Siege at the Villa Lipp (30 page)

“That’s what I still call it.’

‘Then you must still be, Professor, as big an intellectual and academic phony as you were when you dreamed up the phrase.’

I didn’t wait for a reaction, but turned and went through into the drawing-room. It was well-bugged in there - and when an adversary is under pressure it’s always better to have a tape, even when there seems to be no way of its ever being used. Besides, it was necessary :to have him off balance. That’s why I’d walked away after insulting him. A double goosing like that is really painful.

He certainly found it so. He came running. The others followed but he didn’t wait for them before counter-attacking. He was too angry to wait.

‘You won’t get rid of your corruption by trying to hang it on me,’ he snapped. ‘Ask any policeman! Defence by projection is common among criminals.’

‘It’s common among all sections of the populace, Professor, including criminologists. I accused you of being a phony. With or without your permission, I intend to explain to your witnesses why I did so.’

I
paused to dismiss his unspoken protest before going on. ‘Symposia is an organization concerned with tax avoidance by strictly legal means. By coupling its name with the word ‘conspiracy’, an imprecise but emotive term loaded with associations of illegality, you created an essentially meaningless but potentially lethal smear. You’ve wasted your talents, Professor. You should have been a politician.’

His martyred God-give-me-patience look brought in Henson for the defence. ‘If it was meaningless, why should it have upset you so much?’

I gave her my best smile. ‘How did your Professor Langridge put it? “More to do with journalism than with scholarship,” was it? Something like that, I think. What would he have said, I wonder, if he’d actually heard his colleague, Krom, threatening to leak the whole smear package to the financial journals and news magazines if I didn’t collaborate?’ “Collaborate” was the chosen euphemism. Moral blackmail and extortion were the realities.’ I faced Krom again. ‘Last night you allowed that you were an extortionist. Of course, as you have explained today, you were tired last night. But tired of
what? Only
of travelling, or of hypocrisy too?’

Connell rallied to the cause. ‘You still haven’t answered the question, Firman. If the charge was baseless, why are we here? Why didn’t you tell him to drop dead?’

‘I can’t believe, Doctor, that you are simple enough to suppose that a smear can always be defeated by ignoring it. Only the invulnerable few, or those past caring what happens to their reputations, can afford to adopt that attitude. I would also remind you that institutions handling, or advising on the handling of, other people’s money are among the most vulnerable to this kind of false charge, however baseless it may be.’

‘But in your case the charge wasn’t false or baseless,’ Henson again, with Krom nodding his blessing. ‘Your first paper admits as much, not just frankly, but brazenly. Oh yes, you’re careful to point out that Oberholzer belonged to your pre-Symposia days, but surely that’s mere nit-picking.’

I was finding it difficult to remain cool and had to make a conscious effort. ‘Let’s be clear about this. What I have admitted is that I once committed offences against the Swiss bank secrecy laws by obtaining confidential information from a bank employee. That offence is, as you well know, one that has been committed time and time again over the years by agents and officials acting for non-Swiss governments. Among them have been the governments of most of the developed nations and a good many from the Third World as well. Within the international communities of income-tax gatherers, fraud-squad investigators and exchange-control enforcers outside Switzerland, the offence is regarded about as seriously as a parking violation. You seem also to need reminding that I have never been arrested in Switzerland or anywhere else, nor even detained for questioning, much less convicted in a court of law.’

Connell went into a world-weary, cut-the-cackle routine. ‘Please, Mr Firman. We’ve seen the bleeding. Now, how about showing us the wound? All you’ve been given, you say, is a parking ticket. And yet, for the honour of dear old Symposia, you act as if you’d been busted for murder-one. Come
on!
The Symposia Conspiracy isn’t about parking violations. It’s about an extortion racket that relies for the fingering of likely victims on an intelligence set-up pretending to be a tax-haven consultancy service, and, for the raking in of its blood money, on a network of illegal debt-collection agencies making undercover use of international communications systems. That’s what Professor Krom was proposing to shed light on, and that’s what he still intends to shed light on. All he did to you was to offer the sort of deal that the law offers crooks all the time and all over the world. ‘Turn informer and we won’t press charges. Tough it out, or try to, and we’ll throw the book at you.’ You started by going along with the deal and now you’re trying to renege. No need to apologize. We understand how it is. But don’t bore us with crap about parking tickets. Okay?’

With almost no effort I was able to laugh. ‘When you wrote your book about organized crime, Dr Connell, chat was the sort of talk you put in the mouths of the stupider DA's and the more reactionary policemen. You disappoint me.’

‘A nice try, Mr Firman,’ said Henson; ‘but we already knew that you could read.’

In spite of her confident tone, she was by then having several second thoughts and Krom had spotted the fact.

‘He’s only digging his own grave, my dear. Don’t let us do the job for him.’ He tried to sound as if he were at ease, but he was showing scarcely any teeth and his eyes had the wary look I had first seen in Brussels when he had been afraid of me. Now, he was afraid of me again; not afraid this time though, of what I might be going to do, but of what he had sensed that I might be going to say.

He had had two months in which to forget the euphoria of his Brussels victory over me and to start wondering why that success had been so easy.

I found it meanly satisfying now to ignore him and give his witnesses the answers he so anxiously awaited. Besides, they were pleasanter to look at.

I said: ‘You asked me why, if this threatened smear were baseless, I didn’t tell Krom, the author of it, to publish and be damned. I’ve given you one answer. All smears that start no-smoke-without-fire talk can be expensive in one way or another. You pay off for the same reason that big corporations often settle nuisance actions against them out of court. It may be cheaper in the long run to pay rather than to argue rights and wrongs. I have given you a second answer. If pushed, we could have called the Professor’s bluff and then warned the publisher he went to that this was a source that couldn’t be protected by the anonymity custom because this source had already tried to sell us the story. That way, ordinarily, we would have been on fairly safe ground. We didn’t adopt that solution because to have done so would have been to take an unacceptable risk.’

‘Aha!’ said Krom.

I didn’t bother to tell him that his relief was premature, but went on addressing the witnesses. ‘In amongst all the hearsay, gossip, innuendo and straight falsehood that had been assembled to support the conspiracy nonsense, there were one or two sets of facts. Most were unimportant or irrelevant. One wasn’t. I refer to the Placid Island material.’

‘What’s so remarkable about that?’ demanded Connell. ‘Placid’s typical. It’s been stripped of most of its natural assets. The only future it has is as a tax-haven outpost with a few high-rise office buildings. Its one extra asset seems to be this Williamson you mentioned - a banker, and an economist too, with a good academic background, who also happens to be a native of the wretched place. Professor Krom noted that Symposia had made overtures to Placid and was trying to establish a monopoly position there. Was
that
what you didn’t like?’

‘That’s what Mat Williamson didn’t like. He didn’t like it because Symposia wasn’t just
trying
to establish a monopoly in advance, it already
had
it established. The Symposia Group is eighty per cent owned by Mat Williamson and always has been.’

‘But I didn’t
know
that!’ Krom yelped. It wasn’t that he was dim-witted, just that a bit of his mind was still refusing to listen to the disaster warning that had begun to paralyse the higher centres.

‘Of course you didn’t know,’ I said. ‘Practically nobody knew, or knows
now.
The Canadian bank for whom Mat acts as a consultant in such matters certainly doesn’t know. Neither do the officials with whom Placid Island independence is being negotiated. Others in ignorance include Chief Tebuke and the lawyers for the phosphate company which is being squeezed by Mat for compensation. Dr Connell asked why we are here. Well, I’ll tell you why I
thought
we were here, if that’s still of interest to anyone but the birds. We were here, Professor, so that .yon wouldn’t rock the boat, of which I’ll admit to owning twenty per cent, by revealing the Williamson-Symposia relationship.’

‘How could I have revealed it? As you have said, I didn’t know about it.’

No doubt he was still in shock, but it was hard to remain civil. ‘I can’t believe, Professor, that you are as unworldly as all that. You must suffer from the delusion that only scholars are capable of doing research. You think that the corporate entities which make up the Symposia Group are an open book to you because you’ve looked at all the available records. They show me as a stockholder and also as a nominee for other voting stockholders. That’s as far as you’ve gone because, thanks to the fact that you once saw me years ago in Zurich, you made an assumption about me that you weren’t prepared to modify or even reconsider. From Mat’s point of view, that was fine - while it lasted. But would it always last? The first thing any newspaperman worth his salt would do would be to question all your assumptions however pretty they looked. And, having questioned, he’d find ways of getting answers that satisfied
his
professional standards. They wouldn’t be your ways, because he’d have to work a lot faster than you people. He’d dig patiently, yes, but he’d use those techniques that governments call espionage or intelligence-gathering, depending on whose side is doing what, and newspaper proprietors call investigative reporting. It doesn’t matter what
we
call it. The point is that, if you’d been allowed to hand your Symposia rag-bag to the financial editor of a news magazine, the information connecting Mat Williamson with Symposia would have been found within days and the result wouldn’t have been called a conspiracy. It would have been called a ‘caper’, or worse. It would have been the Placid Island Rip-Off.
Now
do you understand?’

Silence. Krom looked like death.

‘Well,’ said Connell eventually, ‘none of that’s happened and no one’s yet rocked the boat. So what’s changed since you and the Professor made your deal? Our appraisal of the situation was faulty from the start, according to you. All right. So what?’

‘Unfortunately,
my
appraisal of the situation has
become
faulty. That’s what’s changed. In London, the risk represented by the Professor’s decision to use blackmail in his quest for information seems, after all, to have been judged uninsurable. That phone call was to tell us so, tell all of us.’

‘I see. The best way of making sure that no one rocks a boat is to have no people in it. Then your revised appraisal is, I take it, that those friends of yours outside this place now intend to kill us all. Correct? Or is this to be a selective massacre? Just you? Just us? Some of each? What’s the new ouija board starting to say?’

Melanie said brightly: ‘It’s nearly time for lunch.’

The cook’s husband was at the door asking if he should bring the ice for the drinks in there or whether we would be moving out to the swimming-pool area.

I said that we would have the drinks inside. By the time we moved out to lunch by the swimming pool, a lot more had been said and the guests were thoughtful. Connell hadn’t pressed me for an answer to his questions. He had probably decided that I had no answers.

For a few minutes they seemed to have stopped wondering how much truth there was in me, and to be asking themselves a question that their books had always said was irrelevant. Was there or wasn’t there honour among thieves?

Could criminal relationships be like those to be found in trade and industry? Were comparisons drawn from what was known of marriages or ménages appropriate? Or was the ‘standard’ criminal relationship one of convenience and collusion only, like a contract between politicians cancellable without warning by either party the moment it became in any way embarrassing?

No one was very hungry. Henson soon gave up on the soup. I had already done so. It is an overrated fish.

‘From what you now tell us, Mr Firman,’ she said, ‘one would almost believe that, once upon a time, you and Mr Williamson were really quite good friends.’

‘We have had a long and profitable business association. Obviously, our relationship had a friendly element to it.’

‘Friendly enough for you to compromise your own cover to protect his against the Professor’s enquiries. That was
very
friendly, surely?’

‘Back in May, it seemed to be in both our interests that I should cover for him. Remember, I have twenty per cent. Maybe that clouded my judgement.’

‘Yet now, you don’t seem to be very much surprised or upset by the fact that he’s betraying you,
and
telling you so, moreover. He
is
betraying you, I suppose. That tape we heard wasn’t by any chance a fake?’

Two stiff gins-and-tonic had almost restored Krom’s self esteem. ‘You’re learning, my dear. I’ve been wondering the same thing.’ He cocked an eye at me. ‘Is it a fake?’

‘I wish it were.’

Connell’s hostility towards me had returned to normal. ‘You don’t think much of
our
right to the truth,’ he said. ‘How do you feel about associates like Mr Williamson? I
mean, after that call we heard, what’s the word now about the usefulness of truth?’