Siege at the Villa Lipp

CHAPTER SEVEN

All three of us had a bad night, but at least Melanie and I got some sleep. Yves had none.

About an hour after Melanie’s warning, he returned to the listening post over the garage to report his preliminary findings. Since he had spent most of the hour crawling between bushes and being bitten by insects, he locked a mess.

He borrowed my handkerchief and dabbed at some large scratches on his hands and arms while he explained how he had got them. There had been parked cars on both roads, as Melanie had said. He had seen one on the lower road by the garden gate and two, one on each side at distances of about a hundred and fifty metres from the entrance. It had been in the oleander thickets along the upper boundary fence, where he had gone to take a closer look at the two cars outside, that he had run into trouble. At some time, the chain-link boundary fence had been damaged by a car or truck going off the road after taking the bend too fast. Concrete posts had been put up to prevent a repetition of that particular accident, but the gap in the fence had been temporarily blocked with a barbed-wire entanglement which no one had bothered to remove after the fence had been repaired.

Still, he had been able to get a look at both cars by waiting for the headlights of the occasional passing car to show them up. Each had two persons in it, though of what sex he had not been able to see, and each had a local Alpes Maritimes registration. Each also had its front wheels on full left lock. In addition, both on the lower road and the upper, the places at which the cars were parked were where the roads widened slightly. If you wanted to park on those roads for any ordinary reason — you wanted a smoke and a chat, you wanted to neck or eat a sandwich — those were the places you would logically choose. Not as logically, perhaps, if you wanted to mount a simple surveillance operation against the Villa Lipp because your view of it would be so restricted; but if you wanted to prevent any of the occupants leaving the place without your knowing or, if you wanted to prevent their leaving by car altogether, you were in exactly the right position. You had the lower gateway under observation if they tried leaving on foot, and with your two cars on the upper road you could foil any attempt at a get-away by road simply by starting up, driving four metres and then standing on the brakes. If you kept your ears open for the sound of engines from below, you could have the road blocked on both sides of the entrance before the escaping cars could reach it.

And, of course, we, or rather Melanie, could be imagining things.

I would not have blamed Yves in the slightest if he had thought that possibility as being one at least worthy of discussion. In fact, he did not even hint at it. He appeared to respect Melanie’s instincts as much as he respected his own.

‘One parked car would be of no importance,’ he said; ‘two would be an interesting coincidence. Three parked cars at this time and in those places and postures I will not accept as explainable in terms other than those of surveillance until I hear that explanation. Then if I am able to snap my fingers and say, “Of course, how stupid of me,” I will go to bed. Meanwhile, I must continue to ask obvious questions. Who are they? Who are they working for? What are their orders? Why are they behaving as they are?’

‘There’s one other explanation you might try on yourself,’ I said. ‘This is a rich neighbourhood. Oh, I know there may not be much in the way of valuables in the Villa Lipp, but one or two of the pictures ought to be marketable. The owner is known to be absent. They could be a gang casing the joint.’

‘Then why aren’t they doing so? Why are they just sitting there, all six of them, where they can see so very little but can so easily be seen? And why six? Locking a house over before deciding to rob it is a one-man job and he comes in the daytime with credentials from an insurance company. One is forced to conclude that these people mean to advertise their presence, that they mean to be seen.’

‘Perhaps they’re selling protection. There used to be a gang along this coast who’d strip your house of everything, including the carpets and kitchen stove, if you didn’t pay them.’

This was ignored. Yves had turned to Melanie again.

‘I might not have gone for a walk,’ she said doubtfully.

‘But they did see you?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes.’

‘Did they see that you had found them interesting or suspect?’

‘I doubt it. I can’t be sure.’

‘Then I think,’ he said, ‘that we should see what happens when they know that they have been spotted.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Patron, either they are very close in because they intend to do something violent almost at once and will not allow anyone to escape, or they are applying psychological pressure to make us leave.’

‘They might be out there to make us run, but I don’t think they could be meaning to do anything violent unless they knew that, apart from your revolver, we aren’t armed. There aren’t enough of them. It really comes back to your first question. Who are they?’

‘I could go and ask them,’ Melanie said.

She does sometimes say stupid things. ‘All you’d get would be a blank stare,’ I said.

‘I think,’ said Yves, tactful as ever, ‘that there may be a simpler way of letting them know that we are aware of them. We could just close the entrance gates. They can be seen from where the cars are parked.’

‘Do they close? With all those shrubs growing through and around them, I would say that nobody ever closed them. They’re probably rusted open.’

Yves tried not to look reproachful. ‘When we moved in, Paul, oiling the hinges was one of the first things I did. The lower road gate also.’

‘Sorry. Can they be locked? I know there are plenty of ways of getting into this place, but if one were going to be violent, charging in by car with a bunch of armed hoodlums would be the most intimidating.’

“There is a chain in the garage. I could arrange things so that undoing the chain from the closed gates would be a noisy operation.’

“Then do that, please. The lower road gate, too, if you can.’

‘That has a lock and a key.’

He went off. I heard the distant sound of the front gates closing and then a rattling of chain. Almost immediately afterward, Melanie, who had been sitting by an open window in a room nearer the driveway, came to report that, on the gates being closed, both cars had at once started up and been driven away.

After Yves had dealt with the lower road gate, he returned to report that, on his opening and slamming it noisily before locking it, the third car had also left. He had one additional item to report. Just before he had done his opening and slamming act, he had heard someone’s voice. It had been his impression that the voice had been coming through a small loud-speaker of the kind you would expect on a miniature walkie-talkie set, and that the set had been in the hands of the car passenger. He had glimpsed for a moment a short, chromium-plated whip-antenna, of the kind used on such sets, sticking at an angle through the passenger-side window space. The words he had heard the voice uttering had been: ‘. . now. Okay. Out.’

The three words had been spoken in English, though by what nationality of English-speaker he firmly declined to guess at. All that seemed likely was that he had been hearing the end of a conversation between an occupant of one of the two cars which had been on the upper road and the passenger in the single car on the lower. The rest of the conversation had taken place while he had been moving from the main gate down to the one in the wall.

‘So,’ he concluded. ‘What is the next move, Paul?’

‘You could get some sleep. We all could.’

‘Someone must keep watch in case there is an alarm to be sounded. You have our guests to deal with in the morning and so you must be rested. If had better be me who mounts guard. Melanie could relieve me for an hour, perhaps, so that I don’t begin to see things that aren’t there.’

‘All right,’ said Melanie. ‘At two o’clock, say?’

‘Okay, Paul?’

‘Very well. Divide the watch between you as you like. I shall have to take a sleeping-pill now, I’m afraid, but I shall set my clock for six-thirty unless either of you wakes me before. I’ll also monitor our guests’ get-together at seven-thirty. If anything of interest happens outside, one of you will let me know, eh?’

In spite of the pill I had a poor night.

This wasn’t because of the watchers outside the villa; at least, not directly because of them. Yves had brushed aside what I had said about protection racketeers, but that was the explanation I had settled for in my own mind; and I had done so because, at that point, I had believed it to be the most likely one.

There are such racketeers operating on the French Riviera, and, as their demands are not really exorbitant, it is, especially for foreigners, simpler to pay up than to take moralistic stands and suffer the consequences. The latter can be tiresome as well as costly. A German I know who has a house on Cap Ferrat, but who refused to pay a few thousand francs for protection, had the whole place emptied while he was away, the gang having brought in removal vans to do the job. The police received the owner’s complaint sympathetically but without surprise. These things sometimes happened. After such forceful demonstrations the protection people obviously had much less trouble collecting dues, even from hard cases like my German friend. Though I could see that a man of Yves’s temper might well find it unacceptable, my assumption that, with the cost of everything going up, it had become customary to put the bite on summer-season tenants as well as owners seemed reasonable enough. I quite expected to receive by mail the following morning, in addition to the good news that a protection service was available, a subscription form to fill in and return with my cheque.

So, it wasn’t worry that kept me awake, but my old trouble; the inability to wait before trying to solve a problem until all the available facts are in. Strange as it may seem, the problem that nagged, and went on nagging long after its solution had ceased to matter, was that of figuring out how best to use the presence of external enemies to get Krom and his witnesses out of my hair.

At seven, I went down to the kitchen, complained to the cook that indigestion from the dinner the night before had kept me awake, and appropriated the pot of coffee she had made for her husband and herself. Along with it, I had one of the petit-pains just delivered by the village bakery. The husband told me that during the night some unauthorized person had shut the outer gates. I said that it had been I who had shut them in order to keep out stray dogs. Obviously, and not surprisingly, he thought I was off my head.

I had one cup of coffee in my bedroom and took a second through to the garage loft.

Krom’s seven-thirty meeting started more or less on time. Connell was the first to arrive.

After they had exchanged greetings and told one another how tired they had been and how well they had slept, Krom said: ‘I chose this room for our meeting because it is free of listening devices.’

‘You know that for a fact, eh, Professor?’

‘I have examined the whole room carefully myself.’

‘And didn’t find a thing. Ah, well. . ‘ Connell left his doubts at that. ‘Do you think we could get a cup of coffee if we rang that bell there? Until I’ve had coffee in the morning, I don’t feel altogether. . ‘

He broke off as Dr Henson arrived. More good mornings. She, too, had slept well.

Krom said: ‘Coffee would be desirable, but I think it is more important that we get down to business before we meet Firman. I take it that you have both read this paper? Yes? Then, I would like first to hear your general views on it.’

‘On the whole true? On the whole false? Or on the whole half-and-half?’ asked Henson.

‘That for a start, yes.’

‘I say half-and-half.’

Connell said: ‘So do I, but I can’t make up my mind which half is which. I’m hoping for help there from you, Professor. The part about the actual confrontation a: the crematorium must be true because you were there and saw it. But how did you actually come to be there? It would help a bit if we could now be told, I think.’

‘It would indeed,’ Henson’s voice.

Krom cleared his throat. ‘This will all, of course, be in my book, but I think I can trust you two.’

He could have said right out that, if they dared repeal as much as a word, he would arrange slow and painful deaths for them, but his tone conveyed the message plainly enough.

Henson uttered a strange sound which was probably an involuntary giggle quickly masked by a cough.

‘That’s what we’re here for, Professor,’ said Connell. He managed suddenly to sound like the sheriff of Bodge City in a television western.

Krom hesitated, unsure how to take the performance.

Then, deciding to ignore it, he went ahead. ‘I had obtained the permission of the Federal judicial authorities in Berne to look into the background of a number of cases of blackmail or, to be more precise, extortion, involving persons and corporate entities who banked in Switzerland. These cases had been brought to my notice by an international private enquiry agent who had sometimes made use of tips I have been able to give him. This time, as well as giving me information he thought I should have, he sought advice. These cases of extortion in which he had been asked to act, sometimes in a defensive role, sometimes as a negotiator, covered a period of three years or so. The cases all had two elements in common. They involved tax evasion or breaches of exchange-control regulations under a variety of national jurisdictions, and they involved an organization calling itself a debt-collection agency with branches in most of the countries of Western Europe. Unfortunately, he had had little success to report to his various clients. Given a defensive role, there was nothing he could do except advise them to pay up. Told to negotiate, he encountered nothing but blank walls. He realized quite early on that he was dealing with a front, a facade, in this collection agency, but that those behind it were both well informed and impeccably disciplined. His clients, on the other hand, were mostly, as he put it, ‘at sixes-and-sevens’ from the moment they became victims until they eventually decided to pay. None of them was ever able to deny the allegations of evasion or breach of regulations, at least not for long, and only one or two had the will or gall to fight anyway. There are always a few men and women who prefer fighting to surrendering, even in a cause they well know to be defective, even when they know that they cannot win or draw, that they have to lose. One can only marvel at such lunacy.’

It might have been Carlo speaking.

For a moment or two I found myself wondering what sort of a man Krom would have become without the burden of that overweight super-ego he carries around. What would have happened to all the ‘anarchy’ of which he is so afraid? Might he not have become one of our less scrupulous competitors?

An agreeable day-dream, but still a day-dream; he was on again about the troubles of his fat-headed friend, the private enquiry agent, who had unwittingly caused me so much inconvenience. I made myself pay attention.

‘It was these diehards among his clients about whom he was specially concerned. And not simply because well-publicized losers were, if known to be his clients, bad for business. He feared too — as we shall see, rightly — that such unbalanced persons could easily decide to take the law into their own hands and commit criminal acts of violence. He wanted the whole matter properly investigated by some responsible police authority. He could do nothing more. The essential initiatives, he though, could only be taken in Switzerland, though obviously not by him. With my academic connections there I might do better.’

‘And you did do better,’ Henson’s longing for coffee was also now becoming audible.

‘A little, yes.’ Krom was savouring every moment, If his witnesses thought that they were going to hurry him along with polite proddings they were much mistaken. ‘A little better,’ he repeated, ‘but only a little. Both the judicial authorities and the police had certain ideas on the subject of those extortion cases which I found it difficult to counter. They were aware, of course, that there were leakages of information from several of the so-called big banks and from some cantonal and private banks as well. These they were naturally determined to locate and stop, because Swiss law, their law, was being broken and the guilty must be found and punished. In so far as the information I brought them about specific leakages helped them to that end, they were interested. But when it came to talk of organized extortion, they lost interest.’

Henson let out a squeak of incredulity. ‘The Swiss lost interest in an extortion racket?’

I was grateful to her. It was the question that had popped up instantly in my own mind.

‘They didn’t believe that it existed,’ Krom explained. ‘They thought, at that point, that I was merely trying to prove a pet theory. They said that, in order to do so, I was confusing two quite different anti-social activities. One wasn’t even a crime. They were referring to the traffic in titbit information that was then being carried on with various US government agencies. For instance, there was the racket worked by those who sold luxury goods like furs and diamonds to rich Americans. In places such as London, Paris and Antwerp, the persons who did the actual selling often earned extra commissions by informing on their clients to the US Revenue as soon as the goods were sold. When a client was caught for smuggling, the informer received a percentage of the fine as a reward. Not nice, or kind, or good for business in the long run, but not illegal. Besides, it didn’t happen in Switzerland. What they were interested in, as far as I was concerned, were the bank employees who allowed themselves to be suborned and the wicked men and women who did the suborning. Among those last group, I am afraid, Dr Connell, agents of the United States Internal Revenue Service, which, with the blessing of the American Congress, had made no secret of its hostility to Swiss secrecy laws. Those agents, with their big money bribes, were then considered the prime villains. It had been thought at one time that Oberholzer might be an important IRS man, or possibly even CIA.’

Connell laughed. ‘Oberholzer, an American government man? With that accent?’

‘You have accepted a Secretary of State with a German accent,’ said Henson crisply. ‘I see nothing extraordinary about Oberholzer being thought of as a possible IRS or CIA agent. Firman’s accent — and I take it that we are talking about the same man — isn’t contemporary British anyway. I’d call it expatriate mid-Atlantic. The same could be said of his vocabulary. If he had a Hungarian-American accent you wouldn’t find the CIA notion in the least odd.’

‘True.’

‘And we are not talking about what, in retrospect, we may think, but what the Swiss knew and believed from time to time,’ Krom reminded them. ‘I said that not all the victims of the Oberholzer organization were prepared to submit. Among those who chose to fight were two clients of the enquiry agent — one Spanish, the other an American — whose cases had certain common denominators. Both had their accounts in the Zurich head office of the same bank. At least three other known victims also banked there. The other common denominator was the method used by the so-called debt-collection agency.’

‘The one of whose methods Firman so much disapproves?’

‘The one of whose methods he says he disapproves, yes, Dr Henson.’

‘I didn’t understand how that worked anyway,’ Connell said. ‘I made a note to ask him a question about it. How do you make a pay-off that can’t either be watched or traced?’

‘A good question,’ Krom said. ‘I will add it to my own list of clarifications required. Anything else?’

‘The part played in the incident by Frau Kramer and the daughter bothers me,’ said Henson. ‘What were those two up to? Assisting or obliging the police? Getting back at Oberholzer for corrupting the good Kramer? Covering themselves against the charge that they had compounded a felony? That identity parade after the funeral doesn’t sound like a good police idea. Why didn’t they go through with the original plan and get Oberholzer out at the apartment? Then, he couldn’t have run, not the way he did anyway. And what was the idea of giving him those plastic slip-covers with the code-names on them? That makes no sense at all.’

‘Oh yes, it does, young woman,’ Krom chuckled. ‘And, as it happens, the sense that it makes ties in with your questions about Frau Kramer’s place in the affair.’

I listened intently to the next bit because I was just as keen to know the answers as Dr Henson, more perhaps; the same questions had puzzled me at the time and, at intervals, ever since.

‘Frau Kramer,’ Krom went on, ‘could not, I think, have ever made her husband a very happy man. She was one of those women who, at the same moment as they complain that their men do not climb higher and faster on the ladder of success, hang on to their coat-tails to make the climb more difficult, perhaps impossible. They are moral saboteurs, you might say. To be specific, Kramer had reached, as do many men in the organizations, his natural level of maximum attainment without either understanding why he would go no higher or recognizing and accepting his own limitations. In this refusal to accept he was abetted by his own wife. But when it came to Oberholzer’s approach, things were undoubtedly different. Ambitious women of Frau Kramer’s type often have broad streaks of self-righteousness in them. They desire the ends but reject the means. Or, rather, they do not wish to hear about the means.’

‘As if Lady Macbeth were to say that she didn’t want to know,’ remarked Connell.

‘Pardon?’ There was a short silence while Krom grappled with the allusion. ‘Well, yes, perhaps. I am sure Frau Kramer did know of the Oberholzer arrangement. It was just never openly discussed, so that she could say, with her hand on her heart, that she had never been told.’

‘Hence her and her daughter’s dislike of Oberholzer,’ commented Henson.

‘The daughter’s attitude was determined much more by the adverse affects on her own marriage, and position of respectability that a criminal scandal would have had. After Kramer’s second coronary attack in the hospital, and once she knew that he was quite unlikely to survive a third, Frau Kramer’s chief concern was for the money her husband had accumulated. All she wanted to know was whether or not she would be allowed to inherit it. Naturally, the police were in no hurry to enlighten her. Equally, she was in no position to ask questions about her husband’s private fortune without admitting that she had been a party to concealing the criminal acts that had made it. The daughter would probably have been prepared to abandon the money, or the prospect of it anyway. The mother could never have done that.’

‘Didn’t they have a lawyer to advise them?’ Connell enquired.

‘Of course. But what use is an honest lawyer when what you need is a dishonest one? No, she chose instead to give co-operation to the police. This, the police accepted gratefully, but remaining stiffly correct, without allowing their gratitude to show even for a moment.’

‘Were you present at the original Kramer interviews?’ asked Connell. ‘I mean before he had the heart attack.’

‘Oh no. That would have been quite improper. I was kept informed though. I was also there when the decision was made to allow Kramer’s encoded telegram to be sent, in the hope that it would bring Oberholzer, his pay-master, to Zurich. As we know, it did.’

Dr Henson sniffed. ‘Even such a stupid woman as Frau Kramer must have known that the police couldn’t try and convict a dead man. If he embezzled that money from the bank and it could be proved that he’d embezzled it, even without his being there, things might have been different. As it was, the police had no case against either her or Oberholzer, and probably no claim to any money there might have been lying around.’

‘You would be surprised,’ said Krom, ‘how great an appearance of power a senior Swiss policeman can convey just by looking absolutely serious. Except in one thing. Frau Kramer did exactly as she was told. The exception was in the matter of where the identification of Oberholzer before witnesses was to take place. She refused, practically at the last minute, to have Oberholzer in her apartment.’

‘On what grounds? He must have been there before, she must have known him before, or how could she have identified him?’

‘She said that until the police had told her that Oberholzer was a criminal she had not known.’

‘Had the police told her?’ Connell asked.

‘Of course not. Challenged on the point, she maintained that the interest of the police in Oberholzer had been enough to tell her. It was obvious now that Oberholzer was a criminal. Her husband, who had known the man slightly, had been questioned about him, but had known nothing. Now, she was being questioned. She also knew nothing, but would assist the police in identifying the villain, anywhere but in the apartment sacred to her husband’s memory and to her own memories of their happiness together.’

She hadn’t needed a lawyer, I would have said.

‘There is still the question of the code-names,’ Dr Henson was reminding Krom.

‘I am not forgetting it, young woman. My good relations with the Swiss authorities obviously do not depend alone upon academic associations. When I am given information it is given on the understanding that the arrangement is reciprocal. I pick their brains, and they pick mine. In this case I helped them discover the real names of the two enquiry-agent clients, the Spaniard and the American, who had defied, or tried to defy, the Oberholzer organization.’

‘Kleister and Torten, you mean? Oh, I see. You matched the code-names with the details found by the police in Kramer’s private files.’

‘Precisely.’ Krom did not like Connell stealing his thunder like that, as he went on to make clear. ‘But the question asked was not ‘how did the police get the names?’ but ‘why did they give them to Oberholzer?’ I will tell you. It began as a joke.’

‘Huh?’

‘Yes, I agree. A somewhat macabre joke but a joke nevertheless. My police friends had made enquiries about the then whereabouts of Kleister and Torten and found that Torten, the American, had since his release from prison on probation, been enjoying his freedom in Florida. Kleister, his old ally, had recently joined him there. What was more, he had joined him not just for a brief holiday, it was understood, but on a permanent basis. Both men were widowers, and, in spite of their costly troubles, both were still wealthy. It seemed likely that they might be preparing to resume operations against the Oberholzer extortionists. For two men of their ages with money to spend and a cause that they could think of as a crusade, what could be a more pleasurable way of passing the time than finding a man they both hated, and then arranging for his murder?’

‘Yes,’ said Connell. ‘I can see that there’d be room there for loads of laughs.’

‘I remember my police friends saying in their droll way that, if Oberholzer were going to be murdered, they would prefer that the crime be committed outside their jurisdiction because they would not have their hearts in the investigation. Someone suggested that they might give Oberholzer a warning of the danger by mentioning Kleister and Torten to him verbally. Later, when the confrontation was moved from the Kramer apartment to the crematorium, they put those marked folders with the code-names in the brief-case because they intended to stop and interrogate Oberholzer at the airport when he tried to leave. Their object, since they could not prosecute him, was, first, to intimidate him, second, to trip him if they could into some damaging admission about his relationship with Kramer and, lastly, to make it clear that he was considered an undesirable alien who would be well advised to stay out of Switzerland. They thought that the code-names in the brief-case might prove useful as an element in the interrogation. In fact, as we now know, he eluded them at the airport, though more by luck than by ingenuity. However, the warning of the code-names did not, it seems, go unheeded. He is still alive.

I wonder about Kleister and Torten. Perhaps he knows. Perhaps I will ask him.’

‘Well,’ said Dr Henson, ‘one thing’s explained. I can see now why he objected so strongly to that field kit of Langridge’s that I tried to smuggle in. With one set of fingerprints on record in Switzerland against an old identity, the last thing he’d want would be another set of prints, one attached to his current identity, circulating internationally. The two would almost certainly be matched. I must say, though, that he doesn’t strike me as a man who has been labouring for years under a threat of death from a pair of half-witted tax-dodgers. If anyone’s had the pleasurable time, I’d say it was he. Most regrettable no doubt, but my guess is that he doesn’t know what a twinge of guilt feels like and that he has always thoroughly enjoyed himself.’

‘He will not be enjoying himself for much longer, my dear. Of that I can assure you. As for us, I think it is time that we went down to breakfast.’

I was ready, seated at the table on the terrace waiting for them when they came down.

They all told me, in response to my polite enquiries, how comfortable they had been and how well they had slept, thank you, at the same time managing to make it clear that solicitude would get me nowhere and that, now they were rested, the sooner we got down to business the better. None of them asked how I had slept.

The coffee was not nearly as good as the earlier pot I had had, but they drank it appreciatively and ate their croissants. Krom did not wait to finish his, however, before going into action.

‘We have all read with interest your first paper,’ he said, spraying crumbs with the sibilants, ‘and, while we find some of it useful, we all agree that it is far from satisfactory.’

‘Full of holes,’ Connell explained.

‘And doth protest too much,’ said Henson in her Langridge’s voice, ‘against accusations that, as far as I know, haven’t yet been made.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you should all try reading it again, and more carefully.’

Krom swallowed the rest of his coffee and reached for more. ‘I myself have read it three times,’ he said; ‘and with each reading it has seemed less and less illuminating, except in one respect.’

‘I am relieved to hear that my failure has not been total.’

‘Sarcasm will not help you. What is illuminated so brilliantly is your determination to disclaim all responsibility for anything and everything concerned with this large-scale criminal activity except the humble part you played in it as a kind of superior, but none too competent, messenger boy.’

‘Incompetent, yes. Humble? I sincerely hope not. The last thing I want to do is give false impressions.’

‘Flippancy is even more tiresome than sarcasm, Mr Firman, so let us have no more of either. We at any rate are serious, and — ’ he whipped a folded sheet of notes from his shirt pocket — ‘to begin with, I propose to ask you a series of questions.’

‘As long as you understand that I may decline to answer those I don’t like, go ahead.’

‘You said that you had prepared a number of discussion papers and that you could be questioned on them. You did not say how many papers, only that they would cover your activities as Oberholzer for a period of three years. My first question is, what is the scope of the activities described? How is the material as a whole organized?’

‘It’s mostly anecdotal, I am afraid, like the first paper. So much is hearsay, of course. I can’t help that.’

‘No, not if you persist in trying to convince us of the existence of senior partners whose orders you meekly obeyed, or separate groups of evil men who did any dirty work that your leader might deem necessary. If you could abandon that pretence it would be helpful.’

‘I said that I would try to answer your questions, Professor, not debate your assertions. You asked about the scope of the activities described in the other papers. I have tried to answer your question. Dr Connell complains that the first paper has holes in it. Do you agree with him?’

‘I go farther. For me, it is in all respects unsatisfactory.’

‘Not exciting enough do you mean, Professor? Not enough murder and mayhem?’

Connell tried to take over. ‘He means that there’s too much shadow and not enough substance. For example. .’

Krom stopped him with a look.

‘Dr Connell was about to raise a question which we all seem to have asked ourselves. Accepting for a moment the fiction that you were never a principal, only an agent, what about this debt-collection agency that you say was or is employed by your employers to extort their fees? Where is it based? How does it work? Please tell us all about this remarkable institution, Mr Firman.’

I smiled. ‘That is the subject of one of the papers you were asking me about.’

‘An entire paper?’

‘It was a complex organization. And please note that it no longer exists. It was originally based in Luxembourg, with branches in Hanover, Rome, Paris and London. It went out of business years ago.’

‘Soon after I saw you in Zürich, in fact.’

‘The two events were not related, Professor. In any case I’m sure you would prefer to read what I’ve written on the subject rather than have it piecemeal.’

Dr Connell stuck his neck out again. ‘Does what you’ve written about explain how you, that is they, got the money without the victims’ knowing where it went?’

I waited expectantly for Krom to intervene, but this time he let the question through without protest. No doubt he was curious himself.

‘I don’t think I understand,’ I said. ‘By victims you mean debtors, I take it.’

‘Call them what you like. I call them victims. Now, how did it function? I guess the process of collection would start with a letter saying that the Luxembourg Finance Corporation, or whatever you called it, had taken over the debt and so kindly pay up without further ado or get clobbered. Right?’

‘I didn’t call the agency anything, and the Lech-Firman partnership was very far from being its major client. Its name, by the way, was Agence Euro-Fiduciare.’

‘Meaningless, but looks respectable I guess. Okay. Now, how about that first move?’

‘It would be of the kind you described. It sometimes produced results.’

‘But not often?’

‘Not often, I would say, no.’

‘So then you got tough. Yes, I know. They got tough.’

‘When the agency purchased the debt from us they would naturally receive an account of the services we had rendered the client. This account would include a complete statement of the client’s financial situation according to our records.’

‘Everything not on record back home, you mean?’

‘A complete statement, as I said. This would include all assets, however held and where held, sometimes together with a summary of the last official tax return made by the client to his domestic revenue authority. Where exchange controls had been evaded, copies of the relevant documents would be provided instead. If, say, from some fringe of the sterling area, money had been transferred to finance a transaction in real-estate or gold, this would be documented as a reminder.’

‘Oh boy!’

‘At the same time new instructions about the way the debt was to be paid would be issued.’

‘I’ll bet they would. That was one of the holes I wanted to see filled in. How was it arranged so that Kleister, and others like him who strongly resented and resisted being screwed, didn’t know, when they’d finally decided that they had to pay up, who’d been screwing them? Their first thought would have been you as the tax-consultant. Right?’

‘The partnership always dealt at arm’s length.’

‘You mean through cut-outs, I take it. Okay, so when things got tough, they weren’t able to find you. Right? But they could find Euro-Fiduciare, eh?’

‘The agency had its own methods,’ I said austerely. The pieces of real meat I had to give were not going to be tossed over in response to the first yaps.

Connell didn’t like being told to wait. He tried jumping for it. ‘So do kidnappers-for-ransom,’ he said; ‘have their own methods, I mean. So do blackmailers and extortionists. But there is a moment all of them have to face. That’s the moment when they pick up the money. Okay, they tell the mark to leave it in the middle of a desert in used twenties and a transparent bag with “Don’t Fence Me In” painted on it in red, but they still have to go there and pick it up. That’s when things usually start going wrong. Their helicopter has engine trouble or the pilot turns out to be a gamma-minus navigator who puts down nowhere near the loot. The police have been brought in by the victim or his family after all. The bills have been chemically marked and are, used or not, traceable. Some cop or FBI man hidden behind a rock there watching the pickup gets bitten by a rattlesnake and yells. A gun goes off accidentally. Anything and everything can happen. How did the agency make sure that, whoever else got hurt, they didn’t?’

‘In my paper on the subject I give examples to show how the whole thing worked.’

I stopped there and poured myself the last of the coffee. Henson was sitting motionless with an unlit cigarette in one hand and her lighter poised in the other. Krom and Connell were both leaning forward expectantly. All three were now, metaphorically speaking, and indeed almost literally, slavering.

‘Tell us about it,’ ordered Krom.

I shrugged submissively but with no thought of obeying.

I knew that if they were allowed to gobble up all the food that had been prepared for them, just because the smell of it had reached their nostrils, there would be none left for tomorrow.

Yes, that’s how I was still thinking. I still hadn’t realized even then that, for me as host at the Villa Lipp, there wasn’t going to be a tomorrow.

‘It isn’t really all that difficult, Professor,’ I said. ‘Look at it this way. The popular jargon now calls those services Carlo gave the old black marketeers, ‘laundering money’. All the debt-collection people did was set up another sanitary process to suit their own special needs. In my paper on the whole subject, I call it, ‘waste-disposal’. Laundered money is money cleansed of its associations with pockets it has been in. Waste-disposal money just disappears into a sewage system, one with so many outfalls that no particular deposit can ever, once it has left the sink, be followed or traced to its ultimate destination.’

Krom looked sour. ‘Your metaphor is appropriately anal, Mr Firman, but I didn’t ask for metaphors. I want specifics, facts of the kind that a banker or a police accountant can get his teeth into.’

‘And facts you shall have,’ I said. ‘You’ll find them all in my next paper. For now, though, you’ll just have to be satisfied with paper number one and metaphors. Unless, that is, any of you would like to try solving the money-transfer problem that seems to worry Dr Connell. As a technical exercise, I mean. I don’t mind giving friendly advice.’

Krom’s lips tightened and he remained silent; but Connell wasn’t so fussy about his dignity.

‘What sort of friendly advice?’ he asked.

‘You know that banks all over the world transfer money to one another by means of what’s called the “tested-cable” system? You do? Good. Then you’ll also know that crooks have used tested-cables to swindle banks, often via their computers, out of millions of dollars which have proved to be untraceable. Well, if crooks can make untraceable transfers, think how much easier it must be when the payers are thought of as honest men and the payees are simple debt collectors.’

Henson made a cooing sound. ‘What an absolutely brilliant idea!’ she exclaimed.

‘No, Dr Henson.’

‘No what, Mr Firman?’

‘I will not be flattered into accepting with only a token murmur or protest the suggestion that using tested-cables was my idea. It wasn’t. The head of the collection agency thought it up.’

‘Oh? And who was he?’

I wasn’t falling for that one either. ‘He? It may have been a woman. I don’t know, Doctor.’

Krom gave his witnesses meaning looks. ‘You see, Mr Firman is a slippery fellow. Do you know that, in Brussels, he actually had the impertinence to tell me that most crime is committed by government, and that delinquency is a function of the class struggle?’

‘Oh dear!’ Dr Henson choked slightly on the cigarette she had at last lighted. ‘That sounds more like cut-price Trotskyism than anarchy.’

‘It’s double-talk,’ said Krom, ‘and I told him so. Quite unnecessarily, of course, because he is intelligent enough to know that himself.’ He turned his attention to me again. ‘We have heard the divided responsibility claim ad nauseam, Mr Firman. It is not accepted. You thought everything up. You were at the controls of the extortion machine you call a collection agency as well as those of the so-called tax-consultancy which kept it fed with information. Your version of the Oberholzer conspiracy is nothing but a pack of lies. What do you say to that?’

‘That you are impolite, Professor, as well as mistaken.’

‘Would you prefer me to call it the Firman conspiracy? What does the name matter? However you choose to masquerade now, you were the figure around which it all pivoted. Yours were the controlling hands, yours the organizing mind. That is the central, the essential, fact.’

‘Central and essential to your case it may be, Professor. That does not make it a fact. To a man of your academic standing and repute I hesitate to use harsh language in a discussion of this kind, and at the breakfast table too, but I must tell you, and in front of your witnesses, that at the centre of your case is what used to be known as an idée fixe. Nowadays, it’s called a hang-up.’

He said something loudly about my personal character. What he said was probably quite unpleasant and it may even have been true; but, as he said it in Dutch, I can’t be sure. I was about to ask him to translate, when we were interrupted by Melanie.

She did not come out on to the terrace, but called to me from a drawing-room window. I turned and she beckoned. Obviously, what she had to say was not to be overheard. I excused myself and went to the window.

‘What is it?’

‘Yves wants to see you. He didn’t want to show himself because he was rather dirty. He’s up in his room.’

‘Is it urgent?’ I didn’t want to leave just then in case they thought I was running away.

‘Yes, Paul. I think it is urgent.’

‘All right. You go over and tell them that I’ll be back in a minute.’

I went up to Yves’s room. He had been in the shower and was drying himself. He greeted me with the glum phrase that had begun to irritate me. Only this time he varied it slightly for emphasis.

‘Nous sommes vraiment foutus,’ he said.

‘Just tell me what’s happened. I’ll draw my own conclusions, Yves.’

He gave me the mournfully threatening look that had reminded Connell of a termite inspector he had known. ‘I have not forgotten that I am under your orders, Patron.’

‘Good. What’s happened?’

He smiled disagreeably. ‘What has happened is, Patron, that I am becoming more nervous every minute. Have you been all over this house?’

‘Most of it. Why?’

‘Then you will know that on the attic floor there are two windows from which, if one keeps moving from one to the other, one can in daylight see practically all the land surrounding this house.’

‘Yes.’

‘At sunrise I moved up there to keep watch with binoculars. At about six-thirty, I saw something I didn’t like. It was on that piece of land beyond the lower road to the right of the bay.’

‘You mean the headland with the tamarisks on it?’

‘Those small trees? Yes. There are bushes too. There was a person there.’

‘That land isn’t on this property. It belongs to the commune, I think. What sort of person?’

‘The first thing I saw was a flashing of light of the kind you get when sun reflects off lenses, but it was difficult to see because the flashing was coming from behind the bushes.’

‘Someone keeping the same sort of watch on this place as you were keeping from the attic?’

‘That’s what I thought. I also thought that it must be an amateur, someone who didn’t know enough to keep in the shadow of a tree to avoid reflections of the sun. So, when Melanie brought me coffee, I told her what I had seen and went down to take a closer look at the watcher. I thought too that perhaps I might frighten this amateur a little.’

‘And?’

‘It wasn’t an amateur there and I didn’t frighten anyone but myself.’ He put on some clean undershorts and a pair of slacks as he continued. ‘What I had seen flashing was the bottom of two new, shiny cans of tomato-juice cocktail mixture. They had been taped together and hung by black thread from a tree branch so that they were just behind a bush. Attached to the tape was a cord going back through the other bushes for perhaps thirty metres. This served two purposes. It kept the cans pointing in this direction, and it enabled the person hidden at the other end to move the cans slightly as they would have moved if they had been hand-held binoculars.’

‘So you followed the cord back and found that the person had gone.’

Yves sat on the edge of the bed and, reaching beneath it, picked up a shoe. ‘That is not all I found.’ He held up the shoe. ‘Please look at that.’

It was a blue canvas espadrille of the kind which used to have plain rope soles but which now have soles of crepe rubber. What was odd about this one was that there were extensive burn marks on it, the sort of marks that you would expect to see if it had been worn to stamp out the embers of a brush fire.

‘What happened?’

‘I followed the cord to where it ended along a narrow path and then I trod on this.’ He reached under the bed again and pulled out a square of charred plywood the size of a chess board, with a long bolt attached to the centre.

‘What is it?’

‘The pressure plate of a very small, insultingly innocuous, incendiary bomb.’

‘What do you mean by innocuous? It burnt your espadrille.’

‘If they had wanted to, they could have blown a foot off. This bolt broke a small tube of sulphuric acid when I trod on the board. All it ignited, judging from the smell, was a very small amount of chlorate of potash mixed with sugar. I was glad I was wearing socks though.’ He took the shoe from me and poked a finger through a burnt spot. ‘They were just having fun, you see, Patron. I don’t like practical jokes of this sort being played at my expense.’

‘You didn’t see anybody?’

‘No one in particular. The motor cruiser arrived, the big one that anchors off the sand beach near the point.’

‘At that time in the morning?’

‘They like a swim before breakfast. I’ve watched them through the glasses. A crewman lowers the dinghy for them to go to the beach. One man, two women. They swim in the morning and early evening every day.’

‘Did you see anything unusual apart from the booby-trap? Or hear anything, like a getaway car starting, for instance?’

‘Patron, have you been across the road there?’

‘No.’

‘All you can see from where I ended up is part of the bay, the part with the little pier where we could bring in a launch for water-skiing, if we had a launch. All you can hear are the sounds of waves breaking on the rocks below and, very faintly because of the bushes, passing traffic on the road. And I will tell you this. After that little pétard had gone off I wasn’t listening very carefully to anything. I have had time to think, however, and come to some conclusions if you would care to hear them.’

‘Of course.’

‘We were told last night that we are blown. We have now been told for a second time, and given one or two additional bits of bad news.’

‘For instance?’

‘That we are not just a little blown, but completely. They know, for instance, how we are organized, Patron.’

‘Explain, please.’

‘As I understand it, you are here to give information to this Krom and the others. No, I am not trying to pry. I don’t want to know more. It’s better the way it is. But you are the key figure, the one who is giving out the information to these educated half-wits. Those outside can only want to stop what is being done inside. At the moment, they seem to be trying to do this by scaring us into breaking up the meeting. Why? They can only wish to make us run so that they can more easily dispose of you.’

‘By “dispose of”, you mean kill, I take it. Aren’t you imagining things?’

‘You’re the one with the information, Patron. How else are they going to stop you?’

‘You said that they know how we are organized. What do you mean by that?’

‘There are at least six of them and they are not amateurs. That we know for certain. Six pros cost money. You don’t use them only to play practical jokes. Patron, they knew that I would see those reflections and go down to find the source of them. I and I alone.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘Because if they had thought that there was any chance of your going down, they would have left something a little more important for you to tread on. They would have left something that would have killed you.’

I thought for a moment. He was wrong, and I could have told him why.

In Italy during the war I had seen a lot of booby-traps and the effects on those who hadn’t made the right allowances for them. There was one trick the Germans had played that I have never forgotten. The hand-guns that their officers and senior NCOs carried had been much prized by Allied troops. The forward area people used to sell them for two or three hundred dollars a time to the chairborne warriors back in the lines-of-communications and base jobs. When the Germans found this out, they used to leave Lugers or Walthers behind when they moved out of a village and booby-trap them with grenades. The Allied engineer patrols got wise to that soon enough and used to carry lengths of cord with hooks on them. Then, when they saw a pistol left behind, they would put a hook on it and pay out the cord until they found a nearby foxhole to take cover in. Even if the pull of the cord set the grenade off, the pistol was usually undamaged. That game went on until the Germans found out, from some prisoner they took I suppose, what was happening. So then they used a bit more ingenuity. They’d still leave a pistol lying around, but it was no longer the pistol that they would booby-trap. Instead, it would be that convenient, nearby foxhole they’d fix; and not just with a grenade; they’d plant an S-mine in it that could cut a man in half. That’s why Yves was wrong. If I’d seen a cord there leading invitingly into the bushes, I’d have been off, scared shitless, scrambling back to the house as fast as I could go. Once you become boobytrap conscious, or get land-mine jitters, you stay that way for life.

I decided to keep all that to myself though. My convenient protection-racket theory had, since I had left the terrace and Krom’s indignation a few minutes earlier, ceased to make even a little sense. Yves was on edge, and now so was I The immediate needs were calm and as much sense as we could bring to dealing with a difficulty we didn’t yet understand.

‘What would you advise?’ I asked.

‘That we should stop covering for certain persons who aren’t here and start thinking of our own skins again.’

I didn’t ask him who it was he thought we were covering for, because I preferred not to know that he had guessed correctly.

‘By doing what, Yves?’

‘That’s a very conspicuous car we came in.’

He was quite right; a white Lincoln Continental with Liechtenstein plates is a conspicuous object; but he knew that the one in the garage was part of our cover story as tenants of the Villa Lipp and I didn’t immediately read his thinking.

‘What of it?’

‘You asked for my advice. I say we forget our guests, take their small car, just the three of us, and make a quick break for it. Then we hole up in the safe-house and hire help to take care of the opposition.’

‘How do you know that there is a safe-house?’

‘With Melanie planning a set-up, there’s always a safe-house.’

‘I’ll bear the suggestion in mind, but I don’t like it at the moment. We know too little. Supposing the opposition turned out to be a government agency. You couldn’t hire help to take care of that.’

‘It isn’t the French. They wouldn’t play practical jokes. On their own ground, as we are, they’d have a complete frame-up ready — drug-smuggling or arras-dealing charges, something like that — and we’d be in police hands while they took us to pieces one at a time until they had what they thought they wanted. If it’s a foreign government outfit operating with French permission, the last thing they’d want is the sort of trouble we could organize.’

‘Maybe. I don’t like the jokes any more than you do, but they bother me in a different way. I can’t help feeling that whoever’s out there must be waiting, hardly able to keep from laughing aloud, to see how soon we start walking like good boys into whatever stew-pot he’s got waiting. We’ve let him know that we’re not asleep. Before we do anything more positive than that, I want to know who’s paying him or them and for what.’

‘Perhaps Melanie was right after all. Perhaps we should try asking them.’

‘The first persons we ask are the ones downstairs on the terrace. If any of them knows anything that we don’t, it’s time we found out. Besides, even if none of them knows anything new, they’ll all have to be told what’s going on. I don’t fancy any more meals on the terrace. We make too easy a target. You’ll probably be up again tonight, Yves. Why don’t you just get some rest now?’

‘Thank you, Paul. Later perhaps. At the moment I would prefer to hear the answers you get downstairs.’

‘In that case you’d better bring your shoe and that other piece of evidence. Krom may be more inclined to believe you than me.’

Krom was not inclined to believe either of us.

At first all he did was cackle with laughter. That ended in a fit of coughing, then, the spluttering and hawking over, he went into a stern-father act broken by giggles whenever his own wit proved too much for him. Not until he had realized that his witnesses had ceased to be even mildly amused did he simmer down sufficiently to deliver a coherent verdict.

‘No, Mr Firman,’ he declared sonorously; ‘yesterday we were tired, and so let you off lightly. Today, things are very different. Today, you will have to lie with much more skill if you expect to be taken seriously, much less believed. Diversionary tactics as elementary as these — sinister watchers lurking in the bushes armed with walkie-talkies, binoculars, booby-traps and bombs — will not help you for an instant. I beg you not to waste our time with them. Let us return to Oberholzer and the account you give of the ways in which the material he gave you was used.’

I glanced at Yves and Melanie to see how they were taking it. Melanie was wearing the expression of mindless impassivity that was her normal response to boredom or stress; and I had expected to see Yves sunk in his habitual gloom. To my surprise and concern, his sallow complexion had gone a shade lighter and his lips were pinched in a peculiar way. It took me a moment or two to realize that he was in a towering rage.

As he caught my eye he stood up suddenly and looked down at me.

‘Patron, I apologise. I came down, against your advice, because I expected to hear some questions answered or at least discussed. I now see that I underrated the difficulties.’ He pointed at Krom. ‘This old bag of piss and wind is too much in love with himself to be able to think, and these others only lick his feet. If you still think you can persuade any of them to listen to sense, that’s your affair. I don’t think it’s worth the sweat. I think, with respect, Patron, that we should now take seriously the suggestion I made upstairs, and simply warn those you are covering for that from now on they’ll have to take their own chances. These people here don’t matter. We do. It’s up to you, though, and I’m still at your orders. You told me to get some rest. That’s what I should have done at once. So, that’s what I will do now.’

He started to walk away. It was Henson who stopped him.

‘Mr Boularis?’ She spoke sharply but with a rising inflection, as if she were asking a visitor who was expected but who had not yet been introduced to identify himself.

He paused and half-turned his head.

‘Mr Boularis,’ she went on quickly, ‘I’m sure that you’re tired, but I would be grateful if you would repeat the explanation you gave us about this pressure-plate device.’

Yves turned round now to look at her suspiciously.

‘I’ know,’ she added, ‘that the explanation you gave ought to have been sufficient, but for someone who doesn’t know much about explosives it was a little puzzling.’

Yves answered her with his eyes on Krom. ‘I’m surprised that with so much bleating going on you heard anything. What don’t you understand?’

‘Well, for instance, you described the thing as having been arranged so that the long bolt in the centre of the board acted as a sort of plunger going down into a small bottle holding the incendiary material. The end rested on a tube containing sulphuric acid which it broke when you trod on the board. Is that right?’

‘That’s how I reconstruct it from what was left.’

‘Thank you. What I don’t understand, though, is how hard it would be to make and set up such a thing.’

‘Quite easy, if you have the stuff.’

‘You mean if you know in advance that you’re going to make it and roughly when you’re going to use it?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long would it take to make and how long to install?’

Yves walked back slowly, deciding how to answer her.

For a few delicious moments I was able to forget about Krom. One of our guests had suddenly started talking sense and the whole atmosphere had changed. Melanie, I saw, had felt the same. I wondered how long the improvement would last and concentrated on looking as if I hadn’t noticed it.

‘To fill a glass tube with sulphuric acid and seal it would be tricky,’ Yves said. ‘The best way would be to use a well-greased rubber cork with a hole in it for the bolt to slide through and break the bottom of the tube. You’d also have to see that the bolt was clear of the acid, or it would simply be eaten away. The whole thing would have to be carefully handled.’

‘It wouldn’t be something you might decide to do on the spur of the moment?’

‘No. With those materials you would not wish to be hurried. An accident could be most painful.’

‘So this device was made yesterday or before?’

‘Certainly.’

Connell could no longer let Henson score all the points. ‘How about siting the ambush? How about digging the hole for the device and doing the installation?’ he asked. ‘Would you do that at night?’

‘Not unless you could use bright lights to see by.’

‘So this harassment, or whatever you want to call it, must have been planned well in advance?’

Krom snorted. ‘Of course it was planned well in advance. Mr Firman plans all his special effects well in advance. Think how carefully he planned to wave his magic wand and turn the unfortunate Carlo Lech into Beelzebub. Planning to conjure up, out of thin air, this band of goblins and evil spirits to frighten the children into being good, and obedient, and uncritical, would be easy by comparison.’

They all looked at me except Henson who was still watching Yves.

‘What would you say to that, Mr Boularis?’ she asked. ‘Why should Professor Krom or Dr Connell or I, or anyone else who has read what Mr Firman is prepared to admit about himself, accept anything he now says at its face value? You see the difficulty?’

‘What difficulty?’ Yves asked. ‘I am a skilled person who recognizes and respects managerial intelligence. What old piss-and-wind there is accusing him of is planning to play pointless, 2nd therefore unintelligent, practical jokes on me!’

‘And why shouldn’t he?’ demanded Krom. ‘He is perfectly capable of hiring other skilled men to do just that.’

‘Of course he is,’ said Connell; ‘but why should he? I mean where’s the mileage in it?’

‘In your very own words, Dr Connell,’ retorted Krom. ‘That’s where the mileage is. You and Dr Henson are now arguing Firman’s own case for him.’

‘Professor, that’s not quite true. You say he’s trying to fool us. Okay. That’s likely enough. All we’re asking is, “why should he try fooling us in this way?” Where does it get him? To a point where he can say that he’s sorry, folks, but he’s being harassed by enemies so we’ll just have to take rain-checks? He can’t be as dumb as that. He’s still over a barrel. You just take what papers he has now and re-convene at a later date. So there has to be another explanation. Either he’s stalling for some reason that we haven’t yet figured out, or there’s an explanation that he hasn’t yet figured out.’

They looked at me again.

‘Quite right,’ I said. ‘I haven’t yet figured it out. If Professor Krom can contain his disbelief for a moment or two, or at least keep it inaudible, I’d like to try again.’ I glanced at Yves. ‘Either sit down or go to bed. Don’t just stand there please.’

He sat down again.

Krom sighed heavily. ‘Now comes the rabbit out of the hat.’

I ignored him. ‘Nothing can be figured out,’ I said, ‘until we know who is playing these tricks. The why can be answered later. Yves, Melanie and I have the advantage of knowing for certain that I’m not the trickster. Perhaps you too will accept that as true for a moment. The only other things we can be certain of so far are, first, that all the elaborate security precautions we took have been penetrated and, second, that whoever did the penetrating wants us to know it beyond all doubt. As I say, we’ll have to leave the “whys” for later. Let’s start with the “who?”. Yves doesn’t think that we’re dealing with a French agency because of the methods being used. I agree with him. It could be, though, a foreign agency. German or British say, acting with consent on French territory.’

Dr Henson smiled slightly. ‘Unless Dr Connell has some CIA connection that we don’t know about, that leaves the Professor and me as those possibly responsible.’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Nonsense!’ said Krom and wagged a finger at me. ‘Either you have a bad memory, my friend, or you are hoping that I have. Yesterday, you told us that if any of us had been under surveillance we would have come no nearer to you than Turin. You had us carefully watched all the way. How could we possibly have led what you call a “foreign agency” to you, even if we had been prepared to act against our own interests as scholars as well as to breach our security pledges? If we did so unwittingly, then it can only have been because your vaunted supervision of our journey here failed. That is if it ever existed.’ He grinned at Connell. ‘You commented that it must have been expensive. If it had existed, I dare say it would have been — very expensive, too expensive. Composing a Firman fairy tale about it would be an easier operation and an infinitely cheaper one.’

The look Connell gave me was hostile. ‘How about that, Firman?’

I motioned to Yves. ‘Tell them.’

‘About the cost?’

‘About what was done.’

‘Ah.’ He cast his mind back. ‘Well, there were several good, clean checkpoints. The first stage, you will remember, was air from Amsterdam to Milan and then, by rented car, to the Palace Hotel in Turin. Only Professor Krom knew even that much in advance. At the Turin hotel, you were still clear. The next appointment was waiting, addressed to the Professor. It was for lunch the following day at the Tre Citroni restaurant in Cuneo. There, the sketch-map was handed to you in a sealed envelope with the bill.’

‘Aren’t you forgetting?’ asked Connell; ‘we all knew the night before that we were going on to that restaurant in Cuneo for lunch the following day. Any one of us could have blown that.’

Yves nodded. ‘You could have, yes. That was why you were given the opportunity. If any one of you had taken it there would have been no sketch-map at Cuneo. But none of you did take it. None of you made a telephone call either that night or in the morning except to order from room service. None of you left letters or notes behind you at the hotel to be picked up later. Overnight your car was examined carefully for beepers. The road to Cuneo is mostly through flat, open country of the kind which makes tailing difficult to conceal from alert observers. You were not followed then, nor when you took the road over the mountains beyond Cuneo. At the French frontier you were also clear. Nevertheless, as you began the final descent to Nice an extra precaution was taken. There was an accident on the road just behind you. Only a minor affair, but it blocked the road for nearly ten minutes. By then, you were either well lost in the late-afternoon Nice traffic jams or already out of Nice and heading along the lower road in this direction.’

They thought it over for a moment or two. Connell was the one who broke the silence.

‘Murphy’s Law?’ he asked.

I shrugged.

‘What did you say?’ Krom was suddenly on the edge of his chair. ‘What law is this?’

Connell smiled kindly. ‘Sorry, Professor, I was using an American folk-expression, a sort of joke proposition called Murphy’s Law. It holds that, in all human affairs involving advance planning, anything that can unexpectedly go wrong will invariably do so.’

‘What has that to do with Firman’s precautions?’

‘Well, it means that even if this security leak he’s trying to trace was caused by one of our group, it could only have been caused by some outlandish mishap, like a tail, who hadn’t for some reason been spotted earlier, accidentally picking us up again outside Nice. Personally, I think it more likely to have been the French police. A little thing like an accident blocking the road wouldn’t have stopped them radioing ahead.’

Henson objected instantly. ‘It simply doesn’t work, you know. Suppose we’d been heading for a high-rise apartment in Monaco. Where were they going to put the booby-trap they’d been working on? If there really is anyone hostile out there, they couldn’t have found this place by following us. They must have known in advance.’

‘And since,’ said Krom, ‘we have no evidence that there is anything out there more hostile than the insects who bit Mr Boularis we may conclude that Mr Firman, after a lifetime of successful chicanery, has at last lost his grip. In his anxiety to get rid of me, he has accused us, his guests, of doing something to place him and his employees at risk, something that, on his own showing mark you, none of us could possibly have done. I find it very sad.’

Such leaden fatuities ought not to have angered me, but they did. My inner anxiety must have been telling on me. Worse, the invitation to reply in kind proved quite hard to refuse. I started to tell him to save his tears, but stopped myself only just before the words were out.

‘No one so far is losing his grip,’ I said instead, ‘and no one has been accused. As your host, I am simply telling you that the arrangements for our safety and security here seem, in spite of all the care taken, to have broken down.

It was my duty to warn you, so I have done so. There will be no more meals served at the round table by the balustrade over there. So far, these people have only annoyed us. However, they may have plans for more aggressive acts. Whether they have or not, I don’t intend to present them with sitting targets.’

Krom gave the balustrade what was supposed to be a terrified look. ‘I am amazed,’ he said, ‘that you don’t call in the police.’

‘If it becomes necessary to do so, Professor, I shall leave you to handle the reporters. As a sensational news story, the siege of the Villa Lipp should be just the thing for newspapers like France Dimanche. I dare say your colleague Professor Langridge would find it enjoyable, too. Meanwhile, if you want to take a walk and inspect the booby-trap site, by all means do so. With luck, the enemy can try playing a practical joke on you. That would make the walk more interesting and, when you get back, you’ll be able to tell me how nearly you were killed. Meanwhile, I shall continue with my enquiries. You will be kept informed, of course, of my progress.’

The idea of sensational publicity had shaken Krom sufficiently to confine him to a sneer. None of them made any move to leave, however, and for several moments we all just sat there staring at one another.

Then Connell spoke. ‘Going to be a bit difficult for you now, isn’t it, Mr Firman?’

‘Difficult? I don’t think I understand.’

‘I mean that looking for leaks now is going to be difficult. Now that we’ve been eliminated, you’ve sort of run out of suspects, I’d say.’

I smiled at him. ‘Dr Connell, I said I was going to continue with my enquiries. I have no further need of suspects.’ I paused to let him interrupt if he wanted to. He didn’t. ‘With you three disposed of, the mystery, or part of it, anyway, is solved. I know now that the leak could have come from only one person.’

Melanie broke the silence that followed by emitting a little gurgling laugh.

They turned to look at her.

‘Mr Firman means me,’ she said.