Word: locksmith
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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...
...Comrade "Koba" was exiled to Siberia and little was heard of him by the locksmith's adolescent daughter until he was pardoned by the Government of Alexander Kerensky who never did the smart thing...
...Lenin called him "Stalin" (meaning "Steel") but he still had a wife. Did she die of pneumonia? Did Stalin divorce her as the story goes, "by mail"? At any rate potent Comrade Stalin, aged 40 came back to Tiflis in 1919, dazzled the 17-year-old daughter of his locksmith friend and carried her back to Moscow. Presumably he married her. Why not?" A story has it that for the first few years of their life together Stalin, the suspicious Asiatic husband, used to lock up Nadezhda Sergeivna Alliluieva in commodious rooms every morning and spend the day with...
...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...