by Brian Lumley
“Before we sat down at this table I took the opportunity to speak to an acquaintance of mine whose interests also are financial. Perhaps he would care to enlarge upon what I have said?” He carefully sat down, his eyes steady upon those of a red-haired, very fat and florid man seated opposite.
As Financial Friend heaved wheezingly to his feet the general consensus of opinion taken from those seated about the table would have been that if overeating didn’t get him, pressure of work would. And at least half of those present would not have minded that at all. Financial Friend was from the Inland Revenue, and he was not in the right job. His shirt and jacket were far too tight, and when he spoke his voice was far too highly pitched:
“Gentlemen,” he wheezed puffily, “Mr. Garrison pays his taxes—some of them, anyway. He pays an awful lot. He would pay a great deal more except that he has the very best accountants in the land, possibly in the world, working for him. That is no exaggeration: I suspect that he pays them more than he pays us! What he does pay us is…” he shook his head and blinked his eyes rapidly in an expression of astonishment, “is an awesome figure! I believe that someone once said of The Beatles, that if we had another ten equally successful groups, then we could abolish income tax for the masses. That was an exaggeration, of course, but if said of our Mr. Garrison it would be much more literally true! Awesome, yes, and yet—as has already been said in connection with him—a mere drop in the ocean. In Garrison’s ocean, that is! And getting hold of even that drop might well be likened to squeezing blood from a stone…
“I only wish there was a way—and you may believe me when I say we are working at it—of getting hold of some of the taxes we’re sure he has avoided paying. That’s all…” He continued to wheeze for a few moments more, then collapsed flabbily into his seat.
The Chairman at once rose and took up the thread, redirecting the meeting’s course:
“Of course, gentlemen, we must be careful not to allow ourselves to dwell too deeply on Mr. Garrison’s considerable—or should we say incredible—wealth. Nor upon his attachment to it, which is only natural. Some might even say laudable. How he got it might be much more illuminating, for quite frankly his roots were only very austere. In fact only a little over ten years ago he was a Corporal serving in the Royal Military Police. And he might still be a member of that estimable Corps if a terrorist bomb had not blinded him in Belfast. After that…” and he went quickly on to vaguely outline something of Garrison’s relationship with Thomas Schroeder, and of the benefits he had acquired upon the German industrialist’s death. In all he was on his feet for some twelve minutes, after which he was glad to sit down again and hand over to MI6.
Intelligence was not at all typical, in no way a stereotype. Small, grubby, with badly bitten fingernails and unevenly cropped sandy hair, he more readily portrayed a sleepless, bankrupt greengrocer. Only when he spoke did it become apparent that his appearance was a front. His voice was clear and cutting, his sentences short and void of the usual security or police jargon. He gave the impression, too, that he would have been delighted to avoid the use of the word “alleged,” but that in Garrison’s case such was quite impossible.
“Gents, the implication of this meeting is that Garrison’s a crook. By crook I mean a criminal, local or international or both. Well, if he is then he’s the cleverest of them all. Put it this way: he’s off and running and already overtaken the hare! He’s so far ahead we don’t have a hope in hell of catching him. Not yet. But…if he is a crook then he’ll make a mistake. They all do sooner or later.
“Okay, let’s assume he is. First of all I’ll tell you what he’s not into—simply because we don’t yet know what he is into! He’s not into gambling, even though he owns a big slice of a London casino. That’s not to say he doesn’t gamble; he does, and phenomenally well. But there’s no legislation against a man’s good luck. He doesn’t organize gambling, that’s all. He’s not into drugs; he doesn’t use them or push them. He’s not into sex—vice, that is. Oh, he occasionally fools around with a couple of high-class ladies, and he has a regular ride in the city—that is to say a mistress, a kept woman—but his heart would seem to belong to the woman he lives with, one Vicki Maler, an alleged German national. Actually, we don’t quite know what to make of her. Her case is as weird as his, maybe weirder, but I’ll explain that in a moment…
“Right, so we can strike narcotics, prostitution and gambling. He is not into the protection rackets, not into smuggling or gunrunning or fraud. Not that we can discover, anyway. He has no big deals going with any known crime syndicate, here or abroad. Which means we can also strike the Mafia, extortion, etc.” He paused and sighed.
“Garrison would appear, therefore, to be on the up and up, honest as the day is long. Well, maybe not too honest. Inland Revenue doesn’t like him because he dodges,” he shrugged. “But if that’s a crime we’re a nation of criminals! So what are we left with?
“He doesn’t mug old ladies, doesn’t even spit on the pavement. A thief? A terrorist? That isn’t even in his nature! He’s an ex-cop, albeit a military cop. So, to echo our Chairman’s question, where did he get his money?
“You’d think we’d have trouble finding out, eh? Well, we had a little trouble, but not a lot. In fact as soon as we stopped hunting haggis and began to accept the facts at face value it was easy. Everything he has is legitimate! Everything!” MI6 glanced out of the corner of his eye at Inland Revenue. “With the possible exception of what he is alleged to owe certain parties in certain quarters…
“So why has it taken us so long to discover he’s legitimate?” Again he shrugged. “Easy. How can any guy with that kind of money be legitimate? Is it possible?
“Well, it would certainly appear to be—but not without a few mildly disturbing discrepancies, ambiguities and anomalies. Let me explain:
“I said Garrison isn’t a racketeer or terrorist. That seems to be true enough—but there do appear to be tenuous links. As you already know he was blinded by a terrorist bomb. IRA, Belfast 1972. Now let me make a point here and say he is officially blind. I’ve seen the records. Army records, medical records, the lot. Permanently blind.” He stood nodding his head for a moment, knuckles on the table. “Blind, yes…but I’ll come back to that.
“Two years ago the IRA were after him again. At least that’s the way it looks. A London-based Irishman with old IRA connections tried to kill him. Something went wrong. The Paddy blew himself to bits instead. That sort of thing happens. But leave it for the moment.
“Then there’s a much more sinister sort of organization called Nazism. Thomas Schroeder was an ex-SS Colonel. That’s not strange—a great many of their top ranks were set free and lots of them still occupy positions of power. Contrary to popular belief, they weren’t all villains. Schroeder, so far as we know, wasn’t a villain. Or he was, but not in the usual poisonous, Jew-killing sort of way. Anyway, he wasn’t taking any chances. He never was brought to trial. Him and a young SS-Scharführer called Wilhem Klinke—later Willy Koenig—knocked over a truckload of SS bullion and disappeared with it, probably into Switzerland but we don’t know that for sure. We don’t know that they stole the gold, but it seems a fair bet. That was towards the end, February 1945.
“When Schroeder died some ten years ago Koenig went to work for Garrison. For some reason known only to himself, the old Colonel not only made sure his money was transferred to Garrison but also his main man. So, a link, however tenuous, with Nazism.
“And another link is a guy called Gareth Wyatt. Wyatt was a doctor, a psychiatrist whom many supposed to be a quack. Certain parties tried to tie him in with a British escape route for the type of Nazis who were villains.
“Well, when the IRA had their second bash at Garrison, they also had a go at Wyatt. We don’t know why, except that Garrison had been undergoing treatment at Wyatt’s place. The psychiatrist had a house in Sussex. I say he had a house, because when the IRA or whoever were finished there was no more house. They took
it out. They also took out Wyatt and Garrison’s wife. That is to say, the two died in the explosion—if it was an explosion….” He paused and frowned.
“Now this is a funny thing. Funny peculiar, not ha-ha. Wyatt’s house was big and old, your old country home sort of place in its own grounds, much like this one. Just what happened there—what really happened—will never be known. But the house isn’t there anymore. Not a brick. The grass grows green over the place where it stood. Underneath—” he shrugged, “the foundations are fused like blast furnace slag!
“Anyway, about the same time we also have the disappearance of Willy Koenig. Not dead, no, simply…let’s say ‘retired.’ Where to, who knows? But definitely not dead. Koenig is a very rich man in his own right, as well you might expect if you remember the SS gold, and he still makes good use of his money. A lot of it is tied up with Garrison’s. But ‘disappeared’ is certainly the right word because no one seems to know where he is. He simply isn’t seen anymore…
“Let’s go back to Garrison’s blindness. To put the record straight, and no matter what the old medical records say, Garrison is not blind! He hasn’t been for at least two years, since about the same time as his wife and Wyatt got hit. One theory in my branch is that his blindness was psychosomatic, and that Wyatt was treating him and was successful. That might also explain the link between them. Anyway he was blind, isn’t now, but continues to wear a pair of blind-man specs. So does the new woman in his life, this Vicki Maler.
“Now for a long time, apparently, Garrison has had dealings with a German firm of oculists—or not exactly oculists but specialists in mechanical aids to sight. This firm supplied him with a lot of expensive equipment when he really was blind. Their latest job for him is the manufacture of several sets of contact lenses, for both him and Vicki Maler. But these are to be very special lenses. Contact lenses to let light in but not out! Like one-way windows. He wants to be able to see things without his eyes being seen. Okay, but surely ordinary contact lenses would suffice? Or again, maybe it’s a special condition of his eyes.” He paused, stood for a moment longer, said: “A break, I think, gents. You’ll excuse me but I’d like a cigarette; also I’d like to sit a while. Would you mind if I carry on seated and smoking?”
No one minded. All of them were fascinated. MI6 sat, produced cigarettes, lit one and relaxed a little in his chair before continuing. “Okay, we were talking about special conditions, anomalies and such. Garrison’s lady, Vicki Maler, is just such an anomaly. She’s in the process of becoming British but holds a German passport which says she was born in 1947. That would make her thirty-six years old but she looks ten years younger than that. Red hair, elfin features, lovely figure—beautiful!
“They travel a fair bit, Garrison and the woman, and they use airports. Her passport has been checked out—discreetly. It’s genuine and was issued in Hamburg in 1960 when she was thirteen. The only thing is—” he paused, cleared his throat and looked at the faces watching him, “—that the Vicki Maler the passport was issued to died in 1974! Oh, and one other thing. She, too, was blind…
“Fine, so for some unknown reason Garrison’s woman has ‘assumed’ an identity other than her real one…Or has she? Well, here are a couple of pretty macabre facts for you:
“One—in the early summer of 1974 the body of one Vicki Maler was placed in so-called ‘cryogenic suspension’ at Schloss Zonigen in the Swiss Alps.
“Two—this was done on the posthumous instructions of Thomas Schroeder, dead since ’73…
“And three—two years ago that same Vicki Maler’s frozen remains disappeared right out of the Schloss!
“As for the Swiss authorities: well they’ve neatly tied the whole thing up and buried it—and I can’t say I blame them. One thing, however, is very definite: Vicki Maler’s name has been lifted from the register. That is to say, not only is there no longer a corpse answering to her description in the fridge, but the records say there never was one.
“Now, there’s a lot more about Garrison that we know, some of it very interesting, some not so interesting. I don’t propose to bore you with trivia, and there are those of you yet to have your say. But there are two more things of major importance. One is Garrison’s money, its source. It wasn’t easy to dig up all the facts out of their various crevices, and there’s doubtless a lot we’ve missed, but most of his bedrock resources—his bulk cash and holdings—all came his way at that same time two years ago. Through Thomas Schroeder. Now Schroeder had been dead since 1973, but he’d left his executors with clear and foolproof instructions. Garrison got the lot.
“Next, I said he didn’t control gambling. That’s true. But he does—or did—gamble. Not so much now, not at all that I know of, but he did. This was something else that started two years ago. In fact for a period of something like four months, shortly after the Wyatt business, he seems to have done little else. And very successfully.
“He hit just about every major football pools syndicate in the world—eighteen of them in all, top wins that is—and jackpots every time! But never with any publicity. We were called in by Littlewoods to see how he was fiddling it. He wasn’t. But we stuck to him anyway, and what that led us to was literally unbelievable. Gents, when Garrison gambles he doesn’t lose. Ever! He doesn’t even come close to losing!
“Under various pseudonyms he reduced almost every major bookmaker and gambling consortium in Great Britain to near-bankruptcy. He did the same in the world’s greatest casinos, some of the smaller ones, too—and finally he took Las Vegas. And he took Las Vegas like no one ever took it before. So well that overnight he went to Number One on the Mafia hit list! Except that when they got around to it there was no one to hit. He’d simply disappeared, moved on with money and credits totalling some twenty-seven million dollars!
“And all of this done more or less openly, with only a minimum of effort to cover his tracks, as if he had absolutely nothing to fear. And why not? For as an honest, upright member of society what would he have to fear?
“Oh, he went to Vegas in a sort of disguise, with a retinue of his staff also disguised—but can you blame him? My guess is he knew he would clean up, knew it for a certainty, and when it was over he simply desired to fade out of sight—which is what he did. Since then he hasn’t gambled a penny. It’s as if it was something he wanted to try—a system, maybe, or just something in his blood—and having got it out of himself he lost all interest in it. Crazy!”
He sat shaking his head, lit a second cigarette, finally looked up. “That’s me finished. My branch is still on Garrison, of course, but at a distance. We don’t intend to harass him, and I’m pretty sure we won’t get anything on him. He’s clean…
“One very last thing: I think you’ll discover pretty soon, when the rest of you have had a chance to speak, that we’ve all of us underestimated Garrison. It’s just a feeling I have, that’s all.”
“Underestimated?” The Chairman was on his feet again. “Will MI6 take a moment more to explain?”
MI6 nodded. “Okay. I think that if we could really see Garrison, all of him—I mean if we could really get under his skin—we’d find we’re fooling about with one of the most powerful men in the world. Powerful in just about any way you care to mention. And barring any accident, any deterioration in his health, shall we say, I think he’s destined to be the most powerful very shortly.”
No one spoke. After a moment The Chairman said, “Thank you.” He stood looking round the table, unsmiling, tall and gaunt and strangely cold. Finally he suggested, “A break for coffee, gentlemen? Following which we’ll continue. And I think by now that we’re all beginning to see just why this meeting was called.”
The seated men remained silent. Then one by one they began to stand up and stretch their legs…
AFTER COFFEE IT WAS THE TURN OF MINERAL RIGHTS AND MINING, followed by Transport, and finally Telecommunications. All told similar tales. In the last two years Garrison had gone from strength to strength; he and/or his c
ompanies were the majority shareholders in almost every big business one might care to name; he was the man behind the men in control. And no one outside this room knew it. But—
“—That’s just the problem, gentlemen,” The Chairman took pains to point out, when once more he had the floor. “If Garrison were the Aga Khan, or the Maharaja of Mogador, or some despot oil sheikh—if his name was Rockefeller or Getty or Onassis—if he was the President of the USA or the head of the Cosa Nostra, then we’d know what or what not to do about him. And if he had any of those backgrounds we’d more ably understand him and not need to fear him. But he isn’t and he doesn’t. What he is is an ex-Military Police Corporal turned big businessman—no, Super-Tycoon—who seems destined to become the richest, most powerful man in the world. And no one knows except us and a handful of others. How he does the things he does is not important—though I’d dearly love to know. What’s to be done about him is important. Quite simply, if Mr. Garrison turned nasty he could pull the chairs out from under all of us! He can ruin our economy—the world’s economy! He can cripple airlines, shipping, communications, industry…may have already begun to do so, if only as an exercise in the manipulation of power. Oh, yes, that’s a possibility: already he may have flexed his muscles, maybe more than once or twice!”
“That is very true,” said Finance, jumping to his feet. “Look at the recent, ahem, fluctuations—supposedly inexplicable fluctuations—in precious metals. Look at the collapse of certain airlines, the much more devastating collapse of entire economies, the shuddery state of banking, of Wall Street and the Stock Exchange…”