Not long into his education, André saw how it worked. Charles noticed a striking young American girl around Istanbul. In her early twenties, she was blessed with a bountiful figure and a merry laugh; men turned to stare when she passed. The only trouble was—she had a boy friend in tow and planned to marry him. Charles was determined to steal the girl, if he could sunder the relationship.
He began with the boy, having sized him up as “weak” and “passive.” The youth, Tom, twenty years old and from a Chicago suburb, had no discernible goal in life and seemed content to drift and wander and squeeze his girl friend’s hand. Charles bought him dinner, stroked his ego, praised his potential, gave him “respect.” Dreams were floated. What was Tom’s secret desire? A Mercedes? A castle? A mountaintop? A poem? As it turned out, Tom had vague thoughts of opening a store in a college town, one that would sell jeans and have a small restaurant attached, with folk singers. Charles thought that was the most wonderful dream in the world. He sympathized, he understood, he offered ways to realize the dream. But he warned Tom not to burden himself with the demands of marriage. By dawn, Tom was putty to be shaped by the sculptor that was Charles. He was dispatched on an imaginary errand into the Turkish countryside, a trip that would take days, his order being to search for a place that sold exquisite antiques.
When he was gone, and out of the way, Charles moved in on the girl, Sherry. Now his tactic changed. He tore the absent fiancé to shreds. He characterized Tom as a loser, a failure condemned to life’s slag pile. André, present, listened to the conversation with fascination and dared not intrude.
Sherry disagreed. She said Tom had always been good to her and good for her. “Goodness and weakness are often a synonym,” shot back Charles. He ordered the girl to wake up and face reality. How could she commit to a man with no direction to his life? Soon Sherry began to waver, and Charles pressed, circling like a picador, thrusting darts of doubt and worry. Then she chimed in with minor flaws in Tom’s character, each of which Charles agreed with, seized, and magnified to grave disorders.
When Tom returned empty-handed from his foray into the countryside, he discovered that Sherry was cool to him. She announced newly found intentions of “waiting” before any marriage, of “needing time to think.” Surprisingly, Tom did not receive the news with noticeable discomfort. It was fine with him, he said. Charles promptly gave Tom another assignment, to visit hippie hangouts near the Blue Mosque and determine if there were any prospective “clients” who might be relieved of their passports and traveler’s checks. His commission would be 50 per cent of any proceeds. Nodding as if the assignment were the most routine of jobs, Tom left immediately.
Sherry went to work as well, becoming, in effect, a prostitute. “She had never been one before and she would never be one again,” recalled André. But for Charles she would entertain a client, lead him on, go to his room, partially disrobe, and wait for him to pass out. Then she would call Charles and watch while the man’s pockets were stripped.
Often André tried to analyze the phenomenon of why men and women with no previous frame of reference for this kind of work would tumble so quickly to the exhortations of his half-brother.
“They did it because they fell in love with him,” he told a friend. “The men saw in Charles everything they could never be. And the women wanted him for a lover, although few ever got him. And they also did it because they were rewarded well. Sherry left Istanbul with $3,000 cash and a $2,000 wristwatch on her arm. Her boy friend was last heard from in jail, where he had been arrested on a dope charge. Charles was right, of course. Tom was weak. Tom was doomed to failure.”
Over several months in late 1973, Charles and André and their cohorts successfully robbed several tourists, though the proceeds were disappointing. One netted $6,000, but after commissions were deducted, and bills paid for dinners and hotel rooms and medicines, the profit was less than $1,500. By early November, André noticed that Charles was restless, fretting that his season in Istanbul was failing. He could not afford to stay too long for fear that police or hotel security would unmask him. In their later analysis of the case, Interpol theorized that specializing in tourist robberies gave Charles a certain advantage, for he usually selected victims who were in Istanbul for only a day or two. After a robbery, it was easy to withdraw and rest in a small hotel for several days, making sure the victims had left the country before returning to the forest for more hunting.
One autumn night, Charles nudged André and gestured toward a pair of potential victims who reeked with promise, an American couple, both past sixty, she wearing a full length mink with diamonds on her fingers and earlobes, he in a well-cut suit and shoes not run down at the heel. Their attitudes were those of people accustomed to money and power. Most important, they were old, and they clung to one another walking across the hotel lobby as if venturing into a maze of darkness. They seemed lonely. Their names were Phil and Ethel and they were on a round-the-world trip to mark their fortieth wedding anniversary.
The next day Phil and Ethel were under scrutiny. Charles watched their every public move, as André later put it, “like a hawk watching a mouse.” When they spoke to the concierge, Charles was nearby, absorbed in a travel folder. When they took tea in the lobby, Charles was seated behind, on the adjoining sofa, listening, making mental notes. Then, at a moment when Phil and Ethel were waiting for an elevator on the floor where they were staying, a voice called out, “Wait, please!” and up hurried Charles, full of smiles and gratitude. By the time the elevator reached the lobby, Charles was well enough connected with the couple to invite them for a drink. Would they mind if a business associate from Paris joined them? Thus was André brought in. Charles and his brother used fake names and fake identities, posing as importers and speculators in currency. At first, the American couple seemed foolish and vacuous, but as a long evening crept by, they became appealing. Deeply devoted, still in love, they touched hands often, not out of nervousness or habit, but because they cared for one another. Phil spoke freely of his business—grain futures, of which Charles knew enough to speak intelligently. She was a retired high school counselor. They had no children, but they had each other, and a pair of basset hounds back home they fretted about. Charles swept everyone up and into a taxi and to a cafe beside the Bosporus, where raucous Turks sang and whirled Ethel about the dance floor. Phil’s eyes glowed with delight. When it was time to settle the bill, Charles reached quickly, but Phil beat him, producing a folder of traveler’s checks thick with hundreds. The two Frenchmen stared at the money and their eyes met fleetingly. But Charles did not seem as confident as André reasoned he should have. Something was worrying him.
Back at the Hilton, they all took a nightcap in the English pub, Ethel bubbling about the glorious, romantic evening she had spent with three handsome men. She kissed Phil giddily and he kissed her back, neither noticing when Charles moved his hand across their glasses, dropping Valiums into each. At the same moment, Charles checked his watch. André knew what he was doing. From practice and study, Charles knew the time it required to put someone to sleep with Valiums, relating the medication to weight, age, and amount of alcohol consumed. It was Andrés guess that on this night the elderly couple would collapse within twenty minutes, but by then Charles would have escorted them upstairs and into their bedroom.
André waited for the reaction. He had seen it before. It rarely varied. A victim first grows dizzy, feels a vague malaise, refuses to acknowledge it with the hope that it will pass. Then the eyelids grow heavy, speech becomes slurred, bones turn to jelly. Charles always waited for the precise moment when the victim was on edge of passing out but still able to enter an elevator and walk down a hotel corridor, sometimes sagging on the way.
But after fifteen minutes had come and gone, Phil and Ethel were still very much among the conscious, not wanting to end the party. André could see that the drugs had hit, had hit hard. On their faces were puzzled looks. But neither was willing to acknowledge that their old bo
dies were under assault. In defense, Ethel reached out and clasped her husband’s hand as if it were the last branch on the cliff’s edge, and he moved his head to her shoulder. They remained thus, looking both tender and silly, for several more minutes, long past the instant when they should have crashed onto the floor. Charles studied the couple carefully, while his mouth made inane conversation about investments in Asia. Then he spoke softly. “You seem a little under the weather,” he murmured. “It’s been a long night. May I help you to your room?” Ethel nodded gratefully; she could no longer make words. Phil’s eyes were glazed and he shuffled slowly, like an old man just released from a hospital bed.
Charles and André helped them across the lobby, into an elevator, propping them up until the room was reached. Without being asked, Phil handed Charles the key. Charles guided them to the bed as lovingly as a parent to a child, and he whispered good night. Ethel tried to smile and her lips formed a deeply felt “Thank you.”
With that, Charles left. He did not even look about the room. On the ride back down, André wanted to ask why Charles had left the old couple without taking anything. But he lacked the courage. Instead Charles spoke without prompting. “Those people are superior. I respect them.”
The next morning Charles telephoned to make sure Phil and Ethel had survived the night, then took them to lunch, even provided a chauffeured car and a camera to use for their remaining day in Istanbul. The Americans left Turkey happy, enriched with stories to tell of dashing Frenchmen encountered in romantic, dangerous Istanbul. They would never know that they stood on the precipice—and due to the strength of their love, a love that Charles had never experienced—they were permitted to keep their money. And their lives.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
November 10 is the anniversary of Kemal Atatürk’s death, when Istanbul mourns each year for the father of modern Turkey. The bars close, movie houses still their projectors, mosques are crowded, old women weep on street corners. On this day in 1973, an interesting middle-aged couple from Paris checked into the Istanbul Hilton and were disappointed to discover that the city was shrouded. Both actually should have remembered, since the man and the woman had been reared in Turkey and made annual return visits to Istanbul to visit families and to show off their French trappings.
Anton Kecvic and his wife Krista had been born to poor Armenian farmers, had made their separate ways to Istanbul, had become associated in menial work for the garment industry. They met and married young, forming a strong and successful partnership. Krista had an adventurous sewing needle and a flair for design; Anton possessed the ability to merchandise her clothing, first from pushcarts, then from a tiny stall buried in the bowels of the spice market, finally into export. They moved to Paris when both were nearing forty, began a dress and lingerie business, and lived elaborately on a side street near the Avenue Wagram.
Each autumn they returned to Istanbul and, rather than favor one relative over another with their glamorous presence, always stayed instead at the Hilton, where, in the best sense of the word, they could go home again. Krista swaddled her thickening body in black mink, and on Anton’s finger sparkled a major diamond. She was growing heavy, hair bleached platinum on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, troubled by migraines. He was thin, aquiline, balding, dour. But each felt rejuvenation at the homecoming, the ego lift that comes when money is displayed to those of the same blood who never realized the dream to seek and find success.
Signing the hotel registration card, Anton told the clerk how disappointed he was to arrive on Atatürk’s memorial day. He had planned an evening of gambling in the hotel casino. He also remarked that perhaps it was a blessing as well, for Krista would be delayed at least one day from her assault on the city’s jewelry shops. As Anton talked, he did not notice the thin and well-dressed Oriental-looking man who hovered nearby, browsing through a folder.
For the next two days, shadows trailed the Kecvics. When Anton met an old grizzled friend from the Istanbul garment district, and spoke of his long-unrealized plans to someday crack the Japanese market with his line of lingerie, Charles, sitting nearby and sipping a cocktail with a young woman, overheard every word. And when Krista made mock complaint to a cousin over a cottage cheese lunch in the hotel’s coffee shop, carping that Anton was an overly enthusiastic gambler who brought several thousand francs to Istanbul to finance his passion, André was two tables away and absorbing all.
On the third day of the Kecvics’ stay in Istanbul, Charles made his move. He booked Room 410 in the Hilton under an assumed name and called a meeting of his associates. Present were André, the Dutch bodyguard, whose name was Van Dam, and Pierre le Premier. No women would be needed for this project. As was his custom, Charles began the meeting with a karate exercise, demonstrating with André that their extremities were potentially lethal weapons. Charles did this regularly, as if to remind his associates that any betrayal or misdeed would be punished accordingly. Then, invigorated by the flying kicks and menacing postures, Charles clapped his hands together. He had good news for his group. He had chosen one last business venture for the season in Istanbul. If it were successful, and he had every reason to believe it would be, then they would leave Turkey immediately and take a long holiday. The potential for this finale in Istanbul was substantial, ample to finance at least six months of indolence for all involved. He outlined the plan, made everyone repeat his respective responsibilities, then dispatched each on various errands. André was sent to the central bazaar to purchase toy pistols. Van Dam had to find a printer who could make up a calling card instantly—and in Japanese characters. Pierre was sent to find a book on the Far East textile market. And everything had to be done by sundown—when the casino opened.
That night, the cards were kind to Anton Kecvic. At the baccarat table, he won more than 25,000 Turkish lira (about $5,000) and was in an ebullient mood. Two chairs away, an Oriental man was less fortunate. He had lost steadily all evening, although the sums were minor. When Kecvic rose to take a break and took a light whisky and soda at the bar, he noticed the Oriental man had done the same and was depressed at his losses. Kecvic consoled him in English, and the loser responded in French. “You speak French!” exclaimed Kecvic, happy as any Frenchman is to encounter a man with the same tongue in a place far from Paris. “I am Japanese,” said Charles, who introduced himself as Mr. Okada, “but I have spent much time in Paris.” Mr. Okada presented his business card, its ink barely dry, and he received one in kind from Anton Kecvic. The two men made small talk—of Paris, of baccarat, finally of business. Mr. Okada revealed he was an investment counselor who was interested in marrying Paris couture with Japanese labor and money. He was on his way to France for discussions with clothing manufacturers. How extraordinary! exclaimed Anton Kecvic. That was precisely what he had in mind.
Mr. Okada spoke extensively of the Eastern potential for fine clothing, how Japanese women were ready to buy French design, throwing out impressive statistics as to labor costs, share of the market, the possibility of using cheap Indian seamstresses in Delhi and of exporting by sea to Japan and, potentially, Los Angeles. He held Anton Kecvic spellbound. And, as icing on this tempting gâteau, it so happened that there was another Japanese businessman in this very hotel who was interested in financing such a venture, having made a fortune in electronics and now wanting to diversify. This man was named Saito and he was eccentric, rarely leaving his hotel room, preferring to have visitors call on him. He was extravagantly wealthy and difficult to meet, but Mr. Okado felt certain he could arrange a rendezvous, perhaps for tomorrow night in the casino. Anton Kecvic went to bed happy, twice blessed, by the cards and by the “coincidence” that had seated the intriguing Mr. Okada two seats away at baccarat.
The next night, Kecvic waited in his room, as per directions, and around ten came the expected telephone call from Mr. Okada. Great news! The mysterious Mr. Saito had agreed to meet with the French lingerie manufacturer. Come quickly! Excited, Kecvic rushed to the rendezvous, dressed in h
is best, leaving Krista grumblingly alone to dine from room service.
But in the casino, Mr. Okada was glum, checking his watch and glancing at the entrance. He sighed and apologized to Kecvic. It seemed that Mr. Saito had stood them up. Hugely annoyed, but knowing a little of Japanese protocol, Kecvic contained his feelings and said he would be glad to wait. Half an hour dragged by. Mr. Okada went to the house phone, spoke expansively, returned to inform Kecvic that the object of their attentions was feeling a little under the weather and that he wished to receive them in his hotel room. That was fine with Kecvic; the casino was crowded and noisy.
Room 410 was empty and bereft of signs that anyone was in residence. It was a simple room, hardly the kind of accommodation that a wealthy Japanese would occupy. Quickly Mr. Okada had an explanation: Mr. Saito engaged this chamber solely for business meetings, not wishing to sully his personal suite with talk of finance. Ordering coffee from room service, Mr. Okada bade his friend to sit down and speak once more of beautiful Paris.
When coffee came, Kecvic sipped at his impatiently, then sprang to the window and looked out at the great city. While he enjoyed the view, Charles poured a substantial jolt of sedatives into his cup, knowing that his intended victim had put so much sugar into the coffee that he would never taste anything else. Indeed Kecvic did drain his cup without comment, after which he rose to leave. Mr. Okada begged him to wait a few more minutes. With a sigh, Kecvic sat down and stared grimly at the door. As Mr. Okada watched, Kecvic did nothing but drum his fingers against his chair. He did not even rub his eyes. The drug did not seem to be working, even though enough sleeping potion was now swimming in his stomach to put out a man twice the size.
“Enough,” decided Kecvic. He was tired of waiting for the undependable Japanese industrialist. He would be in the casino and available immediately should the old boy turn up. Mr. Okada stammered, thinking hurriedly. Yes, of course, it was rude of Mr. Saito to keep the important Frenchman waiting. Perhaps he was delayed on a long distance call. Probably he was trying to conclude some major stock transfer. Excuses poured out of Mr. Okada, but they did not work. Kecvic had his hand on the doorknob.
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