Where did he hide it when he left for home? In the lining of his tunic? In one of his shoes?’
‘Supposing he went to Lugano?’
‘They have never heard of him or his numbered account. He would have to come to us, where he would at once learn that, for security reasons, we had some months earlier transferred the money to a different bank. All is perfectly safe. What currency would he like it in? Or would he prefer to have it transferred to his domestic account? You see? He is back with his original dilemma, only now, from the tax-evasion standpoint, the offence is even more serious. He had an illicit hoard of dollars. Now, it has made a profit on which he ought to pay capital-gains tax if he were an upright, God-fearing citizen. But he is no longer that, and he knows it. Perhaps, if he has confided in his wife and she is a woman of courage the pair of them will risk all and smuggle it back to the United States. Or try to do so. We would be failing in our duty, I think, if we did not warn them most seriously of the nature of the risks they would run. At the same time we might remind them that, if they leave the money with us to increase and multiply, there is nothing to prevent their using it later. They might eventually decide to buy a rèsidence secondaire in Italy, or somewhere on the Côte d’Azur, which they could rent when they weren’t luxuriating in it themselves. Then, no one ever need know anything.’ He paused, closed his eyes and breathed in deeply as if he were already enjoying on Mr Q’s behalf the cool evening breeze scented by pine trees. Then he opened his eyes again before narrowing them slightly. ‘You see, Paul? There would never be, there could never be, a run on our bank.’
Does that sound like an anarchist speaking, Professor Krom? — a man against all settled order and systems of law?
I don’t think it does. To me it sounds like a man who enjoyed making money not by breaking laws but by circumventing them, not by destroying order but by utilizing it in unorthodox ways.
Yes, Carlo was vain; indeed he revelled in his own cleverness; but the respect that he professed for the law was absolutely genuine. He was, too, something of a moralist and strongly disapproved of black marketeers.
He disapproved because he considered them parasites. He would have been affronted, though, by any suggestion that the same word could, with equal justice, have been applied to us. I only know of one person who had the temerity even to hint at the suggestion, and the consequences for that person were unpleasant. Carlo could, when angered, become quite vindictive.
In that respect he was different from Mat Williamson. Mat does not have to be in the least angry with a man before deciding that he must be destroyed.
The years immediately following VE day were great ones for parasites. Allied aid supplies, mostly American but some British, poured into Italy and West Germany at a prodigious rate.
However, since this is not a history of the post-World War II black markets — the writing of which I happily leave to a scholar of the Krom school of fantasists — I shall merely give some idea of the scale of them by reporting that, during our first eighteen months of operations, Carlo was ‘entrusted’ with nearly half a million dollars derived from the Italian markets alone.
I say alone because before long we were getting word of much larger sums needing our services in Germany.
The early reports from Carlos’ man in Lugano told of a chaotic situation. Big money was being made, but those making it, mostly American senior NCOs and junior officers in transportation and supply units, seemed unaware of the difficulties into which they would soon be getting. This was not simply because they were new to the game, but because in West Germany the rules were complex and the conditions of play tended to promote over-confidence. For instance, there were three distinct occupation zones, in two of which — the French and the British — exchange control restrictions were maintained on their national currencies. In the British zone, these restrictions were enforced by a Special Investigation Branch squad of remarkable ferocity. So, the American wheeler-dealer, who already benefited from his access to the most sought-after market commodities, also enjoyed the advantage of being able to do business in the only freely convertible currency available, the dollar.
Soon, stories began to come in of American soldiers crossing into Switzerland for ‘Rest and Recuperation’. On arrival, most of them made for the nearest bank. Perfectly natural, one would have said, if all that those fine boys were doing was exchanging a few of their dollars for francs to spend locally during their furloughs; but that, it seemed, was by no means all that some of them were doing; lots were opening bank accounts.
This, of course, was before the mere possession of a Swiss bank account by an American or British citizen rendered him, at least in the eyes of his native Revenue men, at best a jail-worthy tax-evader if not a Mafia narcotics-pedlar as well; but murmurings about refugee Nazi funds being protected by the Swiss bank secrecy laws were already getting louder, and a newspaper story about a black market in antibiotics involving occupation medical-corps personnel had caused a considerable fuss. As always when the nostrils of higher authority are assailed by smells of corruption other than their own, the cries of outrage and disgust are promptly followed by sounds of loophole-stoppings and stampings-out, of tightenings-up and clampings-down.
In the American sector, by the end of 1946, an efficient laundry service of the kind Carlo could provide had become essential. I do not claim that his was the only one in the field — we had our imitators by then — but it was unquestionably the safest and most reliable.
In November, having at last been told that the army no longer required my services, I asked for a travel warrant to London and was demobilized there. Acting on Carlo’s instructions, I then obtained a British passport as well as renewing my Argentine papers, before returning to Milan. From Milan I went to Lugano, where I spent a week or so learning a few more ropes. From Munich, I wrote to my family explaining that I had gone into the scrap-metal business.
The code-name given to me by Carlo for use when I needed to authenticate confidential messages was ‘Oberholzer’.
In 1956, Carlo had an operation for the removal of his gall bladder. The surgeon who performed it somehow bungled the job, and later in the year a second operation became necessary. He recovered all right, but it was a long, debilitating illness and it changed him. I don’t mean that he aged prematurely, though I have noticed that serious illness can have that effect on persons in their sixties. With Carlo what happened was that, as his physical health returned, the pattern of his characteristic psychological responses seemed gradually to intensify. He became an exaggerated, larger-than-life version of himself. Things that would once have only made that smile of his blossom, now made him laugh aloud. Things that would once have been dismissed as annoyances now produced outbursts of rage. It was as if, in the struggle to regain his health, he had been obliged to shed the emotional weight of several old but crucial inhibitions. The result was in many ways a more engaging man, but also a more formidable and sometimes frightening one. I have said that Carlo could be vindictive. After his illness he could be cruelly so. The man who could dream up the butter-train coup was also capable of applying himself with relish to more disagreeable amusements.
His claim that ours was a bank on which there could never be a run had proved to be justified. On that score we had no anxieties; and, after 1951, when the double-taxation conventions between Switzerland and the US and UK came into force, the possibility of a run ceased to exist altogether. Our ‘customers’, a cagey bunch of crooks with finely-tuned survival instincts, could never all go crazy at the same time.