The Kills (38 page)

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."