‘As long as you understand that I may decline to answer those I don’t like, go ahead.’
‘You said that you had prepared a number of discussion papers and that you could be questioned on them. You did not say how many papers, only that they would cover your activities as Oberholzer for a period of three years. My first question is, what is the scope of the activities described? How is the material as a whole organized?’
‘It’s mostly anecdotal, I am afraid, like the first paper. So much is hearsay, of course. I can’t help that.’
‘No, not if you persist in trying to convince us of the existence of senior partners whose orders you meekly obeyed, or separate groups of evil men who did any dirty work that your leader might deem necessary. If you could abandon that pretence it would be helpful.’
‘I said that I would try to answer your questions, Professor, not debate your assertions. You asked about the scope of the activities described in the other papers. I have tried to answer your question. Dr Connell complains that the first paper has holes in it. Do you agree with him?’
‘I go farther. For me, it is in all respects unsatisfactory.’
‘Not exciting enough do you mean, Professor? Not enough murder and mayhem?’
Connell tried to take over. ‘He means that there’s too much shadow and not enough substance. For example. .’
Krom stopped him with a look.
‘Dr Connell was about to raise a question which we all seem to have asked ourselves. Accepting for a moment the fiction that you were never a principal, only an agent, what about this debt-collection agency that you say was or is employed by your employers to extort their fees? Where is it based? How does it work? Please tell us all about this remarkable institution, Mr Firman.’
I smiled. ‘That is the subject of one of the papers you were asking me about.’
‘An entire paper?’
‘It was a complex organization. And please note that it no longer exists. It was originally based in Luxembourg, with branches in Hanover, Rome, Paris and London. It went out of business years ago.’
‘Soon after I saw you in Zürich, in fact.’
‘The two events were not related, Professor. In any case I’m sure you would prefer to read what I’ve written on the subject rather than have it piecemeal.’
Dr Connell stuck his neck out again. ‘Does what you’ve written about explain how you, that is they, got the money without the victims’ knowing where it went?’
I waited expectantly for Krom to intervene, but this time he let the question through without protest. No doubt he was curious himself.
‘I don’t think I understand,’ I said. ‘By victims you mean debtors, I take it.’
‘Call them what you like. I call them victims. Now, how did it function? I guess the process of collection would start with a letter saying that the Luxembourg Finance Corporation, or whatever you called it, had taken over the debt and so kindly pay up without further ado or get clobbered. Right?’
‘I didn’t call the agency anything, and the Lech-Firman partnership was very far from being its major client. Its name, by the way, was Agence Euro-Fiduciare.’
‘Meaningless, but looks respectable I guess. Okay. Now, how about that first move?’
‘It would be of the kind you described. It sometimes produced results.’
‘But not often?’
‘Not often, I would say, no.’
‘So then you got tough. Yes, I know. They got tough.’
‘When the agency purchased the debt from us they would naturally receive an account of the services we had rendered the client. This account would include a complete statement of the client’s financial situation according to our records.’
‘Everything not on record back home, you mean?’
‘A complete statement, as I said. This would include all assets, however held and where held, sometimes together with a summary of the last official tax return made by the client to his domestic revenue authority. Where exchange controls had been evaded, copies of the relevant documents would be provided instead. If, say, from some fringe of the sterling area, money had been transferred to finance a transaction in real-estate or gold, this would be documented as a reminder.’
‘Oh boy!’
‘At the same time new instructions about the way the debt was to be paid would be issued.’
‘I’ll bet they would. That was one of the holes I wanted to see filled in. How was it arranged so that Kleister, and others like him who strongly resented and resisted being screwed, didn’t know, when they’d finally decided that they had to pay up, who’d been screwing them? Their first thought would have been you as the tax-consultant. Right?’
‘The partnership always dealt at arm’s length.’
‘You mean through cut-outs, I take it. Okay, so when things got tough, they weren’t able to find you. Right? But they could find Euro-Fiduciare, eh?’
‘The agency had its own methods,’ I said austerely. The pieces of real meat I had to give were not going to be tossed over in response to the first yaps.
Connell didn’t like being told to wait. He tried jumping for it. ‘So do kidnappers-for-ransom,’ he said; ‘have their own methods, I mean. So do blackmailers and extortionists. But there is a moment all of them have to face. That’s the moment when they pick up the money. Okay, they tell the mark to leave it in the middle of a desert in used twenties and a transparent bag with “Don’t Fence Me In” painted on it in red, but they still have to go there and pick it up. That’s when things usually start going wrong. Their helicopter has engine trouble or the pilot turns out to be a gamma-minus navigator who puts down nowhere near the loot. The police have been brought in by the victim or his family after all. The bills have been chemically marked and are, used or not, traceable. Some cop or FBI man hidden behind a rock there watching the pickup gets bitten by a rattlesnake and yells. A gun goes off accidentally. Anything and everything can happen. How did the agency make sure that, whoever else got hurt, they didn’t?’
‘In my paper on the subject I give examples to show how the whole thing worked.’
I stopped there and poured myself the last of the coffee. Henson was sitting motionless with an unlit cigarette in one hand and her lighter poised in the other. Krom and Connell were both leaning forward expectantly. All three were now, metaphorically speaking, and indeed almost literally, slavering.
‘Tell us about it,’ ordered Krom.
I shrugged submissively but with no thought of obeying.
I knew that if they were allowed to gobble up all the food that had been prepared for them, just because the smell of it had reached their nostrils, there would be none left for tomorrow.
Yes, that’s how I was still thinking. I still hadn’t realized even then that, for me as host at the Villa Lipp, there wasn’t going to be a tomorrow.
‘It isn’t really all that difficult, Professor,’ I said. ‘Look at it this way. The popular jargon now calls those services Carlo gave the old black marketeers, ‘laundering money’. All the debt-collection people did was set up another sanitary process to suit their own special needs. In my paper on the whole subject, I call it, ‘waste-disposal’. Laundered money is money cleansed of its associations with pockets it has been in. Waste-disposal money just disappears into a sewage system, one with so many outfalls that no particular deposit can ever, once it has left the sink, be followed or traced to its ultimate destination.’
Krom looked sour. ‘Your metaphor is appropriately anal, Mr Firman, but I didn’t ask for metaphors. I want specifics, facts of the kind that a banker or a police accountant can get his teeth into.’
‘And facts you shall have,’ I said. ‘You’ll find them all in my next paper. For now, though, you’ll just have to be satisfied with paper number one and metaphors. Unless, that is, any of you would like to try solving the money-transfer problem that seems to worry Dr Connell. As a technical exercise, I mean. I don’t mind giving friendly advice.’