Orania

The eyes gazed back miserably. He returned to the window and looked down at the snow-choked street. A few muffled, huddled babushkas were sweeping away the snow, which would fall again tonight.

It had been so long, he mused, twenty-four years almost to the day, since he had quit his non-job and pointless exile in Beirut to come here. There had been no point in staying. Nick Elliot and the rest at ‘the Firm’ had got it all together by then; he had finally admitted it to them himself. So he had come, leaving wife and children to join him later if they wished.

At first he thought it was like coming home, to a spiritual and moral home. He had thrown himself into the new life; he had truly believed in the philosophy and its eventual triumph. Why not? He had spent twenty-seven years serving it. He had been happy and fulfilled those first, early years of the 1960s. There had been the exten­sive debriefing, of course, but he had been revered within the Committee of State Security. He was, after all, one of the ‘Five Stars”the greatest of them all’along with Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, and Blake, the ones who had burrowed into the inner core of the British establishment and betrayed it all.

Burgess, drinking and buggering his way to an early grave, had been in it before he had arrived. Maclean had lost his illusions first, but then he had been in Moscow since 1951. By 1963 he was sour and embittered, taking it out on Melinda, who had finally quit to come here, to this apartment. Maclean had gone on, somehow, utterly disillu­sioned and resentful, until the cancer got him, by which time he hated his hosts and they hated him. Blunt had been ‘blown’ and disgraced back in England. That left him and Blake, the old man thought.

Normally, the plunger would have been in contact with the Pye microswitch. The turning of the key would have established the complete link, activating the whole system. But with the plunger blanked from the microswitch, the door system, at least, would be inert. Rawlings was certain he could take that door lock within thirty minutes. In the apartment itself there would be other traps. He would cope with those when he met them.

Finishing his coffee, he reached for his file of newspaper cuttings. Like all jewel thieves, Rawlings followed the society gossip columns closely. This particular file was entirely about the social appearances of Lady Fiona and the suite of perfect diamonds she had worn to the gala ball the previous evening’sofar as Jim Rawlings was concerned, for the last time.

A thousand miles to the east, the old man standing at the window of the sitting room in the third-floor-front apart­ment atMiraProspekt 111 was also thinking of midnight. It would herald January 1, 1987, his seventy-fifth birthday.

The hour was well past midday but he was still in a robe; there was little enough cause these days to rise early or spruce up to go to the office. There was no office to go to. His Russian wife, Erita, thirty years his junior, had taken their two boys skating along the flooded and frozen lanes of Gorki Park, so he was alone.

He caught a glance of himself in a wall mirror, and the prospect brought him no more joy than he felt at contemplating his life, or what was left of it. His face, always lined, was now deeply furrowed. His hair, once thick and dark, was now snow-white, skimpy, and lifeless. The skin, after a lifetime of titanic drinking and chain-smoking, was blotched and mottled.

At the door, she had examined the attached card, exclaimed, ‘Oh, how perfectly lovely!’ in the bright cut-crystal accents of her class, and taken the bouquet. Then Billy had held out his receipt pad and ballpoint pen. Unable to manage all three items together, Lady Fiona had withdrawn, flustered, into the sitting room to put down the bouquet, leaving Billy unattended for several seconds in the small hallway.

With his boyish looks, fluffy blond hair, blue eyes, and shy smile, Billy was a gift. He reckoned he could work his way past any middle-aged housewife in the metropolis. But his baby eyes missed very little.

Before even pressing the doorbell, he had spent a full minute scanning the outside of the door, its frame, and the surrounding wall area. He was looking for a small buzzer no larger than a walnut, or a black button or switch with which to turn the buzzer off. Only when satisfied there was none did he ring the bell.

Left alone in the doorway, he did the same again, searching the inner side of the frame and the walls for the buzzer or switch. Again there was none. By the time the lady of the house returned to the hall to sign the receipt, Billy knew the door was secured by a shunt lock, which he had gratefully identified as a Chubb rather than a Brahmah, which is reputedly unpickable.

Lady Fiona took the pad and pen and tried to sign for the flowers. No chance. The ballpoint pen had long since had its cartridge removed and any remaining ink expended on a blank piece of paper. Billy apologized profusely. With a bright smile Lady Fiona told him it was of no account, she was sure she had one in her bag, and returned beyond the sitting-room door.

Rawlings, in fact, had a scrap-metal dealership and car-wrecking yard. It gave him access to a well-equipped machine workshop, metal of all kinds, electrical wiring, battery acid, and the two big thugs he employed both in the yard and as backup should he ever run into any ‘aggro’ from villains who might decide to make trouble for him.

Showered and shaved, Rawlings stirred Demerara crys­tals into his second espresso of the morning and studied again the sketch drawings Billy Rice had left him.

Billy was his apprentice, a smart twenty-three-year-old who would one day become good, even very good. He was just starting out on the fringe of the underworld and eager to do favors for a man of prestige, apart from the invalu­able instruction he would get in the process. Twenty-four hours earlier, Billy had knocked at the door of the eighth-floor apartment at Fontenoy House, carrying a large bou­quet of flowers and dressed in the livery of an expensive flower shop. The props had got him effortlessly past the commissionaire in the lobby, where he had also noted the exact layout of the entrance hall, the porter’s lodge, and the way to the stairs.

It was her ladyship who had answered the door personally, her face lighting up with surprise and pleasure at the sight of the flowers. They purported to come from the commit­tee of the Distressed Veterans Benevolent Fund, of which Lady Fiona was one of the patronesses, and whose gala ball she was due to attend that very night, December 30, 1986. Rawlings figured that even if, at the ball itself, she mentioned the bouquet to any one of the committee members, he would simply assume it had been sent by another member on behalf of them all.

However he prospered, he was a South Londoner, born and bred, and though Wandsworth might not be as chic as Belgravia and Mayfair, it was his ‘manor.’ Like all of his kind, he hated to leave the security of his own manor. Within it he felt reasonably safe, even though to the local underworld and the police he was known as a ‘face,’ underworld slang for a criminal or villain.

Like all successful criminals, he kept a low profile around the manor, driving an unobtrusive car, his sole indulgence being the elegance of his apartment. He culti­vated a deliberate vagueness among the lower orders of the underworld as to exactly what he did, and although the police accurately suspected his specialty, his ‘form book’ was clean, apart from a short stretch of ‘porridge’ as a teenager. His evident success and the vagueness about how he achieved it evoked reverence among the young aspirants in the game, who were happy to perform small errands for him. Even the heavy mobs who took out payrolls in broad daylight with shotguns and pickax han­dles left him alone.

As was necessary, he had to have a front business to account for the money. All the successful faces had some form of legitimate occupation. Favored fronts have always been the taxi business (driving or owning), grocery shops, and scrap-metal yards. All these fronts permit a lot of hidden profits, cash dealing, spare time, a range of hiding places, and the facility to employ a couple of ‘heavies,’ or ‘slags.’ These are hard men of little brain but considerable strength who also need an apparently legitimate employ­ment to supplement their habitual profession as muscle hire.

Many of the rich would be preparing to leave the capital to celebrate the festivities at their country homes.

He was fifty yards behind the Jaguar at Hyde Park Corner and allowed a truck to move between them. Up Park Lane, Rawlings had one momentary misgiving; there was a branch of Coutts Bank there and he feared the couple in the Jaguar might pause to drop the diamonds into the night safe.

At Marble Arch he breathed a second sigh of relief. The limousine ahead of him made no turn around the arch to take the southbound carriageway back down Park Lane toward the bank. It sped straight up Great Cumberland Place, joined Gloucester Place, and kept on north. So, the occupants of the luxury apartment on the eighth floor of Fontenoy House were not leaving the items with Coutts; either they had them in the car and were taking them to the country or they were leaving them for the New Year period in the apartment. Rawlings was confident it would be the latter.

He tailed the Jaguar to Hendon, watched it speeding into the last mile before the M1 motorway, and then turned back toward central London. Evidently, as he had hoped, they were going to join the wife’s brother, the Duke of Sheffield, at his estate in north Yorkshire, a full six-hour drive away. That would give him a minimum of twenty-four hours, more than he needed. He had no doubt he could take the apartment at Fontenoy House; he was, after all, one of the best safecrackers in London.

By midmorning he had returned the Volvo to the rental company, the uniform to the costumiers, and the empty suitcases to his closet. He was back in his top-floor flat, a comfortable and expensively furnished pad atop a convert­ed tea warehouse in his native Wandsworth.

The man in grey decided to take the Glen suite of diamonds at midnight. Provided they were still in the apartment safe and the occupants away. This he needed to know. So he watched and he waited.

At half past seven he was rewarded.

The big, wide limousine swooped up from the subterranean car park with the powerful grace implied by its name. It paused for an instant in the mouth of the cavern as its driver checked the street for traffic, then turned into the road and headed towards Hyde Park Corner.

Sitting across from the luxury apartment block, dressed in a hired chauffeur’s uniform at the wheel of the rented Volvo estate, Jim Rawlings breathed a sight of relief. Gazing unobserved across the Belgravia street he ad seen what he had hoped for: the husband had been at the wheel with his wife beside him. He already had the engine running and the heater on to keep out the cold. Moving the automatic shift to drive, he eased out of the line. of parked cars and went after the Daimler-Jaguar.

It was a crisp and bright morning, with a pale wash of light over Green Park in the east and the street lights still on. Rewlings had been at the stakeout since five o’clock and although a few people ad passed down the street no one had taken any notice of him. A chauffeur in a big car in Belravia, richest of London’s West End districts, attracts no attention, least of all with four suitcases and a hamper in the back, on the morning of 31 December.