The Golden Keel
The Golden Keel
Desmond Bagley
The first action thriller by the classic adventure writer, set in Italy.
When the Allies invaded southern Italy in 1943, Mussolini’s personal treasure was moved north to safety under heavily armed guard. It was never seen again. Now, an expedition plans to unearth the treasure and smuggle it out of Italy. But their reckless mission is being followed – by enemies who are as powerful and ruthless as they are deadly…
DESMOND BAGLEY
The Golden Keel
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_a101df5d-ec1f-5718-959f-71fdcb2a0889)
HARPER
an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1963
Copyright © Brockhurst Publications 1963
Desmond Bagley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008211134
Ebook Edition © January 2016 ISBN 9780008211417
Version: 2016-11-21
CONTENTS
Cover (#u4ec1bb77-8cef-5aef-9210-98498712b378)
Title Page (#u7a537827-bcce-5186-a7ad-1e67d67eb373)
Copyright (#u6006fbf0-1fc1-5cf8-8e6a-c5b854d55e2d)
The Golden Keel (#u11b5e41e-9e29-577f-9c3d-a8000222e356)
Dedication (#u0a9f1ce8-7aa3-5895-a2c9-671d90697916)
Book One: The Men (#u2ec63b62-2d7d-54fc-8004-11f38785e91e)
Chapter One: Walker (#u65688ecd-5cc9-58f7-8986-95a0c516a68c)
Chapter Two: Coertze (#u70fb092a-01a7-5e24-95e5-70c4fe55c6f9)
Book Two: The Gold (#u7c85d487-5974-5a75-826c-2c55c4b507f4)
Chapter Three: Tangier (#uf78f1c7c-364f-5080-8871-acf520c3034b)
Chapter Four: Francesca (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five: The Tunnel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six: Metcalfe (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven: The Golden Keel (#litres_trial_promo)
Book Three: The Sea (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight: Calm and Storm (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine: Sanford (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
THE GOLDEN KEEL (#ulink_352f505f-b572-559b-857e-18754b43678f)
DEDICATION (#ulink_250a9908-8715-543a-8c50-50f3b667842d)
For Joan – who else?
BOOK ONE The Men (#ulink_acf2f91f-9610-530b-92af-16af3ba62a5e)
ONE: WALKER (#ulink_a23645fe-1979-5e57-a6c9-39900eb0d7e6)
My name is Peter Halloran, but everyone calls me ‘Hal’ excepting my wife, Jean, who always called me Peter. Women seem to dislike nicknames for their menfolk. Like a lot of others I emigrated to the ‘colonies’ after the war, and I travelled from England to South Africa by road, across the Sahara and through the Congo. It was a pretty rough trip, but that’s another story; it’s enough to say that I arrived in Cape Town in 1948 with no job and precious little money.
During my first week in Cape Town I answered several of the Sit. Vac. advertisements which appeared in the Cape Times and while waiting for answers I explored my environment. On this particular morning I had visited the docks and finally found myself near the yacht basin.
I was leaning over the rail looking at the boats when a voice behind me said, ‘If you had your choice, which would it be?’
I turned and encountered the twinkling eyes of an elderly man, tall, with stooped shoulders and grey hair. He had a brown, weather-beaten face and gnarled hands, and I estimated his age at about sixty.
I pointed to one of the boats. ‘I think I’d pick that one,’ I said. ‘She’s big enough to be of use, but not too big for single-handed sailing.’
He seemed pleased. ‘That’s Gracia,’ he said. ‘I built her.’
‘She looks a good boat,’ I said. ‘She’s got nice lines.’
We talked for a while about boats. He said that he had a boatyard a little way outside Cape Town towards Milnerton, and that he specialized in building the fishing boats used by the Malay fishermen. I’d noticed these already; sturdy unlovely craft with high bows and a wheelhouse stuck on top like a chicken-coop, but they looked very seaworthy. Gracia was only the second yacht he had built.
‘There’ll be a boom now the war’s over,’ he predicted. ‘People will have money in their pockets, and they’ll go in for yachting. I’d like to expand my activities in that direction.’
Presently he looked at his watch and nodded towards the yacht club. ‘Let’s go in and have a coffee,’ he suggested.
I hesitated. ‘I’m not a member.’
‘I am,’ he said. ‘Be my guest.’
So we went into the club house and sat in the lounge overlooking the yacht basin and he ordered coffee. ‘By the way, my name’s Tom Sanford.’
‘I’m Peter Halloran.’
‘You’re English,’ he said. ‘Been out here long?’
I smiled. ‘Three days.’
‘I’ve been out just a bit longer – since 1910.’ He sipped his coffee and regarded me thoughtfully. ‘You seem to know a bit about boats.’
‘I’ve been around them all my life,’ I said. ‘My father had a boatyard on the east coast, quite close to Hull. We built fishing boats, too, until the war.’
‘And then?’
‘Then the yard went on to contract work for the Admiralty,’ I said. ‘We built harbour defence launches and things like that – we weren’t geared to handle anything bigger.’ I shrugged. ‘Then there was an air-raid.’
‘That’s bad,’ said Tom. ‘Was everything destroyed?’
‘Everything,’ I said flatly. ‘My people had a house next to the yard – that went, too. My parents and my elder brother were killed.’
‘Christ!’ said Tom gently. ‘That’s very bad. How old were you?’
‘Seventeen,’ I said. ‘I went to live with an aunt in Hatfield; that’s when I started to work for de Havilland – building Mosquitos. It’s a wooden aeroplane and they wanted people who could work in wood. All I was doing, as far as I was concerned, was filling in time until I could join the Army.’
His interest sharpened. ‘You know, that’s the coming thing – the new methods developed by de Havilland. That hot-moulding process of theirs – d’you think it could be used in boat-building?’
I thought about it. ‘I don’t see why not – it’s very strong. We did repair work at Hatfield, as well as new construction, and I saw what happens to that type of fabric when it’s been hit very hard. It would be more expensive than the traditional methods, though, unless you were mass-producing.’
‘I was thinking about yachts,’ said Tom slowly. ‘You must tell me more about it sometime.’ He smiled. ‘What else do you know about boats?’
I grinned. ‘I once thought I’d like to be a designer,’ I said. ‘When I was a kid – about fifteen – I designed and built my own racing dinghy.’
‘Win any races?’
‘My brother and I had ’em all licked,’ I said. ‘She was a fast boat. After the war, when I was cooling my heels waiting for my discharge, I had another go at it – designing, I mean. I designed half a dozen boats – it helped to pass the time.’
‘Got the drawings with you?’
‘They’re somewhere at the bottom of my trunk,’ I said. ‘I haven’t looked at them for a long time.’
‘I’d like to see them,’ said Tom. ‘Look, laddie; how would you like to work for me? I told you I’m thinking of expanding into the yacht business, and I could use a smart young fellow.’
And that’s how I started working for Tom Sanford. The following day I went to the boatyard with my drawings and showed them to Tom. On the whole he liked them, but pointed out several ways in which economies could be made in the building. ‘You’re a fair designer,’ he said. ‘But you’ve a lot to learn about the practical side. Never mind, we’ll see about that. When can you start?’
Going to work for old Tom was one of the best things I ever did in my life.
II
A lot of things happened in the next ten years – whether I deserved them or not is another matter. The skills I had learned from my father had not deserted me, and although I was a bit rusty to begin with, soon I was as good as any man in the yard, and maybe a bit better. Tom encouraged me to design, ruthlessly correcting my errors.
‘You’ve got a good eye for line,’ he said. ‘Your boats would be sweet sailers, but they’d be damned expensive. You’ve got to spend more time on detail; you must cut down costs to make an economical boat.’
Four years after I joined the firm Tom made me yard foreman, and just after that, I had my first bit of luck in designing. I submitted a design to a local yachting magazine, winning second prize and fifty pounds. But better still, a local yachtsman liked the design and wanted a boat built. So Tom built it for him and I got the designer’s fee which went to swell my growing bank balance.
Tom was pleased about that and asked if I could design a class boat as a standard line for the yard, so I designed a six-tonner which turned out very well. We called it the Penguin Class and Tom built and sold a dozen in the first year at £2000 each. I liked the boat so much that I asked Tom if he would build one for me, which he did, charging a rock-bottom price and letting me pay it off over a couple of years.
Having a design office gave the business a fillip. The news got around and people started to come to me instead of using British and American designs. That way they could argue with their designer. Tom was pleased because most of the boats to my design were built in the yard.
In 1954 he made me yard manager, and in 1955 offered me a partnership.
‘I’ve got no one to leave it to,’ he said bluntly. ‘My wife’s dead and I’ve got no sons. And I’m getting old.’
I said, ‘You’ll be building boats when you’re a hundred, Tom.’
He shook his head. ‘No, I’m beginning to feel it now.’ He wrinkled his brow. ‘I’ve been going over the books and I find that you’re bringing more business into the firm than I am, so I’ll go easy on the money for the partnership. It’ll cost you five thousand pounds.’
Five thousand was ridiculously cheap for a half-share in such a flourishing business, but I hadn’t got anywhere near that amount. He saw my expression and his eyes crinkled. ‘I know you haven’t got it – but you’ve been doing pretty well on the design side lately. My guess is that you’ve got about two thousand salted away.’
Tom, shrewd as always, was right. I had a couple of hundred over the two thousand. ‘That’s about it,’ I said.
‘All right. Throw in the two thousand and borrow another three from the bank. They’ll lend it to you when they see the books. You’ll be able to pay it back out of profits in under three years, especially if you carry out your plans for that racing dinghy. What about it?’
‘O.K., Tom,’ I said. ‘It’s a deal.’
The racing dinghy Tom had mentioned was an idea I had got by watching the do-it-yourself developments in England. There are plenty of little lakes on the South African highveld and I thought I could sell small boats away from the sea if I could produce them cheaply enough – and I would sell either the finished boat or a do-it-yourself kit for the impoverished enthusiast.
We set up another woodworking shop and I designed the boat which was the first of the Falcon Class. A young fellow, Harry Marshall, was promoted to run the project and he did very well. This wasn’t Tom’s cup of tea and he stayed clear of the whole affair, referring to it as ‘that confounded factory of yours’. But it made us a lot of money.
It was about this time that I met Jean and we got married. My marriage to Jean is not really a part of this story and I wouldn’t mention it except for what happened later. We were very happy and very much in love. The business was doing well – I had a wife and a home – what more could a man wish for?
Towards the end of 1956 Tom died quite suddenly of a heart attack. I think he must have known that his heart wasn’t in good shape although he didn’t mention it to anyone. He left his share of the business to his wife’s sister. She knew nothing about business and less about boat-building, so we got the lawyers on to it and she agreed to sell me her share. I paid a damn sight more than the five thousand I had paid Tom, but it was a fair sale although it gave me financier’s fright and left me heavily in debt to the bank.
I was sorry that Tom had gone. He had given me a chance that fell to few young fellows and I felt grateful. The yard seemed emptier without him pottering about the slips.
The yard prospered and it seemed that my reputation as a designer was firm, because I got lots of commissions. Jean took over the management of the office, and as I was tied to the drawing board for a large proportion of my time I promoted Harry Marshall to yard manager and he handled it very capably.
Jean, being a woman, gave the office a thorough spring cleaning as soon as she was in command, and one day she unearthed an old tin box which had stayed forgotten on a remote shelf for years. She delved into it, then said suddenly, ‘Why have you kept this clipping?’
‘What clipping?’ I asked abstractedly. I was reading a letter which could lead to an interesting commission.
‘This thing about Mussolini,’ she said. ‘I’ll read it.’ She sat on the edge of the desk, the yellowed fragment of newsprint between her fingers. ‘“Sixteen Italian Communists were sentenced in Milan yesterday for complicity in the disappearance of Mussolini’s treasure. The treasure, which mysteriously vanished at the end of the war, consisted of a consignment of gold from the Italian State Bank and many of Mussolini’s personal possessions, including the Ethiopian crown. It is believed that a large number of important State documents were with the treasure. The sixteen men all declared their innocence.”’
She looked up. ‘What was all that about?’
I was startled. It was a long time since I’d thought of Walker and Coertze and the drama that had been played out in Italy. I smiled and said, ‘I might have made a fortune but for that news story.’
‘Tell me about it?’
‘It’s a long story,’ I protested. ‘I’ll tell you some other time.’
‘No,’ she insisted. ‘Tell me now; I’m always interested in treasure.’
So I pushed the unopened mail aside and told her about Walker and his mad scheme. It came back to me hazily in bits and pieces. Was it Donato or Alberto who had fallen – or been pushed – from the cliff? The story took a long time in the telling and the office work got badly behind that day.
III
I met Walker when I had arrived in South Africa from England after the war. I had been lucky to get a good job with Tom but, being a stranger, I was a bit lonely, so I joined a Cape Town Sporting Club which would provide company and exercise.
Walker was a drinking member, one of those crafty people who joined the club to have somewhere to drink when the pubs were closed on Sunday. He was never in the club house during the week, but turned up every Sunday, played his one game of tennis for the sake of appearances, then spent the rest of the day in the bar.
It was in the bar that I met him, late one Sunday afternoon. The room was loud with voices raised in argument and I soon realized I had walked into the middle of a discussion on the Tobruk surrender. The very mention of Tobruk can start an argument anywhere in South Africa because the surrender is regarded as a national disgrace. It is always agreed that the South Africans were let down but from then on it gets heated and rather vague. Sometimes the British generals are blamed and sometimes the South African garrison commander, General Klopper; and it’s always good for one of those long, futile bar-room brawls in which tempers are lost but nothing is ever decided.
It wasn’t of much interest to me – my army service was in Europe – so I sat quietly nursing my beer and keeping out of it. Next to me was a thin-faced young man with dissipated good looks who had a great deal to say about it, with many a thump on the counter with his clenched fist. I had seen him before but didn’t know who he was. All I knew of him was by observation; he seemed to drink a lot, and even now was drinking two brandies to my one beer.
At length the argument died a natural death as the bar emptied and soon my companion and I were the last ones left. I drained my glass and was turning to leave when he said contemptuously, ‘Fat lot they know about it.’
‘Were you there?’ I asked.
‘I was,’ he said grimly. ‘I was in the bag with all the others. Didn’t stay there long, though; I got out of the camp in Italy in ’43.’ He looked at my empty glass. ‘Have one for the road.’
I had nothing to do just then, so I said, ‘Thanks; I’ll have a beer.’
He ordered a beer for me and another brandy for himself and said, ‘My name’s Walker. Yes, I got out when the Italian Government collapsed. I joined the partisans.’
‘That must have been interesting,’ I said.
He laughed shortly. ‘I suppose you could call it that. Interesting and scary. Yes, I reckon you could say that me and Sergeant Coertze had a really interesting time – he was a bloke I was with most of the time.’
‘An Afrikaner?’ I hazarded. I was new in South Africa and didn’t know much about the set-up then, but the name sounded as though it might be Afrikaans.
‘That’s right,’ said Walker. ‘A real tough boy, he was. We stuck together after getting out of the camp.’
‘Was it easy – escaping from the prison camp?’
‘A piece of cake,’ said Walker. ‘The guards co-operated with us. A couple of them even came with us as guides – Alberto Corso and Donato Rinaldi. I liked Donato – I reckon he saved my life.’
He saw my interest and plunged into the story with gusto. When the Government fell in 1943 Italy was in a mess. The Italians were uneasy; they didn’t know what was going to happen next and they were suspicious of the intentions of the Germans. It was a perfect opportunity to break camp, especially when a couple of the guards threw in with them.
Leaving the camp was easy enough, but trouble started soon after when the Germans laid on an operation to round up all the Allied prisoners who were loose in Central Italy.
‘That’s when I copped it,’ said Walker. ‘We were crossing a river at the time.’
The sudden attack had taken them by surprise. Everything had been silent except for the chuckling of the water and the muffled curses as someone slipped – then suddenly there was the sound of ripped calico as the Spandau opened up and the night was made hideous by the eerie whine of bullets as they ricocheted from exposed rocks in the river.
The two Italians turned and let go with their sub-machine-guns. Coertze, bellowing like a bull, scrabbled frantically at the pouch pocket of his battle-dress trousers and then his arm came up in an overarm throw. There was a sharp crack as the hand grenade exploded in the water near the bank. Again Coertze threw and this time the grenade burst on the bank.
Walker felt something slam his leg and he turned in a twisting fall and found himself gasping in the water. His free arm thrashed out and caught on a rock and he hung on desperately.
Coertze threw another grenade and the machine-gun stopped. The Italians had emptied their magazines and were busy reloading. Everything was quiet again.
‘I reckon they thought we were Germans, too,’ said Walker. ‘They wouldn’t expect to be fired on by escaping prisoners. It was lucky that the Italians had brought some guns along. Anyway, that bloody machine-gun stopped.’
They had stayed for a few minutes in midstream with the quick cold waters pulling at their legs, not daring to move in case there was a sudden burst from the shore. After five minutes Alberto said in a low voice, ‘Signor Walker, are you all right?’
Walker pulled himself upright and to his astonishment found himself still grasping his unfired rifle. His left leg felt numb and cold. ‘I’m all right,’ he said.
There was a long sigh from Coertze, then he said, ‘Well, come on. Let’s get to the other side – but quietly.’
They reached the other side of the river and, without resting, pressed on up the mountainside. After a short time Walker’s leg began to hurt and he lagged behind. Alberto was perturbed. ‘You must hurry; we have to cross this mountain before dawn.’
Walker stifled a groan as he put down his left foot. ‘I was hit,’ he said. ‘I think I was hit.’
Coertze came back down the mountain and said irritably, ‘Magtig, get a move on, will you?’
Alberto said, ‘Is it bad, Signor Walker?’
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Coertze, not understanding the Italian.
‘I have a bullet in my leg,’ said Walker bitterly.
‘That’s all we need,’ said Coertze. In the darkness he bulked as a darker patch and Walker could see that he was shaking his head impatiently. ‘We’ve got to get to that partisan camp before daylight.’
Walker conferred with Alberto, then said in English, ‘Alberto says there’s a place along there to the right where we can hide. He says that someone should stay with me while he goes for help.’
Coertze grunted in his throat. ‘I’ll go with him,’ he said. ‘The other Eytie can stay with you. Let’s get to it.’
They moved along the mountainside and presently the ground dipped and suddenly there was a small ravine, a cleft in the mountain. There were stunted trees to give a little cover and underfoot was a dry watercourse.
Alberto stopped and said, ‘You will stay here until we come for you. Keep under the trees so that no one will see you, and make as little movement as possible.’
‘Thanks, Alberto,’ said Walker. There were a few brief words of farewell, then Alberto and Coertze disappeared into the night. Donato made Walker comfortable and they settled down to wait out the night.
It was a bad time for Walker. His leg was hurting and it was very cold. They stayed in the ravine all the next day and as night fell Walker became delirious and Donato had trouble in keeping him quiet.
When the rescuers finally came Walker had passed out. He woke up much later and found himself in a bed in a room with whitewashed walls. The sun was rising and a little girl was sitting by the bedside.
Walker stopped speaking suddenly and looked at his empty glass on the bar counter. ‘Have another drink,’ I said quickly.
He needed no encouraging so I ordered another couple of drinks. ‘So that’s how you got away,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘That’s how it was. God, it was cold those two nights on that bloody mountain. If it hadn’t been for Donato I’d have cashed in my chips.’
I said, ‘So you were safe – but where were you?’
‘In a partisan camp up in the hills. The partigiani were just getting organized then; they only really got going when the Germans began to consolidate their hold on Italy. The Jerries ran true to form – they’re arrogant bastards, you know – and the Italians didn’t like it. So everything was set for the partisans; they got the support of the people and they could begin to operate on a really large scale.
‘They weren’t all alike, of course; there was every shade of political opinion from pale blue to bright red. The Communists hated the Monarchists’ guts and vice versa and so on. The crowd I dropped in on were Monarchist. That’s where I met the Count.’
Count Ugo Montepescali di Todi was over fifty years old at that time, but young-looking and energetic. He was a swarthy man with an aquiline nose and a short greying beard which was split at the end and forked aggressively. He came of a line which was old during the Renaissance and he was an aristocrat to his fingertips.
Because of this he hated Fascism – hated the pretensions of the parvenu rulers of Italy with all their corrupt ways and their money-sticky fingers. To him Mussolini always remained a mediocre journalist who had succeeded in demagoguery and had practically imprisoned his King.
Walker met the Count the first day he arrived at the hill camp. He had just woken up and seen the solemn face of the little girl. She smiled at him and silently left the room, and a few minutes later a short stocky man with a bristling beard stepped through the doorway and said in English, ‘Ah, you are awake. You are quite safe now.’
Walker was conscious of saying something inane. ‘But where am I?’
‘Does that really matter?’ the Count asked quizzically. ‘You are still in Italy – but safe from the Tedesci. You must stay in bed until you recover your strength. You need some blood putting back – you lost a lot – so you must rest and eat and rest again.’
Walker was too weak to do more than accept this, so he lay back on the pillow. Five minutes later Coertze came in; with him was a young man with a thin face.
‘I’ve brought the quack,’ said Coertze. ‘Or at least that’s what he says he is – if I’ve got it straight. My guess is that he’s only a medical student.’
The doctor – or student – examined Walker and professed satisfaction at his condition. ‘You will walk within the week,’ he said, and packed his little kit and left the room.
Coertze rubbed the back of his head. ‘I’ll have to learn this slippery taal,’ he said. ‘It looks as though we’ll be here for a long time.’
‘No chance of getting through to the south?’ asked Walker.
‘No chance at all,’ said Coertze flatly. ‘The Count – that’s the little man with the bokbaardjie – says that the Germans down south are thicker on the ground than stalks in a mealie field. He reckons they’re going to make a defence line south of Rome.’
Walker sighed. ‘Then we’re stuck here.’
Coertze grinned. ‘It is not too bad. At least we’ll get better food than we had in camp. The Count wants us to join his little lot – it seems he has some kind of skietkommando which holds quite a bit of territory and he’s collected men and weapons while he can. We might as well fight here as with the army – I’ve always fancied fighting a war my way.’
A plump woman brought in a steaming bowl of broth for Walker, and Coertze said, ‘Get outside of that and you’ll feel better. I’m going to scout around a bit.’
Walker ate the broth and slept, then woke and ate again. After a while a small figure came in bearing a basin and rolled bandages. It was the little girl he had seen when he had first opened his eyes. He thought she was about twelve years old.
‘My father said I had to change your bandages,’ she said in a clear young voice. She spoke in English.
Walker propped himself up on his elbows and watched her as she came closer. She was neatly dressed and wore a white, starched apron. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
She bent to cut the splint loose from his leg and then she carefully loosened the bandage round the wound. He looked down at her and said, ‘What is your name?’
‘Francesca.’
‘Is your father the doctor?’ Her hands were cool and soft on his leg.
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said briefly.
She bathed the wound in warm water containing some pungent antiseptic and then shook powder on to it. With great skill she began to rebandage the leg.
‘You are a good nurse,’ said Walker.
It was only then that she looked at him and he saw that she had cool, grey eyes. ‘I’ve had a lot of practice,’ she said, and Walker was abashed at her gaze and cursed a war which made skilled nurses out of twelve-year-olds.
She finished the bandaging and said, ‘There – you must get better soon.’
‘I will,’ promised Walker. ‘As quickly as I can. I’ll do that for you.’
She looked at him with surprise. ‘Not for me,’ she said. ‘For the war. You must get better so that you can go into the hills and kill a lot of Germans.’
She gravely collected the soiled bandages and left the room, with Walker looking after her in astonishment. Thus it was that he met Francesca, the daughter of Count Ugo Montepescali.
In a little over a week he was able to walk with the aid of a stick and to move outside the hospital hut, and Coertze showed him round the camp. Most of the men were Italians, army deserters who didn’t like the Germans. But there were many Allied escapees of different nationalities.
The Count had formed the escapees into a single unit and had put Coertze in command. They called themselves the ‘Foreign Legion’. During the next couple of years many of them were to be killed fighting against the Germans with the partisans. At Coertze’s request, Alberto and Donato were attached to the unit to act as interpreters and guides.
Coertze had a high opinion of the Count. ‘That kêrel knows what he’s doing,’ he said. ‘He’s recruiting from the Italian army as fast as he can – and each man must bring his own gun.’
When the Germans decided to stand and fortified the Winterstellung based on the Sangro and Monte Cassino, the war in Italy was deadlocked and it was then that the partisans got busy attacking the German communications. The Foreign Legion took part in this campaign, specializing in demolition work. Coertze had been a gold miner on the Witwatersrand before the war and knew how to handle dynamite. He and Harrison, a Canadian geologist, instructed the others in the use of explosives.
They blew up road and rail bridges, dynamited mountain passes, derailed trains and occasionally shot up the odd road convoy, always retreating as soon as heavy fire was returned. ‘We must not fight pitched battles,’ said the Count. ‘We must not let the Germans pin us down. We are mosquitoes irritating the German hides – let us hope we give them malaria.’
Walker found this a time of long stretches of relaxation punctuated by moments of fright. Discipline was easy and there was no army spit-and-polish. He became lean and hard and would think nothing of making a day’s march of thirty miles over the mountains burdened with his weapons and a pack of dynamite and detonators.
By the end of 1944 the Foreign Legion had thinned down considerably. Some of the men had been killed and more elected to make a break for the south after the Allies had taken Rome. Coertze said he would stay, so Walker stayed with him. Harrison also stayed, together with an Englishman called Parker. The Foreign Legion was now very small indeed.
‘The Count used us as bloody pack horses,’ said Walker. He had ordered another round of drinks and the brandy was getting at him. His eyes were red-veined and he stumbled over the odd word.
‘Pack horses?’ I queried.
‘The unit was too small to really fight,’ he explained. ‘So he used us to transport guns and food around his territory. That’s how we got the convoy.’
‘Which convoy?’
Walker was beginning to slur his words. ‘It was like this. One of the Italian units had gone to carve up a German post and the job was being done in co-operation with another partisan brigade. But the Count was worried because this other mob were Communists – real treacherous bastards they were. He was scared they might renege on us; they were always doing that because he was a Monarchist and they hated him worse than they did the Germans. They were looking ahead to after the war and they didn’t do much fighting while they were about it. Italian politics, you see.’
I nodded.
‘So he wanted Umberto – the chap in charge of our Italians – to have another couple of machine-guns, just in case, and Coertze said he’d take them.’
He fell silent, looking into his glass.
I said, ‘What about this convoy?’
‘Oh, what the hell,’ he said. There’s not a hope of getting it out. It’ll stay there for ever, unless Coertze does something. I’ll tell you. We were on our way to Umberto when we bumped into this German convoy driving along where no convoy should have been. So we clobbered it.’
They had got to the top of a hill and Coertze called a halt. ‘We stay here for ten minutes, then we move on,’ he said.
Alberto drank some water and then strolled down to where he could get a good view of the valley. He looked first at the valley floor where a rough, unmetalled road ran dustily, then raised his eyes to look south.
Suddenly he called Coertze. ‘Look,’ he said.
Coertze ran down and looked to where Alberto was pointing. In the distance, where the faraway thread of brown road shimmered in the heat, was a puff of dust. He unslung his glasses and focused rapidly.
‘What the hell are they doing here?’ he demanded.
‘What is it?’
‘German army trucks,’ said Coertze. ‘About six of them.’ He pulled down the glasses. ‘Looks as though they’re trying to slip by on the side roads. We have made the main roads a bit unhealthy.’
Walker and Donato had come down. Coertze looked back at the machine-guns, then at Walker. ‘What about it?’
Walker said, ‘What about Umberto?’
‘Oh, he’s all right. It’s just the Count getting a bit fretful now the war’s nearly over. I think we should take this little lot – it should be easy with two machine-guns.’
Walker shrugged. ‘O.K. with me,’ he said.
Coertze said, ‘Come on,’ and ran back to where Parker was sitting. ‘On your feet, kêrel,’ he said. ‘The war’s still on. Where the hell is Harrison?’
‘Coming,’ called Harrison.
‘Let’s get this stuff down to the road on the double,’ said Coertze. He looked down the hill. ‘That bend ought to be a lekker place.’
‘A what?’ asked Parker plaintively. He always pulled Coertze’s leg about his South Africanisms.
‘Never mind that,’ snapped Coertze. ‘Get this stuff down to the road quick. We’ve got a job on.’
They loaded up the machine-guns and plunged down the hillside. Once on the road Coertze did a quick survey. ‘They’ll come round that bend slowly,’ he said. ‘Alberto, you take Donato and put your machine-gun there, where you can open up on the last two trucks. The last two, you understand. Knock ’em out fast so the others can’t back out.’
He turned to Harrison and Parker. ‘Put your gun over here on the other side and knock out the first truck. Then we’ll have the others boxed in.’
‘What do I do?’ asked Walker.
‘You come with me,’ Coertze started to run up the road, followed by Walker. He ran almost to the bend, then left the road and climbed a small hillock from where he could get a good sight of the German convoy. When Walker flopped beside him he already had the glasses focused.
‘It’s four trucks not six,’ he said. ‘There’s a staff car in front and a motor-cycle combination in front of that. Looks like one of those BMW jobs with a machine-gun in the side-car.’
He handed the glasses to Walker. ‘How far from the tail of the column to that staff car?’
Walker looked at the oncoming vehicles. ‘About sixty-five yards,’ he estimated.
Coertze took the glasses. ‘O.K. You go back along the road sixty-five yards so that when the last truck is round the bend the staff car is alongside you. Never mind the motor-cycle – I’ll take care of that. Go back and tell the boys not to open up until they hear loud bangs; I’ll start those off. And tell them to concentrate on the trucks.’
He turned over and looked back. The machine-guns were invisible and the road was deserted. ‘As nice an ambush as anyone could set,’ he said. ‘My oupa never did better against the English.’ He tapped Walker on the shoulder. ‘Off you go. I’ll help you with the staff car as soon as I’ve clobbered the motor-cycle.’
Walker slipped from the hillock and ran back along the road, stopping at the machine-guns to issue Coertze’s instructions. Then he found himself a convenient rock about sixty yards from the bend, behind which he crouched and checked his sub-machine-gun.
It was not long before he heard Coertze running along the road shouting, ‘Four minutes. They’ll be here in four minutes. Hold your fire.’
Coertze ran past him and disappeared into the verge of the road about ten yards farther on.
Walker said that four minutes in those conditions could seem like four hours. He crouched there, looking back along the silent road, hearing nothing except his own heart beating. After what seemed a long time he heard the growl of engines and the clash of gears and then the revving of the motor-cycle.
He flattened himself closer to the rock and waited. A muscle twitched in his leg and his mouth was suddenly dry. The noise of the motor-cycle now blanked out all other sounds and he snapped off the safety catch.
He saw the motor-cycle pass, the goggled driver looking like a gargoyle and the trooper in the sidecar turning his head to scan the road, hands clutching the grips of the machine-gun mounted in front of him.
As in a dream he saw Coertze’s hand come into view, apparently in slow motion, and toss a grenade casually into the sidecar. It lodged between the gunner’s back and the coaming of the sidecar and the gunner turned in surprise. With his sudden movement the grenade disappeared into the interior of the sidecar.
Then it exploded.
The sidecar disintegrated and the gunner must have had his legs blown off. The cycle wheeled drunkenly across the road and Walker saw Coertze step out of cover, his sub-machine-gun pumping bullets into the driver. Then he had stepped out himself and his own gun was blazing at the staff car.
He had orientated himself very carefully so that he had a very good idea of where the driver would be placed. When he started firing, he did so without aiming and the windscreen shattered in the driver’s face.
In the background he was conscious of the tac-a-tac of the machine-guns firing in long bursts at the trucks, but he had no time or desire to cast a glance that way. He was occupied in jumping out of the way of the staff car as it slewed towards him, a dead man’s hand on the wheel.
The officer in the passenger seat was standing up, his hand clawing at the flap of his pistol holster. Coertze fired a burst at him and he suddenly collapsed and folded grotesquely over the metal rim of the broken windscreen as though he had suddenly turned into a rag doll. The pistol dropped from his hand and clattered on the ground.
With a rending jar the staff car bumped into a rock on the side of the road and came to a sudden stop, jolting the soldier in the rear who was shooting at Walker. Walker heard the bullets going over his head and pulled the trigger. A dozen bullets hit the German and slammed him back in his seat. Walker said that the range was about nine feet and he swore he heard the bullets hit, sounding like a rod hitting a soft carpet several times.
Then Coertze was shouting at him, waving him on to the trucks. He ran up the road following Coertze and saw that the first truck was stopped. He fired a burst into the cab just to be on the safe side, then took shelter, leaning against the hot radiator to reload.
By the time he had reloaded the battle was over. All the vehicles were stopped and Alberto and Donato were escorting a couple of dazed prisoners forward.
Coertze barked, ‘Parker, go up and see if anyone else is coming,’ then turned to look at the chaos he had planned.
The two men with the motor-cycle had been killed outright, as had the three in the staff car. Each truck had carried two men in the cab and one in the back. All the men in the cabs had been killed within twenty seconds of the machine-guns opening fire. As Harrison said, ‘At twenty yards we couldn’t miss – we just squirted at the first truck, then hosed down the second. It was like using a howitzer at a coconut-shy – too easy.’
Of the seventeen men in the German party there were two survivors, one of whom had a flesh wound in his arm.
Coertze said, ‘Notice anything?’
Walker shook his head. He was trembling in the aftermath of danger and was in no condition to be observant.
Coertze went up to one of the prisoners and fingered the emblem on his collar. The man cringed.
‘These are S.S. men. All of them.’
He turned and went back to the staff car. The officer was lying on his back, half in and half out of the front door, his empty eyes looking up at the sky, terrible in death. Coertze looked at him, then leaned over and pulled a leather briefcase from the front seat. It was locked.
‘There’s something funny here,’ he said. ‘Why would they come by this road?’
Harrison said, ‘They might have got through, you know. If we hadn’t been here they would have got through – and we were only here by chance.’
‘I know,’ said Coertze. ‘They had a good idea and they nearly got away with it – that’s what I’m worrying about. The Jerries aren’t an imaginative lot, usually; they follow a routine. So why would they do something different? Unless this wasn’t a routine unit.’
He looked at the trucks. ‘It might be a good idea to see what’s in those trucks.’
He sent Donato up the road to the north to keep watch and the rest went to investigate the trucks, excepting Alberto who was guarding the prisoners.
Harrison looked over the tailboard of the first truck. ‘Not much in here,’ he said.
Walker looked in and saw that the bottom of the truck was filled with boxes – small wooden boxes about eighteen inches long, a foot wide and six inches deep. He said, ‘That’s a hell of a small load.’
Coertze frowned and said, ‘Boxes like that ring a bell with me, but I just can’t place it. Let’s have one of them out.’
Walker and Harrison climbed into the truck and moved aside the body of a dead German which was in the way. Harrison grasped the corner of the nearest box and lifted. ‘My God!’ he said. ‘The damn’ thing’s nailed to the floor.’
Walker helped him and the box shifted. ‘No, it isn’t, but it must be full of lead.’
Coertze let down the tailboard. ‘I think we’d better have it out and opened,’ he said. His voice was suddenly croaking with excitement.
Walker and Harrison manhandled a box to the edge and tipped it over. It fell with a loud thump to the dusty road. Coertze said, ‘Give me that bayonet.’
Walker took the bayonet from the scabbard of the dead German and handed it to Coertze, who began to prise the box open. Nails squealed as the top of the box came up. Coertze ripped it off and said, ‘I thought so.’
‘What is it?’ asked Harrison, mopping his brow.
‘Gold,’ said Coertze softly.
Everyone stood still.
Walker was very drunk when he got to this point of his story. He was unsteady on his feet and caught the edge of the bar counter to support himself as he repeated solemnly, ‘Gold.’
‘For the love of Mike, what did you do with it?’ I said. ‘And how much of it was there?’
Walker hiccoughed genthy. ‘What about another drink?’ he said.
I beckoned to the bar steward, then said, ‘Come on; you can’t leave me in suspense.’
He looked at me sideways. ‘I really shouldn’t tell,’ he said. ‘But what the hell! There’s no harm in it now. It was like this …’
They had stood looking at each other for a long moment, then Coertze said, ‘I knew I recognized those boxes. They use boxes like that on the Reef for packing the ingots for shipment.’
As soon as they had checked that all the boxes in that truck were just as heavy, there was a mad rush to the other trucks. These were disappointing at first – the second truck was full of packing cases containing documents and files.
Coertze delved into a case, tossing papers out, and said, ‘What the hell’s all this bumph?’ He sounded disappointed.
Walker picked up a sheaf and scanned through it. ‘Seems to be Italian Government documents of some sort. Maybe this is all top-secret stuff.’
The muffled voice of Harrison came from the bowels of the truck. ‘Hey, you guys, look what I’ve found.’
He emerged with both hands full of bundles of lire notes – fine, newly printed lire notes. ‘There’s at least one case full of this stuff,’ he said. ‘Maybe more.’
The third truck had more boxes of gold, though not as much as the first, and there were several stoutly built wooden cases which were locked. They soon succumbed to a determined assault with a bayonet.
‘Christ!’ said Walker as he opened the first. In awe he pulled out a shimmering sparkle of jewels, a necklace of diamonds and emeralds.
‘What’s that worth?’ Coertze asked Harrison.
Harrison shook his head dumbly. ‘Gee, I wouldn’t know.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Not my kind of stone.’
They were ransacking the boxes when Coertze pulled out a gold cigarette case. ‘This one’s got an inscription,’ he said and read it aloud. ‘“Caro Benito da parte di Adolfe – Brennero – 1940.”’
Harrison said slowly, ‘Hitler had a meeting with Mussolini at the Brenner Pass in 1940. That’s when Musso decided to kick in on the German side.’
‘So now we know who this belongs to,’ said Walker, waving his hand.
‘Or used to belong to,’ repeated Coertze slowly. ‘But who does it belong to now?’
They looked at each other.
Coertze broke the silence. ‘Come on, let’s see what’s in the last truck.’
The fourth truck was full of packing cases containing more papers. But there was one box holding a crown.
Harrison struggled to lift it. ‘Who’s the giant who wears this around the palace?’ he asked nobody in particular. The crown was thickly encrusted with jewels – rubies and emeralds, but no diamonds. It was ornate and very heavy. ‘No wonder they say “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,”’ cracked Harrison.
He lowered the crown into the box. ‘Well, what do we do now?’
Coertze scratched his head. ‘It’s quite a problem,’ he admitted.
‘I say we keep it,’ said Harrison bluntly. ‘It’s ours by right of conquest.’
Now it was in the open – the secret thought that no one would admit except the extrovert Harrison. It cleared the air and made things much easier.
Coertze said, ‘I suppose we must bring in the rest of the boys and vote on it.’
‘That’ll be no good unless it’s a unanimous vote,’ said Harrison almost casually.
They saw his point. If one of them held out in favour of telling the Count, then the majority vote would be useless. At last Walker said, ‘It may not arise. Let’s vote on it and see.’
All was quiet on the road so Donato and Parker were brought in from their sentry duty. The prisoners were herded into a truck so that Alberto could join in the discussion, and they settled down as a committee of ways and means.
Harrison needn’t have worried – it was a unanimous vote. There was too much temptation for it to be otherwise.
‘One thing’s for sure,’ said Harrison. ‘When this stuff disappears there’s going to be the biggest investigation ever, no matter who wins the war. The Italian Government will never rest until it’s found, especially those papers. I’ll bet they’re dynamite.’
Coertze was thoughtful. ‘That means we must hide the treasure and the trucks. Nothing must be found. It must be as though the whole lot has vanished into thin air.’
‘What are we going to do with it?’ asked Parker. He looked at the stony ground and the thin soil. ‘We might just bury the treasure if we took a week doing it, but we can’t even begin to bury one truck, let alone four.’
Harrison snapped his fingers. ‘The old lead mines,’ he said. ‘They’re not far from here.’
Coertze’s face lightened. ‘Ja,’ he said. ‘There’s one winze that would take the lot.’
Parker said, ‘What lead mines – and what’s a winze, for God’s sake?’
‘It’s a horizontal shaft driven into a mountain,’ said Harrison. ‘These mines have been abandoned since the turn of the century. No one goes near them any more.’
Alberto said, ‘We drive all the trucks inside …’
‘… and blow in the entrance,’ finished Coertze with gusto.
‘Why not keep some of the jewels?’ suggested Walker.
‘No,’ said Coertze sharply. ‘It’s too dangerous – Harrison is right. There’ll be all hell breaking loose when this stuff vanishes for good. Everything must be buried until it’s safe to recover it.’
‘Know any good jewel fences?’ asked Harrison sardonically. ‘Because if you don’t how would you get rid of the jewels?’
They decided to bury everything – the trucks, the bodies, the gold, the papers, the jewels – everything. They restowed the trucks, putting all the valuables into two trucks and all the non-valuables such as the documents into the other two. It was intended to drive the staff car into the tunnel first with the motor-cycle carried in the back, then the trucks carrying papers and bodies, and lastly the trucks with the gold and jewels.
‘That way we can get out the stuff we want quite easily,’ said Coertze.
The disposal of the trucks was easy enough. There was an unused track leading to the mines which diverged off the dusty road they were on. They drove up to the mine and reversed the trucks into the biggest tunnel in the right order. Coertze and Harrison prepared a charge to blow down the entrance, a simple job taking only a few minutes, then Coertze lit the fuse and ran back.
When the dust died down they saw that the tunnel mouth was entirely blocked – making a rich mausoleum for seventeen men.
‘What do we tell the Count?’ asked Parker.
‘We tell him we ran into a little trouble on the way,’ said Coertze. ‘Well, we did, didn’t we?’ He grinned and told them to move on.
When they got back they heard that Umberto had run into trouble and had lost a lot of men. The Communists hadn’t turned up and he hadn’t had enough machine-guns.
I said, ‘You mean the gold’s still there.’
‘That’s right,’ said Walker, and hammered his fist on the counter. ‘Let’s have another drink.’
I didn’t get much out of him after that. His brain was pickled in brandy and he kept wandering into irrelevancies, but he did answer one question coherently.
I asked, ‘What happened to the two German prisoners?’
‘Oh, them,’ he said carelessly. ‘They were shot while escaping. Coertze did it.’
IV
Walker was too far gone to walk home that night, so I got his address from a club steward, poured him into a taxi and forgot about him. I didn’t think much of his story – it was just the maunderings of a drunk. Maybe he had found something in Italy, but I doubted if it was anything big – my imagination boggled at the idea of four truck loads of gold and jewels.
I wasn’t allowed to forget him for long because I saw him the following Sunday in the club bar gazing moodily into a brandy glass. He looked up, caught my eye and looked away hastily as though shamed. I didn’t go over and speak to him; he wasn’t altogether my type – I don’t go for drunks much.
Later that afternoon I had just come out of the swimming pool and was enjoying a cigarette when I became aware that Walker was standing beside me. As I looked up, he said awkwardly, ‘I think I owe you some money – for the taxi fare the other night.’
‘Forget it,’ I said shortly.
He dropped on one knee. ‘I’m sorry about that. Did I cause any trouble?’
I smiled. ‘Can’t you remember?’
‘Not a damn’ thing,’ he confessed. ‘I didn’t get into a fight or anything, did I?’
‘No, we just talked.’
His eyes flickered. ‘What about?’
‘Your experiences in Italy. You told me rather an odd story.’
‘I told you about the gold?’
I nodded. ‘That’s right.’
‘I was drunk,’ he said. ‘As shickered as a coot. I shouldn’t have told you about that. You haven’t mentioned it to anyone, have you?’
‘No, I haven’t,’ I said. ‘You don’t mean it’s true?’ He certainly wasn’t drunk now.
‘True enough,’ he said heavily. ‘The stuffs still up there – in a hole in the ground in Italy. I’d not like you to talk about it.’
‘I won’t,’ I promised.
‘Come and have a drink,’ he suggested.
‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m going home now.’
He seemed depressed. ‘All right,’ he said, and I watched him walk lethargically up to the club house.
After that, he couldn’t seem to keep away from me. It was as though he had delivered a part of himself into my keeping and he had to watch me to see that I kept it safe. He acted as though we were partners in a conspiracy, with many a nod and wink and a sudden change of subject if he thought we were being overheard.
He wasn’t so bad when you got to know him, if you discounted the incipient alcoholism. He had a certain charm when he wanted to use it and he most surely set out to charm me. I don’t suppose it was difficult; I was a stranger in a strange land and he was company of sorts.
He ought to have been an actor for he had the gift of mimicry. When he told me the story of the gold his mobile face altered plastically and his voice changed until I could see the bull-headed Coertze, gentle Donato and the tougher-fibred Alberto. Although Walker had normally a slight trace of a South African accent, he could drop it at will to take on the heavy gutturals of the Afrikaner or the speed and sibilance of the Italian. His Italian was rapid and fluent and he was probably one of those people who can learn a language in a matter of weeks.
I had lost most of my doubts about the truth of his story. It was too damned circumstantial. The bit about the inscription on the cigarette case impressed me a lot; I couldn’t see Walker making up a thing like that. Besides, it wasn’t the brandy talking all the time; he still stuck to the same story, which didn’t change a fraction under many repetitions – drunk and sober.
Once I said, ‘The only thing I can’t figure is that big crown.’
‘Alberto thought it was the royal crown of Ethiopia,’ said Walker. ‘It wouldn’t be worn about the palace – they’d only use it for coronations.’
That sounded logical. I said, ‘How do you know that the others haven’t dug up the lot? There’s still Harrison and Parker – and it would be dead easy for the two Italians; they’re on the spot.’
Walker shook his head. ‘No, there’s only Coertze and me. The others were killed.’ His lips twisted. ‘It seemed to be unhealthy to stick close to Coertze. I got scared in the end and beat it.’
I looked hard at him. ‘Do you mean to say that Coertze murdered them?’
‘Don’t put words in my mouth,’ said Walker sharply. ‘I didn’t say that. All I know is that four men were killed when they were close to Coertze.’ He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘Harrison was the first – that happened only three days after we buried the loot.’
He tapped a second finger. ‘Next came Alberto – I saw that happen. It was as near an accident as anyone could arrange. Then Parker. He was killed in action just like Harrison, and, just like Harrison, the only person who was anywhere near him was Coertze.’
He held up three fingers and slowly straightened the fourth. ‘Last was Donato. He was found near the camp with his head bashed in. They said he’d been rock-climbing, so the verdict was accidental death – but not in my book. That was enough for me, so I quit and went south.’
I thought about this for a while, then said, ‘What did you mean when you said you saw Alberto killed?’
‘We’d been on a raid,’ said Walker. ‘It went O.K. but the Germans moved fast and got us boxed in. We had to get out by the back door, and the back door was a cliff. Coertze was good on a mountain and he and Alberto went first, Coertze leading. He said he wanted to find the easiest way down, which was all right – he usually did that.
‘He went along a ledge and out of sight, then he came back and gave Alberto the O.K. sign. Then he came back to tell us it was all right to start down, so Parker and I went next. We followed Alberto and when we got round the corner we saw that he was stuck.
‘There were no hand holds ahead of him and he’d got himself into a position where he couldn’t get back, either. Just as we got there he lost his nerve – we could see him quivering and shaking. There he was, like a fly on the side of that cliff with a hell of a long drop under him and a pack of Germans ready to drop on top of him, and he was shaking like a jelly.
‘Parker shouted to Coertze and he came down. There was just room enough for him to pass us, so he said he’d go to help Alberto. He got as far as Alberto and Alberto fell off. I swear that Coertze pushed him.’
‘Did you see Coertze push him?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Walker admitted. ‘I couldn’t see Alberto at all once Coertze had passed us. Coertze’s a big bloke and he isn’t made of glass. But why did he give Alberto the O.K. sign to go along that ledge?’
‘It could have been an honest mistake.’
Walker nodded. ‘That’s what I thought at the time. Coertze said afterwards that he didn’t mean that Alberto should go as far as that. There was an easier way down just short of where Alberto got stuck. Coertze took us down there.’
He lit a cigarette. ‘But when Parker was shot up the following week I started to think again.’
‘How did it happen?’
Walker shrugged. ‘The usual thing – you know how it is in a fight. When it was all over we found Parker had a hole in his head. Nobody saw it happen, but Coertze was nearest.’ He paused. ‘The hole was in the back of the head.’
‘A German bullet?’
Walker snorted. ‘Brother, we didn’t have time for an autopsy; but it wouldn’t have made any difference. We were using German weapons and ammo – captured stuff; and Coertze always used German guns; he said they were better than the British.’ He brooded. ‘That started me thinking seriously. It was all too pat – all these blokes being knocked off so suddenly. When Donato got his, I quit. The Foreign Legion was just about busted anyway. I waited until the Count had sent Coertze off somewhere, then I collected my gear, said goodbye and headed south to the Allied lines. I was lucky – I got through.’
‘What about Coertze?’
‘He stayed with the Count until the Yanks came up. I saw him in Jo’burg a couple of years ago. I was crossing the road to go into a pub when I saw Coertze going through the door. I changed my mind; I had a drink, but not in that pub.’
He shivered suddenly. ‘I want to stay as far from Coertze as I can. There’s a thousand miles between Cape Town and Johannesburg – that ought to be enough.’ He stood up suddenly. ‘Let’s go and have a drink, for God’s sake.’
So we went and had a drink – several drinks.
V
During the next few weeks I could see that Walker was on the verge of making me a proposition. He said he had some money due to him and that he would need a good friend. At last he came out with it.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘My old man died last year and I’ve got two thousand pounds coming when I can get it out of the lawyer’s hands. I could go to Italy on two thousand pounds.’
‘So you could,’ I said.
He bit his lip. ‘Hal, I want you to come with 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 back with us,’ she said.
But two months later the blow fell.
I had designed a boat for Bill Meadows and had sent him the drawings for approval. By mishap the accommodation plans had been left out of the packet, so Jean volunteered to take them to Fish Hoek where Bill lives.
It’s a nice drive to Fish Hoek along the Chapman’s Peak road with views of sea and mountain, far better than anything I have since seen on the Riviera. Jean delivered the drawings and on the way back in the twilight a drunken oaf in a high-powered American car forced her off the road and she fell three hundred feet into the sea.
The bottom dropped out of my life.
It meant nothing to me that the driver of the other car got five years for manslaughter – that wouldn’t bring Jean back. I let things slide at the yard and if it hadn’t been for Harry Marshall the business would have gone to pot.
It was then that I tallied up my life and made a sort of mental balance sheet. I was thirty-six years old; I had a good business which I had liked but which now I didn’t seem to like so much; I had my health and strength – boat-building and sailing tend to keep one physically fit – and I had no debts. I even had money in the bank with more rolling in all the time.
On the other side of the balance sheet was the dreadful absence of Jean, which more than counter-balanced all the advantages.
I felt I couldn’t stay at the yard or even in Cape Town, where memories of Jean would haunt me at every corner. I wanted to get away. I was waiting for something to happen.
I was ripe for mischief.
VII
A couple of weeks later I was in a bar on Adderley Street having a drink or three. It wasn’t that I’d taken to drink, but I was certainly drinking more than I had been accustomed to. I had just started on my third brandy when I felt a touch at my elbow and a voice said, ‘Hallo, I haven’t seen you for a long time.’
I turned and found Walker standing next to me.
The years hadn’t dealt kindly with Walker. He was thinner, his dark, good looks had gone to be replaced by a sharpness of feature, and his hairline had receded. His clothes were unpressed and frayed at the edges, and there was an air of seediness about him which was depressing.
‘Hallo,’ I said. ‘Where did you spring from?’ He was looking at my full glass of brandy, so I said, ‘Have a drink.’
‘Thanks,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll have a double.’
That gave me a pretty firm clue as to what had happened to Walker, but I didn’t mind being battened upon for a couple of drinks, so I paid for the double brandy.
He raised the glass to his lips with a hand that trembled slightly, took a long lingering gulp, then put the glass down, having knocked back three-quarters of the contents. ‘You’re looking prosperous,’ he said.
‘I’m not doing too badly.’
He said, ‘I was sorry to hear of what happened to your wife.’ He hurried on as he saw my look of inquiry. ‘I read about it in the paper. I thought it must have been your wife – the name was the same and all that.’
I thought he had spent some time hunting me up. Old friends and acquaintances are precious to an alcoholic; they can be touched for the odd drink and the odd fiver.
‘That’s finished and best forgotten,’ I said shortly. Unwittingly, perhaps, he had touched me on the raw – he had brought Jean back. ‘What are you doing now?’
He shrugged. ‘This and that.’
‘You haven’t picked up any gold lately?’ I said cruelly. I wanted to pay him back for putting Jean in my mind.
‘Do I look as though I have?’ he asked bitterly. Unexpectedly, he said, ‘I saw Coertze last week.’
‘Here – in Cape Town?’
‘Yes. He’d just come back from Italy. He’s back in Jo’burg now, I expect.’
I smiled. ‘Did he have any gold with him?’
Walker shook his head. ‘He said that nothing’s changed.’ He suddenly gripped me by the arm. ‘The gold’s still there – nobody’s found it. It’s still there – four tons of gold in that tunnel – and all the jewels.’ He had a frantic urgency about him.
‘Well, why doesn’t he do something about it?’ I said. ‘Why doesn’t he go and get it out? Why don’t you both go?’
‘He doesn’t like me,’ said Walker sulkily. ‘He’ll hardly speak to me.’ He took one of my cigarettes from the packet on the counter, and I lit it for him, amusedly. ‘It isn’t easy to get it out of the country,’ he said. ‘Even Sergeant High-and-Mighty Coertze hasn’t found a way.’
He grinned tightly. ‘Imagine that,’ he said, almost gaily. ‘Even the brainy Coertze can’t do it. He put the gold in a hole in the ground and he’s too scared to get it out.’ He began to laugh hysterically.
I took his arm. ‘Take it easy.’
His laughter choked off suddenly. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Buy me another drink; I left my wallet at home.’
I crooked my finger at the bartender and Walker ordered another double. I was beginning to understand the reason for his degradation. For fourteen years the knowledge that a fortune in gold was lying in Italy waiting to be picked up had been eating at him like a cancer. Even when I knew him ten years earlier I was aware of the fatal weakness in him, and now one could see that the bitterness of defeat had been too much. I wondered how Coertze was standing up to the strain. At least he seemed to be doing something about it, even if only keeping an eye on the situation.
I said carefully, ‘If Coertze was willing to take you, would you be prepared to go to Italy to get the stuff out?’
He was suddenly very still. ‘What d’you mean?’ he demanded. ‘Have you been talking to Coertze?’
‘I’ve never laid eyes on the man.’
Walker’s glance shifted nervously about the bar, then he straightened. ‘Well, if he … wanted me; if he … needed me – I’d be prepared to go along.’ He said this with bravado but the malice showed through when he said, ‘He needed me once, you know; he needed me when we buried the stuff.’
‘You wouldn’t be afraid of him?’
‘What do you mean – afraid of him? Why should I be afraid of him? I’m afraid of nobody.’
‘You were pretty certain he’d committed at least four murders.’
He seemed put out. ‘Oh that! That was a long time ago. And I never said he’d murdered anybody. I never said it.’
‘No, you never actually said it.’
He shifted nervously on the bar stool. ‘Oh, what’s the use? He won’t ask me to go with him. He said as much last week.’
‘Oh, yes, he will,’ I said softly.
Walker looked up quickly. ‘Why should he?’
I said quietly, ‘Because I know of a way of getting that gold out of Italy and of taking it anywhere in the world, quite simply and relatively safely.’
His eyes widened. ‘What is it? How can you do it?’
‘I’m not going to tell you,’ I said equably. ‘After all, you wouldn’t tell me where the gold’s hidden.’
‘Well, let’s do it,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you where it is, you get it out, and Bob’s your uncle. Why bring Coertze into it?’
‘It’s a job for more than two men,’ I said. ‘Besides, he deserves a share – he’s been keeping an eye on the gold for fourteen years, which is a damn’ sight more than you’ve been doing.’ I failed to mention that I considered Walker the weakest of reeds. ‘Now, how will you get on with Coertze if this thing goes through?’
He turned sulky. ‘All right, I suppose, if he lays off me. But I won’t stand for any of his sarcasm.’ He looked at me in wonder as though what we were talking about had just sunk in. ‘You mean there’s a chance we can get the stuff out – a real chance?’
I nodded and got off the bar stool. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me.’
‘Where are you going?’ he asked quickly.
‘To phone the airline office,’ I said. ‘I want a seat on tomorrow’s Jo’burg plane. I’m going to see Coertze.’
The sign I had been waiting for had arrived.
TWO: COERTZE (#ulink_c454e8a8-194e-56df-8342-5f5ec6becbd8)
Air travel is wonderful. At noon the next day I was booking into a hotel in Johannesburg, a thousand miles from Cape Town.
On the plane I had thought a lot about Coertze. I had made up my mind that if he didn’t bite then the whole thing was off – I couldn’t see myself relying on Walker. And I had to decide how to handle him – from Walker’s account he was a pretty tough character. I didn’t mind that; I could be tough myself when the occasion arose, but I didn’t want to antagonize him. He would probably be as suspicious as hell, and I’d need kid gloves.
Then there was another thing – the financing of the expedition. I wanted to hang on to the boatyard as insurance in case this whole affair flopped, but I thought if I cut Harry Marshall in for a partnership in the yard, sold my house and my car and one or two other things, I might be able to raise about £25,000 – not too much for what I had in mind.
But it all depended on Coertze. I smiled when I considered where he was working. He had a job in Central Smelting Plant which refined gold from all the mines on the Reef. More gold had probably passed through his hands in the last few years than all the Axis war-lords put together had buried throughout the world.
It must have been tantalizing for him.
I phoned the smelting plant in the afternoon. There was a pause before he came on the line. ‘Coertze,’ he said briefly.
I came to the point. ‘My name’s Halloran,’ I said. ‘A mutual friend – Mr Walker of Cape Town – tells me you have been experiencing difficulty in arranging for the delivery of goods from Italy. I’m in the import-export business; I thought I might be able to help you.’
A deep silence bored into my ear.
I said, ‘My firm is fully equipped to do this sort of work. We never have much trouble with the Customs in cases like these.’
It was like dropping a stone into a very deep well and listening for the splash.
‘Why don’t you come to see me,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to take up your time now; I’m sure you’re a busy man. Come at seven this evening and we’ll discuss your difficulties over dinner. I’m staying at the Regency – it’s in Berea, in …’
‘I know where it is,’ said Coertze. His voice was deep and harsh with a guttural Afrikaans accent.
‘Good; I’ll be expecting you,’ I said, and put down the phone.
I was pleased with this first contact. Coertze was suspicious and properly so – he’d have been a fool not to be. But if he came to the hotel he’d be hooked, and all I had to do would be to jerk on the line and set the hook in firmly.
I was pretty certain he’d come; human curiosity would see to that. If he didn’t come, then he wouldn’t be human – or he’d be superhuman.
He came, but not at seven o’clock and I was beginning to doubt my judgement of the frailty of human nature. It was after eight when he knocked on the door, identified me, and said, ‘We’ll forget the dinner; I’ve eaten.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘But what about a drink?’ I crossed the room and put my hand on the brandy bottle. I was pretty certain it would be brandy – most South Africans drink it.
‘I’ll have a Scotch,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘Thanks,’ he added as an afterthought.
As I poured the drinks I glanced at him. He was a bulky man, broad of chest and heavy in the body. His hair was black and rather coarse and he had a shaggy look about him. I’d bet that when stripped he’d look like a grizzly bear. His eyebrows were black and straight over eyes of a snapping electric blue. He had looked after himself better than Walker; his belly was flat and there was a sheen of health about him.
I handed him a drink and we sat down facing each other. He was tense and wary, although he tried to disguise it by over-relaxing in his chair. We were like a couple of duellists who have just engaged blades.
‘I’ll come to the point,’ I said. ‘A long time ago Walker told me a very interesting story about some gold. That was ten years ago and we were going to do something about it, but it didn’t pan out. That might have been lucky because we’d have certainly made a botch of the job.’
I pointed my finger at him. ‘You’ve been keeping an eye on it. You’ve probably popped across to Italy from time to time just to keep your eye on things in general. You’ve been racking your brains trying to think of a way of getting that gold out of Italy, but you haven’t been able to do it. You’re stymied.’
His face had not changed expression; he would have made a good poker player. He said, ‘When did you see Walker?’
‘Yesterday – in Cape Town.’
The craggy face broke into a derisive grin. ‘And you flew up to Jo’burg to see me just because a dronkie like Walker told you a cock-and-bull story like that? Walker’s a no-good hobo; I see a dozen like him in the Library Gardens every day,’ he said contemptuously.
‘It’s not a cock-and-bull story, and I can prove it.’
Coertze just sat and looked at me like a stone gargoyle, the whisky glass almost lost in his huge fist.
I said, ‘What are you doing here – in this room? If there was no story, all you had to do was to ask me what the hell I was talking about when I spoke to you on the phone. The fact that you’re here proves there’s something in it.’
He made a fast decision. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What’s your proposition?’
I said, ‘You still haven’t figured a way of moving four tons of gold out of Italy. Is that right?’
He smiled slowly. ‘Let’s assume so,’ he said ironically.
‘I’ve got a foolproof way.’
He put down his glass and produced a packet of cigarettes. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m not going to tell you – yet.’
He grinned. ‘Walker hasn’t told you where the gold is, has he?’
‘No, he hasn’t,’ I admitted. ‘But he would if I put pressure on him. Walker can’t stand pressure; you know that.’
‘He drinks too much,’ said Coertze. ‘And when he drinks he talks; I’ll bet that’s how he came to spill his guts to you.’ He lit his cigarette. ‘What do you want out of it?’
‘Equal shares,’ I said firmly. ‘A three-way split after all expenses have been paid.’
‘And Walker comes with us on the job. Is that right?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Coertze moved in his chair. ‘Man, it’s like this,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if you’ve got a foolproof way of getting the gold out or if you haven’t. I thought I had it licked a couple of times. But let’s assume your way is going to work. Why should we take Walker?’
He held up his hand. ‘I’m not suggesting we do him down or anything like that – although he’d think nothing of cheating us. Give him his share after it’s all over, but for God’s sake keep him out of Italy. He’ll make a balls-up for sure.’
I thought of Harrison and Parker and the two Italians. ‘You don’t seem to like him.’
Coertze absently fingered a scar on his forehead. ‘He’s unreliable,’ he said. ‘He almost got me killed a couple of times during the war.’
I said, ‘No, we take Walker. I don’t know for certain if three of us can pull it off, and with two it would be impossible. Unless you want to let someone else in?’
He smiled humourlessly. ‘That’s not on – not with you coming in. But Walker had better keep his big mouth shut from now on.’
‘Perhaps it would be better if he stopped drinking,’ I suggested.
‘That’s right,’ Coertze agreed. ‘Keep him off the pots. A few beers are all right, but keep him off the hard-tack. That’ll be your job; I don’t want to have anything to do with the rat.’
He blew smoke into the air, and said, ‘Now let’s hear your proposition. If it’s good, I’ll come in with you. If I don’t think it’ll work, I won’t touch it. In that case, you and Walker can do what you damn’ well like, but if you go for that gold you’ll have me to reckon with. I’m a bad bastard when I’m crossed.’
‘So am I,’ I said.
We grinned at each other. I liked this man, in a way. I wouldn’t trust him any more than I’d trust Walker, but I had the feeling that while Walker would stick a knife in your back, Coertze would at least shoot you down from the front.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s have it.’
‘I’m not going to tell you – not here in this room,’ I saw his expression and hurried on. ‘It isn’t that I don’t trust you, it’s simply that you wouldn’t believe it. You have to see it – and you have to see it in Cape Town.’
He looked at me for a long moment, then said, ‘All right, if that’s the way you want it, I’ll play along.’ He paused to think. ‘I’ve got a good job here, and I’m not going to give it up on your say-so. There’s a long week-end coming up – that gives me three days off. I’ll fly down to Cape Town to see what you have to show me. If it’s good, the job can go hang; if it isn’t, then I’ve still got the job.’
‘I’ll pay for your fare,’ I said.
‘I can afford it,’ he grunted.
‘If it doesn’t pan out, I’ll pay for your fare,’ I insisted. ‘I wouldn’t want you to be out of pocket.’
He looked up and grinned. ‘We’ll get along,’ he said. ‘Where’s that bottle?’
As I was pouring another couple of drinks, he said, ‘You said you were going to Italy with Walker. What stopped you?’
I took the clipping from my pocket and passed it to him. He read it and laughed. ‘That must have scared Walker. I was there at the time,’ he said unexpectedly.
‘In Italy?’
He sipped the Scotch and nodded. ‘Yes; I saved my army back-pay and my gratuity and went back in ’48. As soon as I got there all hell started popping about this trial. I read about it in the papers and you never heard such a lot of bull in your life. Still, I thought I’d better lie low, so I had a lekker holiday with the Count.’
‘With the Count?’ I said in surprise.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I stay with the Count every time I go to Italy. I’ve been there four times now.’
I said, ‘How did you reckon to dispose of the gold once you got it out of Italy?’
‘I’ve got all that planned,’ he said confidently. ‘They’re always wanting gold in India and you get a good price. You’d be surprised at the amount of gold smuggled out of this country in small packets that ends up in India.’
He was right – India is the gold sink of the world – but I said casually, ‘My idea is to go the other way – to Tangier. It’s an open port with an open gold market. You should be able to sell four tons of gold there quite easily – and it’s legal, too. No trouble with the police.’
He looked at me with respect. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t know much about this international finance.’
‘There’s a snag,’ I said. ‘Tangier is closing up shop next year; it’s being taken over by Morocco. Then it won’t be a free port any more and the gold market will close.’
‘When next year?’
‘April 19,’ I said. ‘Nine months from now. I think we’ll just about have enough time.’
He smiled. ‘I never thought about selling the gold legally; I didn’t think you could. I thought the governments had got all that tied up. Maybe I should have met you sooner.’
‘It wouldn’t have done you any good,’ I said. ‘I hadn’t the brains then that I have now.’
He laughed and we proceeded to kill the bottle.
II
Coertze came down to Cape Town two weeks later. I met him at the airport and drove him directly to the yard, where Walker was waiting.
Walker seemed to shrink into himself when I told him that Coertze was visiting us. In spite of his braggart boasts, I could see he didn’t relish close contact. If half of what he had said about Coertze was true, then he had every reason to be afraid.
Come to think of it – so had I!
It must have been the first time that Coertze had been in a boatyard and he looked about him with keen interest and asked a lot of questions, nearly all of them sensible. At last, he said, ‘Well, what about it?’
I took them down to the middle slip where Jimmy Murphy’s Estralita was waiting to be drawn up for an overhaul. ‘That’s a sailing yacht,’ I said. ‘A 15-tonner. What would you say her draft it – I mean, how deep is she in the water?’
Coertze looked her over and then looked up at the tall mast. ‘She’ll need to be deep to counterbalance that lot,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know how much. I don’t know anything about boats.’
Considering he didn’t know anything about boats, it was a very sensible answer.
‘Her draft is six feet in normal trim,’ I said. ‘She’s drawing less now because a lot of gear has been taken out of her.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘I’d have thought it would be more than that,’ he said. ‘What happens when the wind blows hard on the sails? Won’t she tip over?’
This was going well and Coertze was on the ball. I said, ‘I have a boat like this just being built, another 15-tonner. Come and have a look at her.’
I led the way up to the shed where Sanford was being built and Coertze followed, apparently content that I was leading up to a point. Walker tagged on behind.
I had pressed to get Sanford completed and she was ready for launching as soon as the glass-fibre sheathing was applied and the interior finished.
Coertze looked up at her. ‘They look bloody big out of the water,’ he commented.
I smiled. That was the usual lay reaction. ‘Come aboard,’ I said.
He was impressed by the spaciousness he found below and commented favourably on the way things were arranged. ‘Did you design all this?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘You could live in here, all right,’ he said, inspecting the galley.
‘You could – and you will,’ I said. ‘This is the boat in which we’re going to take four tons of gold out of Italy.’
He looked surprised and then he frowned. ‘Where are you going to put it?’
I said, ‘Sit down and I’ll tell you something about sailing boats you don’t know.’ Coertze sat uncomfortably on the edge of the starboard settee which had no mattress as yet, and waited for me to explain myself.
‘This boat displaces – weighs, that is – ten tons, and …’
Walker broke in. ‘I thought you said she was a 15-tonner.’
‘That’s Thames measure – yacht measure. Her displacement is different.’
Coertze looked at Walker. ‘Shut up and let the man speak.’ He turned to me. ‘If the boat weighs ten tons and you add another four tons, she’ll be pretty near sinking, won’t she? And where are you going to put it? It can’t be out in the open where the cops can see it.’
I said patiently, ‘I said I’d tell you something about sailing boats that you didn’t know. Now, listen – about forty per cent of the weight of any sailing boat is ballast to keep her the right way up when the wind starts to press on those sails.’
I tapped the cabin sole with my foot. ‘Hanging on the bottom of this boat is a bloody great piece of lead weighing precisely four tons.’
Coertze looked at me incredulously, a dawning surmise in his eyes. I said, ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’
We went outside and I showed them the lead ballast keel. I said, ‘All this will be covered up next week because the boat will be sheathed to keep out the marine borers.’
Coertze was squatting on his heels looking at the keel. ‘This is it,’ he said slowly. ‘This is it. The gold will be hidden under water – built in as part of the boat.’ He began to laugh, and after a while Walker joined in. I began to laugh, too, and the walls of the shed resounded.
Coertze sobered suddenly. ‘What’s the melting point of lead?’ he asked abruptly.
I knew what was coming. ‘Four-fifty degrees centigrade,’ I said. ‘We’ve got a little foundry at the top of the yard where we pour the keels.’
‘Ja,’ he said heavily. ‘You can melt lead on a kitchen stove. But gold melts at over a thousand centigrade and we’ll need more than a kitchen stove for that. I know; melting gold is my job. Up at the smelting plant we’ve got bloody big furnaces.’
I said quickly, ‘I’ve thought of that one, too. Come up to the workshop – I’ll show you something else you’ve never seen before.’
In the workshop I opened a cupboard and said, ‘This gadget is brand new – just been invented.’ I hauled out the contraption and put it on the bench. Coertze looked at it uncomprehendingly.
There wasn’t much to see; just a metal box, eighteen inches by fifteen inches by nine inches, on the top of which was an asbestos mat and a Heath Robinson arrangement of clamps.
I said, ‘You’ve heard of instant coffee – this is instant heat.’ I began to get the machine ready for operation. ‘It needs cooling water at at least five pounds an inch pressure – that we get from an ordinary tap. It works on ordinary electric current, too, so you can set it up anywhere.’
I took the heart of the machine from a drawer. Again, it wasn’t much to look at; just a piece of black cloth, three inches by four. I said, ‘Some joker in the States discovered how to spin and weave threads of pure graphite, and someone else discovered this application.’
I lifted the handle on top of the machine, inserted the graphite mat, and clamped it tight. Then I took a bit of metal and gave it to Coertze.
He turned it in his fingers and said, ‘What is it?’
‘Just a piece of ordinary mild steel. But if this gadget can melt steel, it can melt gold. Right?’
He nodded and looked at the machine dubiously – it wasn’t very impressive.
I took the steel from his fingers and dropped it on to the graphite mat, then I gave Walker and Coertze a pair of welders’ goggles each. ‘Better put these on: it gets a bit bright.’
We donned the goggles and I switched on the machine. It was a spectacular display. The graphite mat flashed instantly to a white heat and the piece of steel glowed red, then yellow and finally white. It seemed to slump like a bit of melting wax and in less than fifteen seconds it had melted into a little pool. All this to the accompaniment of a violent shower of sparks as the metal reacted with the air.
I switched off the machine and removed my goggles. ‘We won’t have all these fireworks when we melt gold; it doesn’t oxidize as easily as iron.’
Coertze was staring at the machine. ‘How does it do that?’
‘Something like a carbon arc,’ I said. ‘You can get temperatures up to five thousand degrees centigrade. It’s only intended to be a laboratory instrument, but I reckon we can melt two pounds of gold at a time. With three of these gadgets and a hell of a lot of spare mats we should be able to work pretty fast.’
He said doubtfully, ‘If we can only pour a couple of pounds at a time, the keel is going to be so full of cracks and flaws that I’m not sure it won’t break under its own weight.’
‘I’ve thought of that one, too,’ I said calmly. ‘Have you ever watched anyone pour reinforced concrete?’
He frowned and then caught on, snapping his fingers.
‘We make the mould and put a mesh of wires inside,’ I said. ‘That’ll hold it together.’
I showed him a model I had made, using fuse wire and candle wax, which he examined carefully. ‘You’ve done a hell of a lot of thinking about this,’ he said at last.
‘Somebody has to,’ I said. ‘Or that gold will stay where it is for another fourteen years.’
He didn’t like that because it made him appear stupid; but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He started to say something and bit it short, his face flushing red. Then he took a deep breath and said, ‘All right, you’ve convinced me. I’m in.’
Then I took a deep breath – of relief.
III
That night we had a conference.
I said, ‘This is the drill. Sanford – my yacht – will be ready for trials next week. As soon as the trials are over you two are going to learn how to sail under my instruction. In under four months from now we sail for Tangier.’
‘Christ!’ said Walker. ‘I don’t know that I like the sound of that.’
‘There’s nothing to it,’ I said. ‘Hundreds of people are buzzing about the Atlantic these days. Hell, people have gone round the world in boats a quarter the size.’
I looked at Coertze. ‘This is going to take a bit of financing. Got any money?’
‘About a thousand,’ he admitted.
‘That gets tossed into the kitty,’ I said. ‘Along with my twenty-five thousand.’
‘Magtig,’ he said. ‘That’s a hell of a lot of money.’
‘We’ll need every penny of it,’ I said. ‘We might have to buy a small boatyard in Italy if that’s the only way we can cast the keel in secrecy. Besides, I’m lending it to the firm of Walker, Coertze and Halloran at one hundred per cent interest. I want fifty thousand back before the three-way split begins. You can do the same with your thousand.’
‘That sounds fair enough,’ agreed Coertze.
I said, ‘Walker hasn’t any money and once you’ve thrown your thousand in the kitty, neither have you. So I’m putting you both on my payroll. You’ve got to have your smokes and three squares a day while all this is going on.’
This bit of information perked Walker up considerably. Coertze merely nodded in confirmation. I looked hard at Walker. ‘And you stay off the booze or we drop you over the side. Don’t forget that.’
He nodded sullenly.
Coertze said, ‘Why are we going to Tangier first?’
‘We’ve got to make arrangements to remelt the gold into standard bars,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine any banker calmly taking a golden keel into stock. Anyway, that’s for the future; right now I have to turn you into passable seamen – we’ve got to get to the Mediterranean first.’
I took Sanford on trials and Walker and Coertze came along for the ride and to see what they were letting themselves in for. She turned out to be everything I’ve ever wanted in a boat. She was fast for a deep-sea cruiser and not too tender. With a little sail adjustment she had just the right amount of helm and I could see she was going to be all right without any drastic changes.
As we went into a long reach she picked up speed and went along happily with the water burbling along the lee rail and splashing on deck. Walker, his face a little green, said, ‘I thought you said a keel would hold this thing upright.’ He was hanging tightly on to the side of the cockpit.
I laughed. I was happier than I had been for a long time. ‘Don’t worry about that. That’s not much angle of heel. She won’t capsize.’
Coertze didn’t say anything – he was busy being sick.
The next three months were rough and tough. People forget that the Cape was the Cape of Storms before some early public relations officer changed the name to the Cape of Good Hope. When the Berg Wind blows it can be as uncomfortable at sea as anywhere in the world.
I drove Walker and Coertze unmercifully. In three months I had to turn them into capable seamen, because Sanford was a bit too big to sail single-handed. I hoped that the two of them would equal one able-bodied seaman. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds because in those three months they put in as much sea time as the average week-end yachtsman gets in three years, and they had the dubious advantage of having a pitiless instructor.
Shore time was spent in learning the theory of sail and the elements of marline-spike seamanship – how to knot and splice, mend a sail and make baggywrinkle. They grumbled a little at the theory, but I silenced that by asking them what they’d do if I was washed overboard in the middle of the Atlantic.
Then we went out to practise what I had taught – at first in the bay and then in the open sea, cruising coastwise around the peninsula at first, and then for longer distances well out of sight of land.
I had thought that Coertze would prove to be as tough at sea as apparently he was on land. But he was no sailor and never would be. He had a queasy stomach and couldn’t stand the motion, so he turned out to be pretty useless at boat handling. But he was hero enough to be our cook on the longer voyages, a thankless job for a sea-sick man.
I would hear him swearing below when the weather was rough and a pot of hot coffee was tossed in his lap. He once told me that he now knew what poker dice felt like when they were shaken in the cup. He wouldn’t have stood it for any lesser reason, but the lust for gold was strong in him.
Walker was the real surprise. Coertze and I had weaned him from his liquor over many protests, and he was now eating more and the air and exercise agreed with him. He put on weight, his thin cheeks filled out and his chest broadened. Nothing could replace the hair he had lost, but he seemed a lot more like the handsome young man I had known ten years earlier.
More surprisingly, he turned out to be a natural sailor. He liked Sanford and she seemed to like him. He was a good helmsman and could lay her closer to the wind than I could when we were beating to windward. At first I was hesitant to give him a free hand with Sanford, but as he proved himself I lost my reluctance.
At last we were ready and there was nothing more to wait for. We provisioned Sanford and set sail for the north on November 12, to spend Christmas at sea. Ahead of us was a waste of water with the beckoning lure of four tons of gold at the other side.
I suppose one could have called it a pleasure cruise!
BOOK TWO The Gold (#ulink_3053a2c7-3b40-5f71-983d-3dc91509154b)
THREE: TANGIER (#ulink_5fb1e51d-920b-5834-94c9-4bda076fe1ff)
Two months later we sailed into Tangier harbour, the ‘Q’ flag hoisted, and waited for the doctor to give us pratique and for the Customs to give us the once-over. To port of Sanford was the modern city with its sleek, contemporary buildings sharply outlined against the sky. To starboard was the old city – the Arab city – squat and low-roofed and hugging a hill, the skyline only broken by the up-flung spear of a minaret.
To port – Europe; to starboard – Africa.
This was nothing new to Walker and Coertze. They had sown a few wild oats in their army days, roistering in Cairo and Alexandria. On the voyage from Cape Town they had talked much about their army days – and all in Italian, too. We made it a rule to speak as much Italian as possible, and while the others were on a refresher course, I didn’t lag far behind even though I had to start from scratch.
We had settled on a good cover story to veil our activities in the Mediterranean. I was a South African boat builder on a cruise combining business with pleasure. I was thinking of expanding into the lucrative Mediterranean market and might buy a boatyard if the price and conditions were right. This story had the advantage of not departing too far from the truth and would serve if we really had to buy a yard to cast the golden keel.
Coertze was a mining man with medical trouble. His doctor had advised him to take a leisurely holiday and so he was crewing Sanford for me. His cover story would account for any interest he might take in derelict lead mines.
Walker, who proved to be something of an actor, was a moderately wealthy playboy. He had money but disliked work and was willing to go a long way to avoid it. He had come on this Mediterranean trip because he was bored with South Africa and wanted a change. It was to be his job to set things up in Tangier; to acquire a secluded house where we could complete the last stages of the operation.
All in all, I was quite satisfied, even though I had got a bit tired of Coertze on the way north. He didn’t like the way I seemed to be taking charge of things and I had to ram home very forcibly the fact that a ship can only have one skipper. He had seen the point when we ran into heavy weather off the Azores, and it galled him that the despised Walker was the better seaman.
Now we were in Tangier, he had recovered his form and was a bit more inclined to throw his weight around. I could see that I’d have to step on him again before long.
Walker looked about the yacht basin. ‘Not many sailing boats here,’ he commented.
That was true. There were a few ungainly-looking fishing boats and a smart ketch, probably bound for the Caribbean. But there were at least twenty big power craft, fast-looking boats, low on the water. I knew what they were.
This was the smuggling fleet. Cigarettes to Spain, cigarette lighters to France, antibiotics to where they could make a profit (although that trade had fallen off), narcotics to everywhere. I wondered if there was much arms smuggling to Algeria.
At last the officials came and went, leaving gouges in my planking from their hob-nailed boots. I escorted them to their launch, and as soon as they had left, Walker touched my arm.
‘We’ve got another visitor,’ he said.
I turned and saw a boat being sculled across the harbour. Walker said, ‘He was looking at us through glasses from that boat across there.’ He pointed to one of the motor craft. ‘Then he started to come here.’
I watched the approaching dinghy. A European was rowing and I couldn’t see his face, but as he dexterously backed water and swung round to the side of Sanford he looked up and I saw that it was Metcalfe.
Metcalfe is one of that international band of scallywags of whom there are about a hundred in the world. They are soldiers of fortune and they flock to the trouble spots, ignoring the danger and going for the money. I was not really surprised to see Metcalfe in Tangier; it had been a pirates’ stronghold from time immemorial and would be one of Metcalfe’s natural hang-outs.
I had known him briefly in South Africa but I didn’t know what he was at the time. All that I knew was that he was a damned good sailor who won a lot of dinghy races at Cape Town and who came close to winning the South African dinghy championship. He bought one of my Falcons and had spent a lot of time at the yard tuning it.
I had liked him and had crewed for him a couple of times. We had had many a drink together in the yacht club bar and he had spent a week-end at Kirstenbosche with Jean and myself. It was in the way of being a firmly ripening friendship between us when he had left South Africa a hop, skip and a jump ahead of the police, who wanted to nail him on a charge of I.D.B. Since then I had not seen him, but I had heard passing mentions and had occasionally seen his name in the papers, usually quoted as being in trouble in some exotic hot-spot.
Now he was climbing on to the deck of Sanford.
‘I thought it was you,’ he said. ‘So I got the glasses to make sure. What are you doing here?’
‘Just idly cruising,’ I said. ‘Combining business with pleasure. I thought I might see what the prospects in the Med. are like.’
He grinned. ‘Brother, they’re good. But that’s not in your line, is it?’
I shook my head, and said, ‘Last I heard of you, you were in Cuba.’
‘I was in Havana for a bit,’ he said. ‘But that was no place for me. It was an honest revolution, or at least it was until the Commies moved in. I couldn’t compete with them, so I quit.’
‘What are you doing now?’
He smiled and looked at Walker. ‘I’ll tell you later.’
I said, ‘This is Walker and this is Coertze.’ There was handshaking all round and Metcalfe said, ‘It’s good to hear a South African accent again. You’d have a good country there if the police weren’t so efficient.’
He turned to me. ‘Where’s Jean?’
‘She’s dead,’ I said. ‘She was killed in a motor smash.’
‘How did it happen?’
So I told him of Chapman’s Peak and the drunken driver and the three-hundred-foot fall to the sea. As I spoke his face hardened, and when I had finished, he said, ‘So the bastard only got five years, and if he’s a good boy he’ll be out in three and a half.’
He rubbed his finger against the side of his nose. ‘I liked Jean,’ he said. ‘What’s the bludger’s name? I’ve got friends in South Africa who can see to him when he comes out.’
‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘That won’t bring Jean back.’
He nodded, then slapped his hands together. ‘Now you’re all staying with me at my place; I’ve got room enough for an army.’
I said hesitantly, ‘What about the boat?’
He smiled. ‘I see you’ve heard stories about the Tangier dock thieves. Well, let me tell you they’re all true. But that doesn’t matter; I’ll put one of my men on board. Nobody steals from my men – or me.’
He rowed back across the harbour and presently returned with a scar-faced Moroccan, to whom he spoke in quick and guttural Arabic. Then he said, ‘That’s all fixed. I’ll have the word passed round the docks that you’re friends of mine. Your boat’s safe enough, as safe as though it lay in your own yard.’
I believed him. I could believe he had a lot of pull in a place like Tangier.
‘Let’s go ashore,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry.’
‘So am I,’ said Coertze.
‘It’ll be a relief not to do any more cooking for a while, won’t it?’ I said.
‘Man,’ said Coertze, ‘I wouldn’t mind if I never saw a frypan again.’
‘That’s a pity,’ said Metcalfe. ‘I was looking forward to you making me some koeksusters; I always liked South African grub.’ He roared with laughter and slapped Coertze on the back.
Metcalfe had a big apartment on the Avenida de España, and he gave me a room to myself while Coertze and Walker shared a room. He stayed and chatted while I unpacked my bag.
‘South Africa too quiet for you?’ he asked.
I went into my carefully prepared standard talk on the reasons I had left. I had no reason to trust Metcalfe more than anyone else – probably less – judging by the kind of man he was. I don’t know whether he believed me or not, but he agreed that there was scope in the Mediterranean for a good boatyard.
‘You may not get as many commissions to build,’ he said. ‘But there certainly is room for a good servicing and maintenance yard. I’d go east, towards Greece, if I were you. The yards in the islands cater mostly for the local fishermen; there’s room for someone who understands yachts and yachtsmen.’
‘What have you got a boat for?’ I asked banteringly. ‘Hiring it out for charter cruises?’
He grinned. ‘Aw, you know me. I carry all sorts of cargoes; anything except narcotics.’ He pulled a face. ‘I’m a bad bastard, I know, but I draw the line at drugs. Anything else I’m game for.’
‘Including guns to Algeria,’ I hazarded.
He laughed. ‘The French in Algiers hate my guts – they tried to do me down a couple of months ago. I’d unloaded a cargo into some fishing boats and then I ran into Algiers to refuel. I was clean, see! they couldn’t touch me – my papers were in order and everything.’
‘I let the crew go ashore for a drink and I turned in and had a zizz. Then something woke me up – I heard a thump and then a queer noise that seemed to come from underneath the boat. So I got up and had a look around. When I got on deck I saw a boat pulling away and there seemed to be a man in the water, swimming alongside it.’
He grinned. ‘Well, I’m a careful and cautious man, so I got my snorkel and my swim-fins and went over the side to have a look-see. What do you think those French Security bastards had done to me?’
I shook my head. ‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘They’d put a limpet mine on my stern gear. They must have reckoned that if they couldn’t nail me down legally they’d do it illegally. If that thing went off it would blow the bottom out of my stern. Well, I got it off the boat and did a bit of heavy thinking. I knew they wouldn’t have timed it to blow up in harbour – it wouldn’t have looked nice – so I reckoned it was set to blow after I left.
‘I slung it round my neck by the cord and swam across the harbour to where the police patrol boat was lying and stuck it under their stern. Let them have the trouble of buying a new boat.
‘Next day we left early as planned and, as we moved out, I heard the police boat revving up. They followed us a long way while I was taking it nice and easy, cruising at about ten knots so they wouldn’t lose me. They hung on to my tail for about thirty miles, waiting for the bang and laughing to themselves fit to bust, I suppose. But they didn’t laugh when the bang came and blew the arse off their own boat.
‘I turned and picked them up. It was all good clean fun – no one was hurt. When I’d got them out of the water I took them back to Algiers – the noble rescuer. You ought to have seen the faces of the Security boys when I pitched up. Of course, they had to go through the motions of thanking me for rescuing those lousy, shipwrecked mariners. I kept a straight face and said I thought it must have been one of the antisubmarine depth charges in the stern that had gone off. They said it couldn’t have been that because police boats don’t carry depth charges. And that was that.’
He chuckled. ‘No, they don’t like me in Algiers.’
I laughed with him. It was a good story and he had told it well.
I was in two minds about Metcalfe; he had his advantages and his disadvantages. On the one hand, he could give us a lot of help in Tangier; he knew the ropes and had the contacts. On the other hand, we had to be careful he didn’t get wind of what we were doing. He was a hell of a good chap and all that, but if he knew we were going to show up with four tons of gold he would hijack us without a second thought. We were his kind of meat.
Yes, we had to be very careful in our dealings with Mr Metcalfe. I made a mental note to tell the others not to let anything drop in his presence.
I said, ‘What kind of boat have you got?’
‘A Fairmile,’ he said. ‘I’ve re-engined it, of course.’
I knew of the Fairmiles, but I had never seen one close up. They had been built in the hundreds during the war for harbour defence. The story was that they were built by the mile and cut off as needed. They were 112 feet overall with powerful engines and could work up over twenty knots easily, but they had the reputation of being bad rollers in a cross sea. They were not armoured or anything like that, being built of wood, and when a few of them went into St Nazaire with the Campbelltown they got shot up very badly.
After the war you could buy a surplus Fairmile for about five thousand quid and they had become a favourite with the smugglers of Tangier. If Metcalfe had re-engined his Fairmile, he had probably gone for power to outrun the revenue cutters and his boat would be capable of at least twenty-six knots in an emergency. Sanford would have no chance of outrunning a boat like that if it came to the push.
‘I’d like to see her sometime,’ I said. There was no harm in looking over a potential enemy.
‘Sure,’ said Metcalfe expansively. ‘But not just yet. I’m going out tomorrow night.’
That was good news – with Metcalfe out of the way we might be able to go about our business undisturbed. ‘When are you coming back?’ I asked.
‘Some time next week,’ he said. ‘Depending on the wind and the rain and suchlike things.’
‘Such as those French Security bastards?’
‘That’s right,’ he said carelessly. ‘Let’s eat.’
II
Metcalfe made us free of his flat and said we could live there in his absence – the servants would look after us. That afternoon he took me round town and introduced me to several people. Some were obviously good contacts to have, such as a ship’s chandler and a boat builder. Others were not so obviously good; there was a villainous-looking café proprietor, a Greek with no discernible occupation and a Hungarian who explained volubly that he was a ‘Freedom Fighter’ who had escaped from Hungary after the abortive revolution of 1956. I was particularly cynical about him.
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Desmond Bagley
The first action thriller by the classic adventure writer, set in Italy.
When the Allies invaded southern Italy in 1943, Mussolini’s personal treasure was moved north to safety under heavily armed guard. It was never seen again. Now, an expedition plans to unearth the treasure and smuggle it out of Italy. But their reckless mission is being followed – by enemies who are as powerful and ruthless as they are deadly…
DESMOND BAGLEY
The Golden Keel
COPYRIGHT (#ulink_a101df5d-ec1f-5718-959f-71fdcb2a0889)
HARPER
an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1963
Copyright © Brockhurst Publications 1963
Desmond Bagley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008211134
Ebook Edition © January 2016 ISBN 9780008211417
Version: 2016-11-21
CONTENTS
Cover (#u4ec1bb77-8cef-5aef-9210-98498712b378)
Title Page (#u7a537827-bcce-5186-a7ad-1e67d67eb373)
Copyright (#u6006fbf0-1fc1-5cf8-8e6a-c5b854d55e2d)
The Golden Keel (#u11b5e41e-9e29-577f-9c3d-a8000222e356)
Dedication (#u0a9f1ce8-7aa3-5895-a2c9-671d90697916)
Book One: The Men (#u2ec63b62-2d7d-54fc-8004-11f38785e91e)
Chapter One: Walker (#u65688ecd-5cc9-58f7-8986-95a0c516a68c)
Chapter Two: Coertze (#u70fb092a-01a7-5e24-95e5-70c4fe55c6f9)
Book Two: The Gold (#u7c85d487-5974-5a75-826c-2c55c4b507f4)
Chapter Three: Tangier (#uf78f1c7c-364f-5080-8871-acf520c3034b)
Chapter Four: Francesca (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five: The Tunnel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six: Metcalfe (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven: The Golden Keel (#litres_trial_promo)
Book Three: The Sea (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight: Calm and Storm (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine: Sanford (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
THE GOLDEN KEEL (#ulink_352f505f-b572-559b-857e-18754b43678f)
DEDICATION (#ulink_250a9908-8715-543a-8c50-50f3b667842d)
For Joan – who else?
BOOK ONE The Men (#ulink_acf2f91f-9610-530b-92af-16af3ba62a5e)
ONE: WALKER (#ulink_a23645fe-1979-5e57-a6c9-39900eb0d7e6)
My name is Peter Halloran, but everyone calls me ‘Hal’ excepting my wife, Jean, who always called me Peter. Women seem to dislike nicknames for their menfolk. Like a lot of others I emigrated to the ‘colonies’ after the war, and I travelled from England to South Africa by road, across the Sahara and through the Congo. It was a pretty rough trip, but that’s another story; it’s enough to say that I arrived in Cape Town in 1948 with no job and precious little money.
During my first week in Cape Town I answered several of the Sit. Vac. advertisements which appeared in the Cape Times and while waiting for answers I explored my environment. On this particular morning I had visited the docks and finally found myself near the yacht basin.
I was leaning over the rail looking at the boats when a voice behind me said, ‘If you had your choice, which would it be?’
I turned and encountered the twinkling eyes of an elderly man, tall, with stooped shoulders and grey hair. He had a brown, weather-beaten face and gnarled hands, and I estimated his age at about sixty.
I pointed to one of the boats. ‘I think I’d pick that one,’ I said. ‘She’s big enough to be of use, but not too big for single-handed sailing.’
He seemed pleased. ‘That’s Gracia,’ he said. ‘I built her.’
‘She looks a good boat,’ I said. ‘She’s got nice lines.’
We talked for a while about boats. He said that he had a boatyard a little way outside Cape Town towards Milnerton, and that he specialized in building the fishing boats used by the Malay fishermen. I’d noticed these already; sturdy unlovely craft with high bows and a wheelhouse stuck on top like a chicken-coop, but they looked very seaworthy. Gracia was only the second yacht he had built.
‘There’ll be a boom now the war’s over,’ he predicted. ‘People will have money in their pockets, and they’ll go in for yachting. I’d like to expand my activities in that direction.’
Presently he looked at his watch and nodded towards the yacht club. ‘Let’s go in and have a coffee,’ he suggested.
I hesitated. ‘I’m not a member.’
‘I am,’ he said. ‘Be my guest.’
So we went into the club house and sat in the lounge overlooking the yacht basin and he ordered coffee. ‘By the way, my name’s Tom Sanford.’
‘I’m Peter Halloran.’
‘You’re English,’ he said. ‘Been out here long?’
I smiled. ‘Three days.’
‘I’ve been out just a bit longer – since 1910.’ He sipped his coffee and regarded me thoughtfully. ‘You seem to know a bit about boats.’
‘I’ve been around them all my life,’ I said. ‘My father had a boatyard on the east coast, quite close to Hull. We built fishing boats, too, until the war.’
‘And then?’
‘Then the yard went on to contract work for the Admiralty,’ I said. ‘We built harbour defence launches and things like that – we weren’t geared to handle anything bigger.’ I shrugged. ‘Then there was an air-raid.’
‘That’s bad,’ said Tom. ‘Was everything destroyed?’
‘Everything,’ I said flatly. ‘My people had a house next to the yard – that went, too. My parents and my elder brother were killed.’
‘Christ!’ said Tom gently. ‘That’s very bad. How old were you?’
‘Seventeen,’ I said. ‘I went to live with an aunt in Hatfield; that’s when I started to work for de Havilland – building Mosquitos. It’s a wooden aeroplane and they wanted people who could work in wood. All I was doing, as far as I was concerned, was filling in time until I could join the Army.’
His interest sharpened. ‘You know, that’s the coming thing – the new methods developed by de Havilland. That hot-moulding process of theirs – d’you think it could be used in boat-building?’
I thought about it. ‘I don’t see why not – it’s very strong. We did repair work at Hatfield, as well as new construction, and I saw what happens to that type of fabric when it’s been hit very hard. It would be more expensive than the traditional methods, though, unless you were mass-producing.’
‘I was thinking about yachts,’ said Tom slowly. ‘You must tell me more about it sometime.’ He smiled. ‘What else do you know about boats?’
I grinned. ‘I once thought I’d like to be a designer,’ I said. ‘When I was a kid – about fifteen – I designed and built my own racing dinghy.’
‘Win any races?’
‘My brother and I had ’em all licked,’ I said. ‘She was a fast boat. After the war, when I was cooling my heels waiting for my discharge, I had another go at it – designing, I mean. I designed half a dozen boats – it helped to pass the time.’
‘Got the drawings with you?’
‘They’re somewhere at the bottom of my trunk,’ I said. ‘I haven’t looked at them for a long time.’
‘I’d like to see them,’ said Tom. ‘Look, laddie; how would you like to work for me? I told you I’m thinking of expanding into the yacht business, and I could use a smart young fellow.’
And that’s how I started working for Tom Sanford. The following day I went to the boatyard with my drawings and showed them to Tom. On the whole he liked them, but pointed out several ways in which economies could be made in the building. ‘You’re a fair designer,’ he said. ‘But you’ve a lot to learn about the practical side. Never mind, we’ll see about that. When can you start?’
Going to work for old Tom was one of the best things I ever did in my life.
II
A lot of things happened in the next ten years – whether I deserved them or not is another matter. The skills I had learned from my father had not deserted me, and although I was a bit rusty to begin with, soon I was as good as any man in the yard, and maybe a bit better. Tom encouraged me to design, ruthlessly correcting my errors.
‘You’ve got a good eye for line,’ he said. ‘Your boats would be sweet sailers, but they’d be damned expensive. You’ve got to spend more time on detail; you must cut down costs to make an economical boat.’
Four years after I joined the firm Tom made me yard foreman, and just after that, I had my first bit of luck in designing. I submitted a design to a local yachting magazine, winning second prize and fifty pounds. But better still, a local yachtsman liked the design and wanted a boat built. So Tom built it for him and I got the designer’s fee which went to swell my growing bank balance.
Tom was pleased about that and asked if I could design a class boat as a standard line for the yard, so I designed a six-tonner which turned out very well. We called it the Penguin Class and Tom built and sold a dozen in the first year at £2000 each. I liked the boat so much that I asked Tom if he would build one for me, which he did, charging a rock-bottom price and letting me pay it off over a couple of years.
Having a design office gave the business a fillip. The news got around and people started to come to me instead of using British and American designs. That way they could argue with their designer. Tom was pleased because most of the boats to my design were built in the yard.
In 1954 he made me yard manager, and in 1955 offered me a partnership.
‘I’ve got no one to leave it to,’ he said bluntly. ‘My wife’s dead and I’ve got no sons. And I’m getting old.’
I said, ‘You’ll be building boats when you’re a hundred, Tom.’
He shook his head. ‘No, I’m beginning to feel it now.’ He wrinkled his brow. ‘I’ve been going over the books and I find that you’re bringing more business into the firm than I am, so I’ll go easy on the money for the partnership. It’ll cost you five thousand pounds.’
Five thousand was ridiculously cheap for a half-share in such a flourishing business, but I hadn’t got anywhere near that amount. He saw my expression and his eyes crinkled. ‘I know you haven’t got it – but you’ve been doing pretty well on the design side lately. My guess is that you’ve got about two thousand salted away.’
Tom, shrewd as always, was right. I had a couple of hundred over the two thousand. ‘That’s about it,’ I said.
‘All right. Throw in the two thousand and borrow another three from the bank. They’ll lend it to you when they see the books. You’ll be able to pay it back out of profits in under three years, especially if you carry out your plans for that racing dinghy. What about it?’
‘O.K., Tom,’ I said. ‘It’s a deal.’
The racing dinghy Tom had mentioned was an idea I had got by watching the do-it-yourself developments in England. There are plenty of little lakes on the South African highveld and I thought I could sell small boats away from the sea if I could produce them cheaply enough – and I would sell either the finished boat or a do-it-yourself kit for the impoverished enthusiast.
We set up another woodworking shop and I designed the boat which was the first of the Falcon Class. A young fellow, Harry Marshall, was promoted to run the project and he did very well. This wasn’t Tom’s cup of tea and he stayed clear of the whole affair, referring to it as ‘that confounded factory of yours’. But it made us a lot of money.
It was about this time that I met Jean and we got married. My marriage to Jean is not really a part of this story and I wouldn’t mention it except for what happened later. We were very happy and very much in love. The business was doing well – I had a wife and a home – what more could a man wish for?
Towards the end of 1956 Tom died quite suddenly of a heart attack. I think he must have known that his heart wasn’t in good shape although he didn’t mention it to anyone. He left his share of the business to his wife’s sister. She knew nothing about business and less about boat-building, so we got the lawyers on to it and she agreed to sell me her share. I paid a damn sight more than the five thousand I had paid Tom, but it was a fair sale although it gave me financier’s fright and left me heavily in debt to the bank.
I was sorry that Tom had gone. He had given me a chance that fell to few young fellows and I felt grateful. The yard seemed emptier without him pottering about the slips.
The yard prospered and it seemed that my reputation as a designer was firm, because I got lots of commissions. Jean took over the management of the office, and as I was tied to the drawing board for a large proportion of my time I promoted Harry Marshall to yard manager and he handled it very capably.
Jean, being a woman, gave the office a thorough spring cleaning as soon as she was in command, and one day she unearthed an old tin box which had stayed forgotten on a remote shelf for years. She delved into it, then said suddenly, ‘Why have you kept this clipping?’
‘What clipping?’ I asked abstractedly. I was reading a letter which could lead to an interesting commission.
‘This thing about Mussolini,’ she said. ‘I’ll read it.’ She sat on the edge of the desk, the yellowed fragment of newsprint between her fingers. ‘“Sixteen Italian Communists were sentenced in Milan yesterday for complicity in the disappearance of Mussolini’s treasure. The treasure, which mysteriously vanished at the end of the war, consisted of a consignment of gold from the Italian State Bank and many of Mussolini’s personal possessions, including the Ethiopian crown. It is believed that a large number of important State documents were with the treasure. The sixteen men all declared their innocence.”’
She looked up. ‘What was all that about?’
I was startled. It was a long time since I’d thought of Walker and Coertze and the drama that had been played out in Italy. I smiled and said, ‘I might have made a fortune but for that news story.’
‘Tell me about it?’
‘It’s a long story,’ I protested. ‘I’ll tell you some other time.’
‘No,’ she insisted. ‘Tell me now; I’m always interested in treasure.’
So I pushed the unopened mail aside and told her about Walker and his mad scheme. It came back to me hazily in bits and pieces. Was it Donato or Alberto who had fallen – or been pushed – from the cliff? The story took a long time in the telling and the office work got badly behind that day.
III
I met Walker when I had arrived in South Africa from England after the war. I had been lucky to get a good job with Tom but, being a stranger, I was a bit lonely, so I joined a Cape Town Sporting Club which would provide company and exercise.
Walker was a drinking member, one of those crafty people who joined the club to have somewhere to drink when the pubs were closed on Sunday. He was never in the club house during the week, but turned up every Sunday, played his one game of tennis for the sake of appearances, then spent the rest of the day in the bar.
It was in the bar that I met him, late one Sunday afternoon. The room was loud with voices raised in argument and I soon realized I had walked into the middle of a discussion on the Tobruk surrender. The very mention of Tobruk can start an argument anywhere in South Africa because the surrender is regarded as a national disgrace. It is always agreed that the South Africans were let down but from then on it gets heated and rather vague. Sometimes the British generals are blamed and sometimes the South African garrison commander, General Klopper; and it’s always good for one of those long, futile bar-room brawls in which tempers are lost but nothing is ever decided.
It wasn’t of much interest to me – my army service was in Europe – so I sat quietly nursing my beer and keeping out of it. Next to me was a thin-faced young man with dissipated good looks who had a great deal to say about it, with many a thump on the counter with his clenched fist. I had seen him before but didn’t know who he was. All I knew of him was by observation; he seemed to drink a lot, and even now was drinking two brandies to my one beer.
At length the argument died a natural death as the bar emptied and soon my companion and I were the last ones left. I drained my glass and was turning to leave when he said contemptuously, ‘Fat lot they know about it.’
‘Were you there?’ I asked.
‘I was,’ he said grimly. ‘I was in the bag with all the others. Didn’t stay there long, though; I got out of the camp in Italy in ’43.’ He looked at my empty glass. ‘Have one for the road.’
I had nothing to do just then, so I said, ‘Thanks; I’ll have a beer.’
He ordered a beer for me and another brandy for himself and said, ‘My name’s Walker. Yes, I got out when the Italian Government collapsed. I joined the partisans.’
‘That must have been interesting,’ I said.
He laughed shortly. ‘I suppose you could call it that. Interesting and scary. Yes, I reckon you could say that me and Sergeant Coertze had a really interesting time – he was a bloke I was with most of the time.’
‘An Afrikaner?’ I hazarded. I was new in South Africa and didn’t know much about the set-up then, but the name sounded as though it might be Afrikaans.
‘That’s right,’ said Walker. ‘A real tough boy, he was. We stuck together after getting out of the camp.’
‘Was it easy – escaping from the prison camp?’
‘A piece of cake,’ said Walker. ‘The guards co-operated with us. A couple of them even came with us as guides – Alberto Corso and Donato Rinaldi. I liked Donato – I reckon he saved my life.’
He saw my interest and plunged into the story with gusto. When the Government fell in 1943 Italy was in a mess. The Italians were uneasy; they didn’t know what was going to happen next and they were suspicious of the intentions of the Germans. It was a perfect opportunity to break camp, especially when a couple of the guards threw in with them.
Leaving the camp was easy enough, but trouble started soon after when the Germans laid on an operation to round up all the Allied prisoners who were loose in Central Italy.
‘That’s when I copped it,’ said Walker. ‘We were crossing a river at the time.’
The sudden attack had taken them by surprise. Everything had been silent except for the chuckling of the water and the muffled curses as someone slipped – then suddenly there was the sound of ripped calico as the Spandau opened up and the night was made hideous by the eerie whine of bullets as they ricocheted from exposed rocks in the river.
The two Italians turned and let go with their sub-machine-guns. Coertze, bellowing like a bull, scrabbled frantically at the pouch pocket of his battle-dress trousers and then his arm came up in an overarm throw. There was a sharp crack as the hand grenade exploded in the water near the bank. Again Coertze threw and this time the grenade burst on the bank.
Walker felt something slam his leg and he turned in a twisting fall and found himself gasping in the water. His free arm thrashed out and caught on a rock and he hung on desperately.
Coertze threw another grenade and the machine-gun stopped. The Italians had emptied their magazines and were busy reloading. Everything was quiet again.
‘I reckon they thought we were Germans, too,’ said Walker. ‘They wouldn’t expect to be fired on by escaping prisoners. It was lucky that the Italians had brought some guns along. Anyway, that bloody machine-gun stopped.’
They had stayed for a few minutes in midstream with the quick cold waters pulling at their legs, not daring to move in case there was a sudden burst from the shore. After five minutes Alberto said in a low voice, ‘Signor Walker, are you all right?’
Walker pulled himself upright and to his astonishment found himself still grasping his unfired rifle. His left leg felt numb and cold. ‘I’m all right,’ he said.
There was a long sigh from Coertze, then he said, ‘Well, come on. Let’s get to the other side – but quietly.’
They reached the other side of the river and, without resting, pressed on up the mountainside. After a short time Walker’s leg began to hurt and he lagged behind. Alberto was perturbed. ‘You must hurry; we have to cross this mountain before dawn.’
Walker stifled a groan as he put down his left foot. ‘I was hit,’ he said. ‘I think I was hit.’
Coertze came back down the mountain and said irritably, ‘Magtig, get a move on, will you?’
Alberto said, ‘Is it bad, Signor Walker?’
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Coertze, not understanding the Italian.
‘I have a bullet in my leg,’ said Walker bitterly.
‘That’s all we need,’ said Coertze. In the darkness he bulked as a darker patch and Walker could see that he was shaking his head impatiently. ‘We’ve got to get to that partisan camp before daylight.’
Walker conferred with Alberto, then said in English, ‘Alberto says there’s a place along there to the right where we can hide. He says that someone should stay with me while he goes for help.’
Coertze grunted in his throat. ‘I’ll go with him,’ he said. ‘The other Eytie can stay with you. Let’s get to it.’
They moved along the mountainside and presently the ground dipped and suddenly there was a small ravine, a cleft in the mountain. There were stunted trees to give a little cover and underfoot was a dry watercourse.
Alberto stopped and said, ‘You will stay here until we come for you. Keep under the trees so that no one will see you, and make as little movement as possible.’
‘Thanks, Alberto,’ said Walker. There were a few brief words of farewell, then Alberto and Coertze disappeared into the night. Donato made Walker comfortable and they settled down to wait out the night.
It was a bad time for Walker. His leg was hurting and it was very cold. They stayed in the ravine all the next day and as night fell Walker became delirious and Donato had trouble in keeping him quiet.
When the rescuers finally came Walker had passed out. He woke up much later and found himself in a bed in a room with whitewashed walls. The sun was rising and a little girl was sitting by the bedside.
Walker stopped speaking suddenly and looked at his empty glass on the bar counter. ‘Have another drink,’ I said quickly.
He needed no encouraging so I ordered another couple of drinks. ‘So that’s how you got away,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘That’s how it was. God, it was cold those two nights on that bloody mountain. If it hadn’t been for Donato I’d have cashed in my chips.’
I said, ‘So you were safe – but where were you?’
‘In a partisan camp up in the hills. The partigiani were just getting organized then; they only really got going when the Germans began to consolidate their hold on Italy. The Jerries ran true to form – they’re arrogant bastards, you know – and the Italians didn’t like it. So everything was set for the partisans; they got the support of the people and they could begin to operate on a really large scale.
‘They weren’t all alike, of course; there was every shade of political opinion from pale blue to bright red. The Communists hated the Monarchists’ guts and vice versa and so on. The crowd I dropped in on were Monarchist. That’s where I met the Count.’
Count Ugo Montepescali di Todi was over fifty years old at that time, but young-looking and energetic. He was a swarthy man with an aquiline nose and a short greying beard which was split at the end and forked aggressively. He came of a line which was old during the Renaissance and he was an aristocrat to his fingertips.
Because of this he hated Fascism – hated the pretensions of the parvenu rulers of Italy with all their corrupt ways and their money-sticky fingers. To him Mussolini always remained a mediocre journalist who had succeeded in demagoguery and had practically imprisoned his King.
Walker met the Count the first day he arrived at the hill camp. He had just woken up and seen the solemn face of the little girl. She smiled at him and silently left the room, and a few minutes later a short stocky man with a bristling beard stepped through the doorway and said in English, ‘Ah, you are awake. You are quite safe now.’
Walker was conscious of saying something inane. ‘But where am I?’
‘Does that really matter?’ the Count asked quizzically. ‘You are still in Italy – but safe from the Tedesci. You must stay in bed until you recover your strength. You need some blood putting back – you lost a lot – so you must rest and eat and rest again.’
Walker was too weak to do more than accept this, so he lay back on the pillow. Five minutes later Coertze came in; with him was a young man with a thin face.
‘I’ve brought the quack,’ said Coertze. ‘Or at least that’s what he says he is – if I’ve got it straight. My guess is that he’s only a medical student.’
The doctor – or student – examined Walker and professed satisfaction at his condition. ‘You will walk within the week,’ he said, and packed his little kit and left the room.
Coertze rubbed the back of his head. ‘I’ll have to learn this slippery taal,’ he said. ‘It looks as though we’ll be here for a long time.’
‘No chance of getting through to the south?’ asked Walker.
‘No chance at all,’ said Coertze flatly. ‘The Count – that’s the little man with the bokbaardjie – says that the Germans down south are thicker on the ground than stalks in a mealie field. He reckons they’re going to make a defence line south of Rome.’
Walker sighed. ‘Then we’re stuck here.’
Coertze grinned. ‘It is not too bad. At least we’ll get better food than we had in camp. The Count wants us to join his little lot – it seems he has some kind of skietkommando which holds quite a bit of territory and he’s collected men and weapons while he can. We might as well fight here as with the army – I’ve always fancied fighting a war my way.’
A plump woman brought in a steaming bowl of broth for Walker, and Coertze said, ‘Get outside of that and you’ll feel better. I’m going to scout around a bit.’
Walker ate the broth and slept, then woke and ate again. After a while a small figure came in bearing a basin and rolled bandages. It was the little girl he had seen when he had first opened his eyes. He thought she was about twelve years old.
‘My father said I had to change your bandages,’ she said in a clear young voice. She spoke in English.
Walker propped himself up on his elbows and watched her as she came closer. She was neatly dressed and wore a white, starched apron. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
She bent to cut the splint loose from his leg and then she carefully loosened the bandage round the wound. He looked down at her and said, ‘What is your name?’
‘Francesca.’
‘Is your father the doctor?’ Her hands were cool and soft on his leg.
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said briefly.
She bathed the wound in warm water containing some pungent antiseptic and then shook powder on to it. With great skill she began to rebandage the leg.
‘You are a good nurse,’ said Walker.
It was only then that she looked at him and he saw that she had cool, grey eyes. ‘I’ve had a lot of practice,’ she said, and Walker was abashed at her gaze and cursed a war which made skilled nurses out of twelve-year-olds.
She finished the bandaging and said, ‘There – you must get better soon.’
‘I will,’ promised Walker. ‘As quickly as I can. I’ll do that for you.’
She looked at him with surprise. ‘Not for me,’ she said. ‘For the war. You must get better so that you can go into the hills and kill a lot of Germans.’
She gravely collected the soiled bandages and left the room, with Walker looking after her in astonishment. Thus it was that he met Francesca, the daughter of Count Ugo Montepescali.
In a little over a week he was able to walk with the aid of a stick and to move outside the hospital hut, and Coertze showed him round the camp. Most of the men were Italians, army deserters who didn’t like the Germans. But there were many Allied escapees of different nationalities.
The Count had formed the escapees into a single unit and had put Coertze in command. They called themselves the ‘Foreign Legion’. During the next couple of years many of them were to be killed fighting against the Germans with the partisans. At Coertze’s request, Alberto and Donato were attached to the unit to act as interpreters and guides.
Coertze had a high opinion of the Count. ‘That kêrel knows what he’s doing,’ he said. ‘He’s recruiting from the Italian army as fast as he can – and each man must bring his own gun.’
When the Germans decided to stand and fortified the Winterstellung based on the Sangro and Monte Cassino, the war in Italy was deadlocked and it was then that the partisans got busy attacking the German communications. The Foreign Legion took part in this campaign, specializing in demolition work. Coertze had been a gold miner on the Witwatersrand before the war and knew how to handle dynamite. He and Harrison, a Canadian geologist, instructed the others in the use of explosives.
They blew up road and rail bridges, dynamited mountain passes, derailed trains and occasionally shot up the odd road convoy, always retreating as soon as heavy fire was returned. ‘We must not fight pitched battles,’ said the Count. ‘We must not let the Germans pin us down. We are mosquitoes irritating the German hides – let us hope we give them malaria.’
Walker found this a time of long stretches of relaxation punctuated by moments of fright. Discipline was easy and there was no army spit-and-polish. He became lean and hard and would think nothing of making a day’s march of thirty miles over the mountains burdened with his weapons and a pack of dynamite and detonators.
By the end of 1944 the Foreign Legion had thinned down considerably. Some of the men had been killed and more elected to make a break for the south after the Allies had taken Rome. Coertze said he would stay, so Walker stayed with him. Harrison also stayed, together with an Englishman called Parker. The Foreign Legion was now very small indeed.
‘The Count used us as bloody pack horses,’ said Walker. He had ordered another round of drinks and the brandy was getting at him. His eyes were red-veined and he stumbled over the odd word.
‘Pack horses?’ I queried.
‘The unit was too small to really fight,’ he explained. ‘So he used us to transport guns and food around his territory. That’s how we got the convoy.’
‘Which convoy?’
Walker was beginning to slur his words. ‘It was like this. One of the Italian units had gone to carve up a German post and the job was being done in co-operation with another partisan brigade. But the Count was worried because this other mob were Communists – real treacherous bastards they were. He was scared they might renege on us; they were always doing that because he was a Monarchist and they hated him worse than they did the Germans. They were looking ahead to after the war and they didn’t do much fighting while they were about it. Italian politics, you see.’
I nodded.
‘So he wanted Umberto – the chap in charge of our Italians – to have another couple of machine-guns, just in case, and Coertze said he’d take them.’
He fell silent, looking into his glass.
I said, ‘What about this convoy?’
‘Oh, what the hell,’ he said. There’s not a hope of getting it out. It’ll stay there for ever, unless Coertze does something. I’ll tell you. We were on our way to Umberto when we bumped into this German convoy driving along where no convoy should have been. So we clobbered it.’
They had got to the top of a hill and Coertze called a halt. ‘We stay here for ten minutes, then we move on,’ he said.
Alberto drank some water and then strolled down to where he could get a good view of the valley. He looked first at the valley floor where a rough, unmetalled road ran dustily, then raised his eyes to look south.
Suddenly he called Coertze. ‘Look,’ he said.
Coertze ran down and looked to where Alberto was pointing. In the distance, where the faraway thread of brown road shimmered in the heat, was a puff of dust. He unslung his glasses and focused rapidly.
‘What the hell are they doing here?’ he demanded.
‘What is it?’
‘German army trucks,’ said Coertze. ‘About six of them.’ He pulled down the glasses. ‘Looks as though they’re trying to slip by on the side roads. We have made the main roads a bit unhealthy.’
Walker and Donato had come down. Coertze looked back at the machine-guns, then at Walker. ‘What about it?’
Walker said, ‘What about Umberto?’
‘Oh, he’s all right. It’s just the Count getting a bit fretful now the war’s nearly over. I think we should take this little lot – it should be easy with two machine-guns.’
Walker shrugged. ‘O.K. with me,’ he said.
Coertze said, ‘Come on,’ and ran back to where Parker was sitting. ‘On your feet, kêrel,’ he said. ‘The war’s still on. Where the hell is Harrison?’
‘Coming,’ called Harrison.
‘Let’s get this stuff down to the road on the double,’ said Coertze. He looked down the hill. ‘That bend ought to be a lekker place.’
‘A what?’ asked Parker plaintively. He always pulled Coertze’s leg about his South Africanisms.
‘Never mind that,’ snapped Coertze. ‘Get this stuff down to the road quick. We’ve got a job on.’
They loaded up the machine-guns and plunged down the hillside. Once on the road Coertze did a quick survey. ‘They’ll come round that bend slowly,’ he said. ‘Alberto, you take Donato and put your machine-gun there, where you can open up on the last two trucks. The last two, you understand. Knock ’em out fast so the others can’t back out.’
He turned to Harrison and Parker. ‘Put your gun over here on the other side and knock out the first truck. Then we’ll have the others boxed in.’
‘What do I do?’ asked Walker.
‘You come with me,’ Coertze started to run up the road, followed by Walker. He ran almost to the bend, then left the road and climbed a small hillock from where he could get a good sight of the German convoy. When Walker flopped beside him he already had the glasses focused.
‘It’s four trucks not six,’ he said. ‘There’s a staff car in front and a motor-cycle combination in front of that. Looks like one of those BMW jobs with a machine-gun in the side-car.’
He handed the glasses to Walker. ‘How far from the tail of the column to that staff car?’
Walker looked at the oncoming vehicles. ‘About sixty-five yards,’ he estimated.
Coertze took the glasses. ‘O.K. You go back along the road sixty-five yards so that when the last truck is round the bend the staff car is alongside you. Never mind the motor-cycle – I’ll take care of that. Go back and tell the boys not to open up until they hear loud bangs; I’ll start those off. And tell them to concentrate on the trucks.’
He turned over and looked back. The machine-guns were invisible and the road was deserted. ‘As nice an ambush as anyone could set,’ he said. ‘My oupa never did better against the English.’ He tapped Walker on the shoulder. ‘Off you go. I’ll help you with the staff car as soon as I’ve clobbered the motor-cycle.’
Walker slipped from the hillock and ran back along the road, stopping at the machine-guns to issue Coertze’s instructions. Then he found himself a convenient rock about sixty yards from the bend, behind which he crouched and checked his sub-machine-gun.
It was not long before he heard Coertze running along the road shouting, ‘Four minutes. They’ll be here in four minutes. Hold your fire.’
Coertze ran past him and disappeared into the verge of the road about ten yards farther on.
Walker said that four minutes in those conditions could seem like four hours. He crouched there, looking back along the silent road, hearing nothing except his own heart beating. After what seemed a long time he heard the growl of engines and the clash of gears and then the revving of the motor-cycle.
He flattened himself closer to the rock and waited. A muscle twitched in his leg and his mouth was suddenly dry. The noise of the motor-cycle now blanked out all other sounds and he snapped off the safety catch.
He saw the motor-cycle pass, the goggled driver looking like a gargoyle and the trooper in the sidecar turning his head to scan the road, hands clutching the grips of the machine-gun mounted in front of him.
As in a dream he saw Coertze’s hand come into view, apparently in slow motion, and toss a grenade casually into the sidecar. It lodged between the gunner’s back and the coaming of the sidecar and the gunner turned in surprise. With his sudden movement the grenade disappeared into the interior of the sidecar.
Then it exploded.
The sidecar disintegrated and the gunner must have had his legs blown off. The cycle wheeled drunkenly across the road and Walker saw Coertze step out of cover, his sub-machine-gun pumping bullets into the driver. Then he had stepped out himself and his own gun was blazing at the staff car.
He had orientated himself very carefully so that he had a very good idea of where the driver would be placed. When he started firing, he did so without aiming and the windscreen shattered in the driver’s face.
In the background he was conscious of the tac-a-tac of the machine-guns firing in long bursts at the trucks, but he had no time or desire to cast a glance that way. He was occupied in jumping out of the way of the staff car as it slewed towards him, a dead man’s hand on the wheel.
The officer in the passenger seat was standing up, his hand clawing at the flap of his pistol holster. Coertze fired a burst at him and he suddenly collapsed and folded grotesquely over the metal rim of the broken windscreen as though he had suddenly turned into a rag doll. The pistol dropped from his hand and clattered on the ground.
With a rending jar the staff car bumped into a rock on the side of the road and came to a sudden stop, jolting the soldier in the rear who was shooting at Walker. Walker heard the bullets going over his head and pulled the trigger. A dozen bullets hit the German and slammed him back in his seat. Walker said that the range was about nine feet and he swore he heard the bullets hit, sounding like a rod hitting a soft carpet several times.
Then Coertze was shouting at him, waving him on to the trucks. He ran up the road following Coertze and saw that the first truck was stopped. He fired a burst into the cab just to be on the safe side, then took shelter, leaning against the hot radiator to reload.
By the time he had reloaded the battle was over. All the vehicles were stopped and Alberto and Donato were escorting a couple of dazed prisoners forward.
Coertze barked, ‘Parker, go up and see if anyone else is coming,’ then turned to look at the chaos he had planned.
The two men with the motor-cycle had been killed outright, as had the three in the staff car. Each truck had carried two men in the cab and one in the back. All the men in the cabs had been killed within twenty seconds of the machine-guns opening fire. As Harrison said, ‘At twenty yards we couldn’t miss – we just squirted at the first truck, then hosed down the second. It was like using a howitzer at a coconut-shy – too easy.’
Of the seventeen men in the German party there were two survivors, one of whom had a flesh wound in his arm.
Coertze said, ‘Notice anything?’
Walker shook his head. He was trembling in the aftermath of danger and was in no condition to be observant.
Coertze went up to one of the prisoners and fingered the emblem on his collar. The man cringed.
‘These are S.S. men. All of them.’
He turned and went back to the staff car. The officer was lying on his back, half in and half out of the front door, his empty eyes looking up at the sky, terrible in death. Coertze looked at him, then leaned over and pulled a leather briefcase from the front seat. It was locked.
‘There’s something funny here,’ he said. ‘Why would they come by this road?’
Harrison said, ‘They might have got through, you know. If we hadn’t been here they would have got through – and we were only here by chance.’
‘I know,’ said Coertze. ‘They had a good idea and they nearly got away with it – that’s what I’m worrying about. The Jerries aren’t an imaginative lot, usually; they follow a routine. So why would they do something different? Unless this wasn’t a routine unit.’
He looked at the trucks. ‘It might be a good idea to see what’s in those trucks.’
He sent Donato up the road to the north to keep watch and the rest went to investigate the trucks, excepting Alberto who was guarding the prisoners.
Harrison looked over the tailboard of the first truck. ‘Not much in here,’ he said.
Walker looked in and saw that the bottom of the truck was filled with boxes – small wooden boxes about eighteen inches long, a foot wide and six inches deep. He said, ‘That’s a hell of a small load.’
Coertze frowned and said, ‘Boxes like that ring a bell with me, but I just can’t place it. Let’s have one of them out.’
Walker and Harrison climbed into the truck and moved aside the body of a dead German which was in the way. Harrison grasped the corner of the nearest box and lifted. ‘My God!’ he said. ‘The damn’ thing’s nailed to the floor.’
Walker helped him and the box shifted. ‘No, it isn’t, but it must be full of lead.’
Coertze let down the tailboard. ‘I think we’d better have it out and opened,’ he said. His voice was suddenly croaking with excitement.
Walker and Harrison manhandled a box to the edge and tipped it over. It fell with a loud thump to the dusty road. Coertze said, ‘Give me that bayonet.’
Walker took the bayonet from the scabbard of the dead German and handed it to Coertze, who began to prise the box open. Nails squealed as the top of the box came up. Coertze ripped it off and said, ‘I thought so.’
‘What is it?’ asked Harrison, mopping his brow.
‘Gold,’ said Coertze softly.
Everyone stood still.
Walker was very drunk when he got to this point of his story. He was unsteady on his feet and caught the edge of the bar counter to support himself as he repeated solemnly, ‘Gold.’
‘For the love of Mike, what did you do with it?’ I said. ‘And how much of it was there?’
Walker hiccoughed genthy. ‘What about another drink?’ he said.
I beckoned to the bar steward, then said, ‘Come on; you can’t leave me in suspense.’
He looked at me sideways. ‘I really shouldn’t tell,’ he said. ‘But what the hell! There’s no harm in it now. It was like this …’
They had stood looking at each other for a long moment, then Coertze said, ‘I knew I recognized those boxes. They use boxes like that on the Reef for packing the ingots for shipment.’
As soon as they had checked that all the boxes in that truck were just as heavy, there was a mad rush to the other trucks. These were disappointing at first – the second truck was full of packing cases containing documents and files.
Coertze delved into a case, tossing papers out, and said, ‘What the hell’s all this bumph?’ He sounded disappointed.
Walker picked up a sheaf and scanned through it. ‘Seems to be Italian Government documents of some sort. Maybe this is all top-secret stuff.’
The muffled voice of Harrison came from the bowels of the truck. ‘Hey, you guys, look what I’ve found.’
He emerged with both hands full of bundles of lire notes – fine, newly printed lire notes. ‘There’s at least one case full of this stuff,’ he said. ‘Maybe more.’
The third truck had more boxes of gold, though not as much as the first, and there were several stoutly built wooden cases which were locked. They soon succumbed to a determined assault with a bayonet.
‘Christ!’ said Walker as he opened the first. In awe he pulled out a shimmering sparkle of jewels, a necklace of diamonds and emeralds.
‘What’s that worth?’ Coertze asked Harrison.
Harrison shook his head dumbly. ‘Gee, I wouldn’t know.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Not my kind of stone.’
They were ransacking the boxes when Coertze pulled out a gold cigarette case. ‘This one’s got an inscription,’ he said and read it aloud. ‘“Caro Benito da parte di Adolfe – Brennero – 1940.”’
Harrison said slowly, ‘Hitler had a meeting with Mussolini at the Brenner Pass in 1940. That’s when Musso decided to kick in on the German side.’
‘So now we know who this belongs to,’ said Walker, waving his hand.
‘Or used to belong to,’ repeated Coertze slowly. ‘But who does it belong to now?’
They looked at each other.
Coertze broke the silence. ‘Come on, let’s see what’s in the last truck.’
The fourth truck was full of packing cases containing more papers. But there was one box holding a crown.
Harrison struggled to lift it. ‘Who’s the giant who wears this around the palace?’ he asked nobody in particular. The crown was thickly encrusted with jewels – rubies and emeralds, but no diamonds. It was ornate and very heavy. ‘No wonder they say “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,”’ cracked Harrison.
He lowered the crown into the box. ‘Well, what do we do now?’
Coertze scratched his head. ‘It’s quite a problem,’ he admitted.
‘I say we keep it,’ said Harrison bluntly. ‘It’s ours by right of conquest.’
Now it was in the open – the secret thought that no one would admit except the extrovert Harrison. It cleared the air and made things much easier.
Coertze said, ‘I suppose we must bring in the rest of the boys and vote on it.’
‘That’ll be no good unless it’s a unanimous vote,’ said Harrison almost casually.
They saw his point. If one of them held out in favour of telling the Count, then the majority vote would be useless. At last Walker said, ‘It may not arise. Let’s vote on it and see.’
All was quiet on the road so Donato and Parker were brought in from their sentry duty. The prisoners were herded into a truck so that Alberto could join in the discussion, and they settled down as a committee of ways and means.
Harrison needn’t have worried – it was a unanimous vote. There was too much temptation for it to be otherwise.
‘One thing’s for sure,’ said Harrison. ‘When this stuff disappears there’s going to be the biggest investigation ever, no matter who wins the war. The Italian Government will never rest until it’s found, especially those papers. I’ll bet they’re dynamite.’
Coertze was thoughtful. ‘That means we must hide the treasure and the trucks. Nothing must be found. It must be as though the whole lot has vanished into thin air.’
‘What are we going to do with it?’ asked Parker. He looked at the stony ground and the thin soil. ‘We might just bury the treasure if we took a week doing it, but we can’t even begin to bury one truck, let alone four.’
Harrison snapped his fingers. ‘The old lead mines,’ he said. ‘They’re not far from here.’
Coertze’s face lightened. ‘Ja,’ he said. ‘There’s one winze that would take the lot.’
Parker said, ‘What lead mines – and what’s a winze, for God’s sake?’
‘It’s a horizontal shaft driven into a mountain,’ said Harrison. ‘These mines have been abandoned since the turn of the century. No one goes near them any more.’
Alberto said, ‘We drive all the trucks inside …’
‘… and blow in the entrance,’ finished Coertze with gusto.
‘Why not keep some of the jewels?’ suggested Walker.
‘No,’ said Coertze sharply. ‘It’s too dangerous – Harrison is right. There’ll be all hell breaking loose when this stuff vanishes for good. Everything must be buried until it’s safe to recover it.’
‘Know any good jewel fences?’ asked Harrison sardonically. ‘Because if you don’t how would you get rid of the jewels?’
They decided to bury everything – the trucks, the bodies, the gold, the papers, the jewels – everything. They restowed the trucks, putting all the valuables into two trucks and all the non-valuables such as the documents into the other two. It was intended to drive the staff car into the tunnel first with the motor-cycle carried in the back, then the trucks carrying papers and bodies, and lastly the trucks with the gold and jewels.
‘That way we can get out the stuff we want quite easily,’ said Coertze.
The disposal of the trucks was easy enough. There was an unused track leading to the mines which diverged off the dusty road they were on. They drove up to the mine and reversed the trucks into the biggest tunnel in the right order. Coertze and Harrison prepared a charge to blow down the entrance, a simple job taking only a few minutes, then Coertze lit the fuse and ran back.
When the dust died down they saw that the tunnel mouth was entirely blocked – making a rich mausoleum for seventeen men.
‘What do we tell the Count?’ asked Parker.
‘We tell him we ran into a little trouble on the way,’ said Coertze. ‘Well, we did, didn’t we?’ He grinned and told them to move on.
When they got back they heard that Umberto had run into trouble and had lost a lot of men. The Communists hadn’t turned up and he hadn’t had enough machine-guns.
I said, ‘You mean the gold’s still there.’
‘That’s right,’ said Walker, and hammered his fist on the counter. ‘Let’s have another drink.’
I didn’t get much out of him after that. His brain was pickled in brandy and he kept wandering into irrelevancies, but he did answer one question coherently.
I asked, ‘What happened to the two German prisoners?’
‘Oh, them,’ he said carelessly. ‘They were shot while escaping. Coertze did it.’
IV
Walker was too far gone to walk home that night, so I got his address from a club steward, poured him into a taxi and forgot about him. I didn’t think much of his story – it was just the maunderings of a drunk. Maybe he had found something in Italy, but I doubted if it was anything big – my imagination boggled at the idea of four truck loads of gold and jewels.
I wasn’t allowed to forget him for long because I saw him the following Sunday in the club bar gazing moodily into a brandy glass. He looked up, caught my eye and looked away hastily as though shamed. I didn’t go over and speak to him; he wasn’t altogether my type – I don’t go for drunks much.
Later that afternoon I had just come out of the swimming pool and was enjoying a cigarette when I became aware that Walker was standing beside me. As I looked up, he said awkwardly, ‘I think I owe you some money – for the taxi fare the other night.’
‘Forget it,’ I said shortly.
He dropped on one knee. ‘I’m sorry about that. Did I cause any trouble?’
I smiled. ‘Can’t you remember?’
‘Not a damn’ thing,’ he confessed. ‘I didn’t get into a fight or anything, did I?’
‘No, we just talked.’
His eyes flickered. ‘What about?’
‘Your experiences in Italy. You told me rather an odd story.’
‘I told you about the gold?’
I nodded. ‘That’s right.’
‘I was drunk,’ he said. ‘As shickered as a coot. I shouldn’t have told you about that. You haven’t mentioned it to anyone, have you?’
‘No, I haven’t,’ I said. ‘You don’t mean it’s true?’ He certainly wasn’t drunk now.
‘True enough,’ he said heavily. ‘The stuffs still up there – in a hole in the ground in Italy. I’d not like you to talk about it.’
‘I won’t,’ I promised.
‘Come and have a drink,’ he suggested.
‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m going home now.’
He seemed depressed. ‘All right,’ he said, and I watched him walk lethargically up to the club house.
After that, he couldn’t seem to keep away from me. It was as though he had delivered a part of himself into my keeping and he had to watch me to see that I kept it safe. He acted as though we were partners in a conspiracy, with many a nod and wink and a sudden change of subject if he thought we were being overheard.
He wasn’t so bad when you got to know him, if you discounted the incipient alcoholism. He had a certain charm when he wanted to use it and he most surely set out to charm me. I don’t suppose it was difficult; I was a stranger in a strange land and he was company of sorts.
He ought to have been an actor for he had the gift of mimicry. When he told me the story of the gold his mobile face altered plastically and his voice changed until I could see the bull-headed Coertze, gentle Donato and the tougher-fibred Alberto. Although Walker had normally a slight trace of a South African accent, he could drop it at will to take on the heavy gutturals of the Afrikaner or the speed and sibilance of the Italian. His Italian was rapid and fluent and he was probably one of those people who can learn a language in a matter of weeks.
I had lost most of my doubts about the truth of his story. It was too damned circumstantial. The bit about the inscription on the cigarette case impressed me a lot; I couldn’t see Walker making up a thing like that. Besides, it wasn’t the brandy talking all the time; he still stuck to the same story, which didn’t change a fraction under many repetitions – drunk and sober.
Once I said, ‘The only thing I can’t figure is that big crown.’
‘Alberto thought it was the royal crown of Ethiopia,’ said Walker. ‘It wouldn’t be worn about the palace – they’d only use it for coronations.’
That sounded logical. I said, ‘How do you know that the others haven’t dug up the lot? There’s still Harrison and Parker – and it would be dead easy for the two Italians; they’re on the spot.’
Walker shook his head. ‘No, there’s only Coertze and me. The others were killed.’ His lips twisted. ‘It seemed to be unhealthy to stick close to Coertze. I got scared in the end and beat it.’
I looked hard at him. ‘Do you mean to say that Coertze murdered them?’
‘Don’t put words in my mouth,’ said Walker sharply. ‘I didn’t say that. All I know is that four men were killed when they were close to Coertze.’ He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘Harrison was the first – that happened only three days after we buried the loot.’
He tapped a second finger. ‘Next came Alberto – I saw that happen. It was as near an accident as anyone could arrange. Then Parker. He was killed in action just like Harrison, and, just like Harrison, the only person who was anywhere near him was Coertze.’
He held up three fingers and slowly straightened the fourth. ‘Last was Donato. He was found near the camp with his head bashed in. They said he’d been rock-climbing, so the verdict was accidental death – but not in my book. That was enough for me, so I quit and went south.’
I thought about this for a while, then said, ‘What did you mean when you said you saw Alberto killed?’
‘We’d been on a raid,’ said Walker. ‘It went O.K. but the Germans moved fast and got us boxed in. We had to get out by the back door, and the back door was a cliff. Coertze was good on a mountain and he and Alberto went first, Coertze leading. He said he wanted to find the easiest way down, which was all right – he usually did that.
‘He went along a ledge and out of sight, then he came back and gave Alberto the O.K. sign. Then he came back to tell us it was all right to start down, so Parker and I went next. We followed Alberto and when we got round the corner we saw that he was stuck.
‘There were no hand holds ahead of him and he’d got himself into a position where he couldn’t get back, either. Just as we got there he lost his nerve – we could see him quivering and shaking. There he was, like a fly on the side of that cliff with a hell of a long drop under him and a pack of Germans ready to drop on top of him, and he was shaking like a jelly.
‘Parker shouted to Coertze and he came down. There was just room enough for him to pass us, so he said he’d go to help Alberto. He got as far as Alberto and Alberto fell off. I swear that Coertze pushed him.’
‘Did you see Coertze push him?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Walker admitted. ‘I couldn’t see Alberto at all once Coertze had passed us. Coertze’s a big bloke and he isn’t made of glass. But why did he give Alberto the O.K. sign to go along that ledge?’
‘It could have been an honest mistake.’
Walker nodded. ‘That’s what I thought at the time. Coertze said afterwards that he didn’t mean that Alberto should go as far as that. There was an easier way down just short of where Alberto got stuck. Coertze took us down there.’
He lit a cigarette. ‘But when Parker was shot up the following week I started to think again.’
‘How did it happen?’
Walker shrugged. ‘The usual thing – you know how it is in a fight. When it was all over we found Parker had a hole in his head. Nobody saw it happen, but Coertze was nearest.’ He paused. ‘The hole was in the back of the head.’
‘A German bullet?’
Walker snorted. ‘Brother, we didn’t have time for an autopsy; but it wouldn’t have made any difference. We were using German weapons and ammo – captured stuff; and Coertze always used German guns; he said they were better than the British.’ He brooded. ‘That started me thinking seriously. It was all too pat – all these blokes being knocked off so suddenly. When Donato got his, I quit. The Foreign Legion was just about busted anyway. I waited until the Count had sent Coertze off somewhere, then I collected my gear, said goodbye and headed south to the Allied lines. I was lucky – I got through.’
‘What about Coertze?’
‘He stayed with the Count until the Yanks came up. I saw him in Jo’burg a couple of years ago. I was crossing the road to go into a pub when I saw Coertze going through the door. I changed my mind; I had a drink, but not in that pub.’
He shivered suddenly. ‘I want to stay as far from Coertze as I can. There’s a thousand miles between Cape Town and Johannesburg – that ought to be enough.’ He stood up suddenly. ‘Let’s go and have a drink, for God’s sake.’
So we went and had a drink – several drinks.
V
During the next few weeks I could see that Walker was on the verge of making me a proposition. He said he had some money due to him and that he would need a good friend. At last he came out with it.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘My old man died last year and I’ve got two thousand pounds coming when I can get it out of the lawyer’s hands. I could go to Italy on two thousand pounds.’
‘So you could,’ I said.
He bit his lip. ‘Hal, I want you to come with 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 back with us,’ she said.
But two months later the blow fell.
I had designed a boat for Bill Meadows and had sent him the drawings for approval. By mishap the accommodation plans had been left out of the packet, so Jean volunteered to take them to Fish Hoek where Bill lives.
It’s a nice drive to Fish Hoek along the Chapman’s Peak road with views of sea and mountain, far better than anything I have since seen on the Riviera. Jean delivered the drawings and on the way back in the twilight a drunken oaf in a high-powered American car forced her off the road and she fell three hundred feet into the sea.
The bottom dropped out of my life.
It meant nothing to me that the driver of the other car got five years for manslaughter – that wouldn’t bring Jean back. I let things slide at the yard and if it hadn’t been for Harry Marshall the business would have gone to pot.
It was then that I tallied up my life and made a sort of mental balance sheet. I was thirty-six years old; I had a good business which I had liked but which now I didn’t seem to like so much; I had my health and strength – boat-building and sailing tend to keep one physically fit – and I had no debts. I even had money in the bank with more rolling in all the time.
On the other side of the balance sheet was the dreadful absence of Jean, which more than counter-balanced all the advantages.
I felt I couldn’t stay at the yard or even in Cape Town, where memories of Jean would haunt me at every corner. I wanted to get away. I was waiting for something to happen.
I was ripe for mischief.
VII
A couple of weeks later I was in a bar on Adderley Street having a drink or three. It wasn’t that I’d taken to drink, but I was certainly drinking more than I had been accustomed to. I had just started on my third brandy when I felt a touch at my elbow and a voice said, ‘Hallo, I haven’t seen you for a long time.’
I turned and found Walker standing next to me.
The years hadn’t dealt kindly with Walker. He was thinner, his dark, good looks had gone to be replaced by a sharpness of feature, and his hairline had receded. His clothes were unpressed and frayed at the edges, and there was an air of seediness about him which was depressing.
‘Hallo,’ I said. ‘Where did you spring from?’ He was looking at my full glass of brandy, so I said, ‘Have a drink.’
‘Thanks,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll have a double.’
That gave me a pretty firm clue as to what had happened to Walker, but I didn’t mind being battened upon for a couple of drinks, so I paid for the double brandy.
He raised the glass to his lips with a hand that trembled slightly, took a long lingering gulp, then put the glass down, having knocked back three-quarters of the contents. ‘You’re looking prosperous,’ he said.
‘I’m not doing too badly.’
He said, ‘I was sorry to hear of what happened to your wife.’ He hurried on as he saw my look of inquiry. ‘I read about it in the paper. I thought it must have been your wife – the name was the same and all that.’
I thought he had spent some time hunting me up. Old friends and acquaintances are precious to an alcoholic; they can be touched for the odd drink and the odd fiver.
‘That’s finished and best forgotten,’ I said shortly. Unwittingly, perhaps, he had touched me on the raw – he had brought Jean back. ‘What are you doing now?’
He shrugged. ‘This and that.’
‘You haven’t picked up any gold lately?’ I said cruelly. I wanted to pay him back for putting Jean in my mind.
‘Do I look as though I have?’ he asked bitterly. Unexpectedly, he said, ‘I saw Coertze last week.’
‘Here – in Cape Town?’
‘Yes. He’d just come back from Italy. He’s back in Jo’burg now, I expect.’
I smiled. ‘Did he have any gold with him?’
Walker shook his head. ‘He said that nothing’s changed.’ He suddenly gripped me by the arm. ‘The gold’s still there – nobody’s found it. It’s still there – four tons of gold in that tunnel – and all the jewels.’ He had a frantic urgency about him.
‘Well, why doesn’t he do something about it?’ I said. ‘Why doesn’t he go and get it out? Why don’t you both go?’
‘He doesn’t like me,’ said Walker sulkily. ‘He’ll hardly speak to me.’ He took one of my cigarettes from the packet on the counter, and I lit it for him, amusedly. ‘It isn’t easy to get it out of the country,’ he said. ‘Even Sergeant High-and-Mighty Coertze hasn’t found a way.’
He grinned tightly. ‘Imagine that,’ he said, almost gaily. ‘Even the brainy Coertze can’t do it. He put the gold in a hole in the ground and he’s too scared to get it out.’ He began to laugh hysterically.
I took his arm. ‘Take it easy.’
His laughter choked off suddenly. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Buy me another drink; I left my wallet at home.’
I crooked my finger at the bartender and Walker ordered another double. I was beginning to understand the reason for his degradation. For fourteen years the knowledge that a fortune in gold was lying in Italy waiting to be picked up had been eating at him like a cancer. Even when I knew him ten years earlier I was aware of the fatal weakness in him, and now one could see that the bitterness of defeat had been too much. I wondered how Coertze was standing up to the strain. At least he seemed to be doing something about it, even if only keeping an eye on the situation.
I said carefully, ‘If Coertze was willing to take you, would you be prepared to go to Italy to get the stuff out?’
He was suddenly very still. ‘What d’you mean?’ he demanded. ‘Have you been talking to Coertze?’
‘I’ve never laid eyes on the man.’
Walker’s glance shifted nervously about the bar, then he straightened. ‘Well, if he … wanted me; if he … needed me – I’d be prepared to go along.’ He said this with bravado but the malice showed through when he said, ‘He needed me once, you know; he needed me when we buried the stuff.’
‘You wouldn’t be afraid of him?’
‘What do you mean – afraid of him? Why should I be afraid of him? I’m afraid of nobody.’
‘You were pretty certain he’d committed at least four murders.’
He seemed put out. ‘Oh that! That was a long time ago. And I never said he’d murdered anybody. I never said it.’
‘No, you never actually said it.’
He shifted nervously on the bar stool. ‘Oh, what’s the use? He won’t ask me to go with him. He said as much last week.’
‘Oh, yes, he will,’ I said softly.
Walker looked up quickly. ‘Why should he?’
I said quietly, ‘Because I know of a way of getting that gold out of Italy and of taking it anywhere in the world, quite simply and relatively safely.’
His eyes widened. ‘What is it? How can you do it?’
‘I’m not going to tell you,’ I said equably. ‘After all, you wouldn’t tell me where the gold’s hidden.’
‘Well, let’s do it,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you where it is, you get it out, and Bob’s your uncle. Why bring Coertze into it?’
‘It’s a job for more than two men,’ I said. ‘Besides, he deserves a share – he’s been keeping an eye on the gold for fourteen years, which is a damn’ sight more than you’ve been doing.’ I failed to mention that I considered Walker the weakest of reeds. ‘Now, how will you get on with Coertze if this thing goes through?’
He turned sulky. ‘All right, I suppose, if he lays off me. But I won’t stand for any of his sarcasm.’ He looked at me in wonder as though what we were talking about had just sunk in. ‘You mean there’s a chance we can get the stuff out – a real chance?’
I nodded and got off the bar stool. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me.’
‘Where are you going?’ he asked quickly.
‘To phone the airline office,’ I said. ‘I want a seat on tomorrow’s Jo’burg plane. I’m going to see Coertze.’
The sign I had been waiting for had arrived.
TWO: COERTZE (#ulink_c454e8a8-194e-56df-8342-5f5ec6becbd8)
Air travel is wonderful. At noon the next day I was booking into a hotel in Johannesburg, a thousand miles from Cape Town.
On the plane I had thought a lot about Coertze. I had made up my mind that if he didn’t bite then the whole thing was off – I couldn’t see myself relying on Walker. And I had to decide how to handle him – from Walker’s account he was a pretty tough character. I didn’t mind that; I could be tough myself when the occasion arose, but I didn’t want to antagonize him. He would probably be as suspicious as hell, and I’d need kid gloves.
Then there was another thing – the financing of the expedition. I wanted to hang on to the boatyard as insurance in case this whole affair flopped, but I thought if I cut Harry Marshall in for a partnership in the yard, sold my house and my car and one or two other things, I might be able to raise about £25,000 – not too much for what I had in mind.
But it all depended on Coertze. I smiled when I considered where he was working. He had a job in Central Smelting Plant which refined gold from all the mines on the Reef. More gold had probably passed through his hands in the last few years than all the Axis war-lords put together had buried throughout the world.
It must have been tantalizing for him.
I phoned the smelting plant in the afternoon. There was a pause before he came on the line. ‘Coertze,’ he said briefly.
I came to the point. ‘My name’s Halloran,’ I said. ‘A mutual friend – Mr Walker of Cape Town – tells me you have been experiencing difficulty in arranging for the delivery of goods from Italy. I’m in the import-export business; I thought I might be able to help you.’
A deep silence bored into my ear.
I said, ‘My firm is fully equipped to do this sort of work. We never have much trouble with the Customs in cases like these.’
It was like dropping a stone into a very deep well and listening for the splash.
‘Why don’t you come to see me,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to take up your time now; I’m sure you’re a busy man. Come at seven this evening and we’ll discuss your difficulties over dinner. I’m staying at the Regency – it’s in Berea, in …’
‘I know where it is,’ said Coertze. His voice was deep and harsh with a guttural Afrikaans accent.
‘Good; I’ll be expecting you,’ I said, and put down the phone.
I was pleased with this first contact. Coertze was suspicious and properly so – he’d have been a fool not to be. But if he came to the hotel he’d be hooked, and all I had to do would be to jerk on the line and set the hook in firmly.
I was pretty certain he’d come; human curiosity would see to that. If he didn’t come, then he wouldn’t be human – or he’d be superhuman.
He came, but not at seven o’clock and I was beginning to doubt my judgement of the frailty of human nature. It was after eight when he knocked on the door, identified me, and said, ‘We’ll forget the dinner; I’ve eaten.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘But what about a drink?’ I crossed the room and put my hand on the brandy bottle. I was pretty certain it would be brandy – most South Africans drink it.
‘I’ll have a Scotch,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘Thanks,’ he added as an afterthought.
As I poured the drinks I glanced at him. He was a bulky man, broad of chest and heavy in the body. His hair was black and rather coarse and he had a shaggy look about him. I’d bet that when stripped he’d look like a grizzly bear. His eyebrows were black and straight over eyes of a snapping electric blue. He had looked after himself better than Walker; his belly was flat and there was a sheen of health about him.
I handed him a drink and we sat down facing each other. He was tense and wary, although he tried to disguise it by over-relaxing in his chair. We were like a couple of duellists who have just engaged blades.
‘I’ll come to the point,’ I said. ‘A long time ago Walker told me a very interesting story about some gold. That was ten years ago and we were going to do something about it, but it didn’t pan out. That might have been lucky because we’d have certainly made a botch of the job.’
I pointed my finger at him. ‘You’ve been keeping an eye on it. You’ve probably popped across to Italy from time to time just to keep your eye on things in general. You’ve been racking your brains trying to think of a way of getting that gold out of Italy, but you haven’t been able to do it. You’re stymied.’
His face had not changed expression; he would have made a good poker player. He said, ‘When did you see Walker?’
‘Yesterday – in Cape Town.’
The craggy face broke into a derisive grin. ‘And you flew up to Jo’burg to see me just because a dronkie like Walker told you a cock-and-bull story like that? Walker’s a no-good hobo; I see a dozen like him in the Library Gardens every day,’ he said contemptuously.
‘It’s not a cock-and-bull story, and I can prove it.’
Coertze just sat and looked at me like a stone gargoyle, the whisky glass almost lost in his huge fist.
I said, ‘What are you doing here – in this room? If there was no story, all you had to do was to ask me what the hell I was talking about when I spoke to you on the phone. The fact that you’re here proves there’s something in it.’
He made a fast decision. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What’s your proposition?’
I said, ‘You still haven’t figured a way of moving four tons of gold out of Italy. Is that right?’
He smiled slowly. ‘Let’s assume so,’ he said ironically.
‘I’ve got a foolproof way.’
He put down his glass and produced a packet of cigarettes. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m not going to tell you – yet.’
He grinned. ‘Walker hasn’t told you where the gold is, has he?’
‘No, he hasn’t,’ I admitted. ‘But he would if I put pressure on him. Walker can’t stand pressure; you know that.’
‘He drinks too much,’ said Coertze. ‘And when he drinks he talks; I’ll bet that’s how he came to spill his guts to you.’ He lit his cigarette. ‘What do you want out of it?’
‘Equal shares,’ I said firmly. ‘A three-way split after all expenses have been paid.’
‘And Walker comes with us on the job. Is that right?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Coertze moved in his chair. ‘Man, it’s like this,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if you’ve got a foolproof way of getting the gold out or if you haven’t. I thought I had it licked a couple of times. But let’s assume your way is going to work. Why should we take Walker?’
He held up his hand. ‘I’m not suggesting we do him down or anything like that – although he’d think nothing of cheating us. Give him his share after it’s all over, but for God’s sake keep him out of Italy. He’ll make a balls-up for sure.’
I thought of Harrison and Parker and the two Italians. ‘You don’t seem to like him.’
Coertze absently fingered a scar on his forehead. ‘He’s unreliable,’ he said. ‘He almost got me killed a couple of times during the war.’
I said, ‘No, we take Walker. I don’t know for certain if three of us can pull it off, and with two it would be impossible. Unless you want to let someone else in?’
He smiled humourlessly. ‘That’s not on – not with you coming in. But Walker had better keep his big mouth shut from now on.’
‘Perhaps it would be better if he stopped drinking,’ I suggested.
‘That’s right,’ Coertze agreed. ‘Keep him off the pots. A few beers are all right, but keep him off the hard-tack. That’ll be your job; I don’t want to have anything to do with the rat.’
He blew smoke into the air, and said, ‘Now let’s hear your proposition. If it’s good, I’ll come in with you. If I don’t think it’ll work, I won’t touch it. In that case, you and Walker can do what you damn’ well like, but if you go for that gold you’ll have me to reckon with. I’m a bad bastard when I’m crossed.’
‘So am I,’ I said.
We grinned at each other. I liked this man, in a way. I wouldn’t trust him any more than I’d trust Walker, but I had the feeling that while Walker would stick a knife in your back, Coertze would at least shoot you down from the front.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s have it.’
‘I’m not going to tell you – not here in this room,’ I saw his expression and hurried on. ‘It isn’t that I don’t trust you, it’s simply that you wouldn’t believe it. You have to see it – and you have to see it in Cape Town.’
He looked at me for a long moment, then said, ‘All right, if that’s the way you want it, I’ll play along.’ He paused to think. ‘I’ve got a good job here, and I’m not going to give it up on your say-so. There’s a long week-end coming up – that gives me three days off. I’ll fly down to Cape Town to see what you have to show me. If it’s good, the job can go hang; if it isn’t, then I’ve still got the job.’
‘I’ll pay for your fare,’ I said.
‘I can afford it,’ he grunted.
‘If it doesn’t pan out, I’ll pay for your fare,’ I insisted. ‘I wouldn’t want you to be out of pocket.’
He looked up and grinned. ‘We’ll get along,’ he said. ‘Where’s that bottle?’
As I was pouring another couple of drinks, he said, ‘You said you were going to Italy with Walker. What stopped you?’
I took the clipping from my pocket and passed it to him. He read it and laughed. ‘That must have scared Walker. I was there at the time,’ he said unexpectedly.
‘In Italy?’
He sipped the Scotch and nodded. ‘Yes; I saved my army back-pay and my gratuity and went back in ’48. As soon as I got there all hell started popping about this trial. I read about it in the papers and you never heard such a lot of bull in your life. Still, I thought I’d better lie low, so I had a lekker holiday with the Count.’
‘With the Count?’ I said in surprise.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I stay with the Count every time I go to Italy. I’ve been there four times now.’
I said, ‘How did you reckon to dispose of the gold once you got it out of Italy?’
‘I’ve got all that planned,’ he said confidently. ‘They’re always wanting gold in India and you get a good price. You’d be surprised at the amount of gold smuggled out of this country in small packets that ends up in India.’
He was right – India is the gold sink of the world – but I said casually, ‘My idea is to go the other way – to Tangier. It’s an open port with an open gold market. You should be able to sell four tons of gold there quite easily – and it’s legal, too. No trouble with the police.’
He looked at me with respect. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t know much about this international finance.’
‘There’s a snag,’ I said. ‘Tangier is closing up shop next year; it’s being taken over by Morocco. Then it won’t be a free port any more and the gold market will close.’
‘When next year?’
‘April 19,’ I said. ‘Nine months from now. I think we’ll just about have enough time.’
He smiled. ‘I never thought about selling the gold legally; I didn’t think you could. I thought the governments had got all that tied up. Maybe I should have met you sooner.’
‘It wouldn’t have done you any good,’ I said. ‘I hadn’t the brains then that I have now.’
He laughed and we proceeded to kill the bottle.
II
Coertze came down to Cape Town two weeks later. I met him at the airport and drove him directly to the yard, where Walker was waiting.
Walker seemed to shrink into himself when I told him that Coertze was visiting us. In spite of his braggart boasts, I could see he didn’t relish close contact. If half of what he had said about Coertze was true, then he had every reason to be afraid.
Come to think of it – so had I!
It must have been the first time that Coertze had been in a boatyard and he looked about him with keen interest and asked a lot of questions, nearly all of them sensible. At last, he said, ‘Well, what about it?’
I took them down to the middle slip where Jimmy Murphy’s Estralita was waiting to be drawn up for an overhaul. ‘That’s a sailing yacht,’ I said. ‘A 15-tonner. What would you say her draft it – I mean, how deep is she in the water?’
Coertze looked her over and then looked up at the tall mast. ‘She’ll need to be deep to counterbalance that lot,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know how much. I don’t know anything about boats.’
Considering he didn’t know anything about boats, it was a very sensible answer.
‘Her draft is six feet in normal trim,’ I said. ‘She’s drawing less now because a lot of gear has been taken out of her.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘I’d have thought it would be more than that,’ he said. ‘What happens when the wind blows hard on the sails? Won’t she tip over?’
This was going well and Coertze was on the ball. I said, ‘I have a boat like this just being built, another 15-tonner. Come and have a look at her.’
I led the way up to the shed where Sanford was being built and Coertze followed, apparently content that I was leading up to a point. Walker tagged on behind.
I had pressed to get Sanford completed and she was ready for launching as soon as the glass-fibre sheathing was applied and the interior finished.
Coertze looked up at her. ‘They look bloody big out of the water,’ he commented.
I smiled. That was the usual lay reaction. ‘Come aboard,’ I said.
He was impressed by the spaciousness he found below and commented favourably on the way things were arranged. ‘Did you design all this?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘You could live in here, all right,’ he said, inspecting the galley.
‘You could – and you will,’ I said. ‘This is the boat in which we’re going to take four tons of gold out of Italy.’
He looked surprised and then he frowned. ‘Where are you going to put it?’
I said, ‘Sit down and I’ll tell you something about sailing boats you don’t know.’ Coertze sat uncomfortably on the edge of the starboard settee which had no mattress as yet, and waited for me to explain myself.
‘This boat displaces – weighs, that is – ten tons, and …’
Walker broke in. ‘I thought you said she was a 15-tonner.’
‘That’s Thames measure – yacht measure. Her displacement is different.’
Coertze looked at Walker. ‘Shut up and let the man speak.’ He turned to me. ‘If the boat weighs ten tons and you add another four tons, she’ll be pretty near sinking, won’t she? And where are you going to put it? It can’t be out in the open where the cops can see it.’
I said patiently, ‘I said I’d tell you something about sailing boats that you didn’t know. Now, listen – about forty per cent of the weight of any sailing boat is ballast to keep her the right way up when the wind starts to press on those sails.’
I tapped the cabin sole with my foot. ‘Hanging on the bottom of this boat is a bloody great piece of lead weighing precisely four tons.’
Coertze looked at me incredulously, a dawning surmise in his eyes. I said, ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’
We went outside and I showed them the lead ballast keel. I said, ‘All this will be covered up next week because the boat will be sheathed to keep out the marine borers.’
Coertze was squatting on his heels looking at the keel. ‘This is it,’ he said slowly. ‘This is it. The gold will be hidden under water – built in as part of the boat.’ He began to laugh, and after a while Walker joined in. I began to laugh, too, and the walls of the shed resounded.
Coertze sobered suddenly. ‘What’s the melting point of lead?’ he asked abruptly.
I knew what was coming. ‘Four-fifty degrees centigrade,’ I said. ‘We’ve got a little foundry at the top of the yard where we pour the keels.’
‘Ja,’ he said heavily. ‘You can melt lead on a kitchen stove. But gold melts at over a thousand centigrade and we’ll need more than a kitchen stove for that. I know; melting gold is my job. Up at the smelting plant we’ve got bloody big furnaces.’
I said quickly, ‘I’ve thought of that one, too. Come up to the workshop – I’ll show you something else you’ve never seen before.’
In the workshop I opened a cupboard and said, ‘This gadget is brand new – just been invented.’ I hauled out the contraption and put it on the bench. Coertze looked at it uncomprehendingly.
There wasn’t much to see; just a metal box, eighteen inches by fifteen inches by nine inches, on the top of which was an asbestos mat and a Heath Robinson arrangement of clamps.
I said, ‘You’ve heard of instant coffee – this is instant heat.’ I began to get the machine ready for operation. ‘It needs cooling water at at least five pounds an inch pressure – that we get from an ordinary tap. It works on ordinary electric current, too, so you can set it up anywhere.’
I took the heart of the machine from a drawer. Again, it wasn’t much to look at; just a piece of black cloth, three inches by four. I said, ‘Some joker in the States discovered how to spin and weave threads of pure graphite, and someone else discovered this application.’
I lifted the handle on top of the machine, inserted the graphite mat, and clamped it tight. Then I took a bit of metal and gave it to Coertze.
He turned it in his fingers and said, ‘What is it?’
‘Just a piece of ordinary mild steel. But if this gadget can melt steel, it can melt gold. Right?’
He nodded and looked at the machine dubiously – it wasn’t very impressive.
I took the steel from his fingers and dropped it on to the graphite mat, then I gave Walker and Coertze a pair of welders’ goggles each. ‘Better put these on: it gets a bit bright.’
We donned the goggles and I switched on the machine. It was a spectacular display. The graphite mat flashed instantly to a white heat and the piece of steel glowed red, then yellow and finally white. It seemed to slump like a bit of melting wax and in less than fifteen seconds it had melted into a little pool. All this to the accompaniment of a violent shower of sparks as the metal reacted with the air.
I switched off the machine and removed my goggles. ‘We won’t have all these fireworks when we melt gold; it doesn’t oxidize as easily as iron.’
Coertze was staring at the machine. ‘How does it do that?’
‘Something like a carbon arc,’ I said. ‘You can get temperatures up to five thousand degrees centigrade. It’s only intended to be a laboratory instrument, but I reckon we can melt two pounds of gold at a time. With three of these gadgets and a hell of a lot of spare mats we should be able to work pretty fast.’
He said doubtfully, ‘If we can only pour a couple of pounds at a time, the keel is going to be so full of cracks and flaws that I’m not sure it won’t break under its own weight.’
‘I’ve thought of that one, too,’ I said calmly. ‘Have you ever watched anyone pour reinforced concrete?’
He frowned and then caught on, snapping his fingers.
‘We make the mould and put a mesh of wires inside,’ I said. ‘That’ll hold it together.’
I showed him a model I had made, using fuse wire and candle wax, which he examined carefully. ‘You’ve done a hell of a lot of thinking about this,’ he said at last.
‘Somebody has to,’ I said. ‘Or that gold will stay where it is for another fourteen years.’
He didn’t like that because it made him appear stupid; but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He started to say something and bit it short, his face flushing red. Then he took a deep breath and said, ‘All right, you’ve convinced me. I’m in.’
Then I took a deep breath – of relief.
III
That night we had a conference.
I said, ‘This is the drill. Sanford – my yacht – will be ready for trials next week. As soon as the trials are over you two are going to learn how to sail under my instruction. In under four months from now we sail for Tangier.’
‘Christ!’ said Walker. ‘I don’t know that I like the sound of that.’
‘There’s nothing to it,’ I said. ‘Hundreds of people are buzzing about the Atlantic these days. Hell, people have gone round the world in boats a quarter the size.’
I looked at Coertze. ‘This is going to take a bit of financing. Got any money?’
‘About a thousand,’ he admitted.
‘That gets tossed into the kitty,’ I said. ‘Along with my twenty-five thousand.’
‘Magtig,’ he said. ‘That’s a hell of a lot of money.’
‘We’ll need every penny of it,’ I said. ‘We might have to buy a small boatyard in Italy if that’s the only way we can cast the keel in secrecy. Besides, I’m lending it to the firm of Walker, Coertze and Halloran at one hundred per cent interest. I want fifty thousand back before the three-way split begins. You can do the same with your thousand.’
‘That sounds fair enough,’ agreed Coertze.
I said, ‘Walker hasn’t any money and once you’ve thrown your thousand in the kitty, neither have you. So I’m putting you both on my payroll. You’ve got to have your smokes and three squares a day while all this is going on.’
This bit of information perked Walker up considerably. Coertze merely nodded in confirmation. I looked hard at Walker. ‘And you stay off the booze or we drop you over the side. Don’t forget that.’
He nodded sullenly.
Coertze said, ‘Why are we going to Tangier first?’
‘We’ve got to make arrangements to remelt the gold into standard bars,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine any banker calmly taking a golden keel into stock. Anyway, that’s for the future; right now I have to turn you into passable seamen – we’ve got to get to the Mediterranean first.’
I took Sanford on trials and Walker and Coertze came along for the ride and to see what they were letting themselves in for. She turned out to be everything I’ve ever wanted in a boat. She was fast for a deep-sea cruiser and not too tender. With a little sail adjustment she had just the right amount of helm and I could see she was going to be all right without any drastic changes.
As we went into a long reach she picked up speed and went along happily with the water burbling along the lee rail and splashing on deck. Walker, his face a little green, said, ‘I thought you said a keel would hold this thing upright.’ He was hanging tightly on to the side of the cockpit.
I laughed. I was happier than I had been for a long time. ‘Don’t worry about that. That’s not much angle of heel. She won’t capsize.’
Coertze didn’t say anything – he was busy being sick.
The next three months were rough and tough. People forget that the Cape was the Cape of Storms before some early public relations officer changed the name to the Cape of Good Hope. When the Berg Wind blows it can be as uncomfortable at sea as anywhere in the world.
I drove Walker and Coertze unmercifully. In three months I had to turn them into capable seamen, because Sanford was a bit too big to sail single-handed. I hoped that the two of them would equal one able-bodied seaman. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds because in those three months they put in as much sea time as the average week-end yachtsman gets in three years, and they had the dubious advantage of having a pitiless instructor.
Shore time was spent in learning the theory of sail and the elements of marline-spike seamanship – how to knot and splice, mend a sail and make baggywrinkle. They grumbled a little at the theory, but I silenced that by asking them what they’d do if I was washed overboard in the middle of the Atlantic.
Then we went out to practise what I had taught – at first in the bay and then in the open sea, cruising coastwise around the peninsula at first, and then for longer distances well out of sight of land.
I had thought that Coertze would prove to be as tough at sea as apparently he was on land. But he was no sailor and never would be. He had a queasy stomach and couldn’t stand the motion, so he turned out to be pretty useless at boat handling. But he was hero enough to be our cook on the longer voyages, a thankless job for a sea-sick man.
I would hear him swearing below when the weather was rough and a pot of hot coffee was tossed in his lap. He once told me that he now knew what poker dice felt like when they were shaken in the cup. He wouldn’t have stood it for any lesser reason, but the lust for gold was strong in him.
Walker was the real surprise. Coertze and I had weaned him from his liquor over many protests, and he was now eating more and the air and exercise agreed with him. He put on weight, his thin cheeks filled out and his chest broadened. Nothing could replace the hair he had lost, but he seemed a lot more like the handsome young man I had known ten years earlier.
More surprisingly, he turned out to be a natural sailor. He liked Sanford and she seemed to like him. He was a good helmsman and could lay her closer to the wind than I could when we were beating to windward. At first I was hesitant to give him a free hand with Sanford, but as he proved himself I lost my reluctance.
At last we were ready and there was nothing more to wait for. We provisioned Sanford and set sail for the north on November 12, to spend Christmas at sea. Ahead of us was a waste of water with the beckoning lure of four tons of gold at the other side.
I suppose one could have called it a pleasure cruise!
BOOK TWO The Gold (#ulink_3053a2c7-3b40-5f71-983d-3dc91509154b)
THREE: TANGIER (#ulink_5fb1e51d-920b-5834-94c9-4bda076fe1ff)
Two months later we sailed into Tangier harbour, the ‘Q’ flag hoisted, and waited for the doctor to give us pratique and for the Customs to give us the once-over. To port of Sanford was the modern city with its sleek, contemporary buildings sharply outlined against the sky. To starboard was the old city – the Arab city – squat and low-roofed and hugging a hill, the skyline only broken by the up-flung spear of a minaret.
To port – Europe; to starboard – Africa.
This was nothing new to Walker and Coertze. They had sown a few wild oats in their army days, roistering in Cairo and Alexandria. On the voyage from Cape Town they had talked much about their army days – and all in Italian, too. We made it a rule to speak as much Italian as possible, and while the others were on a refresher course, I didn’t lag far behind even though I had to start from scratch.
We had settled on a good cover story to veil our activities in the Mediterranean. I was a South African boat builder on a cruise combining business with pleasure. I was thinking of expanding into the lucrative Mediterranean market and might buy a boatyard if the price and conditions were right. This story had the advantage of not departing too far from the truth and would serve if we really had to buy a yard to cast the golden keel.
Coertze was a mining man with medical trouble. His doctor had advised him to take a leisurely holiday and so he was crewing Sanford for me. His cover story would account for any interest he might take in derelict lead mines.
Walker, who proved to be something of an actor, was a moderately wealthy playboy. He had money but disliked work and was willing to go a long way to avoid it. He had come on this Mediterranean trip because he was bored with South Africa and wanted a change. It was to be his job to set things up in Tangier; to acquire a secluded house where we could complete the last stages of the operation.
All in all, I was quite satisfied, even though I had got a bit tired of Coertze on the way north. He didn’t like the way I seemed to be taking charge of things and I had to ram home very forcibly the fact that a ship can only have one skipper. He had seen the point when we ran into heavy weather off the Azores, and it galled him that the despised Walker was the better seaman.
Now we were in Tangier, he had recovered his form and was a bit more inclined to throw his weight around. I could see that I’d have to step on him again before long.
Walker looked about the yacht basin. ‘Not many sailing boats here,’ he commented.
That was true. There were a few ungainly-looking fishing boats and a smart ketch, probably bound for the Caribbean. But there were at least twenty big power craft, fast-looking boats, low on the water. I knew what they were.
This was the smuggling fleet. Cigarettes to Spain, cigarette lighters to France, antibiotics to where they could make a profit (although that trade had fallen off), narcotics to everywhere. I wondered if there was much arms smuggling to Algeria.
At last the officials came and went, leaving gouges in my planking from their hob-nailed boots. I escorted them to their launch, and as soon as they had left, Walker touched my arm.
‘We’ve got another visitor,’ he said.
I turned and saw a boat being sculled across the harbour. Walker said, ‘He was looking at us through glasses from that boat across there.’ He pointed to one of the motor craft. ‘Then he started to come here.’
I watched the approaching dinghy. A European was rowing and I couldn’t see his face, but as he dexterously backed water and swung round to the side of Sanford he looked up and I saw that it was Metcalfe.
Metcalfe is one of that international band of scallywags of whom there are about a hundred in the world. They are soldiers of fortune and they flock to the trouble spots, ignoring the danger and going for the money. I was not really surprised to see Metcalfe in Tangier; it had been a pirates’ stronghold from time immemorial and would be one of Metcalfe’s natural hang-outs.
I had known him briefly in South Africa but I didn’t know what he was at the time. All that I knew was that he was a damned good sailor who won a lot of dinghy races at Cape Town and who came close to winning the South African dinghy championship. He bought one of my Falcons and had spent a lot of time at the yard tuning it.
I had liked him and had crewed for him a couple of times. We had had many a drink together in the yacht club bar and he had spent a week-end at Kirstenbosche with Jean and myself. It was in the way of being a firmly ripening friendship between us when he had left South Africa a hop, skip and a jump ahead of the police, who wanted to nail him on a charge of I.D.B. Since then I had not seen him, but I had heard passing mentions and had occasionally seen his name in the papers, usually quoted as being in trouble in some exotic hot-spot.
Now he was climbing on to the deck of Sanford.
‘I thought it was you,’ he said. ‘So I got the glasses to make sure. What are you doing here?’
‘Just idly cruising,’ I said. ‘Combining business with pleasure. I thought I might see what the prospects in the Med. are like.’
He grinned. ‘Brother, they’re good. But that’s not in your line, is it?’
I shook my head, and said, ‘Last I heard of you, you were in Cuba.’
‘I was in Havana for a bit,’ he said. ‘But that was no place for me. It was an honest revolution, or at least it was until the Commies moved in. I couldn’t compete with them, so I quit.’
‘What are you doing now?’
He smiled and looked at Walker. ‘I’ll tell you later.’
I said, ‘This is Walker and this is Coertze.’ There was handshaking all round and Metcalfe said, ‘It’s good to hear a South African accent again. You’d have a good country there if the police weren’t so efficient.’
He turned to me. ‘Where’s Jean?’
‘She’s dead,’ I said. ‘She was killed in a motor smash.’
‘How did it happen?’
So I told him of Chapman’s Peak and the drunken driver and the three-hundred-foot fall to the sea. As I spoke his face hardened, and when I had finished, he said, ‘So the bastard only got five years, and if he’s a good boy he’ll be out in three and a half.’
He rubbed his finger against the side of his nose. ‘I liked Jean,’ he said. ‘What’s the bludger’s name? I’ve got friends in South Africa who can see to him when he comes out.’
‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘That won’t bring Jean back.’
He nodded, then slapped his hands together. ‘Now you’re all staying with me at my place; I’ve got room enough for an army.’
I said hesitantly, ‘What about the boat?’
He smiled. ‘I see you’ve heard stories about the Tangier dock thieves. Well, let me tell you they’re all true. But that doesn’t matter; I’ll put one of my men on board. Nobody steals from my men – or me.’
He rowed back across the harbour and presently returned with a scar-faced Moroccan, to whom he spoke in quick and guttural Arabic. Then he said, ‘That’s all fixed. I’ll have the word passed round the docks that you’re friends of mine. Your boat’s safe enough, as safe as though it lay in your own yard.’
I believed him. I could believe he had a lot of pull in a place like Tangier.
‘Let’s go ashore,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry.’
‘So am I,’ said Coertze.
‘It’ll be a relief not to do any more cooking for a while, won’t it?’ I said.
‘Man,’ said Coertze, ‘I wouldn’t mind if I never saw a frypan again.’
‘That’s a pity,’ said Metcalfe. ‘I was looking forward to you making me some koeksusters; I always liked South African grub.’ He roared with laughter and slapped Coertze on the back.
Metcalfe had a big apartment on the Avenida de España, and he gave me a room to myself while Coertze and Walker shared a room. He stayed and chatted while I unpacked my bag.
‘South Africa too quiet for you?’ he asked.
I went into my carefully prepared standard talk on the reasons I had left. I had no reason to trust Metcalfe more than anyone else – probably less – judging by the kind of man he was. I don’t know whether he believed me or not, but he agreed that there was scope in the Mediterranean for a good boatyard.
‘You may not get as many commissions to build,’ he said. ‘But there certainly is room for a good servicing and maintenance yard. I’d go east, towards Greece, if I were you. The yards in the islands cater mostly for the local fishermen; there’s room for someone who understands yachts and yachtsmen.’
‘What have you got a boat for?’ I asked banteringly. ‘Hiring it out for charter cruises?’
He grinned. ‘Aw, you know me. I carry all sorts of cargoes; anything except narcotics.’ He pulled a face. ‘I’m a bad bastard, I know, but I draw the line at drugs. Anything else I’m game for.’
‘Including guns to Algeria,’ I hazarded.
He laughed. ‘The French in Algiers hate my guts – they tried to do me down a couple of months ago. I’d unloaded a cargo into some fishing boats and then I ran into Algiers to refuel. I was clean, see! they couldn’t touch me – my papers were in order and everything.’
‘I let the crew go ashore for a drink and I turned in and had a zizz. Then something woke me up – I heard a thump and then a queer noise that seemed to come from underneath the boat. So I got up and had a look around. When I got on deck I saw a boat pulling away and there seemed to be a man in the water, swimming alongside it.’
He grinned. ‘Well, I’m a careful and cautious man, so I got my snorkel and my swim-fins and went over the side to have a look-see. What do you think those French Security bastards had done to me?’
I shook my head. ‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘They’d put a limpet mine on my stern gear. They must have reckoned that if they couldn’t nail me down legally they’d do it illegally. If that thing went off it would blow the bottom out of my stern. Well, I got it off the boat and did a bit of heavy thinking. I knew they wouldn’t have timed it to blow up in harbour – it wouldn’t have looked nice – so I reckoned it was set to blow after I left.
‘I slung it round my neck by the cord and swam across the harbour to where the police patrol boat was lying and stuck it under their stern. Let them have the trouble of buying a new boat.
‘Next day we left early as planned and, as we moved out, I heard the police boat revving up. They followed us a long way while I was taking it nice and easy, cruising at about ten knots so they wouldn’t lose me. They hung on to my tail for about thirty miles, waiting for the bang and laughing to themselves fit to bust, I suppose. But they didn’t laugh when the bang came and blew the arse off their own boat.
‘I turned and picked them up. It was all good clean fun – no one was hurt. When I’d got them out of the water I took them back to Algiers – the noble rescuer. You ought to have seen the faces of the Security boys when I pitched up. Of course, they had to go through the motions of thanking me for rescuing those lousy, shipwrecked mariners. I kept a straight face and said I thought it must have been one of the antisubmarine depth charges in the stern that had gone off. They said it couldn’t have been that because police boats don’t carry depth charges. And that was that.’
He chuckled. ‘No, they don’t like me in Algiers.’
I laughed with him. It was a good story and he had told it well.
I was in two minds about Metcalfe; he had his advantages and his disadvantages. On the one hand, he could give us a lot of help in Tangier; he knew the ropes and had the contacts. On the other hand, we had to be careful he didn’t get wind of what we were doing. He was a hell of a good chap and all that, but if he knew we were going to show up with four tons of gold he would hijack us without a second thought. We were his kind of meat.
Yes, we had to be very careful in our dealings with Mr Metcalfe. I made a mental note to tell the others not to let anything drop in his presence.
I said, ‘What kind of boat have you got?’
‘A Fairmile,’ he said. ‘I’ve re-engined it, of course.’
I knew of the Fairmiles, but I had never seen one close up. They had been built in the hundreds during the war for harbour defence. The story was that they were built by the mile and cut off as needed. They were 112 feet overall with powerful engines and could work up over twenty knots easily, but they had the reputation of being bad rollers in a cross sea. They were not armoured or anything like that, being built of wood, and when a few of them went into St Nazaire with the Campbelltown they got shot up very badly.
After the war you could buy a surplus Fairmile for about five thousand quid and they had become a favourite with the smugglers of Tangier. If Metcalfe had re-engined his Fairmile, he had probably gone for power to outrun the revenue cutters and his boat would be capable of at least twenty-six knots in an emergency. Sanford would have no chance of outrunning a boat like that if it came to the push.
‘I’d like to see her sometime,’ I said. There was no harm in looking over a potential enemy.
‘Sure,’ said Metcalfe expansively. ‘But not just yet. I’m going out tomorrow night.’
That was good news – with Metcalfe out of the way we might be able to go about our business undisturbed. ‘When are you coming back?’ I asked.
‘Some time next week,’ he said. ‘Depending on the wind and the rain and suchlike things.’
‘Such as those French Security bastards?’
‘That’s right,’ he said carelessly. ‘Let’s eat.’
II
Metcalfe made us free of his flat and said we could live there in his absence – the servants would look after us. That afternoon he took me round town and introduced me to several people. Some were obviously good contacts to have, such as a ship’s chandler and a boat builder. Others were not so obviously good; there was a villainous-looking café proprietor, a Greek with no discernible occupation and a Hungarian who explained volubly that he was a ‘Freedom Fighter’ who had escaped from Hungary after the abortive revolution of 1956. I was particularly cynical about him.
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Desmond Bagley
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Триллеры
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
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О книге: The first action thriller by the classic adventure writer, set in Italy.