David Dickinson: Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

He was a great believer in punctuality, the General. At precisely three o’clock in the afternoon, on the day Powerscourt met Natasha Shaporova again, a certain Captain Yuri Gorodetsky was shown into his office. The Captain was the senior officer in London who had a special appointment to see his boss.

‘Good afternoon, Captain. I believe you have come on urgent business. You must have your hands full, with the Ballets Russes in town. They can be guaranteed to cause a certain amount of chaos wherever they go. God knows, they cause enough trouble every time they come to Paris. I don’t think that rogue Diaghilev has paid his hotel bill from the time he was here three years ago.’

‘I don’t think he’s changed, General. I don’t think he’ll ever change. I want your advice on a slightly different matter this afternoon, if you would.’

‘Please, carry on.’

‘I’m sure you remember that big bank robbery in Tiflis a few years back? The one where some people were killed and the Bolsheviks made off with an enormous amount of money?’

The General nodded. ‘Not one of our better days, I fear.’

‘As you know, the Bolsheviks couldn’t get their hands on most of the cash. The haul was enormous, three hundred and forty-one thousand roubles. This was the snag. Most of the money, over a quarter of a million roubles, was in five-hundred-rouble notes. Most people have never set eyes on one of these. But the authorities knew the numbers. They sent them to every bank in Russia. Lenin organized a plot to cash some of the notes abroad. We managed to stop that. Now he’s going to try again, in London this time.’

‘Is he, by God?’ said the General, taking a large cigar from the top drawer of his enormous desk. ‘You’ve done well to track this plot down.’

‘Thank you, General. There is a link with the Ballets Russes, as it happens. Lenin has a follower who works part of the time for the Ballets Russes, a member of Lenin’s gang, currently holed up in Cracow. They spend a lot of time in the Café Noworolski apparently, reading the newspapers and planning the revolution. I don’t think this contact brought the money with him. I suspect, but I’m not sure, that the banknotes were smuggled in by the Ballets Russes. Some of those female dancers take enough stuff with them to fill Selfridge’s department store, or the Galeries Lafayette here in the Boulevard Haussmann. This is the important thing, General. Lenin’s man has been meeting with a lot of home-grown revolutionaries in London. Our friends in the Metropolitan Police keep a very close eye on these characters. We believe that they are going to send a number of local revolutionaries in their best suits into a collection of banks across the City of London and the West End. Each man, we believe, will have a packet of five-hundred-rouble notes with him. They’ll probably turn them into pounds or dollars — probably pounds, as that’s the local currency. You could change those anywhere in Europe with no questions asked.’

‘You have done well, Captain. Do you know when this is going to happen? And is it all meant to happen at once so the various banks haven’t got time to warn each other?’

‘I don’t know how soon this is going to happen, General. I believe it is going to be very soon. Our English friends hope to get the answer to that question tonight. It was they who gave me all these details.’

‘And what are the London police going to do? Do we know?’

‘That is why I am here. Our English friends want to know our wishes. Should they arrest these people and put them in jail? Or should they watch and wait?’

The General took a long pull on his cigar. Outside, the noise of the children on the swings in the Parc Monceau floated in through the General’s open windows.

‘I can see the appeal of locking all those people up. It must be very tempting. But I’m always wary about sending these characters to prison. Even if you disperse them all over the country, there’s still a risk. They go to jail knowing the trade they work in and a load of revolutionary nonsense. But think of the people they’re going to meet, and the skills they could learn. You could be sent down as a carpenter and come back a burglar, or a lock picker, or a fraudster — maybe even all three. Perhaps you absorb even more revolutionary rubbish in the prison library. Is there another way round this problem?’

‘I think the English police worry about publicity, General. The politicians would certainly want to lock them up. That would make them popular for a day or two. They would probably like to keep them locked away for a very long time. Suppose we just observe the operation? If we have witnesses in the banks, the police can pick up the revolutionaries any time they want and charge them with money laundering. We must have records of those bloody bank numbers in the files here.’

The General smiled a private smile as he thought of a night hunt through the grey cabinets in the long corridors down in his basement.

‘Do we know what they’re going do with the pounds or dollars once they’ve changed them?’

‘No, we don’t.’

‘Suppose you’re Lenin with that ghastly beard, holed up in his Cracow café with the newspapers and his Bolshevik friends. You wouldn’t want to let your English colleagues keep the money for any length of time, would you? Their wives might spend it. They could get plenty of new friends in the pub standing everybody drinks. Maybe they could buy enough dynamite to build a few bombs.’

‘How about this, General? Surely if you’re Lenin, now on your fifth cup of coffee of the afternoon, you’re going to get the money out the same way you sent it in. Pack it away in the Ballets Russes luggage. Next stop Paris or Monte Carlo. Plenty of banks in Monte Carlo near that great casino. You could change your new English pounds into any currency you liked in there.’

‘Let’s just act it through to see what the problems might be.’ General Kilyagin was very fond of amateur theatricals. The shy members of his family always dreaded Christmas and the summer holidays. ‘I’ll be the banker. You’re the Bolshevik from Bethnal Green.’

The Captain was already reaching for his wallet. ‘You hand the money over,’ the General went on, as his colleague duly gave him two English pound notes, masquerading as large numbers of roubles. ‘Thank you very much, are you staying long? My goodness,’ the General was peering closely at the note, ‘we don’t see these very often, even in London. Let me just check our current exchange-rate tables,’ he rummaged about in his drawer. ‘Here we are. That’ll be eighty-four pounds six shillings and sixpence.’

As the General parted with two ten-franc notes, he slapped his hand on the table very hard. ‘Damn,’ he said very loudly. ‘It’s always good to rehearse these things. I see a problem.’ The General rose from his desk and walked to the window. The children were still playing on the swings, their nannies gossiping in groups of three or four. ‘I’ve got it!’ he cried, sinking into his chair, thinking back to his days in the military. ‘We funnel them, Captain, we bloody well funnel them!’

‘Funnel them, General? Forgive me, I don’t understand.’

‘Sorry. The problem is the number of banks. It’s a long time since I’ve been to London, but that bit round the Royal Exchange in the City, that’s full of banks. I’m sure there are plenty more over in Mayfair and the West End. There must be a limit to the number of banks the Metropolitan Police can man, if you see what I mean. They could probably manage a dozen or so, but not fifty or a hundred. So they have to decide which twelve banks would suit their purposes, plenty of room to watch, that sort of thing. Then they cable all the other banks to tell them to tell any customers trying to change five-hundred-rouble notes: terribly sorry, sir, we don’t have the facilities to change those here, but Blanks Bank round the corner can do it for you. Off they go to Blanks Bank, packed full of policemen in plain clothes. That’s how the funnel works. What do you think?’