The Golden Keel. Desmond Bagley
me.’
‘For the gold?’
‘That’s right; for the gold. Share and share alike.’
‘What about Coertze?’
‘To hell with Coertze,’ said Walker violently. ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with him.’
I thought about it. I was young and full of vinegar in those days, and this sounded just the ticket – if Walker was telling the truth. And if he wasn’t telling the truth, why would he finance me to a trip to Italy? It seemed a pleasantly adventurous thing to do, but I hesitated. ‘Why me?’ I asked.
‘I can’t do it myself,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t trust Coertze, and you’re the only other chap who knows anything about it. And I trust you, Hal, I really do.’
I made up my mind. ‘All right, it’s a deal. But there are conditions.’
‘Trot them out.’
‘This drinking of yours has to stop,’ I said. ‘You’re all right when you’re sober, but when you’ve got a load on you’re bloody awful. Besides, you know you spill things when you’re cut.’
He rearranged his eager face into a firm expression. ‘I’ll do it, Hal; I won’t touch a drop,’ he promised.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘When do we start?’
I can see now that we were a couple of naïve young fools. We expected to be able to lift several tons of gold from a hole in the ground without too much trouble. We had no conception of the brains and organization that would be needed – and were needed in the end.
Walker said, ‘The lawyer tells me that the estate will be settled finally in about six weeks. We can leave any time after that.’
We discussed the trip often. Walker was not too much concerned with the practical difficulties of getting the gold, nor with what we were going to do with it once we had it. He was mesmerized by the millions involved.
He said once, ‘Coertze estimated that there were four tons of gold. At the present price that’s well over a million pounds. Then there’s the lire – packing cases full of the stuff. You can get a hell of a lot of lire into a big packing case.’
‘You can forget the paper money,’ I said. ‘Just pass one of those notes and you’ll have the Italian police jumping all over you.’
‘We can pass them outside Italy,’ he said sulkily.
‘Then you’ll have to cope with Interpol.’
‘All right,’ he said impatiently. ‘We’ll forget the lire. But there’s still the jewellery – rings and necklaces, diamonds and emeralds.’ His eyes glowed. ‘I’ll bet the jewels are worth more than the gold.’
‘But not as easily disposed of,’ I said.
I was getting more and more worried about the sheer physical factors involved. To make it worse, Walker wouldn’t tell me the position of the lead mine, so I couldn’t do any active planning at all.
He was behaving like a child at the approach of Christmas, eager to open his Christmas stocking. I couldn’t get him to face facts and I seriously contemplated pulling out of this mad scheme. I could see nothing ahead but a botched job with a probably lengthy spell in an Italian jail.
The night before he was to go to the lawyer’s office to sign the final papers and receive his inheritance I went to see him at his hotel. He was half-drunk, lying on his bed with a bottle conveniently near.
‘You promised you wouldn’t drink,’ I said coldly.
‘Aw, Hal, this isn’t drinking; not what I’m doing. It’s just a little taste to celebrate.’
I said, ‘You’d better cut your celebration until you’ve read the paper.’
‘What paper?’
‘This one,’ I said, and took it from my pocket. ‘That little bit at the bottom of the page.’
He took the paper and looked at it stupidly. ‘What must I read?’
‘That paragraph headed: “Italians Sentenced”.’
It was only a small item, a filler for the bottom of the page.
Walker was suddenly sober. ‘But they were innocent,’ he whispered.
‘That didn’t prevent them from getting it in the neck,’ I said brutally.
‘God!’ he said. ‘They’re still looking for it.’
‘Of course they are,’ I said impatiently. ‘They’ll keep looking until they find it.’ I wondered if the Italians were more concerned about the gold or the documents.
I could see that Walker had been shocked out of his euphoric dreams of sudden wealth. He now had to face the fact that pulling gold out of an Italian hole had its dangers. ‘This makes a difference,’ he said slowly. ‘We can’t go now. We’ll have to wait until this dies down.’
‘Will it die down – ever?’ I asked.
He looked up at me. ‘I’m not going now,’ he said with the firmness of fear. ‘The thing’s off – it’s off for a long time.’
In a way I was relieved. There was a weakness in Walker that was disturbing and which had been troubling me. I had been uneasy for a long time and had been very uncertain of the wisdom of going to Italy with him. Now it was decided.
I left him abruptly in the middle of a typical action – pouring another drink.
As I walked home one thought occurred to me. The newspaper report confirmed Walker’s story pretty thoroughly. That was something.
VI
It was long past lunch-time when. I finished the story. My throat was dry with talking and Jean’s eyes had grown big and round.
‘It’s like something from the Spanish Main,’ she said. ‘Or a Hammond Innes thriller. Is the gold still there?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t read anything about it in the papers. For all I know it’s still there – if Walker or Coertze haven’t recovered it.’
‘What happened to Walker?’
‘He got his two thousand quid,’ I said. ‘Then embarked on a career of trying to drink the distilleries dry. It wasn’t long before he lost his job and then he dropped from sight. Someone told me he’d gone to Durban. Anyway, I haven’t seen him since.’
Jean was fascinated by the story and after that we made a game of it, figuring ways and means of removing four tons of gold from Italy as unobtrusively as possible. Just as an academic exercise, of course. Jean had a fertile imagination and some of her ideas were very good.
In 1959 we got clear of our indebtedness to the bank by dint of strict economy. The yard was ours now with no strings attached and we celebrated by laying the keel of a 15-tonner I had designed for Jean and myself. My old faithful King Penguin, one of the first of her class, was all right for coastal pottering, but we had the idea that one day we would do some ocean voyaging, and we wanted a bigger boat.
A 15-tonner is just the right size for two people to handle and big enough to live in indefinitely. This boat was to be forty feet overall, thirty feet on the waterline with eleven feet beam. She would be moderately canvased for ocean voyaging and would have a big auxiliary diesel engine. We were going to call her Sanford in memory of old Tom.
When she was built we would take a year’s leave, sail north to spend some time in the Mediterranean, and come back by the east coast, thus making a complete circumnavigation of Africa. Jean had a mischievous glint in her eye. ‘Perhaps we’ll bring that gold