In June she called me and told me that Adrian Drake was writing a series of articles about Tallinn. The first dealt with his early life and entry into the mafiosi, with the help of his friend, the local mayor. The next dealt with the build-up of his trade, the drugs, the routes and his arrangements with the members of the Russian Duma, the military and the Secret Police. In the final two features Drake described Tallinn’s dealings with a British banker and his realisation that his support network inside Russia had collapsed and his erstwhile helpers were selling him out; how he’d run to London and sought the protection of his business partner, the banker, who’d organised official help for him. He had been guarded by men who had been instructed, he claimed, to disappear when a group of hired hitmen came to kill him.
And he had described to Drake the scene at Eaton Square when he’d shot Jethro. It didn’t matter to him. He was wanted for everything but incest all over Europe and the Middle East already. One more crime was no skin off his nose.
This part of the story, the shooting, had to be carefully handled by Drake and his paper, but the articles caused a furore. What Drake didn’t reveal, the Internet did. Shock waves reverberated all over London and some, no doubt, reached other capitals, where other bankers were taking on dodgy mafia money while blind eyes were turned.
Drake told us all about it one evening, after he got back from Lima. It was extraordinary, he said, sitting with Tallinn night after night, in smoky bars full of music and loud conversation, listening to his story. An articulate man, he said, and intelligent. You could see why he’d been successful. But Drake said there was something about him he’d come across in other, similar men. He was completely cold, emotionally distanced like all men who take others’ deaths for granted. Drake said he was frightened all the time, afraid that at some point in the conversation Tallinn would just lose it, and kill him on the spot. He said he knew that since Tallinn would never signal what he was going to do, he’d stand no chance. Or, he thought, Tallinn might wake up sober one morning, decide he regretted making his revelations and come round and kill Drake to get the recordings back.
On the last occasion they met, Drake said, he was so frightened of this he drank along with Tallinn, too scared to go home in case he woke up with Tallinn bending over him. He just collapsed across the table in the bar. Tallinn did the same. They woke up together next morning still where they’d been sitting the night before. An old woman was mopping the floor round their feet. Tallinn had burst out laughing, Drake told us. He said he had a certain charm, if you didn’t mind being charmed while the hair on the back of your neck was standing on end. Apparently they parted on quite good terms, had a final drink at the airport and exchanged hats just as Drake went through the check-in to get the plane back to London.
Later he was put under pressure to reveal Tallinn’s exact whereabouts, but he wouldn’t, and pointed out that in any case it was likely Tallinn would have moved on by then. It looked, from what Fleur had said, as if the day before Tallinn broke into Jethro’s house and shot him, Jethro had raised three million for him, which he’d probably taken out of the country in bearer bonds. He had enough cash to go where he wanted.
I heard all this in Adrian and Jess’s house in Highgate, in a long room with the windows open on to the garden. It was ten, but the light had not yet completely failed. Candles burned and there was a smell of roses from outside. Drake was lolling across a sofa as he spoke. His wife sat in a chair and Fleur, the only other person in the room, was on a cushion on the floor, hunched up with her arms around her knees.
“For five years,” Drake said, “Tallinn’s cash was flooding into Strauss Jethro Smith. It came into private airfields by private planes, and in small boats from Holland and France landing all round the coasts of Britain and Ireland. It came in container trucks originating from Zurich, Milan and Lyons. It even came in travellers’ suitcases.” On one famous occasion two million dollars had been handed to a trawler captain from the deck of a surfaced Russian submarine off the coast of Norway.
One suitcase came out of Afghanistan on a donkey laden with rugs and saddle-cushions and then reached Britain peacefully in the bottom of a big brass pot which ended up in an antique shop in London. The owner of the shop was in debt and it was a one-off. He handed over the money; Tallinn paid him and never asked again.
Another couple of consignments were made part of a deal for smuggling in illicit immigrants from Bangladesh. Tallinn was clever. He seldom used the same methods twice or the same people, which meant no one got used to his routes and no one got cheeky with him. “Who would have dared anyway?” Drake said, his face showing his own fear of the Russian.
“He had a staff of course, a group of henchmen you wouldn’t want to meet on a bright sunny day, let alone a dark night. But the mules or the routes were varied. It was a game with him. Tallinn is quick, intelligent, not thoughtful, easily bored. His idea of a relationship with a man is that the man shouldn’t betray him before he, Tallinn, betrays the man first; with a woman it’s rape. He doesn’t have any morals, not even the ‘family’, the banal ethic of other criminals. The morality of his youth was communism, which nobody believed in, and that was followed by jungle law. We’ll never understand what made him tick, I suppose, unless he writes his memoirs one day, which seems unlikely – but with the likes of Tallinn, you never know. I think he’s one of those people who are too much for themselves. They come out of nowhere with a mix of ambition, inventiveness, energy and restlessness and develop into something nobody would have expected. They need the right climate to grow, of course, and present-day Russia is the place for Tallinns to thrive. I don’t know if you could call him a psychopath. He’d have eaten a baby – fuck it, he’d have eaten his baby – but arguably, he was a creature adapted for survival in the climate he found himself in.”
Drake said that the period where Tallinn’s money kept on rolling in unstoppably to Strauss Jethro Smith was about the time of the attack on Vanessa Whitcombe in Gordon Mews. Jethro kept the flat for confidential business, very basic confidential business involving backpacks full of used dollar bills in high denominations and suitcases tied up with string containing ditto. Not very nice from Jethro’s point of view. Too crude. We like to eat meat but we don’t necessarily want to go to the abattoir to see it killed. But he had to talk to Tallinn somewhere. He didn’t want him in the bank and he certainly didn’t want him popping round to Eaton Square and being invited in for a cup of tea by Sophia while he was waiting. He knew Tallinn was an animal.
It must have been horrible for Jethro, having to get along with Tallinn and listen to his abominable accounts of what he was doing to get the cash into his lily-white hands. But he was trapped. He had no choice. All Tallinn needed to do was to inform the police of what had been happening and give them pointers where to look and he, Sir Richard Jethro, the acceptable face of capitalism for the Government, would find himself doing seven to ten years in Ford Open Prison, coming out a tired, disgraced, elderly man. With no money. Jethro wanted and needed money and all that came with it.
So, after I’d assured Pugh that I couldn’t find the two men and the woman Jethro thought could bring him down, Jethro must have stopped thinking about it.
By this time Tallinn’s funds at Strauss Jethro Smith must have amounted to over fifty million, consisting of the sums paid in and the profits made from them by Jones. No wonder Tallinn was cut up when he thought he wasn’t going to get it back from the bank – even though, in that, he was probably mistaken. He wanted them to liquidate everything in a few days because he was on the run. He probably wanted electronic transfers to Latin America and offshore islands in his own name and that simply couldn’t be done in the time available. When Jethro tried to tell him this, he took it that Jethro was out to steal his money. In the world he came from that would have been natural. Equally natural was his revenge. The shooting was by way of a misunderstanding over business ethics.
But there would have been a crisis sooner or late
r, while Tallinn was flooding money into the bank and Jethro couldn’t stop him. Something had to happen and what happened was that Tallinn got into trouble. It began with his associates selling him out, which enabled the Germans to catch the man they believed responsible for Iran’s sudden elevation to the position of Bad Boy of the Middle East – the man who had set embassy lights burning all night all over the Middle East, Europe, not forgetting the Pentagon. Well, we always need some second-rate Satan these days, don’t we, since the collapse of communism, or, frankly, where’s the charm? So Tallinn was on the run. And he shot Fleur’s father. There’s always collateral damage when someone gets killed. Friends, relatives, daughters …
As I’ve said, it was a lovely summer evening in Adrian and Jess’s lovely house, but, as Drake unravelled it all for us, Jethro’s daughter shivered. “I still think of Tallinn,” she said, “coming through the windows in a shower of glass. See the whole table, all the people there, frozen. We couldn’t do anything. I see him shoot my father.”
Her friend got up and put a match to the fire. Logs burst into flame. A perfect summer evening, windows open, the fire dispelling a slight chill, the scent of roses.
Drake said, “It was pretty weird, sitting in those dark bars with salsa and rumba coming out of the jukeboxes, looking into those very pale blue eyes and hearing Tallinn’s story.”
“What’s the real reason he spoke to you?” I asked him.
“He was lonely, he told me. He spoke only Russian and a bit of basic English. And Peru’s not full of Russian speakers. But myself I think he’s probably got a plan. Getting his story told is only part of it.”
“What plan?” I said.
Drake shook his head. “I don’t know, but I don’t think he’s finished yet.”
He said Tallinn had been born in Belarus, not far from the Polish border, in 1970. His place of birth put him firmly on the European side of the Russian federation. He’d had no father to speak of, unless, and this was something he didn’t make quite clear, his father had been the mayor of the region, which must have helped when they went into business together. By the time of glasnost the boy was already out of hand, head of a robber band, never going to school, stealing cars and breaking his mother’s heart. It wasn’t too long before he became a useful part of a drugs chain which ran from Afghanistan into Latvia and Lithuania. He did his apprenticeship as a drugs courier into the Baltic ports. Then the day came, when Tallinn was fifteen, when the boss of his end of the operation had an unfortunate accident and was found dead in the harbour at Riga one December morning. Perhaps he’d stumbled in, drunk – a man wouldn’t last three minutes in that water. Or possibly someone had knocked him on the head and pushed him in. Anyway, Tallinn, it turned out, had his notebook and took over the business. He was on his way.
There was a mutually beneficial arrangement with his local mayor, who, a year after the association began, was the owner of a villa on the Côte d’Azur. The mayor, easing the path of Tallinn’s consignments, also had a seat in the Russian Parliament, the Duma, and through his connections there Tallinn’s contacts grew and widened, his protection became better and better and his empire expanded. And somewhere along the line, when profits were fine apart from the fact of not knowing what to do with them, he met the man who introduced him to Jethro.
Then came his downfall, a rival who offered better terms to his contacts in the Duma, the KGB and the army and who backed his claims by a savage massacre. It was over a consignment of heroin leaving Uzbekistan in army trucks and left six of Tallinn’s soldiers dead on the dusty plain. Tallinn himself barely escaped with his life, fleeing through Afghanistan, relying on the old loyalties of the tribesmen who’d been supplying and couriering heroin for him over the years – loyalties, he knew, which would soon switch to whoever was opposing him. But he got into Pakistan and that was where he heard he now had two couriers in the hands of the Germans and the Turks. He knew he must have been betrayed by the couriers, who were no longer afraid of his long reach.
He knew he was in deep trouble. He had one way out – to go to Britain, appeal to Jethro for protection, and get his money.
And, William, here’s why you’ll find you really don’t want me at the Enquiry, confirming Tallinn’s allegations. Because Jethro must have confided to Prothero at MI5, or quite likely someone even higher up than Prothero, that the man the Germans wanted for smuggling nuclear material and personnel to Iran had been laundering his dirty money through Strauss Jethro Smith for six, maybe seven long years. And Jethro must have told whoever it was that Tallinn had threatened that if he was extradited to Germany, he’d tell all.
While continuing to conceal the facts from his co-director at the bank, Jethro, cornered, must have revealed all to the British authorities and asked them to cover for him. And they did, William. Obviously, they did. The alternative would have been the shame of seeing their blue-eyed boy disgraced, a scandal involving the government, the collapse of a City bank, and loss of faith in our banking system.
It was a nasty choice for whoever made the ultimate decision. And that decision, William, I need hardly tell you, must have been made from high up, very high up – how high I leave you to wonder.
Typically, they temporised at first, just resisting the German efforts to extradite Tallinn, protecting him, treating him like an honoured guest. It got very embarrassing, with the Germans repeating their perfectly legitimate request for Tallinn and the British Government coming up with silly excuses not to return him. It was all attracting attention, so some bright spark, perhaps from the MI6 core, the illuminati, the ungovernable ones, decided that the most obvious solution to this problem was to knock Tallinn off. This failed, letting him loose on the general public – and the rest is history.
When Drake had finished his story we put on a record and listened to it quietly. Music on a summer night – one of life’s greatest pleasures, isn’t it, William? But it was a melancholy pleasure. Lacrimae rerum, William.
Well, I’m closing down now, old boy. I’m off on the morning tide. Goodbye – or is it just au revoir?
Yours aye, Sam Hope.
Thirty
She had come from a valley of cypress and olive trees, where cyclamen in pink, lilac and cream sprinkled the grass and beyond it lay a bay of clear Mediterranean blue.
Now Fleur sat beside her father in the courtyard of an old house outside Athens. Trees and flowers stood in pots on the mosaic floor. Water came slowly from a fountain. Dickie Jethro was in a wheelchair, one side of his body paralysed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She didn’t know how much he remembered of what he had done, what had happened, how much he understood about what was still going on.
“Tried – tried – to get you away from those men,” he said effortfully, from a mouth one side of which was still and useless.
She smiled at him. “You offered me Ben, and money, and all I did was run away.” Sophia had told her that the Barbados bribes – the money, the retrieved lover – were chiefly to separate her from Adelaide House and Dominic and Joe, whose knowledge threatened her father. She had not asked whether her father had been the man who had decided to have them killed, or whether it was an idea dreamed up by the ever loyal Henry Jones. For that matter, she had not told Sophia or her father she was on holiday in Greece with Dominic. She had come over that day from the island in a boat and would return that evening to the table under the cypress, supper in the open, the scent of herbs, candles burning in the darkness.
He sighed. “Naughty girl.” He pointed up into the clear sky where a flock of birds flew. “Swallows, going south,” he said. She could barely make out what he said, did not know if what he said was true. “Winter coming,” he said.
“It’s not so bad here,” she said. “Think of London, sleet and snow, short days.”
As she spoke she realised what she said was not consoling a man who had led an active, exciting life and was now caught, luxuriously, in a golden web spun for him by his wife and her pa
rents. He had devoted nurses, his loving wife always in attendance and the best medical treatment obtainable. All Dickie Jethro lacked was his freedom. He was a man of power suddenly powerless, a man of decision who no longer could decide anything for himself. He was not happy, sometimes impatient. Sophia, Fleur thought, was already showing the strain six months of this unnatural life had imposed on her. She was thirty-one, Dickie fifty-eight and wheelchair bound. What the outcome would be no one could predict. Whatever her father had done, Fleur thought, he was being well punished for it.
“Fleur,” he said, “Fleur.”
It was almost time for her to leave to get the boat back to the island. Sophia emerged from the house, smiling. “So glad you came,” she said. “Dickie often talks of you, don’t you darling?”
“Bobby doesn’t come, or Hazel,” he brought out.
“They’re very busy,” Sophia told her husband. “Hazel’s just had another baby. You know that. She sent you the photographs.”
“No—” he stumbled out, “no m— no money – for them.”
“Hazel certainly doesn’t care,” Sophia told him. “She told me so. She said money isn’t everything.”
“It’s a h— h— hell of a a lot,” he managed, his eyes gleaming.
“You’re still a very bad man,” she said. She had told Fleur she was keeping from her husband the news of the Bank of England Enquiry into Strauss Jethro Smith, but knew he had a radio and often listened to the World Service at night, when unable to sleep. He had not mentioned it, but she believed he had heard the news. She said the thought of having his old life combed over and taken apart in committee without his own testimony must be agony to him. There would be a report, too, and further publicity.
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