Brian Freemantle - Charlie Muffin U.S.A.

Williamson, who was sitting in the foyer, glanced up at the wall clock and then expectantly along the corridor in the direction from which the security men would enter. Exactly on time, they approached the exhibition hall and three entered while a fourth remained on guard outside. How easy it would have been, reflected Williamson, to walk up calmly and alert the guard that four men who intended to steal the contents of the chamber behind him were at that moment crouched in the darkness of the ante-room, its alarms already nullified. The security people emerged within two minutes. Aware that Pendlebury wouldn’t risk his people humping a dead body through the foyer, Williamson had decided that if an attempt were to be made upon Charlie’s life, it would be within ten feet of where he sat. And within the next twenty-eight minutes. He looked around, wondering if the Englishman had left Pendlebury’s control centre. On the far side of the reception area, Ramirez waited in the position Williamson had specified. Aware of the man’s attention, the Cuban looked up, anticipating some nodded instruction. Williamson stared at the man blank-faced, then looked away.

There was something surrealistic about witnessing a robbery in which the participants were being operated, puppet-like. Visually, thought Charlie, it was a combination of an old silent movie and a moon walk. The cameras undetected were fixed and concealed, so there was not a complete view of the exhibition room, and Chambine’s men kept entering and leaving the picture, heightening the impression of a staged production.

Everyone in the control room was staring fixedly at the television screen. Pendlebury and Cosgrove had arranged chairs alongside Gilbert, from around whom came the only activity in the room. He was quietly dictating the identities of the thieves into a tape recorder from which court depositions were later to be assembled, to accompany the film. Beside Gilbert was hunched a second F.B.I. man, counting aloud, allowing Pendlebury to time the robbery according to Chambine’s own assessment and therefore gauge the risk to the twelve-thirty security patrol. To Pendlebury’s left was the operator who had taken over from Gilbert the radio surveillance on Saxby, Boella and Cham-bine. The man had already recorded the extinguishing of the pool lights by the time Bulz and Beldini entered the room. It was exactly two minutes past twelve.

‘Sixty seconds early,’ Pendlebury said. Until then Charlie had not realised that clipped to the front of the man’s sweatdamp shirt was the pick-up of a microphone connected to a second tape recorder.

The disguise of the first two men was excellent. It was impossible to discern where the black balaclava headpieces merged with their black tracksuits.

Their movements appeared almost choreographed. Going for the lights first, they glided from fixture to fixture, one never impeding the other, each confident of the other’s position and purpose. The light died on the picture as if someone in the control room had turned down the brightness button.

‘Twelve-six,’ intoned the timekeeper.

‘Made up two minutes,’ calculated Pendlebury.

Cosgrove was hunched forward, hands against his knees.

The picture suddenly brightened again as the coverings were taken from the lights, and in the second it took for their eyes to adjust, Bertrano and Petrilli had entered the room. Bulz and Beldini snatched their balaclavas off and there were a few grunts of amusement at the silent picture of the two men puffing to indicate how hot the coverings had been.

‘That’ll convict the bastards,’ said Pendlebury.

The four men began moving with the precision that Bulz and Beldini had earlier shown. Bertrano and Petrilli slid the rods beneath the display cases and then lifted, like carriers of a miniature sedan chair, while the two who had entered first crouched with their bypass leads, clamped them into position and then crab-walked to the adjoining cases, to make the connection to the Unking alarm. It was almost an amusing sequence, thought Charlie, like a complicated Morris dance. As the impression came to Charlie, Cosgrove sniggered.

‘Twelve-nine,’ said the man alongside Gilbert.

‘All display case alarms circumvented,’ Gilbert mouthed into his recorder.

‘Two minutes, fifty seconds ahead,’ confirmed Pendlebury.

Maintaining the Morris dance analogy, Bertrano and Beldini skipped back to the first case, repeating the sequence but this time lifting higher so that Bulz could cut through the immobilised connecting wires. As each display case became free, they ran it to the window through which they intended to hand them all to Saxby and Boella.

‘Drive lights going,’ said the man in radio contact with the outside observers. ‘First section… second… third… now Chambine is in the car park, moving towards the cars…’

Nine of the twelve display cases were lined up near the window. Bulz remained there now, scraping the covering from the alarm wire beneath the sill and infusing the last bypass lead into the system.

‘Twelve-sixteen,’ said the man with the watch.

‘Saxby and Boella have entered the car park,’ reported the radio listener. There was a momentary pause, then: ‘First lights gone… second…’

‘Made up three minutes,’ recorded Pendlebury. The shoulders of his shirt were black with sweat.

‘They’re good,’ muttered Cosgrove, addressing no one. ‘They’re very, very good.’

‘Car park completely out,’ said the radio man.

‘Twelve-eighteen.’

The four men were grouped around the window. There was a momentary pause, as if they were taking breath, then Bertrano unbolted the sash, paused again and then jerked the window upwards. Chambine and Saxby were just identifiable in the square of darkness.

‘Marvellous,’ groaned Pendlebury, as if enjoying some physical pleasure. ‘Oh Christ, bloody marvellous.’

‘Boella’s by the station waggon,’ said the radio man.

The cases were chain-handed through the window and into the car with the same efficiency there had been throughout the robbery.

‘Twelve-nineteen…’ counted the man, ‘twelve-nineteen, fifty…’

‘Eight cases loaded…’ said Pendlebury.

‘Twelve-twenty…’

‘Just one more to go…’

‘Twelve-twenty, fifty seconds…’

‘They’ve done it!’ There was a note of personal triumph in Pendlebury’s voice as they watched Bertrano vault easily through the window and turn to close it so that the sixty-second burst of light in the car park would not be investigated, and they were again looking at the unmoving but now empty picture of the exhibition hall.

‘And we’ve done it,’ said Cosgrove, turning to the F.B.I. man. His voice began softly, but rose as he got towards the end of the sentence. ‘We’ve done It!’ he shouted, slapping Pendlebury’s damp shoulder.

The F.B.I. man grinned, almost shyly, as if he still found it difficult to believe it had gone as smoothly as he had planned. ‘Yes,’ he said, controlling himself better than the senator, ‘it all worked.’

‘Moving off down the drive,’ said the man at the radio, ‘quite undetected.’

Appearing to remember Charlie Muffin, Pendlebury swivelled in his chair, the triumph that Cosgrove had earlier shown starting out upon his fat, reddened face. For a moment of incomprehension, the look stayed there, the smile flickering uncertainly.

‘Gone,’ he said, his voice broken in disbelief. ‘The son-of-a-bitch has gone.’

Had Giuseppe Terrilli ever been asked, incautiously, what he considered the single most important reason for his success he would have named his self control. It had been with him that childhood morning on the tenement roof, remained throughout his early career as a soldier when he was determined to rise to the very top of the organisation, and was with him now, subduing the excitement that was churning through him at the thought of feeling and touching and caressing the stamps that had once belonged to Tsar Nicholas II of All the Russias.