‘Really?’ said Walker. ‘You sell it, just like that?’
Aristide smiled. ‘Just like that.’ His smile turned to a frown. ‘But if you want to buy, you must buy now, because the open market in Tangier is closing very soon.’ He shrugged. ‘You say that you have never seen a bar of gold. I’ll show you bars of gold—many of them.’ He turned to me. ‘You too, Mr Halloran, if you wish,’ he said off-handedly. ‘Please come this way.’
He led us down into the bowels of the building, through grilled doors and to the front of an immense vault. On the way down, two broad-shouldered bodyguards joined us. Aristide opened the vault door, which was over two feet thick, and led us inside.
There was a lot of gold in that vault. Not four tons of it, but still a lot of gold. It was stacked up neatly in piles of bars of various sizes; it was boxed in the form of coins; it was a hell of a lot of gold.
Aristide indicated a bar. ‘This is a Tangier standard bar. It weighs 400 ounces troy—about twenty-seven and a half pounds avoirdupois. It is worth over five thousand pounds sterling.’ He picked up a smaller bar. ‘This is a more convenient size. It weighs a kilo—just over thirty-two ounces—and is worth about four hundred pounds.’
He opened a box and let coins run lovingly through his pudgy fingers. ‘Here are British sovereigns—and here are American double eagles. These are French napoleons and these are Austrian ducats.’ He looked at Walker with a gleam in his eye and said, ‘You see what I mean when I say that gold never loses its value?’
He opened another box. ‘Not all gold coins are old. These are made privately by a bank in Tangier—not mine. This is the Tangier Hercules. It contains exactly one ounce of fine gold.’
He held the coin out on the palm of his hand and let Walker take it. Walker turned it in his fingers and then passed it to me reluctantly.
It was then that this whole crazy, mad expedition ceased to be just an adventure to me. The heavy, fatty feel of that gold coin turned something in my guts and I understood what people meant when they referred to gold lust. I understood why prospectors would slave in arid, barren lands looking for gold. It is not just the value of the gold that they seek—it is gold itself. This massive, yellow metal can do something to a man; it is as much a drug as any hell-born narcotic.
My hand was trembling slightly when I handed the coin back to Aristide.
He said, tossing it, ‘This costs more than bullion of course, because the cost of coining must be added. But it is in a much more convenient form.’ He smiled sardonically. ‘We sell a lot to political refugees and South American dictators.’
When we were back in his office, Walker said, ‘You have a lot of gold down there. Where do you get it from?’
Aristide shrugged. ‘I buy gold and I sell gold. I make my profit on both transactions. I buy it where I can; I sell it when I can. It is not illegal in Tangier.’
‘But it must come from somewhere,’ persisted Walker. ‘I mean, suppose one of the pirate chaps, I mean one of the
smuggling fellows, came to you with half a ton of gold. Would you buy it?’
‘If the price was right,’ said Aristide promptly.
‘Without knowing where it came from?’
A faint smile came to Aristide’s eyes. ‘There is nothing more anonymous than gold,’ he said. ‘Gold has no master; it belongs only temporarily to the man who touches it. Yes I would buy the gold.’
‘Even when the gold market closes?’
Aristide merely shrugged and smiled.
‘Well, now, think of that,’ said Walker fatuously. ‘You must get a lot of gold coming into Tangier.’
‘I will sell you gold when you want it, Mr Walker,’ said Aristide, seating himself behind his desk. ‘Now, I assume that, since you are coming to live in Tangier, you will want to open a bank account.’ He was suddenly all businessman.
Walker glanced at me, then said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I’m on this cruise with Hal here, and I’m taking care of my needs with a letter of credit that was issued in South Africa. I’ve already cashed in a lot of boodle at one of the other banks here—I didn’t realize I would have the good fortune to meet a friendly banker.’ He grinned engagingly.
‘We’re not going to stay here long,’ he said. ‘We’ll be pushing off in a couple of weeks, but I’ll be back; yes, I’ll be back. When will we be back, Hal?’
I said, ‘We’re going to Spain and Italy, and then to Greece. I don’t think we’ll push on as far as Turkey or the Lebanon, although we might. I should say we’ll be back here in three or four months.’
‘You see,’ said Walker. ‘That’s when I’ll move into the house properly. Casa Saeta,’ he said dreamily. ‘That sounds fine.’
We took our leave of Aristide, and when we got outside, I said furiously, ‘What made you do a stupid thing like that?’
‘Like what?’ asked Walker innocently.
‘You know very well what I mean. We agreed not to mention gold.’
‘We’ve got to say something about it sometime,’ he said. ‘We can’t sell gold to anyone with saying anything about it. I just thought it was a good time to find out something about it, to test Aristide’s attitude towards gold of unknown origin. I thought I worked up to it rather well.’
I had to give him credit for that. I said, ‘And another thing: let’s have less of the silly ass routine. You nearly gave me a fit when you started to pull Aristide’s leg about the ghosts. There are more important things at stake than fooling about.’
‘I know,’ he said soberly. ‘I realized that when we were in the vault. I had forgotten what gold felt like.’
So it had hit him too. I calmed down and said, ‘O.K. But don’t forget it. And for God’s sake don’t act the fool in front of Coertze. I have enough trouble keeping the peace as it is.’
When we met Coertze for lunch, I said, ‘We saw a hell of a lot of gold this morning.’
He straightened. ‘Where?’
Walker said, ‘In a bloody big safe at Aristide’s bank.’
‘I thought…’ Coertze began.
‘No harm done,’ I said. ‘It went very smoothly. We saw a lot of ingots. There are two standard sizes readily acceptable here in Tangier. One is 400 ounces, the other is one kilogram.’ Coertze frowned, and I said, ‘That’s nearly two and a quarter pounds.’
He grunted and drank his Scotch. I said, ‘Walker and I have been discussing this and we think that Aristide will
buy the gold under the counter, even after the gold market closes—but we’ll probably have to approach him before that so he can make his arrangements.’
‘I think we should do it now,’ said Walker.
I shook my head. ‘No! Aristide is a friend of Metcalfe; that’s too much like asking a tiger to come to dinner. We mustn’t tell him until we come back and then we’ll have to take the chance.’
Walker was silent so I went on. ‘The point is that it’s unlikely that Aristide will relish taking a four-ton lump of gold into stock, so we’ll probably have to melt the keel down into ingots, anyway. In all probability Aristide will fiddle his stock sheets somehow so that he can account for the four extra tons, but it means that he must be told before the gold market closes—which means that we must be back before April 19.’
Coertze said, ‘Not much time.’
I said, ‘I’ve worked out all the probable times for each stage of the operation and we have a month in hand. But there’ll be snags and we’ll need all of that. But that isn’t what’s worrying me now—I’ve got other things on my mind.’
‘Such as?’
‘Look. When—and if—we get the gold here and we start to melt it down, we’re going to have a hell of a lot of ignots lying around. I don’t want to dribble them to Aristide as they’re cast—that’s bad policy, too much chance of an outsider catching on. I want to let him have the lot all at once, get paid with a cast-iron draft on a Swiss bank and then clear out. But it does mean that we’ll have a hell of a lot of ignots lying around loose in the Casa Saeta and that’s bad.’
I sighed. ‘Where do we keep the damn’ things? Stacked up in the living room? And how many of these goddammed ignots will there be?’ I added irritably.
Walker looked at Coertze. ‘You said there was about four tons, didn’t you?’
‘Ja,’
said Coertze. ‘But that was only an estimate.’
I said, ‘You’ve worked with bullion since. How close is that estimate?’
He thought about it, sending his mind back fifteen years and comparing what he saw then with what he had learned since. The human mind is a marvellous machine. At last he said slowly, ‘I think it is a close estimate, very close.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘So it’s four tons. That’s 9000 pounds as near as dammit. There’s sixteen ounces to the pound and…’
‘No,’ said Coertze suddenly. ‘Gold is measured in troy ounces. There’s 14.58333 recurring ounces troy to the English pound.’
He had the figures so pat that I was certain he knew what he was talking about. After all, it was his job. I said, ‘Let’s not go into complications; let’s call it fourteen and a half ounces to the pound. That’s good enough.’
I started to calculate, making many mistakes although it should have been a simple calculation. The mathematics of yacht design don’t have the same emotional impact.
At last I had it. ‘As near as I can make out, in round figures we’ll have about 330 bars of 400 ounces each.’
‘What’s that at five thousand quid a bar?’ asked Walker.
I scribbled on the paper again and looked at the answer unbelievingly. It was the first time I had worked this out in terms of money. Up to this time I had been too busy to think about it, and four tons of gold seemed to be a good round figure to hold in one’s mind.
I said hesitantly, ‘I work it out as £1,650,000!’
Coertze nodded in satisfaction. ‘That is the figure I got. And there’s the jewels on top of that.’
I had my own ideas about the jewels. Aristide had been right when he said that gold is anonymous—but jewels
aren’t. Jewels have a personality of their own and can be traced too easily. If I had my way the jewels would stay in the tunnel. But that I had to lead up to easily.
Walker said, ‘That’s over half a million each.’
I said, ‘Call it half a million each, net. The odd £150,000 can go to expenses. By the time this is through we’ll have spent more than we’ve put in the kitty.’
I returned to the point at issue. ‘All right, we have 330 bars of gold. What do we do with them?’
Walker said meditatively, ‘There’s a cellar in the house.’
‘That’s a start, anyway.’
He said, ‘You know the fantastic thought I had in that vault? I thought it looked just like a builder’s yard with a lot of bricks lying all over the place. Why couldn’t we build a wall in the cellar?’
I looked at Coertze and he looked at me, and we both burst out laughing.
‘What’s funny about that?’ asked Walker plaintively.
‘Nothing,’ I said, still spluttering. ‘It’s perfect, that’s all.’
Coertze said, grinning, ‘I’m a fine bricklayer when the rates of pay are good.’
A voice started to bleat in my ear and I turned round. It was an itinerant lottery-ticket seller poking a sheaf of tickets at me. I waved him away, but Coertze, in a good mood for once, said tolerantly, ‘No, man, let’s have one. No harm in taking out insurance.’
The ticket was a hundred pesetas, so we scraped it together from the change lying on the table, and then we went back to the flat.
The next day we started work in earnest. I stayed with
Sanford,
getting her ready for sea by dint of much bullying
of the chandler and the sailmaker. By the end of the week I was satisfied that she was ready and was able to leave for anywhere in the world.
Coertze and Walker worked up at the house, rehabilitating the boat-shed and the slip and supervising the local labour they had found through Metcalfe’s kind offices. Coertze said, ‘You have no trouble if you treat these wogs just the same as the Kaffirs back home.’ I wasn’t so sure of that, but everything seemed to go all right.
By the time Metcalfe came back from whatever nefarious enterprise he had been on, we were pretty well finished and ready to leave. I said nothing to Metcalfe about this, feeling that the less he knew, the better.
When I’d got
Sanford
shipshape I went over to Metcalfe’s Fairmile to pay my promised visit. A fair-haired man who was flushing the decks with a hose said, ‘I guess you must be Halloran. I’m Krupke, Metcalfe’s side-kick.’
‘Is he around?’
Krupke shook his head. ‘He went off with that friend of yours—Walker. He said I was to show you around if you came aboard.’
I said, ‘You’re an American, aren’t you?’
He grinned. ‘Yep, I’m from Milwaukee. Didn’t fancy going back to the States after the war, so I stayed on here. Hell, I was only a kid then, not more’n twenty, so I thought that since Uncle Sam paid my fare out here, I might as well take advantage of it.’
I thought he was probably a deserter and couldn’t go back to the States, although there might have been an amnesty for deserters. I didn’t know how the civil statute limitations worked in military law. I didn’t say anything about that, though—renegades are touchy and sometimes unaccountably patriotic.
The wheelhouse—which Krupke called the ‘deckhouse’—was well fitted. There were two echo sounders, one with a
recording pen. Engine control was directly under the helmsman’s hand and the windows in front were fitted with Kent screens for bad weather. There was a big marine radio transceiver—and there was radar.
I put my hand on the radar display and said, ‘What range does this have?’
‘It’s got several ranges,’ he said. ‘You pick the one that’s best at the time. I’ll show you.’
He snapped a switch and turned a knob. After a few seconds the screen lit up and I could see a tiny plan of the harbour as the scanner revolved. Even
Sanford
was visible as one splotch among many.
‘That’s for close work,’ said Krupke, and turned a knob with a click. ‘This is maximum range—fifteen miles, but you won’t see much while we’re in harbour.’
The landward side of the screen was now too cluttered to be of any use, but to seaward, I saw a tiny speck. ‘What’s that?’
He looked at his watch. ‘That must be the ferry from Gibraltar. It’s ten miles away—you can see the mileage marked on the grid.’