Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

He pursed his lips and grinned, as if he knew more about what I was alluding to than even I did. “Let’s hear it.”

So high was the ambient noise level here that the thought of trying to read his mind was preposterous. I did try in a few instances, leaning toward him, focusing as hard as I could, but nothing. Still, there was nothing I wanted to know from him that he wouldn’t say aloud. To say nothing of how banal, how mind-numbingly and teeth-achingly dull Knapp’s thoughts surely were.

“How much do you know about gold?”

“How much do you want to know?”

“I’m trying to track down a deposit of gold made to one of the banks here.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know.”

He snorted derisively. “There’re four hundred banks registered here, big guy. Almost five thousand branch offices. And there’re millions of ounces of new gold coming into Switzerland every year, from South Africa or wherever. Good luck.”

“Which ones are the biggest?”

“The biggest banks? The Big Three — the Anstalt , the Verein, and the Gesellschaft. ”

“Hmm?”

“Sorry. The Anstalt’s what we call Credit Suisse, or Schweizerische Kreditanstalt. The Verein is the Swiss Bank Corporation. The Gesellschaft is the Union Bank of Switzerland. So you’re looking for gold deposited in one of the big three, only you don’t know which one?”

“Right.”

“How much gold?”

“Tons.”

“Tons?” Another snort. “I doubt it seriously. What are we talking about here, a country ?”

I shook my head. “A prosperous enterprise.”

He gave a low whistle. A blond woman in a pale green, tight-fitting, spaghetti-strap outfit glanced over at him, mistakenly thinking she was being admired, then quickly looked away. Presumably she had no interest in a dissolute monk in a blue suit. “So what’s the problem?” he asked, draining his kirschwasser and snapping his fingers at the waiter to signal for another. “Someone misplaced the account number?”

“Stay with me for a second,” I said. I was beginning to sound like Knapp, and I didn’t like it. “If a significant amount of gold were shipped into Zurich and placed into a numbered account, where would it go, physically?”

“Vaults. It’s an increasing problem for the banks here, actually. They’ve got all this money and gold to stash, and they’re running out of space and the municipal laws won’t permit them to put up taller buildings, so they have to burrow underground like gophers.”

“Under the Bahnhofstrasse.”

“Exactly.”

“But wouldn’t it be more convenient to sell the gold here, put it into liquid assets? Deutsche marks, Swiss francs, whatever?”

“Not quite. The Swiss government is terrified of inflation, so they have limits on the amount of cash foreigners can keep. There even used to be a limit of a hundred thousand francs on foreign accounts.”

“Gold doesn’t earn interest, right?”

“Of course not,” Knapp said. “But come on, you don’t bank in Switzerland to earn interest , for Christ’s sake. Their interest rates are, like, one percent. Or zero. Sometimes you have to pay for the privilege of keeping your money here. I’m not kidding. Lots of the banks charge something like one and a half percent for all withdrawals.”

“All right. Now, you can tell by looking at gold where it’s from, isn’t that right?”

“Usually. Gold — the sort of gold that central banks use as their monetary reserves — is kept in the form of gold ingots, usually four hundred troy ounces per bar. Usually ‘three nines’ gold, which means it’s 99.9 percent pure. And usually it’s earmarked, stamped with numbers and assay numbers, the ID and serial numbers.” The waiter came with his kirschwasser , and Knapp took it without acknowledging where it had materialized from. “For every ten bars of gold that are poured, one is assayed, by drilling holes in six different locations on the bar, taking a few milligrams of shavings, and assaying it. Anyway, yeah, most gold bars you can tell where they’re from.”

He chuckled, sipped his drink thoughtfully. “You should try this stuff. You really get to like it. Anyway, the gold market is a funny, high-strung thing. I remember when the gold market went crazy not too long ago. The Soviets were trying to sell a shipment of gold bars here, and someone noticed that some of the bars had czarist eagles on them. The gnomes flipped out.”

“Why?”

“Come on, big guy. This was back in Christmas 1990. Gold bars with Romanoff eagles on it! The Gorby government was in the process of going down the tubes and was selling off the last of its gold! Scraping the bottom of the barrel! Why else would they be dipping into the czarist reserves? So the price of gold shot up fifty bucks an ounce.”

I froze in mid-sip, felt the blood rush to my head. “Then what?” I asked.

“Then what? Then nothing. It turned out to be an elaborate hoax. A pretty sophisticated bit of financial disinformation on the part of the Sovs. Turned out they’d mixed a few old czarist bars in the pile deliberately. Watched the market go haywire, as they knew it would, then unloaded their gold at the higher price. Pretty clever, huh? The Sovs weren’t total numbskulls.”

I thought in silence for a moment. What if it hadn’t been disinformation? I wondered. What if... But I couldn’t make any sense of this. Instead, I set my glass down and continued, as unflustered-seeming as possible: “So can gold be laundered ?”

He paused a moment. “Yeah... sure. You just melt it down — re-refine it, re-assay it, get rid of the earmarks. If you’re trying to be secretive about it, it’s sort of a pain in the ass to move it around and get it done, but it’s possible. And it’s cheap. Gold’s completely fungible. But Ben, I don’t get this. You’re looking for a huge load of gold that belongs to one of your clients, and you don’t know where it is ?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that. I can’t be too specific. Tell me this: When you talk about the secrecy of Swiss banking, what does that mean? How difficult is it to penetrate the secrecy?”

“Whoa,” Knapp said. “Sounds a little cloak-and-dagger to me.”

I glared at him, and he replied, “It ain’t easy, Ben. Some of the most revered words in this town are ‘the principle of confidentiality’ and ‘the freedom of currency exchange.’ Translation: the inalienable right to hide money. That’s their reason for being. Money is their religion. I mean, when Huldrych Zwingli launched the Reformation of Zurich by chucking all the Catholic statues into the Limmat River, he made sure first to salvage the gold from the statues and give it to the town council. Thus giving birth to Swiss banking.

“But the Swiss — well, you gotta love ’em. They’re mad about secrecy, unless it benefits them to break confidentiality. Mafiosi, drug kingpins, corrupt third-world dictators with briefcases full of embezzled funds — the Swiss protect their secrecy like a priest in a confessional. But don’t forget, when the Nazis came during the war and started putting pressure on them, suddenly the Swiss got real accommodating. They gave the Nazis the names of the German Jews who had Swiss accounts. They like to spread this myth that they stood up to the Nazis, real steadfastlike, when they came to grab the Jews’ money, but no way. Unh-unh. Okay, not all the banks, but a lot. The Basler Handelsbank laundered Nazi money, and that’s a documented fact.” His eyes were roaming the crowd as if he were searching for someone. “Look, Ben, you’re looking for a needle in a haystack.”