The only person near to me then who would have enjoyed the joke was Mat. Jokes about people stepping on metaphorical banana skins always made him laugh. Luckily, I never told him that one.
It was the order in which things were happening then, not caution, that stopped me. Mat had already known of Carlo and of my connection with him — I was never able to discover how he had known — before we had met in the New Hebrides. The only consolation for me had been that he had told me about the Lech-Oberholzer operation while still believing me to be a louche character named Perrivale (Perry) Smythson whose brains he was trying to pick about certain loopholes said to exist in the Anglo-French Condominium Law. I had begun by taking him for a local boy who had made good. When the matter of our identities had been straightened out, and sufficient time had been given to mutual inspection, exploratory talks about the possibility of joint ventures had taken us a little farther. I would report our talks to Carlo and get his reactions. A further meeting place convenient for both of us was chosen — Singapore. Of course, I never heard from Carlo on the subject; the virus must already have been at work; but his unexpected going stirred everything up and made it all move faster. I mourned Carlo and needed distractions. When next I met Mat our Symposia project had become a discussable deal. There had been neither time nor inclination then for banana-skin jokes.
In those early days of our relationship Mat treated me with the deference due to an elder statesman. Some of this, of course, was part of the process of buttering me up and at the same time making me feel old, but not all. I had knowledge that he might find useful. He would listen with more than token attention to what I had to say, even if it involved criticisms of his judgement. For instance, I hadn’t approved of the pattern of business deals he’d been weaving around the Pacific, and I told him so.
He went into a long spiel about the vacuums created by the abdication of old imperialisms. There was an urgent need of entrepreneurial skills to stimulate constructive business activity at provincial levels, to bring out the money hidden in mattresses so that it could work for all and to engage the non-Chinese in major enterprises.
‘They’re either just coming down from the trees,’ he concluded, ‘or emerging from extremely ancient feudalisms. Someone’s got to get things moving for them.’
‘That’s what the invest-in-the-future type con-men usually.say when they’re finally caught.’
His ability to look mystified while deciding his next move used to impress me very much in those days. ‘What have con-men to do with me, Paul?’
‘Con-men like that are also very difficult to prosecute.’
‘Also?’
‘Those entrepreneurial skills of yours, Mat, are being used in a way that is well understood by any policeman. By the British, the offence of exploiting credit facilities on the here-today-gone-tomorrow principle is called “long-term fraud”. In Germany it’s “Stossbetrug”, in France “carambouillage”, and in America most bunco-squads call it “scam”, I believe. Authorities everywhere have difficulty in getting convictions mainly because they’re always short of the kind of auditors who know what to look for, where to look for it, and above all, can work fast enough to grab the paper-work before it disappears. You, Mat, have something extra going for you because, as well as moving from corporate set-up to corporate set-up in an ingenious way, you’re also moving backwards and forwards between national jurisdictions. You’re almost impossible to catch, except in one area.’
The broad smile. ‘I know nothing of sharp practices, Paul. Please enlighten me.’
‘Two policemen of different nationalities could one day get together, maybe through reading an Interpol bulletin, and regret that there is nothing they can do jointly to bust you. But one or other of them, or both, depending on the countries concerned, might decide to clobber you with a breach of some exchange control regulation. It would still be slow going for them, and they might never get a conviction on the fraud charge, but there’s one thing a lot of these law maniacs can always get done quickly. They can have bank accounts frozen pending enquiries. For the victim, I’m told, it can be a nasty, lingering disease that prevents his enjoying life to the full.’
He tapped my arm gently. ‘You’re absolutely right, Paul. That’s been my own view for a long time and I’m delighted to hear that you share it.’ He made it sound as if he’d been testing me; and, for all I knew, he had been. ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘I took my name out of it months ago, and not just because I didn’t like what some of those rascals I’d trusted were getting up to. It was the local Chinese who decided me in the end. That’s one of the clubs that won’t be licked and can’t be joined. They’re natural business leaders, the overseas Chinese. Some people compare them with the Jews — diaspora, ghetto life, preservation of cultural identity despite assimilation, that sort of stuff. I say that’s superficial. I say that they’re the one multinational corporation that’ll never be busted under any anti-trust law anywhere. Why? Complete local autonomy for every single unit of accounting is there for all to see, that’s why. So where’s the corporation? It’s programmed into their genes. Tell you something else about the Chinese. . ‘
He paused. He’d been talking more or less freely to a listener he’d considered as safe. Now, though, there was something that he considered important to be said; so he was reviewing it again before letting me hear it.
‘Paul, the Chinese can’t be frightened in the same way as the rest.’
By the ‘rest’, I later found, he meant the rest of mankind.
The nature of his peculiar ideas, about intimidation and the techniques of frightening people into absolute obedience emerged from what he then told me about something that had happened to him in Java. He had, of course, been making his first million at the time, so his recollection of the incident was pleasantly light-hearted.
‘Just getting about the place was terribly difficult,’ he said. ‘There were bandits calling themselves religious patriots raiding the villages, and bits of the civil war still going on everywhere outside the large towns. It wasn’t safe to travel by road, even from Djakarta to Bandung, without a military escort, and not all that safe with one. So, all the sizeable towns were jammed with people. A top priority got you a bed, but not much else. A room to yourself? Rare, very rare. The Russians were among the greatest friends of the revolution, but the Soviet Embassy had to function for months from a bungalow in the western areas, though in East Java, and especially in places like Surabaja, Jogjakarta and Semarang, it stayed difficult. That was because the hard-cores on both sides were still using the interior as a battle-field. God, how I hate hard-cores! Give me the pragmatists every time.’
‘I hadn’t realized, Mat, that you’d ever found it necessary to give that choice any thought.’
‘You’ve never worked for a revolutionary government, that’s for sure. Well, I had a top priority then, and let me tell you, whenever I had to take trips East I used that priority as if I were Genghis Khan. I’d found that the best way of getting through your business is comfort in those parts was to commandeer a foreign consulate. There were several available. No foreign consuls in them just then, of course, on account of the troubles, but the compounds and houses were still there, and in most cases the old native servants had stayed on. In theory they were there protecting property belonging to friendly foreign governments entitled to diplomatic status and immunities.’