An Eye for Gold

by Sarah Andrews

  Faye pulled the leather wallet out of her shoulder bag and presented it to Rudolf, who closed his eyes and sniffed at it as if it were food. Eyes still closed, he unzipped the wallet and dug in greedily with his fingers. He quickly extracted the ring and put it to his cheek. “I love that old lady. She gets me some of my best pieces.”

  “So you’ve seen these before,” I said.

  “Oh yes, my dear. I never buy without seeing. I visit dear ‘Auntie’ every chance I get. She has a weakness for lavender roses, and I never go without at least a dozen of them.” He popped open his eyes. “In exchange, she calls me first each time she decides she’s ready to part with one of her little gumdrops.”

  “She said she gives the money to worthy causes,” I said.

  “Oh yes, she loves her little environmental groups. She’s particularly fond of anti-mining causes. Don’t you just love the irony? I mean, where does she think her little baubles came from?”

  “But it makes sense,” Faye countered. “It’s good karma to give back from that which takes away.”

  My antennae were up and alert. I asked Rudolf, “Is she connected locally, or does she go on the road with her environmental activism?” I was of course instantly thinking about the save-the-desert group that Tom and Ian had talked about in Nevada the day before, the group which was slowing down progress at Granville Resources.

  Ignoring my question in his excitement over the ring, Rudolf turned to his woman jeweler. “Linda,” he said. “Hold out your hanny.”

  Linda closed her eyes and stuck out a hand. Rudolf dropped the ring into it. “Ooooh,” she said. “I like the weight.”

  I said, “Do you think ‘Auntie’ would talk to me about this anti-mine stuff?”

  “Oh, I’m certain she would. Twenty-two carats,” Rudolf crooned to the stone. “I first met this ring six years ago. I have been in lust for it. God bless ‘Auntie’ for having no heirs.” His eyes danced my way again. “Each time one of her pet environmental charities comes begging, she gives me a call and says, ‘The Russian white is ready to go,’ or, ‘Are you ready for the teardrop earrings, Rudie?’ ”

  “That old tartar calls you Rudie?” I asked, aghast.

  “Lavender,” he purred. “Roses. They work on her like liquor.”

  There was another round of frivolity when Rudolf pulled the teardrop earrings out, but then he slung the earrings into a safe, spun the dial, and handed the ring to one of the men.

  I said, “So do ‘Auntie’ and her friends want to close down any gold mines?”

  Rudolf patted the man’s shoulder cozily, then turned back to me. “Enough of business. I am starving. There’s some great ahi to be had at a joint not far from here. I ordered in. Come.” He led us back into a fourth room, which was an unglamorous kitchenette with a bare Formica table. “Please excuse the informality, Em, but I can get so much more dirt out of Faye here, where there’s nobody listening.”

  Linda walked through and grabbed a cup of coffee. “Don’t listen to a word of this. He’s just a tightwad. Ahi’s just a fancy term for tuna salad.”

  “Get back to work, or I’ll have you lashed!” Rudolf roared, opening the refrigerator and pulling out three takeout lunches with what looked like a Chinese sesame salad done up with fresh fish instead of chicken. His hands moved quickly and with great finesse as he removed them from their Styrofoam containers to plain white china plates and served us up some bubbly apple juice in glasses. We sat down at the table and prepared to dive in.

  Rudolf lifted his fork. “So tell me, Emmy dear, why are you so interested in environmental groups that want to shut down gold mines?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m a geologist. Just yesterday I was out running around looking for a gold mine, but—” I stopped short. Rudolf’s eyes suddenly riveted on me, and his expression drew up from silly fat guy to a reflection of the sharp mind that had to be in there to develop a business like this.

  He put down his fork and set his elbows on the table and folded his hands in front of his lips. ‘Tell me.”

  “There’s not much to tell,” I said. “I didn’t get to the mine.”

  Rudolf leaned across the table towards me, giving me a look that Ray would have saved for his wedding night, and groaned. “What a tease you are. Diamonds are fun. But gold . . . is serious shit.”

  I swallowed a bite of the tuna without tasting it. “Is it? Then maybe you can help me understand a few things about it. Like, what makes it like it is? I mean, central to its value is its nice yellow color and its luster, of course, and—”

  Rudolf leaned even closer across the table, his lunch and gossip forgotten, and took my hand. “It is not just yellow, dear Emily, it is gold. It is brilliant. It is warm.” He took a deep breath. “Its chemical symbol, A-U, is an abbreviation of the Latin aurum, which has the same root as aurora, the radiant dawn. It brings us the very essence of the sun.”

  I swallowed again, a bit harder. “And, well, its malleability is important, because you can work it. Make jewelry and so forth.”

  Now stroking my hand, Rudolf said, “Malleable is too small a word to describe this metal. It can be shaped into fabulous objects, or drawn out into wire, or hammered into incredibly thin sheets—an ounce can be hammered into a sheet three hundred feet square. A wafer five millionths of an inch thick.”

  “Yes. Well, and it can be plated onto microswitches,” I said.

  Rudolf brought my hand up to his chest. “Yes. Highly conductive to electricity. The perfect plating for micro-electrical contacts, because it does not corrode or tarnish in air.”

  I yanked my hand back. “Uh, yes. But why doesn’t it corrode or tarnish? I mean, it’s right below silver on the periodic chart, so the atom has the same number of electrons in its outer shell, and yet silver oxidizes like mad. Why doesn’t gold?”

  Rudolf leaned back and opened his left hand and stroked the insides of his rings with the fingertips of his right. It was a gentle, yet impassioned gesture, the kind of touch one saves for the forehead of a sleeping child. He said, “Gold is a very large, very contented atom. It is at peace, at rest.”

  “What makes gold so special?” I asked desperately.

  He laughed. “It’s the relativity effect.”

  “The what?”

  “Atoms are such tricksters,” he said. “Why is one perceived as green and another yellow? I don’t know. They’re all made up of the same few parts—protons, neutrons, gluons, quarks, with electrons spinning around them—and the mass of all those bits exerts a pull on those electrons. The bigger the pull, the tighter in the nucleus pulls the electrons. And drink of the figure skater: She starts twirling, and as she draws her arms in, she spins faster and faster. At the atomic weight of gold—precisely at the number of neutrons and protons and so forth that make it gold and not the next atom smaller—die electrons approach the speed of light. You’re in Einstein land. Things go around corners and laugh at you.” And like an atom of gold himself, Rudolf drew himself in and hummed.

  “All that, right down inside the fillings in your teeth,” I said.

  He rose suddenly from his chair. “Wait,” he said, and hurried back into the workroom, where he knelt down and worked the combination on his safe and reopened it. From it, he extracted something wrapped in a velvet sack and a pair of long, shallow wooden boxes, which he brought to the table. Pushing my lunch aside, he set them down in front of me and opened the velvet sack.

  Inside was a lump of white quartz. It was a nice specimen, full of tiny crystals, but it didn’t knock me out. But then Rudolf handed me a jeweler’s loupe, which is a large hand lens, and directed my attention to a concavity at the center of the specimen. “Handle it carefully, dear. Do not place your fingers near the center.”

  I adjusted the lens near my eye and angled the specimen so that light struck it squarely at the center, a task I had performed a great many times in my years as a student and as a working geologist. There is always a delicious moment of anticipation as the ra
nge is sought and the focus found, and then the object jumps into view, a revelation of the earth’s magnificence at miniature scale. This time my wait was fabulously rewarded. Wire gold burst into my field of observation, brilliant and glowing. As always when I examined hand samples through a lens, I felt a sense of privilege at seeing something so intimate and tiny brought up to the scale of my existence. I said, “Nice!”

  “Gimme see,” said Faye.

  To Rudolf, I said, “That was a lovely specimen. But I’m trying to understand something about gold mining. And the price of gold. And something about how mining and gold prices connect with the world we live in.”

  “Can you be more specific?” Rudolf asked.

  I thought. “Well, that’s the problem. There’s something about all this that I don’t quite grasp. I mean, I’ve worked in a commodities-based industry ever since I graduated from college. Oil and gas. The price of a barrel of oil is set by the demand for it, except of course that every sheik and his brother are trying to control that price. But oil and gas are different from gold. Oil and gas as energy. Fuel. Gold is—”

  “Money,” Rudolf said. He passed the sample and hand lens on to Faye, and with a small, reverent flourish, opened the lid of the first box to reveal a series of antique coins encased in plastic jackets. He pointed to one marked with the pouting profile of a long-haired man. “George the Third,” he said. “This is a Guinea, so-called because the gold was mined in Guinea in West Africa. Minted in 1789.” He pointed to another. “A Sovereign. See the queen? Elizabeth the First, seated on her throne, grasping her orb. Beautiful work. It dates from the late fifteenth century, and was nominally worth one British pound. And this, the Centenario, fifty pesos. The Venetian Ducat, thirteenth century. The French Napoleon, twenty francs, this one 1815. These are numismatic coins—collector’s items. They are very interesting, and pretty to look at, but their value is as much in their age as in their gold content They were usually alloys of gold and silver. Electoral.”

  The second box contained an array of new, and much brighter, gold coins, each about an inch and a half in diameter. They lay uncovered, and their brilliance dazzled my eyes.

  Rudolf leaned very close to me, and spoke directly into my ear. “These, my dear, are bullion,” he uttered, the word taking on extra richness with the depth and sonorosity of his voice, “You are looking at the right of the individual to own gold. Our government has not always granted us this right Dear ‘Auntie’ doesn’t fully understand this. She has been allowed to have her jewelry, and the caps on her lovely old teeth, but it is only in the past two decades of her lifetime that her government has granted her die right to own gold outright”

  I could feel the heat of his breath on my ear, and the urgency carried in the vibrations of his words made my pulse quicken.

  “These coins are not money in the sense of having an assigned value,” he continued, “such as a five-dollar, or a ten-dollar piece, although a few have a stamped nominal value. No, with these, you understand their value is in the weight Each contains precisely an ounce of gold. Then, whatever an ounce of gold is worth, so goes the value of your bullion coin.” He pointed at them one at a time, lingering over the fine ornament minted into each in bas-relief. “The South African Krugerrand. The British Britannia. The Canadian Maple Leaf. The Chinese Panda. The Australian Nugget. The Belgian Ecu. And the American Eagle.” He traced a delicate antelope; a helmeted, trident-brandishing Britannia; an exquisite five-pointed leaf; a bear swaying from a frond of bamboo; a radiant kangaroo; a circlet of stars; and the proud symbol of American pride and vision. This last he lifted reverently from its velvet cushion and turned over into my hand. I felt its density sink into my palm, and I bent to examine die coin more closely. On the back strode a powerful woman dressed in flowing Grecian robes, her hair lifted by the wind. In her raised right hand, she brandished a torch, and in her left, she held a branch of olive leaves. She seemed to rise from the fan of radiance that surrounded her, as if leaping through the ring of tiny stars that edged the coin. Rudolf ran the tip of his smallest finger over the word that was inscribed in an arch above her head, LIBERTY.

  The eagle on the coin’s face had put me in mind of Peggy’s story about the Cheyenne medicine wheel, about flying East, the province of Eagle, and of Illumination. I wondered if this woman on the reverse side then symbolized the West, the Looks-Within place, or Introspection. Was that the domain of freedom? And how did freedom and liberty relate to gold, and money, and for that matter, mining? I had always been proud to be a daughter of the west, the land where an individual could rise or fall on his or her own merits. I had gone into die oil business partly because it had seemed an elemental exercise of my freedoms to look for commodities, but my environmental friends questioned that. And I questioned the shortfall between their lifestyles and the ideals which they espoused. They denigrated oil drilling but drove cars. Some ate meat but hated hunting and slaughtering. The old “I use it but don’t condone it” conundrum. I sighed. It seemed that, no matter how much I learned, there was always just a bit more to be understood before ambiguity would untangle itself into a greater truth.

  I heard Rudolf’s voice just inches from my ear and snapped out of my reverie. “Liberty,” he whispered. “This is the lady of my heart.”

  Faye spoke. “Is she your key to freedom?”

  Rudolf plucked the coin from my hand. “No,” he said. “This is for the small investor. They are beautiful,” he said worshipfully, “but not so beautiful as this . . .” He whisked the two boxes away to the safe and produced a third, larger one. This, as the others, he set carefully in front of me, and lifted the lid. Inside lay a brick of solid gold.

  My breath caught in my throat. The bar seemed to gather all light in the room and to propel it ravishingly, and with near sexual heat, into my eyes. I had never seen gold so pure; had not known the depth and splendor of its luster. I wanted to fall into it. “This is gold,” I whispered.

  “Yes,” Rudolf sighed in return. ”This is gold.”

  Faye shook her head. “You just keep that lying around, Rudolf? Is that for the business?”

  “No,” he said impatiently. “The jewelry we fabricate here is alloyed, as I explained. Four nines—twenty-four carat gold—is pure, but it’s too soft to wear on your body. You don’t see fabricated jewelry that’s more than twenty-two carat. Eighteen is common; three-quarters gold. We use that for the prongs that hold the gems to the piece, because you need the strength. Good gold chain is eighteen-carat. You see fourteen at the cheap shops, or as little as nine or even eight. Or it’s plate. No, this I keep around for its beauty. And for its value”

  “You mean, as your hedge against inflation?” Faye asked saucily.

  “Heavens yes, dear, but I keep a great deal more of it where you’ll never see it”

  Interrupting their discussion of material wealth, I said, “If eighteen carat is only three-quarters gold, what makes up the other quarter?”

  “That depends on what color you desire,” Rudolf said, his voice unconsciously modulating to the tones I suppose he used on his richest customers. ‘To set diamonds, you might want a very white gold. You’d use silver, or nickel or palladium. A red gold wants copper or a touch of zinc. Green tints are achieved by using varying proportions of copper and silver, nickel or palladium. Here, look into my last little treasure.” He opened a box which contained a smooth, black stone and a set of metal wands with flattened ends. The brightest and yellowest was stamped “24,” and each other descended to lesser and lesser carat purities, all the way down to a dull, tinny-looking “6.” “This is a touchstone,” Rudolf murmured. “You rub an object across the stone and compare marks with the wands. It was the first method used for assaying the purity of gold, back in five hundred BC.”

  “This set is twenty-five hundred years old?” I asked, incredulous.

  “No, no, my dear. This set is modern. I bought it in a bazaar in India just two years ago. Not every last pocket of the world is
as technologically advanced as we are. Your gold mines in Nevada are light years ahead of what they’re doing today in, say, parts of Brazil. The men dig ore out with their hands if they can’t find shovels, and they carry it to the assayer in baskets, on their shoulders.”

  Rudolf closed the fourth box and straightened. He raised his eyes pensively toward the ceiling. “So many terms we use in everyday life arise from the search for and handling of gold. For instance, ‘acid test’: another early method of assaying, as you’ll recall that only aqua regia dissolves it—the water of kings. ‘Didn’t pan out’: our efforts went unrewarded. This refers to the sourdough prospector’s primitive method of testing for gold, which is of course still in use. ‘Good as gold.’ ‘Worth its weight in gold.’ ‘A king’s ransom.’ They’re talking about gold, the province of kings. The list is endless. Even your term ‘malleable’ derives from the Latin malleus, a hammer, referring to the hammer originally used to form metal foil. The term is defined by the most malleable metal of all: gold.”

  I stared at my uneaten ahi. The sight of Rudolf’s brilliant, shining specimens was alluring, and on some level deeply stimulating, almost titillating. I felt confused, and deep inside, repelled. “Sure, gold keeps our cell phones and computers humming, so maybe it has a new importance to our culture, but it seems an anachronism. We’re not on a gold standard anymore, and the few kings still around are mostly figureheads. And with the speed of communication that those microcircuits provide, the world has become a smaller place. National boundaries are softening with the rise of the power of multinational corporations. Perhaps they’re the new monarchs.”

  Rudolf lowered his large body back into his chair with a thud, his face clouding with anger.

  I glanced at Faye. She was shaking her head at me. Clearly I had blown some test

  ‘Transportable wealth,” Rudolf muttered, staring into his tuna. He began forking it rapidly into his mouth, and when he spoke again, I was no longer certain that it was to me he was speaking. “You clearly don’t get that, but that’s no matter, as it’s more for me. Other metals may come and others may go, but come the crunch, gold is the only one that is universally recognized as money.”