Charlie Muffin U.S.A.
( Charlie Muffin - 4 )
Brian Freemantle
Charlie Muffin U.S.A.
Brian Freemantle
Prologue
Tsar Nicholas II of All the Russias and his desperately ill heir, Tsarevich Alexei, had less than three months to live when the specially guarded Imperial prison train arrived at Ekaterinburg on April 30th, 1918.
A year earlier, the Tsar had abdicated in favour of the government that preceded Lenin. In the first few months, under a semblance of a government, respect had lingered for someone whom most Russians regarded as a near-God. By April, the Bolsheviks had taken control. Little respect remained.
In Ekaterinburg, it was predictable. Ekaterinburg is a mining town in the heart of the Urals and from the Urals Lenin had drawn the fiercest support for his revolution. The coming of the Imperial family had been kept secret, but inevitably there had been rumours. The carriage from the station to Ipatiev house, where they were to be held, was jeered at and spat upon and initially the guards were as much to protect them from mob violence as to prevent any rescue attempt.
At the time of his abdication, Tsar Nicholas had been the richest man in the world. Still with him at Ekaterinburg was a train load of personal possessions he had been allowed to assemble. Had he survived the Russian Revolution, the priceless contents of that baggage train would have ensured a life as luxurious as any he had known throughout his fifty years. Among the treasures was a stamp collection. Befitting the world’s richest man, it was worth a fortune, 1,274 items carefully annotated and catalogued in a set of hand-tooled leather albums.
Its creation had been conceived as early as 1907, when Nicholas had decided that three hundred years of Romanov suzerainty should be celebrated by a stamp issue depicting the emperors and empresses of the dynasty. Work had begun in 1909 and at every stage during the four years it had taken to create, the Tsar was involved, making his personal choice of the drawings and the essays and the specimens. It had been issued on January 2nd, 1913, by which time he had already ordered his personal philatelist to prepare for him a unique collection. It included the original drawings and artists’ sketches, the rejected essays, heads and frames, in black and in every other colour that had been attempted, samples of those colour trials, the final design and the projected but unadopted overprint for use in the Grand Duchy of Finland, then under the Tsar’s control. There were also the first prints of every issued stamp, in blocks of four.
The first guard commander for the Tsar, Tsarina and their five children at Ekaterinburg typified both the local feeling and that of the Bolsheviks who had erupted in hatred to overthrow three hundred years of blinkered, misguided Romanov rule. Alexander Avdeyev was a bully and a drunk, a former fitter in a munitions factory who insisted upon eating with the Imperial family and on one occasion elbowed the Tsar in the mouth, stretching across the table to seize some food. Pilfering the royal treasures had started before Ekaterinburg, at Tobolsk, but under Avdeyev’s command the stealing was allowed to go unchecked, at times even encouraged, like a game, because of the distress it caused the Tsar. But five weeks after their imprisonment at Ekaterinburg the stamp collection was intact; those who were stealing were peasants who wore rags and the fine linen and jewellery and silver and gold had more obvious value. Stamps were just pieces of coloured paper.
After three months, Alexander Avdeyev was replaced by Yankel Yurovsky, the regional commissar for justice and a member of the Cheka, the secret police force through which the Tsar had formerly controlled his country. Yurovsky showed the Imperial family more respect and stopped the guards making crude, sexual insults towards the Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatania, Maria and Anastasia. The stealing he didn’t bother about.
By July 14th, 1918, rescue was very close for the Tsar and his family. Headed by two superbly trained and led Czech regiments, the White Russian army had almost surrounded the town. In their cream stucco two-storey house on Voznesenky Avenue, the Imperial family could hear the constant crump of artillery, hourly getting nearer. It was audible, too, in Room Three of the Hotel America which was the Cheka headquarters and where Yurovsky sat in permanent emergency session with three other members of the Ural Soviet. Alexander Beloborodov, the chairman of the Soviet and the man who had received the Tsar, his family and the treasures in April, nearly always controlled the meetings. His deputy, Alexei Chutskayev, had dealt with the British enquiries over the Tsar’s fate and was frequently asked his opinion about foreign concern for the family, particularly for the German-born Tsarina, Alexandra. The fourth man, Chaya Goloshckokin was the regional commissar for war who had just returned from Moscow after meetings with Lenin and Trotsky about what to do with their royal prisoners.
On July 16th, Tsar Nicholas, just fifty, and his haemophiliac son, Alexei, just fourteen, were shot and bayoneted to death. In the early-morning darkness, the Tsarina and her four daughters were taken from Ipatiev house to a railway station on the outskirts of the town and put aboard a shuttered carriage which took them two hundred miles north-west of Ekaterinburg, to the provincial capital of Perm, where they were kept isolated from everyone, their presence never confirmed officially.
As their train left Ekaterinburg, it passed the royal baggage waggons. Some of the locks were already visibly smashed in the scramble to loot the Imperial family possessions which, because of the speed of the Bolshevik retreat, had had to be left behind.
The White Russian officer, who half guessed its importance and believed the Tsar still to be alive, paid three loaves of bread and a packet of salt to retrieve the stamp collection from a disappointed peasant who had thought the album contained bank notes. A Swedish consular official, at the time as ignorant as the officer of the fate of the Tsar, smuggled the stamps to the Latvian port of Riga, for their eventual return to their rightful owner.
It was eight years before they were heard of again. To the surprise of the philatelic world, the Romanov Collection unexpectedly appeared for display and sale in New York in 1926. In the mid-thirties, it was put on exhibition again, this time in a restaurant in London’s High Holborn and then at Selfridges, the Oxford Street store. There, a twenty-four-hour security guard had to be established because of Bolshevik threats to destroy it.
Before the outbreak of the Second World War it again went to New York, once more to be sold. It was broken up, large sections going to individual buyers.
It was not until after the Russian Revolution that the second 925-item collection of proofs and essays of the Imperial collection had been found to exist. Richard Zarrins, Director of the Imperial State Printing Works and the man who had supervised the Romanov issue, formed it from the material left over after the Tsar had had his collection assembled. In 1967 – like the Tsar’s collection before them – the Zanins stamps reached America, to be sold by a New York dealer. After that, like Tsarina Alexandra and her four Grand Duchess daughters forty-eight years before, it vanished.
For the avid philatelist, it is a fascinatingly unique collection. For some, even worth committing crime to possess.
1
On the day that his attempted destruction began, Giuseppe Terrilli ordered the killing of three people. One had to be allowed to die slowly, as an example to other recruits who were not careful enough. It took five hours, for the last two of which the man became insane. It was a good example.
Terrilli, who was 1,500 miles away on his Miami estate, lunched in his customarily spartan manner; just cottage cheese, salad without dressing and mineral water. Not once did he think of the people who were dying. It was a business matter, being satisfactorily resolved and therefore no longer necessary for any further consideration. Giuseppe Terrilli regarded such detach
ment as essential for the business he conducted.
The man who set out to be Terrilli’s destroyer never discovered the example killings. It would have been difficult, because Dean Warburger was in the Director’s office at the F.B.I. headquarters in Washington and the murders were in the northern Colombian province of Guajira.
But Warburger had learned that day of something else and his initial excitement was such to prompt a four-martini and lobster au gratin lunch at the Sans Souci. By four in the afternoon, Warburger had a bad headache, and realised that the intake was dangerous as well as premature and the proposal probably impractical. He authorised a feasibility study anyway.
It was the first time, after almost a year of exhaustive investigation, that he had become aware of Terrilli’s interest in philately. And Warburger, who was determined to make his directorship of the F.B.I. as legendary as that of J. Edgar Hoover, thought he had known everything that it was possible to uncover about Terrilli. Warburger usually disdained any dictum by which Hoover had ruled the Bureau, but on this occasion he made an exception. Hoover had said that personal secrets were weaknesses. It was the hope that Hoover was right which had caused the early Sans Souci celebration.
It took six weeks to steer the Lady McLeod of Trinidad towards a dealer through whom they discovered Terrilli had bought in the past. Warburger only became really excited when Terrilli made the purchase, because he had ensured that the theft of such a rare stamp as the Lady McLeod had been widely publicised. Having confirmed the weakness, Warburger refused to hurry, recognising it as possibly the only chance he would get. The indictment had to be unbreakable, with Terrilli provably involved in a crime. And that meant the bait had to be spectacular.
It took a further two months for Warburger to determine upon the Romanov and Zarrins Collections. They were unusual enough and their disposal in America between 1926 and 1967 meant they were traceable by the Bureau.
Warburger was an expert in the internal government of Washington, which meant it would have been unthinkable of him to confine the operation only to Terrilli’s arrest. There had to be political side benefits and he employed himself in obtaining them while his agents traced the stamps to their scattered ownership. By the time Warburger had the location of nearly every item, he had a senator ambitious to be Attorney-General set up as a front man and therefore the protection of the F.B.I. guaranteed for several years.
It was a full twelve months from the Sans Souci hangover before Warburger was completely happy with the preparations.
‘There’s nothing I haven’t anticipated,’ he boasted to his deputy, Peter Bowler.
At that stage it would have been as difficult for him to predict the involvement of Charlie Muffin as it had been to learn of the Guajira killings.
Charlie Muffin, who was a realist and therefore aware of the social gulf between himself and Rupert Willoughby’s friends, was curious about the reason for his invitation. He still went to the party, of course; a man officially listed as a dead traitor by the Intelligence Services of both Britain and America and wishing to remain that way doesn’t get out much and Charlie liked company, even company which seemed to regard him oddly.
Realist again, Charlie accepted that it wasn’t their fault. It had always been the same, whenever he’d worn a black tie. He had hired the dinner jacket and everything that went with it, even the shoes, which pinched. He had expected the discomfort with his feet, because they usually hurt, but he had hoped for more success with the suit. Inside the jacket he had found a raffle ticket for the Henley regatta, with a telephone number on the back. Perhaps there would be some compensation in the reply when he called the number.
Very early in the party Charlie had discarded his champagne, because the bubbles gave him wind and he genuinely didn’t want to fart and reduce the chances of his being invited again. But he hadn’t realised the combined disadvantages of not having a glass in his hand and looking as he did in a hired outfit.
Since he had entered the two-floored apartment off Eaton Square, in which a smaller party of people had already eaten and at which a larger number of guests were now arriving for an after-dinner party, several people had half turned to him, as if expecting him to be carrying a tray of drinks. Once, rather than interrupt the conversation of an angular, flat-chested woman who had gestured at him. Charlie had taken her empty glass so that she could gesticulate at a frowning man whose photograph Charlie recognised from one of those blown-up displays outside the Young Vic.
Charlie became aware that Willoughby had witnessed the episode with the angular woman and he wandered towards the Lloyd’s underwriter, who was standing immediately before the lift from the first floor to receive people as they arrived.
‘Sorry about that,’ Willoughby apologised. He was much taller than Charlie and stooped, attempting to minimise his embarrassing height. It gave him an odd, hunched-back appearance.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Charlie. He looked to where the woman had begun another hand-moving story. ‘She’s wasting her time,’ he added. ‘That guy’s a poof.’
‘So I believe,’ said Willoughby. ‘Would you like another drink?’
Charlie shook his head. He was quite proud of how well he had conquered the booze habit. It had always been worse when he was bored: and he was very bored now. Sometimes he wondered if it were even necessary still to take precautions against detection. The doubt never lasted long. There was never a moment of his waking life when he could properly relax. His exposure of the incompetence of the British and American services had been too complete and the Soviet propaganda too embarrassing for him ever to believe himself safe.
‘Nice party,’ he said.
Willoughby smiled at the politeness. ‘Clarissa likes these sort of things,’ he said, his voice that of a man who knows he is criticised for allowing his wife’s indulgences but can’t stop permitting them.
As if on cue, the hostess of the party appeared through the crush of people, bright smile attached like a badge, head twisting from side to side in permanent greeting, and chirping cries of apparent delight and surprise at the people she saw. Frequently she stopped, offering her cheek to be kissed. She was not a particularly tall woman and her face was chiselled by perpetual diet. Her hair bubbled in a current style, which tended to accentuate the appearance of thinness and her dress, which Charlie assumed to come from the latest designer to be lionised by the society rich, was layered in tiers of brightly coloured chiffon, which bounced, feather-like, as she moved. She looked like a bird in search of a nest. A slim cuckoo, perhaps. No, more like a bird of paradise.
She greeted her husband as if he were standing alone and Charlie realised that like so many others, she believed him to be one of the extra staff brought in for the evening.
‘Millie says the Ambassador is coming. And that he’s trying to persuade the Princess, too.’
The scientist who perfected a cancer cure would probably have a matching note of triumph in his voice when he announced the discovery, decided Charlie. He wondered if Clarissa Willoughby would be a difficult person to like; he would try, for her husband’s sake.
‘Good,’ said the underwriter, unimpressed and showing it. He turned, making the woman aware of Charlie.
‘This is the person whom you particularly asked to meet,’ he said, in introduction.
Clarissa focussed upon him for the first time. She squinted, not frowned, when she was curious, Charlie saw.
‘Who…?’ she said doubtfully.
‘He helped us over the Hong Kong problem,’ enlarged the underwriter. ‘Helped’ seemed such an inadequate word, thought Willoughby. It was easy for him to understand why his father, when he had been head of the Intelligence Service, had regarded Charlie as the best operative he had ever had. Willoughby doubted if anyone else could have uncovered the liner insurance fraud which would have bankrupted his firm for?6,000,000. Clarissa had openly announced her intention to divorce him if it happened. Sometimes Willoughby wondered if he should have been as gra
teful to Charlie about that outcome as he was about everything else.
‘You’re that fascinating man!’ exclaimed the woman.
‘I represented the company in Hong Kong,’ said Charlie, modestly. Clarissa Willoughby was someone who constantly talked in italics. She probably shouted at foreign airport porters who didn’t speak English too.
‘And were brilliant!’
‘Lucky,’ qualified Charlie.
‘I always think people make their own luck,’ said Clarissa.
Italics and cliches, thought Charlie.
‘There were some people who weren’t quite so lucky,’ he said. A whore named Jenny, Charlie recalled. And an Englishman ostracised because he had loved her. Their graves would be overgrown, he guessed. The neglect would offend the Chinese, who attached great importance to their ancestors and to whom cemeteries were places to visit on holidays, like picnic parks. It could easily have been him in that cemetery overlooking the New Territories and the Chinese mainland. He had allowed Willoughby to invoke the loyalty and respect he had felt for the man’s father and had come nearer than at any time in five years to discovery by the C.I.A.
Charlie became aware of Clarissa’s examination and thought how strange it was that people usually did that, as if in search of something they couldn’t understand. Instinctively he started pulling in his stomach and then stopped, annoyed at himself. Bollocks, he thought, relaxing so that the hired suit bulged again. Why should he try to impress her?
‘You’re very different from what I expected,’ she said.
‘Shakespeare probably stuttered,’ said Charlie.
‘What?’ she said, frowning.
‘And disappointed people who expected brilliant conversation,’ said Charlie, laboriously. She would be a difficult woman to live with.
‘I didn’t say I was disappointed,’ she said, coquettishly.
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