Siege at the Villa Lipp (3 page)

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

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

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

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

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

The house-phone buzzed.

‘Paul?’ It was Yves.

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

‘What did you decide?’

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

‘I think so. What conditions?’

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

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

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

‘Then why was it heavy?’

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

‘Oh, for God’s sake! What kind?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Not a gun, I hope.’

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

‘Which you didn’t believe.’

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

‘What did you say?’

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

‘And?’

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

‘But you weren’t impressed.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Where are they now?’

‘Melanie’s giving them soothing drinks.’

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

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

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

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

That was the cause of the whole trouble.

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

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

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

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

I am not the defendant.

I am the plaintiff.

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

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

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

The place was Brussels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The receptionist telephoned me in my room.

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

‘Certainly you are. What is it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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