I was beginning to feel sorry for Vic. ‘You’d do that to him for a ten per cent pay-off?’
‘Of that pathetic reward I shall not accept one cent,’ he said contemptuously. ‘My reward will be the satisfaction of my sense of the fitness of things. He insulted me. He insulted you. He will be punished, as a criminal, such as he, deserves to be punished, for his crimes against his country’s laws.’ He sat up very straight in his chair and gazed fixedly at the Moretto landscape on the wall behind me. Finally, he made the cobweb-brushing gesture he still used to punctuate thought processes. ‘All this has taught me a lesson, Paul,’ he added.
‘You mean that, if we’re going to blow him to the IRS, he’s liable to blow us too?’
‘Certainly not! What crimes have we committed? I was merely reflecting that it might be time for us to spread our wings again and to fly in a new direction.’ He raised his elbows sideways, dropped his hands, then tensed his fingers into talons as if he were a bird of prey about to kill.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. In future, Paul, we will have no more dealings with illegitimate money. It is contagious, it carries infection.’ One of the talons brushed away yet another cobweb. ‘By devoting ourselves diligently to the new arts of tax avoidance, I think that we may be able to create for our clients, and certain others, impenetrable and indestructible shields against the rapacity of governments.’
He went on to explain in detail what he had in mind.
I have admitted that, after he had recovered physically from his illness, I sometimes found Carlo a little frightening. The revenge he had taken on Vic, simply because the man had been foolish enough to speak his mind, worried me quite a bit, but the plan of action he then proceeded to lay out was wholly rational.
The idea derived from his belief — a widely-held belief, I know, but one that was in his case based on special knowledge — that the very rich are always also very stingy.
Thus, if you were able to show a rich man how he could avoid paying large amounts of money to the government which presumed to tax him and his corporate enterprises, he, in his turn, would be ready to pay a much, much smaller amount of money to you in the shape of a fee.
At least, he would be ready to do so for a time. That, sooner or later, he would become reluctant to pay you as he had previously been reluctant to pay the tax collector, was inevitable. Ultimately, he would probably try to cheat you as, once upon a time, he had tried to cheat the tax man. Therefore, you bore that possibility in mind from the start, armed yourself with appropriate sanctions and made sure that, if or when the attempts to cheat you were made, simple mechanisms to ensure their failure were triggered automatically. Ideally, Carlo thought, our relationship with our clients should be one of mutual, and permanent, trust.
Who but Krom could have had the breathtaking audacity to speak in this context of ‘international parasitism’ and make wild allegations about a ‘multi-million-dollar extortion racket’?
CHAPTER SIX
I am not the only one who has found Krom hard to take.
Had our stay at the Villa Lipp not been cut short so suddenly, Connell and Henson would surely have ended by quarrelling with him. Obviously, they respected his earlier work and so were prepared to put up with a certain amount of his nonsense, including a lot of tipsy pontificating; otherwise, they would not have been there; but even on that first night, before we knew that things had gone seriously wrong and that we were in danger, there were signs of strain.
Krom had objected strongly to Connell’s asking me questions; and I had made a bet with myself that, in due course, I would hear him insisting just as strongly that only he was entitled to receive my ‘papers’, and that only he would have the right thereafter to decide who saw how much of what was in them. I won the bet too.
When the coffee had been served, I told Melanie to pass round file number one to our guests. Krom stopped her instantly by clutching at one of her arms. He was as stricken as a child who has just been told that the bright new toy which was to have been his alone must, after all, be shared.
‘I think, Mr Firman,’ he said with a show of teeth, ‘that, in your own interests as well as ours, the distribution of all documents ought to be strictly limited.’
‘I quite agree, Professor,’ I stared hard at Melanie’s arm until he released it. ‘There are only three copies of that document, one for you and one each for your witnesses. I shall insist that the last two be returned to me to destroy as soon as they have been read and compared with your text.’
He tried to think of an inoffensive way of saying that he did not want his witnesses having access to material that was really his, and his alone, in case they stole bits of it from him. Naturally, he failed; there is no inoffensive way of saying such a thing. He tried stepping around the difficulty.
‘Notes should be taken.’
‘Of course. And I am sure that they will be taken,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Dr Connell has a tape-recorder and Dr Henson has a shorthand-writer’s notebook in her suitcase. I dare say she also has an excellent memory.’
Henson suddenly laughed and received a glare from Krom.
She at once raised both hands in apology. ‘Sorry, but I had an unworthy thought,’ she explained. ‘It crossed my mind, only for an instant but quite distinctly, that Mr Firman couldn’t care less how many notes are taken because he has no intention of letting us see or hear anything that could in any way compromise him.’
Yves broke in angrily. ‘There, Doctor, you are greatly mistaken. This meeting alone compromises him, and us.’ His outstretched hand included Melanie.
‘Don’t worry, Mr Boularis,’ Krom tried clumsily to pat him on the knee and seemed to resent Yves’s instinctively flinching sway. ‘But don’t deceive yourself either, or let him deceive you,’ he went on with one of his saliva sprays. ‘Your friend Firman was compromised years ago when I saw him in Zurich.’
Connell stifled what might have been the start of a low moan. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘we’re back to the celebrated Oberholzer-Firman identification. Are we now going to be allowed to hear exactly what was so compromising about it, or is that still “pas devant les enfants”, Professor?’
He sounded as if he had become as tired of Krom as I had. Before the elder statesman had time to do more than glare and show teeth again, I had signalled to Melanie.
This time she went the other way round the table so that the witnesses received their copies of the file first.
‘Read all about it,’ I said to Connell.
The witnesses’ behaviour towards me since then has left much to be desired, inevitably perhaps; but I still regret that security considerations, now known to have been irrelevant, prevented my giving them more of the truth than I did. They might have learned something, not only to their own advantage, but, of more immediate consequence in this time of trial, to mine.
This is how it really came about that Krom saw me in Zurich.
The warning telegram did not reach me until late on Tuesday, over twenty-four hours after Kramer had been taken ill.
The text of it said only that he was in the emergency heart unit of the Kantonsspital in Zurich. The signature, however, was in a code form meaning that not only was there material urgently awaiting collection but also that the strictest security precautions should be taken. Use of the code signature showed that, ill or not, he had written or dictated the telegram himself and that his mind was still functioning.
I was in Lisbon at the time and the message had been re-transmitted from Milan by Carlo; and I mean by Carlo personally, not by some trusted underling to whom the job had been delegated. If that sounds an odd way to run a business making net profits in the five-million-dollar-plus region I shall have to agree, it was odd; but that was because the business was odd.