playboy.'
Mike said. 'So when he fled from Egypt, does anybody know whether that was with or without the bird?'
'Good question,' Alvino answered. 'And I'm not sure that anyone really does know the answer. The Egyptian revolutionaries-led by General Nasser-made Farouk leave most of his toys behind. But it's clear that in the months before his expulsion he got out enough money, enough jewels to sell, and some of his smaller treasures to allow him to live like a king, even in exile, for the rest of his life.'
'The man without a country. But maybe
'Not for almost fifty years, Mike. People assumed it had been left behind in Cairo when Sotheby's included it for sale in an auction catalog of Farouk's treasures in 1955. As soon as the Secret Service agents attached to the Mint saw that listing, they directed the American consul in Cairo to have the government remove the Double Eagle from the auction and return it to the U.S.'
'So it never went on the block?'
'Correct. But we didn't get it back then either,' Alvino said. 'Nasser's aides claimed it was all a big mistake. That Farouk had taken it with him. That no one in Egypt had seen it in years. It disappeared completely-no explanation, no clue, no trace.'
'The one the Stark brothers sold at auction in 2002-Farouk's seven-million-dollar Eagle-when did that get back into this country?' Mike asked.
'Not until 1996, fifty years after it was delivered to the king in Egypt.'
'Who brought it in?' I asked, curious about its circuitous route home.
'There was a prominent coin dealer from England who flew in with it and arranged what he thought was going to be a private meeting with an American counterpart. Breakfast at the Waldorf-Astoria.'
'You've got a shit-eating grin on your face, Lori,' Mike said. 'Must mean your boys were hiding under the table.'
'You're not wrong. A few intercepted calls and wiretaps, and the Secret Service picked up the tab for the scrambled eggs and bacon.'
'And landed the Double Eagle?'
'Exactly.'
'Did the Brit tell you where he bought it?' Mercer asked.
'That's still a pretty murky story,' she answered. 'Gave us a lot of nonsense about one of the Egyptian colonels who sold it to a merchant after the coup. Couldn't name names or provide any documentary proof.'
Lori Alvino hesitated. Her boss, she had said earlier, had told her to give us everything. 'Besides, that wasn't what our intelligence picked up.'
'What was the contradictory information?' Mike asked.
'I know you think all the federal agencies don't get along with each other very well,' Lori said, looking back and forth among us to see if we agreed with her.
'We don't work with you guys often enough to know,' Mike answered, in a less than candid fashion.
'Well, I don't want you to think this is one of those immature interagency rivalries. It's just the way business was.'
'No quarrel from us.'
'The CIA screwed this up,' she said emphatically. 'The Central Intelligence Agency made a mess of the whole thing.'
'Of the Double Eagle?'
'That, too,' Lori said. 'I was talking about the political trouble they caused-with Farouk, with the rebels, with the coup. And as a side effect of those problems, the disappearance of that coin, among many other valuables.'
The CIA had lurked on the outskirts of our case since the beginning. Andrew Tripping claimed to have been an agent. Victor Vallis may have been in their employ when he returned to Cairo in the early fifties. The faux Harry Strait had pretended to Paige Vallis that he was a CIA agent, when in fact the real Harry Strait had been a member of the Secret Service. What had linked these individuals together, to the government agencies, and to our case?
'The CIA,' I asked, 'was it actually involved with King Farouk?'
'In a very big way. Teddy Roosevelt's grandson-his name was Kermit-was the CIA's main man in Cairo in the early fifties. He made a fast friend of the king.'
'That was easy to do?'
'Well, Farouk considered the Roosevelt family the royalty of the U.S. That was part of his access. And also Roosevelt had a guy on his staff who had an inside track.'
'What do you mean?'
'Kermit Roosevelt brought with him as an aide a young Foreign Service officer who had served in the thirties as Farouk's tutor-a brilliant guy who spoke six or seven languages and knew more world history-'
Mike Chapman filled in the blanks, letting out a low whistle. 'Victor Vallis.'
'That's exactly right,' said Lori. 'I didn't realize the CIA would have been so cooperative and given you so much information.'
Not to worry, I thought. You called that one right. The fact that we knew an occasional name or fact seemed to encourage her to trust us with more details.
'Apparently, the king was very fond of Victor from the old days-they were practically the same age, and he treated his old tutor like a brother. Gave him the run of the palace.'
'Knowing he was CIA?'
'Oh, no. Believing that he just held some low-level post, the kind a tutor-cum-grad-student would land the first few times out. This Vallis fellow lived virtually inside the royal quarters, had an apartment of his own there.'
'Talk about access and opportunity,' Mercer said.
'So the CIA,' I asked, 'did they support Farouk's reign?'
Lori Alvino shook her head. 'Not for long. FDR had two goals. He needed Egypt as a democratic stronghold in the Middle East, since the rest of the region was so susceptible to communism. And he was among the first to recognize the importance of Arab oil to fuel the American economy. Farouk? He was a loose cannon, and the Americans realized they couldn't control him.'
'So the U.S. funded the Egyptian coup? We backed General Nasser and Anwar Sadat?'
She pursed her lips. 'Not with guns and tanks and planes. Simply with the promise that if their coup was successful, the Americans would not step in to save the king.'
'And when the time came?'
'Nasser's rebels took over the Egyptian army, closed the airfields so Farouk couldn't escape on one of his private planes, and held his royal yacht in dry dock. The king himself called the embassy to get Truman to intercede on his behalf-by then FDR was long dead-but the president refused to do it. His enemies sent him off into exile-with seventy pieces of luggage rumored to be packed with gold ingots and hidden jewels. The Americans never lifted a hand to help King Farouk.'
'But the rebels let him live,' Mike said.
'Nasser was no fool. He didn't want to risk a civil war, or make Farouk a martyr by killing him,' Lori said.
'Do the math,' Mike said. 'Farouk had a five-hundred-room palace, chock-full of priceless treasures. Best guess is he beats it out of town with all those suitcases and pockets full of goodies. The rest that got left behind-maybe four hundred rooms' worth of stuff-who got it all?'
Lori shrugged. 'Some of it was auctioned by Sotheby's. Some of it was taken by the rebel soldiers-all his great racehorses-and everything from his cigar collection to some of his pornography showed up at Nasser's headquarters.'
'The CIA was in on that?' I asked.
'At some levels, sure. The stories were legendary. Somebody seen sipping a martini at Shepheard's Bar in Cairo, pulling out a cigarette lighter with Farouk's initials; or a young agent coming home to the States with a unique assortment of Confederate coins, which happened to have been a hallmark of the king's collection-that kind of thing.'
'Nobody called on the carpet for any of it?'
