Siege at the Villa Lipp (23 page)

‘And you
did
do better,’ Henson’s longing for coffee was also now becoming audible.

‘A little, yes.’ Krom was savouring every moment, If his witnesses thought that they were going to hurry him along with polite proddings they were much mistaken. ‘A little better,’ he repeated, ‘but
only
a little. Both the judicial authorities and the police had certain ideas on the subject of those extortion cases which I found it difficult to counter. They were aware, of course, that there were leakages of information from several of the so-called big banks and from some cantonal and private banks as well. These they were naturally determined to locate and stop, because Swiss law,
their
law, was being broken and the guilty must be found and punished. In so far as the information I brought them about specific leakages helped them to that end, they were interested. But when it came to talk of organized extortion, they lost interest.’

Henson let out a squeak of incredulity. ‘The Swiss lost interest in an extortion racket?’

I was grateful to her. It was the question that had popped up instantly in my own mind.

‘They didn’t believe that it existed,’ Krom explained. ‘They thought, at that point, that I was merely trying to prove a pet theory. They said that, in order to do so, I was confusing two quite different anti-social activities. One wasn’t even a crime. They were referring to the traffic in titbit information that was then being carried on with various US government agencies. For instance, there was the racket worked by those who sold luxury goods like furs and diamonds to rich Americans. In places such as London, Paris and Antwerp, the persons who did the actual selling often earned extra commissions by informing on their clients to the US Revenue as soon as the goods were sold. When a client was caught for smuggling, the informer received a percentage of the fine as a reward. Not nice, or kind, or good for business in the long run, but not illegal. Besides, it didn’t happen in Switzerland. What they were interested in, as far as I was concerned, were the bank employees who allowed themselves to be suborned and the wicked men and women who did the suborning. Among those last group, I am afraid, Dr Connell, agents of the United States Internal Revenue Service, which, with the blessing of the American Congress, had made no secret of its hostility to Swiss secrecy laws. Those agents, with their big money bribes, were then considered the prime villains. It had been thought at one time that Oberholzer might be an important IRS man, or possibly even CIA.’

Connell laughed. ‘Oberholzer, an American government man? With
that
accent?’

‘You have accepted a Secretary of State with a German accent,’ said Henson crisply. ‘I see nothing extraordinary about Oberholzer being thought of as a possible IRS or CIA agent. Firman’s accent - and I take it that we
are
talking about the same man - isn’t contemporary British anyway. I’d call it expatriate mid-Atlantic. The same could be said of his vocabulary. If he had a Hungarian-American accent you wouldn’t find the CIA notion in the least odd.’

‘True.’

‘And we are not talking about what, in retrospect, we may think, but what the Swiss knew and believed from time to time,’ Krom reminded them. ‘I said that not all the victims of the Oberholzer organization were prepared to submit. Among those who chose to fight were two clients of the enquiry agent - one Spanish, the other an American - whose cases had certain common denominators. Both had their accounts in the Zurich head office of the same bank. At least three other known victims also banked there. The other common denominator was the method used by the so-called debt-collection agency.’

‘The one of whose methods Firman so much disapproves?’

‘The one of whose methods he
says
he disapproves, yes, Dr Henson.’

‘I didn’t understand how that worked anyway,’ Connell said. ‘I made a note to ask him a question about it. How do you make a pay-off that can’t either be watched or traced?’

‘A good question,’ Krom said. ‘I will add it to my own list of clarifications required. Anything else?’

‘The part played in the incident by Frau Kramer and the daughter bothers me,’ said Henson. ‘What were those two up to? Assisting or obliging the police? Getting back at Oberholzer for corrupting the good Kramer? Covering themselves against the charge that they had compounded a felony? That identity parade after the funeral doesn’t sound like a good police idea. Why didn’t they go through with the original plan and get Oberholzer out at the apartment? Then, he couldn’t have run, not the way he did anyway. And what was the idea of giving him those plastic slip-covers with the code-names on them? That makes no sense at all.’

‘Oh yes, it does, young woman,’ Krom chuckled. ‘And, as it happens, the sense that it makes ties in with your questions about Frau Kramer’s place in the affair.’

I listened intently to the next bit because I was just as keen to know the answers as Dr Henson, more perhaps; the same questions had puzzled me at the time and, at intervals, ever since.

‘Frau Kramer,’ Krom went on, ‘could not, I think, have ever made her husband a very happy man. She was one of those women who, at the same moment as they complain that their men do not climb higher and faster on the ladder of success, hang on to their coat-tails to make the climb more difficult, perhaps impossible. They are moral saboteurs, you might say. To be specific, Kramer had reached, as do many men in the organizations, his natural level of maximum attainment without either understanding why he would go no higher or recognizing and accepting his own limitations. In this refusal to accept he was abetted by his own wife. But when it came to Oberholzer’s approach, things were undoubtedly different. Ambitious women of Frau Kramer’s type often have broad streaks of self-righteousness in them. They desire the ends but reject the means. Or, rather, they do not wish to hear about the means.’

‘As if Lady Macbeth were to say that she didn’t want to know,’ remarked Connell.

‘Pardon?’ There was a short silence while Krom grappled with the allusion. ‘Well, yes, perhaps. I am sure Frau Kramer
did
know of the Oberholzer arrangement. It was just never openly discussed, so that she could say, with her hand on her heart, that she had never been told.’

‘Hence her and her daughter’s dislike of Oberholzer,’ commented Henson.

‘The daughter’s attitude was determined much more by the adverse affects on her own marriage, and position of respectability that a criminal scandal would have had. After Kramer’s second coronary attack in the hospital, and once she knew that he was quite unlikely to survive a third, Frau Kramer’s chief concern was for the money her husband had accumulated. All she wanted to know was whether or not she would be allowed to inherit it. Naturally, the police were in no hurry to enlighten her. Equally, she was in no position to ask questions about her husband’s private fortune without admitting that she had been a party to concealing the criminal acts that had made it. The daughter would probably have been prepared to abandon the money, or the prospect of it anyway. The mother could never have done that.’

‘Didn’t they have a lawyer to advise them?’ Connell enquired.

‘Of course. But what use is an honest lawyer when what you need is a dishonest one? No, she chose instead to give co-operation to the police. This, the police accepted gratefully, but remaining stiffly correct, without allowing their gratitude to show even for a moment.’

‘Were you present at the original Kramer interviews?’ asked Connell. ‘I mean before he had the heart attack.’

‘Oh no. That would have been quite improper. I
was kept informed though. I
was also there when the decision was made to allow Kramer’s encoded telegram to be sent, in the hope that it would bring Oberholzer, his pay-master, to Zurich. As we know, it did.’

Dr Henson sniffed. ‘Even such a stupid woman as Frau Kramer must have known that the police couldn’t try and convict a dead man. If he
embezzled
that money from the bank and it could be proved that he’d embezzled it, even without his being there, things might have been different. As it was, the police had no case against either her or Oberholzer, and probably no claim to any money there might have been lying around.’

‘You would be surprised,’ said Krom, ‘how great an appearance of power a senior Swiss policeman can convey just by looking absolutely serious. Except in one thing. Frau Kramer did exactly as she was told. The exception was in the matter of where the identification of Oberholzer before witnesses was to take place. She refused, practically at the last minute, to have Oberholzer in her apartment.’

‘On what grounds? He must have been there before, she must have known him before, or how could she have identified him?’

‘She said that until the police had told her that Oberholzer was a criminal she had not known.’

‘Had
the police told her?’ Connell asked.

‘Of course not. Challenged on the point, she maintained that the interest of the police in Oberholzer had been enough to tell her. It was obvious now that Oberholzer was a criminal. Her husband, who had known the man slightly, had been questioned about him, but had known nothing. Now, she was being questioned. She also knew nothing, but would assist the police in identifying the villain, anywhere but in the apartment sacred to her husband’s memory and to her own memories of their happiness together.’

She hadn’t
needed
a lawyer, I would have said.

‘There is still the question of the code-names,’ Dr Henson was reminding Krom.

‘I am not forgetting it, young woman. My good relations with the Swiss authorities obviously do not depend alone upon academic associations. When I
am given information it is given on the understanding that the arrangement is reciprocal. I
pick their brains, and they pick mine. In this case I helped them discover the real names of the two enquiry-agent clients, the Spaniard and the American, who had defied, or tried to defy, the Oberholzer organization.’

‘Kleister and Torten, you mean? Oh, I see. You matched the code-names with the details found by the police in Kramer’s private files.’

‘Precisely.’ Krom did not like Connell stealing his thunder like that, as he went on to make clear. ‘But the question asked was not ‘how did the police get the names?’ but ‘why did they give them to Oberholzer?’ I will tell you. It began as a joke.’

‘Huh?’

‘Yes, I agree. A somewhat macabre joke but a joke nevertheless. My police friends had made enquiries about the then whereabouts of Kleister and Torten and found that Torten, the American, had since his release from prison on probation, been enjoying his freedom in Florida. Kleister, his old ally, had recently joined him there. What was more, he had joined him not just for a brief holiday, it was understood, but on a permanent basis. Both men were widowers, and, in spite of their costly troubles, both were still wealthy. It seemed likely that they might be preparing to resume operations against the Oberholzer extortionists. For two men of their ages with money to spend and a cause that they could think of as a crusade, what could be a more pleasurable way of passing the time than finding a man they both hated, and then arranging for his murder?’

‘Yes,’ said Connell. ‘I can see that there’d be room there for loads of laughs.’

‘I remember my police friends saying in their droll way that, if Oberholzer were going to be murdered, they would prefer that the crime be committed outside their jurisdiction because they would not have their hearts in the investigation. Someone suggested that they might give Oberholzer a warning of the danger by mentioning Kleister and Torten to him verbally. Later, when the confrontation was moved from the Kramer apartment to the crematorium, they put those marked folders with the code-names in the brief-case because they intended to stop and interrogate Oberholzer at the airport when he tried to leave. Their object, since they could not prosecute him, was, first, to intimidate him, second, to trip him if they could into some damaging admission about his relationship with Kramer and, lastly, to make it clear that he was considered an undesirable alien who would be well advised to stay out of Switzerland. They thought that the code-names in the brief-case might prove useful as an element in the interrogation. In fact, as we now know, he eluded them at the airport, though more by luck than by ingenuity. However, the warning of the code-names did not, it seems, go unheeded. He is still alive.

I wonder about Kleister and Torten. Perhaps he knows. Perhaps I will ask him.’

‘Well,’ said Dr Henson, ‘one thing’s explained. I can see now why he objected so strongly to that field kit of Langridge’s that I tried to smuggle in. With one set of fingerprints on record in Switzerland against an old identity, the last thing he’d want would be another set of prints, one attached to his current identity, circulating internationally. The two would almost certainly be matched. I must say, though, that he doesn’t strike me as a man who has been labouring for years under a threat of death from a pair of half-witted tax-dodgers. If anyone’s had the pleasurable time, I’d say it was he. Most regrettable no doubt, but my guess is that he doesn’t know what a twinge of guilt feels like and that he has always thoroughly enjoyed himself.’

‘He will not be enjoying himself for much longer, my dear. Of that I can assure you. As for us, I think it is time that we went down to breakfast.’

I was ready, seated at the table on the terrace waiting for them when they came down.

They all told me, in response to my polite enquiries, how comfortable they had been and how well they had slept, thank you, at the same time managing to make it clear that solicitude would get me nowhere and that, now they were rested, the sooner we got down to business the better. None of them asked how
I
had slept.

The coffee was not nearly as good as the earlier pot I had had, but they drank it appreciatively and ate their croissants. Krom did not wait to finish his, however, before going into action.

‘We have all read with interest your first paper,’ he said, spraying crumbs with the sibilants, ‘and, while we find some of it useful, we all agree that it is far from satisfactory.’