The Golden Keel / The Vivero Letter

by Desmond Bagley

  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 hand-grip 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 submachinegun, 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.

  Ten 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 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 tunnel 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 said.

  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! 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 rock 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 distillers 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 it 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.’

  I yawned. ‘What colour are they?’

  ‘White,’ he said. ‘The biggest notes I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘You pass one of those and you’re for the high jump,’ I said. ‘They changed the design of the fiver when they discovered that the Germans had forged God knows how many millions. Come to think of it, it’s quite likely that those are of German manufacture.’

  He seemed disappointed at that, and I said, ‘Get some sleep; you’ll be glad of it later.’

  He gathered his blankets and settled himself down. I lay awake, fighting off sleep, until I heard the slow, regular breathing of deep slumber, then I got up and softly made my way down the tunnel. I retrieved the Schmeisser and the clips and brought them back. I didn’t know where to put them at first, then I found that the cushion I was using as a pillow was torn and leaking stuffing. I tore out some more of the stuffing and put the gun and the clips inside. It made a hard pillow, but I didn’t mind that—if people were going to wave guns at me, I wanted one to wave back.

  IV

  Neither of us slept very well—we had too much on our minds. I lay, turning restlessly, and hearing Walker doing the same until, at last, we could stand it no longer and we abandoned the pretence of sleep. It was four in the afternoon and I reckoned that the others should be starting for Varsi just about then.

  We went up to the front of the tunnel and checked everything again, then settled to wait for nightfall. It could have been night then, if my watch hadn’t told us otherwise, because there was no light in the tunnel except for the bright circle cast by the lamp, which quickly faded into darkness.

  Walker was nervous. Twice he asked me if I heard a noise, not from the entance but from back in the tunnel. The bodies of the men he had killed were worrying him. I told him to go back and look at them, thinking the shock treatment might do him good, but he refused to go.

  At last I heard a faint noise from the entrance. I took the hammer in my hand and waited—this might not be Coertze at all. A rock clattered and a voice said, ‘Halloran?’

  I relaxed and blew my cheeks out. It was Coertze.

  Another rock clattered and I said, ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘No trouble at all,’ he said, furiously pulling down the screen of rocks. ‘The trucks are here.’

  Walker and I helped to push down the wall from the inside and Coertze shone a torch in my face. ‘Man,’ he said. ‘But you need a clean-up, ay.’

  I could imagine what I looked like. We had no water for washing and the dust lay heavily upon us. Francesca stood next to Coertze. ‘Are you all right, Mr Halloran?’

  ‘I’m O.K. Where are the trucks?’

  She moved, barely distinguishable in the darkness. ‘They are back there.’

  ‘There are four Italians,’ said Coertze.

  ‘Do they know what they are doing here?’ I asked swiftly.

  Piero loomed up. ‘They know that this is secret, and therefore certainly illegal,’ he said. ‘But otherwise they know nothing.’

  I thought about that. ‘Tell two of them to go down to the caravan, strike camp, and then wait there. Tell them to keep a watch on the road and to warn us if anyone comes up. The other two must go into the hills overlooking the mine, one to the left, the other to the right. They must watch for anyone coming across country. This is the tricky part and we don’t want anyone surprising us when the gold is in the open.’

  Piero moved away and I heard him giving quick instructions. I said, ‘The rest of us will start work inside. Bring the timber from the trucks.’

  The trucks were all right, bigger than we needed. One of them was loaded with lengths of rough boxwood and there were also some crude crates that would do for putting the loose stuff in. We hauled out the wood and took it into the tunnel, together with the tools—a couple of saws, four hammers and several packets of nails—and we started to nail covers on to the bullion boxes, changing their shape and character.

  With four of us it went quickly and, as we worked, we developed an assembly-line technique. Walker sawed the wood into the correct lengths, Coertze nailed on the bottoms and the tops, I put on the sides and Piero put on the ends. Francesca was busy transferring the jewels and the gold trivia from the original boxes into the crates.

  Within three hours we had finished and all there was left to do was to take the boxes outside and load them into the trucks.

  I rolled my blankets and took my pillow outside and thrust them behind the driving-seat of one of the trucks—that disposed of the Schmeisser very nicely.

  The boxes were heavy but Coertze and Piero had the muscle to hoist them vertically into the trucks and to stow them neatly. Walker and I used the chain again to pull the boxes through the narrow entrance. Francesca produced some flasks of coffee and a pile of cut sandwiches and we ate and drank while we worked. She certainly believed in feeding the inner man.

  At last we were finished. I said, ‘Now we must take away from the tunnel everything we have brought here. We mustn’t leave a scrap of evidence that we have been here, not a thing that can be traced back to us.’

  So we all went back into the tunnel and collected everything—blankets, cushions, tools, torches, flasks, even the discarded bent nails and the fragments of stuffing from the torn cushions. All this went outside to be stowed in the trucks and I stayed behind to take one last look round. I picked up a length of wood that had been forgotten and turned to leave.

  Then it happened.

  Coertze must have been hasty in shoring up the last bit of the entrance—he had seen the gold and his mind wasn’t on his job. As I turned to leave, the piece of timber I was carrying struck the side of the entrance and dislodged a rock. There was a warning creak and I started to run—but it was too late.

  I felt a heavy blow on my shoulder which drove me to my knees. There was a rumble of falling rock and then I knew no more.

  V

  I came round fuzzily, hearing a voice, ‘Halloran, are you all right? Halloran!’

  Something soft touched my cheek and then something cold and wet. I groaned and opened my eyes but everything was hazy. The back of my head throbbed and waves of pain washed forward into my eyes.


  I must have passed out again, but the next time I opened my eyes things were clearer. I heard Coertze saying, ‘Can you move your legs, man; can you move your legs?’

  I tried. I didn’t understand why I should move my legs but I tried. They seemed to move all right so, dizzily, I tried to get up. I couldn’t! There was a weight on my back holding me down.

  Coertze said, ‘Man, now take it easy. We’ll get you out of there, ay.’

  He seemed to move away and then I heard Francesca’s voice. ‘Halloran, you must stay quiet and not move. Can you hear me?’

  ‘I can hear you,’ I mumbled. ‘What happened?’ I found it difficult to speak because the right side of my face was lying on something rough and hard.

  ‘You are pinned down by a lot of rock,’ she said. ‘Can you move your legs?’

  ‘Yes, I can move my legs.’

  She went away and I could hear her talking to someone. My wits were coming back and I realized that I was lying prone with a heavy weight on my back and my head turned so that my right cheek was lying on rock. My right arm was by my side and I couldn’t move it; my left arm was raised, but it seemed to be wedged tight.

  Francesca came back and said, ‘Now, you must listen carefully. Coertze says that if your legs are free then you are only held in your middle. He is going to get you out, but it will be very slow and you mustn’t move. Do you understand?’

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  ‘How do you feel? Is there pain?’ Her voice was low and gentle.

  ‘I feel sort of numb,’ I said. ‘All I feel is a lot of pressure on my back.’

  ‘I’ve got some brandy. Would you like some?’

  I tried to shake my head and found it impossible. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Tell Coertze to get cracking.’

  She went away and Coertze came back. ‘Man,’ he said. ‘You’re in a spot, ay. But not to worry, I’ve done this sort of thing before. All you have to do is keep still.’