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.