The Kills

by Fairstein, Linda

  “Not until 1996, fifty years after it was delivered to the king in Egypt.”

  “Who brought it in?” I asked, curious about its circuitous route home.

  “There was a prominent coin dealer from England who flew in with it and arranged what he thought was going to be a private meeting with an American counterpart. Breakfast at the Waldorf-Astoria.”

  “You’ve got a shit-eating grin on your face, Lori,” Mike said. “Must mean your boys were hiding under the table.”

  “You’re not wrong. A few intercepted calls and wiretaps, and the Secret Service picked up the tab for the scrambled eggs and bacon.”

  “And landed the Double Eagle?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Did the Brit tell you where he bought it?” Mercer asked.

  “That’s still a pretty murky story,” she answered. “Gave us a lot of nonsense about one of the Egyptian colonels who sold it to a merchant after the coup. Couldn’t name names or provide any documentary proof.”

  Lori Alvino hesitated. Her boss, she had said earlier, had told her to give us everything. “Besides, that wasn’t what our intelligence picked up.”

  “What was the contradictory information?” Mike asked.

  “I know you think all the federal agencies don’t get along with each other very well,” Lori said, looking back and forth among us to see if we agreed with her.

  “We don’t work with you guys often enough to know,” Mike answered, in a less than candid fashion.

  “Well, I don’t want you to think this is one of those immature interagency rivalries. It’s just the way business was.”

  “No quarrel from us.”

  “The CIA screwed this up,” she said emphatically. “The Central Intelligence Agency made a mess of the whole thing.”

  “Of the Double Eagle?”

  “That, too,” Lori said. “I was talking about the political trouble they caused-with Farouk, with the rebels, with the coup. And as a side effect of those problems, the disappearance of that coin, among many other valuables.”

  The CIA had lurked on the outskirts of our case since the beginning. Andrew Tripping claimed to have been an agent. Victor Vallis may have been in their employ when he returned to Cairo in the early fifties. The faux Harry Strait had pretended to Paige Vallis that he was a CIA agent, when in fact the real Harry Strait had been a member of the Secret Service. What had linked these individuals together, to the government agencies, and to our case?

  “The CIA,” I asked, “was it actually involved with King Farouk?”

  “In a very big way. Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson-his name was Kermit-was the CIA’s main man in Cairo in the early fifties. He made a fast friend of the king.”

  “That was easy to do?”

  “Well, Farouk considered the Roosevelt family the royalty of the U.S. That was part of his access. And also Roosevelt had a guy on his staff who had an inside track.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Kermit Roosevelt brought with him as an aide a young Foreign Service officer who had served in the thirties as Farouk’s tutor-a brilliant guy who spoke six or seven languages and knew more world history-”

  Mike Chapman filled in the blanks, letting out a low whistle. “Victor Vallis.”

  “That’s exactly right,” said Lori. “I didn’t realize the CIA would have been so cooperative and given you so much information.”

  Not to worry, I thought. You called that one right. The fact that we knew an occasional name or fact seemed to encourage her to trust us with more details.

  “Apparently, the king was very fond of Victor from the old days-they were practically the same age, and he treated his old tutor like a brother. Gave him the run of the palace.”

  “Knowing he was CIA?”

  “Oh, no. Believing that he just held some low-level post, the kind a tutor-cum-grad-student would land the first few times out. This Vallis fellow lived virtually inside the royal quarters, had an apartment of his own there.”

  “Talk about access and opportunity,” Mercer said.

  “So the CIA,” I asked, “did they support Farouk’s reign?”

  Lori Alvino shook her head. “Not for long. FDR had two goals. He needed Egypt as a democratic stronghold in the Middle East, since the rest of the region was so susceptible to communism. And he was among the first to recognize the importance of Arab oil to fuel the American economy. Farouk? He was a loose cannon, and the Americans realized they couldn’t control him.”

  “So the U.S. funded the Egyptian coup? We backed General Nasser and Anwar Sadat?”

  She pursed her lips. “Not with guns and tanks and planes. Simply with the promise that if their coup was successful, the Americans would not step in to save the king.”

  “And when the time came?”

  “Nasser’s rebels took over the Egyptian army, closed the airfields so Farouk couldn’t escape on one of his private planes, and held his royal yacht in dry dock. The king himself called the embassy to get Truman to intercede on his behalf-by then FDR was long dead-but the president refused to do it. His enemies sent him off into exile-with seventy pieces of luggage rumored to be packed with gold ingots and hidden jewels. The Americans never lifted a hand to help King Farouk.”

  “But the rebels let him live,” Mike said.

  “Nasser was no fool. He didn’t want to risk a civil war, or make Farouk a martyr by killing him,” Lori said.

  “Do the math,” Mike said. “Farouk had a five-hundred-room palace, chock-full of priceless treasures. Best guess is he beats it out of town with all those suitcases and pockets full of goodies. The rest that got left behind-maybe four hundred rooms’ worth of stuff-who got it all?”

  Lori shrugged. “Some of it was auctioned by Sotheby’s. Some of it was taken by the rebel soldiers-all his great racehorses-and everything from his cigar collection to some of his pornography showed up at Nasser’s headquarters.”

  “The CIA was in on that?” I asked.

  “At some levels, sure. The stories were legendary. Somebody seen sipping a martini at Shepheard’s Bar in Cairo, pulling out a cigarette lighter with Farouk’s initials; or a young agent coming home to the States with a unique assortment of Confederate coins, which happened to have been a hallmark of the king’s collection-that kind of thing.”

  “Nobody called on the carpet for any of it?”

  “Hard to do. Most of them would just say the items had been a gift from the king. Awfully tough to prove otherwise, after time went by.”

  “And Victor Vallis, any stories about him, about what he took out of the palace?”

  “Odd guy, the tutor. Didn’t seem to be interested in all the glitz around him. He was a scholar. Nobody worried about what he took, because he asked first.”

  “Asked what?”

  “He wanted letters, correspondence, government missives. He was a paper man. Probably could have filled his shoes with gold, too, but apparently he didn’t. Said he was going to write a book about Farouk, but I’m not sure he ever did. He moved out of the palace days after the king went into exile, and Nasser let him take boxes of documents with him, assuming the CIA was glad to see the old boy out of the country, too.”

  Mercer was still puzzling over all the names involved. “Harry Strait,” he asked, “was he with the CIA?”

  “Oh, no. One of our own. The very best. I’m sure Mr. Stark told you what an amazing job Harry did getting back the stray Double Eagles. Pure Secret Service.”

  “Did he have a son?”

  “Harry? Never married. One of those guys whose whole life was the service.”

  “You’ve been very gracious with your information, Lori,” I said. I didn’t want to reveal to her how tight the CIA had been in response to our efforts to get files on Vallis, Tripping, and Strait. But a deposed Egyptian king was a different story. “It’s hard to imagine that half a century after this coup, the CIA still considers Farouk’s files a matter of national security, isn’t it? It’s been hard to ge
t the facts we need on all this.”

  “Ten years in exile, doin’ as the Romans do,” Mike said. “Wine, women, and song. Fat and happy. Has his last supper, smokes a big fat cigar, and then croaks at the dinner table. When you think of the fates of a lot of monarchs-from the guillotine to the firing squad-all in all, not a bad way for the king to die.”

  “That’s just the official version, Mike,” Lori Alvino told him. “That’s the way the newspapers played it. The fact is, Mr. Homicide Detective, King Farouk was murdered.”

  31

  “What the Romans needed, Mike, was a good homicide cop,” Lori said. “They rolled over on this one, big-time.”

  He was standing at the window, looking at the traffic going eastbound over the Brooklyn Bridge. I knew what he was thinking, because I was trying to make the same kinds of connections. What was it that linked the unnatural death of an Egyptian king in Rome back in 1965 to the murders in New York City, in the last few days, of a Harlem dancer and the daughter of a former CIA operative? “How’d it happen?” Mike asked.

  “Most of what you know from history books and old newspaper stories is true. The man weighed almost four hundred pounds. He smoked like a fiend, and took medication for high blood pressure. Went out for dinner at a fancy restaurant, in full view of a big crowd.”

  “Something on the menu he wasn’t expecting?”

  “Let me remember,” she said. “I think he had a dozen oysters, a nice rich lobster Newburg, followed by roast baby lamb, with about six side dishes, and flaming cr��pe suzettes for dessert. He lit up his Havana, and in front of a roomful of spectators, his head fell onto the table and he dropped dead.”

  “Cause of death at autopsy?”

  “What autopsy?” Lori Alvino asked. “That’s the whole point. Nobody ordered an autopsy. The king died of excess, they said at the time. A cerebral hemorrhage. It seemed so obvious that people didn’t question it.”

  “But in fact?” Mercer asked.

  Lori Alvino rested her chin in her hands, propped up by her elbows, telling us what she knew was in the official files. “There’s a poison called alacontin. Ever hear of it?”

  None of us had.

  “Tasteless, odorless. Causes cardiac arrest immediately, but wouldn’t show up in an autopsy.”

  “Why not?”

  “Ask your docs how the drug works. I just read the reports, I don’t do the forensics.”

  “No, I mean why no autopsy?” I asked.

  “On the orders of the Italian Secret Service.”

  “There’s an Italian Secret Service?” Mike asked. “That’s got to be as effective as the Swiss navy.”

  “Easy, Detective,” Lori said. “I’ve got paisans over there.”

  “Now we’re talking 1965,” Mercer said. “Who wanted Farouk dead at that point? He’d been in exile for more than ten years by then.”

  “Pick your leaders. Some say the poisoner was working for the Egyptians. In a decade, Nasser had gone from being a dashing rebel to a socialist dictator. Loyal Egyptians talked of restoring the monarchy, bringing home the exiled leader. Farouk’s death would have been a gift to Nasser from his supporters.”

  “Who else?”

  “The Americans, of course. And the English,” Lori said. I reminded myself that Peter Robelon’s father had also been a British agent in Europe during that period.

  “Why them? Why us?”

  “Because things had not gone as planned with Nasser. Our CIA and the British intelligence agency thought, quite wrongly, that the young general was going to be more malleable than Farouk had been. But he wasn’t.”

  “Then why would we hurt Farouk?”

  “A lot of government people thought, at the time, that Nasser would be ousted and the Egyptian monarchy would be restored. The Brits wanted their old outpost again in Cairo.”

  “So why not put a king back on the throne, and control him?” I asked.

  “You got it. But Farouk hadn’t worked the first time around. Now he was older, still very undisciplined, and totally unacceptable to the Western leaders. His son, however, was the perfect candidate.”

  Of course, I remembered. After Farouk had lost interest in Queenie, he had sired a son with his young second wife.

  “The boy was only a teenager, so he would need guidance from the British and American delegations, they figured. And he’d be very appealing to the Egyptian masses as a return of the last ruling dynasty. The U.S. could prop him up on the throne and we’d all be back in business.”

  “So Farouk’s death could have been a first step in our Allied plan to regain control of the territory, rather than a gift to Nasser from his own followers?”

  “It works either way,” Lori said.

  “So now, Farouk is killed, in Rome,” Mercer said. “And what became of all the treasures he had taken there?”

  Lori Alvino didn’t answer.

  “C’mon, Lori, too late to stop talking to us now,” Mike said. “The CIA?”

  “Or the British Secret Service. Or even the Italian Secret Service. There were enough slices of Farouk’s pie for everyone to get a handful.”

  “I’m thinking,” Mike said, “about how that Double Eagle got to Egypt in the first place.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “In a diplomatic pouch. What could be a more foolproof way to move something valuable around the continent, or between continents? Who would know what’s inside the little bag? What if the Double Eagle also left Italy in a government pouch?”

  “I hate to remind you two,” Mercer said. “But the coin that Mr. Stark sold in 2002 was the only one left like it in the entire world.”

  “That’s the one I’m talking about, too,” Mike said. “The one Farouk had since 1944-the one in Stark’s auction in 2002. What are our choices? The king left it in Egypt when he was deposed, then someone found it and sold it to the British dealer. Lori here says that’s not likely.”

  He looked to her for a sign of agreement and he got it.

  “An American CIA agent sat on the nest in Cairo, after the fat man fled,” Mike went on. “Someone who knew where to locate the coin, someone who had access to the palace. Other people forgot about the little piece of gold over time, because of all the turmoil in the region, and eventually our guy brought it out on the black market.”

  Lori picked up on the possibilities. “Maybe the Italian authorities who cleaned out his apartment in Rome found the coin. Maybe even the British agents, who continued to keep a close watch on him all his life. Lots of people have theories about the whereabouts of the precious little object for the fifty years it was missing, but the fact is that no one knows for sure.”

  I glanced at my watch, as the sky darkened over the East River. “I’m sorry to break this up. It’s been most useful for us. I’m afraid I’m taking a couple of days off, and I’ve got a flight to catch out of La Guardia.”

  “Let me know what you need, Alex,” Lori said. “Nobody’s going to open those CIA files of Farouk’s anytime soon. There was too much backstabbing and betrayal in play. None of the officials looks good, in hindsight.”

  We thanked her for the time and information, and I called a car service to meet me outside the building and drive me to the airport.

  The three of us were talking over each other as we stepped into the elevator. Fortunately for us, no one else was aboard.

  “McQueen Ransome, Paige Vallis, Andrew Tripping,” I said, listing off some of the cast of characters. “They’re all tied up with Farouk or the Middle East.”

  “You got Paige’s father, Robelon’s father, some nutcase calling himself Harry Strait,” Mike added.

  “Bam.More Farouk.”

  I went on. “Graham Hoyt fancies himself a collector, on a smaller scale than Farouk, but with obvious delusions of grandeur. Spike Logan gained the confidence of Queenie-enough to wind up with a few expensive gifts that he knew came from Farouk, and a penchant to go hunting for more after she died.”

&nbs
p; “Nobody,” I said softly, “nobody can really tell us how many Double Eagles were stolen. Ten? That’s only the best guess. That’s only the ones that were identified and recovered.”

  “You’re dreaming big, blondie. And you’re missing the point. Even so, even if you found a dozen of them on the floor of Queenie’s closet, they were never monetized. Worthless. They’re not legal. You heard Bernard Stark. You can’t even get twenty bucks for them. Only the one that was auctioned in 2002 was monetized for Farouk.”

  “But the killer might not know that,” I said.

  “Yeah, but-”

  “Just suppose, Mike. If I heard that a Double Eagle sold for seven million dollars, and I knew where to find another piece that was identical to it, it would never occur to me that it wasn’t a legitimate coin. Maybe I’d still move heaven and earth to get my greedy little hands on one.”

  The car service driver was outside the building, flashers blinking, with the company name and car number displayed on a plate in the windshield.

  “Why’d you call for this? I would have driven you to the airport,” Mike said.

  “I took you away from Val long enough last night. You don’t need to chauffeur me around. Call me if anything breaks, guys, okay? I’ll be home by the weekend.”

  I got in the car, slammed the door, and sat back for the slow trip over the bridge and out the BQE to La Guardia.

  “U.S. Airways terminal, please.”

  “What time’s your flight, lady?”

  “Six-fifteen.”

  “You live dangerously. Cutting it mighty close. I’ll do my best.”

  When I reached the checkin counter it was almost six o’clock. I showed my photo ID and e-ticket. “We’ve had some weather delays, ma’am. Your aircraft is coming in from Pittsburgh a bit late. We won’t be boarding for another hour.”

  “How does it look on the Vineyard end?”

  The small airfield on the Vineyard gets socked in regularly, subject to all the weather variables of an island surrounded by both cold ocean waters and warmer bays. You couldn’t be a Vineyarder if you were unable to cope with the likelihood of getting stranded at an airport because of summer fog or winter storms.