Eric Ambler - Siege at the Villa Lipp

Not that we ever spied on anyone; I don’t mean that. If anything, as I now realize, we were too easy-going. Naturally, we always took an interest in the identities of those who attended our seminars, in their countries of origin, the passports they carried and the fields of their specializations; but those little dossiers we compiled were primarily for the benefit of our faculty lecturers. From the start it was always Symposia policy to admit to our seminars, however delicate the subject matter, all who were prepared to remit with their applications cheques for the registration fees. We expect the major government revenue services to be represented and they usually are, often adding — especially when the lecturer is himself a former revenue official — a certain liveliness to the discussion periods. The atmosphere, though, is essentially one of friendly rivalry and mutual respect. Both sides are simply doing their jobs as best they can and with pretty clear ideas about one another’s strengths and weaknesses. Discretion is practised, of course, but almost never to the point of play-acting. I know of only two cases of persons registering under false names.

One was a journalist working for a French left-wing scandal sheet. The seminar he attended was devoted mainly to the subject of discretionary and exempt trust concepts. He pretended to be a lawyer. In the article he wrote following this masquerade, he managed not only to mount a totally irrelevant attack on multinational corporations but also to reveal that he did not quite know what a trust was.

The other case was, as we shall see, different.

The journalist had been spotted immediately. Krom was not spotted at all; chiefly because the name under which he registered was not false enough. It had been borrowed, with its owner’s knowledge and consent, so that the usual intelligence cross-check turned up nothing to alert us.

In my official capacity as Director of the Institute it was natural that I should take the chair and introduce the speakers at one or two sessions. The first of those I presided over was in the afternoon of the second day. It ended at five: An hour later Krom introduced himself to me.

His method of doing so had an unpleasant touch of the macabre in it and was for me, I freely admit, highly disturbing. No doubt he intended it to be.

The receptionist telephoned me in my room.

He was a man who knew me and my voice well. He still asked carefully if he was speaking to Mr Firman.

‘Certainly you are. What is it?’

We usually spoke French. Now he began speaking in English. He was obviously reading what he had to say.

‘I am asked to state, Mr Firman, that Mr Kramer and Mr Oberholzer of Zürich are waiting in the lobby here to see you.’

Since they were both dead men — Kramer being literally dead and Oberholzer figuratively so — the announcement gave me quite a jolt.

I said: ‘I see. Both these gentlemen are there?’

‘That is what I am instructed to say, sir.’ The tone of his voice was unnaturally formal. I thought it possible that he believed he was dealing with a police matter.

As we were in Brussels, I knew that possibility to be remote. We were on excellent terms with the authorities there. In fact, if I could have assumed that it was only a police matter, I would, at that moment, have been much relieved.

‘I’ll be down in a few minutes, Jules.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Still very formal, painfully so.

I didn’t wait a few minutes. I went down straight away and by the emergency stairs. This enabled me to get a look at the vicinity of Jules’s reception desk without crossing the lobby.

There were some new arrivals at the hotel checking in, or waiting to do so, and there was quite a crowd by the desk. None among them was known to me or looked in the least like a person who could have intimidated an experienced hotel receptionist.

Jules was pretending to study his reservation plot-board on the wall behind the counter, and I could see, even at that distance, that he was in a state of shock. I had another, more careful, look around, then went over quickly and elbowed my way through to him. The indignant looks his two assistants gave me were easy to ignore. I tapped him on the shoulder. It was as if he had been expecting arrest and was now resigned to it. He leaned wearily against the wall before he turned.

He was, I knew, in his sixties. Now, grey and sweating, he looked eighty and unlikely to last much longer. When he recognized me he fluttered his hands and started to protest weakly against my invasion of his territory. I cut him short.

‘Stop yammering. Where are they?’

‘There’s only one, the man in three-two-six. But. . ‘

‘Name?’

‘Dopff. He is over in the corner by the big flower arrangement, and he is watching us speak. I beg you, Mr Firman, please. . ‘

I did not wait to hear what he was begging me to do, or not do, but turned and walked straight across to where the man was sitting.

My memory for names and faces is good, very good, but it has its limits. I could remember that a person named Dopff was registered for the seminar and that he was from Luxembourg, but I couldn’t recall his profession. That meant only one thing: whatever he was — lawyer, banker, amateur tax-evader, or government spy — he had been checked out as a potential client and, as such, found wanting.

As I approached, I recognized him; he was the elderly man who had been sitting in the middle of the third row an hour or so earlier, listening with rapt attention to my introduction of the main speaker. I had noticed him partly because he had actually seemed interested in my ritual listing of the speaker’s qualifications — they were all there printed in the official programme he had in his hand — but mostly because he appeared to wear a permanent smile. The smile, I had noted later as we were all leaving the conference room, was an optical illusion which vanished when you came closer to him. It was produced by the combination of an upper lip shaped like a circumflex accent and a mouthful of large, very white teeth, the kind that look like cheap dentures even when they are not.

He was showing them to me now as I approached him; only this was no illusory smile; it was a blatantly triumphant grin. Had I not needed badly to know who he really was, what he wanted and what sort of threat he constituted, I would have walked straight on past him just for the pleasure of watching the result through the mirror on the adjacent wall. I took refuge instead in courtesy. The really heavy-handed, old-world stuff can make it possible for one to discharge an enormous amount of anger without the object of the anger becoming fully aware of it. He may suspect but he cannot be certain. With luck, one will cause him considerable unease without giving him any excuse to take offence.

Unfortunately, with a man as sure of himself as Krom, this form of attack can never be wholly effective.

The common language of our seminar has always been English, so it was in English that I addressed him.

‘Mr Dopff, is it? I understand that you wish to see me.’

To the grin he added an insolent stare. ‘No, Mr Firman, that is not at all what I wish. I have already seen you, clearly and unmistakably, before. That was in Zürich five years ago when you were calling yourself Oberholzer.’

‘My name is Firman, sir.’

He went on as if I had not spoken. ‘So, I have seen you twice. What I intend to do from now on is to talk with you.’ He patted the arm of the empty chair beside him. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

I remained standing. ‘I am sure that you will understand that I am a busy man, Mr Dopff. I simply came to tell you that the receptionist here gave me a strange message, from you he tells me, about two persons of whom I have never heard. It seemed proper and sensible to let you know that the message was either garbled or misdirected. That is all.’