Interview With a Stamp Buyer
Red and gold light spilled from the fireplace at the end of the room. All the billowing and curling of the smoke fled up the chimney, lest it fall into the trap of settling down on a nice white surface and never pursuing its dreams, and the light beamed out in straight lines to wherever it could reach. Between the bars of the grating it slipped, throwing itself hard against the opposite wall, the furniture, and the occupants, like storm-driven waves smashing themselves into the coastline. No ships or driftwood were yet to be washed up by the illumination, but according to certain multiverse theorists it would only be a matter of time.
Enjoying the glow and the warmth of the fire were two men, seated opposite one another in luxurious bucket seats. One of the men sat up straight, the creases in his pristinely pressed white shirt sharp enough to slice open a honeydew melon and serve it to the camera crew that lurked all around him. The other man, much older and more relaxed, or at least more reclined, made far fuller use of the chair’s padded nature. He sank into it like a dropped knife might sink into an unbaked cake, but no panicked, probing fingers came to rescue him. If fate had determined that this gentleman should be utterly engulfed by padding and upholstery, then none would dare to defy it.
Heavy duty wires, tripods, boom arms and flight cases covered the floor of the modest library, hiding the thick, expensive rugs and masking many of the bookshelves from view. Only the space between the two chairs, the space within shot, had been left clear, to create the illusion of a quiet, intimate conversation between the two of them, that didn’t feature another half dozen crew lurking in the periphery.
As luck, where luck is a euphemism for ‘deliberately orchestrated circumstance and years of practice’, would have it, both men were perfectly accustomed to ignoring camera operators, sound engineers and directors while having a recorded conversation with someone else. Neither one of them fiddled with the microphones clipped to their lapels, nor did they mind trying to act natural with a powerful, highly directional light shining straight into their face. It was all necessary for the production.
“Thank you again for agreeing to do this, Carlin. I’m very excited to hear what you’ve got to say.” The white-shirted man said. Interviewing hadn’t ever been his dream, as such, but Tristan Snoops, as he was known, had fallen onto his feet with the vocation. His natural nosiness and disarmingly good looks were the perfect foundation on which to build a career of professional enquiry.
Across from him the older man smiled, revealing two rows of yellowing teeth. They were firmly fixed into his gums, and not rolling frighteningly around in his mouth, something for which he awoke grateful every morning.
“You’re welcome, Tristan. I thought it would be distracting to spend a day talking through my life with a stranger, and I can’t say that I lament the generous remuneration offered for my time.” He grinned. He had the sort of time-worn face that featured deep enough furrows and folds to hide any number of secrets, and any quantity of redundant farming equipment. Every time Carlin DeVescio coughed, the people around him feared that a chain plough might topple out of the deep crevices that lined his forehead. To date, those fears had proven themselves utterly unfounded. The case of the missing chain plough, however, remained commensurately unsolved.
“Could you say something else please, Mr DeVescio? Nearly got your levels sorted.” One of the sound engineers called over. Carlin shifted slightly in his seat.
“I can say all sorts of other things. It wouldn’t be much of an interview if I repeated that one sentence over and over for an hour, would it?” He acquiesced. A smattering of polite laughter, the kind that tends to get uttered when awkwardly occupying someone else’s house, filled the room briefly.
“OK, that’s great, thanks. Tristan?”
“Yep. Test, one, two, some more numbers. Question, question, question…” He said, looking down at his notes. “Are we alright angled like this? Need the chairs to rotate at all?”
“No, you’re fine. We’ve got everything lined up as we need it.” Replied the head camera woman, without looking up from her equipment. One could have done a reasonably convincing job of scaffolding an Edwardian townhouse with the amount of rails, boom arms and stands that she’d set up around the room.
“All the levels are fine. We’re ready to go whenever you are.” A sound engineer quietly informed the director. She was perched on a small bookshelf, legs crossed with a laptop on her knees. Lesser mortals might have found their kneecaps burning from the hot air exhaust, but not Samantha Travers. It only fuelled her unquenchable thirst for well-framed shots and appropriate pacing in a narrative.
“Good. Tristan?” She said, curtly. Mr Snoops nodded.
“So, Carlin DeVescio! Welcome to Snooping Around with me, Tristan Snoops. It’s an honour to have you here with us.” He said, all white teeth, fake smiles and well-rehearsed platitudes. It took a certain, intense arrogance to welcome someone into their own library for the sake of an interview, especially when the diktat of a despotic director had made them anything but welcome to roam around their own home. Such was the contrivance under which they met.
“Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to you.” Carlin replied. Although he’d hidden from the spotlight for many years, there was no forgetting the public face that one was forced to put on when answering questions about themselves. In fact, there could well have been several other faces ensconced within the folds of his cheeks. Sufficiently deep questioning from Tristan would hopefully bring speculation on that matter to a satisfying conclusion.
“You’re so welcome. So welcome.” Mr Snoops apparently had a scale of welcomeness that went incredibly high. “I’d first of all, before we start, like to complement you on such a beautiful home and, in particular, a majestic library. You must be an avid reader!” He said, his plastic compliments and synthetic enthusiasm rolling out like cardboard boxes on a conveyor belt. Carlin smiled back, playing his part in the theatre of small-talk. He wanted to observe how Tristan had shown no interest in the house until this point, and that no-one ever used terms except avid or keen to describe how much another person liked reading. It was laziness. It was the printing press of faux-personal observations. But Carlin was an intelligent man who had played the game before.
“Thank you! I’m glad you noticed. I do indeed like to sit and read by the fire of an evening.” He replied, gifting the director the perfect moment to cut away to a shot of the fireplace in the final edit. She’d appreciate that. Or, at least, she wouldn’t grow to hate him more because of it.
“Anything in particular you like to read?”
Books, he wanted to reply. But he didn’t.
“The classics. Some new work as well. Some days just a magazine. It depends on what mood I’m in, I suppose. I try to have broad horizons but I fear that they’re narrower than I want to believe.”
“I guess you could say that, maybe, the breadth of your horizons could fit on a postage stamp?” Tristan said with a performative smile and wiggle of the eyebrows. He and Carlin both feigned a laugh at the painful segue.
“Yes, very good.”
“So viewers, for those who somehow don’t know, and I really defy you not to know this unless you’ve been living under a rock your whole life,” Tristan said, directly to the camera. The exaggerated delivery of ‘under a rock’ made Carlin want to lift up his chair and introduce it, back first, to Tristan’s cranium. But he didn’t, and Tristan kept speaking. “Carlin DeVescio is one of the greatest and most successful stamp collectors and traders of all time. From the classic Second Class, to the titanic First Class Large, from the gorgeous 1901 Commemorative Christmas stamp to the unreasonably named Berkshire Bluebottle Bottle Blue stamp, they are in or have passed through Carlin’s collection.”
While Tristan reeled off a continual list of accolades and credentials, Carlin gave a series of nods that spanned from polite to humble to amused. His years of giving regular interviews were long in the past, and while one never really forgot how to be talked about, and even talked to for the benefit of an unseen viewer, he had forgotten how long these people could go on. For a job role that was supposedly about listening to the responses their guests gave, interviewers seemed to do a lot of talking. Sitting on her bookshelf, Samantha had also noted this characteristic in Mr Snoops. In no uncertain terms she gave a series of hand signals for Tristan to get to the point and stop wasting time.
“…but that’s why we’re here today, having been honoured with Mr DeVescio’s first discussions about his life and works in over fifteen years. Carlin, again, thank you for letting us be the crew to hear your exclusive exposé, for letting us listen while you break your silence on what’s been going on in your life.”
“It’s an opportunity to relay my story that I didn’t wish to pass up.” Carlin replied, trying to ground the whole room before Tristan quite literally levitated from his chair with pure hype. His answer wasn’t necessarily untrue, but it did omit the detail that, mostly, he didn’t wish to pass up the generous compensation he’d been offered for agreeing to an interview. “After all these years I think my experiences, and the truth behind the rumours about my life and my retirement from the public eye, deserve to be communicated.”
“And communicate them we shall. So, since this is a story of your life as a philatelist, I suppose we should start at your first foray into the wonderful world of self-adhesive squares to alleviate your postal cares.” Grinned Mr Snoops. Carlin looked at him disappointedly.
“Not all stamps are self-adhesive. That’s a very modern development, from the early 1960s in tropical, humid countries that made water-based adhesives troublesome. But I suppose you’re too young to know about that.” DeVescio corrected the interviewer, without making much eye-contact. “But we’re not here for a history lesson on stamp adhesion, we’re here for a history lesson on me, arrogant as it is to make that statement.” He chuckled. “I began my career not as a postal enthusiast per se, but as courier. I worked for a company known back then as Stretch and Snap’s Rubber-Based Pile Containment Solutions who, for those who don’t speak the arcane language of the branding department, manufactured and sold rubber bands. They received more than a few enquiries for haemorrhoid treatment on account of that particular name, as one can imagine.”
Tristan nodded with a professional smile, while the several members of the production crew, especially those monitoring the microphones, grimaced a little at the imagery. Samantha showed no emotion except contempt and impatience.
“Harrowing stuff. I hope that sitting in a van all day didn’t give you any ‘unconstrained piles’.” Tristan laughed. No-one particularly joined in. “So, uh, so what did you do for Stretch and Snap?”
“I was a courier, as I said.”
“Right, but what did that entail?”
“Being a courier? It entailed couriering goods, mostly the rubber bands that Stretch and Snap’s Rubber-Based Pile Containment Solutions manufactured and sold, but occasionally I transported other things like the boxes in which those rubber bands were stored, or the money that clients paid to receive the rubber bands from the boxes. Nothing terribly out of the ordinary there.” Carlin answered. Tristan maintained his professional mask despite the torrent of sarcasm raging around him. “But although my courier work was perfectly mundane, it led me into the company of several employees of the local post offices, as well as certain members of the postal delivery service. Their industry, that of ensuring that anything precious enough to send to someone else, but not so precious that it needs to be protected by anything more than paper or cardboard, is a great consumer of rubber bands. At least half of my deliveries of a day or night would be to a post office somewhere in my region.”
“Sorry, by night?”
“Oh goodness yes! I was always on call in the case of rubber band shortages. The night sorting couldn’t be allowed to halt, lest the following day’s delivery should fall into disarray. If they ran out of bands then I would be round there with a few boxes of Stretch and Snap’s finest to remedy the situation.”
“I hadn’t realised that there was such agility and responsiveness required in the rubber band game.”
“Not many people would realise it, but you’ve got to be just as elastic as the product.” Carlin said. Tristan laughed on his cue. “So as I was saying, I would often find myself in the post office. Plenty of the posties and sorties got to know me soon enough. We’d stand around and have a mug of tea, or a mug of gravy if the tea had run out, and we’d talk on this and that. Eventually, as you might be able to surmise, a woman named Clarice Wivenro who worked in the Thundersley branch mentioned that she’d got an envelope with a rare stamp on it that evening.”
“Your first interaction with philately!” Tristan remarked, so that his voice didn’t go unheard for too long.
“My reaction was something along the lines of ‘what do you mean a rare stamp?’ or ‘aren’t they just first and second class’ or an equally squalid and ill-informed question. And she said to me, I’ll never forget it, she said ‘You’ve never heard about collector’s edition stamps or rare examples? Your rubber bands are first class but your observations certainly aren’t’. It cut me to the core, let me tell you. I always prided myself on being very observant, which is why I eventually did so well, I think, but she was right, and she’d piqued my interest. We spent the best part of an hour talking about how much money the top collectors can make, and she showed me some of the more interesting ones they had in the pile of sorted post. I remember it being such a wrench to leave that night, but I was running the risk of being late for my next drop and the post must go through, as they say.”
“It sounds like that night changed your life, Carlin. A throwaway anecdote from this - Clarice was it? - let you in on the secret.” Summarised the interviewer. “So what did you do from there? How did it go from a comment in a post office at night to something that, if you’ll excuse the pun, got stuck right on you?”
Carlin DeVescio could excuse many things. Puns were included on that list, but Tristan came closer to slipping off it every time he spoke.
“It was the promise of being able to make a fortune from it, I’m a little embarrassed to say. The stamps were genuinely interesting, don’t get me wrong. There was a 1933 example, released to commemorate the day when the Mayor of Gloucester found, and I quote ‘an absolutely smashing load of bees’ in his garden shed, which remains a firm favourite of mine. There’s a hive in the middle and fifteen individually drawn bees on each one. Nightmare to produce, apparently. But the point is, while my enthusiasm was genuine, is genuine, it was the chance not to have to work that really spurred me on. Every night for the next few months I thought about raking in the stamp money and how I could make it happen.”
“So it turned into an obsession for you?” Tristan asked, gravely. He slightly tilted his head sideways and down to offer the question a little more artificial gravitas, and transformed his professional smile into professional faux-concern.
“No. No, not even slightly.” Carlin replied, with a mixture of confusion, disappointment and disgust at the enquiry. “Where did you make logical leap from? I didn’t cease to function except for my thoughts about stamp collection, I just focused a lot of thought on it compared to other future ventures while continuing to live my life. Honestly, do you seek drama in every shadow cast by a moth at the window? Does every rainfall portend the coming of tragedy for all you hold dear when the clouds are spied through misty windows?”
Tristan leaned nervously back in his chair, the suspicion beginning to form in his mind that he’d said something with which Carlin wasn’t completely in love. For her own part, sitting in a stoic and perpetually irritated vigil over the interview, Samantha seemed comparatively pleased with the development.
“It was not an obsession, but it did occupy my spare time, and I spoke to Ms Wivenro et al about how one might start their own collection. They directed me to an initiative known as ‘Post Postal Postage’, of which I had never heard previously, that collected used envelopes from the public with an aim of recycling the paper. They were pioneers in the sector of paper re-use, and also my first supplier of postage stamps. You see, they would steam the stamps off so that the adhesives did not interfere with the recycling process, and then either sell the stamps to collectors like myself or destroy them as demand dictated. Comparatively speaking, they made very little money from the stamp business, because despite being a major source for rare stamps, none of them really understood the product. The prices seemed to me, even as a rank amateur, to be wild and erratic, totally devoid of any logic but always well below the open market price. A common first class stamp might set one back by thirty pence, whereas a rare Nigerian ‘Ibex riding the rings of Saturn’ stamp, created in celebration of the discovery of a living Scots Pine in a Nigerian doctor’s refrigerator, was on sale for only twelve pence.” Carlin relayed, disbelief at the memory still etched on his increasingly ridged face. It was clear from his tone that nobody in the room should have been left standing after such a shocking and baffling revelation, and yet all feet remained correctly in use.
“Suffice to say it was a boon to me, as someone just starting out. Years later, after I had risen to fame, I did have a chance to tour the interior of Post Postal Postage, and on the route was, of course, a visit to their pricing department. Their methodology, it transpired, was to throw an open bag of smarties at a dart board some twenty feet away on the floor, and sum the scores together to form the price in pence. Once I had stopped asking them to repeat themselves, and had resigned myself to the knowledge that they spoke truly, I accepted that this method explained the frankly extortionate ten pound price tag for a very common second class stamp.”
To describe the production team in the room as riveted by Carlin’s story would have been an overstatement. In fact, it would have overstated their interest by at least one hundred percent, and understated their complete apathy by a similar quantity. This was not the portion of the story, however, for which they had arranged and paid handsomely for the interview, of course. Most of this was already a matter of public record, give or take a few details, and Samantha’s continued signalling to Tristan to move things along was symptomatic of that. The fact that Carlin could also see her was a significant reason for why he continued to speak so slowly, and at such great length.
“Ten pounds? That’s a lot for a stamp and even I know it!” Tristan cut in, hoping that a short period of polite laughter from his guest would break the momentum, and buy time for him to ask another question. Alas, Carlin was not in the laughing mood.
“Which is saying something, yes. Frankly the sales of stamps by Post Postal Postage could have made them disastrously rich, but nobody there seemed interested in pursuing that goal. It was better for me and the other collectors like me, but deeply confusing nonetheless.”
“OK, so you started your collection from PPP?” Tristan asked with a smirk that betrayed how smart he felt for making that acronym all by himself. “Then what happened?”
“Don’t call them PPP. That’s the acronym of an organisation that cleans up birds with large bills, have fallen foul of deep-sea plastic spillages, and then washed onto the shores of Puerto-Rico. I would never seek to make my fortune by exploiting their stamp collection sub-division.” Carlin replied sharply. There was real annoyance on his face.
“Erm, of course. My apologies for the insinuation.” Replied the interviewer, with aggravation building in the back of his throat, threatening to ambush any subsequent sentences and morph them in its own image. Samantha stared daggers at him for upsetting the guest and not bringing them back onto topic. When these daggers proved ineffective, she threw one of her shoes at him out of shot. That, at least, made Carlin smile. “OW-er, that is to say, how did you proceed from the start of your collection, then?”
“Slowly, I’m afraid, is the answer there. Although I had a ready source of stamps, so did many others. I was far from the only customer of Post Postal, and there was tough competition to grab the stamps when they became available. What with the demands of my courier role, having to be on call for emergency rubber bands, I could not always get there in time for the day’s drop of stamps. Things were similarly troublesome when trying to sell the stamps on; it was hard for me to access the major buyers at the time, people like Big Stamp Murphy. I was snubbed by him many a time in favour of providers with whom he had more experience. To him, it seemed that if he didn’t know you personally, he had no interest in getting to know you at all, or, more importantly, buy from you.”
“Big Stamp Murphy? We know that your interactions here weren’t the last you’d have to do with him.” Observed the interviewer, hoping for a reaction.
“Indeed we do.” Carlin said calmly. “But that’s something we’ll come to later. The fact of the matter is that Big Stamp Murphy’s rejections led me on the path to success, in a roundabout way. Had I been able to sell to him and his peers back then, in my smaller days, then I would have been able to keep operating via legitimate means, which in turn would have seen my growth vastly curtailed compared to my, er, less legal dealings.” As one, Tristan, the production team and even the clinical Samantha leaned forwards a little. It was most troublesome for the boom mic operator, of course, who nearly overbalanced as a result, but consummate professionalism and impressive core strength held her steady.
Carlin let out a gentle sigh.
“My trading in stamps led to some financial gain, it’s true, but it didn’t bring me to the heights of wealth for which I had hoped. I could use it to buy a nice meal every now and again, but I couldn’t hope to make a real living from it. Even if I reinvested every penny I made from stamp collection, and every bit of disposable income I had from my couriering, my rate of growth would have been too low to quit formal employment before retirement age. I was a victim of my own poor expectation management, I suppose, and my dreams had turned into a bar by which I judged myself to have failed. In the depths of some painful ruminations on the matter, I struck upon a plan to remedy that.”
Several paranoia-checks were made on the cameras and the microphones. Although this part of Carlin’s life had been discussed in passing before, and speculated upon with moderate certainty, there might be a revelation or two that could get headlines, even if the events of his disappearance from the public eye later on in life were the ticket item of the day.
“I became frustrated with my lack of access to the Post Postal Postage stocks on some days, and by the notion that surely, many stamps were being thrown away rather than recycled, thus never reaching Post Postal Postage in the first place. I was raking through the dregs of the dregs, and I wouldn’t see success unless I harvested from more fertile ground, so to speak. I decided that I needed to go to the source, and intercept the stamps before they reached their destinations.”
“So… presumably the post boxes? The sorting office? The postal delivery agents?”
“The sorting offices and post offices.” Carlin confirmed, shuffling uncomfortably in his seat with the severe regret and embarrassment that can only come from a shameful memory. “Knowing roughly what the Post Postal Postage process was for stamp harvesting, and knowing that I could always spend time in the post office thanks to my deliveries and relationship with the staff there, I hatched a plan to make my own factory.”
Carlin sighed again. Under the bright studio lights it seemed that he might be fading into translucency, the secrets that he’d hidden behind his public façade becoming visible beneath the skin. Or possibly he just needed more powder for his face. In the background, the makeup artist was nudged for an opinion.
“Typically the sorting offices were busy of an evening, when all the bags of letters and parcels were dropped off, and needed to be prepared for the following day’s post. However, there was always a bit of downtime at the Thundersley branch. I knew when it was because I was there so often, and I arranged for myself to be there at the quiet time as whenever I could. While the staff were having a break or tending to other duties, I would sneak into the sorting room with a pack of fresh first or second class stamps, sometimes a combination of both that I’d purloined from the storefront, and then I’d rifle through the post bags with my travel kettle. Everyone else thought I was preparing them tea according to my ‘secret recipe’, but really I was brewing up some perfectly banal supermarket teabags, all the while making kettleful after kettleful of hot water for steaming. Every time I found a rare stamp I’d steam it off, replace it with one of my own, and pocket the profits.”
“My goodness.” Said Tristan. “Did nobody at the branch notice what you were up to at any point? Surely they’d think you were taking a long time for a brew.”
“There were questions, certainly. I mostly fobbed them off with talk of it being a family secret that I couldn’t ever reveal, and I made several cups every hour. The lavatories took as much of a punishing as the stamp collection industry did, to be honest, but everyone was just happy not to be drinking gravy anymore.”
“Delightful. So you’d walk into the post office of an evening with your rubber bands, offer the staff a few dozen cups of tea, and harvest all the rare stamps you could find in the meanwhile. Then, come some reasonable end point for the night’s clandestine activity, you’d walk out with a pocketful of profitable stamps.” Tristan summarised, for the sake of later teaser trailers of the interview.
“That’s about the fill of it, yes. My collection suddenly brimmed with rare items.”
"And that was your big break into the life of lights and glitter. You joined the high rollers of the stamp collection world off the back of that, well, we'll call it morally juvenile behaviour."
"We can call it whatever we like, it was still theft. It makes me no less of a criminal whether you call it m.j.b., mature delinquency or petty, premeditated theft." Carlin said drily, looking at Tristan with all the respect that a reversing truck shows to a discarded crisp packet. "But yes, my actions in the sorting office did lead to meeting the self-styled lickers and stickers of philately."
“Talk me through that, please. Your rise to fame on the wave of rare stamps acquired through illicit means.”
Carlin nodded wearily.
“Armed with my improved collection, my sales and profits took an enormous upturn. I went from just another name in the sea of traders to being the top of the bottom; nothing to write home about, but far more visible. Gone were the days of chasing buyers, because I became the first port of call for many of the local philatelists seeking to expand their collection. My home was infused permanently with the smell of stamp adhesive, I had folder after folder of plastic sleeves holding precious paper squares, and my collection was suddenly stock. It was an archive. I was somebody within the space.”
“So you were willing to sell anything you got hold of?”
“Not quite anything, no. Some of my favourite examples still sit in some of the folders you see around you in this library.” Carlin told him, indicating to a shelf of A4 binders.
“Get some close-ups of those later.” Samantha hissed to one of the camera operators. “We’ll get the old man to pull good ones down for some B-roll too.”
Carlin chose to ignore the old man comment and carry on with the story, mostly because it was hard to deny that his youth had long since passed.
“I did, however, let a lot of precious stamps pass through my hands for the sake of profit. Once you’ve sold a few top tier stamps, like the 1950 Canadian Railway stamp, showing their famous Vancouver Express crushing the American Supreme Court Justice’s porcelain dinner service, your name really gets out there in the community. The more I traded, the harder it was for the top players to ignore me. I knew I’d really made it when I got a call from Cutty Nora.”
“Ah, yes. Cutty Nora. She was the queen of slipping a blade between stamp and envelope, rather than steaming, correct?” Recalled the interviewer, from his hurried research that morning over a mug of piping hot water with a cinnamon stick in it.
“Exactly, yes. I remember it vividly. It was late morning, and I’d not long woken up following my nocturnal theft by steam. I’d place it somewhere in mid-November, because there was definitely frost on the postman when he came to the door, but he wasn’t tangled in the net of tinsel I tend to leave out during the festive season.” Carlin recounted. Tristan nodded sagely in approval. “I was sitting at my kitchen table and sorting the previous night’s haul into their appropriate parts of the collection when my phone began to ring. This wasn’t a great shock to me, because phones are designed to ring when someone calls you, so that you don’t miss the fact that they would like to speak with you. Couple that to the frequent enquiries I was receiving over what I did or did not have for sale at the time, and you can see why I wouldn’t be surprised by that telecommunications bell at all.” Explained Mr DeVescio.
“It’s almost too clear.” Agreed the interviewer.
“I answered the phone, which is what you have to do to make sure that you can speak to the other person rather than the call failing to connect, and Cutty Nora was at the other end. This is when I did feel some shock, because most often when you answer a phone call it’s not Cutty Nora at the other end. That’s true of literally everyone, except perhaps Cutty Nora’s partner, who likely receives a lot of calls from her.”
Samantha’s other shoe arced through the air and struck Tristan on the knee, implying gently that the interviewer should have been steering the interviewee back onto the point.
“And what did she want?” Mr Snoops asked, rubbing at the sore patch where a stiletto heel had expertly nailed the joint.
“I’m getting to that now.” Carlin frowned. “She introduced herself, and she said that she had a very particular request. At the time, there was a lot of interest in a limited run of stamps from the short-lived Republic of North Sea Oil Rigs. If you recall, they led a short revolution and declared independence from any sovereign nation. During that time the oil supplies became slightly more expensive, because their erstwhile government was raising tax to form their own postal system. Quite why that was their first priority is a matter for the historians to ponder and argue over, but they had a run of stamps showing a cross-section diagram of the oil being extracted by a giant stork with a straw. To this day I have no idea how they got a printing press and the required reagents for the adhesive out to the rigs, nor how they managed to operate them, but they did it.”
“Baffling.” Tristan agreed.
“The so called Straw Storks were inestimably valuable, although a value could always be placed at auction, and Cutty Nora was requisitioning one from me. She didn’t care how long it took, but she demanded that I get her one, and that I would find myself very wealthy indeed if I could do so. Her only stipulation, as one can imagine, was that I provide it either unused, or with the envelope still attached.”
“So no steaming?”
“No steaming at all. Not even storage in a humid part of the house.” Carlin confirmed.
“Troublesome for your favoured technique.”
“Yes, very troublesome. It was easy to replace a stamp that’s been steamed away, but covering my tracks after cutting an envelope apart would be a whole other matter. I told myself that I would have plenty of time to work it out though, since those stamps were incredibly rare. One might never pass through my branch of the post office.”
“But I take it that one eventually did?”
“Aye, and a lot sooner than anyone anticipated.” Confirmed Carlin. “It was only a week after that call that I sat with kettle in hand and mouth agape, holding in my other hand a letter addressed to the BBC from the Republic of North Sea Oil rigs, featuring one of their very own Straw Storks. I nearly spilled all ten cups of tea that I’d positioned around myself on the sorting room floor.
It took a few moments for me to find my composure in the face of such an opportunity, but once I did, it was all business. I rushed back into the break room with the mugs, and said that I needed to borrow a pair of scissors and some envelopes in order to make the next batch. Naturally that did cause something of a maelstrom of curiosity, but they bought my excuse of needing to perform one-off maintenance on the recipe. With the supplies in hand, I retreated into the sorting room again and, very carefully, cut out the whole top corner of the envelope featuring the Straw Stork. My hands had never shaken so much, not even when I spent an evening drinking strong coffee atop a poorly counterweighted washing machine on the back of an aggregates lorry in a quartz quarry.”
“The famous night of June 16th, 1997?”
“That same night, yes. But there I was, with a rare stamp in my possession and a clearly abused envelope to somehow disguise. In my haste, the best plan I could come up with was to tuck the cut envelope into a new one with a window on the front, stick a stamp on, and hope for the best. Unfortunately, all the envelopes I had were the same size, so the Republic’s message did get a little bent out of shape, but it was good enough for my tracks to be covered.”
“Did you manage to read what the letter said?” Asked Tristan, in the knowledge that there might be a chance for an interview with the ex-chancellor of the Republic of North Sea Oil Rigs on the matter. Samantha showed her respect for the savvy move, by bombarding Tristan’s shin using the boom mic operator’s boots.
“I caught a few glimpses. It was addressed to the makers of Top of the Pops, requesting that the Republic be granted several tickets to attend the recording, as part of a trade deal to secure fishing rights in Republic’s waters.” Carlin indulged them. Tristan made a few hurried notes.
“Thank you. Now I believe you were up to the point of escaping the post office?”
“Yes, that was the next move. Citing an upset stomach from the powerful fumes of tea manufacture, a known side-effect of our secret recipe, I made good my exit from the post office and drove home. It was the early hours of the morning by then, and I couldn’t in good conscience call Cutty Nora until office hours, but I didn’t sleep at all. I passed the time variously looking at the Straw Stork, worrying about repercussions, and re-grouting the bathroom. When nine O’clock finally came around, I picked up the phone with hands coated in battleship-grey grout, and dialled Cutty Nora’s number.”
“Was she surprised that you’d managed the get the stamp so quickly? Excited?”
“She was shocked that I’d managed it at all, I think. I’d achieved what no other supplier had been able to.”
“And in only seven short days.” Dramatised Tristan.
“Seven perfectly normal length days, as I remember it.” Carlin dismissed. “She gave me an address to which to courier the stamp myself, so I immediately cleaned myself up and headed out there with the Straw Stork.”
“Was it nearby?”
“Good heavens no. It was a three hour drive, one which took me into the middle of what I can only describe as the cast-offs from a particularly run-down swamp. The roads were as narrow as they were flooded, as muddy as they were blind, and as related to the map as I am to the Aurora Borealis.”
“That’s… very expressive of you, Mr DeVescio. I see the journey made quite an impression on you. It’s certainly a long and arduous drive to make on a night without sleep.”
“It was hair-raising for sure. The need for sleep was in constant combat with the adrenaline and anxiety over what might await me at the other end. You don’t know fear until you take both hands off the wheel, and lean into the passenger foot well while speeding along the motorway, all to make sure that your precious stamp hasn’t fallen out of its plastic sleeve within the protective binder.”
“I’d wager you’re correct on that one.”
“By the time I made it to Cutty Nora’s place I suppose I’d had six, seven, maybe eight near death experiences, but I was fairly numb to them. I also found myself stunned out of any mortal fear by the sight of Nora’s swampside estate. It was glorious and grand in its own way, but also a lot like an abandoned shed in others. Imagine someone had taken a country estate, one of the great manor houses and extravagantly landscaped gardens of the landed elite, and recreated the whole thing in a bog, using nothing but planks of damp wood reclaimed from the bottom of the peat. That’s kind of the sense I got when I rolled up the gravelly driveway. Obviously Cutty Nora was anticipating me, and she was keeping an eye out through the window, because she opened the front door as soon as I’d pulled up.”
“What did she say? Was she pleased to see you?” Tristan asked, repeatedly giving in to the habit of asking for information that would inevitably follow regardless.
“I think so, yes. Cutty Nora’s not the sort to express her emotions with particular extravagance, so looking back on it I’d say she was more pleased than annoyed.” Carlin assessed. “Once I stepped out of the car with the binder in hand she was straight to business. She called out to me and she said ‘Mr DeVescio? Is that my Straw Stork?’ and I told her that it was.
‘Come straight in, then. I’ll take a look and we’ll arrange payment.’ She said, so I did. I walked in through her driftwood front door, and I’ll say that I was impressed by the interior of her home. Far from the damp, rotting impression I’d got from the exterior, the inside of her house was a lot more like a typical manor. It still had aspects of the swamp about it, like the preserved wood art mounted on the walls, the large tanks and pipework funnelling foul, green-brown bog water from room to room, and the planters containing a wide variety of moss and heather, but it was still a liveable home.
Cutty Nora led me to into her workshop, a room I saw many times thereafter, but on my first visit I was blown away. It was more like an operating theatre than what you’d usually picture as a workshop; the wooden benches and power tools were replaced by clean, sterile benches and scalpels or tweezers or any number of fine, surgical instruments. I remember in particular being in awe of the array of mechanical arms leaning over her workspace, each one ending in a light, or a magnifying glass, or a clip to hold something suspended in mid-air.
‘Hand me the stamp, please.’ She asked me. I did it, and she disinterestedly discarded the folder and the plastic sleeve. ‘It’s a work of art, a real thing of beauty, this.’ She said, looking at it. Nora asked me if I’d spent long studying it, and of course I had; it was easily the rarest item I’d ever handled, and it really was a standout piece of memorabilia. My whole life would have been different if not for the chance occurrence that this stamp was passing through that post office on that night.” Reminisced Carlin, wistfully. He was looking upwards at the middle distance rather than facing Tristan directly.
“Serendipitous circumstances.” The interviewer chimed in, seeking to fill any silence with his own speech.
“Quite so. With the stamp in her hands she worked like a skilled surgeon, placing it in the afore-mentioned clip on an arm, and sitting down in front of it with one of her glasses focused in.
‘Sit down if you like.’ She told me. There was a leather-seated bench running along one wall that I placed myself down on, and I tried to pay attention while she picked up her tools, but the night of sleeplessness rather caught up with me, I’m afraid; only made it a couple of careful slices in before I dozed off. The next thing I remember is Cutty Nora waking me up with a big smile on her face, and the Straw Stork, now extracted from its envelope, in a secure plastic case.
‘It’s genuine and you did a great job, Mr DeVescio. I think this could be the start of a beautiful career for you in the world of big philately.’ She said to me. It was a bit bewildering to wake up to that, but it eventually sunk in. While I sat in the house with her she arranged for payment to be made into my account, and then wished me a safe trip back home. It was dark by then, because I’d been asleep for a long time, but I didn’t mind.”
“Did she send you home without anything to eat? Seems callous.” Enquired Tristan. Samantha narrowed her eyes and readied another shoe from somewhere.
“It wasn’t callously done. Nora just gets focused on certain things and everything else fades into a kind of background noise. The same thing happened many times over and I just learned to take sandwiches with me in the car.”
“So you kept supplying Cutty Nora for how long?”
“For years. I’m not fully sure how many, but between the trips to Nora and the increased revenue from my own trading, I stopped working for Stretch and Snap to go full time on the stamps. Naturally this cut down on my ability to harvest stamps from the source, but by then I had enough notoriety that trading by legitimate means could sustain me. It wouldn’t have been worth it to incriminate myself when I’d just hit the big time, and I really mean the big time.
Cutty Nora was a discerning customer, which made the other players in the philately game take notice. It wasn’t long until I started getting work and even making deals with the rest of the big four.”
“Ah, the big four. Famous among every stamp enthusiast. For the benefit of our less educated viewers, why don’t you tell us who the big four were.” Tristan suggested, very spontaneously, according to his script.
“Well of course there was Cutty Nora, who we’ve discussed. Next there was Big Stamp Murphy, who I mentioned had previously rejected me several times when I was less of a leader in the business. Big Stamp Murphy, as the name might suggest, specialised in the larger stamps produced by the world’s postal services. If it could be used to send a letter of unfolded A4 size or greater, without requiring additional postage to be added, then Murphy was interested. No-one could compete with him on either the size or the breadth of his large stamp collection, from the Central European Railway Stamp, the one that has a map of all the major train terminals in mainland Europe, to the one-of-a-kind Iron Rectangle. That one was made of pure iron, and produced for a Texan steel magnate to send a letter to his estranged uncle, regarding how much the same uncle looked like a water tank that had been dropped into a crater.”
There was an audible intake of air from some of the production crew. Even Tristan looked a bit surprised.
“Surely an iron stamp would have put the package into a higher weight category.” He speculated.
“It did. The Iron Rectangle required other stamps to be added to justify its own weight, and is the only known example of a stamp that requires its own dedicated postage to cover it. Incredible, really.” Carlin remembered, wistfully.
“Big Stamp Murphy was definitely a big deal then. Who were the other two?”
“Third of the big four was, of course, Billy the Adhesive. He was the glue man of the scene, more interested in which type of adhesive adorned the back of the paper than the design that was on the front. It was a niche, granted, but that only made what he traded in that much more valuable.”
“A niche within philately? That’s got to reduce the pool of people taking part.”
“Aye, but he was good. He was very good. I once saw him tell two glues apart just from looking at how the paper crumpled around the edges of their respective stamps. Both pieces were flat! But still he managed it. He was the only one of the big four who lived in an enormous bottle of PVA glue, and by gosh did that show.
Finally, of course, is possibly the most famous of all; First Class Francesa.”
Everything else in the room was dead silent, and not just because they didn’t want any external noises picked up on the microphones.
“Yes, of course. First Class Francesca, with whom you had your share of dealings.” Tristan said, offering some unnecessary framing to proceedings.
“You could say that. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves, isn’t it? Francesca, as her name implied, only dealt with first class stamps, but even then there were extra rules. First Class Francesca would not tolerate anything but the best, in terms of quality, rarity, price, anything; she sought the diamonds and jewels of every crown, and she bid hard to get what she’d decided was hers. If anyone could be said to act as the voice or the face of the big four, then it would be First Class Francesca. Whether the rest of them liked it or not.”
“Intriguing. So there was some kind of power struggle there among them? Some competition to have the greatest collection?”
“Not as such… I’ll get to it. The point is that I was as close as anyone to turning the big four into the big five. My network of trading connections and my reputation for finding the stamps that eluded others was legendary, to the point that it started a career in television and media for me. These were what I think of as the prime years of my fame, my golden age. If ever there was a programme about small squares of paper I would present it. If someone wanted an expert on placing small things in the corners of larger things that were still, in and of themselves, quite small, then I would be there. During those days there was very little known about the big four in the public domain, so I got a lot of work from people asking what it was like to be in the shadow of the stamp giants, but I was really more like their envoy than their protégée.”
“So it would seem, Mr DeVescio, and we agree. We don’t think of you as being in their shadow at all, for your work in and out of stamps stands on its own two feet. What would you say is the highlight of your time in the spotlight? Presenting the International Postage Championships? The Gala Awards Ceremony for Collectors and Traders of all things Paper?”
“Gosh… there were so many standout moments, including those you’ve listed… but I think my main choice would be something more humble, really. Those high society events, those big ticket proceedings, were great, but they aren’t what I was in the business for. I think the real pinnacle was recording ‘Around the World in Twenty Square Centimetres’.” Carlin decided, nodding slowly to signal contentment with his own thought processes.
“Ah yes, of course. Your travel documentary and world stamp industry amalgamation.”
“The very same. The premise was, as you’ll no doubt know from your research, that I travelled all the way around the world, following the most common postal routes and visiting the stamp production facilities of each nation I passed through. There was the perilous mail pass of South Eastern France, the naval corridor to the Balearic Islands, where the sea floor is lined with postal ship upon postal ship, the great adhesive mines of Northern Slovenia… each one of them has near mythical status for philatelists like myself, and I got to see them all.”
“Which production facility was your favourite? My money is on the Royal Mill of Postage in Australia.”
“It’s a good one, but no. I think my preferred choice was the People’s Postage Palace in Ukraine. The way they managed to carve their printing presses from stone, even though they had easily enough money and expertise to purchase more modern, and more efficient, machinery, was inspiring. If you ever get a chance to see someone painting a full colour picture of a stamp using only a few dozen tonnes of granite then I would recommend that you dive on it.” Mr DeVescio said, the most genuine smile of the whole interview breaking free of his face as he remembered it.
“I will take that advice.” Tristan lied. He’d told lies similar to that one many times before. “And a great choice, I’m sure. Now, I hope you won’t mind me steering this to perhaps darker territory, but you’ve described this as the pinnacle of your career. Tell us about how you wound your way down from the public eye.”
There came another classic Carlin DeVescio sigh.
“I suppose we must discuss it, but it’s the darkest part of my history and I do not look fondly back upon it. Darker even than those simple nights in the sorting room.” He took a deep breath. “After a few years of my time working with the big four, there was a schism. First Class Francesca and Big Stamp Murphy had clashed on many occasions, mostly when a large first class stamp came onto the market that both of them wanted, but they’d always managed to keep some kind of cordial relationship alive. That all ended when First Class Francesca told Big Stamp Murphy to back down from the auction for the Iron Rectangle, which I think I told you about before.”
“Yes, you did. Texan steel magnate, made of iron, needs its own postage.” Tristan proved. Carlin was begrudgingly impressed.
“Well, procuring that was obviously a priority for many collectors, but mostly Murphy and Fran. Big Stamp Murphy did not take kindly to being told he couldn’t bid on it, much less so when First Class Francesca tried to have him removed from the auction room, by claiming that he’d parked his car in the cafeteria, rather than the car park. The staff just about managed to see through the ruse, and Big Stamp Murphy came to win the auction, but the damage was done. He split away from the big four and stopped communicating with any of them, preferring to deal with things on his own terms and actively competing against them for items he’d previously have ignored. I was the only one to maintain any contact with him, because he still used my services to procure some of his dream stamps.”
“A decisive and divisive move, to be sure!” Tristan remarked. The previously prepared shoe from Samantha crashed into the growing bruise on his leg. “There was retaliation from the big three, as it now must have been, of course?”
“Yes. Yes there was.” Carlin said, swallowing. “First Class Francesca took even less kindly to the schism than Murphy did to her sabotage of the auction, and I’m ashamed to say that she manipulated me. I was drawn in by a tale she spun to me, about how she had only tried to get Murphy thrown out of the auction because she’d caught him trying to lick and stick one of Billy the Adhesive’s favourite stamps. You have to understand, Tristan, that licking and sticking someone else’s stamp is heresy of the highest order. A pristine stamp is one that is free from any paper, and sits in mint condition in its case. What Fran accused Murphy of doing was both vandalism and cruelty. She told me that he was planning to do it again, with some of her stamps and some of mine, and that we needed to send him a message. Being the only one in contact with him, of course, it had to be me to do the dirty work.”
“What did she ask you to do? It’s alright, there’s no judgement here, Mr DeVescio.”
“I… I went to Big Stamp Murphy’s home under cover of darkness one night. The cover story was a delivery of especially rare parcel stamps from the Philippines, ones that Murphy had wanted for years, and on that basis the staff at his home let me right in. Big Stamp Murphy was always early to bed, so I claimed I would drop them off in his collection room and then make my own way out. I was there so often that I went completely unquestioned. Of course, when left completely alone I carried out the foul deed for which I had in fact travelled there.”
Carlin paused, the memory too much to speak of openly.
“Take your time, Mr DeVescio.” Tristan reassured, bracing himself for the inevitable shoe attack, but nothing came. He glanced over at Samantha and she indeed had a loafer primed and ready for heaving at him, but her assault was held for the moment.
“I took myself into Big Stamp Murphy’s dressing room and located the wardrobe. At the bottom was where he kept his shoes and I…” He took another breath. “I took one of each pair, and placed them in my courier bag. When I was sure that each pair had been halved, I made my escape, travelled to the nearby canal, and carefully filled them with foul water. Honestly, it was worse than the swamps outside Cutty Nora’s home; the mud, the smell and the bits of traffic cone… it was nearly too much to stomach, but it felt like a fitting revenge for a potential lick and sticker.”
“What did you do next?” Asked Tristan, now starting to question if this event was quite as dire as Carlin was making out.
“I took the shoes back to his home, telling the staff that I’d left my reading bow-tie in the house by mistake, and lined them up on his landing with a message that messing with the First Class Francesca was not a sensible move. Can you imagine it, waking up one morning to be confronted by a row of your favourite shoes, only one of each pair, full to the brim with stinking canal water?”
“I cannot, really.”
“Me either, but that was Big Stamp Murphy’s reality. Unsurprisingly he went completely silent, and pulled back from the scene. There were no more competitive bids at auction, no more requests for me to get him anything, no more appearances at all. We later learned that he had chosen to keep his collection as it was, completely closed, and live the quiet life of a retired philatelist. Occasionally I would drive past the area, and see a team of specialist emergency cobblers tending to the fruits of my crime, and I would feel a pang of guilt that I couldn’t account for. It was only a chance encounter with Billy the Adhesive that revealed to me that I’d been duped, and no such lick or stick attempt had been made at all.
Needless to say I was furious, but what could I do against First Class Francesca? She had so much money, power and influence that to defy her would only lead to me being wet-shoed next.
Wracked with guilt, I also retreated from the public eye, still serving the philately community but no longer hosting shows or presenting awards. In the following two years I think I made only one or two appearances, on short segments about how long you can expect for a package to take with a certain amount of postage applied to it. I thought I would be allowed to fade away gracefully, but then First Class Francesca came to me again.” Carlin lamented.
“Another shady job?” Asked Tristan.
Carlin nodded.
“This time it was against Cutty Nora, the woman who had earned me my place in the high society of stamp trading to begin with. Reportedly she’d got hold of a whole sheet of Danish pre-war Commemorative Easter stamps and was planning to cut them up for individual sale. Francesca, on the other hand, had wanted them to remain as a sheet for greater rarity. I was to give her a wet-shoeing to make it clear that defiance was unwise.
Naturally, this time, I refused. Cutty Nora had been a great friend to me, in relative terms, and I would not be used again, I told her. Unfortunately, Fran was ready for me. She told me that if I refused to carry out the job, then the media would find out about not only my actions in Big Stamp Murphy’s home, but also at the sorting office all those years before. To this day I don’t know how she found out about that, because I didn’t tell a soul, but such was her influence. She always knew what was happening, even when it seemed to be a total secret.”
“Wow. Blackmailing you to carry out her dirty work?”
“Exactly that.”
“So what did you do?” Tristan asked. All eyes and all ears were on Carlin DeVescio, and all equipment was primed to immortalise the end of his story. All the world would be hooked to find out what really happened to cause the disappearance of Cutty Nora and Carlin DeVescio on the same fateful night, all those years before.
“I… I travelled to Cutty Nora’s home.” There was a gasp from the production crew, and Samantha nearly made Carlin the target of her next projectile. “But I did not wet-shoe her. I never would.” There was a collective sigh of relief, and the producer celebrated by bombarding Tristan no fewer than six times with the shoes of the whole sound crew. “Instead, I warned her, frankly and clearly, about what First Class Francesca had asked me to do, as well as what we’d done to Big Stamp Murphy. Gratefully she thanked me, and she pledged that she would get revenge on Fran one day, but that would have to wait. Cutty Nora packed up her collection, including her shoes, and she made her way into hiding that very night.
Knowing that Fran would work out what had happened and come after me, I also needed a plan to get out of her sight, so I did what any reasonable person in my position would.”
“The police witness protection programme? A secret home overseas?” Tristan guessed. These were the most popular theories among the public.
“Of course not! I couldn’t rely on either of those avenues. The only safe option was to spend several years in hiding as an elm tree in my own garden.” A flight case, previously used to hold a microphone, struck Tristan on one foot, evidencing Samantha’s depletion of the shoe stock.
“You hid… as an elm tree?”
“Yes. Hiding in my own garden was the one place Fran would never think to look for me. We hollowed it out and dug a cellar underneath. Naturally Fran had the cellar searched by her lackeys, but they never found the secret aperture in the ceiling, above which I was safely ensconced, within the trunk of the tree. Every day my staff would come out and ‘water’ the tree, pouring nutrient rich slurry into ground which was, in fact, a false turf. It concealed a grating that allowed the slurry to sluice through, and I would descend from my tree to drink it when the coast was clear.”
“You are telling us that you, Carlin DeVescio, spent the last eight years standing all day every day inside an elm tree and drinking a nutrient slurry?”
“Not exclusively, no! I had my cellar, in which I played a lot of pinball on my pinball machine, knitted the trousers that I’m currently wearing, and read a lot of history about Carthage. It was time well spent and safely spent.”
Tristan rubbed at his temples, struggling to accept what he was hearing as anything but the raving of an infirm elderly gentleman.
“Can we see this tree and cellar?” He asked.
“Of course. We’ll film it after we’re done here.” Carlin said comfortably. “Gosh it feels good to get that all off my chest and reveal the truth.”
“That’s a fair point; why now? Why do you now feel able to stop being a tree and tell your story?”
“Because Cutty Nora had her revenge. You see, once she’d made it out she contacted my staff, and they knew I would want to hear what she had to say. Nora had plenty of evidence of Fran’s own crimes, including an odyssey of tax evasion, stamp smuggling, and constructing a three storey dwelling in a neighbour’s favourite sweater, without planning permission I’d add, for ‘crossing her one too many times’. She’s now in prison, as I suspect you know, and as soon as I heard that I knew it was safe for me to come out of hiding. I kept myself to myself for a long time, but with her incarceration set to continue for many years hence, and my own finances standing to benefit from the fee… it seemed like a good time.”
“Well…” Tristan said, uncertainly. “there you have it folks. The fantastical story of Carlin DeVescio is finally told. Thank you, Carlin, for sharing that, and viewers please come back next time for another shocking exposé on the next episode of Snooping Around with me, Tristan Snoops.” Said the interviewer. One final shoe struck him on the shin, and the cameras blinked off.
Enjoying the glow and the warmth of the fire were two men, seated opposite one another in luxurious bucket seats. One of the men sat up straight, the creases in his pristinely pressed white shirt sharp enough to slice open a honeydew melon and serve it to the camera crew that lurked all around him. The other man, much older and more relaxed, or at least more reclined, made far fuller use of the chair’s padded nature. He sank into it like a dropped knife might sink into an unbaked cake, but no panicked, probing fingers came to rescue him. If fate had determined that this gentleman should be utterly engulfed by padding and upholstery, then none would dare to defy it.
Heavy duty wires, tripods, boom arms and flight cases covered the floor of the modest library, hiding the thick, expensive rugs and masking many of the bookshelves from view. Only the space between the two chairs, the space within shot, had been left clear, to create the illusion of a quiet, intimate conversation between the two of them, that didn’t feature another half dozen crew lurking in the periphery.
As luck, where luck is a euphemism for ‘deliberately orchestrated circumstance and years of practice’, would have it, both men were perfectly accustomed to ignoring camera operators, sound engineers and directors while having a recorded conversation with someone else. Neither one of them fiddled with the microphones clipped to their lapels, nor did they mind trying to act natural with a powerful, highly directional light shining straight into their face. It was all necessary for the production.
“Thank you again for agreeing to do this, Carlin. I’m very excited to hear what you’ve got to say.” The white-shirted man said. Interviewing hadn’t ever been his dream, as such, but Tristan Snoops, as he was known, had fallen onto his feet with the vocation. His natural nosiness and disarmingly good looks were the perfect foundation on which to build a career of professional enquiry.
Across from him the older man smiled, revealing two rows of yellowing teeth. They were firmly fixed into his gums, and not rolling frighteningly around in his mouth, something for which he awoke grateful every morning.
“You’re welcome, Tristan. I thought it would be distracting to spend a day talking through my life with a stranger, and I can’t say that I lament the generous remuneration offered for my time.” He grinned. He had the sort of time-worn face that featured deep enough furrows and folds to hide any number of secrets, and any quantity of redundant farming equipment. Every time Carlin DeVescio coughed, the people around him feared that a chain plough might topple out of the deep crevices that lined his forehead. To date, those fears had proven themselves utterly unfounded. The case of the missing chain plough, however, remained commensurately unsolved.
“Could you say something else please, Mr DeVescio? Nearly got your levels sorted.” One of the sound engineers called over. Carlin shifted slightly in his seat.
“I can say all sorts of other things. It wouldn’t be much of an interview if I repeated that one sentence over and over for an hour, would it?” He acquiesced. A smattering of polite laughter, the kind that tends to get uttered when awkwardly occupying someone else’s house, filled the room briefly.
“OK, that’s great, thanks. Tristan?”
“Yep. Test, one, two, some more numbers. Question, question, question…” He said, looking down at his notes. “Are we alright angled like this? Need the chairs to rotate at all?”
“No, you’re fine. We’ve got everything lined up as we need it.” Replied the head camera woman, without looking up from her equipment. One could have done a reasonably convincing job of scaffolding an Edwardian townhouse with the amount of rails, boom arms and stands that she’d set up around the room.
“All the levels are fine. We’re ready to go whenever you are.” A sound engineer quietly informed the director. She was perched on a small bookshelf, legs crossed with a laptop on her knees. Lesser mortals might have found their kneecaps burning from the hot air exhaust, but not Samantha Travers. It only fuelled her unquenchable thirst for well-framed shots and appropriate pacing in a narrative.
“Good. Tristan?” She said, curtly. Mr Snoops nodded.
“So, Carlin DeVescio! Welcome to Snooping Around with me, Tristan Snoops. It’s an honour to have you here with us.” He said, all white teeth, fake smiles and well-rehearsed platitudes. It took a certain, intense arrogance to welcome someone into their own library for the sake of an interview, especially when the diktat of a despotic director had made them anything but welcome to roam around their own home. Such was the contrivance under which they met.
“Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to you.” Carlin replied. Although he’d hidden from the spotlight for many years, there was no forgetting the public face that one was forced to put on when answering questions about themselves. In fact, there could well have been several other faces ensconced within the folds of his cheeks. Sufficiently deep questioning from Tristan would hopefully bring speculation on that matter to a satisfying conclusion.
“You’re so welcome. So welcome.” Mr Snoops apparently had a scale of welcomeness that went incredibly high. “I’d first of all, before we start, like to complement you on such a beautiful home and, in particular, a majestic library. You must be an avid reader!” He said, his plastic compliments and synthetic enthusiasm rolling out like cardboard boxes on a conveyor belt. Carlin smiled back, playing his part in the theatre of small-talk. He wanted to observe how Tristan had shown no interest in the house until this point, and that no-one ever used terms except avid or keen to describe how much another person liked reading. It was laziness. It was the printing press of faux-personal observations. But Carlin was an intelligent man who had played the game before.
“Thank you! I’m glad you noticed. I do indeed like to sit and read by the fire of an evening.” He replied, gifting the director the perfect moment to cut away to a shot of the fireplace in the final edit. She’d appreciate that. Or, at least, she wouldn’t grow to hate him more because of it.
“Anything in particular you like to read?”
Books, he wanted to reply. But he didn’t.
“The classics. Some new work as well. Some days just a magazine. It depends on what mood I’m in, I suppose. I try to have broad horizons but I fear that they’re narrower than I want to believe.”
“I guess you could say that, maybe, the breadth of your horizons could fit on a postage stamp?” Tristan said with a performative smile and wiggle of the eyebrows. He and Carlin both feigned a laugh at the painful segue.
“Yes, very good.”
“So viewers, for those who somehow don’t know, and I really defy you not to know this unless you’ve been living under a rock your whole life,” Tristan said, directly to the camera. The exaggerated delivery of ‘under a rock’ made Carlin want to lift up his chair and introduce it, back first, to Tristan’s cranium. But he didn’t, and Tristan kept speaking. “Carlin DeVescio is one of the greatest and most successful stamp collectors and traders of all time. From the classic Second Class, to the titanic First Class Large, from the gorgeous 1901 Commemorative Christmas stamp to the unreasonably named Berkshire Bluebottle Bottle Blue stamp, they are in or have passed through Carlin’s collection.”
While Tristan reeled off a continual list of accolades and credentials, Carlin gave a series of nods that spanned from polite to humble to amused. His years of giving regular interviews were long in the past, and while one never really forgot how to be talked about, and even talked to for the benefit of an unseen viewer, he had forgotten how long these people could go on. For a job role that was supposedly about listening to the responses their guests gave, interviewers seemed to do a lot of talking. Sitting on her bookshelf, Samantha had also noted this characteristic in Mr Snoops. In no uncertain terms she gave a series of hand signals for Tristan to get to the point and stop wasting time.
“…but that’s why we’re here today, having been honoured with Mr DeVescio’s first discussions about his life and works in over fifteen years. Carlin, again, thank you for letting us be the crew to hear your exclusive exposé, for letting us listen while you break your silence on what’s been going on in your life.”
“It’s an opportunity to relay my story that I didn’t wish to pass up.” Carlin replied, trying to ground the whole room before Tristan quite literally levitated from his chair with pure hype. His answer wasn’t necessarily untrue, but it did omit the detail that, mostly, he didn’t wish to pass up the generous compensation he’d been offered for agreeing to an interview. “After all these years I think my experiences, and the truth behind the rumours about my life and my retirement from the public eye, deserve to be communicated.”
“And communicate them we shall. So, since this is a story of your life as a philatelist, I suppose we should start at your first foray into the wonderful world of self-adhesive squares to alleviate your postal cares.” Grinned Mr Snoops. Carlin looked at him disappointedly.
“Not all stamps are self-adhesive. That’s a very modern development, from the early 1960s in tropical, humid countries that made water-based adhesives troublesome. But I suppose you’re too young to know about that.” DeVescio corrected the interviewer, without making much eye-contact. “But we’re not here for a history lesson on stamp adhesion, we’re here for a history lesson on me, arrogant as it is to make that statement.” He chuckled. “I began my career not as a postal enthusiast per se, but as courier. I worked for a company known back then as Stretch and Snap’s Rubber-Based Pile Containment Solutions who, for those who don’t speak the arcane language of the branding department, manufactured and sold rubber bands. They received more than a few enquiries for haemorrhoid treatment on account of that particular name, as one can imagine.”
Tristan nodded with a professional smile, while the several members of the production crew, especially those monitoring the microphones, grimaced a little at the imagery. Samantha showed no emotion except contempt and impatience.
“Harrowing stuff. I hope that sitting in a van all day didn’t give you any ‘unconstrained piles’.” Tristan laughed. No-one particularly joined in. “So, uh, so what did you do for Stretch and Snap?”
“I was a courier, as I said.”
“Right, but what did that entail?”
“Being a courier? It entailed couriering goods, mostly the rubber bands that Stretch and Snap’s Rubber-Based Pile Containment Solutions manufactured and sold, but occasionally I transported other things like the boxes in which those rubber bands were stored, or the money that clients paid to receive the rubber bands from the boxes. Nothing terribly out of the ordinary there.” Carlin answered. Tristan maintained his professional mask despite the torrent of sarcasm raging around him. “But although my courier work was perfectly mundane, it led me into the company of several employees of the local post offices, as well as certain members of the postal delivery service. Their industry, that of ensuring that anything precious enough to send to someone else, but not so precious that it needs to be protected by anything more than paper or cardboard, is a great consumer of rubber bands. At least half of my deliveries of a day or night would be to a post office somewhere in my region.”
“Sorry, by night?”
“Oh goodness yes! I was always on call in the case of rubber band shortages. The night sorting couldn’t be allowed to halt, lest the following day’s delivery should fall into disarray. If they ran out of bands then I would be round there with a few boxes of Stretch and Snap’s finest to remedy the situation.”
“I hadn’t realised that there was such agility and responsiveness required in the rubber band game.”
“Not many people would realise it, but you’ve got to be just as elastic as the product.” Carlin said. Tristan laughed on his cue. “So as I was saying, I would often find myself in the post office. Plenty of the posties and sorties got to know me soon enough. We’d stand around and have a mug of tea, or a mug of gravy if the tea had run out, and we’d talk on this and that. Eventually, as you might be able to surmise, a woman named Clarice Wivenro who worked in the Thundersley branch mentioned that she’d got an envelope with a rare stamp on it that evening.”
“Your first interaction with philately!” Tristan remarked, so that his voice didn’t go unheard for too long.
“My reaction was something along the lines of ‘what do you mean a rare stamp?’ or ‘aren’t they just first and second class’ or an equally squalid and ill-informed question. And she said to me, I’ll never forget it, she said ‘You’ve never heard about collector’s edition stamps or rare examples? Your rubber bands are first class but your observations certainly aren’t’. It cut me to the core, let me tell you. I always prided myself on being very observant, which is why I eventually did so well, I think, but she was right, and she’d piqued my interest. We spent the best part of an hour talking about how much money the top collectors can make, and she showed me some of the more interesting ones they had in the pile of sorted post. I remember it being such a wrench to leave that night, but I was running the risk of being late for my next drop and the post must go through, as they say.”
“It sounds like that night changed your life, Carlin. A throwaway anecdote from this - Clarice was it? - let you in on the secret.” Summarised the interviewer. “So what did you do from there? How did it go from a comment in a post office at night to something that, if you’ll excuse the pun, got stuck right on you?”
Carlin DeVescio could excuse many things. Puns were included on that list, but Tristan came closer to slipping off it every time he spoke.
“It was the promise of being able to make a fortune from it, I’m a little embarrassed to say. The stamps were genuinely interesting, don’t get me wrong. There was a 1933 example, released to commemorate the day when the Mayor of Gloucester found, and I quote ‘an absolutely smashing load of bees’ in his garden shed, which remains a firm favourite of mine. There’s a hive in the middle and fifteen individually drawn bees on each one. Nightmare to produce, apparently. But the point is, while my enthusiasm was genuine, is genuine, it was the chance not to have to work that really spurred me on. Every night for the next few months I thought about raking in the stamp money and how I could make it happen.”
“So it turned into an obsession for you?” Tristan asked, gravely. He slightly tilted his head sideways and down to offer the question a little more artificial gravitas, and transformed his professional smile into professional faux-concern.
“No. No, not even slightly.” Carlin replied, with a mixture of confusion, disappointment and disgust at the enquiry. “Where did you make logical leap from? I didn’t cease to function except for my thoughts about stamp collection, I just focused a lot of thought on it compared to other future ventures while continuing to live my life. Honestly, do you seek drama in every shadow cast by a moth at the window? Does every rainfall portend the coming of tragedy for all you hold dear when the clouds are spied through misty windows?”
Tristan leaned nervously back in his chair, the suspicion beginning to form in his mind that he’d said something with which Carlin wasn’t completely in love. For her own part, sitting in a stoic and perpetually irritated vigil over the interview, Samantha seemed comparatively pleased with the development.
“It was not an obsession, but it did occupy my spare time, and I spoke to Ms Wivenro et al about how one might start their own collection. They directed me to an initiative known as ‘Post Postal Postage’, of which I had never heard previously, that collected used envelopes from the public with an aim of recycling the paper. They were pioneers in the sector of paper re-use, and also my first supplier of postage stamps. You see, they would steam the stamps off so that the adhesives did not interfere with the recycling process, and then either sell the stamps to collectors like myself or destroy them as demand dictated. Comparatively speaking, they made very little money from the stamp business, because despite being a major source for rare stamps, none of them really understood the product. The prices seemed to me, even as a rank amateur, to be wild and erratic, totally devoid of any logic but always well below the open market price. A common first class stamp might set one back by thirty pence, whereas a rare Nigerian ‘Ibex riding the rings of Saturn’ stamp, created in celebration of the discovery of a living Scots Pine in a Nigerian doctor’s refrigerator, was on sale for only twelve pence.” Carlin relayed, disbelief at the memory still etched on his increasingly ridged face. It was clear from his tone that nobody in the room should have been left standing after such a shocking and baffling revelation, and yet all feet remained correctly in use.
“Suffice to say it was a boon to me, as someone just starting out. Years later, after I had risen to fame, I did have a chance to tour the interior of Post Postal Postage, and on the route was, of course, a visit to their pricing department. Their methodology, it transpired, was to throw an open bag of smarties at a dart board some twenty feet away on the floor, and sum the scores together to form the price in pence. Once I had stopped asking them to repeat themselves, and had resigned myself to the knowledge that they spoke truly, I accepted that this method explained the frankly extortionate ten pound price tag for a very common second class stamp.”
To describe the production team in the room as riveted by Carlin’s story would have been an overstatement. In fact, it would have overstated their interest by at least one hundred percent, and understated their complete apathy by a similar quantity. This was not the portion of the story, however, for which they had arranged and paid handsomely for the interview, of course. Most of this was already a matter of public record, give or take a few details, and Samantha’s continued signalling to Tristan to move things along was symptomatic of that. The fact that Carlin could also see her was a significant reason for why he continued to speak so slowly, and at such great length.
“Ten pounds? That’s a lot for a stamp and even I know it!” Tristan cut in, hoping that a short period of polite laughter from his guest would break the momentum, and buy time for him to ask another question. Alas, Carlin was not in the laughing mood.
“Which is saying something, yes. Frankly the sales of stamps by Post Postal Postage could have made them disastrously rich, but nobody there seemed interested in pursuing that goal. It was better for me and the other collectors like me, but deeply confusing nonetheless.”
“OK, so you started your collection from PPP?” Tristan asked with a smirk that betrayed how smart he felt for making that acronym all by himself. “Then what happened?”
“Don’t call them PPP. That’s the acronym of an organisation that cleans up birds with large bills, have fallen foul of deep-sea plastic spillages, and then washed onto the shores of Puerto-Rico. I would never seek to make my fortune by exploiting their stamp collection sub-division.” Carlin replied sharply. There was real annoyance on his face.
“Erm, of course. My apologies for the insinuation.” Replied the interviewer, with aggravation building in the back of his throat, threatening to ambush any subsequent sentences and morph them in its own image. Samantha stared daggers at him for upsetting the guest and not bringing them back onto topic. When these daggers proved ineffective, she threw one of her shoes at him out of shot. That, at least, made Carlin smile. “OW-er, that is to say, how did you proceed from the start of your collection, then?”
“Slowly, I’m afraid, is the answer there. Although I had a ready source of stamps, so did many others. I was far from the only customer of Post Postal, and there was tough competition to grab the stamps when they became available. What with the demands of my courier role, having to be on call for emergency rubber bands, I could not always get there in time for the day’s drop of stamps. Things were similarly troublesome when trying to sell the stamps on; it was hard for me to access the major buyers at the time, people like Big Stamp Murphy. I was snubbed by him many a time in favour of providers with whom he had more experience. To him, it seemed that if he didn’t know you personally, he had no interest in getting to know you at all, or, more importantly, buy from you.”
“Big Stamp Murphy? We know that your interactions here weren’t the last you’d have to do with him.” Observed the interviewer, hoping for a reaction.
“Indeed we do.” Carlin said calmly. “But that’s something we’ll come to later. The fact of the matter is that Big Stamp Murphy’s rejections led me on the path to success, in a roundabout way. Had I been able to sell to him and his peers back then, in my smaller days, then I would have been able to keep operating via legitimate means, which in turn would have seen my growth vastly curtailed compared to my, er, less legal dealings.” As one, Tristan, the production team and even the clinical Samantha leaned forwards a little. It was most troublesome for the boom mic operator, of course, who nearly overbalanced as a result, but consummate professionalism and impressive core strength held her steady.
Carlin let out a gentle sigh.
“My trading in stamps led to some financial gain, it’s true, but it didn’t bring me to the heights of wealth for which I had hoped. I could use it to buy a nice meal every now and again, but I couldn’t hope to make a real living from it. Even if I reinvested every penny I made from stamp collection, and every bit of disposable income I had from my couriering, my rate of growth would have been too low to quit formal employment before retirement age. I was a victim of my own poor expectation management, I suppose, and my dreams had turned into a bar by which I judged myself to have failed. In the depths of some painful ruminations on the matter, I struck upon a plan to remedy that.”
Several paranoia-checks were made on the cameras and the microphones. Although this part of Carlin’s life had been discussed in passing before, and speculated upon with moderate certainty, there might be a revelation or two that could get headlines, even if the events of his disappearance from the public eye later on in life were the ticket item of the day.
“I became frustrated with my lack of access to the Post Postal Postage stocks on some days, and by the notion that surely, many stamps were being thrown away rather than recycled, thus never reaching Post Postal Postage in the first place. I was raking through the dregs of the dregs, and I wouldn’t see success unless I harvested from more fertile ground, so to speak. I decided that I needed to go to the source, and intercept the stamps before they reached their destinations.”
“So… presumably the post boxes? The sorting office? The postal delivery agents?”
“The sorting offices and post offices.” Carlin confirmed, shuffling uncomfortably in his seat with the severe regret and embarrassment that can only come from a shameful memory. “Knowing roughly what the Post Postal Postage process was for stamp harvesting, and knowing that I could always spend time in the post office thanks to my deliveries and relationship with the staff there, I hatched a plan to make my own factory.”
Carlin sighed again. Under the bright studio lights it seemed that he might be fading into translucency, the secrets that he’d hidden behind his public façade becoming visible beneath the skin. Or possibly he just needed more powder for his face. In the background, the makeup artist was nudged for an opinion.
“Typically the sorting offices were busy of an evening, when all the bags of letters and parcels were dropped off, and needed to be prepared for the following day’s post. However, there was always a bit of downtime at the Thundersley branch. I knew when it was because I was there so often, and I arranged for myself to be there at the quiet time as whenever I could. While the staff were having a break or tending to other duties, I would sneak into the sorting room with a pack of fresh first or second class stamps, sometimes a combination of both that I’d purloined from the storefront, and then I’d rifle through the post bags with my travel kettle. Everyone else thought I was preparing them tea according to my ‘secret recipe’, but really I was brewing up some perfectly banal supermarket teabags, all the while making kettleful after kettleful of hot water for steaming. Every time I found a rare stamp I’d steam it off, replace it with one of my own, and pocket the profits.”
“My goodness.” Said Tristan. “Did nobody at the branch notice what you were up to at any point? Surely they’d think you were taking a long time for a brew.”
“There were questions, certainly. I mostly fobbed them off with talk of it being a family secret that I couldn’t ever reveal, and I made several cups every hour. The lavatories took as much of a punishing as the stamp collection industry did, to be honest, but everyone was just happy not to be drinking gravy anymore.”
“Delightful. So you’d walk into the post office of an evening with your rubber bands, offer the staff a few dozen cups of tea, and harvest all the rare stamps you could find in the meanwhile. Then, come some reasonable end point for the night’s clandestine activity, you’d walk out with a pocketful of profitable stamps.” Tristan summarised, for the sake of later teaser trailers of the interview.
“That’s about the fill of it, yes. My collection suddenly brimmed with rare items.”
"And that was your big break into the life of lights and glitter. You joined the high rollers of the stamp collection world off the back of that, well, we'll call it morally juvenile behaviour."
"We can call it whatever we like, it was still theft. It makes me no less of a criminal whether you call it m.j.b., mature delinquency or petty, premeditated theft." Carlin said drily, looking at Tristan with all the respect that a reversing truck shows to a discarded crisp packet. "But yes, my actions in the sorting office did lead to meeting the self-styled lickers and stickers of philately."
“Talk me through that, please. Your rise to fame on the wave of rare stamps acquired through illicit means.”
Carlin nodded wearily.
“Armed with my improved collection, my sales and profits took an enormous upturn. I went from just another name in the sea of traders to being the top of the bottom; nothing to write home about, but far more visible. Gone were the days of chasing buyers, because I became the first port of call for many of the local philatelists seeking to expand their collection. My home was infused permanently with the smell of stamp adhesive, I had folder after folder of plastic sleeves holding precious paper squares, and my collection was suddenly stock. It was an archive. I was somebody within the space.”
“So you were willing to sell anything you got hold of?”
“Not quite anything, no. Some of my favourite examples still sit in some of the folders you see around you in this library.” Carlin told him, indicating to a shelf of A4 binders.
“Get some close-ups of those later.” Samantha hissed to one of the camera operators. “We’ll get the old man to pull good ones down for some B-roll too.”
Carlin chose to ignore the old man comment and carry on with the story, mostly because it was hard to deny that his youth had long since passed.
“I did, however, let a lot of precious stamps pass through my hands for the sake of profit. Once you’ve sold a few top tier stamps, like the 1950 Canadian Railway stamp, showing their famous Vancouver Express crushing the American Supreme Court Justice’s porcelain dinner service, your name really gets out there in the community. The more I traded, the harder it was for the top players to ignore me. I knew I’d really made it when I got a call from Cutty Nora.”
“Ah, yes. Cutty Nora. She was the queen of slipping a blade between stamp and envelope, rather than steaming, correct?” Recalled the interviewer, from his hurried research that morning over a mug of piping hot water with a cinnamon stick in it.
“Exactly, yes. I remember it vividly. It was late morning, and I’d not long woken up following my nocturnal theft by steam. I’d place it somewhere in mid-November, because there was definitely frost on the postman when he came to the door, but he wasn’t tangled in the net of tinsel I tend to leave out during the festive season.” Carlin recounted. Tristan nodded sagely in approval. “I was sitting at my kitchen table and sorting the previous night’s haul into their appropriate parts of the collection when my phone began to ring. This wasn’t a great shock to me, because phones are designed to ring when someone calls you, so that you don’t miss the fact that they would like to speak with you. Couple that to the frequent enquiries I was receiving over what I did or did not have for sale at the time, and you can see why I wouldn’t be surprised by that telecommunications bell at all.” Explained Mr DeVescio.
“It’s almost too clear.” Agreed the interviewer.
“I answered the phone, which is what you have to do to make sure that you can speak to the other person rather than the call failing to connect, and Cutty Nora was at the other end. This is when I did feel some shock, because most often when you answer a phone call it’s not Cutty Nora at the other end. That’s true of literally everyone, except perhaps Cutty Nora’s partner, who likely receives a lot of calls from her.”
Samantha’s other shoe arced through the air and struck Tristan on the knee, implying gently that the interviewer should have been steering the interviewee back onto the point.
“And what did she want?” Mr Snoops asked, rubbing at the sore patch where a stiletto heel had expertly nailed the joint.
“I’m getting to that now.” Carlin frowned. “She introduced herself, and she said that she had a very particular request. At the time, there was a lot of interest in a limited run of stamps from the short-lived Republic of North Sea Oil Rigs. If you recall, they led a short revolution and declared independence from any sovereign nation. During that time the oil supplies became slightly more expensive, because their erstwhile government was raising tax to form their own postal system. Quite why that was their first priority is a matter for the historians to ponder and argue over, but they had a run of stamps showing a cross-section diagram of the oil being extracted by a giant stork with a straw. To this day I have no idea how they got a printing press and the required reagents for the adhesive out to the rigs, nor how they managed to operate them, but they did it.”
“Baffling.” Tristan agreed.
“The so called Straw Storks were inestimably valuable, although a value could always be placed at auction, and Cutty Nora was requisitioning one from me. She didn’t care how long it took, but she demanded that I get her one, and that I would find myself very wealthy indeed if I could do so. Her only stipulation, as one can imagine, was that I provide it either unused, or with the envelope still attached.”
“So no steaming?”
“No steaming at all. Not even storage in a humid part of the house.” Carlin confirmed.
“Troublesome for your favoured technique.”
“Yes, very troublesome. It was easy to replace a stamp that’s been steamed away, but covering my tracks after cutting an envelope apart would be a whole other matter. I told myself that I would have plenty of time to work it out though, since those stamps were incredibly rare. One might never pass through my branch of the post office.”
“But I take it that one eventually did?”
“Aye, and a lot sooner than anyone anticipated.” Confirmed Carlin. “It was only a week after that call that I sat with kettle in hand and mouth agape, holding in my other hand a letter addressed to the BBC from the Republic of North Sea Oil rigs, featuring one of their very own Straw Storks. I nearly spilled all ten cups of tea that I’d positioned around myself on the sorting room floor.
It took a few moments for me to find my composure in the face of such an opportunity, but once I did, it was all business. I rushed back into the break room with the mugs, and said that I needed to borrow a pair of scissors and some envelopes in order to make the next batch. Naturally that did cause something of a maelstrom of curiosity, but they bought my excuse of needing to perform one-off maintenance on the recipe. With the supplies in hand, I retreated into the sorting room again and, very carefully, cut out the whole top corner of the envelope featuring the Straw Stork. My hands had never shaken so much, not even when I spent an evening drinking strong coffee atop a poorly counterweighted washing machine on the back of an aggregates lorry in a quartz quarry.”
“The famous night of June 16th, 1997?”
“That same night, yes. But there I was, with a rare stamp in my possession and a clearly abused envelope to somehow disguise. In my haste, the best plan I could come up with was to tuck the cut envelope into a new one with a window on the front, stick a stamp on, and hope for the best. Unfortunately, all the envelopes I had were the same size, so the Republic’s message did get a little bent out of shape, but it was good enough for my tracks to be covered.”
“Did you manage to read what the letter said?” Asked Tristan, in the knowledge that there might be a chance for an interview with the ex-chancellor of the Republic of North Sea Oil Rigs on the matter. Samantha showed her respect for the savvy move, by bombarding Tristan’s shin using the boom mic operator’s boots.
“I caught a few glimpses. It was addressed to the makers of Top of the Pops, requesting that the Republic be granted several tickets to attend the recording, as part of a trade deal to secure fishing rights in Republic’s waters.” Carlin indulged them. Tristan made a few hurried notes.
“Thank you. Now I believe you were up to the point of escaping the post office?”
“Yes, that was the next move. Citing an upset stomach from the powerful fumes of tea manufacture, a known side-effect of our secret recipe, I made good my exit from the post office and drove home. It was the early hours of the morning by then, and I couldn’t in good conscience call Cutty Nora until office hours, but I didn’t sleep at all. I passed the time variously looking at the Straw Stork, worrying about repercussions, and re-grouting the bathroom. When nine O’clock finally came around, I picked up the phone with hands coated in battleship-grey grout, and dialled Cutty Nora’s number.”
“Was she surprised that you’d managed the get the stamp so quickly? Excited?”
“She was shocked that I’d managed it at all, I think. I’d achieved what no other supplier had been able to.”
“And in only seven short days.” Dramatised Tristan.
“Seven perfectly normal length days, as I remember it.” Carlin dismissed. “She gave me an address to which to courier the stamp myself, so I immediately cleaned myself up and headed out there with the Straw Stork.”
“Was it nearby?”
“Good heavens no. It was a three hour drive, one which took me into the middle of what I can only describe as the cast-offs from a particularly run-down swamp. The roads were as narrow as they were flooded, as muddy as they were blind, and as related to the map as I am to the Aurora Borealis.”
“That’s… very expressive of you, Mr DeVescio. I see the journey made quite an impression on you. It’s certainly a long and arduous drive to make on a night without sleep.”
“It was hair-raising for sure. The need for sleep was in constant combat with the adrenaline and anxiety over what might await me at the other end. You don’t know fear until you take both hands off the wheel, and lean into the passenger foot well while speeding along the motorway, all to make sure that your precious stamp hasn’t fallen out of its plastic sleeve within the protective binder.”
“I’d wager you’re correct on that one.”
“By the time I made it to Cutty Nora’s place I suppose I’d had six, seven, maybe eight near death experiences, but I was fairly numb to them. I also found myself stunned out of any mortal fear by the sight of Nora’s swampside estate. It was glorious and grand in its own way, but also a lot like an abandoned shed in others. Imagine someone had taken a country estate, one of the great manor houses and extravagantly landscaped gardens of the landed elite, and recreated the whole thing in a bog, using nothing but planks of damp wood reclaimed from the bottom of the peat. That’s kind of the sense I got when I rolled up the gravelly driveway. Obviously Cutty Nora was anticipating me, and she was keeping an eye out through the window, because she opened the front door as soon as I’d pulled up.”
“What did she say? Was she pleased to see you?” Tristan asked, repeatedly giving in to the habit of asking for information that would inevitably follow regardless.
“I think so, yes. Cutty Nora’s not the sort to express her emotions with particular extravagance, so looking back on it I’d say she was more pleased than annoyed.” Carlin assessed. “Once I stepped out of the car with the binder in hand she was straight to business. She called out to me and she said ‘Mr DeVescio? Is that my Straw Stork?’ and I told her that it was.
‘Come straight in, then. I’ll take a look and we’ll arrange payment.’ She said, so I did. I walked in through her driftwood front door, and I’ll say that I was impressed by the interior of her home. Far from the damp, rotting impression I’d got from the exterior, the inside of her house was a lot more like a typical manor. It still had aspects of the swamp about it, like the preserved wood art mounted on the walls, the large tanks and pipework funnelling foul, green-brown bog water from room to room, and the planters containing a wide variety of moss and heather, but it was still a liveable home.
Cutty Nora led me to into her workshop, a room I saw many times thereafter, but on my first visit I was blown away. It was more like an operating theatre than what you’d usually picture as a workshop; the wooden benches and power tools were replaced by clean, sterile benches and scalpels or tweezers or any number of fine, surgical instruments. I remember in particular being in awe of the array of mechanical arms leaning over her workspace, each one ending in a light, or a magnifying glass, or a clip to hold something suspended in mid-air.
‘Hand me the stamp, please.’ She asked me. I did it, and she disinterestedly discarded the folder and the plastic sleeve. ‘It’s a work of art, a real thing of beauty, this.’ She said, looking at it. Nora asked me if I’d spent long studying it, and of course I had; it was easily the rarest item I’d ever handled, and it really was a standout piece of memorabilia. My whole life would have been different if not for the chance occurrence that this stamp was passing through that post office on that night.” Reminisced Carlin, wistfully. He was looking upwards at the middle distance rather than facing Tristan directly.
“Serendipitous circumstances.” The interviewer chimed in, seeking to fill any silence with his own speech.
“Quite so. With the stamp in her hands she worked like a skilled surgeon, placing it in the afore-mentioned clip on an arm, and sitting down in front of it with one of her glasses focused in.
‘Sit down if you like.’ She told me. There was a leather-seated bench running along one wall that I placed myself down on, and I tried to pay attention while she picked up her tools, but the night of sleeplessness rather caught up with me, I’m afraid; only made it a couple of careful slices in before I dozed off. The next thing I remember is Cutty Nora waking me up with a big smile on her face, and the Straw Stork, now extracted from its envelope, in a secure plastic case.
‘It’s genuine and you did a great job, Mr DeVescio. I think this could be the start of a beautiful career for you in the world of big philately.’ She said to me. It was a bit bewildering to wake up to that, but it eventually sunk in. While I sat in the house with her she arranged for payment to be made into my account, and then wished me a safe trip back home. It was dark by then, because I’d been asleep for a long time, but I didn’t mind.”
“Did she send you home without anything to eat? Seems callous.” Enquired Tristan. Samantha narrowed her eyes and readied another shoe from somewhere.
“It wasn’t callously done. Nora just gets focused on certain things and everything else fades into a kind of background noise. The same thing happened many times over and I just learned to take sandwiches with me in the car.”
“So you kept supplying Cutty Nora for how long?”
“For years. I’m not fully sure how many, but between the trips to Nora and the increased revenue from my own trading, I stopped working for Stretch and Snap to go full time on the stamps. Naturally this cut down on my ability to harvest stamps from the source, but by then I had enough notoriety that trading by legitimate means could sustain me. It wouldn’t have been worth it to incriminate myself when I’d just hit the big time, and I really mean the big time.
Cutty Nora was a discerning customer, which made the other players in the philately game take notice. It wasn’t long until I started getting work and even making deals with the rest of the big four.”
“Ah, the big four. Famous among every stamp enthusiast. For the benefit of our less educated viewers, why don’t you tell us who the big four were.” Tristan suggested, very spontaneously, according to his script.
“Well of course there was Cutty Nora, who we’ve discussed. Next there was Big Stamp Murphy, who I mentioned had previously rejected me several times when I was less of a leader in the business. Big Stamp Murphy, as the name might suggest, specialised in the larger stamps produced by the world’s postal services. If it could be used to send a letter of unfolded A4 size or greater, without requiring additional postage to be added, then Murphy was interested. No-one could compete with him on either the size or the breadth of his large stamp collection, from the Central European Railway Stamp, the one that has a map of all the major train terminals in mainland Europe, to the one-of-a-kind Iron Rectangle. That one was made of pure iron, and produced for a Texan steel magnate to send a letter to his estranged uncle, regarding how much the same uncle looked like a water tank that had been dropped into a crater.”
There was an audible intake of air from some of the production crew. Even Tristan looked a bit surprised.
“Surely an iron stamp would have put the package into a higher weight category.” He speculated.
“It did. The Iron Rectangle required other stamps to be added to justify its own weight, and is the only known example of a stamp that requires its own dedicated postage to cover it. Incredible, really.” Carlin remembered, wistfully.
“Big Stamp Murphy was definitely a big deal then. Who were the other two?”
“Third of the big four was, of course, Billy the Adhesive. He was the glue man of the scene, more interested in which type of adhesive adorned the back of the paper than the design that was on the front. It was a niche, granted, but that only made what he traded in that much more valuable.”
“A niche within philately? That’s got to reduce the pool of people taking part.”
“Aye, but he was good. He was very good. I once saw him tell two glues apart just from looking at how the paper crumpled around the edges of their respective stamps. Both pieces were flat! But still he managed it. He was the only one of the big four who lived in an enormous bottle of PVA glue, and by gosh did that show.
Finally, of course, is possibly the most famous of all; First Class Francesa.”
Everything else in the room was dead silent, and not just because they didn’t want any external noises picked up on the microphones.
“Yes, of course. First Class Francesca, with whom you had your share of dealings.” Tristan said, offering some unnecessary framing to proceedings.
“You could say that. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves, isn’t it? Francesca, as her name implied, only dealt with first class stamps, but even then there were extra rules. First Class Francesca would not tolerate anything but the best, in terms of quality, rarity, price, anything; she sought the diamonds and jewels of every crown, and she bid hard to get what she’d decided was hers. If anyone could be said to act as the voice or the face of the big four, then it would be First Class Francesca. Whether the rest of them liked it or not.”
“Intriguing. So there was some kind of power struggle there among them? Some competition to have the greatest collection?”
“Not as such… I’ll get to it. The point is that I was as close as anyone to turning the big four into the big five. My network of trading connections and my reputation for finding the stamps that eluded others was legendary, to the point that it started a career in television and media for me. These were what I think of as the prime years of my fame, my golden age. If ever there was a programme about small squares of paper I would present it. If someone wanted an expert on placing small things in the corners of larger things that were still, in and of themselves, quite small, then I would be there. During those days there was very little known about the big four in the public domain, so I got a lot of work from people asking what it was like to be in the shadow of the stamp giants, but I was really more like their envoy than their protégée.”
“So it would seem, Mr DeVescio, and we agree. We don’t think of you as being in their shadow at all, for your work in and out of stamps stands on its own two feet. What would you say is the highlight of your time in the spotlight? Presenting the International Postage Championships? The Gala Awards Ceremony for Collectors and Traders of all things Paper?”
“Gosh… there were so many standout moments, including those you’ve listed… but I think my main choice would be something more humble, really. Those high society events, those big ticket proceedings, were great, but they aren’t what I was in the business for. I think the real pinnacle was recording ‘Around the World in Twenty Square Centimetres’.” Carlin decided, nodding slowly to signal contentment with his own thought processes.
“Ah yes, of course. Your travel documentary and world stamp industry amalgamation.”
“The very same. The premise was, as you’ll no doubt know from your research, that I travelled all the way around the world, following the most common postal routes and visiting the stamp production facilities of each nation I passed through. There was the perilous mail pass of South Eastern France, the naval corridor to the Balearic Islands, where the sea floor is lined with postal ship upon postal ship, the great adhesive mines of Northern Slovenia… each one of them has near mythical status for philatelists like myself, and I got to see them all.”
“Which production facility was your favourite? My money is on the Royal Mill of Postage in Australia.”
“It’s a good one, but no. I think my preferred choice was the People’s Postage Palace in Ukraine. The way they managed to carve their printing presses from stone, even though they had easily enough money and expertise to purchase more modern, and more efficient, machinery, was inspiring. If you ever get a chance to see someone painting a full colour picture of a stamp using only a few dozen tonnes of granite then I would recommend that you dive on it.” Mr DeVescio said, the most genuine smile of the whole interview breaking free of his face as he remembered it.
“I will take that advice.” Tristan lied. He’d told lies similar to that one many times before. “And a great choice, I’m sure. Now, I hope you won’t mind me steering this to perhaps darker territory, but you’ve described this as the pinnacle of your career. Tell us about how you wound your way down from the public eye.”
There came another classic Carlin DeVescio sigh.
“I suppose we must discuss it, but it’s the darkest part of my history and I do not look fondly back upon it. Darker even than those simple nights in the sorting room.” He took a deep breath. “After a few years of my time working with the big four, there was a schism. First Class Francesca and Big Stamp Murphy had clashed on many occasions, mostly when a large first class stamp came onto the market that both of them wanted, but they’d always managed to keep some kind of cordial relationship alive. That all ended when First Class Francesca told Big Stamp Murphy to back down from the auction for the Iron Rectangle, which I think I told you about before.”
“Yes, you did. Texan steel magnate, made of iron, needs its own postage.” Tristan proved. Carlin was begrudgingly impressed.
“Well, procuring that was obviously a priority for many collectors, but mostly Murphy and Fran. Big Stamp Murphy did not take kindly to being told he couldn’t bid on it, much less so when First Class Francesca tried to have him removed from the auction room, by claiming that he’d parked his car in the cafeteria, rather than the car park. The staff just about managed to see through the ruse, and Big Stamp Murphy came to win the auction, but the damage was done. He split away from the big four and stopped communicating with any of them, preferring to deal with things on his own terms and actively competing against them for items he’d previously have ignored. I was the only one to maintain any contact with him, because he still used my services to procure some of his dream stamps.”
“A decisive and divisive move, to be sure!” Tristan remarked. The previously prepared shoe from Samantha crashed into the growing bruise on his leg. “There was retaliation from the big three, as it now must have been, of course?”
“Yes. Yes there was.” Carlin said, swallowing. “First Class Francesca took even less kindly to the schism than Murphy did to her sabotage of the auction, and I’m ashamed to say that she manipulated me. I was drawn in by a tale she spun to me, about how she had only tried to get Murphy thrown out of the auction because she’d caught him trying to lick and stick one of Billy the Adhesive’s favourite stamps. You have to understand, Tristan, that licking and sticking someone else’s stamp is heresy of the highest order. A pristine stamp is one that is free from any paper, and sits in mint condition in its case. What Fran accused Murphy of doing was both vandalism and cruelty. She told me that he was planning to do it again, with some of her stamps and some of mine, and that we needed to send him a message. Being the only one in contact with him, of course, it had to be me to do the dirty work.”
“What did she ask you to do? It’s alright, there’s no judgement here, Mr DeVescio.”
“I… I went to Big Stamp Murphy’s home under cover of darkness one night. The cover story was a delivery of especially rare parcel stamps from the Philippines, ones that Murphy had wanted for years, and on that basis the staff at his home let me right in. Big Stamp Murphy was always early to bed, so I claimed I would drop them off in his collection room and then make my own way out. I was there so often that I went completely unquestioned. Of course, when left completely alone I carried out the foul deed for which I had in fact travelled there.”
Carlin paused, the memory too much to speak of openly.
“Take your time, Mr DeVescio.” Tristan reassured, bracing himself for the inevitable shoe attack, but nothing came. He glanced over at Samantha and she indeed had a loafer primed and ready for heaving at him, but her assault was held for the moment.
“I took myself into Big Stamp Murphy’s dressing room and located the wardrobe. At the bottom was where he kept his shoes and I…” He took another breath. “I took one of each pair, and placed them in my courier bag. When I was sure that each pair had been halved, I made my escape, travelled to the nearby canal, and carefully filled them with foul water. Honestly, it was worse than the swamps outside Cutty Nora’s home; the mud, the smell and the bits of traffic cone… it was nearly too much to stomach, but it felt like a fitting revenge for a potential lick and sticker.”
“What did you do next?” Asked Tristan, now starting to question if this event was quite as dire as Carlin was making out.
“I took the shoes back to his home, telling the staff that I’d left my reading bow-tie in the house by mistake, and lined them up on his landing with a message that messing with the First Class Francesca was not a sensible move. Can you imagine it, waking up one morning to be confronted by a row of your favourite shoes, only one of each pair, full to the brim with stinking canal water?”
“I cannot, really.”
“Me either, but that was Big Stamp Murphy’s reality. Unsurprisingly he went completely silent, and pulled back from the scene. There were no more competitive bids at auction, no more requests for me to get him anything, no more appearances at all. We later learned that he had chosen to keep his collection as it was, completely closed, and live the quiet life of a retired philatelist. Occasionally I would drive past the area, and see a team of specialist emergency cobblers tending to the fruits of my crime, and I would feel a pang of guilt that I couldn’t account for. It was only a chance encounter with Billy the Adhesive that revealed to me that I’d been duped, and no such lick or stick attempt had been made at all.
Needless to say I was furious, but what could I do against First Class Francesca? She had so much money, power and influence that to defy her would only lead to me being wet-shoed next.
Wracked with guilt, I also retreated from the public eye, still serving the philately community but no longer hosting shows or presenting awards. In the following two years I think I made only one or two appearances, on short segments about how long you can expect for a package to take with a certain amount of postage applied to it. I thought I would be allowed to fade away gracefully, but then First Class Francesca came to me again.” Carlin lamented.
“Another shady job?” Asked Tristan.
Carlin nodded.
“This time it was against Cutty Nora, the woman who had earned me my place in the high society of stamp trading to begin with. Reportedly she’d got hold of a whole sheet of Danish pre-war Commemorative Easter stamps and was planning to cut them up for individual sale. Francesca, on the other hand, had wanted them to remain as a sheet for greater rarity. I was to give her a wet-shoeing to make it clear that defiance was unwise.
Naturally, this time, I refused. Cutty Nora had been a great friend to me, in relative terms, and I would not be used again, I told her. Unfortunately, Fran was ready for me. She told me that if I refused to carry out the job, then the media would find out about not only my actions in Big Stamp Murphy’s home, but also at the sorting office all those years before. To this day I don’t know how she found out about that, because I didn’t tell a soul, but such was her influence. She always knew what was happening, even when it seemed to be a total secret.”
“Wow. Blackmailing you to carry out her dirty work?”
“Exactly that.”
“So what did you do?” Tristan asked. All eyes and all ears were on Carlin DeVescio, and all equipment was primed to immortalise the end of his story. All the world would be hooked to find out what really happened to cause the disappearance of Cutty Nora and Carlin DeVescio on the same fateful night, all those years before.
“I… I travelled to Cutty Nora’s home.” There was a gasp from the production crew, and Samantha nearly made Carlin the target of her next projectile. “But I did not wet-shoe her. I never would.” There was a collective sigh of relief, and the producer celebrated by bombarding Tristan no fewer than six times with the shoes of the whole sound crew. “Instead, I warned her, frankly and clearly, about what First Class Francesca had asked me to do, as well as what we’d done to Big Stamp Murphy. Gratefully she thanked me, and she pledged that she would get revenge on Fran one day, but that would have to wait. Cutty Nora packed up her collection, including her shoes, and she made her way into hiding that very night.
Knowing that Fran would work out what had happened and come after me, I also needed a plan to get out of her sight, so I did what any reasonable person in my position would.”
“The police witness protection programme? A secret home overseas?” Tristan guessed. These were the most popular theories among the public.
“Of course not! I couldn’t rely on either of those avenues. The only safe option was to spend several years in hiding as an elm tree in my own garden.” A flight case, previously used to hold a microphone, struck Tristan on one foot, evidencing Samantha’s depletion of the shoe stock.
“You hid… as an elm tree?”
“Yes. Hiding in my own garden was the one place Fran would never think to look for me. We hollowed it out and dug a cellar underneath. Naturally Fran had the cellar searched by her lackeys, but they never found the secret aperture in the ceiling, above which I was safely ensconced, within the trunk of the tree. Every day my staff would come out and ‘water’ the tree, pouring nutrient rich slurry into ground which was, in fact, a false turf. It concealed a grating that allowed the slurry to sluice through, and I would descend from my tree to drink it when the coast was clear.”
“You are telling us that you, Carlin DeVescio, spent the last eight years standing all day every day inside an elm tree and drinking a nutrient slurry?”
“Not exclusively, no! I had my cellar, in which I played a lot of pinball on my pinball machine, knitted the trousers that I’m currently wearing, and read a lot of history about Carthage. It was time well spent and safely spent.”
Tristan rubbed at his temples, struggling to accept what he was hearing as anything but the raving of an infirm elderly gentleman.
“Can we see this tree and cellar?” He asked.
“Of course. We’ll film it after we’re done here.” Carlin said comfortably. “Gosh it feels good to get that all off my chest and reveal the truth.”
“That’s a fair point; why now? Why do you now feel able to stop being a tree and tell your story?”
“Because Cutty Nora had her revenge. You see, once she’d made it out she contacted my staff, and they knew I would want to hear what she had to say. Nora had plenty of evidence of Fran’s own crimes, including an odyssey of tax evasion, stamp smuggling, and constructing a three storey dwelling in a neighbour’s favourite sweater, without planning permission I’d add, for ‘crossing her one too many times’. She’s now in prison, as I suspect you know, and as soon as I heard that I knew it was safe for me to come out of hiding. I kept myself to myself for a long time, but with her incarceration set to continue for many years hence, and my own finances standing to benefit from the fee… it seemed like a good time.”
“Well…” Tristan said, uncertainly. “there you have it folks. The fantastical story of Carlin DeVescio is finally told. Thank you, Carlin, for sharing that, and viewers please come back next time for another shocking exposé on the next episode of Snooping Around with me, Tristan Snoops.” Said the interviewer. One final shoe struck him on the shin, and the cameras blinked off.