Word: locksmith
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...stinking hovel of a Tiflis locksmith, Sergei Alliluiev, a brown-eyed girl was born in 1902. As an infant she grew accustomed to the furtive visits of a tall, violent, smoldering-eyed man who talked Revolution to her father, receiving in exchange deftly filed pass keys and professional advice on how to handle combination locks...
...stranger, like the brown-eyed baby's mother, came from Georgia in the wild, fierce south of Russia?a land of authentic brigands who sniped at Tsarist officials from behind romantic mountain crags and unromantically ignored Georgia's pink & purple sunsets. As she grew to childhood, the locksmith's daughter knew her father's friend, the future Dictator of Russia, by his Georgian nicknames. "Soso" and "Koba." His daring robberies (which he called ''expropriations'') seemed as natural to her as his still more daring murders ("executions")?for were they all not done to get money for the Communist cause...
When cocky Locksmith Charles Courtney of Manhattan, founder-president of the American Association of Master Locksmiths, sailed last month for Europe, he said he was off to pick a lock, where or for whom he did not know. Observers guessed it might be a rusted lock on a treasure chest hauled from the sunken Egypt by the Italian salvage ship Artiglio II (TIME, June 20). Never having met the lock that could resist him, Master Courtney, who first learned his trade at the door of his mother's jam closet, expected no trouble. Last week, back in Manhattan...
...pattern) of what the lock probably was like, where it should be drilled. His templates opened one safe, failed on the other until he had flown to Calais and drawn another. His employers told him to come back in August when there would be more locks to pick. Then Locksmith Courtney had another adventure. From Bremen he was taken to a subcellar of the late Prince Heinrich's palace in Kiel, shown a safe untouched since 1918. Breathing ancestral Hohenzollern mustiness, lit by flashlights, he twiddled until he heard the tumblers fall on the lock, telling him the safe...
...cockiest picklock in the U. S. last week signed a Europe-bound steamship's register: Charles Courtney, New York. N. Y., master locksmith, founder-president of the American Association of Master Locksmiths. His errand was to pick open some treasure chests plucked from Davy Jones's lockerby whom he would not say, from where he could not say. His cautious employers had merely supplied him expense money and instructions to have his passport visaed for England, France and Germany. When his ship neared Europe he would receive wireless orders for debarkation. The chests he was to open might...