‘Well, I said. ‘I suppose that I shall go home and see my family. There’s a job there, if I want it.’
‘But in the meantime, what?’
‘I don’t think there’s going to be much meantime.’
‘There, I fancy, you are wrong,’ he said. ‘For you, there may be more than you think. I expect that you have heard talk of demobilization plans.’
‘Of course. There’ll still be Japan to be finished off, but not for the old sweats. I hear they’ve already started sending the long-service men home from Burma. It’s to be first in, first out, with a points bonus for every month of overseas service. On that basis, I should be home three months after it’s over, even going by a slow boat.’
He shook his head. ‘I intend no disrespect, but if you had been a fighting soldier, an infantryman, an engineer, a gunner, that might have been a reasonable expectation on your part; but you are not in those categories. I believe that, even after the Nazis are finished here, Allied troops will still be needed. There will be problems with the Yugoslavs about Trieste and other places, there will no doubt be problems with the French. Above all there will be immediate internal problems, social, economic, and political, which will not be solved without the presence for a time of occupation forces. With partisans in absolute control of vital areas in the north, we could not even administer a direct economic-aid programme without armed help. Your governments may choose to replace what you call the old sweats — I suppose you mean the experienced men — with younger conscripts or those who have seen less service, but specialists like you will have to stay on. You will be asked to volunteer.’
‘Or else?’
‘That’s right. Or else stay on anyway, but forgo the rewards that would have been yours as volunteers.’
‘Thanks for warning me. One our people managed to get sent home and given a psychiatric discharge a month or two ago, I was surprised how easy it was, once he’d really decided.’
‘Baby talk doesn’t become you, Paul. I think that you would prefer to stay in Italy for a year or eighteen months and make your fortune.’
‘In the army? That sounds as if we’re back to black marketeering.’
He sighed irritably. ‘It is absolutely essential that you rid yourself of this absurd idea that I am a criminal or that I have criminal instincts. I am a lawyer who respects the law. Illegality is for the immature and the foolish. The wise man has no need of it.’
‘Sorry.’ He seemed genuinely put out, so I poured him some more of his own whisky. ‘But,’ I went on, ‘you must admit that when anyone speaks of making a fortune out of the army, the mind instantly turns to thoughts of … ‘
‘No, no!’ he protested. ‘While in the army, not from or out of the army.’ He made one of his brushing-away-a-cobweb gestures. ‘The kind of cheating you are thinking of is already being done on a scale that you could not possibly emulate, even if you wanted to. And the scale is increasing. I told you, I have seen and heard a lot on my travels. There is an American quartermaster, for example, who is at present, according to my estimates, over thirty thousand dollars ahead in canned-food deals.’
‘Then we are talking about the black market.’
‘No, we are considering a problem that arises out of it. In a nutshell it is this. What does the quartermaster do with his money when the time comes for him to go home? Does he carry it in his musette bag? Does he?’
‘I gather that you think that to do so would be unwise.’
‘From his point of view, catastrophic. I can tell you that the Judge-Advocate’s department is already preparing court-martials against two splendid old soldiers, regular army veterans, who were simple enough to do just that. Given the opportunity, any fool can steal money. It’s accounting for the possession of it later that is difficult. Do you know that one of those fellows was stupid enough to claim that he had won it all in crap games? The trouble was that he couldn’t remember any of the other players. I can tell you this. When the time comes for the rest of these lines-of-communcation and base-area bandits to go home, or even be transferred to other theatres, they are going to find that there are obstacle courses for them to run that they never knew about and that they can neither beat nor avoid.’
‘So what would you advise the quartermaster to do with his thirty thousand dollars?’
‘Advise him to give them all to me, so that I can take care of them for him.’
He himself obviously found nothing strange about what he was saying. It called, consequently, for a careful reply.
‘Carlo, you are, as I have reason to know, a trustworthy man. But, with respect, I don’t see how you are going to persuade a man who has made thirty thousand dollars by cheating to believe that you, to say nothing of the rest of his fellow men, aren’t just as crooked as he is. Isn’t that the way the crook’s mind works?’
‘Certainly, it is. For that precise reason he must be sold new ideas. First, if he is an American, he must be made aware of the various hostile moves that can be made against his thirty thousand by the United States Government and its Internal Revenue Service. For instance, that part of his nest egg which is in occupation money will be made worthless after a certain date unless it is declared beforehand. In order to declare large sums he must be able satisfactorily to explain them. That part of the whole which is in Italian currency cannot be converted outside the country except by payment through his own home bank. Once more he must explain. In the same way if he remits dollars in amounts which exceed his accumulated base pay, he will also be required to explain. In other words, he must either lose all or he must trust, and pay, someone else to do what he cannot do for himself; that is, convert that portion of his equity which is not in dollars into currencies which will remain negotiable. Then, the whole of it must be kept safe until such time as he can reclaim it without ever having had to account to anyone for his possession of one cent. How will we perform these unique and quite invaluable services for him? My dear Paul, I will tell you.’
Thirty years were to go by before the Watergate investigation brought the word ‘laundering’ into metaphorical association with the word ‘money’. In 1945 we did not use that particular figure of speech; but in fact ‘laundering money’, the process of giving large sums which have been criminally acquired the appearance of having been come by legally was what Carlo then began to describe.
Mr Q, the quartermaster, would hear, as if by accident, not only of the obstacle courses in preparation but also about an Italian lawyer of the highest repute who specialized in foreign tax law and was an expert on international currency dealings. How did Mr Q imagine that all those rich Italian industrialists had managed to get the hell out and stay rich when all the rest of Italy was on the bread line? Obviously, they had switched all their loose cash to currencies and places in which it was safe, and it was this wonderful little lawyer who had made it possible for them to get away with it.
Once Mr Q’s agile mind had grasped the fact that here might be a way of concealing his own ill-gotten gains until the heat was off, an introduction would be arranged and Carlo would go to work.
Of course, Mr Q, your problems can be very simply solved. No trouble at all. I will arrange to have your money converted into gold-backed bonds and deposited in my Lugano bank. As soon as you wish to reconvert and receive the money, you write from America and tell me so. In reply you will hear news of the sad death in Europe of a distant relative of yours. Your family emigrated originally from where, Mr Q? Denmark? Then the relative will die in Copenhagen and the money that this so-generous cousin bequeathed to you will be paid in Danish kroner. Any questions?