The Kills

30

"Of course he has a gun," Mike said. "He's an agent."

He, Mercer, and I were in the reception area of the Secret Service offices. "How the hell do you know he's an agent?" I asked. "We don't have a clue who he is. He pulled a gun on me a couple of hours ago and you're defending him already?"

"Yo, blondie. You saw him right here in this building, at high noon, where security's tighter than the inseam on your slacks. I assume he's legit. Maybe old Harry had a son. Maybe he's a junior-Little Mister Agent Strait the Second. He must have had some way to get in and out of this building without causing a stink. I truly doubt he pulled a gun on you. He must have had it drawn for a good reason."

"And I'm telling you that I was that very reason."

"Fine. So we made a report. You got a partial plate, and there'll be a make on the car by the end of the day. You're chasing the guy down the street like a banshee. Maybe he thought he had to defend himself."

"How do we figure out who he is? There must be photo IDs of everyone who works here in Federal Plaza."

"You weren't even able to describe him with any detail when the agents came to your office the other day. What are you gonna do now? Sit here and look at thousands of pictures of buzz-cut pasty-faced white men and hope for a match?"

"Yeah, I could do that. I didn't have any trouble picking him out of the crowd today."

It was going on two o'clock. My delay had taken us into the lunch hour, and the agent who had agreed to meet us had stepped away to keep another appointment.

A trim woman, younger than I, came through reception and directly over to the three of us. "Alvino. Lori Alvino. Sorry about your problem today. You ever get your man?" she asked, greeting me with a handshake.

"She never does, for very long. Don't you start worrying about that, too. I'm Mike Chapman. This is Mercer Wallace, and that's Alex Cooper."

She guided us into her suite, a good bit larger than most of the agent cubicles I had visited over the years, suggesting the importance of her position.

"You must have some juice, Lori," Mike said. "Big digs, glass partition, nice view of the Brooklyn Bridge."

"I show them the money," she said, grinning back at him. "That's why the feds love me. I'm the agent in charge of recovering all assets related to the National Mint, here and abroad. My boss says you need everything I can give you on the coin collection of King Farouk, is that right?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Alvino established what we knew of the story from Bernard Stark and picked it up from there. "The U.S. government worked with Farouk's people on a regular basis back then. We're talking 1944 and thereabouts, during World War Two. He had already become the king then-just twenty-four years old and richer than Croesus."

"Had he started collecting coins by that time?"

"Absolutely. He had dealers all over the States. They tripped over themselves whenever they had something unusual to unload, trying to get it under the royal nose. The more expensive, the better."

"How did they get the coins to Egypt? Did you just ship things as valuable and as small as that?"

"No way. Farouk used his royal legation to make purchases, which were sent to him regularly by diplomatic pouch. Just about every week. And his staff knew all the rules, believe me."

"What rules?"

"After FDR's Gold Reserve Act became law, it was illegal to export gold, unless the Treasury specifically issued you a license."

"Even a single piece of gold?" I asked. "A single coin?"

"You bet," Lori Alvino answered. "To get that license, you had to be able to establish that the coin being sent abroad had special, collector's value before 1933, before we went off the gold standard."

"How'd they prove that?"

"The keepers of the Castle, that was their territory."

"What castle?" I asked.

"Sorry. The old Smithsonian Institution-our guys always referred to it as the Castle. Experts at the Smithsonian decided on the uniqueness of whatever coin was in question."

"This happened often?" I asked.

"Pretty infrequently, actually," Alvino answered. "There weren't a lot of people during the war who were terribly concerned about their coin collections while the world was turned upside down. The entire European market was virtually shut down. It left the field wide-open for Farouk."

Mercer leaned in to speak. "This stuff doesn't quite qualify as ancient history, but it's a bit remote from what you're handling today. How come you know so much about all this? You had a refresher course recently?"

Alvino blushed. "I had a chance to look over the files a couple of weeks back. I had to pull all this paperwork together for someone else who came in for a briefing," she said, gesturing to the several folders full of documents related to the Farouk collection.

Chapman gave her his best trust-me-and-you-won't-know-I'm-working-you-over grin. "Anyone I know, Lori?"

She returned the smile and shrugged. "Can't help you there. My boss gave me orders to arrange all this for a presentation he had to make to some government officials. But I wasn't invited to the actual meeting, so I don't know who was involved."

Now he ran his fingers through his thick mane of black hair, moving on to his most serious mode. Mike was about to try to bluff her out of some information. "I've got a homicide to solve. The lieutenant told me those guys were a real threat," he said, flashing Mercer a glance. "Now I'm wasting precious time trying to catch up with what they already know."

Lori caught his sense of urgency. She wanted to be helpful. "Are-are we talking about the same people, do you think?"

"They were here to talk to your boss about Farouk, right?"

"Uh-huh."

"Let's make sure we're on the same wavelength. Which coins from his collection were you focusing on?" Mike asked, flipping through his notepad as though looking for specific names to match against things she said.

"I gave them a bunch of information-some silver pieces from the Civil War period, some gold ingots from San Francisco, circa 1849. The only kudos I got from my boss was for the research I came up with on the Double Eagle."

Mike slapped the pad against his knee. "Damn if I don't owe you for this one, Lori. I think we've already got all we need about his Civil War items. It's the other two we're after as well. Ever solve a murder before?"

"No, no, I haven't." She was grave as a stone now.

"Most satisfying thing you can ever be involved in. Give us what you got on the ingots and the big bird. I've always wanted a partner like you."

"Sure," Lori Alvino said. She spent the next ten minutes explaining the provenance and descriptions of some of the objects Farouk had purchased that had come out of the Gold Rush. Although handsome and somewhat unusual, they were far too plentiful-and probably too large-to have been part of McQueen Ransome's stash.

"Did you ever hear of Max Mehl?" Alvino asked.

The three of us shook our heads.

"He was a dealer. From Texas, I think. He's the one who first made contact with King Farouk about this fabulous twenty-dollar gold piece that he wanted to sell."

We listened carefully as she started to tell the story. "Mehl knew about the king's appetite for the rare and beautiful," she went on. "He not only convinced Farouk of the uniqueness of the coin, but also guaranteed that he could get it out of the country because of its special designation."

"How did he manage that?" I asked.

"Somehow, Mehl made a call to Treasury the very same day that Farouk expressed interest in the coin. The director of the Mint herself carried the Double Eagle to the Castle."

"Was that typical?" Mercer asked.

"Are you kidding? There was nothing routine about this bird's flight."

The more she talked about it, the more convinced I was that we were going in the right direction.

"The same day," Alvino said, "the curator examined the piece, declared it of special value dating back to before the presidential order of a decade earlier. To tell you the truth, he was under such pressure that my boss thinks he didn't even know what he was signing."

"But he agreed to request the licensing that made the coin valid?" I asked.

"Through ignorance, probably. No sign of a bribe, but that hasn't stopped some folks from believing there was one. Either way, he asked for the license-or the monetization-that turned the twenty-dollar piece into a small fortune."

"From the secretary of the treasury himself?"

"Exactly. Then the king's representatives took possession of the coin, packed it securely in the diplomatic pouch, and delivered it personally to Cairo, to Farouk's pleasure palace."

"What was the timing on all this?"

"That's what's so ironic. The coins were minted in 1933, as you know, and a bunch of them stolen a few years thereafter. Thousands more were melted down because we went off the gold standard."

"Sure."

"The royal legation picked Farouk's Double Eagle up from the Mint on March eleventh, 1944," Alvino said, looking down at her notes. "Exactly one week later is when the Secret Service found out about the plans that the Stark brothers had to auction another of the supposedly nonexistent treasures. They were furious."

"Did our government ever try to get the coin back from Farouk?"

"Yes, Detective. My predecessors knew that the license had been obtained from Morgenthau in error. They tried diplomatic measures to get it back," Alvino said. "But think of the date. We were in the middle of the Second World War. Egypt was a pivotal piece of the map, controlling the Suez Canal and passage to the Indian Ocean. Nobody wanted to upset the applecart for a purloined Double Eagle."

How trivial a single piece of stolen gold, valued then at twenty dollars, would have seemed to diplomats in the middle of a raging war.

"And after the war ended?" Mercer asked.

She fingered papers on her desk. "I can show you the letter that the man who had my job drafted then, asking the king for the return of the Double Eagle. Unfortunately, protocol required that he send the document up to the State Department, to get approval to correspond with a foreign government. The powers-that-be at State denied his request to do that."

"Why so?"

"'Politically inadvisable' is the language they used. The Arab-Israeli war in 1948 was the next international hot spot, and Farouk was widely unpopular-at home and abroad-by then. And he was way too distracted to be interested in the return of the Eagle."

"You think anybody could have predicted its future worth in those days?"

She laughed. "Maybe to the tune of a few thousand dollars. Seven million was an astronomical figure back then. Nobody would have believed it possible."

"Seven million's still pretty far over the top, as far as I'm concerned," Mike said. "So the fat boy gets deposed in 1952. He's exiled to…?"

"Rome," Alvino answered. "He loved la dolce vita. As a wild young man, he used to be called the Night Crawler."

"Yeah," Mike said, "so we've heard."

"Old habits die hard. He still spent his nights club hopping-the Hunt Club, the Piccolo Slam, the Boîte Pigalle, the Via Veneto. Flipped over to Monaco for Grace Kelly's wedding to his royal buddy, Prince Rainier. Ever the playboy."

Mike said. "So when he fled from Egypt, does anybody know whether that was with or without the bird?"

"Good question," Alvino answered. "And I'm not sure that anyone really does know the answer. The Egyptian revolutionaries-led by General Nasser-made Farouk leave most of his toys behind. But it's clear that in the months before his expulsion he got out enough money, enough jewels to sell, and some of his smaller treasures to allow him to live like a king, even in exile, for the rest of his life."

"The man without a country. But maybe with a Double Eagle," Mike said, thinking about the chronology. "So, he got the coin in 1944, left Egypt in 1952-and the coin finally surfaced when?"

"Not for almost fifty years, Mike. People assumed it had been left behind in Cairo when Sotheby's included it for sale in an auction catalog of Farouk's treasures in 1955. As soon as the Secret Service agents attached to the Mint saw that listing, they directed the American consul in Cairo to have the government remove the Double Eagle from the auction and return it to the U.S."

"So it never went on the block?"

"Correct. But we didn't get it back then either," Alvino said. "Nasser's aides claimed it was all a big mistake. That Farouk had taken it with him. That no one in Egypt had seen it in years. It disappeared completely-no explanation, no clue, no trace."

"The one the Stark brothers sold at auction in 2002-Farouk's seven-million-dollar Eagle-when did that get back into this country?" Mike asked.

"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 get 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."