Madrigal for Charlie Muffin

by Brian Freemantle

  Lady Billington treated the business with the same casual detachment. After an hour she said, ‘When Hector said this was legally necessary I thought it was a good idea. Now I’m not so sure.’

  ‘It’s best to be careful,’ said Charlie. She stretched her legs out along the chaise longue, so he eased himself onto the dressing-table stool, flexing the cramp from his legs. Pieces of fluff from the carpet speckled his trousers.

  ‘Quite frankly I couldn’t give a damn,’ she said. ‘Surprised?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Right that you should be,’ she said. ‘Just as I should be surprised at the poor little rich girl feeling.’

  The confessional of gin, thought Charlie. It was tenuous but Charlie decided there was a similarity between this woman and the one he had left in bed at the hotel. Lady Billington sought her escape in a bottle and Clarissa in bed. He felt a twitch of anger towards both of them.

  Lady Billington stirred a box with her feet; a rope of pearls, Charlie knew.

  ‘Know what I think sometimes when I’m putting these things on?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How many empty bellies they could fill.’

  She was draining bottles and putting messages inside, he thought. ‘Why don’t you give them away then? Save this sort of thing every year.’

  She smiled wearily. ‘All the old stuff is in family trust anyway,’ she said. ‘And there is already a charity established: something to do with bringing Africans to England to train them to be agronomists. My father set it up.’

  ‘Aren’t there organizations you could become involved with?’

  ‘International committees flying first class to New York or Geneva and eating six-course banquets and agreeing how beastly it is for people to starve.’

  He’d been wrong about Lady Billington. She was a woman brim full of sadness. ‘It’s an uneven world,’ agreed Charlie.

  ‘That’s trite,’ she said.

  ‘But true.’

  Lady Billington added unsteadily to her glass, spilling some onto the cloth so that a damp grey stain spread across it. ‘“From each according to his abilities … to each according to his needs,”’ she quoted indistinctly.

  ‘Is that the Karl Marx original or the Oxford Book of Quotations?’

  ‘Political science. Girton. A poor Second.’

  Charlie indicated the boxes and then spread his hands to include the villa. ‘Do you need all this?’

  ‘Truth is I’m not sure,’ she admitted. ‘Couldn’t give a damn about the jewellery. But I don’t think I want to get rid of everything.…’ She smiled wearily again. ‘Am I making sense?’

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘I shouldn’t drink so much.’

  ‘It’s an easy habit to get into,’ said Charlie with feeling. ‘Shouldn’t we get on?’

  ‘How’s your drink?’

  ‘All right, thank you.’

  ‘Don’t suppose I should,’ she said reluctantly.

  It took a further hour to complete the jewellery inventory. They finished with Lady Billington’s engagement ring, which was the only piece she hadn’t returned to the safe in preparation for his visit.

  ‘One for the road,’ she insisted.

  ‘A small one.’

  She looked at him curiously. ‘You’ve got bits all over your clothes.’

  Charlie made an ineffective attempt to sweep away the carpet debris. Lady Billington gazed vaguely around the dressing room. ‘Suppose there should be a brush somewhere.’

  ‘Don’t bother.’

  ‘Do you need to see my husband for anything?’ she said. ‘If you do, it’ll have to be at the embassy.’

  Charlie shook his head in instant rejection. ‘No,’ he said. The whole business had been remarkably straightforward. How easy would it be to persuade Willoughby to employ him more regularly? The idea settled and he decided it was a good one: anything was better than the state into which he had been crumbling. Charlie’s mind blocked at the thought. What about Clarissa?

  They left through the ambassador’s bedroom and Lady Billington stopped near the oar-blade display. ‘Have you seen these?’ she said, the pride obvious.

  Charlie went alongside her. Lady Billington’s finger traced a line along the photographs of her husband in the university rowing team. ‘He was almost chosen for the Olympics,’ she said.

  Although he’d looked at them before, Charlie politely studied the pictures again. All assured, confident, good-looking young men, their places in life guaranteed by name and influence. Lucky buggers.

  They left the bedroom and Lady Billington walked with him down the marbled staircase and along the corridor to the door. ‘Forgive the maudlin,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks for the drink.’

  ‘Drive carefully.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  Charlie was an intuitive man, reacting to feelings and to impressions. And the feeling at the moment was uncertainty. As he took the hire car down the tree-lined driveway he tried to find a reason for it. He’d avoided absolutely any contact with the embassy and the security check had been what he had anticipated in Willoughby’s office, a job for a clerk. So why the unease? On the return to Rome Charlie maintained a regular speed and constantly checked his rear-view mirror; today there was no obvious pursuit. He must have imagined the blue Lancia, like everything else. It had to be Clarissa.

  She was already in the hotel room when he got there, surrounded by packages and parcels, like a child who’d found its way into Santa’s storeroom.

  ‘I’ve had a fantastic time,’ she said. ‘My American Express card is like a piece of rubber.’

  ‘I felt like that this morning,’ said Charlie.

  ‘I can fix that.’

  ‘Won’t Rupert wonder at purchases in Rome when you’re supposed to be off the coast of France on a yacht?’

  ‘Oh, bugger Rupert,’ she said carelessly. ‘He never notices anything anyway.’

  In the foyer downstairs, a patient man in a grey suit carefully folded the newspaper he couldn’t read because it was in Italian, and made another precise entry in a notebook. Already the list was extensive.

  Henry Jackson was a large, soft-fleshed man who would have looked the part astride a policeman’s bicycle on an English country beat. It was an impression he purposely conveyed because it made people careless. He was, in fact, extremely astute and even, when the occasion demanded, physically quick, which was why Harkness had chosen him to supervise the British field team in Rome. Henry Walsingham greeted him with the withdrawn friendliness of an out-of-town representative undergoing an annual visit from head office. Jackson emphasized plodding officialdom. He insisted upon a complete tour of every department, hoping to gauge the required degree of efficiency from the behaviour of the staff and the material on their desks. In one office overlooking the Via Settembre he identified Richard Semingford. The Second Secretary looked up in mild interest at the intrusion and then returned to his work. There were marines on guard in the cipher and vault room and every check and identification was observed. Jackson remained for some time in the cipher room, stressing its importance for the forthcoming Summit for direct communication between the Premier and his ministers in Italy with the cabinet in London. It would be necessary for him to instal someone over a longer period, but Jackson’s initial impression was that the security was being maintained at the proper level. Back in Walsingham’s office, he allowed himself to be taken through the list of every official and unofficial function in which the British party would be involved. Indexed against each function were details of the security provisions made by the Italian government.

  ‘There’s extensive use of helicopters.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘The whole thing is an obvious target for the Red Brigade,’ said the embassy security man. Even when he was supposedly relaxed there was a military uprightness about him.

  ‘That’s our assessment as well.’

  ‘The Italians are worried.
’

  ‘With every reason to be.’

  ‘Still didn’t expect a visit from you people quite so soon,’ said Walsingham. ‘There’s a lot of time left.’

  ‘Better to be safe than sorry,’ said Jackson. It was the sort of remark the other man would expect. ‘I’ve brought five people with me. I want to move them into the embassy tomorrow.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Familiarize themselves with the working of the place,’ said Jackson. ‘Find out where the lavatories and the different departments are.’

  ‘I think I should advise the ambassador.’ Walsingham was a man who always deferred to a superior officer.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What exactly will they be doing?’

  ‘Poking around the cipher room and vaults mostly.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve told you,’ said Jackson patiently. ‘It’s from there all the stuff will be going back to London. Don’t want any embarrassments, do we?’

  Indignation showed upon Walsingham’s face. ‘There is nothing wrong with the security at this embassy,’ he, said stiffly.

  ‘I’m sure there’s not,’ said Jackson, at once placatory. He spread his hands, entering the charade he was sure the other man would accept, ‘Not my decision, old boy. You know what it’s like at Whitehall: they still use initials instead of proper names for the director and talk about moles and daft stuff like that.’

  There was a complete surveillance operation upon Henry Walsingham and Richard Semingford when they left the embassy that evening. Walsingham went to his apartment overlooking the Tiber and remained there. Semingford met Jane Williams at a café on the Via Condotti. They had a drink, walked a short distance to a restaurant where they ate early, and went back to her apartment. Semingford was still there at midnight and all the lights were out.

  ‘Why the hell didn’t one of the bastards react!’ demanded Jackson irritably, when the reports were brought back to him at the Eden. ‘I was supposed to have made one of them nervous.’

  Kalenin used the best calligraphist but, even so, limited the entries to initialled notations in Charlie Muffin’s name and to the signatures against the bank authority. There were four genuine messages of top-secret classification which he had received from the British embassy in Rome re-copied on paper brought in from Italy to satisfy any forensic test. The reference to the earlier meeting with Charlie Muffin in Washington the previous June was provably upon Russian foolscap and he hesitated, looking down at it. They had identified Charlie in Florida on 15 June, but, from the checks later, Kalenin knew the stamp exhibition had been in New York from 8 June. From New York it was easier to reach Washington than from Palm Beach, just an hour on the shuttle. It was the sort of detail that was important; 10 June was perfect. He put it with the other documents, then another Russian foolscap containing all the information about the combination and security precautions at Billington’s Ostia villa. The final, fittingly cosmetic, touch was ten thousand dollars in American currency.

  Kalenin had just addressed it for diplomatic transport to Igor Solomatin in Rome when the message arrived from London about the previous shipment. The hidden compartment had been fixed below the base of a bedroom closet and all the material placed in it. They were confident it would be found, but only after a rummage search.

  Kalenin sat back at his desk. allowing himself a brief moment of satisfaction. Almost immediately he rose to his feet. Alexander Hotovy had undergone sufficient preparation. Everything was going too well to allow uncertainty, and Kalenin was anxious to satisfy himself the Czech did not represent any greater danger than he already imagined.

  12

  Emilio Fantani had a criminal’s ability to distinguish between true wealth and surface glitter, and as he rounded the promontory on the Ostia road to gaze down upon the Billington villa he knew this was true wealth. Unlike Charlie Muffin, who had taken the same route earlier, Fantani slowed and then stopped, using the elevation of the hill for his reconnaissance. The angle prevented his establishing a seafront approach, but there would obviously be one leading up to the grape and flower hung verandah he could just determine at the right-hand side of the house.

  With a burglar’s patience he waited for thirty minutes slumped back in his seat, ensuring the information about no ground patrol was correct before releasing the handbrake to coast down under minimal power towards the entrance. He was briefly aware of the men in the gate lodge but his concentration was upon the electrical wiring thatched along the top of the walls.

  The sea, he decided, reverting to his original intention. There was a layby almost at the junction of the Pratica road and as he reached it Fantani saw the parked police car. It was unmarked but identifiable from the heavy radio antennae that was always mounted in the roof; as discreet as elephants in ballet slippers, he thought. There were three men inside the yellow vehicle, lounged back with the practice of those who spend a lot of time waiting for things to happen.

  Fantani didn’t slow. To his right the sun sparked off the polished water and far out to sea a clutch of fishing boats moved sedately along the skyline, like ducks in a line. The hills were ochre and bald, patched occasionally with thin grass. Hobbled goats, neck bells jangling, nuzzled hopefully and once Fantani had to brake and swerve to avoid one that started into the road to tug at a suddenly discovered tuft.

  It took longer than Fantani wanted before he found a cliff break to get down to the beach. He parked and took a towel and the raffia mat from the rear seat. Descending the looped pathway, he set out through the foot-sucking sand and shingle in the direction of the villa. It took an hour and Fantani was glad he had allowed himself so much time. He stopped some way from the barrier that made the ambassador’s beach private. Fantani had come prepared, already wearing a costume beneath his clothes. He spread the mat, undressed and folded everything neatly before stretching out, apparently to sunbathe. For almost half an hour he did, before turning over onto his stomach to begin the examination. The beach fence was high and spike-topped and projected some unseen distance into the water. Fantani did not think it was insurmountable. It didn’t matter anyway, he decided, looking to the cliff face. It might have been possible to scale once, but from the artificially smooth surface of the rocks he guessed it had been blasted away to create the almost perpendicular drop.

  Like a black line drawn down it, there was a smoked-glass lift linking the villa to the sea, and alongside the zigzag of emergency steps. It would only need one man at the top to protect both approaches. Fantani squinted up against the sun at the villa, locating more pillars and bourgainvillea. It was at the point where the protective estate wall abutted the cliff that Fantani stopped. The wall had been brought to the edge and from the conduit box which stuck up like a proud thumb he guessed the electrical connection stopped there. The screen was completed by a wide half-circle of meshed spikes, splayed out like a woman’s fan against the wall end and the cliff face, over a drop which Fantani estimated at four hundred metres but accepted would probably be more, because of his shortened elevation. He smiled, seeing the way, and turned over onto his back again to doze in the sun. For another hour he relaxed, then dressed and rolled up his mat, leaving his shoes and socks off for the gritty walk back to the car.

  It was still only four in the afternoon so Fantani continued towards Pratica until he found the first roadside café. He considered a brandy but decided his nerves didn’t need any help. Instead he took coffee.

  Life was good, decided Fantani. And going to get better. A lot better. It had taken long enough; nearly fifteen years of screwing and being screwed, trinket stealing from those who wouldn’t risk complaint, and then the gradual reputation as a competent craftsman. He knew it was the reputation that had prompted the approach. Only two arrests and both unimportant. It was the sort of thing the big organizers liked: style and expertise. Fantani had no doubt whom he was working for; who else but the Mafia had the organization to get the details he’d been provided with? It had
been a trial period; with this the final test. When he passed he’d learn who the man was. Fantani was sure the name wasn’t Jacono. But he’d never shown any curiosity or tried to question. They respected attitudes like that. Style, thought Fantani again.

  Driving back towards Ostia, Fantani saw that, because of a kink in the coastline, the sun was setting on the landward, not the seaward, side, which was an advantage: already, to his left, the darkness was merging the clifftop blackly with the water. Fantani took the Fiat up a track, so that it would be completely concealed from the road, and stood against the open boot, changing into the clothing in which he worked. Everything was black for concealment, even the canvas shoes. Before putting on the sweater, he taped to one wrist the electrical bypass leads and to the other the glass-cutter. He kept the trouser pockets free for ease of movement but carefully zipped inside the cotton windcheater the collapsible silk bag, the plans of the villa and its burglar protection, the doctor’s stethoscope with a shortened length of tubing, and the tape roll. Satisfied with his preparations, he completed the last part of the ritual, relieving himself against the wheel of the car.

  He positioned himself carefully during the final approach to the villa neither too near the road, where he would be visible to passing vehicles, nor too near the cliff edge, where he might be seen against the slightly lighter skyline. Three times cars swept along the coast road but on each occasion their lights warned him long before their arrival and he was crouched low and completely hidden when they passed.

  He was adjusted to the darkness when he got to the villa perimeter, conscious of the solid blackness of the wall. Near to it, Fantani squatted, settling himself for the wait, head tensed to one side for any animal or human sound to indicate a regular patrol he’d failed to detect from the overlooking hill. It was thirty minutes before he moved, sure there was none.