Eric Ambler - Siege at the Villa Lipp

Two months later, a whole Special Issue of The New Sociologist was devoted to a piece by Krom. Its title was: The Able Criminal, Notes for a Case-study.

I made no complaint about it at the time.

That wasn’t simply because, in order to oblige Mat Williamson, and discourage him from having me murdered, I was making myself scarce. I may have been incommunicado, but I wasn’t out of touch. I could have instructed lawyers if I’d wished to, or I could have told my people at Symposia to instruct lawyers. There were, indeed, some of them who urged me to do so. I didn’t because I thought it best to ignore the thing. Most international corporation lawyers and accountants are too busy trying to keep abreast of new tax legislation affecting their clients to bother their heads with publications like The New Sociologist.

I am not the first person to have made that sort of mistake, and I won’t be the last. However, it wasn’t until German publication of Krom’s book, Der kompetente Kriminelle, produced a whole crop of articles on the subject in the international news magazines and business journals, that I knew I had made a mistake.

So, it is against Krom’s irresponsible book, not his irresponsible article, that my formal complaint is made.

Not that there’s much to choose between them. The book, now being translated into four other languages, is essentially a revamped version of the article, padded to size with long winded footnotes, appendices, a bibliography and an index. There is little new material. The journalistic crossheads used to break the article up into digestible sections — phrases such as The Arnarchy of Extortion and The Criminal as Moral Philosopher — have become chapter headings.

Not many changes otherwise. The inaccuracy, falsity and total dishonesty of the original remain unqualified.

Frits Buhler Krom is a phony.

He came to see me in Brussels with his head full of preconceived notions. Nothing had been permitted to modify them. He knew what he had to say in order to prove his case. He has now said it.

Why, then, did he risk his skin on the battlefield of Cap d’ Ail? Though he couldn’t have known the kind of danger he would be running into, he was clearly prepared for trouble of some sort. The precautions he took in Brussels against the possibility of my being the kind of man who might like to have him killed tells us that. Why then?

So that he can now apply the respectable label of ‘case-study’ to the drivel he has written, of course. Why else? Now, he can pretend that, having journeyed bravely into the unknown and observed its wonders, he is simply reporting what he alone has seen for the enlightenment of scholars.

As poor Yves might have said, he is ‘all piss and wind’.

For what does this criminological Münchhausen have to tell us about his travels?

Well, once upon a time when he was in Zurich, he identified this man Oberholzer. Years later, he saw him again. Oberholzer, now, as then, the sole and supreme overlord of a vast international extortion conspiracy, agreed to talk and even make written statements about techniques used by able criminals in exchange for immunity from certain pressures Krom was in a position to apply. There were two victims of Oberholzer’s extortion racket who happened to be known to Krom. Their code-names were Kleister and Torten, and. .

And so on, and so. Until we get to the shrewd analysis of my ‘papers’.

Sample questions. Why, if the tax-avoidance consultancy service wasn’t a mere front, was it necessary to employ informers like the unfortunate Kramer? A genuine tax-consultant would naturally be given access to his clients’ banking accounts by the clients themselves. Isn’t it obvious that men like Kleister and Torten were never clients, only victims?

It doesn’t occur to him that men like K and T — men whom even he is prepared to describe in another part of the book, as ‘moneyed psychopaths’ — lie to the consultants they employ as readily as they lie to the revenue authorities they hope to cheat. When such clients tell you that they have three accounts, you naturally assume that they have six. For your own sake, if not for theirs, you’d better know for sure just where things stand.

His is a monochrome world of good-and-evil, innocence-and-guilt, truth-and-falsehood. If such a world exists, and perhaps it does exist in the privacy of some minds, then he is welcome to it. What he may not, must not, do is people it with real-life human beings such as Paul Oops-nearly-said-it Oberholzer, real-life business enterprises such as S. . a Inc., and real-life professional bodies such as the Institute of No-I-shouldn’t-mention-the-name.

There are some things he’s very good at not mentioning. They’re the things about which you’re not supposed to hear.

There’s no mention of Mat Williamson.

No mention of Placid Island.

No mention of Frank Yamatoku.

No mention of the murder of Yves Boularis.

No mention of the gift to us by his colleague, Professor Langridge, of an aerosol spray of ninhydrin and a camera.

There’s no mention of a lot of other things.

No one who has read Krom’s book, certainly no one who matters in the trust management field, has any doubt about the identity of the man and the Group he is indicting.

And it’s no good his retorting: ‘If the cap fits, wear it.’ As I told him at the Villa Lipp, no one concerned with the management of other people’s money can afford to ignore a smear. We’re too vulnerable.

I have the scars and mutilations to prove it.

What figure do I put on the damage?

Well, none of the cases against Professor Krom and his various publishers is yet sub judice so there can be no harm in my making a rough estimate. There’s still plenty of time to settle out of court after withdrawing the book.

To begin with, during a single month following the publication of Der kompetente Kriminelle, attendance at the two scheduled Symposia seminars was sixty per cent down. A temporary set-back? Far from it. During the month following, registrations for our big one of the year, the annual Paris get-together, were down seventy per cent. We also received polite notes of regret from all but one of our star speakers.

So, I decided to cancel.

Note that please, I decided.

I have spoken of ‘my people’ in Brussels. I was referring, of course, to my senior staff — the head of research, the internal security man, those I had hand-picked myself — to whom I had always delegated a certain amount of authority. The Mat Williamson ‘ultimatum’ had made it necessary for me to delegate more, but I had managed.

I had managed by going back to using the methods Carlo and I had used before I’d been fool enough to send those stupid roses to Kramer’s funeral.

I used an office accommodation service in a city where I wasn’t known. It was a good service, properly equipped with telephones, telex and trained operators, and efficiently run. That was how I kept in touch. That was how I went on making the important decisions. Some wouldn’t have called it delegating at all.

That, it seemed, was not what Mat had intended.

I used to go to the accommodation service office every day at noon and look at any telexes that had come in for me during the morning. Then, if I thought it necessary, I would call Brussels and talk to one or two of my people there.

Three months after the publication of Krom’s book we had quite a lot to talk about. The virtual boycotting of our seminars had been only the beginning of our troubles. An old and valued associate, a tax lawyer with whom we’d done a lot of business, had described the nature of our ultimate predicament in uncompromising terms.