Eric Ambler - Siege at the Villa Lipp

Well of course there isn’t. No criminal law has been broken, and nothing injurious to the public welfare has occurred; not, that is, unless you consider the spectacle of EEC bureaucrats going about with egg on their faces injurious to the public welfare. There are, in fact, large sections of the European public who find such sights highly beneficial, and worth every centime or pfennig of their cost.

And not even Krom, by the way, had been altogether unaware of the inconvenient questions which his theories invited. He had dealt with them, cutely, by asking them before his audience could do so.

‘Why, I may be asked, should the word “Able” be used to categorize this well-adapted but minor sub-genus within the human race? Would not the term Successful Crook be at once more accurate and more suitable? My answer must be that it would not. The word “crook” is imprecise and the word “successful” would in this context be misleading, for it could be taken to mean “fortunate”.’ The Able Criminal is, no doubt, fortunate in that he is successful; but he is successful not through some happy series of accidents or because the police authority concerned with him is incompetent; he is successful always and only because he is able.

‘Why, then, is he a criminal at all? What, if he really exists, can possibly motivate him? The desire for wealth and the power that goes, or is said to go, with it? Hardly. Men capable of planning and executing the butter coup or having the fiscal wit to create illusory businesses which make real profits could surely become multi-millionaires quite — I was about to say “legitimately” — perhaps I should say instead “legally”‘. As legally, anyway, as unit trust managers or currency speculators are said to conduct their respective operations.

‘But our Mr X is not attracted by the blessings of legitimacy and legality, only by the extent to which the appearances of them may be put to use. He is a white-collar criminal in the sense that he is an educated one, yes; but his crimes are the products not of breaches of trust — the hand in the till, the falsified accounts — but of breaches of faith. And the faith he breaches is that of faith in established patterns of order. He is, in short, an anarchist.

‘What kind of anarchist? Well, of one thing we can be certain. He will not be stupid. He will not have taken to his heart the works of the ineffable Marcuse, nor troubled himself with the ravings of those hapless social philosophers, those paladins of the lollipop set, Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord. He will believe neither in the Spectacular Society nor in Situationist Intervention. He will not be a carrier of bombs in plastic shopping-bags. But his tactical thinking will have much in common with that of some of the better disciplined urban guerrilla groups — those who work by confounding bureaucratic controls and exploiting the resultant confusion for profit. Whether that profit be ideological or solely financial is a matter which need not concern us here. The first step is to recognize the nature of the difficulties facing us. In the jungles of international bureaucracy, including those of the multinational corporations, there is always plenty of dense undergrowth in which able men may conceal themselves and from which they may mount attacks. The task of those attempting to flush them out will never be easy.’

We had one room in the office suite which was regularly checked for bugs. I sat in there to take the call to Mat.

Our conversation lasted less than a minute. Most of it consisted of code-words suggesting that we were in the fertilizer business. They conveyed, however, first a top priority blown-cover alert from me with a request for orders. From Mat came an instruction to go to London forthwith by the company plane, and be prepared to return to Brussels that same night. The journey was to be made unobtrusively. If possible it should not be known that I had left the hotel at all.

Finding the pilot took time because he was in bed with some girl; but he had obeyed standing orders, which ensured that he was always on call in an emergency, and, once found, he responded promptly. For the salaries we paid we expected efficiency. When I got to the airport he had already obtained a clearance to land at Southend and filed a flight plan. Customs clearances presented no problem. The only baggage I carried was my Brussels room-key with its heavy brass number-tag. By eleven-thirty I was in London.

Mat usually stayed at Claridge’s, but this time he had chosen to hole up in a rather seedy Kensington hotel.

I had twitted him about it when I had seen him some weeks earlier. What, I had asked, had he been trying to prove? That he was just a simple island wog being victimized by the wicked monopoly capitalists who had stolen his forefathers’ birthright? And whom did he hope to impress with this nonsense? The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office people he was dealing with, who knew to a man that he was a graduate of the London School of Economics and had attended Stanford Law School? Or Anglo-Anzac Phosphate who thought of him chiefly as the expert on Pacific tax-haven trust laws appointed by a Canadian bank to make sure that many mangy old Chief kept his nose clean and got his sums right?

There had been no answering smile. About some things one no longer makes jokes.

‘Paul, there is only one person I have to impress at the movement, Chief Tebuke. You ought to know why, without my having to spell it out for you. If we want real power in an independent Placid Island with a dollar-linked currency and beneficent corporation laws, the appearance of that power must be vested initially in the historically acceptable indigenous figure who can give it a glaze of respectability. The granting of independence must seem, especially in North America, to be a belated act of simple justice to which no honest man, whatever his race, creed or colour, could possibly object. For how long did the Australian Government tolerate the fiscal independence of Norfolk Island when they found that it was taking a slice our of their tax cake? Just as long as it took to pass the legislation cancelling Norfolk’s right to take it. No effective right of appeal existed because there was no indisputably valid claim to sovereignty. Any rich fool can buy an island and proclaim it a sovereign state. On the mainland he need not even be so very rich. All he needs to do there is back an up-and-coming separatist movement, or a bunch of dissident army officers, and play it patiently by ear. But how or what he buys into is unimportant. It’s getting the recognition that counts. Not just a tolerated measure of autonomy, but de facto, de jure, UN-approved, copper-bottomed sovereignty, the works.’

‘I only asked you why you weren’t staying at Claridge’s.’

‘And I’m telling you. In this case the key to recognition lies in Chief Tebuke, our symbol of both legitimacy and self-determination. In order to control him I must retain his trust and affection. In the islands, trust and affection are based on the strict observance of certain social rules, which you might choose to call etiquette but which I prefer to call a code of manners. I am not the Chief, but an adviser. Therefore, I must live in a lesser place. He happens to be impressed by the Hilton. So, I must not live in Claridge’s where heads of state are known to stay. I could live on a lower floor of the Hilton, of course, but the less I see of him the better. This is well out of his way. What’s the matter with it anyhow? I’ve lived in worse hotels and so have you. You’re getting soft, Paul.’

That one had been rather more long-winded than usual, probably because he had thought it necessary to mix some falsehood in with the truth; but, apart from that, you could call it a typically sanctimonious Mat reproof.