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Brian Freemantle: Charlie Muffin U.S.A.

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Brian Freemantle Charlie Muffin U.S.A.

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It was only when the jacket that he pitched towards the chair missed and landed on the floor that Charlie remembered the raffle ticket and the telephone number. He retrieved it, stood gazing at it for a few moments and then shrugged. Why not?

Someone as alert as Charlie should have recognised it, from the speed and professionalism of the answer, but his mind was still occupied with thoughts of stamps and insurance cover arranged through social friends and so he initially missed the husky sensuousness.

‘Believe we met at Henley,’ he said brightly.

‘Henley?’

‘Boat races the other week. Remember me?’

There was a pause, for both of them a time for realisation. The woman spoke first because it was her business, after all.

‘Same as last time,’ she said, briskly. ‘If you want to wear that funny cap and striped blazer while we’re doing it, it’s kinky so it’s an extra?5. And the ruler is another?5, too.’

‘I need another sort of relief,’ said Charlie, for his own amusement. ‘I’ve got aching feet.’

‘Try a fucking chiropodist,’ said the voice, no longer husky or inviting.

He frequently had, remembered Charlie. The last one had wrapped his toes individually in little cocoons of cotton wool and put an additional?3 on the bill. Perhaps that was kinky, too.

2

Like the drawbridges that were the only entries to the castles of medieval times, a set of bridges staples the island of Palm Beach to the Florida mainland, with Lake Worth forming the moat. Only very rich people ever lived in castles and only very rich people live in Palm Beach. Perhaps in unconscious envy of medieval times, when the division of wealth between those who had and those who had not was more clearly defined, a few of the residents have actually invoked castellated architecture for their mansions, which jut out, ridged and angular, among the more traditional hacienda constructions showing the Spanish influence throughout the State.

An eccentric newspaper magnate who had been a personal friend of Henry Morrison Flagler, the Standard Oil founder credited with the single-handed development of Palm Beach as the resort it now is, was responsible for just such a construction at the end of a small but usefully private road that loops off Ocean Boulevard. Even in a society accustomed to grandeur, the building was regarded as something unusual, transported as it had been stone by stone from the French countryside, where it had been originally built as a fortified chateau, three centuries before. While retaining perfectly its outside design, the newspaper magnate had permitted some interior improvements, like modern plumbing and air conditioning, and the man who had succeeded him in owner-ship had further added to the amenities. One such innovation had been to introduce electrification to the surrounding fencing and then to attach spotlights at strategic points, so that at the touch of any one of five switches, the grounds could be bathed in a blaze of revealing light and protected by sufficient volts to kill a man. While elsewhere this might have been regarded as a little strange, paranoic even, in Palm Beach it was accepted by neighbours who knew how the possessions of the wealthy are coveted by others. For some it would have been comforting to know that at night the mainland bridges could be raised to keep out intruders.

Giuseppe Terrilli was known to be wealthy. While not as outgoing as his predecessor at the castle, Terrilli was an admired member of a community where respect is achieved by making exactly the right contributions to the charity functions staged at the Breakers Hotel, financing a cultural week at the music auditorium, presenting a Modigliani to the Norton Gallery of Art and actively serving on the committee of the Palm Beach Round Table and attending every event put on by them at the Paramount Theatre.

He was further respected for choosing to be an all-year resident and not one of those who took off for the summer, when the climate and humidity became somewhat bothersome to those who had the money to guarantee their every comfort. There was an obvious reason, of course. All of Terrilli Industries was based in and around the State.

The construction division responsible for so much real estate development – and for the built-at-cost school for underprivileged children that he had so modestly declined to have named after him – was less than an hour away at Fort Lauderdale. The air charter and transport fleet was even nearer, at Palm Beach International Airport and from there it was little more than an hour to the excellent airport at Tampa. On the Gulf coast, where the ports are geared for freight work, there was the sea division, with a fleet of container vessels moving throughout the South American countries and using the easy access to the Panama Canal to work the West Coast and the Far East.

Terrilli involved himself just sufficiently in civic affairs but at the same time managed to remain a private, unostentatious man. To some in Palm Beach, the house seemed strangely out of character. But it was an oddness that didn’t trouble them for long: moguls are allowed their eccentricities, and apart from the house Terrilli was the most conservative of men. No one remembered being told his age, but it was guessed at around fifty; and if there were talk at all now that he was completely assimilated within the enclosed community, it was at coffee mornings or whist functions at which still disappointed women sometimes wondered why such an attractive, courtly man remained unmarried.

There had been a wife who had died five years earlier. There were some who could remember her, a diminutive blonde woman showing the eaten-away signs of her fatal illness and bearing little resemblance to the vibrant, almost glittering woman whose photograph was so prominently displayed in the unusual home. After a respectable period had been allowed to elapse, so that there should be no intrusion into Terrilli’s mourning, there had been a flurry of invitations. At the affairs which he had attended, Terrilli had been courteous but reserved, never once hurting the feelings of the women whom he gently rejected, always making it seem that the reluctance was belatedly theirs rather than his own.

Now, after so long, the regret had almost left the voices of those who gossiped. There was a romance about the man’s decision to remain faithful to the memory of one woman, sad though it may have been for those who had so briefly hoped.

A basement gymnasium had been one of the improvements Terrilli had made to the castle and use of that, together with his fairly frequent appearances on the Breakers and sometimes the Everglades links accounted for his slim, lean figure. In a climate of constant sunlight, which encouraged brightness, his dress was always subdued, rarely going beyond grey or black, which tended to enhance the greyness at his temples, already brought out by the deep, year-round tan. His car was a Rolls-Royce, of course, but without the blackened windows favoured by some, which looked theatrical. When Giuseppe Terrilli was chauffeured around the tiny island, he was plainly visible, head usually bent over the market section of the Wall Street Journal.

There were many things about Terrilli of which the admirers in Palm Beach were entirely ignorant. They didn’t know, for instance, of the stamp collection housed in a vault-like room very near the gymnasium but insulated from it, so that the temperature remained at a constant, undamaging sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Or that such was the intensity of Terrilli’s interest that there was never a day when he did not spend at least two hours hunched, oblivious to everything but the tiny squares of paper before him, in his subterranean chamber.

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