The Golden Keel / The Vivero Letter

by Desmond Bagley

  He had orientated himself very carefully so that he had a very good idea of where the driver would be placed. When he started firing, he did so without aiming and the windscreen shattered in the driver’s face.

  In the background he was conscious of the tac-a-tac of the machine-guns firing in long bursts at the trucks, but he had no time or desire to cast a glance that way. He was occupied in jumping out of the way of the staff car as it slewed towards him, a dead man’s hand on the wheel.

  The officer in the passenger seat was standing up, his hand clawing at the flap of his pistol holster. Coertze fired a burst at him and he suddenly collapsed and folded grotesquely over the metal rim of the broken windscreen as though he had suddenly turned into a rag doll. The pistol dropped from his hand and clattered on the ground.

  With a rending jar the staff car bumped into a rock on the side of the road and came to a sudden stop, jolting the soldier in the rear who was shooting at Walker. Walker heard the bullets going over his head and pulled the trigger. A dozen bullets hit the German and slammed him back in his seat. Walker said that the range was about nine feet and he swore he heard the bullets hit, sounding like a rod hitting a soft carpet several times.

  Then Coertze was shouting at him, waving him on to the trucks. He ran up the road following Coertze and saw that the first truck was stopped. He fired a burst into the cab just to be on the safe side, then took shelter, leaning against the hot radiator to reload.

  By the time he had reloaded the battle was over. All the vehicles were stopped and Alberto and Donato were escorting a couple of dazed prisoners forward.

  Coertze barked, ‘Parker, go up and see if anyone else is coming,’ then turned to look at the chaos he had planned.

  The two men with the motor-cycle had been killed outright, as had the three in the staff car. Each truck had carried two men in the cab and one in the back. All the men in the cabs had been killed within twenty seconds of the machine-guns opening fire. As Harrison said, ‘At twenty yards we couldn’t miss—we just squirted at the first truck, then hosed down the second. It was like using a howitzer at a coconut-shy—too easy.’

  Of the seventeen men in the German party there were two survivors, one of whom had a flesh wound in his arm.

  Coertze said, ‘Notice anything?’

  Walker shook his head. He was trembling in the aftermath of danger and was in no condition to be observant.

  Coertze went up to one of the prisoners and fingered the emblem on his collar. The man cringed.

  ‘These are S.S. men. All of them.’

  He turned and went back to the staff car. The officer was lying on his back, half in and half out of the front door, his empty eyes looking up at the sky, terrible in death. Coertze looked at him, then leaned over and pulled a leather briefcase from the front seat. It was locked.

  ‘There’s something funny here,’ he said. ‘Why would they come by this road?’

  Harrison said, ‘They might have got through, you know. If we hadn’t been here they would have got through—and we were only here by chance.’

  ‘I know,’ said Coertze. ‘They had a good idea and they nearly got away with it—that’s what I’m worrying about. The Jerries aren’t an imaginative lot, usually; they follow a routine. So why would they do something different? Unless this wasn’t a routine unit.’

  He looked at the trucks. ‘It might be a good idea to see what’s in those trucks.’

  He sent Donato up the road to the north to keep watch and the rest went to investigate the trucks, excepting Alberto who was guarding the prisoners.

  Harrison looked over the tailboard of the first truck. ‘Not much in here,’ he said.

  Walker looked in and saw that the bottom of the truck was filled with boxes—small wooden boxes about eighteen inches long, a foot wide and six inches deep. He said, ‘That’s a hell of a small load.’

  Coertze frowned and said, ‘Boxes like that ring a bell with me, but I just can’t place it. Let’s have one of them out.’

  Walker and Harrison climbed into the truck and moved aside the body of a dead German which was in the way. Harrison grasped the corner of the nearest box and lifted. ‘My God!’ he said. ‘The damn’ thing’s nailed to the floor.’

  Walker helped him and the box shifted. ‘No, it isn’t, but it must be full of lead.’

  Coertze let down the tailboard. ‘I think we’d better have it out and opened,’ he said. His voice was suddenly croaking with excitement.

  Walker and Harrison manhandled a box to the edge and tipped it over. It fell with a loud thump to the dusty road. Coertze said, ‘Give me that bayonet.’

  Walker took the bayonet from the scabbard of the dead German and handed it to Coertze, who began to prise the box open. Nails squealed as the top of the box came up. Coertze ripped it off and said, ‘I thought so.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Harrison, mopping his brow.

  ‘Gold,’ said Coertze softly.

  Everyone stood still.

  Walker was very drunk when he got to this point of his story. He was unsteady on his feet and caught the edge of the bar counter to support himself as he repeated solemnly, ‘Gold.’

  ‘For the love of Mike, what did you do with it?’ I said. ‘And how much of it was there?’

  Walker hiccoughed genthy. ‘What about another drink?’ he said.

  I beckoned to the bar steward, then said, ‘Come on; you can’t leave me in suspense.’

  He looked at me sideways. ‘I really shouldn’t tell,’ he said. ‘But what the hell! There’s no harm in it now. It was like this…’

  They had stood looking at each other for a long moment, then Coertze said, ‘I knew I recognized those boxes. They use boxes like that on the Reef for packing the ingots for shipment.’

  As soon as they had checked that all the boxes in that truck were just as heavy, there was a mad rush to the other trucks. These were disappointing at first—the second truck was full of packing cases containing documents and files.

  Coertze delved into a case, tossing papers out, and said, ‘What the hell’s all this bumph?’ He sounded disappointed.

  Walker picked up a sheaf and scanned through it. ‘Seems to be Italian Government documents of some sort. Maybe this is all top-secret stuff.’

  The muffled voice of Harrison came from the bowels of the truck. ‘Hey, you guys, look what I’ve found.’

  He emerged with both hands full of bundles of lire notes—fine, newly printed lire notes. ‘There’s at least one case full of this stuff,’ he said. ‘Maybe more.’

  The third truck had more boxes of gold, though not as much as the first, and there were several stoutly built wooden cases which were locked. They soon succumbed to a determined assault with a bayonet.

  ‘Christ!’ said Walker as he opened the first. In awe he pulled out a shimmering sparkle of jewels, a necklace of diamonds and emeralds.

  ‘What’s that worth?’ Coertze asked Harrison.

  Harrison shook his head dumbly. ‘Gee, I wouldn’t know.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Not my kind of stone.’

  They were ransacking the boxes when Coertze pulled out a gold cigarette case. ‘This one’s got an inscription,’ he said and read it aloud. ‘“Caro Benito da parte di Adolfe—Brennero—1940.”’

  Harrison said slowly, ‘Hitler had a meeting with Mussolini at the Brenner Pass in 1940. That’s when Musso decided to kick in on the German side.’

  ‘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 jew
els—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.’

  IV

  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.

  He ought to have been an actor for he had the gift of mimicry. When he told me the story of the gold his mobile face altered plastically and his voice changed until I could see the bull-headed Coertze, gentle Donato and the tougher-fibred Alberto. Although Walker had normally a slight trace of a South African accent, he could drop it at will to take on the heavy gutturals of the Afrikaner or the speed and sibilance of the Italian. His Italian was rapid and fluent and he was probably one of those people who can learn a language in a matter of weeks.

  I had lost most of my doubts about the truth of his story. It was too dam
ned circumstantial. The bit about the inscription on the cigarette case impressed me a lot; I couldn’t see Walker making up a thing like that. Besides, it wasn’t the brandy talking all the time; he still stuck to the same story, which didn’t change a fraction under many repetitions—drunk and sober.

  Once I said, ‘The only thing I can’t figure is that big crown.’

  ‘Alberto thought it was the royal crown of Ethiopia,’ said Walker. ‘It wouldn’t be worn about the palace—they’d only use it for coronations.’

  That sounded logical. I said, ‘How do you know that the others haven’t dug up the lot? There’s still Harrison and Parker—and it would be dead easy for the two Italians; they’re on the spot.’

  Walker shook his head. ‘No, there’s only Coertze and me. The others were killed.’ His lips twisted. ‘It seemed to be unhealthy to stick close to Coertze. I got scared in the end and beat it.’

  I looked hard at him. ‘Do you mean to say that Coertze murdered them?’

  ‘Don’t put words in my mouth,’ said Walker sharply. ‘I didn’t say that. All I know is that four men were killed when they were close to Coertze.’ He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘Harrison was the first—that happened only three days after we buried the loot.’

  He tapped a second finger. ‘Next came Alberto—I saw that happen. It was as near an accident as anyone could arrange. Then Parker. He was killed in action just like Harrison, and, just like Harrison, the only person who was anywhere near him was Coertze.’

  He held up three fingers and slowly straightened the fourth. ‘Last was Donato. He was found near the camp with his head bashed in. They said he’d been rock-climbing, so the verdict was accidental death—but not in my book. That was enough for me, so I quit and went south.’

  I thought about this for a while, then said, ‘What did you mean when you said you saw Alberto killed?’

  ‘We’d been on a raid,’ said Walker. ‘It went O.K. but the Germans moved fast and got us boxed in. We had to get out by the back door, and the back door was a cliff. Coertze was good on a mountain and he and Alberto went first, Coertze leading. He said he wanted to find the easiest way down, which was all right—he usually did that.