“Maybe he kept it empty for another reason entirely,” Paul told Carey with a sly wink.
He’d offered to leave her at the hotel this morning, but she wanted to be with him. She sat on the floor and read a book as he methodically ran the sensor up and down. He was in another room when she heard loud chirping noises. She jumped up and ran to where he was.
“Did you find something?”
“Maybe. This is the first hit I’ve had since we got here.” He ran the detector across the wall again and got more chirps. “Pull the wallpaper off right there!” he yelled.
She stripped the faded paper. Behind it was the unmistakable outline of a door. Paul took a hammer and furiously dug it into the drywall. It took only minutes before they were standing in front of what had once been a walk-in closet.
There was nothing in it except four wooden crates, each about two feet square. They were sitting in a corner.
The hammer made quick work of the first crate’s lid. They pulled it off and saw that their hunches had been correct. There was more gold after all. A lot more.
Laughing like kids, they sat on the floor and emptied that box. In it were thirty-six bars. A quick lift of three more lids confirmed each box held the same thing. There were a hundred and forty-four bars total.
“Shit,” she said with a grin. “Old Nicu stole a hell of a lot more than he admitted in his diary.”
“I had a hunch he did,” Paul replied. “He was making sure his future was secure. And he did it. He served his time and lived a comfortable life for a hundred and five years. Comfortable, I suppose, but I’d wager he wasn’t happy until you came along.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense,” she blurted, admitting with a giggle, “I couldn’t do the math on my measly twenty-three bars. How much money are we looking at here?”
Paul pulled out his smartphone and entered some numbers. “In US dollars, around five million, give or take.”
This whole thing simply took her breath away. She could barely speak. “What do we do with it?”
“Happy birthday,” he replied.
“It’s not my birthday. My birthday’s not until September 17th!”
“Consider it an early birthday present. It’s yours, Carey. I have plenty. We’ll take the jet to Linz and use your black card to convert the gold to cash in your account.”
Just like always, the man she was going to spend the rest of her life with surprised her once again.
“I love you, Paul Silver.”
He kissed her passionately. “Ditto, Apostol. Let’s get this stuff loaded up and get on with our lives!”
——
It would be years before ownership rights to the Ghost Train were resolved. By then both the Romanian and German ministers would have long since retired. Human rights organizations asserted claims to the stolen treasures on behalf of the millions who had died in the Holocaust. Romania claimed an interest since the bounty was found at Peles Castle. So did the royal family. Germany asserted its claim as well since many of the items the train carried had been stolen in Germany. The art, sculpture and relics were more simply dealt with. Many could easily be traced back to the institutions or families who had owned them prior to the war.
Ultimately each of those claimants would be awarded a share, with families of the Holocaust victims receiving the most. Billions of dollars of stolen property at last was returned to those from whom the Nazis had taken everything. Now there would be no treasure to build a neo-Nazi Germany. There would be no Fourth Reich, no rising phoenix. Hitler’s reign of horror was over at last.
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