Siege at the Villa Lipp (31 page)

‘Carlo Lech and I always told one another the truth. To do so was part of our mutual respect. With Mat Williamson, mutual respect is based on insights of a different order. When a question is asked there, you consider, first, not what the exactly truthful answer would be, but what the questioner wishes to hear from you. No, I’m not surprised by his betraying me, nor by his telling me, in that oblique way, that he’s doing so. When you deal with Mat, there’s always a chance that he may
try
to deceive or betray you. What you
should
do is make sure that he can’t. I thought I
had
made sure. Upset? More annoyed, I think. Mat’s a complex creature, difficult to explain.’

He and I had been in Singapore when I had heard of Carlo’s death.

My reports on the Pacific tax-havens, existing and potential, had been written. I was waiting for Carlo’s acknowledgment of the last one, and with it, the words pronouncing my absolution and telling me that my exile was at an end.

He died of heart failure following a virus infection, according to the Vaduz lawyer who acted for our various corporate set-ups there. The man’s vagueness was understandable. There was legislation against Liechtenstein Anstalts pending in Italy as well as moves afoot to clamp down on citizens holding large amounts of their capital abroad. It would have been indiscreet of him even to have visited Carlo’s Milan office, and highly dangerous to have communicated with the family. There would have been no business reason for him to do so anyway. Carlo’s stashed-away fortune was, and still is, in trusts administered jointly by the Vaduz man, with his partners as successors, and me. Carlo’s invalid wife, his son and his daughter all benefited, in accordance with Italian inheritance laws, under the formal will he had made there. The trusts benefit only the daughter, her musician husband and, above all, Carlo’s grandson Mario. When he comes of age, that boy will be very rich.

However, according to the first letter from Vaduz, Carlo had, in addition, bequeathed me a piece of valuable real-estate.

This news had surprised me. My own holdings in our joint enterprises were already worth several million and I had discussed the whole subject with Carlo long before. We both had plenty of money, earned by our joint efforts but apportioned in accordance with an agreement made when Carlo had been convalescing after his gall-bladder trouble. Aside from the agreement, neither of us owned the other anything except good faith and a single duty. When one of us died, the other would see, as best he could, that the dead man’s family and other private obligations were taken care of in a proper fashion. For the sake of official appearances, the survivor would receive the fees and expenses normally payable to a trustee.

A second letter from Vaduz told me that the piece of valuable real-estate aforementioned was Carlo’s island.

Surprise had then become confusion. In spite of my occasional white lies on the subject, Carlo had always known that the island bored me. That was why he had sent me to stew there after the Zurich fiasco. Bequeathing the place to me could have been the kind of stupid gesture that wealthy dotards have sometimes made in order to get the last word in some old and silly argument; but Carlo had not been stupid, far from it, nor had he been the kind of man who would give away a tropical island he had loved to a tropic-hater who would at once proceed to sell it.

The third letter explained all. Carlo’s island was the property of a Netherland Antilles real-estate company, the shares in which would go to Mario when he was twenty-one. Meanwhile, I was asked to hold them in trust for him. To compensate me for the time and trouble of maintaining the place, as it had been maintained during Carlo’s lifetime - and as I had known it, complete with staff - I would, until Mario was old enough to take possession, have free and unfettered use of the island and its installations at all times, for my own personal enjoyment. Our man in Vaduz suggested thoughtfully that it might be a good idea if, on my way back to Europe, I called in at the island and took stock of the current situation there.

Carlo, an innovator to the last, had found a way of getting the last word in an old argument, and of making a ribald gesture from the grave, at the expense of no one but a cornered trustee. Vaduz would have thought it foolish of me as well as petty if I had refused the task.
Everyone
loved islands in the Caribbean, surely. They must do. Otherwise, why did all those tourists go there?

The only person near to me then who would have enjoyed the joke was Mat. Jokes about people stepping on metaphorical banana skins always made him laugh. Luckily, I never told him that one.

It was the order in which things were happening then, not caution, that stopped me. Mat had already known of Carlo and of my connection with him - I was never able to discover how he had known - before we had met in the New Hebrides. The only consolation for me had been that he had told me about the Lech-Oberholzer operation while still believing me to be a louche character named Perrivale (Perry) Smythson whose brains he was trying to pick about certain loopholes said to exist in the Anglo-French Condominium Law. I had begun by taking him for a local boy who had made good. When the matter of our identities had been straightened out, and sufficient time had been given to mutual inspection, exploratory talks about the possibility of joint ventures had taken us a little farther. I would report our talks to Carlo and get his reactions. A further meeting place convenient for both of us was chosen - Singapore. Of course, I never heard from Carlo on the subject; the virus must already have been at work; but his unexpected going stirred everything up and made it all move faster. I mourned Carlo and needed distractions. When next I met Mat our Symposia project had become a discussable deal. There had been neither time nor inclination then for banana-skin jokes.

In those early days of our relationship Mat treated me with the deference due to an elder statesman. Some of this, of course, was part of the process of buttering me up and at the same time making me feel old, but not all. I had knowledge that he might find useful. He would listen with more than token attention to what I had to say, even if it involved criticisms of his judgement. For instance, I hadn’t approved of the pattern of business deals he’d been weaving around the Pacific, and I told him so.

He went into a long spiel about the vacuums created by the abdication of old imperialisms. There was an urgent need of entrepreneurial skills to stimulate constructive business activity at provincial levels, to bring out the money hidden in mattresses so that it could work for all and to engage the non-Chinese in major enterprises.

‘They’re either just coming down from the trees,’ he concluded, ‘or emerging from extremely ancient feudalisms.
Someone’s
got to get things moving for them.’

‘That’s what the invest-in-the-future type con-men usually .say when they’re finally caught.’

His ability to look mystified while deciding his next move used to impress me very much in those days. ‘What have con-men to do with me, Paul?’

‘Con-men like that are
also
very difficult to prosecute.’

‘Also?’

‘Those entrepreneurial skills of yours, Mat, are being used in a way that is well understood by any policeman. By the British, the offence of exploiting credit facilities on the here-today-gone-tomorrow principle is called “long-term fraud”. In Germany it’s “Stossbetrug”, in France “carambouillage”, and in America most bunco-squads call it “scam”, I believe. Authorities everywhere have difficulty in getting convictions mainly because they’re always short of the kind of auditors who know
what
to look for,
where
to look for it,
and
above all, can work fast enough to grab the paper-work before it disappears. You, Mat, have something extra going for you because, as well as moving from corporate set-up to corporate set-up in an ingenious way, you’re also moving backwards and forwards between national jurisdictions. You’re almost impossible to catch, except in one area.’

The broad smile. ‘I know nothing of sharp practices, Paul. Please enlighten me.’

‘Two policemen of different nationalities could one day get together, maybe through reading an Interpol bulletin, and regret that there is nothing they can do jointly to bust you.
But
one or other of them, or both, depending on the countries concerned, might decide to clobber you with a breach of some exchange control regulation. It would still be slow going for them, and they might never get a conviction on the fraud charge, but there’s one thing a lot of these law maniacs can always get done quickly. They can have bank accounts frozen pending enquiries. For the victim, I’m told, it can be a nasty, lingering disease that prevents his enjoying life to the full.’

He tapped my arm gently. ‘You’re absolutely right, Paul. That’s been my own view for a long time and I’m delighted to hear that you share it.’ He made it sound as if he’d been testing me; and, for all I knew, he
had
been. ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘I took my name out of it months ago, and not just because I didn’t like what some of those rascals I’d trusted were getting up to. It was the local Chinese who decided me in the end. That’s one of the clubs that won’t be licked and can’t be joined. They’re natural business leaders, the overseas Chinese. Some people compare them with the Jews - diaspora, ghetto life, preservation of cultural identity despite assimilation, that sort of stuff. I say that’s superficial. I say that they’re the one multinational corporation that’ll never be busted under any anti-trust law anywhere. Why? Complete local autonomy for every single unit of accounting is there for all to see, that’s why. So where’s the corporation? It’s programmed into their genes. Tell you something else about the Chinese . . . ‘

He paused. He’d been talking more or less freely to a listener he’d considered as safe. Now, though, there was something that he considered important to be said; so he was reviewing it again before letting me hear it.

‘Paul, the Chinese can’t be frightened in the same way as the rest.’

By the ‘rest’, I later found, he meant the rest of mankind.

The nature of his peculiar ideas, about intimidation and the techniques of frightening people into absolute obedience emerged from what he then told me about something that had happened to him in Java. He had, of course, been making his first million at the time, so his recollection of the incident was pleasantly light-hearted.

‘Just getting about the place was terribly difficult,’ he said. ‘There were bandits calling themselves religious patriots raiding the villages, and bits of the civil war still going on everywhere outside the large towns. It wasn’t safe to travel by road, even from Djakarta to Bandung, without a military escort, and not all that safe with one. So, all the sizeable towns were jammed with people. A top priority got you a bed, but not much else. A room to yourself? Rare, very rare. The Russians were among the greatest friends of the revolution, but the Soviet Embassy had to function for months from a bungalow in the western areas, though in East Java, and especially in places like Surabaja, Jogjakarta and Semarang, it stayed difficult. That was because the hard-cores on both sides were still using the interior as a battle-field. God, how I hate hard-cores! Give me the pragmatists every time.’

‘I hadn’t realized, Mat, that you’d ever found it necessary to give that choice any thought.’

‘You’ve never worked for a revolutionary government, that’s for sure. Well, I had a top priority then,
and
let me tell you, whenever I had to take trips East I used that priority as if I were Genghis Khan. I’d found that the best way of getting through your business is comfort in those parts was to commandeer a foreign consulate. There were several available. No foreign consuls in them just then, of course, on account of the troubles, but the compounds and houses were still there, and in most cases the old native servants had stayed on. In theory they were there protecting property belonging to friendly foreign governments entitled to diplomatic status and immunities.’

‘How did you get around that?’

He gave me a boyish smile. ‘Servants protecting foreign property on behalf of the central government were responsible to the central government. When one of that government’s officials decided to inspect the property to see if the protectors were doing their duty, they’d better co-operate. Otherwise, they’d find themselves out on their ears or, more likely, in jail.’

‘So they co-operated.’

‘Yes. But they also resented and hated and wondered how to handle the interloper, this man who was suddenly giving them orders, making them work instead of resting up, sitting at the consul’s dinner table, sleeping in their consul’s bedroom. What would you have done in their place, Paul?’

‘Pretended you were the consul and tried to kill you with kindness, I expect.’

‘They could do that and they often did. But sometimes the effort seemed to cost them too much and then they’d try to redress the balance in their favour. That happened once when I was staying in a French consulate. I’d been to dinner with the official in charge of the port installations because I’d had business to do with him. He lived in a compound two minutes away, so, after an early dinner and a brief chat, I walked back to the consul’s house. You know how those places are arranged? Square lot of half a hectare maybe, high wall all around with barbed-wire on top as optional extra, house in the centre, separate servants’ quarters in back of compound, gap in the wall for gate, driveway from gate to house?’

‘I know.’

‘Well, when I got to the gate I found it unlocked. In that place and at that time, that alone would have given me pause. I also heard and saw movements inside. There was a moon, so I waited by the gate till my eyes had adjusted to the light and I could see what was going on. Have you met many French consuls, Paul?’

‘Not many, no.’

‘Those I’ve met haven’t, on the whole, been great hobbyists. There was one who was a bit of an ornithologist and made a hobby of his bird-photography, but I haven’t come across any who cultivated their gardens much, except career-wise and metaphorically. I think this particular consul may have had an English wife.’