Dark Eye of the Jaguar

by Robert Mitchell

  We both looked at the reply, now sitting in the middle of the kitchen table.

  Subject to our being able to examine the cross and verifying its authenticity, we would be prepared to pay you the sum of US$50,000. This sum could be paid to you in Australia, or in any other country in the world and either in Australian dollars or in any other currency, and in either cash or a bank draft or in any other manner of payment that you may require. Please advise as to where we may now examine the cross. We acknowledge that you may have some fears and would therefore state that we would have no objection to examining the cross in some public place such as a bank or legal office, or at any other place that you might choose. The monetary payment would be made available within 24 hours of our examination.

  “They aren’t mucking around, are they?” I said. “Fifty thousand dollars.”

  “No,” Sue replied. “It’s a lot of money.”

  “It’s a lot of money for a first offer, especially when they’ve only seen pictures of it.” I said. “These guys must know what it is. They must know what church the Boxers stole it from.”

  “Not necessarily,” she replied. “They might just recognise it for what it is?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, they might be experts in eighteenth century religious crosses, and are fairly certain that’s what it is. If they recognised it as one which had been stolen by the Boxers, they wouldn’t be so insistent on wanting to see it before they committed themselves to buying it.”

  “Yeah, you could be right,” I replied.

  “So?” Sue asked. “Do we sell it to them?”

  “Not for fifty thousand we don’t,” I replied quickly. “That’s just their opening bid. Anyway, I don’t want to sell until we get back from Beijing. If we make personal contact with these people, and they’re not just collectors or dealers in eighteenth century religious antiques, but actually do know that the cross was one which disappeared during the Boxer rebellion, they might put us under observation and follow us to China, hoping that maybe we know where a few other pieces might be. Besides, why should we sell it to them and not put it up for auction and sell to the highest bidder?”

  “Why not put that to them?” Sue suggested.

  “I was thinking of doing just that. And besides, it’ll help drag matters out a little longer. Has there been anything else on the collectors’ website about the jade or the pieces of gold?”

  “No. I think we’re old news.”

  We delayed sending off our reply for a week, telling them that we had been away on a cruise again, hoping they might presume from this that we were regular cruisers and this would in part explain the long delays between some of our replies. Their reply was waiting for us to collect from the mall early the next morning.

  The cross has an intrinsic value, an historical value, and a value as an antique. Its intrinsic value is far less than the amount we have offered. Its value as an antique is also less than our offer, although considerably more than its intrinsic value. Our interest in the cross is a personal one. If you were to place the cross up for auction, we would be the highest bidders. We would have to pay a buyer’s commission and you would have to pay a seller’s commission. Your taxation authorities would no doubt be interested in your windfall. As a bequest from your aunt, you no doubt would be required to pay tax on the amount by which the cross has increased in value from when she and your uncle acquired it. If you accept our offer, none of these matters need arise.

  “They make a good point,” Sue said. “The auction commissions could total more than thirty per cent.”

  “How much?” I exclaimed.

  “Over thirty per cent. I’ve been looking at auction sites on the computer at home. Some of them charge a buyer’s commission of twenty-two per cent.”

  “Bloody hell!” I exclaimed. “How much is the seller’s commission?”

  “It depends on the auction house. It could be anything from zero to ten or fifteen per cent.”

  “They don’t bloody miss out, do they!”

  “No, and there’d be capital gains tax payable as well,” she added. “So the fifty thousand they’re offering is probably close to what a hundred thousand dollars would realise at auction, maybe even more. As far as capital gains tax is concerned, well, the cross hasn’t cost us anything so we’d be paying tax on the entire amount left after we pay commission.”

  I thought about it for all of twenty seconds. “I don’t care,” I said. “We’re not selling.”

  “What do you want to do then?” she asked. “I think you’re wrong. This way we get fifty thousand dollars and, even if we find nothing in Beijing, we’ve still got fifty thousand dollars. If we hang on to it the whole thing could blow up in our faces. We haven’t heard from John Jenkinson-Smythe. Just say, for instance, that he starts chasing us. If we’ve sold the cross then he has to chase these other people. It’s not our problem.”

  “If Jenkinson-Smythe sues us, the fifty thousand dollars would go into the pot. It’d make no difference. Anyway, stop worrying about him. He’s not going to do anything. Unless he was the ultimate beneficiary of everything owned by Captain Monty and his widow and children, then he’s got no claim or right. Forget him.”

  “You’ve changed your tune,” she said. “Okay,” she asked again. “Just what do you want to do?”

  “We’ll tell them that we’re thinking about it. We’ll tell them we’ll let them know in a week or two. That’ll give us more time. We leave for China in seven weeks. I don’t want to do anything about selling the cross until we get back. If we find the chest, and it’s full of similar stuff, then we might sell the cross to these guys in order to get ourselves some capital.”

  “Why will we need capital?”

  “In case we run into any claimants for the chest and what’s in it, and we get into a legal fight.”

  “What kind of claimants?” she asked. “John Jenkinson-Smythe?”

  “No, not him. Forget about him, for God’s sake!”

  “Well, who then?”

  “Well, there’s Captain Monty’s descendants for a start, his wife and the three kids. One of the kids had to live long enough to inherit and then pass the estate on.”

  “The son, Arthur, didn’t live for too long,” she replied.

  “What do you mean?”

  “John Jenkinson-Smythe said that he died in the trenches during the First World War.”

  “Yes, but if he was, say, ten or eleven when Captain Monty wrote that letter to his wife,” I replied. “And he was killed as early as 1914. He still would’ve been of age to inherit. Anyway, there were still the other two kids. We don’t know whether they were boys or girls, but it doesn’t really matter. His widow could have remarried for all we know and passed everything on to her new husband.”

  “So,” Sue asked. “Is there anyone else who could make a claim?”

  “Well, there’s whoever the contents of the chest belonged to in the first place.” I thought for a moment and then added: “There’s always the chance that the Chinese government might throw their oar in.”

  “Why would the government be interested?”

  “Treasure trove,” I replied. “I don’t know what the law in China is, or even what it is in Australia for that matter. But if the chest was found buried somewhere in the United Kingdom, there’d be all sorts of complications. There’d be a coronial inquest for a start. If it was found to be treasure trove then the Crown would take the lot and pay a reward, and it wouldn’t be anywhere near its full value. I don’t see why China might be any different, particularly where there’s money to be had.”

  “Do you think that’s likely to happen with our chest?”

  “Not really, but I’d like to be prepared just in case. If a court battle starts with any one of them then all sales would be frozen, and we couldn’t afford to fight. We’ll have to sell the cross, one way or another, but let’s just hang on to it for now.”

  We left it at that for a fortnigh
t. We didn’t want to think about their offer. We didn’t need the temptation. Fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money.

  It was another two weeks later that matters started to become serious. We were both in the mall, Sue buying groceries and me changing a couple of library books. I looked at the public computers as we went down the escalator to the lower floor, and turned to her, my forehead asking the question.

  “We might as well,” she said.

  There were three answers waiting for us. They all said much the same thing. The offer was increased by ten thousand dollars in the first email, by another ten on the second, and by five on the third and last desperate entreaty.

  “It’s up to seventy-five thousand,” Sue said. “I’m glad we didn’t accept their first offer.”

  “If we asked for a hundred thousand they’d jump at it,” I said.

  “Do you think so?”

  “Of course. Those guys are hungry for it.”

  “What do we do?”

  “We write back and tell them that we’ve had another approach, another offer. We won’t mention a figure. Then we ask them why we should sell it to them and not to this other buyer. And we ask them who they are. For all we know they might just be a high-class antique dealer trying to buy privately. If we sold to them we might see it come up for sale at Christie’s or Sotheby’s for hundreds of thousands of dollars in six months’ time. And then we’d start kicking ourselves.”

  Sue typed the message and I followed it over her shoulder as she wrote.

  “That’s good,” I said. “It’ll give them something to think about.”

  I suddenly felt eyes watching me and turned to find Martin Jones, the friend who lived next door to the person whose identity we had stolen and used for the anonymous email address.

  “Hi, you guys,” he said, his tall lanky frame trying to peek over my shoulder to see what Sue was up to on the computer. “What’s up? Has that cheap-line computer of yours gone on the blink?”

  “Huh?” I replied, suddenly on the back foot. “Ah.., no. Sue suddenly remembered an urgent email she had to get off to a friend.” I hoped to hell that Sue had logged off and he couldn’t see the screen, even though the name of the bogus email address was nothing like the name of Martin’s deceased neighbour. “How are things with you?” I asked.

  “Oh, big drama at our place,” he replied.

  “What happened?” Sue asked, shutting down the computer and rising from the chair.

  “We had a break-in next door a couple of days ago.”

  “I thought the guy had died,” I replied. “I thought the house was empty?”

  “It was, well, almost. His grown-up kids had taken all of his personal stuff and some of the furniture, the small stuff. It was only the big stuff that was left, beds, lounge suite, refrigerator, that sort of thing.”

  “So, did they take anything?” I asked.

  “There was nothing they could have taken, not unless they’d had a removal van.”

  “So, what was the big drama?” Sue asked.

  “The mongrels smashed just about every bit of furniture that was left. They slashed the couch, ripped the panels off the refrigerator, and even cracked the legs off the dining room table. The cops said they even went up into the ceiling and started ripping things about there as well.”

  “Bloody hell!” I said, and it wasn’t because I was shocked by what had happened to his neighbour.

  “Yeah, it sure scared the hell out of us. The cops think whoever it was had the wrong address.”

  “Wrong address?” I asked, visions of the damage they might have done to our house if they had got the right address.

  “Yeah. They think that maybe the guys who broke in were looking for a stash of drugs. They think that maybe they got the wrong street, or maybe even the wrong suburb.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said, still trying to come to terms with the bombshell he had just dropped.

  “Anyway,” he replied. “I’ve got to keep moving. Can’t stop and talk. Pam’s waiting for me to help carry the groceries to the car. See you both later. Bye.”

  “That is scary,” Sue said as Martin strode off.

  “Scary? It’s downright terrifying! You know what they were after, don’t you.”

  “The cross?”

  “Yeah, the cross. Let’s get away from here.”

  We scurried to where we had left the car, not caring about the uncompleted shopping, and the library books that would be overdue in the next day or so.

  “How did they track us down?” I asked. “Or, more to the point, how did they track down the old guy who lived next door to Martin?”

  “They got the email address we gave to Truecross on the discussion forum,” Sue replied. “And then they hacked into Yahoo and got the personal details we filed.”

  “I didn’t think you could do that.”

  “I couldn’t do it,” she said. “And I don’t think I know anybody who could, but it must be possible. Anything’s possible in the computer world.”

  “But why didn’t they pick up our real email address?”

  “What do you mean?” she replied.

  “Well, when you placed the cross and that one gold piece on those websites, those discussion forums or whatever, you used our actual email address.”

  “Yes,” she replied. “I did. But as soon as I set up the dummy address, I cancelled our membership and then set up a new membership, using the old guy’s name and address and the dummy email address, and then I used that one whenever I logged into the discussion forums.”

  “Could they find out where we’ve been logging in?” I asked.

  “What, do you mean which computer we were using? Where it might be?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Probably, although I think it would take some doing.”

  “So they could be watching that computer terminal,” I said.

  “Maybe,” she replied quietly. “But I think that it’s highly unlikely. I think that it’s only governments that can do that sort of thing, or police forces. You’d need some pretty good programming, and access to the national communications systems. I don’t think it’s something we have to worry about.”

  “The break-in was only a couple of days ago, according to Martin. They would’ve thought they had the right address. Now they’ll know we used a dummy email address, and they’ll have to track down the computer terminal we’ve been using. That would take them a couple more days, right?”

  “Ah, possibly,” Sue replied. “But it’s not going to happen.”

  “But it could happen,” I replied. “And then it’ll take another day or so to get someone stationed here to watch and see who uses the computers. How would they know we were on line?”

  “They’d probably be monitoring our email address and call through to whoever was watching the computers as soon as we opened it.”

  “Did you notice anyone watching?” I asked.

  “No. But I wasn’t looking for anyone.”

  “Okay, if we’re lucky, they haven’t had enough time to set it up yet, although the break-in was a couple of days ago. They’ve had two or more days to work on it.” I cast my eyes around the mall, looking for anyone who might have been showing any interest in us. If they knew that Martin lived next door to the old guy, they might have been following him, waiting to see whether he made contact with any one. I turned back to Sue. “One thing’s for certain though,” I said, trying not to move my lips.

  “What’s that?”

  “We won’t be using these computers again.”

  “My God, Ben! Don’t be so paranoid! They are not going to track down the actual computer we’re using. It’s not going to happen.”

  “But they might,” I snapped back at her. “We’re just lucky we didn’t use the one at home to check to see if we’d received any emails.”

  “That wasn’t luck, my sweet,” Sue said smiling. “That was because you decided to go shopping with your wife for a change.”

&n
bsp; I drove on, my mind only half on the traffic, and then asked: “Why would those guys break in like that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I realise that seventy-five thousand dollars is a lot of money, but if it had been our house, and we had been the ones to go to the police, then the police could’ve tracked them through their own email address, and through the messages they’d put on the collectors’ website.”

  “Their email address might be a dummy one as well,” Sue tossed in.

  “Yes, it might be, but the initial enquiry they put on the website wouldn’t have been. There are too many ways they could’ve been tracked down by the authorities.”

  “So,” Sue said. “Do you think it’s someone else, and not the guys who’ve made the offer?”

  “Yes, I do. And there’s one other thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It probably means that the cross is worth a lot more than seventy five thousand. Nobody is going to risk leaving an electronic trail for less than twice that amount.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “It’ll be interesting to see what reply we get from that mob,” I said.

  “Which mob?”

  “Truecross. It’ll be interesting to see what they say.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if it was them that broke in, they might say something that gives their game away. If I was them, and it was me who’d broken in, I’d be accusing us of using a dummy email address.”

  “Well, maybe,” she replied.

  “We have to find out what the cross is worth,” I said as we walked into the house carrying the week’s shopping. “Where’s your copy of the email they sent telling us that their interest was only a personal one, and that the cross didn’t really have an intrinsic or historic value?”

  She went in to the computer room and pulled it out from the pile. I read it through again.

  “That’s garbage,” I said. “One of those other guys said that the big stone was probably a South American emerald.”

  “Bobsyboy,” Sue said.