Dr Morelle and Destiny Read online

  When he got back to the Piazza del Gesu he discussed it with Carla who was crazy with enthusiasm about the project, and she elected to rustle up the necessary finance. That was going to be the big snag Johnny foresaw, but he was somewhat reassured by Carla’s certainty that she knew where the money would be forthcoming.

  Next morning Johnny walked into Transatlantic in the Piazza Colonna, the place was noisy with tourists as he went up to the counter, and bought a book of twelve hundred-dollar Transatlantic traveller’s cheques. He wrote the phoney name he was using in them while the teller looked on, but with a neat touch of sleight-of-hand contrived to avoid signing the last one in the book. So he had pulled off the first part of the operation. Elated, he sauntered out of Transatlantic with a genuine unsigned traveller’s cheque in the inside pocket of his navy-blue draped single-breasted jacket.

  A day or two later Johnny contacted the little Englishman who had deserted from the British forces to settle in Rome and engage himself in any nefarious caper that came his way. He was known as Danny Boy, owing to a predilection for whistling snatches of the Londonderry Air between his teeth in moments of abstraction. It was a habit Danny had tried to break himself of, but he still lapsed occasionally. It would be Danny’s job to take care of the creative side. And he was quite an artist in the strictly illegal way.

  Meanwhile Carla had unearthed a bright-eyed Milanese, who went under the name of Giordano Trescalli. He was the front for a group who were already in the same fine, of business upon which Johnny was embarking.

  The first conference took place in the Borghese Gardens, where, situated behind a black iron fence, and cut off from the rest of the rambling walks and wilderness of grass and flower-beds was a little afresco café, the Casina del Lago. The café was reached by a gravelled alley shaded by green oak trees which were delightfully cool and restful after the blazing afternoon sun. It looked like a small temple, with a small portico with classical columns, in front of which were placed little round tables and wicker chairs under the shade of vast umbrellas. Everywhere pink rhododendrons flowered out of great jars. And somewhere a radio played romantic music.

  The rendezvous was Carla’s choice, it was empty at certain times in the afternoon and the waiters were unobtrusive, she explained. After you had been served with your apricot ice and pink paste in frilled paper cups you were left alone.

  And so over ices Johnny and Carla and Giordano discussed the set-up, their voices low and blurred by the radio music against any passing eavesdropper. From the tips of his shiny, pointed shoes to the lavender-coloured soft hat on his head, Giordano was strictly the old pro. Danny Boy made up the party, but he contributed little to the discussion. He wasn’t much of a talker anyway. Even when Giordano scrutinized Johnny’s cheque, Danny appeared to show little interest. He had seen the cheque already and had expressed his opinion on it with professional succinctness.

  “This part is easy,” Giordano Trescalli said with a shrug. “I know a press on which it can be run off and I know where there is plenty of paper.”

  “What’s the problem then?” Johnny said.

  Giordano looked at him with a thin smile. “The problem,” he said, “is always the same problem. Where is the money to pay for all this?”

  Johnny’s glance flickered over Carla and then back to the other. “I thought that was your department,” he said.

  “Certainly I can find the cash,” Giordano said. “But I want you to realize that the business-men I represent are contributing the most important part of the scheme.”

  Johnny’s expression tightened sardonically. They were getting down to the basic fast. He had imagined there would have been a lot of chinning about the weather first. “What cut do you want?” he said.

  “Fifty per cent of all the stuff that is printed,” Giordano said.

  Johnny thought his mouth was like a shark’s snapping shut, then he glanced again at Carla and it flashed across his mind: Was she taking a cut on the side from Giordano for introducing the business? Then he eyed Danny who was sitting on the other side of him brooding over his ice-cream, which he had so far not touched.

  “We will find everything,” Giordano was saying. “As I said the press, and the paper. On top of which we have supplied the answer to your biggest headache, the cash to pay for it all.”

  “I got me my own artist,” Johnny said, and he nodded towards Danny. “Don’t forget that.”

  The other shrugged again. “The people I represent,” Giordano said, “will still want fifty per cent.” He glanced casually at Danny. “You can use your own engraver, provided he can do the job.”

  Danny raised his eyes from his ice to stare at him, and then spat expressively into the gravel path at his feet. He cracked the knuckles of his large, spatulate fingers as if to loosen them up, before contemplating his ice again.

  “Okay,” Johnny said.

  Next day Danny took the unsigned cheque along to the small printing firm for whom he was currently working. The place was in a narrow street back of the cobbled Via Claudia, with its yellowed walls, and Danny had the run of the firm’s dark-room any time he wanted. When he switched on the warning red light over the dark-room door he knew he could rely on not being interrupted for so long as the red light stayed on.

  It was going to be a long job. Four plates were going to be required to give him what he wanted. One for the blue for the face of the cheque, and one for the purple on the face, another plate for the back, and another plate for the pale blue background for the cheque’s serial numbers. Then there was the water-mark which was an integral part of the operation.

  It turned out to be a five weeks’ job, in fact. Then one evening, Danny showed up at the apartment in the Piazza del Gesu with the requisite plates, casually wrapped in bits of cloth and old newspaper. A little while after his arrival in the large comfortable living-room that looked out over the roofs and upper storeys of Rome silhouetted against the pale blues and pinks of the evening sky, shadowed eternally by the sweeping flocks of swifts and the plates had met with Johnny’s approval, Carla showed up with Giordano. The outcome of the discussion which followed was the Italian’s somewhat reluctant agreement that Danny had done an artistic job, and an arrangement to meet next afternoon with those who were to be responsible for printing the counterfeit cheques.

  Chapter Three

  THE BUSINESS-MEN for whom Giordano Trescalli was the front operated from a little pasticcerie behind the railway-station by the east wall of the city. Among their hangers-on was a man who owned a London-made Rotaprint offset press that had found its way into Italy before the war to become diverted from its original legitimate purpose. Now it was for hire for a fee, no questions asked, to anyone who cared to hire it.

  The owner of the press kept it in a backyard shack, and whoever wanted to use it had to move it from the shack and set the press up for himself. While Danny Boy had been busily exercising his artistic talents working direct on to the finely grained surface of the thin, aluminium plates, Johnny and Giordano had contacted an ex-stick-up artist who now ran a small coffee-bar on the city’s outskirts, where the Ponte Milvio carried the Great North Road out of Rome.

  The ex-stick-up artist rented the cellar for three weeks for thirty thousand lira, and a couple of days before Danny had arrived at the Piazza del Gesu with the completed plates, a truck carrying the Rotaprint under wraps and Johnny and Giordano pulled up outside the coffee-bar. Discreetly the proprietor made himself scarce, while the two others unloaded the press, sundry paper and containers of ink, and transferred them down into the cellar.

  Over the course of the next three weeks Danny, sometimes accompanied by Johnny or Giordano, or both, would appear at the coffee-bar, surreptitiously descend into the cellar, and lock the door behind them. Presently the sound of the offset would be heard. In the early stages Johnny watched fascinated as Danny operated the machine, the plate cylinder turning and the rubber blanket of the blanket cylinder transferring the ink from the plate to the pa
per as it passed between the blanket and the impression cylinder. Danny had faked the watermark so brilliantly that the planchettes appeared to have been built right into the paper during its manufacture, as they were in the genuine cheques, instead of in fact being merely drawn on the plate and printed.

  “How many will you knock off from these plates?” Johnny asked Danny. “I mean how long will the plate last, before they get blurred?”

  “They’ll stay sharp long enough for this job,” Danny said cryptically, “and longer.”

  Johnny nodded thoughtfully, he was wondering what happened to the plates after Danny had finished with this particular operation. Danny was banging on the ceiling above with the end of a broomstick, and soon the cellar-door was opened barely wide enough for coffee and sandwiches to be pushed through. Danny often worked on through the night, snatching an hour or two’s sleep on the floor.

  Late one evening, when Johnny and Danny were below, Giordano arrived at the coffee-bar with the truck. He paid the landlord his thirty thousand lira, and advised him to keep his attention strictly to the business of his own coffee-bar, while the press was wrapped up once more, lugged upstairs, heaved aboard the truck and returned quietly to its owner.

  On the Rotaprint Danny had during three weeks underground produced six thousand counterfeit hundred dollar Transatlantic travellers’ cheques.

  Now the caper had reached its most critical phase. The counterfeits were actually in existence, and the big risk was that the police might hear about them through the underworld grapevine, before the first counterfeit was cashed. Even if that danger was avoided, Johnny and the rest of them knew precisely what would happen within a week or so after the first cheque was put on the market. Transatlantic would learn it was a counterfeit, and would alert all its branches and every bank in Europe. Bank-tellers who had previously honoured Transatlantic travellers’ cheques without a second glance would henceforth scrutinize every one that came before them with gimlet eyes. Hotel-cashiers, airport ticket-clerks, jewellers — all those who handled large sums of money would become suspicious-minded to a morbid degree.

  What it amounted to was that Johnny and Giordano’s mob would in fact have little more than a couple of weeks at best in which to unload the stuff. It would be every man for himself, and Johnny suddenly realized that Giordano and his pals stood a better chance of unloading than he did.

  The delivery of the six thousand travellers’ cheques took place in the workroom of a dim theatrical costumiers owned by a friend of Carla’s. Johnny, accompanied by Danny, who was tottering under the weight of a bulky valise, appeared at this musty, cluttered rendezvous next day at midday following the departure of the Rotaprint from the coffee-bar cellar, Giordano and Carla were awaiting them.

  Danny heaved the suitcase on to a table, squashing a couple of tinselled head-dresses all out of shape, Johnny lifting the lid of the valise to allow Giordano a tantalizing glimpse of the contents, now indicated his readiness to hand over the fifty per cent due to Giordano and his business-men he represented in a week’s time and not before. He wanted the extra time in order to get rid of his stuff before the others went into action.

  Giordano took a poor view of the suggestion, and was vehemently backed up by Carla, not much to Johnny’s surprise, he had suspected for the past few weeks that Carla was cheating on him with Giordano. Danny, as usual, said nothing. He merely stood there regarding his spatulate fingers, without whose delicate skill there wouldn’t have been the six thousand cheques to start with.

  After a good deal of chinning, during which no one changed anyone’s viewpoint, Giordano said he would have to consult with his business-men, and would be back with their answer in an hour. Johnny agreed to hang around and the other, accompanied by Carla, her dark eyes flashing dangerously at Johnny, departed.

  Giordano and Carla duly returned, the former to announce that he had induced the business-men he represented to make Johnny a counter-proposal which was to let him have an extra thousand of the cheques for himself in consideration of the happy relationship he and Johnny had enjoyed. But both parties must start getting rid of the stuff together. This was very, very definite.

  Johnny finally agreed, and he and Danny transferred the requisite number of cheques from valise to the hatboxes provided by Carla’s friend, and he and Danny who carried the valise, said arivederla to Giordano and Carla and beat it.

  That night Johnny and Danny took a plane of one of the sixty-six airlines serving Rome and lit out for Antwerp. Working fast and moving around, they spread the counterfeits all over Belgium, some of the stuff was to appear even as far afield as Scandinavia, Germany and Austria, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland.

  But what Johnny hadn’t known was that at the very time that Danny was toiling away beneath the coffee-bar another bunch of counterfeiters had moved into the picture. This crowd had, a few weeks before, dreamed up an ambitious plan for faking fifty-dollar counterfeit Transatlantic travellers’ cheques to be followed by twenties and then tens. One of this mob’s contacts, an individual known as the Lizard, was instructed to locate a supply of paper. Among the first people he talked to was Giordano, an old acquaintance.

  The Lizard thus reported back that a counterfeit hundred-dollar cheque was already being printed. Accordingly, his confederates decided it would be safer and simpler to get in on the Johnny Destiny set-up instead of going through with their own scheme. The Lizard came back to Giordano and told him that in view of what was already planned, his friends had dropped their own idea.

  But, the Lizard said, if Giordano needed any help over disposing of the cheques, his crowd had an outlet in mind which would buy an almost unlimited amount. As a result Giordano accompanied by Carla, had met the Lizard’s boss. He was a Frenchman from Nice, whose clothes were impeccably tailored, whose manners were charming, and who used a violet scent profusely.

  Two nights following this meeting in Rome, Johnny and Danny walked into the hotel in Brussels, where the pair had arrived that afternoon. In the train, earlier, Johnny had been overcome with a premonition that something nasty was due to overtake him. So insistent was this foreboding that he felt impelled to remove a fistful of counterfeit cheques from the valise while Danny was obliviously asleep in the railway compartment and transfer them to his own suitcase.

  And it was the same foreboding which caused him to allow Danny, carrying the suitcase, to precede him by several yards as they went into the hotel-entrance.

  So that when two men, obviously plainclothes detectives, stepped from behind a cigarette-kiosk in the crowded foyer and grabbed Danny firmly by both arms, while at the same time taking possession of the valise, Johnny was not too overcome with shock to spin on his heel and make a dash for it. “We have got you with the stuff on you,” he had time to hear one of the police-officers say to Danny in mangled English, and then he was dodging the traffic in the busy street.

  Johnny was not to know that one of the plain-clothes-men was an ex-police inspector, who had been sacked sometime before for black market activities, and that his companion was an officer still in the force, but not long destined to serve in his present employment. Danny was carted off, not to any police-station, but to a café, where upon a pretext he was left, while the two others departed, the valise with them, due to find its way into the hands of the Lizard’s boss in Rome.

  It was ten days later that Transatlantic realized that a counterfeit hundred-dollar traveller’s cheque had been put into circulation in Rome; followed within only a few hours by a report arrived from Brussels that a man had actually showed up on the Bourse with a Transatlantic hundred dollar cheque but had vanished when told it was a fake. Next day the police in Rome picked up four characters who were attempting to buy jewellery with one of the counterfeits, and who were found to have twenty more duds in their possession. The same afternoon a man was arrested in a café on the Champs-Elysées while attempting to sell ten of the counterfeits to a detective over an aperitif.

  During the next thr
ee weeks it became painfully clear to Transatlantic and the police that the counterfeiters were really putting their hearts into their work. Bogus cheques were turning up all over Western Europe. A Lucerne bank refused to cash one of them for an unknown brunette, whereupon she beat a retreat, not staying to pick up the cheque in her haste; the same day several of them arrived at Transatlantic’s clearing-house in New York; a man was arrested in Basle with seven of them in his possession, which he said he had come by in Strasbourg.

  The Banque de France reported that it had received forty-eight of the counterfeits which had been confiscated by customs officers two days previously at Vallorbe, on the Swiss border. The traveller had, contrary to currency regulations, not declared the cheques which was why they had been confiscated; the customs men not realizing that they were counterfeit, had let the man who was carrying them through into Switzerland. His passport had borne the name: James Donnell, of Detroit.

  It was in fact, Johnny Destiny.

  Coincidentally, in view of certain events that lay in wait around the corner of the not-too-distant future, it was at this time that Dr. Morelle chanced to arrive in Rome from Paris, with two friends who happened to be ace counterfeiting experts, Commissaire Principal Yves Altmeyer, of the Paris police, and Commissaire Principal Paul Roland, of the Surete Nationale. Dr. Morelle was attending a conference of international criminologists and Interpol police-officers.

  Pounced upon by news-hawks for his opinion upon the Transatlantic sensation, Dr. Morelle gave it as his opinion that the source of the counterfeits was Rome, and that, therefore, all of those picked up by the police so far were very likely to be only peddlers, not the actual counterfeiters themselves.