The first priority, then, was to get rid of the car with which I was associated, the one in which I was riding, the one with a driver who would both talk and invent. Next, I had to get out of the canton of Zurich and then out of Switzerland itself as quickly and as unobtrusively as possible.
‘We’ll go direct to the airport,’ I said.
‘At once, six.’
Only then did I open the brief-case.
I had been right about there being no papers in it, but it was not empty, inside, were two of those transparent plastic slip-covers that many European businessmen use to keep loose papers or small amounts of correspondence tidily together without too many paper-clips. I knew that Kramer had used them because, on one of the rare occasions after our first meeting when we had met outside Switzerland, he had shown me how he kept the various sets of document copies that he thought I should see, after he had returned the originals to their proper places.
The volume of useful paper — statements of account, buy and sell orders in respect of investments, yearly audit sheets — had been small and those relating to the persons or corporations in which we were interested at any one time he had been able to keep in a single attache-case. It had been fitted out with one of those concertina-like contraptions that turned it into a miniature filing-cabinet. Into each division went one of the plastic slip-overs. Along the outer edge of each was stuck an identifying strip of Dymo embossing tape with his own code name for the account holder printed on it.
He had always, for ‘sensitive accounts’, used blue tape instead of the normal black. Sensitive accounts were those belonging to clients of the bank who had been judged ‘unpredictable’ — that is to say, marginally insane by ordinary standards — and who remained clients only by virtue of the size of their funds and the voting power of their shareholdings.
Both the empty slip-covers in the brief-case his daughter had given me still had their code name tapes on them, and both were blue. One was kleister and the other torten. Kramer had had a love-hate thing about cakes and pastry — he had always been overweight — and his choice of blue names had invariably been used as a reminder that, for him, such things were bad. I knew Kleister and Torten all too well. The former was a Spanish land-owner, the latter the founder and board chairman of an American pet-food manufacturing outfit with European subsidiaries. They had in common two things: both were exceedingly rich and both suffered from that kind of obsessional madness which has been called, when it has affected whole families, vendetta or feuding, but which in their case may best be described as acute personalized revanchism. Or, to put things more simply, pure bloody hatred of one particular group of their creditors.
Those two had been the most persistently difficult of the clients monitored by Kramer, and in the end Carlo had felt obliged to discipline Torten. With the Spaniard, Kleister, the threat of discipline had been sufficient because he was more vulnerable. The mere possession of a foreign banking account of the kind he had was a serious offence under the Franco regime. Torten had chosen to do battle with the Internal Revenue Service, but Kleister had paid our fees. On the other hand, Kleister had also employed an expensive international private enquiry agent to identify his ‘persecutors’. By one of those strokes of ill-luck against which not even a Carlo Lech can insure himself, the enquiry agent discovered — not because he was all that clever, but because Torten, when drunk, could be monumentally indiscreet — that the method of paying his fees that Torten had been instructed to employ was the same as the one his client Kleister had described. So, he brought the two men together.
Kleister went to America — the terms of Torten’s bail pending his final appeal had involved surrendering his passport — and an alliance was concluded. A council of war followed at which it was decided that as soon as they had discovered who we really were and where we were to be found, they would have us killed.
The expensive enquiry agent had hastily washed his hands of those particular clients. Carlo’s response, when word of the threat had filtered through to him, had been to demand a bonus payment from Kleister and to furnish the IRS with a supplementary dossier on Torten.
That had been over a year earlier. Kleister had paid the bonus and Torten was serving a prison sentence of three years for tax evasion, having already paid a heavy fine for the same offence. It was expected that he would be put on probation after serving a little over a third of his sentence. We had heard no more talk of our being sought out and lulled. It had seemed likely that K and T were at last beginning to behave rationally.
The sight of those two names in that brief-case, though, gave me a peculiar feeling, chiefly one of anger. I had no doubt that they were there with the knowledge of the police. What was I supposed to do? Panic and throw myself under a bus? Tell them what the words really meant? Give them the missing recipes for Kleister and Torten a la Kramer? Beg for mercy? Confess to some unspecified crime? Drop dead?
I shoved the things back in the brief-case and very nearly wound down the window with the idea of throwing the whole lot out. Then I thought of how upsetting that would be to the driver, and calmed down. Anyway, we were nearing the airport.
When we got there I told him to go to the Departure area and murmured something about the urgent necessity of my getting a plane that would, if I changed at Frankfurt or Munich, get me to Hamburg that afternoon. Then I paid him liberally, saw him drive away and went through to Arrivals.
I had to assume that the police had put out some sort of alert on me, so I hadn’t much time; but there were two things that had to be done before I started running.
In the Arrivals area among the rental car company desks was one belonging to the company I had used for the car from Frankfurt the previous day. So I told them where the car was on the park, gave them the ticket for it, turned in the keys and paid with my Oberholzer credit card. The police could make what they liked of that. I hoped it would tend to confirm what the driver would tell them, that I was on my way to Hamburg. It would take them ten more minutes or so to find out that there was no Oberholzer booked on any of the flights out to West Germany destinations.
The other thing I had to do was contact Carlo, or at least get an urgent message to him. I put the call through to Milan with the help of the restaurant telephonist, who didn’t mind earning twenty francs for pressing a few buttons on her new PBX. It was just before noon and Carlo hadn’t yet gone to lunch. I told him cryptically as much of the bad news as he needed to know at that moment and what I proposed to do about it. I then asked for immediate courier assistance and specified a rendezvous. Carlo did not argue or question, but said that I might have to wait a little. Then he hung up.
I went back outside to the bus stand. There was one just leaving. I rode, as I had done the day before, as far as the Haupt-Bahnhof; but this time I took a train from there, the one that left just after one o’clock for Geneva via Lausanne. There was a restaurant car but I stayed away from it. The man who clipped my ticket between stops along the way might remember me if asked, but there was no point in adding a waiter to the list of those who had seen the last of Reinhardt Oberholzer.