The Golden Keel / The Vivero Letter

III

Aristide Theotopopoulis was a round man. His girth was roughly equal to his height, and as he sat down he creased in the middle like a half-inflated football bladder. Rolls of fat flowed over his collar from his jowls and the back of his neck. Even his hands were round – pudgy balls of fat with the glint of gold shining from deeply embedded rings.

‘Ah, yes, Mr Walker; you want a house,’ he said. ‘I received a phone call from Mr Metcalfe this morning. I believe I have the very thing.’ His English was fluent and colloquial.

‘You mean you have such a house?’ inquired Walker.

‘Of course! Why do you suppose Mr Metcalfe sent you to me? He knows the Casa Saeta.’ He paused. ‘You don’t mind if it’s an old house?’ he asked anxiously.

‘Not at all,’ replied Walker easily. ‘I can afford any alterations provided the house suits me.’ He caught my eye, then said, hastily, ‘But I would like to suggest that I rent it for six months with an option to buy.’

Aristide’s face lengthened from a circle to an ellipse. ‘Very well, if that is what you wish,’ he said dubiously.

He took us up the north coast in a Cadillac with Coertze following in our hired car. The house looked like something from a Charles Addams’ cartoon and I expected to see Boris Karloff peering from a window. There was no Moorish influence at all; it was the most hideous Victorian Gothic in the worst possible taste. But that didn’t matter if it could give us what we wanted.

We went into the house and looked cursorily over the worm-eaten panelling and viewed the lack of sanitation. The kitchen was primitive and there was a shaggy garden at the back of the house. Beyond was the sea and we looked over a low cliff to the beach.

It was perfect. There was a boat-house big enough to take Sanford once we unstepped the mast, and there was a crude slip badly in need of repair. There was even a lean-to shed where we could set up our foundry.

I looked at everything, estimating how long it would take to put in order, then I took Coertze on one side while Aristide extolled the beauties of the house to Walker.

‘What do you think?’ I asked.

‘Man, I think we should take it. There can’t be another place like this in the whole of North Africa.’

‘That’s just what I was thinking,’ I said. ‘I hope we can find something like this in Italy. We can get local people to fix up the slip, and with a bit of push we should be finished in a week. We’ll have to do some token work on the house, but the bulk of the money must go on essentials – there’ll be time to make the house livable when we come back. I’ll tip Walker off about that; he’s good at thinking up wacky reasons for doing the damnedest things.’

We drifted back to Walker and Aristide who were still going at it hammer and tongs, and I gave Walker an imperceptible nod. He smiles dazzlingly at Aristide, and said, ‘It’s no use, Mr Theotopopoulis, you can’t talk me out of taking this house. I’m determined to have it at once – on a six months’ rental, of course.’

Aristide, who hadn’t any intention of talking anyone out of anything, was taken aback, but making a game recovery, said, ‘You understand, Mr Walker, I can give no guarantees …’ His voice tailed off, giving the impression that he was doing Walker a favour.

‘That’s all right, old man,’ said Walker gaily. ‘But I must have a six months’ option on the house, too. Remember that.’

‘I think that can be arranged,’ said Aristide with spurious dubiety.

‘Won’t it be fun, living in this beautiful house?’ said Walker to me. I glared at him. That was the trouble with Walker; he got wrapped up in his part too much. My glare went unnoticed because he had turned to Aristide. ‘The house isn’t haunted, or anything like that?’ he demanded, as though he equated ghosts with dead rats in the wainscotting.

‘Oh, no,’ said Aristide hurriedly. ‘No ghosts.’

‘A pity,’ said Walker negligently. ‘I’ve always wanted to live in a haunted house.’

I saw Aristide changing his mind about the ghosts, so I spoke hastily to break up this buffoonery. I had no objection to Aristide thinking he was dealing with a fool, but no one could be as big a damn’ fool as Walker was acting and I was afraid that Aristide might smell a rat.

I said, ‘Well, I suggest we go back to Mr Theotopopoulis’s office and settle the details. It’s getting late and I have to do some work on the boat.’

To Coertze, I said, ‘There’s no need for you to come. We’ll meet you for lunch at the restaurant we went to last night.’

I had watched his blood pressure rising at Walker’s fooleries and I wanted him out of the way in case he exploded. It’s damned difficult working with people, especially antagonistic types like Walker and Coertze.

We went back to Aristide’s office and it all went off very well. He stung us for the house, but I had no objection to that. No one who splashed money around like Walker could be anything but an honest man.

Then Walker said something that made my blood run cold, although afterwards, on mature consideration, I conceded that he had built up his character so that he could get away with it. He said to Aristide, ‘Tangier is a funny place. I hear you’ve got bars of gold scattered about all over the place.’

Aristide smiled genially. He had cut his pound of flesh and was willing to waste a few minutes in small talk; besides, this idiot Walker was going to live in Tangier – he could be milked a lot more. ‘Not scattered, exactly,’ he said. ‘We keep our gold in very big safes.’

‘Um,’ said Walker. ‘You know, it’s a funny thing, but I’ve lived all my life in South Africa where they mine scads of gold, and I’ve never seen any. You can’t buy gold in South Africa, you know.’

Aristide raised his eyebrows as though this was unheard of.

‘I’ve heard you can buy gold here by the pound like buying butter over the counter. It might be fun to buy some gold. Imagine me with all my money and I’ve never seen a gold bar,’ he said pathetically. ‘I’ve got a lot of money, you know. Most people say I’ve got too much.’

Aristide frowned. This was heresy; in his book no one could have too much money. He became very earnest. ‘Mr Walker, the best thing anyone can do in these troubled times is to buy gold. It’s the only safe investment. The value of gold does not fluctuate like these unstable paper currencies.’ With a flick of his fingers he stripped the pretentions from the U.S. dollar and the pound sterling. ‘Gold does not rust or waste away; it is always there, always safe and valuable. If you want to invest, I am always willing to sell gold.’

‘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.’

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 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.

V

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.