‘And you did do better,’ Henson’s longing for coffee was also now becoming audible.
‘A little, yes.’ Krom was savouring every moment, If his witnesses thought that they were going to hurry him along with polite proddings they were much mistaken. ‘A little better,’ he repeated, ‘but only a little. Both the judicial authorities and the police had certain ideas on the subject of those extortion cases which I found it difficult to counter. They were aware, of course, that there were leakages of information from several of the so-called big banks and from some cantonal and private banks as well. These they were naturally determined to locate and stop, because Swiss law, their law, was being broken and the guilty must be found and punished. In so far as the information I brought them about specific leakages helped them to that end, they were interested. But when it came to talk of organized extortion, they lost interest.’
Henson let out a squeak of incredulity. ‘The Swiss lost interest in an extortion racket?’
I was grateful to her. It was the question that had popped up instantly in my own mind.
‘They didn’t believe that it existed,’ Krom explained. ‘They thought, at that point, that I was merely trying to prove a pet theory. They said that, in order to do so, I was confusing two quite different anti-social activities. One wasn’t even a crime. They were referring to the traffic in titbit information that was then being carried on with various US government agencies. For instance, there was the racket worked by those who sold luxury goods like furs and diamonds to rich Americans. In places such as London, Paris and Antwerp, the persons who did the actual selling often earned extra commissions by informing on their clients to the US Revenue as soon as the goods were sold. When a client was caught for smuggling, the informer received a percentage of the fine as a reward. Not nice, or kind, or good for business in the long run, but not illegal. Besides, it didn’t happen in Switzerland. What they were interested in, as far as I was concerned, were the bank employees who allowed themselves to be suborned and the wicked men and women who did the suborning. Among those last group, I am afraid, Dr Connell, agents of the United States Internal Revenue Service, which, with the blessing of the American Congress, had made no secret of its hostility to Swiss secrecy laws. Those agents, with their big money bribes, were then considered the prime villains. It had been thought at one time that Oberholzer might be an important IRS man, or possibly even CIA.’
Connell laughed. ‘Oberholzer, an American government man? With that accent?’
‘You have accepted a Secretary of State with a German accent,’ said Henson crisply. ‘I see nothing extraordinary about Oberholzer being thought of as a possible IRS or CIA agent. Firman’s accent — and I take it that we are talking about the same man — isn’t contemporary British anyway. I’d call it expatriate mid-Atlantic. The same could be said of his vocabulary. If he had a Hungarian-American accent you wouldn’t find the CIA notion in the least odd.’
‘True.’
‘And we are not talking about what, in retrospect, we may think, but what the Swiss knew and believed from time to time,’ Krom reminded them. ‘I said that not all the victims of the Oberholzer organization were prepared to submit. Among those who chose to fight were two clients of the enquiry agent — one Spanish, the other an American — whose cases had certain common denominators. Both had their accounts in the Zurich head office of the same bank. At least three other known victims also banked there. The other common denominator was the method used by the so-called debt-collection agency.’
‘The one of whose methods Firman so much disapproves?’
‘The one of whose methods he says he disapproves, yes, Dr Henson.’
‘I didn’t understand how that worked anyway,’ Connell said. ‘I made a note to ask him a question about it. How do you make a pay-off that can’t either be watched or traced?’
‘A good question,’ Krom said. ‘I will add it to my own list of clarifications required. Anything else?’
‘The part played in the incident by Frau Kramer and the daughter bothers me,’ said Henson. ‘What were those two up to? Assisting or obliging the police? Getting back at Oberholzer for corrupting the good Kramer? Covering themselves against the charge that they had compounded a felony? That identity parade after the funeral doesn’t sound like a good police idea. Why didn’t they go through with the original plan and get Oberholzer out at the apartment? Then, he couldn’t have run, not the way he did anyway. And what was the idea of giving him those plastic slip-covers with the code-names on them? That makes no sense at all.’
‘Oh yes, it does, young woman,’ Krom chuckled. ‘And, as it happens, the sense that it makes ties in with your questions about Frau Kramer’s place in the affair.’
I listened intently to the next bit because I was just as keen to know the answers as Dr Henson, more perhaps; the same questions had puzzled me at the time and, at intervals, ever since.
‘Frau Kramer,’ Krom went on, ‘could not, I think, have ever made her husband a very happy man. She was one of those women who, at the same moment as they complain that their men do not climb higher and faster on the ladder of success, hang on to their coat-tails to make the climb more difficult, perhaps impossible. They are moral saboteurs, you might say. To be specific, Kramer had reached, as do many men in the organizations, his natural level of maximum attainment without either understanding why he would go no higher or recognizing and accepting his own limitations. In this refusal to accept he was abetted by his own wife. But when it came to Oberholzer’s approach, things were undoubtedly different. Ambitious women of Frau Kramer’s type often have broad streaks of self-righteousness in them. They desire the ends but reject the means. Or, rather, they do not wish to hear about the means.’
‘As if Lady Macbeth were to say that she didn’t want to know,’ remarked Connell.
‘Pardon?’ There was a short silence while Krom grappled with the allusion. ‘Well, yes, perhaps. I am sure Frau Kramer did know of the Oberholzer arrangement. It was just never openly discussed, so that she could say, with her hand on her heart, that she had never been told.’
‘Hence her and her daughter’s dislike of Oberholzer,’ commented Henson.
‘The daughter’s attitude was determined much more by the adverse affects on her own marriage, and position of respectability that a criminal scandal would have had. After Kramer’s second coronary attack in the hospital, and once she knew that he was quite unlikely to survive a third, Frau Kramer’s chief concern was for the money her husband had accumulated. All she wanted to know was whether or not she would be allowed to inherit it. Naturally, the police were in no hurry to enlighten her. Equally, she was in no position to ask questions about her husband’s private fortune without admitting that she had been a party to concealing the criminal acts that had made it. The daughter would probably have been prepared to abandon the money, or the prospect of it anyway. The mother could never have done that.’
‘Didn’t they have a lawyer to advise them?’ Connell enquired.
‘Of course. But what use is an honest lawyer when what you need is a dishonest one? No, she chose instead to give co-operation to the police. This, the police accepted gratefully, but remaining stiffly correct, without allowing their gratitude to show even for a moment.’