Desmond Bagley - The Golden Keel

‘So now we know who this belongs to,’ said Walker, waving his hand.

‘Or used to belong to,’ repeated Coertze slowly. ‘But who does it belong to now?’

They looked at each other.

Coertze broke the silence. ‘Come on, let’s see what’s in the last truck.’

The fourth truck was full of packing cases containing more papers. But there was one box holding a crown.

Harrison struggled to lift it. ‘Who’s the giant who wears this around the palace?’ he asked nobody in particular. The crown was thickly encrusted with jewels – rubies and emeralds, but no diamonds. It was ornate and very heavy. ‘No wonder they say “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,”’ cracked Harrison.

He lowered the crown into the box. ‘Well, what do we do now?’

Coertze scratched his head. ‘It’s quite a problem,’ he admitted.

‘I say we keep it,’ said Harrison bluntly. ‘It’s ours by right of conquest.’

Now it was in the open – the secret thought that no one would admit except the extrovert Harrison. It cleared the air and made things much easier.

Coertze said, ‘I suppose we must bring in the rest of the boys and vote on it.’

‘That’ll be no good unless it’s a unanimous vote,’ said Harrison almost casually.

They saw his point. If one of them held out in favour of telling the Count, then the majority vote would be useless. At last Walker said, ‘It may not arise. Let’s vote on it and see.’

All was quiet on the road so Donato and Parker were brought in from their sentry duty. The prisoners were herded into a truck so that Alberto could join in the discussion, and they settled down as a committee of ways and means.

Harrison needn’t have worried – it was a unanimous vote. There was too much temptation for it to be otherwise.

‘One thing’s for sure,’ said Harrison. ‘When this stuff disappears there’s going to be the biggest investigation ever, no matter who wins the war. The Italian Government will never rest until it’s found, especially those papers. I’ll bet they’re dynamite.’

Coertze was thoughtful. ‘That means we must hide the treasure and the trucks. Nothing must be found. It must be as though the whole lot has vanished into thin air.’

‘What are we going to do with it?’ asked Parker. He looked at the stony ground and the thin soil. ‘We might just bury the treasure if we took a week doing it, but we can’t even begin to bury one truck, let alone four.’

Harrison snapped his fingers. ‘The old lead mines,’ he said. ‘They’re not far from here.’

Coertze’s face lightened. ‘ Ja ,’ he said. ‘There’s one winze that would take the lot.’

Parker said, ‘What lead mines – and what’s a winze, for God’s sake?’

‘It’s a horizontal shaft driven into a mountain,’ said Harrison. ‘These mines have been abandoned since the turn of the century. No one goes near them any more.’

Alberto said, ‘We drive all the trucks inside …’

‘… and blow in the entrance,’ finished Coertze with gusto.

‘Why not keep some of the jewels?’ suggested Walker.

‘No,’ said Coertze sharply. ‘It’s too dangerous – Harrison is right. There’ll be all hell breaking loose when this stuff vanishes for good. Everything must be buried until it’s safe to recover it.’

‘Know any good jewel fences?’ asked Harrison sardonically. ‘Because if you don’t how would you get rid of the jewels?’

They decided to bury everything – the trucks, the bodies, the gold, the papers, the jewels – everything. They restowed the trucks, putting all the valuables into two trucks and all the non-valuables such as the documents into the other two. It was intended to drive the staff car into the tunnel first with the motor-cycle carried in the back, then the trucks carrying papers and bodies, and lastly the trucks with the gold and jewels.

‘That way we can get out the stuff we want quite easily,’ said Coertze.

The disposal of the trucks was easy enough. There was an unused track leading to the mines which diverged off the dusty road they were on. They drove up to the mine and reversed the trucks into the biggest tunnel in the right order. Coertze and Harrison prepared a charge to blow down the entrance, a simple job taking only a few minutes, then Coertze lit the fuse and ran back.

When the dust died down they saw that the tunnel mouth was entirely blocked – making a rich mausoleum for seventeen men.

‘What do we tell the Count?’ asked Parker.

‘We tell him we ran into a little trouble on the way,’ said Coertze. ‘Well, we did, didn’t we?’ He grinned and told them to move on.

When they got back they heard that Umberto had run into trouble and had lost a lot of men. The Communists hadn’t turned up and he hadn’t had enough machine-guns.

I said, ‘You mean the gold’s still there.’

‘That’s right,’ said Walker, and hammered his fist on the counter. ‘Let’s have another drink.’

I didn’t get much out of him after that. His brain was pickled in brandy and he kept wandering into irrelevancies, but he did answer one question coherently.

I asked, ‘What happened to the two German prisoners?’

‘Oh, them,’ he said carelessly. ‘They were shot while escaping. Coertze did it.’

Walker was too far gone to walk home that night, so I got his address from a club steward, poured him into a taxi and forgot about him. I didn’t think much of his story – it was just the maunderings of a drunk. Maybe he had found something in Italy, but I doubted if it was anything big – my imagination boggled at the idea of four truck loads of gold and jewels.

I wasn’t allowed to forget him for long because I saw him the following Sunday in the club bar gazing moodily into a brandy glass. He looked up, caught my eye and looked away hastily as though shamed. I didn’t go over and speak to him; he wasn’t altogether my type – I don’t go for drunks much.

Later that afternoon I had just come out of the swimming pool and was enjoying a cigarette when I became aware that Walker was standing beside me. As I looked up, he said awkwardly, ‘I think I owe you some money – for the taxi fare the other night.’

‘Forget it,’ I said shortly.

He dropped on one knee. ‘I’m sorry about that. Did I cause any trouble?’

I smiled. ‘Can’t you remember?’

‘Not a damn’ thing,’ he confessed. ‘I didn’t get into a fight or anything, did I?’

‘No, we just talked.’

His eyes flickered. ‘What about?’

‘Your experiences in Italy. You told me rather an odd story.’

‘I told you about the gold?’

I nodded. ‘That’s right.’

‘I was drunk,’ he said. ‘As shickered as a coot. I shouldn’t have told you about that. You haven’t mentioned it to anyone, have you?’

‘No, I haven’t,’ I said. ‘You don’t mean it’s true?’ He certainly wasn’t drunk now.

‘True enough,’ he said heavily. ‘The stuffs still up there – in a hole in the ground in Italy. I’d not like you to talk about it.’

‘I won’t,’ I promised.

‘Come and have a drink,’ he suggested.

‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m going home now.’

He seemed depressed. ‘All right,’ he said, and I watched him walk lethargically up to the club house.

After that, he couldn’t seem to keep away from me. It was as though he had delivered a part of himself into my keeping and he had to watch me to see that I kept it safe. He acted as though we were partners in a conspiracy, with many a nod and wink and a sudden change of subject if he thought we were being overheard.

He wasn’t so bad when you got to know him, if you discounted the incipient alcoholism. He had a certain charm when he wanted to use it and he most surely set out to charm me. I don’t suppose it was difficult; I was a stranger in a strange land and he was company of sorts.