose all or he must trust, and pay, someone else to do what he cannot do for himself; that is, convert that portion of his equity which is not in dollars into currencies which will remain negotiable. Then, the whole of it must be kept safe until such time as he can reclaim it without ever having had to account to anyone for his possession of one cent. How will we perform these unique and quite invaluable services for him? My dear Paul, I will tell you.’

Thirty years were to go by before the Watergate investigation brought the word ‘laundering’ into metaphorical association with the word ‘money’. In 1945 we did not use that particular figure of speech; but in fact ‘laundering money’, the process of giving large sums which have been criminally acquired the appearance of having been come by legally was what Carlo then began to describe.

Mr Q, the quartermaster, would hear, as if by accident, not only of the obstacle courses in preparation but also about an Italian lawyer of the highest repute who specialized in foreign tax law and was an expert on international currency dealings. How did Mr Q imagine that all those rich Italian industrialists had managed to get the hell out and stay rich when all the rest of Italy was on the bread line? Obviously, they had switched all their loose cash to currencies and places in which it was safe, and it was this wonderful little lawyer who had made it possible for them to get away with it.

Once Mr Q’s agile mind had grasped the fact that here might be a way of concealing his own ill-gotten gains until the heat was off, an introduction would be arranged and Carlo would go to work.

Of course, Mr Q, your problems can be very simply solved. No trouble at all. I will arrange to have your money converted into gold-backed bonds and deposited in my Lugano bank. As soon as you wish to reconvert and receive the money, you write from America and tell me so. In reply you will hear news of the sad death in Europe of a distant relative of yours. Your family emigrated originally from where, Mr Q? Denmark? Then the relative will die in Copenhagen and the money that this so-generous cousin bequeathed to you will be paid in Danish kroner. Any questions?

‘Yes, Dottore Lech. How do I know that I can trust you?’

‘A sound question, Mr Q. I like hard-headed clients who take nothing for granted. You trust me initially because I am trustworthy and of good reputation. You sit here in my office confident that nothing which is said here will go any farther. You entrust your money to me because I shall give you, first, a notarized receipt for it and, second, the name of the bank in Lugano where it will be held to your credit in an anonymous numbered account. Do you know about anonymous numbered accounts, Mr Q?’

Naturally, he didn’t. In 1945 the numbered Swiss bank account was not the hocus-pocus cliché beloved of knowing crime-reporters that it was to become in later years. Refugees from the Nazis had used it, as the Swiss had intended it to be used, as a defence against Gestapo enquiries and Gestapo reprisals. Subsequently, top Nazis and Fascisti, having second thoughts and wanting to hedge their bets, had used it as a defence against the dark suspicions of diehard comrades and the awful penalties that awaited defeatists.

To Mr Q the concept was new and immediately reassuring. He hung upon the Dottore’s words; and if he never quite got around to asking how it was possible for a numbered account to be opened for him in a Lugano bank without anyone at all in the bank knowing his identity, it was understandable. In Italy and sitting on thirty thousand hot bucks it all sounded just great.

Now, of course, it all sounds so wide-eyed and artless that just recalling it makes me smile. Nevertheless, it worked. Parts of the set-up still work. When we started, it worked in all its parts because Carlo had thought everything through carefully and realistically down to the smallest detail. Not even Mat Williamson denies that Carlo was a superbly imaginative planner.

His choice of me as the contact man, the intermediary who knows how one can get in touch with the legendary Dottore Lech and what miracles the great man can perform is an example.

‘Why me?’ I had asked.

‘Because a man like Q would automatically suspect a fellow-American who dangled information like that before his eyes of being an agent-provocateur; and he could very well be right. You, a British non-com, one those upper-crust limeys whose voices make them sound as if they’re pederasts even when they’re not, could never be suspect.

And what more natural than that someone in your line of work should hear about someone like me? From our own point of view, you have freedom to move about and make new contacts. With the cessation of actual hostilities, that freedom will tend to increase, and so will your freedom to invent reasons for extending your liaison with the Americans.’

‘What about the British Mr Q’s?’

He raised his right hand as if he were about to swear an oath or deliver a blessing, and then said very sharply: ‘No!’ After a pause he went on slowly: ‘Never, Paul, as long as we are associated, will you ever approach any of your own people, no matter what you may suspect or know about them. Remember this. Nothing we ever do will ever be illegal with our own, our respective, national authorities. In your case, talking about currency transactions to an American soldier, or a Polish or a French one, you would be taking negligible risks. Talking to a British soldier of the same things, you risk being charged with an infinite variety of military offences. If we trifle a little with the law, it must always be the law of others, never of cur own. Besides, most of the marketable commodities are now supplied by the Americans, who also control the main storage and distribution facilities. I expect that state of affairs to continue. Oh yes, there will be, as there are now, British, French and Polish fingers in the black-market pie. I have no doubt of that. But most of the fingers will belong, apart from those of my own countrymen, to Americans. That is where the serious money will end up.’

‘But what happens to the money, Carlo? I mean, if it’s left with us for safe-keeping.’

He was surprised that I should find it necessary to ask. ‘Naturally, it remains the property of our client. That we will have the use of it to finance our own market operations will be none of his business, any more than it is the business of the man who banks his money in the conventional way to oversee the banks’ investment policies. In many ways we shall, indeed, operate exactly like a bank, but a bank unfettered by petty rules and restrictions.’

‘At most ordinary banks the client can go and withdraw his money if he wants. Will he be able to do that with ours?’

‘Certainly he will! He can have his money any time he wishes, plus a generous share of its earnings during the time we have managed it. Our own charges will seem modest when we are found to have doubled his money for him. The fact that we may have quadrupled it for our own account need not concern him. Of course,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘complications are bound to arise. They always do when laws are broken.’

I waited. Carlo was thinking how best to enlighten the innocent without seeming to condescend or over-simplify. He was a courteous man.

‘Consider,’ he said at last, ‘the position of a client of ours once he is back in his home town, a civilian again with perhaps a job and even a wife and family. How different it will all seem. And how unreal this faraway treasure of his will soon become!’

He contemplated that agreeable vision for a moment before sighing his way back into the real world. ‘But let us assume a bolder spirit, or one who cannot bear the thought of money lying, as he thinks, idle in a Lugano bank. There are such men, Paul.’

‘Yes, Carlo, there are, especially among those who have made killings as black marketeers.’

‘Especially, you think? Among those who were always pilferers, thieves, even before they went into the army, stupidity is to be expected, I agree. But from those late development delinquents who will use our services we can count upon more sense, I believe. Take our prototypical Mr Q for example. Longing for, or possibly needing, money, he decides to send for his nest-egg in the prescribed manner.’

‘You mean he chooses to inherit? Yes? Well, we then have to find the equivalent of thirty thousand dollars in

Danish kroner and remit from Copenhagen. Or do we just ignore him?’

The smile blossomed. ‘Ignore him? That is the last thing we do. On the contrary, we at once arrange to have sent from Copenhagen direct to his local home town paper the magnificent news of this remarkable legacy and of the romantic story which lies behind it.’ He looked at me expectantly.

‘What romantic story?’

‘What does it matter? You are being obtuse, Paul. Think of Mr Q and the strange position in which he would find himself. Think of questions that would be put to him. Who is this mysterious relative? Why has nobody ever heard of him or her before? And it would not be only the local newspaper reporter who wanted answers. His friends and, above all, his family would want answers, too, and they would examine them somewhat more critically. Almost as critically as the Internal Revenue people. How quick they would be to note the source of Mr Q’s surprising windfall and to request a copy of the probated Will when one became available! Do you know, Paul, I believe that Mr Q would very soon be countermanding his instructions to us and telling his local paper that the whole thing had been a case of mistaken identity. Same name, wrong man.’

‘What about his notarized receipt! He could come here and collect.’

‘He could, but would he? Have you thought of all the anxieties, the heartaches, that receipt must already have caused him? He will have realized, remember, almost as he saw me signing it, that to be found with that piece of paper in his possession could be as damning as to be found counting the money itself, perhaps more so. There could be no plea for leniency on the score of ignorance. Al Capone went to prison for income-tax evasion, not for the way he had made the income. No need to remind Mr Q of that. How he must, in the end, have hated that beautiful receipt!

Where did he hide it when he left for home? In the lining of his tunic? In one of his shoes?’

‘Supposing he went to Lugano?’

‘They have never heard of him or his numbered account. He would have to come to us, where he would at once learn that, for security reasons, we had some months earlier transferred the money to a different bank. All is perfectly safe. What currency would he like it in? Or would he prefer to have it transferred to his domestic account? You see? He is back with his original dilemma, only now, from the tax-evasion standpoint, the offence is even more serious. He had an illicit hoard of dollars. Now, it has made a profit on which he ought to pay capital-gains tax if he were an upright, God-fearing citizen. But he is no longer that, and he knows it. Perhaps, if he has confided in his wife and she is a woman of courage the pair of them will risk all and smuggle it back to the United States. Or try to do so. We would be failing in our duty, I think, if we did not warn them most seriously of the nature of the risks they would run. At the same time we might remind them that, if they leave the money with us to increase and multiply, there is nothing to prevent their using it later. They might eventually decide to buy a rèsidence secondaire in Italy, or somewhere on the Côte d’Azur, which they could rent when they weren’t luxuriating in it themselves. Then, no one ever need know anything.’ He paused, closed his eyes and breathed in deeply as if he were already enjoying on Mr Q’s behalf the cool evening breeze scented by pine trees. Then he opened his eyes again before narrowing them slightly. ‘You see, Paul? There would never be, there could never be, a run on our bank.’

Does that sound like an anarchist speaking, Professor Krom? — a man against all settled order and systems of law?

I don’t think it does. To me it sounds like a man who enjoyed making money not by breaking laws but by circumventing them, not by destroying order but by utilizing it in unorthodox ways.

Yes, Carlo was vain; indeed he revelled in his own cleverness; but the respect that he professed for the law was absolutely genuine. He was, too, something of a moralist and strongly disapproved of black marketeers.

He disapproved because he considered them parasites. He would have been affronted, though, by any suggestion that the same word could, with equal justice, have been applied to us. I only know of one person who had the temerity even to hint at the suggestion, and the consequences for that person were unpleasant. Carlo could, when angered, become quite vindictive.

In that respect he was different from Mat Williamson. Mat does not have to be in the least angry with a man before deciding that he must be destroyed.

The years immediately following VE day were great ones for parasites. Allied aid supplies, mostly American but some British, poured into Italy and West Germany at a prodigious rate.

However, since this is not a history of the post-World War II black markets — the writing of which I happily leave to a scholar of the Krom school of fantasists — I shall merely give some idea of the scale of them by reporting that, during our first eighteen months of operations, Carlo was ‘entrusted’ with nearly half a million dollars derived from the Italian markets alone.

I say alone because before long we were getting word of much larger sums needing our services in Germany.

The early reports from Carlos’ man in Lugano told of a chaotic situation. Big money was being made, but those making it, mostly American senior NCOs and junior officers in transportation and supply units, seemed unaware of the difficulties into which they would soon be getting. This was not simply because they were new to the game, but because in West Germany the rules were complex and the conditions of play tended to promote over-confidence. For instance, there were three distinct occupation zones, in two of which — the French and the British — exchange control restrictions were maintained on their national currencies. In the British zone, these restrictions were enforced by a Special Investigation Branch squad of remarkable ferocity. So, the American wheeler-dealer, who already benefited from his access to the most sought-after market commodities, also enjoyed the advantage of being able to do business in the only freely convertible currency available, the dollar.

Soon, stories began to come in of American soldiers crossing into Switzerland for ‘Rest and Recuperation’. On arrival, most of them made for the nearest bank. Perfectly natural, one would have said, if all that those fine boys were doing was exchanging a few of their dollars for francs to spend locally during their furloughs; but that, it seemed, was by no means all that some of them were doing; lots were opening bank accounts.

This, of course, was before the mere possession of a Swiss bank account by an American or British citizen rendered him, at least in the eyes of his native Revenue men, at best a jail-worthy tax-evader if not a Mafia narcotics-pedlar as well; but murmurings about refugee Nazi funds being protected by the Swiss bank secrecy laws were already getting louder, and a newspaper story about a black market in antibiotics involving occupation medical-corps personnel had caused a considerable fuss. As always when the nostrils of higher authority are assailed by smells of corruption other than their own, the cries of outrage and disgust are promptly followed by sounds of loophole-stoppings and stampings-out, of tightenings-up and clampings-down.

In the American sector, by the end of 1946, an efficient laundry service of the kind Carlo could provide had become essential. I do not claim that his was the only one in the field — we had our imitators by then — but it was unquestionably the safest and most reliable.

In November, having at last been told that the army no longer required my services, I asked for a travel warrant to London and was demobilized there. Acting on Carlo’s instructions, I then obtained a British passport as well as renewing my Argentine papers, before returning to Milan. From Milan I went to Lugano, where I spent a week or so learning a few more ropes. From Munich, I wrote to my family explaining that I had gone into the scrap-metal business.

The code-name given to me by Carlo for use when I needed to authenticate confidential messages was ‘Oberholzer’.

In 1956, Carlo had an operation for the removal of his gall bladder. The surgeon who performed it somehow bungled the job, and later in the year a second operation became necessary. He recovered all right, but it was a long, debilitating illness and it changed him. I don’t mean that he aged prematurely, though I have noticed that serious illness can have that effect on persons in their sixties. With Carlo what happened was that, as his physical health returned, the pattern of his characteristic psychological responses seemed gradually to intensify. He became an exaggerated, larger-than-life version of himself. Things that would once have only made that smile of his blossom, now made him laugh aloud. Things that would once have been dismissed as annoyances now produced outbursts of rage. It was as if, in the struggle to regain his health, he had been obliged to shed the emotional weight of several old but crucial inhibitions. The result was in many ways a more engaging man, but also a more formidable and sometimes frightening one. I have said that Carlo could be vindictive. After his illness he could be cruelly so. The man who could dream up the butter-train coup was also capable of applying himself with relish to more disagreeable amusements.

His claim that ours was a bank on which there could never be a run had proved to be justified. On that score we had no anxieties; and, after 1951, when the double-taxation conventions between Switzerland and the US and UK came into force, the possibility of a run ceased to exist altogether. Our ‘customers’, a cagey bunch of crooks with finely-tuned survival instincts, could never all go crazy at the same time.

That is not to say, however, that some of them did not over the years withdraw their deposits, having devised their own ways of accounting for them. Some of the ways worked. Few attempted, though, to use the legacy method of getting their money, and most who did chickened out, as Carlo had predicted they would, before the pay-off was finally made.

The typical American customer seeking to close his account with us was usually in Europe on a business or vacation trip. Mostly, they wrote, after leaving the United States and generally from London or Paris, to announce that they were on their way. Those who went unannounced direct to Lugano were referred to Milan, and Carlo was immediately given advance warning either by telephone or by one of our couriers. When such customers arrived they were usually, and quite naturally, a bit flustered. Doubt and greed, plus a little anger and a lot of fear, make a disturbing emotional mix; but most were easy to handle.

The one who so upset Carlo was exceptional in a number of respects. To being with, he was not flustered, only bloody-minded. Furthermore, during the time that had elapsed since I had signed him up in Germany, he had returned to the United States and, under the GI Bill of Rights, qualified as an accountant. In addition, he had married a woman, also an accountant, whom he had met while they were both attending a post-graduate course in business administration. She had worked then for a firm of Wall Street investment bankers. After their marriage they had gone into business together, starting an employment agency specialising in trained data-processing staff.

This customer was so different from our prototypical Mr Q that I shall call him Vic — as in Victor and victim.

When I first met him, Vic had been dealing with the already overcrowded market for stolen PX goods, but later, thanks to a lucky posting and a promotion, he had been able to switch to army truck tyres and make real money. By the time his tour of duty in Germany ended we were holding over seventy thousand dollars for him, and he, although he had met Carlo only once, held nine of the notarized receipts. The courier service we operated made such transactions fairly routine, once confidence had been established at an initial meeting, as well as safer. The meeting usually took place near Zug, where Carlo’s holding corporation was registered.

Vic gave no advance warning of his arrival in Milan, and none was received from Lugano because he had not bothered to go there. I had other projects to supervise by then, and was dividing my time between Milan and three other cities. It was by chance that I was there when Vic descended on us. A lucky chance, I think; not because the occasion was in the least enjoyable, but because it made me think more carefully than I had thought before about Carlo. Naturally, he called me in to greet his old client and my old friend.

At first, Vic showed no signs at all of bloody-mindedness. He was not exactly affable, but cool, polite and collected. He had a brand-new Gucci brief-case which he carefully placed on the floor between his legs. Then he told us what a wonderful little woman he had married and why he hadn’t troubled to go to the bank in Lugano.

A month earlier they had been talking about expanding their business, of opening a second office in Chicago. They had spoken of the additional capital that would be needed and of the problems of borrowing it they would have to face. In the watches of the night Vic had revealed for the first time that while in the army he had not always been a simple soldier.

Mrs Vic had heard his confession with surprise but only token distress. They were both human, weren’t they? Once her surprise had worn off curiosity had taken over. Her Wall Street experience had given her some knowledge of Swiss banking customs. What sort of an account did he say he had? An anonymous one? Didn’t he mean numbered? No, he meant one hundred per cent anonymous numbered. Well, honey, I have news for you. There are numbered accounts, but not one hundred per cent anonymous ones. Okay, your name’s not on the account externally, but it’s on it internally. The only anonymity lies in the fact that no more than five key bank personnel can match the name to the number. Exactly how did you open this account? What sort of application did you sign?

Now, Vic turned narrowed eyes in my direction. ‘How many other suckers did you sign up, Paul baby?’

‘You had an anonymous account.’

‘There’s no such thing.’

‘There’s no such thing now. The rules were changed when the double-taxation conventions were signed.’

‘Bullshit!’

I gave him the weary look. ‘If you yourself had not insisted that, for security reasons, contacts between us could only be made on your initiative, you would long ago have been formally notified of the situation. Why project your paranoia on us? If you had simply gone to the Lugano bank you would have been referred here automatically.’

‘Well, now that I’m here un-automatically, where’s the money?’

I looked at Carlo. He already had his hand on the intercom to the outer office. He flipped the switch and said in English: ‘Send in the current confidential fiscal account of Mr Vic’ To Vic he said: ‘I am assuming that you can produce the original receipts that I notarized. You have them with you?’

‘Sure.’ He reached for the brief-case and took out an old-fashioned pouch file of the kind that is tied with a linen tape. He undid the tape, took out the receipts and spread them out elaborately in the shape of a fan. ‘How many peanuts are they worth now?’ he asked unpleasantly.

What interested me at once was their condition. I had seen a number of those receipts produced for inspection in Carlo’s office, and always before they had looked unfit even for his elegant waste-basket. Either they had been dog-eared and greasy from years of furtive handling and re-examination, or so creased, folded and refolded to suit strange hiding-places that they were nearly falling apart. Vic’s were all clean and smooth. As well as being astute and impertinent, he was also, it seemed, overwhelmingly sure of himself.

Carlo’s senior secretary, the matriarch, came in with the statement of account and placed it reverently on the desk in front of him.

Normally, that is faced with a client who had minded his manners and was there merely to enquire about the state of his dream money, Carlo would have let the account lie there for a few minutes while he chatted away knowledgeably about some new sculptor whose work had caught his eye, or the follies of currency speculation, or anything else that had happened to come into his mind as he sat there. The truth was that the accounts, which were always updated twice a year, were his own particular pride and joy. He did them himself and they were masterpieces of obfuscation. One of his greatest pleasures was to see a client, on examining an account, purse his lips and then nod vaguely as if it were all perfectly understandable. He believed that the preliminary chit-chat — what he called his abracadabra — helped the process along by bemusing the client.

With Vic, however, abracadabra was obviously not going to work. Besides, the fellow annoyed him. Almost before the secretary had left the room, Carlo leaned forward and tossed the account folder in Vic’s direction.

Vic caught it neatly, opened it and spent about ten seconds glancing at each of the three pages inside. Then, he slapped it shut and skimmed it back so that it plopped on to the desk right under Carlo’s nose.

‘Mr Lech,’ he said, ‘I left you with seventy-three thousand dollars of mine. In eight years those dollars have become one hundred eighty-six thousand somethings. First question, what kind of somethings? Lire?’

Carlo put the account folder aside as if the sight of it now offended him. ‘American dollars, of course,’ he said. ‘You have more than doubled your money.’

Vic did not look in the least pleased. He just said: ‘How? How have I doubled it? Tell me, Mr Lech.’

Carlo touched the account folder without looking at it. ‘It is all here, Sir. I thought you understood figures.’

Vic made a spitting sound. ‘Sure I understand figures, when I know how they’ve been cooked. You, or rather your boy Paul here, now tells me that my money hasn’t been in that bank after all. So where has it been?’

‘Acting on your behalf, we held it in a deposit account.’

‘Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Acting on my behalf, you said. Right? So what did you invest it in? German blue chips? Schering? Siemens? Daimler-Benz? Hoechst? What was the portfolio?’

Carlo had a small ebony-edged silver ruler which he used as a paperweight. With it, he suddenly rapped on the desk. ‘That is enough, sir,’ he said sternly. ‘I am a lawyer, not an investment banker. You found it convenient to utilize my services in order to hold your money in trust. I have held it in trust. It is more than intact. You can receive it back at any time you wish, less my proper fees but plus compound interest at bank rates as they have fluctuated over the relevant period. You have more than doubled your money. What is your complaint?’

Vic sat back, as if relaxing, then cocked an eye again at me. ‘What kind of an account do you charmers say you put it in?’

‘A deposit account.’

He made his spitting noise again. ‘Now, I know you’re lying. If you had opened anything at all in my behalf, it would have been a discretionary investment account. No, let’s cut the crap now, eh, Pauly? I’ve done my homework, I figure that, over the last eight years you’ve had them to play with, you and Mr Lech have made a cool million out of my seventy-three thousand. That would be par for the course. Now, you tell me you’ve doubled my money plus a few bucks, less your fees of course, and ask me what my complaint is. Are you serious?’

What did he think we were? Nice guys about to vote him a pension as sucker of the year? He had indeed done some homework, but not as much as he thought. In fact, thanks to the Lugano bank’s post-war policy of investment in German industry, we had made over two million dollars out of his particular nest-egg. Now, it remained only to get rid of the man.

‘How would you like your money, Mr Vic?’ I asked. ‘A draft on the Chase-Manhattan in Geneva? A telex transfer to your own bank in the United States? Cash?’

He examined us both carefully for a moment or two without answering. Carlo began tapping on the desk-top with his ruler.

Then, Vic broke his own silence with a short laugh. ‘The shyster and his shill!’ he said.

Carlo stopped tapping and I saw that he had gone quite pale. His colloquial English was not good, but it was good enough to understand the word ‘shyster’. Rather than let him say something he might regret, I got in first.

‘Don’t push your luck, Vic,’ I said. ‘We could always ship it back as truck tyres. It’s cash, I take it. Dollars in century bills?’

‘Fifties or centuries, but I want them right now.’

Carlo reached for the intercom and told the matriarch to get the bank on the phone. That was unnecessary because we kept a cash float of half a million dollars in a safe deposit box. He was playing for time; to think, presumably, though what there was to think about just then I did not immediately understand. When the bank was put through, he said first that I would shortly be requiring access to the safe deposit vault. Then he told the procurator at the other end to wait and, looking at Vic, asked him in Italian if, in view of the large sum of money he would be carrying, he would like a bank escort to his hotel.

I gathered, correctly, that this was a test question to see if Vic understood Italian. When it was evident that he did not, Carlo repeated the question in English.

No, Vic did not need an escort, thank you very much; he could take care of himself.

Carlo said goodbye to the procurator and then went on speaking in Italian to me.

‘Paul, I want the receipt from him for the money to be witnessed by someone at the bank. Make a ceremony of it. And I particularly want those old notarized receipts of mine back. Then, I want to know as soon as possible which hotel he’s in. Offer to share a taxi with him and drop him off. Then phone me the name of the hotel immediately. Unless it’s within a couple of minutes of here don’t wait until you get back.’

It was not the moment to ask him what he was up to, so I went ahead and did exactly as I had been told.

Vic made difficulties about signing for the money, but the actual sight of it and the solemnity of the bank officials quietened him down eventually. The old receipts he handed over without a murmur. Only about half the money was in hundreds and he had trouble stuffing it all into his nice new brief-case. He rejected my suggestion that we share a taxi — now that he had the money he seemed scared of me — but he let me flag one down for him and tell the driver where to go.

I called Carlo from the nearest cafe and reported.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘You have all the receipts? Splendid. Now please bring them back here, Paul.’

When he had the originals spread out on the desk he looked at them as if they were old and much-loved friends.

‘How could such an otherwise cautious man be so stupid?’ he asked. ‘If they had been mine, I would have set light to every single one myself before I handed you its ashes.’

‘He was too worried about the receipt that he had to sign.’

‘That is why I asked for it. Oh yes, it will be useful, but it will be the first ones which will count. Look at the dates! How interesting, and how devastatingly conclusive.’

‘Conclusive of what?’

He did not answer straightaway. ‘What is that name he called you, Paul?’

‘Shill?’

‘Yes. What does it mean?’

‘Mostly it’s the slang word for a professional gambler’s accomplice who is there to make winning look easy, but con-men and other crooks also use shills. A shill is a person, man or woman, who persuades the victims to come and try their luck, to let themselves be swindled.’

He sighed. ‘One would think we had lost this foolish man’s money, instead of doubling it. Well, he must pay for his insolence. As soon as you phoned me I arranged to have him tailed from his hotel.’ He responded to my raised eyebrows, ‘I wish to know what he does with the money.’

‘If he has any sense he’ll put it in a bank.’

‘Yes, but which bank and where? It is too late today, but perhaps he will travel overnight. Where to? Lausanne? Basle?’

A wild thought occurred to me. ‘You’re not thinking of taking it back off him, Carlo?’

‘It would serve him right, but we are not thieves. No, I simply wish to know which branch of which bank he chooses.’

Then what?’

‘The American Internal Revenue Service pays a ten per cent reward to informers who give them proof that a US citizen has failed to declare income.’

‘You’d inform on Vic?’

‘I? Great heavens, no! I have an associate in New York who will do that. I will just send him the evidence. Think of the wringing hands when the IRS descends on our friend Mr Vic with their demands for back audits. What was the source of these large sums obtained while you were serving in the army and for which we hold receipts? Why did you no report them? You refuse to answer because to do so might incriminate you? Then answer this. We have evidence here of a capital gain by you of over eighty thousand dollars. Why was that not reported? Where is it? We’ll tell you. It’s in such-and-such a bank. And before you add perjury to the rest of the crimes you’re going to be charged with, let us remind you of this. Swiss bank secrecy doesn’t protect persons who can be shown to have committed criminal offences like stealing US army property. What a fine time they will have!’

I was beginning to feel sorry for Vic. ‘You’d do that to him for a ten per cent pay-off?’

‘Of that pathetic reward I shall not accept one cent,’ he said contemptuously. ‘My reward will be the satisfaction of my sense of the fitness of things. He insulted me. He insulted you. He will be punished, as a criminal, such as he, deserves to be punished, for his crimes against his country’s laws.’ He sat up very straight in his chair and gazed fixedly at the Moretto landscape on the wall behind me. Finally, he made the cobweb-brushing gesture he still used to punctuate thought processes. ‘All this has taught me a lesson, Paul,’ he added.

‘You mean that, if we’re going to blow him to the IRS, he’s liable to blow us too?’

‘Certainly not! What crimes have we committed? I was merely reflecting that it might be time for us to spread our wings again and to fly in a new direction.’ He raised his elbows sideways, dropped his hands, then tensed his fingers into talons as if he were a bird of prey about to kill.

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. In future, Paul, we will have no more dealings with illegitimate money. It is contagious, it carries infection.’ One of the talons brushed away yet another cobweb. ‘By devoting ourselves diligently to the new arts of tax avoidance, I think that we may be able to create for our clients, and certain others, impenetrable and indestructible shields against the rapacity of governments.’

He went on to explain in detail what he had in mind.

I have admitted that, after he had recovered physically from his illness, I sometimes found Carlo a little frightening. The revenge he had taken on Vic, simply because the man had been foolish enough to speak his mind, worried me quite a bit, but the plan of action he then proceeded to lay out was wholly rational.

The idea derived from his belief — a widely-held belief, I know, but one that was in his case based on special knowledge — that the very rich are always also very stingy.

Thus, if you were able to show a rich man how he could avoid paying large amounts of money to the government which presumed to tax him and his corporate enterprises, he, in his turn, would be ready to pay a much, much smaller amount of money to you in the shape of a fee.

At least, he would be ready to do so for a time. That, sooner or later, he would become reluctant to pay you as he had previously been reluctant to pay the tax collector, was inevitable. Ultimately, he would probably try to cheat you as, once upon a time, he had tried to cheat the tax man. Therefore, you bore that possibility in mind from the start, armed yourself with appropriate sanctions and made sure that, if or when the attempts to cheat you were made, simple mechanisms to ensure their failure were triggered automatically. Ideally, Carlo thought, our relationship with our clients should be one of mutual, and permanent, trust.

Who but Krom could have had the breathtaking audacity to speak in this context of ‘international parasitism’ and make wild allegations about a ‘multi-million-dollar extortion racket’?