Siege at the Villa Lipp (18 page)

Carlo kept up his office with its appropriate staff in Milan mainly as a front. Otherwise the only persons we employed were our six couriers, four men and two women, who did exactly as they were told and never asked a question except when the answer was needed to clarify an instruction. All, other operations in the ten cities we used as bases were handled through the neutral channels of ‘business accommodation’ services which provided mail-forwarding and phone-answering together with addresses to put on our various letter-heads. Our consultancy work was always done in hotel rooms. For the profits we made, our overheads were negligible.

The business I was doing in Lisbon had reached a delicate stage and it was impossible to respond to the warning message as promptly as I
might have done. I don’t think it would have made much difference though. When I received the message, the Kramer relationship was already unsalvageable. All that would have been different, possibly, would have been the nature of the trap set for me.

Anyway, it was Thursday before I could leave Lisbon. I reached Frankfurt later that day and rented a car. I
was in Zurich at nine-thirty on Friday morning.

Why did I drive when I could more quickly have got there by air? Mainly because, if you are in western Europe and want to have a confidential business discussion on the other side of a frontier, it is more secure to travel by car. The days when an elaborate carnet recorded every frontier transit which the car and its passengers made are gone. All you need is an international certificate of insurance and they generally don’t bother even with that, much less your passport; at most road frontier crossings they just wave you through. Airlines, on the other hand, keep copies of passenger flight manifests that can be checked by anyone with the right kind of muscle, and at lots of airports you may get your passport stamped. Train controls can be stickier than road, too, because the officials have more time. The only persons who should never use road frontiers are smugglers, because on some roads the Customs people like to play games. Instead of lining up beside the immigration squad, they move their check-point three or more kilometres back along the road on their side where a build-up of traffic doesn’t matter. Then, they have plenty of time to nail the ones with the evidence on them, just as the poor slobs think they are free and clear.

I am not a smuggler and I use the roads. I
did, though, go to the Zurich airport and park the car there before taking an airport bus into town. Anyone then becoming interested in my movements would have assumed that I had arrived by air. I got off the bus at the Haupt-Bahnhof.

From there I phoned the hospital and learned that Kramer had been dead for two days.

It was too early in the morning, I
felt, to telephone a newly-created widow. To pass the time, I
had a second breakfast while I decided how best to handle the phase-out-and-forget routine in this particular case. At that point, strange as it may seem now, the only grave difficulty of which I was aware was that of remembering the widow’s first name without having Kramer’s personal file there to check on.

I got it eventually - Frieda. After breakfast I went for a stroll and found a department store where I was able to buy a black tie.

By then it was ten-thirty, so I went back to the station and called the Kramer apartment.

The voice of the woman who answered was that of someone younger than Frieda; the married daughter, I found. She accepted my condolences politely enough on her mother’s behalf, but when I asked if I could speak to the mother there was a marked change of tone.

‘Is that, by any chance, Herr Oberholzer of Frankfurt?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I am an old friend of your father’s.’

‘So I
have been given to understand.’ Her tone was now distinctly cool. That could have put me on my guard, but didn’t. Those nursing private griefs often resent attempts, real or imagined, by outsiders to share them.

‘I am speaking for my mother,’ she went on briskly. ‘She has asked me to tell you that the funeral will be at eleven tomorrow morning. The crematorium is on the Käferholz-strasse. Flowers, if you wish to send any, should be delivered to the chapel of the hospital mortuary before nine-thirty.’

‘Thank you. I am grateful for that information. However, I hope to pay my respects and offer my personal sympathies to your mother before then. I propose to call on her this morning, just before noon if that would be convenient.’

‘No, Herr Oberholzer. I am afraid that would not be convenient. Only family members are here today. But my mother has anticipated your anxiety and concern. She asks me to assure you that your papers are quite safe and that you may collect them at any time after the funeral tomorrow. There will be sandwiches and coffee here for those who can stomach them. Goodbye, Herr Oberholzer.’

She hung up.

Even then I
wasn’t really worried. Under the emotional stress of her husband’s sudden death, Frieda had obviously been talking too freely about things she would have been wiser to forget; but, as her knowledge of them was necessarily limited to what Kramer would have told her in an unlikely fit of total indiscretion, it represented no serious threat to me, just a nuisance. Because she had disapproved of me and my relationship with her husband - though she could scarcely have disapproved of the money it had brought in - I was being made to stay in Zurich when it was neither necessary nor advisable for me to do so, and to attend a funeral.

Persuading wealthy tax and exchange-control evaders to pay you for advising them is not difficult; not, that is, when you have the right sanctions at your disposal; but, unless you are very careful, it can be dangerous.

It must be accepted that any rich man who chooses to
evade
his country’s fiscal laws when, simply by taking a little trouble and obtaining good advice, he could
avoid
them, has to be, however superficially astute, basically stupid.

When, therefore, he has to pay up in order to conceal his folly he is unlikely to accept the loss philosophically. On the contrary, he will quite often go to extravagant lengths to avenge the ‘outrage’. I know of one case in which the idiot actually went out, bought himself the most expensive rifle on the market, had it fitted with a telescopic sight and began practising to become a marksman.

The fact is that a lot of these very rich men can behave remarkably like old-fashioned psychopathic gangsters. Protecting your set-up from lunatic vindictiveness of that kind calls for more than ordinary care and attention. Where security is concerned, you have to be a trifle paranoid.

The moment Kramer’s daughter hung up on me, I should have immediately gone back to my car and hit the road for home and a good dinner. I was married at the time to my second wife. She was really an excellent cook.

The wrong kind of greed, that was my trouble; greed, plus slow and very sloppy thinking. Kramer had said in his telegram that there was important material to be collected. So, there was I hanging about in the expectation of collecting; just as if nothing had happened; just as if Kramer had still been alive and well.

The weather was horrible, a bitter wind was blowing showers of wet snow. If I had been travelling on one of my real passports I might well have checked in at a first-rate hotel where I was known and would be cosseted. Luckily, I was travelling as Reinhardt Oberholzer. I say ‘luckily’, because if I had been using a real identity nothing I could have done would have saved the situation. There are some paper-trails that cannot be diverted or cleaned up because, before you get busy with your little spiked walking-stick, the hounds will be there in the field waiting for you.

So, thank God for the Oberholzer passports.

Yes, that’s right, Krom. Passports, plural. We used five. I had one. The four men couriers had one each, which they used when they were acting as cut-outs.

Carlo’s unorthodox thinking would have sent any trained intelligence man crazy. For example, he had picked the cover name Oberholzer originally because it was neither common nor uncommon but middle-ordinary in most German-speaking places. In an Anglo-Saxon community, Underwood or Overton would be in the same bracket. So far, quite orthodox. But what happened when the cover wore thin and began to unravel?

Orthodox opinion was that you promptly junked both it and its occupant. Carlo did not agree. By hastily junking a cover, to say nothing of the person who had been using it, you might well supply confirmation of what had until then been only a suspicion. You might even create suspicions where none had existed except in your own imagination. Was it not better, surely, to present the opposition with a fresh set of doubts to resolve by putting a second man into play, one who in some respects strongly resembled his namesake, yet in others was confusingly different? If suspicions had existed before, would they not now be allayed? Or, if not wholly allayed, would not the reasons for them now have to be reassessed?

In view of the nature of the opposition we faced, an opposition which had always to rely upon reluctant or havering witnesses telling as little of the truth as they dared, such a reassessment could have only one result. ‘Doubt demoralizes’ was one of Carlo’s favourite maxims. His tactical description of the Oberholzer-style multiplication manoeuvre was ‘dispersal’ or, if he felt like being facetious, ‘defence in width’.

I once played against a good three-card-trick man for over an hour. I
knew exactly what he was doing and how he was doing it, and still he beat me three times out of five. That was how the Oberholzer game had worked. Only we had been winning five tricks out of five, until I lost one that made it necessary not only to change the name of the game but also some of the rules.

Zurich is a busy city and unless you have made reservations in advance or are a known and valued client in a particular establishment, central hotel rooms are not always easy to find. Since I could not go to a place where I was known, I went to the tourist bureau at the station, where they operated a hotel booking service.

Now I may have been careless that day, but I was not completely feckless. When you are using a cover, you always, and automatically, use it as little as possible simply in order to protect it from unnecessary wear and tear. So, when I gave my name to the girl at the tourist bureau I instinctively resorted to an old ploy.

In most countries, officialdom tends, when identifying you, to put your surname first and your given name or names after it. In many parts of Asia this name order is socially usual as well. On the European mainland and in South America, the social and administrative usages tend to overlap. Your insurance policies may describe you as OBERHOLZER, Reinhardt or Reinhardt Oberholzer. On a formal occasion among strangers you may click heels and introduce yourself as Oberholzer Reinhardt, while at a less starchy function you are dear old lovable Reinhardt Oberholzer. To the travel-bureau girl I gave my name as Oswald Reinhardt, slurring the Oswald slightly so that I could always claim, if necessary, that she had not been listening attentively.

By the time I had returned to the department store, bought an overnight bag and a change of linen and was back at the bureau, they had a room for me. St was in a second-category place up by the botanical gardens. The receptionist there had my name as O.Reinhardt from the bureau, and did not bother to look closely at the Oberholzer passport I fumbled with before filling out the police card.

The hotel was on a pleasant street with lots of trees which probably gave it quite a rustic outlook during the summer. Unfortunately, it was also next door to a church with a clock tower. This had a full set of chimes which were, I soon found, in robust working order. The receptionist, showing me to my room, said with a false but practised smile that many guests enjoyed the sound of the clock striking. The prospect of going back to the tourist bureau and starting afresh was unattractive, so I asked the way to the nearest pharmacy.

It was several streets away in a little shopping district which appeared to serve a quarter which was mixed business and residential. In a miniature supermarket I bought half a bottle of whisky. In the pharmacy I bought, in addition to razor, soap, face-cloth and tooth-brush, some ear-plugs. Then, deciding to return to the hotel by a different route, one that I thought might be less exposed to the wind, I saw the flower shop.

Now, although I like flowers and normally find flower shops agreeable places, I am not one of those who cannot resists them. It was just that, in this particular shop, there was a remarkably handsome girl visible through the window. She was spraying the leaves of some philodendra, and the way she was raising her arms did something for her. As I slowed down to admire the view, the sight of her happened to coincide with an irresistible urge to get in out of the cold wind again plus the thought that a wreath from Oberholzer at the Kramer funeral might serve both to modify his women’s hostility and to fortify their discretion.

So I went in.

When the girl was not spraying plants placed high up on wrought-iron display stands, her posture was not so good, but she was cheerful and friendly. She wouldn’t recommend a wreath, she said, because her partner, who was the real expert at making wreaths quickly, was away with ‘flu. If I insisted, she would do her best to make a nice wreath in time, but as it would have to be at the hospital mortuary before nine-thirty the following morning, she really thought that flowers would be better. What about some of those hot-house roses over there? Of course, they wouldn’t last beyond tomorrow, but in this weather neither would the flowers in a wreath. You couldn’t just send green stuff, could you? If I decided on the roses she would see that they were well wrapped and, as she was the one who would be doing the delivery, taken straight into the mortuary chapel when they got there. For a German like me they wouldn’t be all that expensive, and if I took the lot - the red, yellow and pink would look lovely together - she would give me a discount. She was a good saleswoman with some miserable roses on her hands which weren’t going to last the weekend anyway.