Charlie Muffin U.S.A.

15

Jack Pendlebury felt no hesitation in bringing one of his squads into Palm Beach. Since they were not to be employed in any way connected with the exhibition, he was confident that they would not be detected by any check Giuseppe Terrilli might make.

Within an hour of his poolside conversation with Clarissa Willoughby, the American had withdrawn Roger Gilbert from Lake Worth and appointed him controller of the surveillance operation on Charlie Muffin, with responsibility for thirty men. It took Gilbert a further two hours to get his people into position, identify their subject and establish a rota system under which each group operated every third day.

Charlie recognised the surveillance almost as soon as it was imposed. Relief came with the identification, because since Clarissa’s supposed indiscretion Charlie had been tensed for some response and would have been more alarmed had there not been one.

Charlie was confident that his training and past experience still gave him an advantage. It enabled him to think like Pendlebury, which was of primary importance. And now that he was aware of being watched, it meant he could, without Pendlebury suspecting it, influence the man’s responses.

‘ A clever animal, knowing it is being pursued, can always lead its hunters to disaster.’

That had been another of Sir Archibald’s catch-phrases and Charlie had used it before when an operation had temporarily slipped out of control.

He left the Breakers, pausing at the end of the drive to check his watch and then began pacing along South County Road, a man establishing a time schedule. At Bethesda, Pendleton Avenue and Barton Avenue he consulted his watch again, then turned left, to bring himself out to Ocean Boulevard. At the entrance to the private road to Terrilli’s house, he hesitated, looking once more at his watch, continued for about a hundred yards and then retraced his steps. As he passed the private road, he allowed another pause and glanced in towards the unseen, castellated mansion. Despite the heat, which made him sweat, Charlie returned to the Breakers at the same brisk pace. Twice during the journey he checked the time.

Inside the hotel, he queued at the cashier’s for change, then entered one of the public telephone boxes, from which it would be impossible for anyone to establish from the hotel switchboard with whom he made contact. Shuddering slightly as the air conditioning cooled the perspiration upon him, Charlie went through a fifteen-minute charade of making long distance calls, in fact dialling for the time, the weather information, the small-advertisement department of the Palm Beach Daily News to ask about small-ad rates, and the airport to enquire about services to Miami, New Orleans and New York.

He created a satisfied expression on his face before leaving the kiosk and went immediately to the Alcazar, where he had arranged to meet Clarissa.

She was already waiting. She wore a crisp white dress, with little jewellery, hardly any make-up and her hair was tied back in the way he had told her he liked.

He waved exuberantly at her, kissed her cheek as he got to the table and then gestured extravagantly at a waiter, announcing as he looked back to Clarissa, ‘We’ll celebrate.’

‘What?’ she asked, frowning slightly at Charlie’s performance.

‘It’s a game,’ he said, more quietly. ‘I’m trying to worry people.’

‘Do I need to know the rules?’

‘No. Just follow along,’ said Charlie. Once, he thought, she would have turned the remark into some sort of sexual innuendo. Her attitude was a pleasant improvement.

‘Where have you been?’ she said.

Raising his voice, Charlie said, ‘Taking an important walk.’

Clarissa grimaced through the window, towards the sun-whitened sand.

‘It’s too damned hot for walking,’ she said.

‘Not for the sort of walking I did,’ said Charlie.

‘You seem very pleased with yourself.’

‘People seem to be responding in the way I want.’

‘When am I going to know the secret?’

‘As soon as I do,’ said Charlie seriously and more softly.

‘More puzzles?’

‘But we’ve got a lot more of the pieces fitted together than we had a few days ago.’

‘Has Pendlebury approached you yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Isn’t that odd?’ said Clarissa. ‘Surely as the man in charge of security, he should have contacted you immediately, after what I told him.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Charlie. ‘That’s what he should have done. But he isn’t thinking properly.’ He raised his drink to her and said, loudly again, ‘To the success of the operation.’

She drank, disguising her bewilderment.

In a corner of the room but with a better view of the ocean, Robert Chambine sat unaware of the couple, Coca Cola before him and a copy of the Miami Herald discarded beside it. He was looking towards the door when Leonard Saxby and Peter Boella entered. There was not the slightest indication of any recognition between them. The two men went immediately to the bar, gossiping about that morning’s golf score.

‘I had a call from Lyford Cay this morning,’ announced Clarissa. ‘They want to know when I’m going down.’

She had been looking away from him but now she stared directly into his face.

‘How much longer would you like me to stay?’ she said.

There was none of the imperious demand that had been in her voice in New York. And she didn’t speak in italics any more, Charlie realised. She’d performed the function for which he had asked her to come to Palm Beach. But was proving additionally useful for this charade.

Charlie suddenly became aware of the intensity of her expression and his mind was thrown, with frightening clarity, to his earlier thoughts in the hotel suite and then through the years to an argument he had had with Edith, soon after they had gone on the run and he had explained fully to her what he had done and the people he had deceived to make it possible.

‘There’s a cruelty about you, Charlie,’ she had said accusingly, ‘a cruelty that sees nothing wrong in using any-one, even me ‘

He had denied it, of course. And four years later he had stared down at the pulped body of the only woman he had ever loved and whom he had constantly cheated, and he had known that he would never lose the guilt of using her.

‘I’d stay if you want me to,’ said Clarissa. She hesitated, a smile trying hopefully at the edges of her mouth. Then she added, ‘I’d like to, really…’

‘No,’ he interrupted, ‘it’s better you go.’

‘Please…’ she tried, but Charlie shook his head at her again.

‘I told you it would be dangerous,’ he said. ‘And it might be.’

‘You’re just saying that… an excuse,’ she said.

‘I’m not,’ said Charlie sincerely. ‘I promised Rupert there wouldn’t be any danger.’

‘Hardly kept your promise, did you?’ she demanded, turning the words back upon him and reminding him of the other guilt.

Charlie frowned, nervous of the direction of the conversation.

‘Let’s not be stupid, Clarissa.’

‘Never that,’ she said. ‘The society butterfly, that’s me.’

It was her first attempt at brittleness for a long time and it failed, and they both knew it.

He moved to speak, but she burst out ahead of him. ‘Don’t tell me how much older you are than me.’

‘I am.’

‘That’s a cop-out,’ she said. ‘Like married men always try to end an affair by saying their responsibility to their children is too great.’

‘I wasn’t going to talk about age,’ said Charlie.

‘What then?’

‘You’d become bored… honestly you would.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ she said defiantly.

‘It’s like -’ he stopped, searching for the expression ‘- like a holiday romance,’ he resumed, badly. ‘There wouldn’t be any novelty left, back in England.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of it as novelty.’

‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘That’s all it is, really.’

To cover the sigh, he brought the glass to his lips. The conversation had disconcerted him. Mixed with surprise was irritation; this was creating a situation he didn’t want, taking his mind from Pendlebury and Terrilli and the Russian stamps.

Behind him and therefore unseen, Saxby and Boella finished their drinks and left the Alcazar, wandering out into the car park alongside the exhibition room, apparently needing to check something in their golf equipment in the boot of their car.

‘I don’t find it easy to beg,’ she said.

‘Then don’t.’

‘I don’t want to go away from here.’

‘I want you to.’

‘It’s normally I who dictate the end to these sort of things,’ she said.

‘I’m not discarding you,’ attempted Charlie. ‘I’m asking you to go down to Lyford Cay because it might be safer for you there than here.’

‘You’ll see me when we get back to London?’

‘As a friend,’ he qualified.

She laughed, trying to make it a sneering sound. ‘What’s the difference between screwing a man’s wife three thousand miles from home rather than two miles away?’

‘None, I suppose,’ admitted Charlie honestly. ‘It just seems different, somehow.’

‘I think you’re a bastard,’ she said.

To remind her that it had been she who initiated the seduction would qualify him for the description, Charlie decided.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am.’

She made as if to rise abruptly, but then relaxed against the table.

‘I’m sorry I’ve been a nuisance,’ she said.

‘You haven’t.’

‘An embarrassment, then.’

‘Nor that, either.’

‘Could there really be danger?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Quite easily.’

‘And you could get hurt?’

Charlie thought about the question. ‘I’ve usually managed to avoid it,’ he said.

‘But you could?’

‘I suppose so. That’s why I don’t want you to say anything of this to Sally. It mustn’t get back to Cosgrove.’

‘Please be careful,’ she said.

‘I’m always that,’ promised Charlie.

‘I’ve a car coming for me at eight,’ said Clarissa. Seeing Charlie’s expression, she said, ‘I didn’t think you’d want me to stay. And I could have always cancelled it.’

‘Of course,’ he said.

‘It’s only twelve thirty.’

‘Do you want lunch?’

‘No.’

‘Another drink?’

‘No. I want to say goodbye properly.’

He rose, to help her from her chair. She didn’t stand immediately, instead remaining where she was and gazing up at him.

‘It’s strange,’ she said. ‘If anyone had told me a month ago that this was going to happen, I’d have said they were mad.’

‘Novelty,’ repeated Charlie.

‘I wonder how long it will take to wear off,’ she said, rising at last.

Pendlebury regarded the arrival of Saxby and Boella as marginally more important than the Englishman’s apparent awareness of Terrilli. He immediately allocated more men to the two known criminals, ignoring Warburger’s fears about detection because he felt the situation justified the risk. When he learned about their checks on the lighting cables he nodded happily, confident that the operation was going exactly as he intended and that he was in complete control.

The initial surprise at the Englishman’s visit to Terrilli’s home did not last long. It meant he had identified the video picture, that’s all. It still needn’t alter the timing of the man’s death.

Pendlebury left his room and shambled to the elevator, head sunk against his chest in concentration. He’d delayed too long to confront the man about his suspicions of robbery,

Pendlebury decided. He would have to behave as if he attached no importance to what the woman had said.

He was still deep in thought when he emerged at ground level, so that the presence of one of his people near the desk momentarily startled him.

‘Any news of the insurance guy?’ he asked.

‘Spent three hours with the woman,’ said the agent. ‘She’s just left and he’s gone back to his rooms; probably needs the rest. Must be quite a performer.’

‘Yes,’ said Pendlebury, ‘I think he is.’

John Williamson planned his attempted entry into the exhibition chamber very carefully, knowing there were only five minutes before it closed. The security men were in a bunch, even those in plain clothes, so the Russian managed to take a photograph including almost all of them with the Minnox camera concealed in the hollowed out book he carried beneath his arm. He allowed himself to be stopped and smiled apologetically at his stupidity in expecting to view the stamps so late, glancing around and identifying the security cameras while he was talking to an attendant. There would be time enough later, he assured the man. He was staying for several days.

He was turning when the lift opened to his right and he saw the unkempt figure of another of the security men whom he’d identified from his observation of the exhibition earlier in the evening. From the deference paid, someone in authority, Williamson had judged.

As Charlie Muffin strolled casually across the lobby, Williamson managed three exposures on his camera, two full face and one profile. With luck, he thought, he might get the other man who had gone upstairs about thirty minutes earlier: another person in authority, the man had realised. And similarly scruffy. If he didn’t manage it that night, there was always the following day.

For the moment, Williamson considered the Cubans more important. He was impressed with them, and intended telling Moscow. Despite being provided with a complete description, it had taken him several hours to identify them all. He seated himself casually in one of the lobby chairs, less than fifteen feet from Manuel Ramirez, whom he knew to be the leader from the information he had been provided with in San Diego. The Cuban was a middle-aged, thickly built man, his hair already whitening at the temples. He appeared quite at ease in the luxury of an American hotel; had Williamson not been a trained observer, it would have been impossible to detect the attention that Ramirez was paying to the exhibition, even though it was now closed for the night. Williamson continued his gaze around the lobby. Ramirez had perfectly placed his people, ensuring that every possible entry was under observation. Because he had come only minutes earlier from the parking area, Williamson knew there were two more men outside covering the garden windows.

He looked back to Ramirez, feeling a brief moment of pity for the man who imagined the operation to be his passport back to America. Quickly he stifled the feeling, surprised at its appearance. It made unarguable sense to expose them, if the need arose, so that the C.I.A. would be embarrassed.

He rose, moving towards the restaurant. All he had done so far, he admitted to himself, was establish the procedures which were basic to the start of any operation. It was time he concentrated upon the purpose of his mission, isolating the man who knew General Kalenin.

The maitre d’hotel greeted him at the entrance to the dining room, searched for a single seat and then led him to within three tables of where Charlie Muffin was sitting, also alone.