Siege at the Villa Lipp (10 page)

He got no farther, Krom was half out of his seat and leaning across the table with teeth bared.

‘No, Dr Connell, no!’ He swallowed a couple of times trying to get rid of some of his anger before it choked him. ‘No, I shall not need that sort of assistance from you in questioning Mr Firman about his origins and background.’

He had begun in his vehemence to spray saliva, and Dr Henson hastily moved her wine glass out of the line of fire.

Connell was looking utterly astounded. It was a facial expression of which he made much use I was to find. ‘Of course, Professor, of course, of
course.
I was simply making an idle enquiry.’

Krom was neither deceived nor appeased. ‘It was agreed between us, let me remind you,’ he grated on, ‘that all enquiries of whatever kind will be made by me. Here, everything will be conducted throughout in the way that I decide and only in the way that I decide. That was positively agreed.’

‘Sure, Professor, sure it was agreed.’

‘But not,’ I remarked distinctly, ‘by me.’

They all stared at me except Yves, who poured himself some more wine. I continued: ‘I will be the one who decides which questions are answered and which are not. I will also decide the areas of business activity concerning which information may be given. No, Professor, it’s no good you huffing and puffing. Since our meeting in Brussels I
have had plenty of time for reflection and decision. After Dr Henson’s demonstration of her disregard for her agreement about confidentiality, to say nothing of Dr Connell’s less covert breach of his, my conviction that none of you is to be trusted has been further strengthened.’

Krom made a gargling sound of disgust and sat back in his chair. ‘No, Mr Firman, no. No more wriggling, please. Will you not even now accept the fact that you are hooked?’

‘When you accept the fact that the fish on the end of the line is not after all the one you thought you had, yes.’ I did not wait for him to answer but turned to Henson. ‘Why did they give you ninhydrin to bring here, Doctor? Do you know?’

‘Oh, not that again!’ from Connell.

Krom did some more gargling.

She took no notice of either of them. ‘Apparently,’ she said ‘quite a lot of people still don’t know that one can raise fingerprints from matt-surfaced papers if one knows how. They didn’t think it would be prudent for me to try stealing something else you’d handled and start dusting it in the old fashioned way. Besides, the results wouldn’t have been as good.’

‘Supposing I hadn’t handled the papers while you were here?’

‘They said you would. As long as your hands were warm, a book, a newspaper or even a paper napkin would work. As a last resort I was to ask you to read the typescript of a book review I have just written and get your opinion on it as well as your prints.’

‘I’ll gladly read it, Doctor.’

‘Unbelievable!’ blared Krom.

‘Rubbish!’ I said irritably. ‘What about you and your friends in West German intelligence, Professor? When they ask you confidentially for the precise details of your adventures in the quest of Mr X, are you going to remain, after all the kindness they have done you with their files, resolutely silent? Of course you aren’t. None of you is going to keep his mouth shut. He won’t be able to. So, what you are going to be given is not all the truth, if there is such an entity, but bits of it. And you, Professor, can take your choice. Leak what you know and you get nothing more. Play it my way and you get something.’

He thought about it, then glowered at me suspiciously. ‘How much?’

‘Some days in the life of Herr Oberholzer?’

‘I have one already.’

‘No, you haven’t. You can’t begin to know what happened that day. You don’t even know what crimes you might accuse him of.’

‘Extorting money by threats. Blackmail. There are more, but those will do to begin with.’

I laughed sufficiently to choke a little over my wine. ‘Extortion, Professor,’ I said when I had recovered, ‘is, as you must surely know, the standard cry raised against those who collect, or try to collect, payment from delinquent debtors. Blackmail is often used to describe letters from creditors beginning with the word “unless”. Oberholzer was no debt collector in any case. If that’s all you have . . . ‘

‘I am not speaking about debts incurred for goods or services legally supplied. I am speaking of the exactions of criminals.’

‘But the services which we supplied were always perfectly legal. Is it a crime to give good advice?’

‘Some advice, yes. To advise a man who has himself committed a criminal act how he may, by giving you money, avoid the consequences is certainly criminal.’

‘And, Professor, if you ask for information instead of money?’

Henson giggled and Connell smirked, but it took Krom a moment or two to grasp the implication. It did not please him. He straightened his back.

‘Very well, if such hair-splitting amuses you, I have, in the interests of social science, become an extortionist. Maybe you will find it less amusing, Mr Firman, if I now ask you to start paying up?’

‘Of course,’ I looked at Melanie. ‘Would you mind getting the copies of file number one for me, my dear?’

Krom stared at me suspiciously as she went. I sipped my wine and took no notice of him.

The moment had arrived, as I had known it would eventually, and I was prepared to serve Krom what I believed would look, smell and taste like the meat for which he had asked.

The work they are doing in the food laboratories nowadays to make protein artificially is really amazing. I believe that they have even been able to produce it from really unlikely substances such as oil. The only trouble with the artificial stuff, though, is that it doesn’t really taste of anything much. You have to add a meat essence to give the concoction flavour.

If you are feeding social scientists, especially criminologists, you have also to add to the artificially produced material a little truth.

When I saw Melanie returning along the terrace I turned to Krom. ‘In expectation of our meeting,’ I said, ‘I have prepared papers concerning Oberholzer, his employer and later senior partner, their business associates and their business activities over a period of three years. They are papers for discussion of and, of course, I am prepared to be questioned by you on them. My answers may or may not satisfy you. We shall have to see.’

At that moment, the butler announced that, at the other table on the terrace, dinner was served.

Melanie had timed it perfectly.

Their eyes were on the files she held, their stomachs were thinking about dinner.

One can divide one’s adversary without necessarily conquering him, of course, but any division is better than none. I had won at least something; not a battle, still less a campaign, but perhaps a minor skirmish on an outer flank.

The first course was a duck-liver paste. For the occasion I had called it Pâté Oberholzer.

I don’t care for such things myself.

The others ate all of it.

Krom said that he intended to write my life story and now has the audacity to claim that he has done so.

What rubbish the man talks! He does not even know where I was born. And why does he not know? Because
he
did not ask. Because,
he,
with this fatuous obsession of his, this determined inability to distinguish between a criminal and a businessman, prefers to assume that I must wish to keep such facts about myself secret.

Utter nonsense!

If he had not intervened so energetically when Connell had asked me where I came from, I would almost certainly have answered. There was no reason why I
should not have done so.

I was born in Argentina, and my family was, still is, one of the many there of British origin bearing commonplace British names. In our case, as with others like us, intermarriage with and absorption by the Spanish-descended majority has, chiefly for religious reasons, been a slow process. When I was born, even though we had been in the country for well over a century and thought of ourselves as more Argentine than British, our name was still free of Spanish collaterals and my birth was duly registered at a British consulate as well as with the local municipality. All very schizoid. With us, British nannies still supervised the upbringing of children, and we were still sent to England at the age of eight to endure the torments of its boarding schools. My father thought it proper in 1914 to join the Royal Navy. In 1939 I joined the British Army no less matter-of-factly. If I withhold the family name I do so for good reason. I have dual nationality, and the possibility that the protective cover which this could give me might, after all these years, become an asset is one that I cannot now ignore.

Allegations of the, kind Krom has made, consisting of one part fact stirred into nine parts fantasy, are always the hardest to refute; and, in this instance, the task has been made still harder because the fragments of truth embedded in his slab like case-study were supplied by me in what he persists in calling my ‘confidential papers’. He also makes much of their having been supplied in front of witnesses. What effect that could have on the value of the papers as evidence is beyond me. If I had handed him a forged ten-dollar bill, would the presence of Connell and Henson as witnesses have rendered it genuine?

The first paper - how much grander the word ‘paper’ sounds than the more appropriate ‘hand-out’ - dealt with some of the circumstances leading up to Krom’s seeing Oberholzer in Zurich and some of the consequences of the whole incident.

And that was
all
it was, an incident. Krom’s presentation of it as if he were Zola discovering for an amazed public the iniquities of the Dreyfus case is, no doubt, for anyone who knows the truth, pretty funny. Far from funny is his clear and instantly recognizable picture of me dressed up to look like the super-villain of his imaginings.

Melanie, who helped me concoct the texts of the ‘papers’ and who was responsible for some of the juiciest red herrings in them, thinks that we overestimated him. She says that we relied too much on the scholarly scepticism allied to an ability to evaluate misinformation that ought to have been there, but which were not. In other words, we were too clever.

I
say that we underestimated his capacity for self-deception. We gave him a kaleidoscope to play with and he used it as if it were a reading glass.

If there must be a picture, let it be a warts-and-all photograph, not a caricature; and if the world, or that small portion of it inhabited by criminologists and policemen, really wants to know about poor old Oberholzer, let it be one of his own many voices that is heard. My account will be full, reasonably accurate and free from Krom’s distortions. It will not, of course, be free from
my
distortions. I happen to be one of those who believe that the ability to tell the whole truth about anything at all is so rare that anyone who claims it, especially if he does so with hand on heart, should be regarded with the deepest suspicion.

I
can only attempt to be truthful.

I met Carlo Lech for the first time when I almost had to arrest him near Bari. That was in 1943 after our landings on the heel of Italy, when the Eighth Army had moved north to Foggia. I was in the British Field Security Police at the time, and I almost had to arrest him because a corporal in the detachment of which I was in command was an officious bloody idiot.

But what, it may be asked, was an English-Spanish bilingual doing in Field Security in Italy? Was this the British Army once more up to its ancient game of putting square pegs into round holes? No, it was not. During the year after I left school, I learned to speak very good Italian.

Where his children were concerned, my father was generous and, though far from being imaginative, always scrupulously fair. I was the youngest of his three sons, and when, in the summer of 1938, he was notified by my housemaster that my year in the sixth form had ended less disastrously than had been feared, I was offered the same choice of rewards as my brothers before me. I could go to a university before going into the family business; I could spend a year and two thousand dollars travelling in Europe before going into the family business; or I could have the sports car of my choice and go into the family business right away.

My brothers had both taken sports cars. I chose the year in Europe.

In three months I had spent the two thousand dollars - having had a very good time doing so, though - and was flat broke in Cannes. A cable would have brought me a steamer ticket home, a sermon on the value of money, and, of course, immediate entry into the family business. I didn’t send the cable because I didn’t want to go home and didn’t want to go into a boring family business which already had more junior executives than it needed anyway. As any good con-man will tell you, it takes most people a long time to spot the fact that a spender has turned into a sponger, and in places like Cannes it can take even longer for a credit-rating to slip. I gave myself a month to get out of the hole I was in before I ran screaming to Daddy or started doing silly things that could get me into trouble with the police. I made it in three weeks. I got a job as steward on a yacht.

The owner was an Italian banker and some of the reasons for my being hired were simple.

The Munich crisis had led in France to a partial mobilization, and the French steward had been one of those called up. It was not known when he would be released or, since he had insisted that local union rules entitled him to a full month’s wages on leaving, whether, when released, he would trouble to return. At that end of the season it would be hopeless to look for an experienced replacement. The rest of the crew, including the cook, were Italians, who did not care who poured the drinks and served the meals and made the beds. I had Argentine papers and, as the yacht was registered in Genoa, there would be no nonsense about labour permits and unions that the owner could not deal with later should he decide to keep me on. Meanwhile the job was strictly temporary.

Among the less simple reasons for my getting the job was the fact that the owner’s wife had picked me up one morning at the Carlton beach. She had done so under the impression that I was a virgin youth seeking reassurance and instruction from the older-yet-still-amazingly-attractive woman she believed herself to be. Both my clothes and the hotel at which I was staying were of the expensive kind, and when I confessed to her that I could no longer afford to tip even the boy who put up the beach umbrellas much less pay my fare home, she had at once blamed the gambling tables for my predicament and easily understood, without my having to tell her of it, my fear of parental retribution. I never tried to disabuse her of any of those notions. She was friendly in bed, only sometimes demanding, and she always smelt nice.