Riviera Gold

by Laurie R. King

  The man before us was as physically unlike Sherlock Holmes as two human males could be, and yet as he studied the bronze object, his face took on a look of calculation and curiosity I knew well.

  I was not in the least surprised when he walked over to the big furnace, and set about getting it running. Though it did take me aback when he looked me over, head to toe, and pointed at one of the stone crucibles lined up against the wall.

  “You,” he said. “Can you lift that?”

  Obediently, I wrapped my arms around it and lifted, stifling a grunt, then staggered around in a circle before lowering it back into place.

  Wordlessly, he pointed at the leather apron and gauntlets hanging on their pegs.

  Bronze has a melting point of around 950 degrees centigrade. To keep it from forming an inadvertent alloy with something inside, it would require either a great precision in the temperature, or an impervious barrier with an even higher melting point. Monsieur Ferrant, who knew his equipment like a baker knew his oven, might have managed the task of separating out the bronze without a mechanical division—but someone like Rafe Ainsley would prefer a margin of safety.

  Rafe Ainsley might well choose to employ an impervious barrier. Something with a higher melting point than bronze.

  Monsieur Ferrant chose a crucible with a wide mouth, positioned it in the furnace, and stood the sculpture at the edge to pre-heat it. When the heavy bowl was glowing hot, he glanced around to make sure Holmes and I were well back, then used a pair of long-handled tongs to lower the piece inside. He made a tiny adjustment to the temperature, and waited…

  It took a long time to melt. When at last he gave me the signal, I donned all the protective garments on offer, from gaiters to apron, gauntlets to goggles. By this time, he had the crucible out of its furnace and into the frame, so I squatted awkwardly down and seized one end of the two-person pouring shank. He nodded his approval, took his own handles, then, “Hoop”—and I lifted, helping him carry the massive, burning weight over to the trio of ingot-trays he’d arranged on the floor.

  “Là,” Monsieur Ferrant said, and the rod swivelled against my gloves as he directed the molten stream into the first tray. When it was full, I shuffled to follow him towards the second tray. Halfway through this pour, the stream began to sputter, tossing around gobbets of thousand-degree metal. My hands twitched at the urge to flee—but I forced myself to stand firm.

  Something was blocking the spout. Ferrant signalled a move to the third tray, waited until we were in place, then spoke to Holmes. “Bring the skimmer—that with the long handle. No, the next one—yes. Stand across from us, there. When it tilts, push the core back.”

  Holmes positioned the skimmer’s half-circle end just inside the crucible’s spout, then pushed, freeing the last of the stream to flow cleanly out. This ingot was only half filled when Ferrant let the crucible fall upright. “Hoop”—only this time, we stopped in the middle of the bare floor. At his next “Là,” he tipped, straining to turn the heavy pot nearly on its head.

  Something fell onto the stones in a shower of glowing drops. It rolled, picking up grit, but he ignored it, directing me backwards, easing the crucible down onto its stand.

  He shut off the furnace. The silence was deafening, but for the sounds of cooling metal.

  “How long before that can be handled?” I asked.

  “My wife will have made coffee,” he said, by way of a reply.

  He stripped off his outer garments and walked out of the big doors. More slowly, I removed the gauntlets, apron, and the rest, returning them to their pegs. The air felt remarkably cool.

  Holmes and I stood eyeing the object. It was a cylinder some seven inches high and perhaps three across. Much like the cheap cocktail shakers used in the Murphy kitchen.

  “You’re probably aware that stainless steel has a melting point considerably higher than bronze,” I said.

  “Fifteen hundred ten degrees, as opposed to nine hundred fifty. Depending on the alloy, naturally.”

  Naturally. “It looks so harmless, doesn’t it?” I asked after a time. “The hand is tempted to just pick it up.”

  “The hand would be seared to the bone,” Holmes pointed out.

  I found a stool and sat, awaiting the expert’s return. Holmes took out his tobacco, and did the same.

  To my surprise, the man’s return included a tray with a jug of water and three steaming mugs of coffee. Monsieur Ferrant took a swallow from his, then pulled on a pair of slightly less bulky leather gloves and moved the steel cylinder over to the work-bench. He used the chisel to tap experimentally on the case, testing its thickness.

  Whatever he heard satisfied him. He moved it to the vice, locked the jaws down tight, and took up the mallet and chisel again.

  In moments, the steel skin was flayed back, exposing the rich colour within. Two minutes after that, Ferrant undid the clamp and overturned the contents on the bench.

  The magic of pure gold washed through the old building. A fused and gleaming tangle of pieces—one could make out the remains of an earring here, a necklace there—had been relieved of their stones and pounded down hard into the stainless steel cups until the soft metal was compacted into a cylindrical ingot.

  The small crucible that Rafe was so sensitive about, I thought, had been originally meant for melting down the scrap gold. But when he realised that the foundry could be used only if Monsieur Ferrant was away—off with his family and the rest of Antibes to see Niko’s Bastille Day fireworks, for example—Rafe had fallen back on a purely mechanical means of inserting the gold into the steel. Portions of the outside pieces, I noticed, had melted and pooled at the bottom.

  Ferrant grunted out a French curse, rustic and reverent. My eyes were fixed on the tangle of golden shapes, but my mind had set off on some rough calculations. Three-by-seven cylinder, just under 50 cubic inches—even with its relatively loose packing, there had to be nearly thirty pounds of gold on the work-bench. And at twenty American dollars per ounce—I blinked.

  That lump on the work-table could be worth ten thousand dollars. With four crates, each holding twenty identical cylinders packed away in excelsior—some three-quarters of a million dollars behind that padlocked door. And two previous shipments, of how many crates, already in New York waiting for the sculptor’s arrival? It might not be railway cars of Russian bullion, but there was enough to keep a man and his sickly daughter very comfortable indeed.

  It took me two attempts before my voice was steady. “Er, would you like to phone Inspector Jourdain,” I asked Holmes, “or should we ask Monsieur Ferrant to do so?”

  I thought Sara Murphy was the best person to hear the news first. I may have been wrong.

  “Sara, I need to tell you what’s been going on here, and you can decide how—and how much—to tell the others.”

  “Mary, how mysterious. What’s up?”

  “First of all, I have to admit I haven’t been absolutely truthful with you. I am indeed Mary Russell, but my husband’s name isn’t Sheldon Russell. It’s…” I sighed. “He’s Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Sherlock Holmes?” Her sweet mouth twitched, her eyes sparkled, and she burst into laughter. “Sherlock Holmes! Oh, Mary, you’re such a kidder! Sure, your husband looks like the pictures but honestly, what have you been smoking?”

  I had been through this before, and as arguments go, this one was about as pointless as they come. One response was to drag out all proofs. The other was far simpler. “Oh, you’re right, Sara, he’s not the real one—but he and I are actually investigators, and this is what we’re working on at the moment.”

  “You’re an investigator? Ooh, how exciting!”

  “Every so often,” I agreed. “More often, it’s drudgery during the case and some uncomfortable conversations after. Such as this one, in which I tell you that the French police have arrested your friend Rafe Ainsley
for smuggling.”

  “Rafe? Oh, surely not. I’ve never even seen him use cocaine.”

  “Not drugs—gold.”

  “Gold? Why would one even smuggle that? It’s not illegal, is it?”

  “Various governments would not be happy to have it move across their borders. Not in the quantity we’re talking about.”

  “Why? How much is there?”

  “A lot.”

  “You must be wrong. Where would Rafe have got gold, for heaven’s sake?”

  “He was moving it for someone. Hol—my husband and I found the gold inside statues that Rafe himself poured.”

  “It’s probably some clever Surrealist stunt. Like Duchamp entering his pissoir into that exhibition.”

  For a moment, I wondered…But no. “Sara, I’m sorry, but it was no stunt. Niko Cassavetes died because of it.”

  “Rafe could not have done that. He’s a bit of a scoundrel, yes—and okay, I can see him smuggling to thumb his nose at the law, but he’s not a rat. He wouldn’t kill anyone.”

  “No, we think that was Count Vasilev.”

  “The Count? What on earth makes you think that?”

  “The gold that’s being smuggled once belonged to the Czar. When the Romanovs fell, Count Vasilev was in a position to divert some of it away from the Bolsheviks. We think he sent it to Greece. There he found Niko, who helped bring the gold to the Riviera. Niko also introduced the Count to a man with a boat, who could help smuggle it into America. They did one shipment during the winter, but then the man was arrested in the Bahamas, and they needed to find an alternative.

  “Rafe joined you here in, what—March? April?”

  “The end of March.”

  “Niko met him, and, as was his habit, he made himself useful. He located a foundry for Rafe, as he located fireworks, and sketch-books and temporary nannies. But when he saw how Rafe made his sculptures, it gave him an idea. The gold could be hidden inside the bronze.

  “Rafe helped him, obviously. They’d got two batches of the sculptures off, and one ready to go, but Count Vasilev wanted to close up his life here for good. And Niko was a loose end.”

  Her lovely face was twisted in disbelief. “You honestly believe that Yevgeny killed Niko? But why?”

  “The Count was desperate to get to America, taking as much with him as he could. His daughter was getting better, and he wanted to join her. And as you know, he was also convinced that Europe is headed towards another War, and he could not risk getting trapped here, just as so many of his family had been trapped in Russia. Once the gold was on its way, Niko knew too much about him, so he had to be removed.”

  And if he could do so in a way that silenced Niko’s other partner-in-crime, Mrs Hudson, so much the better. We can aim the police at you any time, the murderer told her. If you open your mouth to anyone, we can do far worse.

  There was no need to tell Sara that, once Vasilev had taken possession of the gold in America, he might well have arranged a similar death for Rafe Ainsley. She was already sitting with her arms hugging her knees, looking too cold for a warm afternoon on the Côte d’Azur.

  “I invited him into my house,” she said. “I invited all of them. They ate my food, drank my wine. They played on the beach with my children.”

  I dropped down in front of her and took her hands, forcing her to look at me. “Sara, you and the children were always absolutely safe. Even Gerald had nothing to do with it. None of you would have come to harm. Think of this all like—like driving past a nasty accident on the road. The people are strangers, and there’s others helping out already, so the best thing you can do is keep going.”

  After a while, she spoke, in a distracted voice. “Yesterday some workmen came to measure the beach wall, at La Garoupe. The town is going to put in a row of bathing huts.”

  It sounded like a non-sequitur, but I understood that it was not. Paradise had been breached. The snakes of criminality and mass tourism were moving into its edges.

  “I am sorry,” I told her.

  “Maybe we’ll take up Cole and Linda’s invitation, after all. I think I’d prefer to be in Venice, for a little while.”

  “Have we managed to warm up your bones a little, Clarissa?”

  “I’m much better now, Lillie. Maybe just another cup. So now, dear thing, I need to ask: how much did you tell him?”

  “Who—Mr Holmes, or the policeman? Not that it matters, I didn’t tell either of them much of anything. Only your young lady.”

  “Mary?”

  “The note you sent frightened me. I could see you were trying to protect me, in case something went wrong. And when I saw Zedzed at the café when he should have been on the yacht, I went to find her, and showed her your note. I did realise it meant that Zedzed wasn’t the one who was threatening you, so it had to be the Count—but I didn’t go into any details with her. I simply told her that you were in danger. I did admit that I knew more about your affairs than ‘nothing at all,’ but I kept it in the most general of terms. I said nothing about the bonds.”

  “You mean the papers?”

  “Yes, sorry. She asked me to get word to Mr Holmes, so I waited at the Hermitage, drinking endless cups of Russian tea, until he finally showed up. I told him that Mary and her young friend had gone after the Count, and that the sea-plane pilot might know which direction they’d take. He phoned to the policeman from the hotel desk—he shouted, Clarissa: who would have thought the man could lose that much control?—and threatened to drop an international incident on Prince Louis’ head if the police weren’t in the harbour with fast boats in ten minutes. His precise words. And I’d thought it was histrionics until I saw all those uniformed police piling into speed-boats and taking off as if the Prince himself was in danger.”

  “An international incident would be the least of it if anything happened to Mary. Mr Holmes does not like it when people threaten those he loves.”

  “To be fair, he did seem to include you in his concern.”

  “Yes. Although that does not change how he would react if he found out about the papers.”

  “About that. Do you think the Count actually succeeded in redeeming it?”

  “He said he did. That it’s in the bank in San Remo—under his name.”

  “Oh dear. And you have no chance of claiming it, with him gone?”

  “I can’t see how.”

  “Clarissa, I am so sorry. I should never have urged you to trust him.”

  “We both knew from the beginning it was a risk. That much money would tempt even an honest man. There was no way to guess that it would turn him murderous as well.”

  “You should have played him along. Told him about the other bon—the other papers.”

  “I did.”

  “He decided it was better to cut his losses, then.”

  “Hardly losses. More like deciding that ten pounds in the hand is better than twenty dangling at the end of a risk. While we were out there, waiting for the sun to go down, he told me all about it. What man can pass up a chance to explain life to the nearest woman? Whatever arrangement he had with Mr Ainsley was nearing its end, and he was absolutely terrified of the Communist threat, with Stalin coming in and the Zinoviev letter that changed last autumn’s General Election. He was finished with Europe, and wanted to be with his daughter.”

  “But you’re certain he’s dead? It’s not a trick?”

  “There was blood on the railings. It’s too far to swim to any shore. And Mary’s friend and I both saw the gun go off.”

  “So it’s over?”

  “Oh, Lillie, is anything like this ever over? I suppose it’s possible all the trouble will just…fade away. If it doesn’t, I’m in for an uncomfortable time, and may end up back under the parole of Mr Holmes. I only hope I can keep you out of it.”

  “Do you want to leave, no
w? Mathilde could drive you to Nice, or maybe Cannes, and I could meet you in Paris, with the other papers once things quiet down.”

  “No, dear. I don’t want to run. As for money, well, he’s got his eyes on me now. Even if I avoid arrest, I shall have to keep my head down for a time. Yet again, I bring down catastrophe on myself. But in case I don’t get the opportunity to say it in the days to come, thank you, dear friend. In spite of everything that has happened—poor Niko, my arrest, those hours on the Bella Ragazza, and even now the uncertainty that will not go away—the time spent with you, these past weeks, has been among the best in my life.”

  “Holmes, I cannot say our time on the Riviera has made for much of a holiday. Is crime as all-pervasive as it appears, or does it simply follow us about?”

  “A mechanic’s ears hear trouble in a motor long before the problem manifests,” he noted.

  “And a normal person would have tripped merrily through the sunshine without noticing any smuggling or murdering or depravity? I suppose you’re right. But could we perhaps take a few days and—I don’t know. Go explore the Roman ruins?” I knew better than to suggest lying on the sand with a book.

  “You do not imagine that we are finished here?”

  I stifled a sigh. “No, I suppose not. Mrs Hudson is still under threat.”

  “Mrs Hudson is still under suspicion.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of having the Predergast fortune.”

  What was it Lillie Langtry had said? Something she had that required more specialised knowledge, when it came to converting it into cash…

  I should tell him.

  No, I should talk to Mrs Hudson first.

  “Holmes, the only people who believed in that fortune were criminals—who thought that since they were always looking to commit a felony, everyone else was, too.” Criminals, and chronically suspicious detectives.

  “Monaco is an expensive place to retire.”