Desmond Bagley - The Golden Keel

I took the clipping from my pocket and passed it to him. He read it and laughed. ‘That must have scared Walker. I was there at the time,’ he said unexpectedly.

‘In Italy?’

He sipped the Scotch and nodded. ‘Yes; I saved my army back-pay and my gratuity and went back in ’48. As soon as I got there all hell started popping about this trial. I read about it in the papers and you never heard such a lot of bull in your life. Still, I thought I’d better lie low, so I had a lekker holiday with the Count.’

‘With the Count?’ I said in surprise.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I stay with the Count every time I go to Italy. I’ve been there four times now.’

I said, ‘How did you reckon to dispose of the gold once you got it out of Italy?’

‘I’ve got all that planned,’ he said confidently. ‘They’re always wanting gold in India and you get a good price. You’d be surprised at the amount of gold smuggled out of this country in small packets that ends up in India.’

He was right – India is the gold sink of the world – but I said casually, ‘My idea is to go the other way – to Tangier. It’s an open port with an open gold market. You should be able to sell four tons of gold there quite easily – and it’s legal, too. No trouble with the police.’

He looked at me with respect. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t know much about this international finance.’

‘There’s a snag,’ I said. ‘Tangier is closing up shop next year; it’s being taken over by Morocco. Then it won’t be a free port any more and the gold market will close.’

‘When next year?’

‘April 19,’ I said. ‘Nine months from now. I think we’ll just about have enough time.’

He smiled. ‘I never thought about selling the gold legally; I didn’t think you could. I thought the governments had got all that tied up. Maybe I should have met you sooner.’

‘It wouldn’t have done you any good,’ I said. ‘I hadn’t the brains then that I have now.’

He laughed and we proceeded to kill the bottle.

Coertze came down to Cape Town two weeks later. I met him at the airport and drove him directly to the yard, where Walker was waiting.

Walker seemed to shrink into himself when I told him that Coertze was visiting us. In spite of his braggart boasts, I could see he didn’t relish close contact. If half of what he had said about Coertze was true, then he had every reason to be afraid.

Come to think of it – so had I!

It must have been the first time that Coertze had been in a boatyard and he looked about him with keen interest and asked a lot of questions, nearly all of them sensible. At last, he said, ‘Well, what about it?’

I took them down to the middle slip where Jimmy Murphy’s Estralita was waiting to be drawn up for an overhaul. ‘That’s a sailing yacht,’ I said. ‘A 15-tonner. What would you say her draft it – I mean, how deep is she in the water?’

Coertze looked her over and then looked up at the tall mast. ‘She’ll need to be deep to counterbalance that lot,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know how much. I don’t know anything about boats.’

Considering he didn’t know anything about boats, it was a very sensible answer.

‘Her draft is six feet in normal trim,’ I said. ‘She’s drawing less now because a lot of gear has been taken out of her.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘I’d have thought it would be more than that,’ he said. ‘What happens when the wind blows hard on the sails? Won’t she tip over?’

This was going well and Coertze was on the ball. I said, ‘I have a boat like this just being built, another 15-tonner. Come and have a look at her.’

I led the way up to the shed where Sanford was being built and Coertze followed, apparently content that I was leading up to a point. Walker tagged on behind.

I had pressed to get Sanford completed and she was ready for launching as soon as the glass-fibre sheathing was applied and the interior finished.

Coertze looked up at her. ‘They look bloody big out of the water,’ he commented.

I smiled. That was the usual lay reaction. ‘Come aboard,’ I said.

He was impressed by the spaciousness he found below and commented favourably on the way things were arranged. ‘Did you design all this?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘You could live in here, all right,’ he said, inspecting the galley.

‘You could – and you will,’ I said. ‘This is the boat in which we’re going to take four tons of gold out of Italy.’

He looked surprised and then he frowned. ‘Where are you going to put it?’

I said, ‘Sit down and I’ll tell you something about sailing boats you don’t know.’ Coertze sat uncomfortably on the edge of the starboard settee which had no mattress as yet, and waited for me to explain myself.

‘This boat displaces – weighs, that is – ten tons, and …’

Walker broke in. ‘I thought you said she was a 15-tonner.’

‘That’s Thames measure – yacht measure. Her displacement is different.’

Coertze looked at Walker. ‘Shut up and let the man speak.’ He turned to me. ‘If the boat weighs ten tons and you add another four tons, she’ll be pretty near sinking, won’t she? And where are you going to put it? It can’t be out in the open where the cops can see it.’

I said patiently, ‘I said I’d tell you something about sailing boats that you didn’t know. Now, listen – about forty per cent of the weight of any sailing boat is ballast to keep her the right way up when the wind starts to press on those sails.’

I tapped the cabin sole with my foot. ‘Hanging on the bottom of this boat is a bloody great piece of lead weighing precisely four tons.’

Coertze looked at me incredulously, a dawning surmise in his eyes. I said, ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’

We went outside and I showed them the lead ballast keel. I said, ‘All this will be covered up next week because the boat will be sheathed to keep out the marine borers.’

Coertze was squatting on his heels looking at the keel. ‘This is it,’ he said slowly. ‘This is it. The gold will be hidden under water – built in as part of the boat.’ He began to laugh, and after a while Walker joined in. I began to laugh, too, and the walls of the shed resounded.

Coertze sobered suddenly. ‘What’s the melting point of lead?’ he asked abruptly.

I knew what was coming. ‘Four-fifty degrees centigrade,’ I said. ‘We’ve got a little foundry at the top of the yard where we pour the keels.’

‘ Ja, ’ he said heavily. ‘You can melt lead on a kitchen stove. But gold melts at over a thousand centigrade and we’ll need more than a kitchen stove for that. I know; melting gold is my job. Up at the smelting plant we’ve got bloody big furnaces.’

I said quickly, ‘I’ve thought of that one, too. Come up to the workshop – I’ll show you something else you’ve never seen before.’

In the workshop I opened a cupboard and said, ‘This gadget is brand new – just been invented.’ I hauled out the contraption and put it on the bench. Coertze looked at it uncomprehendingly.

There wasn’t much to see; just a metal box, eighteen inches by fifteen inches by nine inches, on the top of which was an asbestos mat and a Heath Robinson arrangement of clamps.

I said, ‘You’ve heard of instant coffee – this is instant heat.’ I began to get the machine ready for operation. ‘It needs cooling water at at least five pounds an inch pressure – that we get from an ordinary tap. It works on ordinary electric current, too, so you can set it up anywhere.’

I took the heart of the machine from a drawer. Again, it wasn’t much to look at; just a piece of black cloth, three inches by four. I said, ‘Some joker in the States discovered how to spin and weave threads of pure graphite, and someone else discovered this application.’