Gold (14 page)

“You like the drama,” Carajec finally said, once they were under way, speaking Italian now but keeping his voice low.

Fürglin cut off the conversation. “There will be a lot less drama if we keep this quiet.”

He did feel slightly ridiculous, even though he was nervous. He’d been out with Carajec often, and many times had gotten off at Gabelli’s villa, not even thinking about its being an unofficial crossing of the Swiss-Italian border. Tonight’s quiet exit from Switzerland was just a precaution, perhaps an unnecessary one. But what did a little caution cost? He’d seen too many bankers go to jail to feel like taking chances now.

He knew it was hard for Carajec, an ebullient personality, to keep quiet. But Fürglin adamantly remained silent, forestalling any conversation. The banker had also instructed Carajec to furnish himself with an alibi, “as a precaution.” If anyone asked, four drivers would swear that the Yugoslav had spent the evening with them, discussing a first-class boat and bus tour to Lago Maggiore that was scheduled for the next day. Carajec had enough marginal activities of his own not to question the banker’s instructions.

In spite of all the caution, Fürglin was enjoying himself. He had come to the lake region later in life, when he began his bank training, and still experienced the outsider’s wonder at boats, which transform an obstacle into a pleasant highway.

The trip was over quickly, without any incident and without any further conversation. Fürglin just nodded at Carajec as he stepped onto the cement landing dock in darkness. The villa was dark and shuttered, but Fürglin discerned two dim shapes near the door, a man rhythmically stroking a dog.

The man at the door whispered something to the dog and then went inside without turning on a light, leaving the door open for Fürglin to follow. Fürglin nodded again at the man when he lit a candle inside; Antonio knew him well. The stocky gray-headed retainer shuffled ahead of Fürglin, carrying the candle to light the stairs to the guest room on the garden side of the villa.

A plate of cold cuts and an ice bucket with a bottle of wine were on the table in the room. Gabelli was a generous soul, thought Fürglin, grateful for the small favor. But then, Gabelli owed him about a million small favors by now.

Fürglin had nothing to say to Antonio, who left quietly. The banker had planned this down to the last detail. At 7 a.m., Antonio would take him to Linnate airport at Milan, for the flight to Rome and the connection to Kuwait. Fürglin had not come to the villa, and his friend Gabelli was an ocean away in New York.

Attacking the mortadella, Fürglin felt pleased with himself. His precautions may have been superfluous, but he had too much at stake now to risk any mishap. The food and the wine increased his sense of well-being, which enveloped him still as he crawled into the four-poster bed and once again fell quickly to sleep. Being a fugitive wasn’t so bad.

SEVEN

The doorman swept open the cab door with a flourish that would have honored the Prince of Wales. The gentle self-mockery of his smile perfectly suited the incipient euphoria Carol and Drew felt as they entered the glittery elegance of the Dorchester.

Drew ordered champagne cocktails for them in the bar, decorated in a lighthearted modern chic despite the old-fashioned glamour of the hotel. They clinked their glasses together in a giddy toast and sat facing each other in a sudden silence.

It was a comfortable quiet. The two of them had established an easy rapport. They had gone to see the revival of Travesties, followed by a light supper of salmon and white wine at Leicester Square and now the nightcap at Carol’s hotel.

There were only a few people in the bar. The muted lilt of whispered French drifted over from another young couple two tables away. The black and pastel decor gleamed here and there from spotlights punctuating the dim room. The candle on each table created a small circle of intimacy.

Carol broke the silence. “We haven’t talked too much about gold, Mr. Reporter.”

“No, Miss Central Banker, we haven’t,” Drew responded. “Do you think Halden will forgive us?”

“Did you find out anything this afternoon?”

Drew looked at her for a moment. The candlelight reflected a limpid clarity in her brown eyes.

“The more I know, the more confused I get,” he said finally. He told her about his inconclusive conversation with Kraml.

“Don’t feel alone. There was a very discreet meeting at the Bank this afternoon. Guinness called in the fixing banks to discuss the situation. He let me sit in on it.” Carol sipped her cocktail. “They have the same question: Who is supplying the gold to the market?”

“Do they have the same answer?”

“The same collection of maybes.”

Carol was quiet for a while.

“The key seems to be the South Africans,” she resumed suddenly. She looked at Drew. “Do you think they could be selling gold?”

Drew bit off his instinctive negation. The loss of 80 percent of South African production was the cause of the crisis, after all. The mystery about who could have so much gold and would be willing to sell it was predicated on that situation. It seemed obvious that South Africa could not be the source of the gold. And yet, Carol’s question was the logical conclusion of the information they had.

“I don’t see how,” he said.

“Do you think your friend could find out more about what Marcus is really doing?”

“I’m going to see him next week. I’ll ask him.”

“And this reporter of yours—Van der Merwe?—can you reach him?”

Drew toyed with his glass a moment. “I think I may go to South Africa,” he said.

An odd look came into Carol’s eyes. She said nothing.

“I’m going to Geneva. Scotland Yard called—Guinness works fast—and they think I should have a look at this murder victim in Annecy.”

“How terrible!” Carol’s exclamation was spontaneous.

Drew had been shocked himself when the detective sergeant rang up in the afternoon. Idle speculation about mob-style murders was one thing; that Scotland Yard took his suspicion seriously enough to make the trip to Annecy thrust the journalist into a new dimension.

The call from Kraml had unsettled him in a different way. MacLean and his possible fate were worrying, but Kraml’s suspicions had a different order of importance. They lent further weight to Drew’s instinct that Marcus was instrumental in whatever was happening in the gold market.

Now Carol felt the South Africans were the key. The South Africans were in Berne, presumably meeting with Marcus.

Drew had made one other phone call before leaving for the theater to meet Carol. He reached Christian de Narcy, who always stayed late in his office, and arranged to meet the French banker Monday for lunch in Paris. Drew was sure that de Narcy, heir to generations of financial wisdom, could help him sort out the bewildering tangle of events.

Drew noticed Carol watching him, patiently, somehow tenderly. An unasked question yawned between them. “I’ll be here through next Friday,” Carol said. Drew nodded. They looked at each other with a quiet confidence. “Right now, I’m going to plead jet lag and thank you for a wonderful evening,” she said.

At the elevator, they kissed, briefly.

“Good night, Drew,” Carol said, stepping into the elevator. “Be careful.”

The admonition stayed with him on the cab ride home. He didn’t feel alone, carrying her concern with him. Somehow, those two words, spoken simply and sincerely, were as intimate as anything they could have said in parting.

~

Drew blinked when they came into the room. The harsh fluorescent light reflected brightly off the whitewashed walls. The unpleasant odor of formaldehyde affronted his nose.

It was his first trip to a morgue. There were indeed square cabinet doors lining one wall. But the white-coated assistant took Drew and the plainclothesman to a table at the far end of the room. Drew, who had taken his coat off in the reception hall, noticed the chill in the air.

A white cloth over the table clearly outlined a body. Drew felt detached, as though he were sitting comfortably at home watching some detective series on television. The laboratory assistant pulled down the cover.

Drew nearly retched as he was plunged into the overpowering reality of death. He fought the impulse to turn his head away. Despite the work of the coroner’s staff to clean up and restore the body, the face was scarcely recognizable as such, while the head was unnaturally oblong, with purple lumps that made it resemble an eggplant.

There was no question of recognizing MacLean from the face, but the very thought that this mutilated corpse might be that of a man Drew had worked with for three years was nauseating.

Having forced himself to look at the head, he found it difficult to divert his gaze from its riveting ugliness. The assistant had completely uncovered the body. Drew swallowed hard and willed himself to objectivize the corpse in front of him. He looked at the shape of the shoulders, the torso, the legs. He imagined the body standing up, dressed in MacLean’s clothes.

“He seems right for the height,” the journalist whispered to the policeman in French. It seemed inappropriate to speak in a normal voice. “The shoulders are bony and flat the way MacLean’s seemed to be.”

The slight bend in the legs corresponded to MacLean’s bow-legged stature as well, but Drew was not sure whether that was due to the body’s position on the table.

He returned to study the head. Some wisps of hair remained on the back of the battered skull. They acted upon Drew like icons, to reveal the identity of the victim. He suddenly had no doubt that the corpse was MacLean’s.

“Excuse me,” he said, leaving the room quickly and crossing the hall into the toilet, which had been pointed out to him as if by happenstance when they were going in. There he retched painfully; he had avoided eating anything for fear of just this reaction, but the nausea continued to rack him.

As frightening as the physical reaction was the numbing coldness in his brain. The recognition of his former colleague froze all emotion and thought in one blast of incomprehension. Drew could not fathom murder and brutality. It did not belong to his sheltered world of words and paper and business suits. For him, violence and even death were the fictions of movies and books.

The palpable evidence of physical violence brought home to him in a new way the moral disruption it reflected. For Drew, the brutal punishment meted out to MacLean seemed appropriate to the violation of his integrity as a journalist.

MacLean had been party to a scam, Drew felt sure. He had taken the telex from Van der Merwe and passed on the information to an accomplice, probably Fürglin, who was allied to investors in Kuwait and elsewhere. With a half hour head start they had been able to buy massively in the bullion and futures markets before the news broke and sent prices skyrocketing. MacLean had violated his sacred trust as a journalist and now lay mutilated and dead on a morgue table.

Drew became dimly aware of his feeling. His reason immediately tried to excuse MacLean, to rationalize the Canadian’s behavior, to reject his own condemnation of MacLean. But the feeling of justice was too strong. He knew that whoever did this to MacLean was not motivated by a respect for truth, but in Drew’s mind the violation of truth had ineluctably carried MacLean to his fate.

A sharp rap on the toilet door interrupted Drew’s internal conflict.

“
Ça va
?” the policeman called.

Drew emerged ashen-faced. “I’m pretty sure it’s him. The hair is just the right mixture of gray and color,” he managed to say.

The perpetrators had made some effort to render the corpse unidentifiable but, through the pressure of time or indifference, had not removed the victim’s teeth. Scotland Yard had located MacLean’s dentist and was sending his dental records to Annecy. When they arrived, the records would almost certainly permit positive identification.

In the meantime, Drew’s companion took him to the police station, where he signed a brief statement identifying the body on a preliminary basis.

~

Fürglin throttled the choke and went flying over the dune, landing on two of the three wheels. The balloon-tired Honda tricycle righted itself, recovered traction, and hurtled along the packed sand to the next dune.

The Swiss banker was delighted with his “toy,” one of a garageful that Tamal al-Masari kept at his weekend house on the Gulf for the amusement of his children, his guests, and, on occasion, himself.

Fürglin thought it was good to visit his Kuwaiti partner. Al-Masari had loaned Fürglin his stake for the gold play, but of course it was Fürglin’s cunning and patience that made the play possible. The Swiss banker had multiplied the wealth of al-Masari’s family. The meeting reminded everyone of that. It also muddied Fürglin’s tracks in case anyone was trying to find him.

The weather was nippy, but not nearly as cold as in Europe. The sky was gray, and the Gulf equally dull. Solitary tankers dotted the water’s surface. Fewer than before, Fürglin reflected.

The banker rounded another dune and nearly ran into Mahout, al-Masari’s oldest son, who swerved his tricycle, balancing it precariously as he avoided a collision. Fürglin guffawed with delight, righted his own vehicle, and bent forward, accelerating on the straightaway before him. The speedometer climbed to 60 kilometers per hour, which seemed thrillingly fast on the ungainly motorcycle. Fürglin extended his left leg, decelerated, and banked in the direction of the clubhouse.