The Golden Keel / The Vivero Letter. Desmond Bagley
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.’
IV
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 ingots 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 ingots 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 ingots 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