Karmesin, page 11
“It all seems so incredible,” I said.
“I am tired of your ‘incredibles.’ Why, only the other day a few Scottish amateurs walked into Westminster Abbey, and trotted out with the sacred Stone of Scone, upon which the throne of England stands. Their trick was the same as mine, old as the hills. Child’s play. I should not have troubled to mention my little affair, except that I know you to be interested in literary curiosities. Thanks for the lunch. Au revoir.”
The Conscience of Karmesin
Karmesin, who, if he is not the greatest criminal of all time, must certainly be the most perfect liar the world has ever known, said to me: “It is a convention of the journalists to say that burglary is the most underpaid profession in the world. Tfoo to that!”
“What do you mean, tfoo?” I asked. “It stands to reason —”
“— I know, I know. Counting the time your average burglar spends in jail, what with one thing and another, his earnings work out at somewhat less than a street-sweeper may rely upon for honest labour. And he has no Union to fall back on, either. Aha, yes! Here, you speak of your average burglar. You might as well say: Writers end in the gutter. Generally, they do. But did Dickens? Did Thackeray? Did Tennyson? I do not observe Mr. James Hadley Chase grinding a barrel-organ, or Mr. Spillane lining up for soup. Do you? No. Your master craftsman will make his way, believe me!
“ ‘Average’ is as much as to say ‘Mediocrity’. Speak for yourself, Kersh,” said Karmesin, brushing a kind of foggy dew off his moustache, which the inclemency of the weather had turned anti-clockwise, while he fished out a waistcoat-pocket a gnarled old cigarette. “Given Ethics, be a thief. Only never abandon your Ethics!”
When I began to protest, Karmesin exclaimed: “Oh, ptoo!” Then, casually: “Ever heard about the greatest robbery of all time?”
“Every five minutes,” I said.
“I committed it,” said Karmesin. “Only it did not pay on account of Ethics. Listen to me and I will tell you why.”
This was by way of being an intellectual exercise, rather than a major operation; because if I got away with that which I set out to get, there would have been little profit for me and a considerable amount of loss. Not loss of money. Not even much loss of liberty, since I have never had a criminal record, never having been convicted.
No, no, I should have suffered a leakage of the morale, a loss of amour proper, and that would have been the end of Karmesin. Understand this: what I did was not for money; it was for its own sake. I was by no means short of a few hundred pounds, having recently got away with the Knoblock Emeralds. Even so I found myself sitting in an hotel which shall be nameless, wondering what to do with myself.
I could tell you a dozen stories of what I proposed to do, about then; and nothing satisfied me. At last, I came across a note from an Argentinian who has written to me some years before, asking me to visit him.
This man’s name, let us say, was Tombola, and he was a ‘cattle king.’ Where even Texans count their steers, Tombola counted his cowboys. Nothing Tombola did could possibly go wrong. He had cows, so he sold the meat; he had beeves, so he made capital out of the hides; he had hooves — he made glue, or calfs foot jelly, or invalid food, or goodness knows what. Every horn and bone of his beasts yielded a handle for a shaving brush made out of their bristles. He did not know what to do with his money. Everything came his way.
He was a character, this ‘King’ Tombola. Only, a megalomaniac: he had more than he knew what to do with. Hence, quite seriously, when I visited him, he made me a proposition. He was in a state of frustration, having failed in an attempt to gold-plate a white Arab stallion. The horse died.
To cut a long story short, he said this: “They call me ‘King’
Tombola. Where’s my crown? ... Have one made, you say? No, thank you! I want a real one, a proper one. I have been offered the crown of the Incas, and all that truck. I want a crown of the King of England, nothing less. I will pay seven million dollars in gold for it.”
This gave me food for thought. Resisting ‘Kang’ Tombola’s invitation to bathe, that night, in a hipbath of green chartreuse, I left next day for England to steal the Crown Jewels.
... To steal the Crown Jewels, as you may be informed, is impossible, nowadays. They were lifted, once, by Colonel Thomas Blood on May 9th, 1671. But this affair was juvenile delinquent stuff.
Having obtained access to the Crown Jewels, it was necessary, simply, for Colonel Blood to overpower the Keeper of the Regalia — an old gentleman of eighty. I ask you — obtain access through a rabble of superannuated halberdiers, and spifflicate your grandfather! Even so,
Colonel Blood was caught, running away with the Crown of England under his cloak. The Merry Monarch, amused by Blood’s audacity — the audacity of a little boy stealing a packet of chewing gum from a drugstore — pardoned him.
But, between 1671 and 1939, when I stole the Crown Jewels, two hundred and sixty-eight years had passed, and circumstances were not the same.
Today, the Crown Jewels are protected by unbreakable glass and a two—inch grille of the toughest steel; I say ‘unbreakable’, as it were, in the commercial sense of the term, which really means ‘more than ordinarily hard to chuck a brick through.’ You could burn your way through the steel and the glass that guard the Crown Jewels, yes; but, do you know what would happen when you did so?
You would break a series of electric circuits. There would be a tintinnabulation to raise the devil. The Yeomen of the Guard would rush out. The River Police would fly to the spot in their fast little boats from up and down the Thames. The Brigade of Guards would be there, with fixed bayonets. The Flying Squad would be on the spot in a matter of minutes.
This is not all. Certain other electric currents would automatically close and seal all the doors of the Jewel Room, while the platform that holds the Jewels would be electrically drawn down, out of sight and out of reach.
Of all the jobs in the world, as I calculate, three are impossible: and the greatest of these impossibilities is to steal the Crown Jewels.
I stole them, of course; but, first, I had to choose a time, and make a plan. A plan any fool can make: indeed, most of the fools I have known have come to grief by their plans. Show me the man who can choose his time, and I will show you a man of genius; and when I speak of timing, I do not mean the picking of a month, or the choosing of a week, or even the selection of an hour — I mean, getting between the finger-and- thumb of a diagnostic intellect one microscopic crumb of operative time, the one and only instant.
Leave it to me to find the instant. In this instant I perpetrated the most stupendous robbery of all time, my friend. It is now necessary for me to go, briefly, into a little psychology; even, if you like, a bit of metaphysics and international politics.
England, by the year 1939, was in a certain predicament for which it is difficult to find a metaphor. Say, if you like, that she had taken to heart too much of the philosophy of those three popular ‘wise’ monkeys. You know them, these apes? The British Government, at the time of which I speak, had fallen into a deplorably ‘wise’ monkeyfied habit. She saw no Mussolini, heard no Hitler, spoke no Franco, and smelled no Stalin — never in history has there been such a Belshazzar’s Feast of illiterates who could not read the Handwriting on the Wall! There was a European Situation — and how! as the Americans say.
The term ‘Fifth Column’ had passed into the English language. A convenient term for provocation, espionage, sabotage, and treachery, it had become as familiar to the man in the street as the name of Judas Iscariot. For example, Hitler’s agents were assisting what there was left of the old Irish Republican Army, working in Belfast and Dublin. This mob of petty nationalists and crosseyed gunmen was, again, reinforced by agents of Stalin. The I.R.A. was in clover ... I mean, that its members had resources such as passports, eighty per cent nitroglycerine dynamite, et cetera. So, these misguided fellows had a picnic planting time—bombs in railway cloakrooms, and so forth. Of course, they did little physical damage; killed a few women and children — but the psychological effect was important.
They alerted, and diverted, the Metropolitan Police and the City Police. Vigilance was redoubled all around the town. Now vigilance is a very good thing in a Police Force; it keeps it up to scratch, and that is all right. But double it, without an extra force of trained men, and you make for a nervous anxiety that cuts efficiency, and sends even disciplined officers jumping out of their skins to run, blowing whistles, in the direction of a car that has backfired.
Upon this I relied when, after the Irish outrages, I chose my time for stealing the Crown Jewels.
The Crown Jewels, as I have said, are guarded by something that works quicker than conscious thought: electricity. Ah, yes! — but even then, a million volts of lightning may be deflected by a copper spike, and run harmless into the ground through a copper ribbon.
A train of thought here, you see?
In 1939, the Tower of London got its electricity supply through cables that ran under Tower Hill ... Now, a calm and determined man who knew his timing could stop the power plants of the Boulder Dam itself, with a well-placed pocketful of gravel. By the same token, one properly—placed darning needle could put an end to the cerebration of an Einstein, a Schopenhauer, a Karmesin; in my case, once, temporarily, it was done with a mallet ...
To proceed: it occurred to me that if I could get at the cables that fed electricity to the Jewel Room in the Tower of London, all those protective electrical gadgets would be so much old iron, and all that marvelously intricate system of wires so much old rope. Problem One: How to cut the current? Problem Two: Having cut off the electricity, how to get at the Jewels?
The best means of approach to the Wakefield Tower, where the Jewels are kept, is by way of the River Thames. This is also the best place for a getaway, since there is always next to nobody on the river bank; while Tower Hill and Tower Bridge have their multitudes.
It was a stimulating little problem. The only thing about it, at that time, that made me uneasy was the fact that I should be compelled to employ assistance.
So I looked up an old friend of mine named Berry: one of those master craftsmen gone wrong that turn into burglars or forgers. He had been a metal-worker once upon a time; invented a new kind of oxyacetylene torch; got swindled out of the right, and fobbed off with a twenty—pound note. He declared war against society in his anger and frustration; took to making portable torches for safe—crackers; got involved, got three years. I saw to it that his children did not starve, and he was grateful for that.
Upon this one I knew I could rely. I told him what I wanted him to make and, by Heaven, he made it! It was a masterpiece — a ladder — but imagine a twenty-foot ladder, collapsible, so that you could hide it under your coat!
Berry made it out of some scrap metal from an old aeroplane. At the top of my ladder, I had fitted six hooks which were to have two functions: One, to hook the ladder to the Tower wall; Two, given the proper moment, to hook the Regalia through a hole which I proposed to burn in the steel and glass in the Jewel Room after I had cut off the current that protected it.
Berry made that oxyacetylene torch with the medculosity of a jeweler. In its way, it was a kind of gem: the whole apparatus fitted into a gasmask case, such as air-raid wardens were carrying at that time. Although Mr. Chamberlain had categorically stated that there would be no war, nevertheless wiser men so ordained it that the town was full of Air-Raid Precaution Officers, in appropriate uniforms ... Begin to get the idea?
There is no disguise as effective as a uniform, because if you are wearing a uniform — any uniform — nine hundred and ninety—nine people out of a thousand will look at it and not at you. Ask yourself that question: would you recognize your postman, your policeman, your milkman, if you met him on the street in plain clothes? Your grocer, even, without his apron? No. If you wish to be unrecognizable, look familiar. And, curiously enough, if you desire to be quite invisible, talk authoritatively in a raucous voice — their ears will blind them.
So. I had made three A.R.P. Wardens’ uniforms. The plot thickens, you observe; what? Then, it was necessary to make contact with certain amenable fellows in the Tower Guard. They were Irish boys, of course, nurtured on legends about the I.R.A. Do not imagine that I imply that the Irish are a disaffected or disloyal people; they are very loyal, indeed — to the myths and legends of their race.
I found, partly by luck, two boys who were to be on guard at two points close to the Regalia Room, and represented myself as the fabulous Commandment Pat M’Hoginey who took the Rotunda in Dublin. I cannot speak Irish, but a very strong American accent with a certain inflection was convincing enough — with a bulge under my left armpit. These boys were incorruptible — they fell in with my scheme, waving aside all offers of reward. For the honour of Ireland, and the I.R.A., I could have the Crown Jewels; only, please, could I give them back Ulster?
We parted good friends, solomonizing in Mullaly’s Wine Lodge ... What? You do not know what it is to solomonize? For a writer, you are not very strong on general knowledge. Many Irish distillers put out little bottle s of whisky called ‘babies’. One ‘baby’ is a heavy drink, so you divide it in two with a friend — splitting the ‘baby’, as in the Judgement of Solomon. We solomonized; and that was another part of the task accomplished.
Next, it was necessary for me to find out precisely where the electric cable traveled under the pavement to feed the Tower of London; and this I did by presenting myself to the Borough Surveyor as Mr. Cecedek, a Czech refugee prominent in textiles, looking for business premises and anxious to know about sources of electric power for his looms.
Now, I had to send one of my coadjustors to steal an electrical truck from another borough, which Berry repainted with the title, et cetera, of the local Borough Council of Stepney. Also, I had to purchase a rowing boat ... Surely, even you must have seen through my little scheme by now?
At the appointed time, Berry and one other would drive the truck to the vital cable plate, put up their workmen’s screen, lift the plate, and wait — with synchronized watches — for the Zero Hour, as it is called, when they were to cut the main power cables.
Simultaneously, my other friend and I, in the uniforms of Air-Raid Wardens, would be rowing along the Thames towards the graceful lawn that separates the Tower of London from the river.
And, as I conceived and organized it, so it occurred. We arrived at the Tower, ran to the outer wall and climbed it by means of Berry’s beautiful ladder ... See what I mean, now, when I say that mediocrity chooses an hour where genius picks its instant!
As I had arranged, precisely when we arrived at the Tower Wall, Berry and the other man cut the main power cable, and it was as if the Tower of London had shut its eyes. Everything went black; but I was prepared to find my way under that blanket of dark, you see.
We scaled the walls, reached the Wakefield Tower, rushed to the Regalia Room. My two sentries — here was where they came in — reporting ‘All’s well,’ I cut through the steel and the glass, and, climbing into the broken cage, pulled out the Imperial State Crown and the King’s Crown — which alone is set with the Koh—I—Noor diamond worth two million pounds. As for the Imperial State Crown, it is encrusted with 2,783 diamonds, 277 pearls, 18 sapphires, 11 emeralds, and 5 rubies.
Offhand, perhaps the most important haul I ever made.
And how did I get out? Exactly the way I came in. And how did I get away? Exactly as I had arrived. Because, you see, the River Police were not on patrol just then, and Scotland Yard had been alerted by me in connection with an I.R.A. plot to dynamite the House of Commons.
So I got away with those wonderful Crowns.
This took place Friday, the first of September, 1939. You know what happened on the Sunday morning: Great Britain declared war on
Germany, and although I had an incalculable fortune in my hands and had, incidentally, fallen passionately in love with the Star of Africa, and the Black Prince’s Ruby ... I don’t know, there happened to my heart something difficult to put into words ...
I did not mind robbing a greasy millionaire; but even him I would not take from, if he were in trouble. How could I steal away something of the history of a valiant people going into battle? Again, I said to myself: “That nice Iving and his kind Lady have trouble enough without this.”
So I nailed the Crowns up in a crate, and sent them to Scotland Yard. The affair — things being as they were — was hushed up. But the Tower of London, as you know, was closed for a time; and now, things being reorganized, it would take a better man even than I to steal so much as a spoon from the Jewel Room...
... Karmesin sighed. I asked him: “What happened to ‘King’
Tombola?”
With infinite scorn, Karmesin said: “What, him? I intended to make him a nice little ersatz Imperial Crown, only he died through eating too much beef with red pepper. Goodnight.”
Karmesin and the Royalties
“I wonder,” I said to Karmesin, “why you don’t write your life-story.”
Karmesin let loose one of his elephantine laughs: Heeeeeeeaaaagh! and slapped me on the back.
“I don’t see what there is to laugh at in that?”
Karmesin, still laughing, replied: “But I do. No, my young friend, I cannot write my life—story. At least, I could write it. But I could never sell it.”
“Of course you could.”
“Not so, my enthusiastic young friend, not so. I have already sold it.” “To whom?” I asked.
“That is in itself a story,” said Karmesin. He unraveled a little heap of cigarette-ends, and began to re—roll them. “I am one of the few people who has made nearly a hundred thousand out of an autobiography.”
