Spoils of War, page 14
Sylvia had been out on the terrace, watering her plants and endeavouring not to eavesdrop, but she could hardly have missed the chilly tone of the conversation. When she came in he said: ‘Alison and I aren’t getting on too well these days, I’m afraid.’
‘I guessed as much.’
‘That was clever of you. I didn’t think I’d given anything away the other night.’
‘It was all in what you didn’t say, dear.’ Beneath her blue rinse and her easy Canadian drawl, Sylvia was a woman of considerable insight. She sat down on a couch, shooed off a couple of shih-tzus and beckoned to him to join her. ‘Eric and I have been worried about you. Not to mention those sweet little girls. And I don’t mean just recently. Things had begun to go wrong before you left Kuwait, hadn’t they?’
‘I think I can date it fairly precisely, in fact, to the time when my business started to look shaky.’
‘And you expected your wife to be supportive at a time like that? But instead she was just the opposite?’
‘Exactly. For better for worse, for richer for poorer. She became obsessive about money. She got discontented, started to withdraw into herself, pick arguments over nothing. Decided she didn’t like Kuwait any more. Now she’s home in England and she’s still no happier. I’ve almost given up trying to please her, frankly.’
‘If you’ll pardon my bluntness, Jack, I don’t think you ever will. Some couples are so similar in temperament that they were born to be together: the types who tell you they’ve never had a cross word in their lives. Others, like Eric and me, have differences that complement each other and make the relationship stronger. But you two are just way off each other’s wavelength. The money you used to make was just papering over your problems.’
‘You could see all that?’
‘I’m not going to take sides,’ Sylvia said, ‘because I like you both for different reasons, but I used to feel that Alison never knew who she really was. She was like a child who hadn’t found an identity for herself and had to go on making up roles. She found a role as your wife and the mother of your children, but she’s grown tired of playing it.
‘She also never had a father she could admire, so she looked up to you instead. It isn’t the thing nowadays for a woman to admit to being dependent on a man, but that’s what she is. And I guess the moment you began to seem less than perfect she felt threatened. Her daddy gambled his money away and she thought you would create a secure, happy new world for her. Whereas what you needed was a grown-up woman who could share your problems as well as your successes. It wasn’t a healthy basis for a lifelong relationship.’
Jack looked at Sylvia with a new respect. She seemed to have hit on something that he had been too close to see for himself. ‘So I should feel sorry for her instead of angry? That’s easier said than done.’
‘I know. But maybe you should try talking to her about it.’
‘We don’t talk about anything, Sylvia, least of all our feelings. And even if we did, she would never accept that analysis of herself. I did suggest marriage counselling, but she said if we couldn’t sort out our own problems no-one else would be able to.’
‘So you think it’s all over?’
‘I’m beginning to think so.’
‘Then the agony aunt’s advice is not to let it drag on. Finish it before the bitterness gets too strong, for the sake of all four of you. Recognize that if she’s ever going to be happy then it won’t be with you. And go out and find that grown woman you need.’
Soon afterwards Sylvia sent for her driver and went out shopping, leaving Jack to have his first shower in three days and change into fresh clothes. The ones he had worn in Kuwait still carried an odour of oil smoke. When Eric came home from work at four-thirty the two of them went out on the terrace. Displacing more dogs from the cane chairs, they sat and drank iced tea and looked out towards the Gulf, over the deceptive acres of grass and shrubbery that had been planted to make a home from home for Americans.
Eric was a shrewd Nova Scotian whose eyes shone with good humour behind gold-rimmed bifocals. He wanted to hear at firsthand about the state of things in Kuwait, and Jack told him circumspectly that he’d been given a commission to chase up some money that had gone missing during the occupation. Eric repeated a story he had heard about a Kuwaiti merchant fleeing across the border on the morning of the invasion, carrying his life savings in the form of a bag full of gem diamonds. This gave Jack an opportunity to raise a subject on which he wanted the benefit of the older man’s knowledge.
‘I remember you telling me you made quite a lot of money playing the gold market at one time,’ he said. ‘How did that come about?’
‘Oh, I was just a small-time speculator and it wasn’t a killing, exactly,’ Eric said; he seemed pleased to retell the story all the same. ‘It was back in the early seventies, not long after the two-tier pricing system had come into operation. It allowed gold to find its own value on the free market, alongside the official rate that was still fixed at thirty-five dollars an ounce. The odd thing was, the markets didn’t seem to know what to make of it at first, and for a couple of years the new price hovered at not much above the old one.
‘Now this seemed crazy to me. I didn’t know much about gold at the time, so I went out and learned everything I could. The official rate had been pegged at thirty-five dollars since nineteen thirty-four. It was obviously artificial. The real value of gold had certainly gone up since then – and I found out that unofficial buyers were prepared to pay a lot more for it. Well, I backed a hunch and it paid off. A run on gold began a few months after I’d bought in. It went on going up and up, and at the time of the first big oil crisis in ’seventy-three it shot through the ceiling. I’d got in at forty dollars an ounce, and I sold at a little under two hundred. A profit of . . . what? Nearly five hundred per cent in three and a half years.’
‘I’d call that a killing,’ Jack said.
‘Not when you consider that it rose a few years later to over eight hundred. But nobody could have foreseen that.’
‘It’s not an area I’m familiar with. If I wanted to invest in gold, how would I go about it?’
‘Simple as buying ice-cream. You’d go to an authorized dealer, or maybe a bank, and you’d write them a cheque. They’d give you gold bars and a certificate proving your ownership, or if you wanted they’d hold them in safe keeping for you.’
‘Let’s say I took the bars and later wanted to sell them somewhere else. In another country, for instance.’
‘No problem, as long as you could prove they were yours. But what I’m saying applies only to the richer countries, really, which have done away with most of the old restrictions on private ownership of gold. In countries with unstable currencies or weak trading positions, they’re still in place. They’re needed to prevent hoarding and protect foreign reserves. The only way to buy or sell gold in a place like India or Russia is on the black market.’
‘So presumably there’s still something to be gained out of smuggling it.’
‘You bet there is,’ Eric said. ‘And nowhere more so than right here in the Middle East. The big markets are India and Pakistan; people there still count their wealth in gold, and there’s probably billions of dollars’ worth held illegally in private hands. I believe a steady supply still travels down the Gulf in dhows, gets offloaded on the coast between Karachi and Bombay. Then there are the overland routes from Turkey.’
‘Turkey?’
‘You sound surprised. As every second-rate guidebook will tell you, Turkey straddles the East and the West. It has borders with half a dozen countries. It was on the main trade route between Asia and the Mediterranean as far back as the time of Alexander the Great. Smuggling is at least its second oldest profession.
‘As a matter of fact I did some business once with a man I know in Istanbul who used to have the whole unofficial gold trade sewn up.’ Eric took on a look of sly, wistful amusement when he remembered shady episodes from his past. ‘Quite a fascinating character called Manolis Zakarios. Retired now, I believe. A Phanariot Greek, one of those people whose families have been there since the Byzantine era. In fact, they still call the place Constantinople. By profession he was a wholesale jeweller. By vocation he was a smuggler.
‘It was all quite respectable. He had agents all over the Middle East who’d buy gold from anyone who wanted to sell, no questions asked. He’d bring the stuff into Turkey, melt it down and recast it into little ten-ounce bars, then ship it out to the hottest markets. He had a wink-and-nod arrangement with the authorities: as long as he used Turkey purely as an entrepôt and he wasn’t costing their treasury anything, they let him get away with it. It brought a lot of foreign exchange into the country. They’ve turned all law-abiding since then and tightened up their rules. But we’ve come a long way from your original question.’
Not necessarily, Jack thought. He poured more iced tea and said: ‘I’m not thinking of buying gold, actually. Between you and me, I’m trying to work out how somebody who had stolen some might go about offloading it.’
Eric shot him a look. ‘You haven’t got desperate and found your way into some racket, have you?’
‘No. It’s a question that arises from this job I’ve taken on. A purely hypothetical question, at the moment.’
‘OK. Hypothetically, how much gold are we talking about?’
‘I don’t have an exact figure, but I worked it out to be between forty-five and fifty million dollars’ worth.’
Instead of looking surprised, Eric made a sceptical face. ‘Somebody’s been shitting you, Jack. Nobody ever had that much hot gold on his hands. Not all at one time, anyway.’
‘I’m not saying I believe it. But I realized just today that the figures at least make a curious kind of sense.’ Jack had decided there was no harm in entrusting all his thoughts to Eric. He took out a sheet of paper on which he’d done some arithmetic. ‘The gold is supposed to be part of the booty that the Iraqis took from the Central Bank of Kuwait. What is definite is that three thousand, two hundred and sixteen bars of it were removed from the vaults. Working on the values I was given, I’m assuming those were the standard international mint bars, four hundred troy ounces each. A total of one million, two hundred and eighty-six thousand, four hundred ounces, or just over forty metric tons.
‘At the current price of around four hundred dollars an ounce, that adds up to nearly five hundred and thirteen million dollars’ worth. Now, what I was told was that a little under ten per cent of that went missing. Call it three hundred bars, conservatively, or a hundred and twenty thousand ounces. Roughly forty-eight million dollars’ worth. Ten per cent, Eric: there’s a significance to that figure.’
Jack recounted parts of the conversations he had had with Major Al-Shaheb and the Iraqi prisoner, Fadel. Both had told him about the ten armoured vehicles that had been sent from Baghdad to collect the gold. It was only this morning, when he’d seen the American truck being pulled out of the desert sand, that he’d remembered Al-Shaheb’s casual reference to one of the vehicles breaking down. Only nine of them had returned to Iraq.
‘Ten per cent is roughly one truckload of gold, Eric. I’d been wondering how it had been possible for part of the consignment to go missing without a whole lot of people knowing about it. Well, that could be the answer: one of the trucks was made to disappear. I didn’t see any importance in it at the time; if I had, I’d have asked more questions before I left Kuwait.’
‘So,’ Eric mused, ‘let’s assume the bad guys have got this truck full of gold, and let’s ask ourselves what they might have done with it. First of all, consider how much of it there is: I’m talking volume and weight, not just value. Give me a minute.’
He went indoors and returned shortly with a calculator and a book which he showed to Jack: it was an old copy of the Minerals Yearbook published by the United States Department of Mines. ‘I remember this had some useful statistics in it. Here we are. One international mint standard bar of gold measures seven inches by three and five-eighths by one and five-eighths. Let’s find its volume and multiply by three hundred.’ He got to work on the calculator. ‘A little over seven cubic feet. Say three feet by two by a foot and a bit. Now in theory you could almost hide a stack that size under your bed, but the problem would be the weight: the stuff is so heavy it would fall right through your floor. You could even fit it into a couple of big suitcases, but you’d need a crane to lift them. Gold has one of the highest specific gravities of all metals – nearly twice as high as lead. A hundred and twenty thousand troy ounces comes to . . . let’s see, three thousand, seven hundred-odd kilograms, or about eight thousand, two hundred pounds. That’s over three and a half tons, whichever way you look at it. So, you see, it’s easy to hide but difficult to transport.
‘The first thing I’d want to do is stash it somewhere safe so it wouldn’t have to be moved around any more than necessary. The second thing: find a buyer or a middleman who doesn’t deal on the official market. There’s a given amount of gold in bank vaults around the world, about a billion ounces of it at the last count, and the people who operate on the international markets know pretty exactly where it all is at any one time. In practical terms, what they’re mostly dealing in is pieces of paper, credit and debit notes representing sales and purchases. A bar of gold could notionally change ownership a hundred times, a thousand times, without ever leaving Fort Knox or the Bank of England.
‘When an actual physical transfer of bullion takes place, it’s usually by way of some international trade-off. A government that doesn’t have strong foreign reserves or a good line of credit, for instance, might have to pay directly in gold for some of its imports. And when that happens, every unit of bullion can be separately accounted for. Each bar has a set of assay marks and serial numbers stamped on it. An expert can tell at a glance where the bar was minted and when. And naturally there’s an international register of any that have been stolen.
‘In other words, you couldn’t take the gold you’re talking about to a reputable dealer. You’d have to go to someone willing to take the risk of disguising its origin, probably by breaking it down into smaller units before it was resold.’
‘Someone like your friend in Istanbul?’ Jack said.
‘Zakarios? In the old days, maybe. Like I said, the Turks have cleaned up their act. They’re trying to join the European Community and they have to look respectable. Which is not to say there aren’t still some freebooters around who don’t have to depend on official connivance. But with a quantity like that, I don’t know. I can see a syndicate getting involved, perhaps, to spread the risk. It’d be a huge capital investment with no quick return. Selling it would have to be a long-term operation, a few thousand ounces at a time. Even a market like India could get flooded by that much coming in all at once.’
‘What was the business you did with this Zakarios?’
Eric smiled and playfully rubbed the side of his nose. ‘Still between you and me? After I’d bought my gold I got a little panicky. The price didn’t move at first and I began to think I’d overextended myself. I decided to hedge my bets a little by offloading some of it on the black market. Drove into Turkey with half a dozen bars hidden in the door panels of my car. Zakarios gave me seventy-five dollars an ounce against the forty I’d paid: chicken feed, as it turned out. The sly old bastard acted like he was doing me a favour. I should have trusted my instincts.’
They talked on until Sylvia returned and joined them on the balcony. As dusk crept in over the Gulf the amplified wail of muezzins began to drift across the city in the call to evening prayer. Later, when the mosques had emptied and the restaurants had opened, the three of them went out and gorged themselves, like the Arabs breaking their fast around them, on red caviar and grilled shrimps, stuffed lamb, smoked aubergines and sticky-sweet baklava.
The abundance of rich food after his three days of spartan living in Kuwait no doubt contributed to the lushness of Jack’s dreams in the Patleys’ air-conditioned guest room later that night. Shining bars of gold, stamped with dollar signs and seven-figure sums, were spread out at his feet. Photographs flickered before him in which the same two subjects, Colonel Jalloul and Noura Hamadi, struck poses for the camera. Dale Griggs, naked and sweaty on her mattress, clasped muscular thighs around his hips and drew him inside her with a little gasp of delight.
He woke up briefly, feeling a warm, guilty but pleasurable wetness in his pyjama trousers, drowsily wallowing in the fantasy that had bubbled up again, this time in the crudest physical way. Some part of his mind was obviously determined to hold on to it.
Part Two
13
The flight to Jeddah the next morning added two hours to what would have been a six-hour journey home. When Jack arrived at Heathrow he couldn’t face the further hassle of a succession of commuter trains at the evening rush hour, so he splurged on a taxi all the way to Banstead. He wanted to be in time to see the twins before they went to bed. And, after all, he reminded himself, he was carrying a cheque for fifty thousand dollars in his wallet, together with drafts for nearly sixteen thousand pounds. It was almost as much money as he’d ever had in his own hands at any one time, but it still seemed faintly illusory.
It seemed even more so once the taxi had turned off the M25 into an area where the outer suburbs of London poked a finger into rural Surrey. Banstead was a placid dormitory town and Prescott Gardens, where Jack lived, had always struck him as the archetypal English middle-class street. After the harsh desert environment of the Gulf its pocket-sized front gardens, flawlessly manicured for the spring, looked impossibly green and well-watered; daffodils were blooming and maple and beech trees were in leaf. In the fading light, lamps glowed invitingly behind the curtains of neat detached houses, most of them of the inter-war Georgian or Tudor type. Across the road from his own house, Fred Reynolds’ lawn was as smooth as a bowling green.
