The gold had an insidious fascination and we were reluctant to leave it. For Walker and Coertze this was the culmination of the battle which was fought on that dusty road fifteen years previously. For me, it was the end of a tale that had been told many years before in the bars of Cape Town.
I suddenly pulled myself together. It was not the end of the tale, and if we wanted the tale to have a happy ending there was still much to do.
"O.K., let's break it up," I said. "There's a lot more to see and a hell of a lot to do."
The golden spell broken, we went to the next truck and Coertze again hammered the tailboard free. The bullion boxes were hidden this time, lying on the floor of the truck with other boxes piled on top.
"That's the box with the crown in it," said Walker excitedly.
We all climbed in, squashed at the back of the truck, and Coertze looked round. He suddenly glanced at Francesca and said, "Open that box and take your pick." He pointed to a stout case with a broken lock.
She opened the box and gasped. There was a shimmer of coruscating light, the pure white of diamonds, the bright green of emeralds and the dull red of rubies. She stretched forth her hand and picked out the first thing she encountered. It was a diamond and emerald necklace.
She ran it through her fingers. "How lovely!"
There was a catch in Piero's voice. "How much would that be worth?" he asked huskily.
"I don't know," I said. "Fifty thousand pounds, perhaps. That is, if the stones are real," I ended sardonically.
Coertze said, "Get this stuff out, then we can see what we have. I didn't have time when we put it in here."
"That's a good idea," I said. "But you won't have too much time now. It'll be dawn pretty soon, and we don't want to be seen round here."
We began to pull the boxes out. Coertze had thoughtfully left plenty of room between the trucks so it was easy enough. There were four boxes of jewellery, one filled with nothing else but wedding rings, thousands of them. I had a vague recollection that the patriotic women of Italy had given their wedding rings to the cause -- and here they were.
There was the box containing the crown, a massive headpiece studded with jewels. There were eight large cases holding paper currency, neatly packeted and bound with rotting rubber bands. The lire had the original bank wrappers round each bundle. Then there were the remaining bullion boxes on the floor of the truck -- another ton of gold.
Francesca went out to the car and brought in some flasks of coffee, and then we sat about examining the loot. The box from which Francesca had taken the necklace was the only one containing jewellery of any great value -- but that was enough. I don't know anything about gems, but I conservatively estimated the value of that one box at well over a million pounds.
One of the other boxes was filled with various objects of value, usually in gold, such as pocket watches of bygone design, cigarette cases and lighters, gold medals and medallions, cigar cutters and all the other usual pieces of masculine jewellery. A lot of the pieces were engraved, but with differing names, and I thought that this must be the masculine equivalent of the wedding rings -- sacrifices to the cause.
The third box contained the wedding rings and the last one was full of gold currency. There were a lot of British sovereigns and thousands of other coins which I identified as being similar to the coins shown to me by Aristide. There were American eagles and Austrian ducats and even some Tangier Hercules. That was a very heavy box.
Francesca picked up the necklace again. "Beautiful, isn't it?" I said.
"It's the loveliest thing I've seen," she breathed.
I took it from her fingers. "Turn round," I said, and fastened it round her neck. "This is the only opportunity you'll have of wearing it; it's a pity to waste it."
Her shoulders straightened and the triple line of diamonds sparkled against her black sweater. Womanlike, she said, "Oh, I wish I had a mirror." Her fingers caressed the necklace.
Walker laughed and staggered to his feet, clutching the crown in both hands. He placed it on Coertze's head, driving the bullet head between the broad shoulders. "King Coertze," he cried hysterically. "All hail."
Coertze braced under the weight of the crown. "Nee, man" he said, "I'm a Republican." He looked straight at me and smiled sardonically. "There's the king of this expedition."
To an outsider it would have been a mad sight. Four dishevelled and dirty men, one wearing a golden crown and with drying blood streaking his face, and a not-too-clean woman wearing a necklace worth a queen's ransom. We ourselves were oblivious to the incongruity of the scene; it had been with us too long in our imaginations.
I said, "Let's think of the next step."
Coertze lifted his hands and took off the crown. The fun was over; the serious work was to begin again.
"You'll have to finish off the entrance," I said. "That last bit isn't big enough to take the loot out."
Coertze said, "Ja, but that won't take long."
"Nevertheless, it had better be done now; it'll soon be dawn." I jerked my thumb at the third truck. "Anything of value back there?"
"There's nothing there but boxes of papers and dead Germans. But you can have a look if you want."
"I will," I said, and looked about the tunnel. "What I suggest is that Walker and I stay here to-day to get this stuff sorted out and moved to the front where it'll be easier to get out. It'll save time when the trucks come; I don't want them hanging about here for a long time."
I had thought out this move carefully. Coertze could be relied upon to keep a close watch on Piero and Francesca and would stand no nonsense from them when they went into Varsi.
But Coertze was immediately suspicious; he didn't want to leave me and Walker alone with the loot. I said, "Dammit, you'll seal us in, and even if we did make a break the stuff we could carry in our pockets wouldn't be worth worrying about compared with the rest of the treasure. All I want to do is save time."
After a glowering moment he accepted it, and he and Piero went to complete the entrance. I said to Walker, "Come on, let's take a look farther back." , He hesitated, and then said, "No. I'm not going back there. I'm not."
"I'll go with you," said Francesca quietly. "I'm not afraid of Germans, especially dead ones." She gave Walker a look of contempt.
I picked up the Tilley lamp and Walker said hysterically, "Don't take the light."
"Don't be a damn fool," I said. "Take this to Coertze; it'll suit him better than a torch. You can give him a hand, too."
As he left I switched on my torch and Francesca did the same. I hefted the hammer and said, "O.K. Let's frighten all those ghosts."
The third truck was full of packing cases and weapons. There looked to be enough guns to start a war. I picked up a sub-machine-gun and cocked the action; it was stiff, but it worked and a round flew out of the breech. I thought that my gallant efforts at disarming Coertze and Piero were all wasted, or would have been if Coertze had remembered that all these guns were here. I wondered if the ammunition was still safe to use.
Francesca pushed some rifles aside and pulled the lid off one of the cases. It was full of files -- dusty files with the fasces of the Fascist Government embossed on the covers. She pulled a file out and started to read, riffling the pages from time to time.
"Anything interesting?" I asked.
"It's about the invasion of Albania," she said. "Minutes of the meetings of the Army Staff." She took another file and became absorbed in it. "This is the same kind of thing, but it's the Ethiopian campaign."
I left her to the dusty records of forgotten wars and went back to the fourth truck. It was not pretty. The tunnel was very dry and apparently there had been no rats. The bodies were mummified, the faces blackened and the skin drawn tight into ghastly grins -- the rictus of death. I counted the bodies -- there were fifteen in the truck, piled in higgledy-piggledy like so many sides of beef -- and two in the staff car, one of which was the body of an S.S. officer. There was a wooden case in the back of the tru
ck but I did not investigate it -- if it contained anything of value, the dead were welcome to keep it.
I went back to the staff car because I had seen something that interested me. Lying in the back, half hidden by the motor cycle, was a Schmeisser machine pistol. I picked it up and hefted it thoughtfully in my hand. I was thinking more of Coertze than of Metcalfe and my thoughts weren't pleasant. Coertze was suspected of having killed at least three men in order to get this treasure to himself. There was still the share-out to take place and it was on the cards that he would play the same game at some stage or other. The stake involved was tremendous.
The Schmeisser machine pistol is a very natty weapon which I had seen and admired during the war. It looks exactly like an ordinary automatic pistol and can be used as such, but there is a simple shoulder rest which fits into the holster and which clips into place at the back of the handgrip so that you can steady the gun at your shoulder.
In principle, this is very much like the old Mauser pistol, but there the resemblance ends. Magazines for the Schmeisser come in two sizes -- one of eight rounds like an ordinary pistol clip -- and the long magazine holding about thirty rounds. With the long magazine in place and the gun switched to rapid fire you have a very handy sub-machine-gun, most effective at close range.
I had not fired a gun since the war and the. thought of something which would make up for my lack of marksmanship by its ability to squirt out bullets was very appealing. I looked round to see if there were any spare clips but I didn't see any. Machine pistols were usually issued to sergeants and junior officers, so I prepared myself for an unpleasant task.
Then minutes later I had got what I wanted. I had the holster and belt, stiff with neglect, but containing the shoulder rest, four long clips and four short clips. There was another machine pistol, but I left that. I put the gun in the holster and left it resting in a niche in the tunnel wall together with the clips of ammunition. Then I went back to Francesca.
She was still reading the files by the light of her torch. I said, "Still reading history?"
She looked up. "It's a pitiful record; all the arguments and quarrels in high places, neatly tabulated and set down." She shook her head. "It is best that these files stay here. All this should be forgotten."
"It's worth a million dollars," I said, "if we could find an American university dishonest enough to buy it. Any historian would give his right arm for that lot. But you're right; we can't let it into the world outside -- that would really give the game away."
"What is it like back there?" she asked.
"Nasty."
"I would like to see," she said and jumped down from the truck. I remembered the little girl of the war years who hated Germans, and didn't try to stop her.
She came back within five minutes, her face pale and her eyes stony, and would not speak of it. A long time afterwards she told me that she had vomited back there in sheer horror at the sight. She thought that the bodies ought to have been given decent burial, even though they were German.
When we got back to the front of the runnel Coertze had finished his work and the entrance was now big enough to push the cases through. I sent Walker and Francesca back to the caravan to bring up food and bedding, then I took Coertze to one side, speaking in English so that Piero wouldn't understand.
"Is there any way to this mine other than by the road we came?" I asked.
"Not unless you travel cross-country," he replied.
I said, "You'll stay with Piero and Francesca at the caravan until late afternoon. You'll be able to see if anyone goes up the road; if anyone does you'll have to cut across country damn' quick and warn us, because we may be making a noise here. We'll probably sleep in the afternoon, so it should be all right then."
"That sounds fair enough," he said.
"Piero will probably start to look for those ammunition clips I threw away," I said. "So you'll have to keep an eye on him. And when you go to Varsi to pick up the trucks, make sure that you all stick together and don't let them talk to anyone unless you're there."
"Moenie panik nie," he said. "They won't slip anything over on me."
"Good," I said. "I'm just going to slip out for a breath of fresh air. It'll be the last I'll get for a long time."
I went outside and strolled about for a while. I thought that everything was going well and if it stayed that way I would be thankful. Only one thing was worrying me. By bringing Francesca and Piero with us, we had cut ourselves off from our intelligence service and we didn't know what Metcalfe and Torloni were up to. It couldn't be helped, but it was worrying all the same.
After a while Piero came from the tunnel and joined me. He looked at the sky and said, "It will soon be dawn."
"Yes," I said. "I wish Walker and Francesca would come back," I turned to him. "Piero, something is worrying me."
"What is it, Signor Halloran?"
I said, "Coertze 1 He still has his gun, and I think he will try to look for those ammunition clips I threw away."
Piero laughed. "I will watch him. He will not get out of my sight."
And that was that. Those two would be so busy watching each other that they wouldn't have time to get up to mischief, and they would stay awake to watch the road. I rather fancied myself as a Machiavelli. I was no longer worrying too much about Francesca; I didn't think she would double-cross anyone, Piero was different; as he had said himself -- gold has a bad effect on the character.
A few minutes later, Walker and Francesca came back in the car bringing food and blankets and some upholstered cushions from the caravan to use as pillows. I asked Walker discreetly, "Any trouble?"
"Nothing," he said.
The first faint light of morning was in the east. I said, "Time to go in," and Walker and I went back into the tunnel. Coertze began to seal up the entrance and I helped him from the inside. As the wall of rock grew higher I began to feel like a medieval hermit being walled up for the good of his soul. Before the last rocks were put in place Coertze said, "Don't worry about Varsi, it will be all right."
I said, "I'll be expecting you tomorrow at nightfall."
"We'll be here," he said. "You don't think I trust you indefinitely with all that stuff in there?"
Then the last rock sealed the entrance, but I heard him scuffling about for a long time as he endeavoured to make sure that it looked normal from the outside.
I went back into the tunnel to find Walker elbow deep in sovereigns. He was kneeling at the box, dipping his hands into it and letting the coins fall with a pleasant jingling sound. "We might as well make a start," I said. "We'll get half of the stuff to the front, then have breakfast, then shift the other half. After that we'll be ready for sleep."
The job had to be done so we might as well do it. Besides, I wanted to get Walker dead tired so that he would be heavily asleep, when I went to retrieve the Schmeisser.
The first thing we did was to clear the fallen rocks from in front of the first truck. This would be our working space when we had to disguise the bullion boxes and recrate the other stuff. We worked quickly without chatting. There was no sound except our heavy breathing, the subdued roar of the Tilley lamp and the occasional clatter of a rock.
After an hour we had a clear space and began to bring the gold to the front. Those bullion boxes were damnably heavy and needed careful handling. One of them nearly fell on Walker's foot before I evolved the method of letting them drop from the lorry on to the piled-up caravan cushions. The cushions suffered but that was better than a broken foot.
It was awkward getting them to the front of the tunnel. The space between the lorry and the wall was too narrow for the two of us to carry a box together and the boxes were a little too heavy for one man to carry himself. I swore at Coertze for having reversed the trucks into the tunnel.
Eventually I hunted round among the trucks and found a long towing chain which we fastened round each box in turn so that we could pull it along the ground. The work went faster then.
After
we had emptied all the gold from the first truck and had taken it to the front, I declared a breakfast break. Francesca had prepared a hot meal and there was plenty of coffee. As we ate we conversed desultorily.
"What will you do with your share?" I asked Walker curiously.
"Oh, I don't know," he said. "I haven't any real plans. I'll have a hell of a good time, I'll tell you that."
I grimaced. The bookmakers would take a lot of it, I guessed, and the distilleries would show a sudden burst in their profits for the first year, and then Walker would probably be dead of cirrhosis of the liver and delirium tremens.
"I'll probably do a lot of travelling," he said. "I've always wanted to travel. What will you do?"
I leaned my head back dreamily. "Half a million is a lot of money," I said. "I'd like to design lots of boats, the experimental kind that no one in their right minds would touch with a barge pole. A big cruising catamaran, for instance; there's a lot of work to be done in that field. I'd have enough money to have any design tank-tested as it should be done. I might even finance a private entry for the America's Cup -- I've always wanted to design a 12-metre, and wouldn't it be a hell of a thing if my boat won?"
"You mean you'd go on working?" said Walker in horror.
"I like it," I said. "It's not work if you like it."
And so we planned our futures, going from vision to wilder vision until I looked at my watch and said, "Let's get cracking; the sooner we finish, the sooner we can sleep." It was nine o'clock and I reckoned we would be through by midday.
We moved the gold from the third truck. This was a longer haul and so took more time. After that i t was easy and soon there was nothing left except the boxes of paper currency. Walker looked at them and said hesitantly; "Shouldn't we . . .?"
"Nothing doing," I said sharply. "I'd burn the lot if I was sure no one would see the smoke."
He seemed troubled at the heresy of someone wanting to burn money and set himself to count it while I got my blankets together and prepared for sleep. As I lay down, he said suddenly, "There's about a thousand million lire here -- that's a hell of a lot of money. And there's any amount of sterling. Thousands of British fivers."
Bagley, Desmond - The Golden Keel Page 15