Charlie Muffin U.S.A.

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘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.

  The lift arrived with more guests and she jerked towards it. The ambassador and the princess? Charlie wondered.

  ‘We must meet again, when there are fewer people. Dinner perhaps,’ she invited, hurrying away.

  ‘That would be nice,’ said Charlie, aware that she hadn’t heard. She probably hadn’t intended the invitation, either.

  Willoughby did not go with her.

  ‘I’d like us to meet soon, Charlie,’ he said, taking up his wife’s remark.

  ‘Why?’ asked Charlie. So there was a reason for the invitation, he thought, unoffended.

  ‘What do you know about stamps?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Charlie.

  ‘We’ve been approached for a rather unusual cover,’ said Willoughby. He looked after the disappearing figure of his wife.

  ‘Politician in Washington; his wife is a friend of Clarissa’s, actually. They want cover for an exhibition. Value is put at £3,000,000.’

  ‘That’s a lot of stamps.’

  ‘It is, as a matter of fact. Unique, too. Nearly the entire collection of Tsar Nicholas II. There are gaps, filled in by part of a second collection created by someone else attached to the court.’

  Charlie turned so that he was directly facing Willoughby. There was a look of pained rebuke about his expression.

  ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to become associated with anything connected with the Soviet Union, do you?’ he demanded.

  Willoughby had anticipated the reaction. The inept army generals who had chosen Charlie for sacrifice during a Berlin border crossing had been those who had replaced his father in the Department and had led to the old man’s suicide. So he had wanted revenge as much as Charlie. To anyone else, setting the department heads of M.I.6 and the C.I.A. for humiliating Soviet arrest and then even more humiliating exchange for an imprisoned Russian spymaster could only be construed as traitorous. Charlie had been lucky to escape the combined pursuit of both agencies. No, not lucky. Clever. It had cost him a lot, thought. The assassination of his wife. And the permanent uncertainty of being discovered. Willoughby looked at the other man, pityingly. Charlie Muffin might have survived, upon his own terms, but he’d created a miserable life for himself.

  ‘Surely there wouldn’t be any harm in discussing it?’ said the underwriter hopefully.

  ‘Or purpose,’ said Charlie. It was a conversation very similar to this which had sent him to Hong Kong.

  ‘A discussion might help me decide what to do.’

  ‘Haven’t you offered cover yet?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Willoughby, nodding. ‘It’s the protection I’m concerned about.’

  ‘We can talk about it,’ agreed Charlie, his voice indicating that that was all he was prepared to do.

  ‘How about tomorrow?’

  Charlie frowned at Willoughby’s insistence. ‘All right,’ he said. It would be a way of filling another day. Since Edith’s death he had been very lonely.

  ‘I’ll remind Clarissa about that dinner invitation, too,’ said the underwriter.

  ‘Fine,’ replied Charlie. He wondered how he would enjoy a concentrated period in the woman’s company.

  ‘Tomorrow then?’ pressed Willoughby, as if he doubted Charlie’s agreement.

  ‘Eleven,’ said Charlie. ‘But it’s only to talk. I don’t want to become involved.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Willoughby.

  He didn’t, Charlie decided. He left the party as early as he considered polite. Clarissa Willoughby was at her station by the lift, unconscious of everything except the hoped-for arrival of guests she considered important. From her reaction to his farewell, Charlie guessed she had forgotten him already.

  There were taxis going to and from Chelsea and Victoria, but Charlie walked, despite his pinching shoes, more confident of that way identifying any surveillance.

  It took him over an hour to reach his flat in Vauxhall. He had searched a year to find it, a high-rise block that loomed permanently black beside the Thames because it was on the windward side of Battersea Power Station and got all the smuts, regardless of what everyone expected from the Clean Air Act. It was the sort of building frequently criticised as socially wrong at inquests upon the people who threw themselves from the top, depressed by anonymity and loneliness. It was precisely because of its anonymity and the fact that nobody was interested in him that Charlie had taken the flat. It was a series of boxes within boxes, a sitting room with a dining annexe, just one bedroom, a bathroom and a toilet. The window to the fire escape was always ajar, winter or summer, for a quick exit.

  It was only when the jacket that he pitched towards the chair missed and landed on the floor that Charlie remembered the raffle ticket and the telephone number. He retrieved it, stood gazing at it for a few moments and then shrugged. Why not?

  Someone as alert as Charlie should have recognised it, from the speed and professionalism of the answer, but his mind was still occupied with thoughts of stamps and insurance cover arranged through social friends and so he initially missed the husky sensuousness.

  ‘Believe we met at Henley,’ he said brightly.

  ‘Henley?’

  ‘Boat races the other week. Remember me?’

  There was a pause, for both of them a time for realisation. The woman spoke first because it was her business, after all.

  ‘Same as last time,’ she said, briskly. ‘If you want to wear that funny cap and striped blazer while we’re doing it, it’s kinky so it’s an extra £5. And the ruler is another £5, too.’

  ‘I need another sort of relief,’ said Charlie, for his own amusement. ‘I’ve got aching feet.’

  ‘Try a fucking chiropodist,’ said the voice, no longer husky or inviting.

  He frequently had, remembered Charlie. The last one had wrapped his toes individually in little cocoons of cotton wool and put an additional £3 on the bill. Perhaps that was kinky, too.

  2

  Like the drawbridges that were the only entries to the castles of medieval times, a set of bridges staples the island of Palm Beach to the Florida mainland, with Lake Worth forming the moat. Only very rich people ever lived in castles and only very rich people live in Palm Beach. Perhaps in unconscious envy of medieval times, when the division of wealth between those who had and those who had not was more clearly defined, a few of the residents have actually invoked castellated architecture for their mansions, which jut out, ridged and angular, among the more traditional hacienda constructions showing the Spanish influence throughout the State.

  An eccentric newspaper magnate who had been a personal friend of Henry Morrison Flagler, the Standard Oil founder credited with the single-handed development of Palm Beach as the resort it now is, was responsible for just such a construction at the end of a small but usefully private road that loops off Ocean Boulevard. Even in a society accustomed to grandeur, the building was regarded as something unusual, transported as it had been stone by stone from the French countryside, where it had been originally built as a fortified château, three centuries before. While retaining perfectly its outside design, the newspaper magnate had permitted some interior improvements, like modern plumbing and air conditioning, and the man who had succeeded him in owner-ship had further added to the amenities. One such innovation had been to introduce electrification to the surrounding fencing and then to attach spotlights at strategic points, so that at the touch of any one of five switches, the grounds could be bathed in a blaze of revealing light and protected by sufficient volts to kill a man. While elsewhere this might have been regarded as a little strange, paranoic even, in Pa
lm Beach it was accepted by neighbours who knew how the possessions of the wealthy are coveted by others. For some it would have been comforting to know that at night the mainland bridges could be raised to keep out intruders.

  Giuseppe Terrilli was known to be wealthy. While not as outgoing as his predecessor at the castle, Terrilli was an admired member of a community where respect is achieved by making exactly the right contributions to the charity functions staged at the Breakers Hotel, financing a cultural week at the music auditorium, presenting a Modigliani to the Norton Gallery of Art and actively serving on the committee of the Palm Beach Round Table and attending every event put on by them at the Paramount Theatre.

  He was further respected for choosing to be an all-year resident and not one of those who took off for the summer, when the climate and humidity became somewhat bothersome to those who had the money to guarantee their every comfort. There was an obvious reason, of course. All of Terrilli Industries was based in and around the State.

  The construction division responsible for so much real estate development – and for the built-at-cost school for underprivileged children that he had so modestly declined to have named after him – was less than an hour away at Fort Lauderdale. The air charter and transport fleet was even nearer, at Palm Beach International Airport and from there it was little more than an hour to the excellent airport at Tampa. On the Gulf coast, where the ports are geared for freight work, there was the sea division, with a fleet of container vessels moving throughout the South American countries and using the easy access to the Panama Canal to work the West Coast and the Far East.

  Terrilli involved himself just sufficiently in civic affairs but at the same time managed to remain a private, unostentatious man. To some in Palm Beach, the house seemed strangely out of character. But it was an oddness that didn’t trouble them for long: moguls are allowed their eccentricities, and apart from the house Terrilli was the most conservative of men. No one remembered being told his age, but it was guessed at around fifty; and if there were talk at all now that he was completely assimilated within the enclosed community, it was at coffee mornings or whist functions at which still disappointed women sometimes wondered why such an attractive, courtly man remained unmarried.

  There had been a wife who had died five years earlier. There were some who could remember her, a diminutive blonde woman showing the eaten-away signs of her fatal illness and bearing little resemblance to the vibrant, almost glittering woman whose photograph was so prominently displayed in the unusual home. After a respectable period had been allowed to elapse, so that there should be no intrusion into Terrilli’s mourning, there had been a flurry of invitations. At the affairs which he had attended, Terrilli had been courteous but reserved, never once hurting the feelings of the women whom he gently rejected, always making it seem that the reluctance was belatedly theirs rather than his own.

  Now, after so long, the regret had almost left the voices of those who gossiped. There was a romance about the man’s decision to remain faithful to the memory of one woman, sad though it may have been for those who had so briefly hoped.

  A basement gymnasium had been one of the improvements Terrilli had made to the castle and use of that, together with his fairly frequent appearances on the Breakers and sometimes the Everglades links accounted for his slim, lean figure. In a climate of constant sunlight, which encouraged brightness, his dress was always subdued, rarely going beyond grey or black, which tended to enhance the greyness at his temples, already brought out by the deep, year-round tan. His car was a Rolls-Royce, of course, but without the blackened windows favoured by some, which looked theatrical. When Giuseppe Terrilli was chauffeured around the tiny island, he was plainly visible, head usually bent over the market section of the Wall Street Journal.

  There were many things about Terrilli of which the admirers in Palm Beach were entirely ignorant. They didn’t know, for instance, of the stamp collection housed in a vault-like room very near the gymnasium but insulated from it, so that the temperature remained at a constant, undamaging sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Or that such was the intensity of Terrilli’s interest that there was never a day when he did not spend at least two hours hunched, oblivious to everything but the tiny squares of paper before him, in his subterranean chamber.

  Such a natural hobby would have caused little surprise in a community where an eighty-year-old millionairess collected piranha fish and another kept an alligator tank in her bedroom. But they would have been truly amazed to know that Giuseppe Terrilli was one of the top five Mafia figures in the United States of America.

  Increasingly Warburger was coming to regret his decision to concentrate upon Senator Kelvin Cosgrove and his aspirations to become Attorney-General and leave the final personnel selection to his deputy. Peter Bowler appeared to think the entrapment of Terrilli would be simple after so much advance planning.

  ‘Jack Pendlebury!’ echoed the Director. ‘Oh, come on!’

  ‘He’s one of the best operators we’ve got,’ persisted Bowler, ‘and that’s what we need more than anything else because of the low profile we’ll have to keep. He’s damned efficient, he’s devious and he comes from Texas.’

  ‘Cosgrove hasn’t said he wants anyone from his home State.’

  ‘It wouldn’t hurt, surely?’

  ‘He hasn’t seen Pendlebury,’ insisted Warburger. He tried to think of objections beyond those he had already made. ‘He cheats on his expenses, too,’ he added, in sudden recollection.

  ‘Cosgrove and Pendlebury won’t have to live in each other’s pockets all the time,’ said Bowler. ‘And he’s no worse with his expenses than some others I’ve known.’

  ‘There’ll have to be some contact. And Cosgrove won’t like it. There must be somebody else,’ said the Director.

  ‘I’ve run the check through the computer, taking us back as far as eight years. Pendlebury is the only Supervisor whose operational life has kept him far enough away to reduce the risk of his being identified.’

  ‘The only way Pendlebury is likely to be identified is for vagrancy,’ said Warburger.

  ‘He’s exactly right,’ argued Bowler. ‘If you notice him at all, it’s out of pity.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Warburger stubbornly. ‘The man makes me uneasy.’

  ‘I’m made far more uneasy at the thought of the whole thing going down the tube from something as simple as one of our men being spotted. Let’s not forget how organised these people are.’

  Warburger nodded at the remark, recognising its truth. The Director was a man who believed in statistics, and the statistics were unarguable: for years now, crime had been paying. That was why this one operation was important; the tremor it would send right down the structure of organised crime would register about nine on the Richter Scale.

  ‘I want it cleared with the senator so that there’ll be no offence,’ warned the Director reluctantly. ‘And if he agrees – and only if he agrees-I want Pendlebury briefed so thoroughly he’ll think he’s being programmed to be Pope.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And try to see he smartens himself up a bit. He’s like a mobile slum.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ promised Bowler without conviction.

  ‘Tell him something else, too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’ll realise how important this is. He’s a cunning bastard. Make it clear the petty cash isn’t limitless. I’ll want receipts for everything … in handwriting other than his own.’

  At that moment the subject of their conversation was in Tijuana, in the sort of bar that tourists shun because there is never an attempt to clear the cockroaches from the toilets or put in even paper towels, because the water doesn’t work anyway. He was sitting forward on a stool attentively watching the barman mix the margarita, widening the gap between his thumb and forefinger to indicate the amount of tequila he wanted. Pendlebury had declared the first drink to be like mosquito piss and knew the barman was annoyed and would try to che
at on the measure.

  The taco came as the drink arrived. Pendlebury heaped the relish on top of the beef, heavy with the chili and the onions, and as he lifted the envelope to his mouth, a mixture of ketchup and mustard fell away, slid off the lapel of his crumpled fawn suit and spread itself in a splash over the left leg of his trousers.

  ‘Shit,’ said Pendlebury.

  He paused for a moment, examining the deepening stain, then went back to his food. These were the best tacos in Tijuana and had to be eaten hot: he could always try to scrape the stain off with a knife after he had finished.

  ‘Drink better this time?’ asked the barman, at last recognising that Pendlebury wasn’t an amateur.

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Ready for another?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Pendlebury. It would be far too hot to walk about outside for another hour at least. Maybe even two.

  ‘And I’ll want a copy of the bill,’ he added. ‘Several, in fact.’

  3

  Jack Pendlebury had tried to formulate all the alternatives but had decided, with a regret which came as something of a surprise, that he had been recalled to Washington to be dumped. Sure, there were things that didn’t add up, like why bother to bring him to the capital when it would have been as easy to sack him on station with one of those letters that looked as if it had been signed by the Director but came in fact from a machine that could create a perfect facsimile of the man’s signature. But sometimes they did inexplicable, illogical things. Perhaps it had been decided to make an example of him. Belying the over-fed, country boy appearance which was rightfully his, because he had been born and raised on a Tennessee homestead, Jack Pendlebury was an astute man. A lot of people went so far as to say a smart ass. And he had known for a long time that he didn’t fit into a department in which men were expected to have button-down minds with their button-down shirts, following procedures as if the job they did was a game which had rules. People who made their own rules were suspect.