Siege at the Villa Lipp

CHAPTER SIX

I am not the only one who has found Krom hard to take.

Had our stay at the Villa Lipp not been cut short so suddenly, Connell and Henson would surely have ended by quarrelling with him. Obviously, they respected his earlier work and so were prepared to put up with a certain amount of his nonsense, including a lot of tipsy pontificating; otherwise, they would not have been there; but even on that first night, before we knew that things had gone seriously wrong and that we were in danger, there were signs of strain.

Krom had objected strongly to Connell’s asking me questions; and I had made a bet with myself that, in due course, I would hear him insisting just as strongly that only he was entitled to receive my ‘papers’, and that only he would have the right thereafter to decide who saw how much of what was in them. I won the bet too.

When the coffee had been served, I told Melanie to pass round file number one to our guests. Krom stopped her instantly by clutching at one of her arms. He was as stricken as a child who has just been told that the bright new toy which was to have been his alone must, after all, be shared.

‘I think, Mr Firman,’ he said with a show of teeth, ‘that, in your own interests as well as ours, the distribution of all documents ought to be strictly limited.’

‘I quite agree, Professor,’ I stared hard at Melanie’s arm until he released it. ‘There are only three copies of that document, one for you and one each for your witnesses. I shall insist that the last two be returned to me to destroy as soon as they have been read and compared with your text.’

He tried to think of an inoffensive way of saying that he did not want his witnesses having access to material that was really his, and his alone, in case they stole bits of it from him. Naturally, he failed; there is no inoffensive way of saying such a thing. He tried stepping around the difficulty.

‘Notes should be taken.’

‘Of course. And I am sure that they will be taken,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Dr Connell has a tape-recorder and Dr Henson has a shorthand-writer’s notebook in her suitcase. I dare say she also has an excellent memory.’

Henson suddenly laughed and received a glare from Krom.

She at once raised both hands in apology. ‘Sorry, but I had an unworthy thought,’ she explained. ‘It crossed my mind, only for an instant but quite distinctly, that Mr Firman couldn’t care less how many notes are taken because he has no intention of letting us see or hear anything that could in any way compromise him.’

Yves broke in angrily. ‘There, Doctor, you are greatly mistaken. This meeting alone compromises him, and us.’ His outstretched hand included Melanie.

‘Don’t worry, Mr Boularis,’ Krom tried clumsily to pat him on the knee and seemed to resent Yves’s instinctively flinching sway. ‘But don’t deceive yourself either, or let him deceive you,’ he went on with one of his saliva sprays. ‘Your friend Firman was compromised years ago when I saw him in Zurich.’

Connell stifled what might have been the start of a low moan. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘we’re back to the celebrated Oberholzer-Firman identification. Are we now going to be allowed to hear exactly what was so compromising about it, or is that still “pas devant les enfants”, Professor?’

He sounded as if he had become as tired of Krom as I had. Before the elder statesman had time to do more than glare and show teeth again, I had signalled to Melanie.

This time she went the other way round the table so that the witnesses received their copies of the file first.

‘Read all about it,’ I said to Connell.

The witnesses’ behaviour towards me since then has left much to be desired, inevitably perhaps; but I still regret that security considerations, now known to have been irrelevant, prevented my giving them more of the truth than I did. They might have learned something, not only to their own advantage, but, of more immediate consequence in this time of trial, to mine.

This is how it really came about that Krom saw me in Zurich.

The warning telegram did not reach me until late on Tuesday, over twenty-four hours after Kramer had been taken ill.

The text of it said only that he was in the emergency heart unit of the Kantonsspital in Zurich. The signature, however, was in a code form meaning that not only was there material urgently awaiting collection but also that the strictest security precautions should be taken. Use of the code signature showed that, ill or not, he had written or dictated the telegram himself and that his mind was still functioning.

I was in Lisbon at the time and the message had been re-transmitted from Milan by Carlo; and I mean by Carlo personally, not by some trusted underling to whom the job had been delegated. If that sounds an odd way to run a business making net profits in the five-million-dollar-plus region I shall have to agree, it was odd; but that was because the business was odd.

Carlo kept up his office with its appropriate staff in Milan mainly as a front. Otherwise the only persons we employed were our six couriers, four men and two women, who did exactly as they were told and never asked a question except when the answer was needed to clarify an instruction. All, other operations in the ten cities we used as bases were handled through the neutral channels of ‘business accommodation’ services which provided mail-forwarding and phone-answering together with addresses to put on our various letter-heads. Our consultancy work was always done in hotel rooms. For the profits we made, our overheads were negligible.

The business I was doing in Lisbon had reached a delicate stage and it was impossible to respond to the warning message as promptly as I might have done. I don’t think it would have made much difference though. When I received the message, the Kramer relationship was already unsalvageable. All that would have been different, possibly, would have been the nature of the trap set for me.

Anyway, it was Thursday before I could leave Lisbon. I reached Frankfurt later that day and rented a car. I was in Zurich at nine-thirty on Friday morning.

Why did I drive when I could more quickly have got there by air? Mainly because, if you are in western Europe and want to have a confidential business discussion on the other side of a frontier, it is more secure to travel by car. The days when an elaborate carnet recorded every frontier transit which the car and its passengers made are gone. All you need is an international certificate of insurance and they generally don’t bother even with that, much less your passport; at most road frontier crossings they just wave you through. Airlines, on the other hand, keep copies of passenger flight manifests that can be checked by anyone with the right kind of muscle, and at lots of airports you may get your passport stamped. Train controls can be stickier than road, too, because the officials have more time. The only persons who should never use road frontiers are smugglers, because on some roads the Customs people like to play games. Instead of lining up beside the immigration squad, they move their check-point three or more kilometres back along the road on their side where a build-up of traffic doesn’t matter. Then, they have plenty of time to nail the ones with the evidence on them, just as the poor slobs think they are free and clear.

I am not a smuggler and I use the roads. I did, though, go to the Zurich airport and park the car there before taking an airport bus into town. Anyone then becoming interested in my movements would have assumed that I had arrived by air. I got off the bus at the Haupt-Bahnhof.

From there I phoned the hospital and learned that Kramer had been dead for two days.

It was too early in the morning, I felt, to telephone a newly-created widow. To pass the time, I had a second breakfast while I decided how best to handle the phase-out-and-forget routine in this particular case. At that point, strange as it may seem now, the only grave difficulty of which I was aware was that of remembering the widow’s first name without having Kramer’s personal file there to check on.

I got it eventually — Frieda. After breakfast I went for a stroll and found a department store where I was able to buy a black tie.

By then it was ten-thirty, so I went back to the station and called the Kramer apartment.

The voice of the woman who answered was that of someone younger than Frieda; the married daughter, I found. She accepted my condolences politely enough on her mother’s behalf, but when I asked if I could speak to the mother there was a marked change of tone.

‘Is that, by any chance, Herr Oberholzer of Frankfurt?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I am an old friend of your father’s.’

‘So I have been given to understand.’ Her tone was now distinctly cool. That could have put me on my guard, but didn’t. Those nursing private griefs often resent attempts, real or imagined, by outsiders to share them.

‘I am speaking for my mother,’ she went on briskly. ‘She has asked me to tell you that the funeral will be at eleven tomorrow morning. The crematorium is on the Käferholz-strasse. Flowers, if you wish to send any, should be delivered to the chapel of the hospital mortuary before nine-thirty.’

‘Thank you. I am grateful for that information. However, I hope to pay my respects and offer my personal sympathies to your mother before then. I propose to call on her this morning, just before noon if that would be convenient.’

‘No, Herr Oberholzer. I am afraid that would not be convenient. Only family members are here today. But my mother has anticipated your anxiety and concern. She asks me to assure you that your papers are quite safe and that you may collect them at any time after the funeral tomorrow. There will be sandwiches and coffee here for those who can stomach them. Goodbye, Herr Oberholzer.’

She hung up.

Even then I wasn’t really worried. Under the emotional stress of her husband’s sudden death, Frieda had obviously been talking too freely about things she would have been wiser to forget; but, as her knowledge of them was necessarily limited to what Kramer would have told her in an unlikely fit of total indiscretion, it represented no serious threat to me, just a nuisance. Because she had disapproved of me and my relationship with her husband — though she could scarcely have disapproved of the money it had brought in — I was being made to stay in Zurich when it was neither necessary nor advisable for me to do so, and to attend a funeral.

Persuading wealthy tax and exchange-control evaders to pay you for advising them is not difficult; not, that is, when you have the right sanctions at your disposal; but, unless you are very careful, it can be dangerous.

It must be accepted that any rich man who chooses to evade his country’s fiscal laws when, simply by taking a little trouble and obtaining good advice, he could avoid them, has to be, however superficially astute, basically stupid.

When, therefore, he has to pay up in order to conceal his folly he is unlikely to accept the loss philosophically. On the contrary, he will quite often go to extravagant lengths to avenge the ‘outrage’. I know of one case in which the idiot actually went out, bought himself the most expensive rifle on the market, had it fitted with a telescopic sight and began practising to become a marksman.

The fact is that a lot of these very rich men can behave remarkably like old-fashioned psychopathic gangsters. Protecting your set-up from lunatic vindictiveness of that kind calls for more than ordinary care and attention. Where security is concerned, you have to be a trifle paranoid.

The moment Kramer’s daughter hung up on me, I should have immediately gone back to my car and hit the road for home and a good dinner. I was married at the time to my second wife. She was really an excellent cook.

The wrong kind of greed, that was my trouble; greed, plus slow and very sloppy thinking. Kramer had said in his telegram that there was important material to be collected. So, there was I hanging about in the expectation of collecting; just as if nothing had happened; just as if Kramer had still been alive and well.

The weather was horrible, a bitter wind was blowing showers of wet snow. If I had been travelling on one of my real passports I might well have checked in at a first-rate hotel where I was known and would be cosseted. Luckily, I was travelling as Reinhardt Oberholzer. I say ‘luckily’, because if I had been using a real identity nothing I could have done would have saved the situation. There are some paper-trails that cannot be diverted or cleaned up because, before you get busy with your little spiked walking-stick, the hounds will be there in the field waiting for you.

So, thank God for the Oberholzer passports.

Yes, that’s right, Krom. Passports, plural. We used five. I had one. The four men couriers had one each, which they used when they were acting as cut-outs.

Carlo’s unorthodox thinking would have sent any trained intelligence man crazy. For example, he had picked the cover name Oberholzer originally because it was neither common nor uncommon but middle-ordinary in most German-speaking places. In an Anglo-Saxon community, Underwood or Overton would be in the same bracket. So far, quite orthodox. But what happened when the cover wore thin and began to unravel?

Orthodox opinion was that you promptly junked both it and its occupant. Carlo did not agree. By hastily junking a cover, to say nothing of the person who had been using it, you might well supply confirmation of what had until then been only a suspicion. You might even create suspicions where none had existed except in your own imagination. Was it not better, surely, to present the opposition with a fresh set of doubts to resolve by putting a second man into play, one who in some respects strongly resembled his namesake, yet in others was confusingly different? If suspicions had existed before, would they not now be allayed? Or, if not wholly allayed, would not the reasons for them now have to be reassessed?

In view of the nature of the opposition we faced, an opposition which had always to rely upon reluctant or havering witnesses telling as little of the truth as they dared, such a reassessment could have only one result. ‘Doubt demoralizes’ was one of Carlo’s favourite maxims. His tactical description of the Oberholzer-style multiplication manoeuvre was ‘dispersal’ or, if he felt like being facetious, ‘defence in width’.

I once played against a good three-card-trick man for over an hour. I knew exactly what he was doing and how he was doing it, and still he beat me three times out of five. That was how the Oberholzer game had worked. Only we had been winning five tricks out of five, until I lost one that made it necessary not only to change the name of the game but also some of the rules.

Zurich is a busy city and unless you have made reservations in advance or are a known and valued client in a particular establishment, central hotel rooms are not always easy to find. Since I could not go to a place where I was known, I went to the tourist bureau at the station, where they operated a hotel booking service.

Now I may have been careless that day, but I was not completely feckless. When you are using a cover, you always, and automatically, use it as little as possible simply in order to protect it from unnecessary wear and tear. So, when I gave my name to the girl at the tourist bureau I instinctively resorted to an old ploy.

In most countries, officialdom tends, when identifying you, to put your surname first and your given name or names after it. In many parts of Asia this name order is socially usual as well. On the European mainland and in South America, the social and administrative usages tend to overlap. Your insurance policies may describe you as OBERHOLZER, Reinhardt or Reinhardt Oberholzer. On a formal occasion among strangers you may click heels and introduce yourself as Oberholzer Reinhardt, while at a less starchy function you are dear old lovable Reinhardt Oberholzer. To the travel-bureau girl I gave my name as Oswald Reinhardt, slurring the Oswald slightly so that I could always claim, if necessary, that she had not been listening attentively.

By the time I had returned to the department store, bought an overnight bag and a change of linen and was back at the bureau, they had a room for me. St was in a second-category place up by the botanical gardens. The receptionist there had my name as O.Reinhardt from the bureau, and did not bother to look closely at the Oberholzer passport I fumbled with before filling out the police card.

The hotel was on a pleasant street with lots of trees which probably gave it quite a rustic outlook during the summer. Unfortunately, it was also next door to a church with a clock tower. This had a full set of chimes which were, I soon found, in robust working order. The receptionist, showing me to my room, said with a false but practised smile that many guests enjoyed the sound of the clock striking. The prospect of going back to the tourist bureau and starting afresh was unattractive, so I asked the way to the nearest pharmacy.

It was several streets away in a little shopping district which appeared to serve a quarter which was mixed business and residential. In a miniature supermarket I bought half a bottle of whisky. In the pharmacy I bought, in addition to razor, soap, face-cloth and tooth-brush, some ear-plugs. Then, deciding to return to the hotel by a different route, one that I thought might be less exposed to the wind, I saw the flower shop.

Now, although I like flowers and normally find flower shops agreeable places, I am not one of those who cannot resists them. It was just that, in this particular shop, there was a remarkably handsome girl visible through the window. She was spraying the leaves of some philodendra, and the way she was raising her arms did something for her. As I slowed down to admire the view, the sight of her happened to coincide with an irresistible urge to get in out of the cold wind again plus the thought that a wreath from Oberholzer at the Kramer funeral might serve both to modify his women’s hostility and to fortify their discretion.

So I went in.

When the girl was not spraying plants placed high up on wrought-iron display stands, her posture was not so good, but she was cheerful and friendly. She wouldn’t recommend a wreath, she said, because her partner, who was the real expert at making wreaths quickly, was away with ‘flu. If I insisted, she would do her best to make a nice wreath in time, but as it would have to be at the hospital mortuary before nine-thirty the following morning, she really thought that flowers would be better. What about some of those hot-house roses over there? Of course, they wouldn’t last beyond tomorrow, but in this weather neither would the flowers in a wreath. You couldn’t just send green stuff, could you? If I decided on the roses she would see that they were well wrapped and, as she was the one who would be doing the delivery, taken straight into the mortuary chapel when they got there. For a German like me they wouldn’t be all that expensive, and if I took the lot — the red, yellow and pink would look lovely together — she would give me a discount. She was a good saleswoman with some miserable roses on her hands which weren’t going to last the weekend anyway.

Once the bargain was struck, though, and I was seated at a little table writing conventional words of sympathy on a card to go with the flowers, and sealing it into one of the envelopes provided, she became curious. She knew from my accent that I was neither Swiss or Austrian, but she couldn’t decide whether I was a north or south German, nor could she figure out my relationship with the dead. When I had declined her offer of a receipt and she was ringing up the sale on the cash register, she remarked that they didn’t have many foreign visitors, buying flowers up there and asked me where I was staying. When I told her she looked genuinely concerned, but at once said bravely, but with even less conviction, what the receptionist had said, that lots of people liked the sound of the bells. She was no longer curious about which part of Germany I came from. She knew now that I would not be back, not in that quarter of Zurich certainly. When I left the shop, she was putting my condolences to the family Kramer into a little plastic bag that would protect them from the weather.

I lunched well, far away from the hotel, spent the afternoon in a cinema and had a good, early, dinner. The night, though, was dreadful.

The ear-plugs did little to help and the whisky less. Every time the clock struck, the windows rattled and you could feel vibrations through the bedsprings, or at least I fancied that I could; and, of course, after a bit you ceased to think of sleep and simply lay there waiting for the next assault.

At three in the morning I took a chair-cushion, the duvet and all the pillows and blankets I could find, and made up a sort of bed in the bathroom where, I had noticed, the sounds from the clock tower were slightly muted. There, I managed to doze through two lots of quarter-hour chimes before the bathroom floor made itself felt and four o’clock shattered the last hope of sleep. I sat up for the rest of the night in the one armchair, with the duvet over my head.

Excuses, it may be said. The man makes a fool of himself. Clearly, he has to blame someone or something, so he picks on a church clock and a sleepless night.

Not so. My mistakes on that occasion had all been made the day before. What is remarkable is that, having suffered the sort of sleepless night after which a man normally needs tranquillizers if he is to function at all, I succeeded in behaving with such decision and efficiency.

I sat in the armchair until five-thirty. Then, I shaved, bathed, put on my new white shirt and black tie and waited for daylight. At six-thirty, while it was still dark, I went down and consulted the night-duty concierge about the possibility of getting a taxi. He said that it might take a while, but that he would phone for one. When he had done so, I asked him about getting some coffee. The kitchen did not open until seven. Casting about in my mind for other ways of killing time, I thought of my bill and asked if I could pay it. Yes, I could. A surprise, until I caught the look of resignation on the concierge’s face. I was evidently not the first guest in the place who had been in a hurry to get away. Nor would I be the last. Very early departures were normal.

So, I paid the bill and said that I would return later for my bag. That was my first piece of luck.

A taxi came eventually and I went to the Carlton-Elite Hotel. There, in the restaurant, I ate a large American breakfast and read the German-language papers. Later, in the lobby, I read the Italian papers and did the Paris Herald-Tribune crossword. By then it was nearly time to go to the funeral.

To the doorman I explained my wants; a taxi or a hire car with a driver who would take me to the crematorium, wait and then drive me to an apartment in the Hottingen district. That was where the Kramer apartment was. The doorman said that a hire car would cost no more for that sort of journey and would be more comfortable. He could have one there in five minutes.

It was a black four-door Taunus and the driver was an elderly man with beautiful iron-grey hair and a thin, sad face. He knew exactly where the crematorium was and obviously enjoyed funeral work, of which, he told me gently, he did a great deal.

‘Was the departed a close relative of the gentleman?’ he asked as he fought his way out of the central traffic.

‘No. He wasn’t a relation of any kind.’

‘A close friend of the gentlemen perhaps?’

‘A friend, a business friend.’

‘Ah.’ He cheered up at once and proceeded to give me some man-to-man advice. ‘Then the gentleman will probably be wise to sit at the back of the chapel during the service. That way, one is able to avoid at the conclusion too much involvement with the close relatives if one does not wish it. A brief word of sympathy to the chief mourner in order to show that one has been present is all that is necessary then before leaving.’

‘I expect you’re right.’

I spoke distantly and he got the message. I heard no more about the theory and practice of funeral attendance. Unfortunately, he had made me think.

I had, in fact, been ‘close’ to Kramer and his wife for several years. But was I a friend? Even a business friend? A more accurate description, and one that Krom may smack his lips over if he wishes, would be ‘co-conspirator’.

I recruited Kramer at an Interfiscal Society Congress in Monaco.

A director of one of the big-three Swiss banks had been there to give a lecture on his country’s bank secrecy laws. It was a good lecture, neither as defensive nor as plaintive as such public-relations exercises usually are, and I said so to a man from the same bank who had accompanied the director to the Congress. That was Kramer and he was strictly middle management. He was there, I gathered, partly so that the director should be seen to have some sort of ADC in attendance, and partly to latch on to any worthwhile business that might be floating around among the delegates to the Congress.

The director was the man with the personality, the financial mastermind. Kramer had his dignity, too, but it was that of the good soldier. He would rise no higher in the bank hierarchy. He obviously knew this and was, for an otherwise sensible man, surprisingly bitter over what he saw as an injustice. He spoke over-respectfully of his superiors in the bank. The sardonic smile, of which he made much use, was the final give-away. He was, I decided, open to an approach.

I made it over a drink in the Hotel de Paris.

‘What I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘is the nature of the penalties that your secrecy laws impose. They seem so light.’

‘You think so, Mr Firman?’

‘Well, supposing an officer of your bank, a man in the head office where you work, is approached by a stranger who is — oh, what shall we say? — an agent of the American Internal Revenue Service? Not impossible?’

He restrained his inner amusement. ‘It has been known,’ he said solemnly.

‘Right. Now, supposing the agent offers this officer of yours three thousand dollars for the name of each and every American citizen on your books and the size of his account with you. What is to stop your man accepting?’

‘Assuming that our man, as you call him, has management status in the bank sufficient to give him access to the information requested, what would be most likely to stop him, leaving aside the question of how law-abiding he might be, would be the risk he takes if he accepts.’

‘A twenty-thousand franc fine and six months in jail maximum? With a hundred thousand dollars, and most likely much more, in an entirely different bank, what’s he got to lose?’

‘I don’t think our director made it quite clear, Mr Firman, that the penalty of fine and imprisonment you mention may be applied for every single offence proved against the accused and that the sentences would run consecutively. Ten offences against the secrecy law would mean five years in prison, twenty offences ten years.’

‘But with zero risk the question hardly arises, does it? Do you mean to tell me that it doesn’t happen all the time? I can tell you of a dozen cases. In one, the British Treasury got all they wanted on a dozen accounts for a measly two thousand dollars.’

He was drinking a silver-fizz, a long drink made of gin and egg-whites mostly. Some women like it and barmen usually provide a straw to drink it with to save the lipstick. He now removed the straw from his glass before he answered.

‘There is no such thing as zero risk, Mr Firman.’ He folded the straw in two and put it in an ash-tray. ‘And what I mean is that, for the kind of information of which you speak, three thousand dollars per item is too little by half.’

It was so easy that Carlo became convinced that Kramer was a provocateur and had to be persuaded that there was no risk on our side. Above all, he said, I must not put myself in the dangerous position of pretending to be an IRS agent. I asked Kramer once whether he thought I was from the IRS, and it was the only time I ever heard him laugh. He said that I was not the IRS agent type. I was never able to decide whether he had intended that as a compliment or not. In time he must have arrived at a very clear understanding of the ways in which the information he supplied me with was used.

One thing I can state with confidence. During the years of our association, Kramer received from us, and in my opinion earned, considerably more than that notional one hundred thousand dollars we had discussed in the Hotel de Paris.

When we reached the crematorium chapel where the service for Kramer was to be held, the tail-end of a procession of mourners was just mounting the steps to go inside.

‘Excellent timing,’ said the driver.

In front of the chapel entrance there was quite a large semi-circular forecourt with cars parked around the rim of it. A black Cadillac limousine with a driver waited by itself in front of the chapel steps. This was obviously the car that had brought the chief mourners and would presently take them away. There was, I noticed, a group of three men draped with cameras and camera equipment huddled by the entrance. I assumed that, since at least one senior bank official would be there to pay last respects to an employee, one photographer would be from the bank’s PR agency, with the other two covering or hoping to cover for local papers.

As I got out, the driver showed me where he intended to park. I followed the last of the mourners inside and was allowed by an usher to take a back seat. There was taped organ music — Bach, of course — coming through loudspeakers, and on a stone catafalque at the far end of the chapel was Kramer’s coffin. There was a single wreath of flowers on the coffin itself but the floor around the catafalque was covered with wreaths and flowers. I couldn’t see my roses but assumed that they would be somewhere there. It is difficult to be certain about numbers, but I would say that the searing capacity of the chapel was a hundred, more or less, end that over half the seats were occupied, mostly by business-suited men. A good turn-out.

The service was conducted by a Protestant pastor and was brief. Then, sliding doors rolled slowly into place, hiding the catafalque, so that the removal of the expendable inner shell of the coffin, the part with the corpse in it, to the functional section of the crematorium could take place unobserved by the mourners. The piped music began again. It went on for about ten minutes. When it ceased, the pastor went to Frieda Kramer in the front row of seats and said something to her. After a moment she stood up and, on the arm of a man who was probably her son-in-law, began to walk slowly back along the chapel aisle. The funeral was over.

The others started to follow. After a bit I joined the procession. A man near me told his companion that one collected an urn with the ashes in it a couple of days later.

Outside, Frieda was standing by an open rear door of the Cadillac as, one after the other, the business-suited men and the women in peculiarly awful hats came to commiserate and express solidarity.

I joined the reception line not because I wanted to but because I saw that she had spotted me. Since there was something I wanted from her, there seemed no point in giving offence by going direct to her apartment without uttering a word of sympathy there in public with everyone else. So, hat in hand, I went forward.

As I did so, Frieda said a word out of the corner of her mouth to the daughter who immediately reached inside the car and picked up something from the back seat. The people still between me and the Cadillac made it impossible to see what it was. The payers-of-respects shuffled forward once more.

I heard a woman mumbling to Frieda something about the deep sense of loss that everyone who had known her dear Johann was experiencing and hastily composed a similar speech for myself.

Finally, the man immediately in front of me sidled out of the way and my turn had come.

Until then, Frieda had been standing there stiffly with her elbows at her sides and both hands clasping her handbag just below her breasts as if she were afraid that someone there was going to try to snatch it. She had looped back her black veil and had her double chins held high ready for the attack. I found myself wondering if she already knew how surprisingly rich she was. As she acknowledged the mourners, you could tell who were friends or family and who were acquaintances she scarcely recognized. With the former she would allow herself to be embraced, with the latter she would incline her head stiffly, ignoring the proffered hands and simply saying, ‘Thank you, thank you.’ But always, so far, she had kept her handbag pressed against her solar plexus.

It was I who broke the spell. There could have been no question of my embracing her, so I did what the other acquaintances had done and proffered a hand for rejection.

That is to say, I started to proffer a hand. It was already on its way to her and the preliminary ‘My dear friend’ was already on my lips, when her handbag shot outwards and upwards, grazing my knuckles.

She was not, in fact, trying to hit me. She was simply using her handbag to point with so that there should be no doubt in any of the spectators’ minds about whom she was pointing at. She was pointing at me and, still pointing, when she spoke.

‘This,’ she said loudly and clearly to those present, ‘is Reinhardt Oberholzer.’

At the same moment several other things happened.

A blunt instrument hit me quite hard on the right shoulder. It was the edge of a brief-case wielded by the daughter. The brief-case must have been the object she had taken from the back seat of their car.

‘There are your papers, Herr Oberholzer,’ she snarled, and let go of the brief-case.’

As I caught it, I heard in the sudden silence that had fallen the clack of an SLR camera shutter. Almost at the same moment, a second photographer let fly with electronic flash. Both of them immediately moved in on me for more pictures.

Krom says that he was right behind the photographer with the flashgun, though I didn’t see him. I don’t say he wasn’t there, just that I didn’t see him; and the fact that I didn’t see him doesn’t surprise me in the least.

He says that I looked stunned. I was stunned, I have a mind that is capable of working quite quickly to solve reasonably simple equations and, as I caught the brief-case, my mind had informed me with breathtaking clarity that I was in some danger and — though I deplore the vulgarity there are times when one must be forthright — perilously close to finding myself up shit creek.

After the brief, horrified silence from everyone, except the cameramen who went on taking pictures, I decided that it was time to go. So I put the brief-case under my arm and then, with a little bow to Frieda, turned and walked over to my hired car.

The driver had neither heard nor understood what had happened but he had seen the photographers at work. That meant only one thing to him. He grinned as he opened the car door for me.

‘I see that the gentleman is a person of importance,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

All I saw was a police car parked thirty metres away with a plain-clothes man leaning through the window to use the radio. His eyes were on the car I was in and he was obviously calling in its registration number. I have never been in a police identification line-up and been tapped by witnesses as the guilty party, but at that moment I learned exactly how it must feel to be in that predicament.

‘Get moving,’ I said.

‘To Hottingen, sir?’

‘No. There is no need for that now. Just go, but go slowly for a moment.’

He was going slowly anyway down the long crematorium driveway, but I still had to have some time in which to think.

I had been set up by the Kramer women and publicly identified as Oberholzer. Photographs had been taken of me, but of no one else at the funeral. The police had been in on the deal. I had been given a brief-case. It was new and nasty, the kind of thing that could be bought for a few francs at a cheap stationers, and I did not think that there were papers or anything else in it. There had to have been a reason for their having given it to me, but any attempt at analysis of the kind of reason would raise questions that I couldn’t possibly answer at that moment. I had too many questions to cope with already. The brief-case could wait. The over-riding factor was the police involvement. What offence had I committed under the Swiss Criminal Code?

Well, I could be said to have induced a bank employee to breach the secrecy laws. That was an offence. But where was the witness to support a case against me? Kramer was dead. Frieda? She was co-operating with the police, it appeared, but why? And what would her evidence against me be worth in court? Nothing, because I would simply maintain that Kramer had approached me. What lies he may later have told his wife were no concern of mine. On the other hand, the Swiss police had a way of putting a foreign suspect in jail and leaving him there for a few months while the judicial authorities mulled over the possible charges that might be brought against him.

The first priority, then, was to get rid of the car with which I was associated, the one in which I was riding, the one with a driver who would both talk and invent. Next, I had to get out of the canton of Zurich and then out of Switzerland itself as quickly and as unobtrusively as possible.

‘We’ll go direct to the airport,’ I said.

‘At once, six.’

Only then did I open the brief-case.

I had been right about there being no papers in it, but it was not empty, inside, were two of those transparent plastic slip-covers that many European businessmen use to keep loose papers or small amounts of correspondence tidily together without too many paper-clips. I knew that Kramer had used them because, on one of the rare occasions after our first meeting when we had met outside Switzerland, he had shown me how he kept the various sets of document copies that he thought I should see, after he had returned the originals to their proper places.

The volume of useful paper — statements of account, buy and sell orders in respect of investments, yearly audit sheets — had been small and those relating to the persons or corporations in which we were interested at any one time he had been able to keep in a single attache-case. It had been fitted out with one of those concertina-like contraptions that turned it into a miniature filing-cabinet. Into each division went one of the plastic slip-overs. Along the outer edge of each was stuck an identifying strip of Dymo embossing tape with his own code name for the account holder printed on it.

He had always, for ‘sensitive accounts’, used blue tape instead of the normal black. Sensitive accounts were those belonging to clients of the bank who had been judged ‘unpredictable’ — that is to say, marginally insane by ordinary standards — and who remained clients only by virtue of the size of their funds and the voting power of their shareholdings.

Both the empty slip-covers in the brief-case his daughter had given me still had their code name tapes on them, and both were blue. One was kleister and the other torten. Kramer had had a love-hate thing about cakes and pastry — he had always been overweight — and his choice of blue names had invariably been used as a reminder that, for him, such things were bad. I knew Kleister and Torten all too well. The former was a Spanish land-owner, the latter the founder and board chairman of an American pet-food manufacturing outfit with European subsidiaries. They had in common two things: both were exceedingly rich and both suffered from that kind of obsessional madness which has been called, when it has affected whole families, vendetta or feuding, but which in their case may best be described as acute personalized revanchism. Or, to put things more simply, pure bloody hatred of one particular group of their creditors.

Those two had been the most persistently difficult of the clients monitored by Kramer, and in the end Carlo had felt obliged to discipline Torten. With the Spaniard, Kleister, the threat of discipline had been sufficient because he was more vulnerable. The mere possession of a foreign banking account of the kind he had was a serious offence under the Franco regime. Torten had chosen to do battle with the Internal Revenue Service, but Kleister had paid our fees. On the other hand, Kleister had also employed an expensive international private enquiry agent to identify his ‘persecutors’. By one of those strokes of ill-luck against which not even a Carlo Lech can insure himself, the enquiry agent discovered — not because he was all that clever, but because Torten, when drunk, could be monumentally indiscreet — that the method of paying his fees that Torten had been instructed to employ was the same as the one his client Kleister had described. So, he brought the two men together.

Kleister went to America — the terms of Torten’s bail pending his final appeal had involved surrendering his passport — and an alliance was concluded. A council of war followed at which it was decided that as soon as they had discovered who we really were and where we were to be found, they would have us killed.

The expensive enquiry agent had hastily washed his hands of those particular clients. Carlo’s response, when word of the threat had filtered through to him, had been to demand a bonus payment from Kleister and to furnish the IRS with a supplementary dossier on Torten.

That had been over a year earlier. Kleister had paid the bonus and Torten was serving a prison sentence of three years for tax evasion, having already paid a heavy fine for the same offence. It was expected that he would be put on probation after serving a little over a third of his sentence. We had heard no more talk of our being sought out and lulled. It had seemed likely that K and T were at last beginning to behave rationally.

The sight of those two names in that brief-case, though, gave me a peculiar feeling, chiefly one of anger. I had no doubt that they were there with the knowledge of the police. What was I supposed to do? Panic and throw myself under a bus? Tell them what the words really meant? Give them the missing recipes for Kleister and Torten a la Kramer? Beg for mercy? Confess to some unspecified crime? Drop dead?

I shoved the things back in the brief-case and very nearly wound down the window with the idea of throwing the whole lot out. Then I thought of how upsetting that would be to the driver, and calmed down. Anyway, we were nearing the airport.

When we got there I told him to go to the Departure area and murmured something about the urgent necessity of my getting a plane that would, if I changed at Frankfurt or Munich, get me to Hamburg that afternoon. Then I paid him liberally, saw him drive away and went through to Arrivals.

I had to assume that the police had put out some sort of alert on me, so I hadn’t much time; but there were two things that had to be done before I started running.

In the Arrivals area among the rental car company desks was one belonging to the company I had used for the car from Frankfurt the previous day. So I told them where the car was on the park, gave them the ticket for it, turned in the keys and paid with my Oberholzer credit card. The police could make what they liked of that. I hoped it would tend to confirm what the driver would tell them, that I was on my way to Hamburg. It would take them ten more minutes or so to find out that there was no Oberholzer booked on any of the flights out to West Germany destinations.

The other thing I had to do was contact Carlo, or at least get an urgent message to him. I put the call through to Milan with the help of the restaurant telephonist, who didn’t mind earning twenty francs for pressing a few buttons on her new PBX. It was just before noon and Carlo hadn’t yet gone to lunch. I told him cryptically as much of the bad news as he needed to know at that moment and what I proposed to do about it. I then asked for immediate courier assistance and specified a rendezvous. Carlo did not argue or question, but said that I might have to wait a little. Then he hung up.

I went back outside to the bus stand. There was one just leaving. I rode, as I had done the day before, as far as the Haupt-Bahnhof; but this time I took a train from there, the one that left just after one o’clock for Geneva via Lausanne. There was a restaurant car but I stayed away from it. The man who clipped my ticket between stops along the way might remember me if asked, but there was no point in adding a waiter to the list of those who had seen the last of Reinhardt Oberholzer.

At Geneva the wind was even colder than that in Zurich, but there was no snow and the sun was shining. I walked to the rendezvous, an English tea-room in the rue des Alpes.

I had to wait an hour before the courier arrived. She was a small, stocky Frenchwoman in her mid-sixties, very lady-like but also quite formidable. A few months earlier two louts had attempted to snatch her handbag in the Paris Metro. Both had had to receive hospital attention for severe cuts and bruises before being charged by the police. The cuts appeared to have been inflicted with a razor blade.

She came into the tea-room, paused for a split second to locate me and then beckoned.

‘You’d better come now,’ she said. ‘I’m double-parked.’ With that she left.

I had the money to pay the bill ready on the table. All I had to do was get my coat from the rack by the door and follow.

She had a Renault with Paris registration, and the moment I was in the passenger seat beside her she was off. There was no conversation; she just drove, quickly and carefully, until she came to a main crossing where she turned on to the Avenue Henri-Dunant. Unless you drive north or north-east to Lausanne or the Jura, practically every main road out of Geneva will very soon take you out of Switzerland and into France. The Avenue Henri-Dunant joins the road to Annecy and I thought she was going to take that. Instead, she turned suddenly into a big filling-station with an automatic car-wash.

It was one of the men couriers, who, when those things began to be introduced, first pointed out what an excellent security device they could be. For the space of about a minute and a half it was possible to cut yourself off completely from the world outside. There was no bug yet invented that could penetrate the defences of a car going through a tunnel of steel and concrete to the accompaniment of the sounds of huge brushes spinning against a car body and water being sprayed through dozens of high-pressure jets.

So, for a time, even though the chances of a courier’s car having been bugged were small, all message exchanges of a confidential nature were delivered, whenever possible, inside cars travelling through car-washes. Silly really, because the message either had to be shouted above the din or written out and handed over. After one or two mistakes had occurred messages were always written and, since no bug was going to pick them up anyway, the use of car-washes for security purposes died out. One of the fringe benefits of the experiment, though, was that for the year or two it lasted, the trade-value of couriers’ cars showed a slight increase.

This courier had written the message out before we got to the car-wash.

Carlo had been brief: Phase out entire Paris operation, repeat entire, then come and see me soonest.

Before the car was under the blast of the hot-air dryer she had retrieved the message, put a match to it and mashed the remains in the ashtray.

We left Switzerland and entered France in the early-evening commuter traffic. Nobody on either side bothered with passports or anything else. Once over the frontier, the courier made a right turn and drove via Bourg to Chalon. From there I went by train to Paris.

When Carlo had told me to ‘phase out’ the Paris operation he had meant that he wanted every possible paper trail cleaned up; and when he had emphasized ‘entire’ he had been referring to something that not even the couriers knew about. This was that we rented a furnished two-room garçonnière in Paris. The object had been to enable me to come and go without registering in hotels. The place was rented on a year-to-year basis so that no question of residence arose. The gérant, who handled the apartment concerned was a crook, naturally, and I dare say that if he could have found out who the mistress was for whom I kept the place, there would have been a little gentle blackmail. She didn’t exist, though, except as a phantom presence represented by half-used make-up containers and scent bottles, some clothing, and a passion for the works of Simone de Beauvoir evidenced by a whole shelf of them, mostly falling to pieces from much re-reading. Melanie had done an excellent job in that case too.

The reason for Carlo’s decision to close down the apartment as well as cutting off our accommodation service contacts was clearly based on the fact that all the clients monitored by Kramer had been dealt with through Paris, coupled with the conclusion arrived at by Carlo that everything even remotely to do with Kramer had become a threat to our security and must, therefore, instantly be discarded or neutralized. Why he should have come to that conclusion I did not then know, but it was not the sort of matter one could discuss at length over an open international telephone circuit.

The immediate difficulty was the weekend.

The accommodation service was relatively easy to cut off, because that was paid for quarterly in advance and all I had to do was write them an Oberholzer letter terminating the agreement on the last day of the year. Any communications received henceforth should be reported or forwarded to our Rome office — another accommodation service which relayed correspondence to Frankfurt.

Getting rid of the apartment was not so easy, because the gérant headed for the country on Friday morning and was not to reached again until Monday afternoon. It was no use my just walking out, leaving everything and hoping for the best. A new tenant, or a policeman, or a forensic expert, must be able to walk into that place when I, and my true love, had vacated it and find no trace whatsoever there of any identifiable human beings. In addition, the gérant must be utterly convinced not only that he knew all, but also that he was going to have to forgo the kick-backs he had once received from the now grief-stricken Oberholzer and look around promptly for a replacement sucker.

During the weekend all I could to was enlist the sympathy of the concierge’s wife, who had used to keep the apartment clean for me, and get her to pick up the belongings of the woman who had betrayed me by going back to her husband, as I could not bear to touch them. Quite an affecting moment it was when I took the suitcases down and put them in the taxi.

I got rid of them by going to the air terminal and buying a one-way ticket to Toulouse. I can’t recall the name I used — something like Souchet, I think — but I remember that I had to pay excess when I checked the bags in because of the weight of Simone de Beauvoir; but with one lot of baggage on its way to Toulouse and limbo, all I had to do then was pack up the spare suit and other things I had kept there for my own use, and wait for Monday afternoon.

It was Tuesday before I reached Milan.

Carlo looked down as he listened to my report, and after I had finished he was silent for a while.

Finally, he stirred, heaved a sigh and said bleakly: ‘I think we are in trouble, Paul.’

‘We’ve been put to some inconvenience and expense, yes. We may also consider it necessary and advisable to abandon some profitable clients. The Oberholzer cover will have to go, of course. But we’ve had these spots of bother before, Carlo. No doubt we’ll have others in the future. This is a nuisance, yes. Trouble? I don’t think so.’

‘We have been lucky,’ he said contemptuously. Luck was something he had always despised. ‘But you miss the point, Paul. I say that we are in trouble.’

‘You mean our partnership?’

‘As it exists now, yes.’

‘Carlo, I didn’t kill Kramer.’

‘Did you take steps to enquire into the circumstances of the death?’

‘No point. He was dead and his wife and daughter were making it clear that the less they saw of me the better.’

‘I wasn’t suggesting that you should have enquired from them. I myself enquired through Lugano.’

‘And?’

‘Kramer was taken ill in his office. He had a heart attack, as you heard. But, an hour earlier he had been questioned at length by men from the police section concerned with offences against the banking laws. The strain on him must have been considerable, don’t you think?’

‘Yes.’

‘What would you have done if you had known whet I have just told you?’

‘I’d have got out.’

‘Exactly. Lugano also reports that, after you had been identified and photographed at the funeral, police visited the hotel where you had stayed overnight. What had you done, Paul? Registered as Oberholzer?’

‘Of course not. And there was never any chance of their finding me at the hotel. I paid the bill before I went to the funeral. All I lost by not going back there was some dirty laundry.’

‘And the chance of meeting the men who had brought on Kramer’s heart attack, surely. How did they know where to go? A few quick phone calls? Nonsense! Zürich is too big a city for that. How did they know?’

I thought back. ‘The flowers,’ I said slowly; ‘it must have been the flowers.’

‘What flowers?’

I told him the truth. Telling lies to one another was something we had never done.

‘The police must have checked all the cards that came with the flowers,’ he said morosely. ‘When they found yours they checked the shop that had sent them. That must have narrowed their field of search considerably.’

I could have remarked that it had in fact pinpointed the hotel because I told the girl where I was staying when she had asked me; but enough was enough.

‘So,’ he went on, ‘in addition to your photograph they now have a specimen of your handwriting and almost certainly your fingerprints as well. And you object when I use the word trouble? You amaze me. You have become soft through having so much money, Paul, and I fear, something of a liability.’

‘What do you want us to do? Split up?’

‘Obviously you can see the difficulties in that course as well as I can. We both need time to think. Meanwhile, though, you must make yourself scarce. I think you should go to the island for a bit.’

The island he had bought was in the Bahamas. He said his wife loved it, my wife adored it, I loathed it.

‘Anna will like that,’ I said.

‘Your wife will stay where she is,’ he said curtly, ‘where a wife should be, in the home looking after your child while you are away on business.’

‘Very well.’

‘I will come over next week perhaps. Then we can discuss the future, without emotion, like sensible men.’

‘All right.’

It was a month before he turned up. I was being punished. And it was punishment, from the start. You went to New York or Miami and thence to Nassau. Then you took an island-hopping plane almost to Caicos. Finally, you headed back north again in a stinking little tub that did a grocery round of ten or twelve of the ‘Out islands’ delivering mail, gasoline, kerosene and bottled gas along with canned meat, powdered milk, bottled water and other necessities. At one of them, Carlo’s cabin-cruiser picked you up and took you still farther off the map.

Anyone who holds the belief that a West Indies island all to yourself except for some servants, is bliss, has to be crazy about sun-bathing, spear-fishing, underwater photography, or re-reading mite-infested paperbacks. If he does not enjoy any of those things, the boredom is deadly and complete. In November and December on that particular island it usually rains heavily, too.

Carlo’s house was comfortable, I admit; but I had noticed on previous visits that it was still more comfortable when he was there to chivvy the cook and tell her exactly what he wanted done. Even on the day he arrived and was too tired from the journey to do much chivvying, the standard of cooking rose perceptibly. That evening the food was eatable.

Afterwards, he asked me whether I had given any thoughts to my future role in our partnership.

‘My only thought has been that I seem no longer to have a role.’

‘I don’t agree. I have been observing the progress of the trends in tax-avoidance, not evasion mark you, avoidance. A few years ago, when you said that word, certain names came automatically into mind as tax havens. What were they?’

‘Monaco, Liechtenstein, the Channel Islands, Bermuda, Curaçao perhaps, Panama, possibly Switzerland.’

‘And now? What names would you add?’

‘The Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, the Caymans, the New Hebrides, all sort of odd places. You need a geographical dictionary to find some of them.’

‘Yes, and what are we doing about it? Nothing.’

‘What would you like done, Carlo?’

‘I would like a survey made by someone upon whose judgement I can rely. I cannot go myself because there is too much going on in Europe that I must attend to personally — ’ he was at the time preparing the butter-train caper — ‘but you will know what to look for and be able to assess the prospects. We should consider investing where it is necessary to safeguard our position against later competition.’

We discussed it for four days, and then left the island; he to go back to Milan, I to scout the Caribbean before flying west to the Pacific.

I never saw Carlo again.

Krom was fidgeting with the file in his hand and I knew that he couldn’t wait to get at it.

‘I have a suggestion, Professor,’ I said.

He looked at me suspiciously. Was I about to play some last-minute trick?

‘Yes, Mr Firman?’

‘I suggest that we now adjourn this gathering until tomorrow morning. Naturally, when you have read what I have written there, you will have questions to ask arising out of it. Would eight-thirty here be too early for a breakfast meeting?’

I looked at the other two to see how they felt about it, but Krom was not consulting them.

‘I agree,’ he said firmly. ‘Eight-thirty.’ He got to his feet a bit unsteadily, pulled himself together and remembered his manners. ‘I must thank you for an excellent dinner. Good night, Mr Firman.’

Adroit use of the backs of the rest of the terrace chairs enabled him to steer a reasonably straight course into the house. Connell gave me a sly look.

‘What was there about that white wine, Mr Firman?’

‘Nothing, except that it was served too cold.’ I stood up.

They took the hint and also said good night.

Yves and I finished our wine. Melanie said that she was going for a walk.

After ten minutes or so, Yves and I went up to the loft over the garage. There was silence from Krom and Henson; they were reading to themselves. Connell was making sure that his copy of the material was going to remain available for future use by reading it to his tape-recorder. Only an occasional grunt of surprise or doubt showed that this was the first time he had been through it. It was interesting to hear it all being read out — truth, rubbish, and half-truth — all as if it were some sort of Holy Writ.

I was listening, fascinated, when he was interrupted by a knock on his door. He switched off the recorder and went to answer the knock.

Dr Henson’s voice said: ‘Sorry to bother you. I’ve just had this note from Krom shoved under my door. Have you had one?’

‘Wanting a pre-breakfast meeting in his room at seven-thirty? Yes. I’ve had one.’

‘Do we accept?’

‘If our lord and master wants to make sure in advance that he asks all the questions and leads for the prosecution, why not? He’ll take charge anyway.’

‘I suppose so. I heard you talking. What were you doing? Recording it all on that thing?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Since you’ve been allowed to get away with it, how about giving me a copy of the transcript?’

There was a pause, then: ‘Dr Henson, may I call you Geraldine?’

He made it sound like a joke and that was the way she treated it. ‘Don’t be a fool, Connell.’

‘Gerry?’

‘My friends call me Hennie, and I assure you that, as a nickname, it’s quite appropriate. Good night again.’

‘Good night.’ The door closed and he went back to his dictation.

It was at that moment that we heard stumbling footsteps on the bare, wooden stairs up to the loft.

It was Melanie and she was looking flustered. She was also out of breath.

I signalled to Yves to turn the sound down. ‘What is it, Melanie?’

‘I went for a walk you know, and I think — only think mind, Paul — that this place may be under surveillance. Cars stationary on both upper and lower roads. It’s difficult to be certain at night, but I thought you’d better know.’