Gold (17 page)

As for the rest, the uncertainty in the markets, the anomalous gold dealing, the murky South African situation—these were certainly not his responsibilities. He was just a journalist, trying to report what’s going on.

What is going on? he wondered. Attempted murder was for investigative reporters tracking mob influence or police corruption, not for managing editors of commodities news services.

It all seemed so melodramatic. After all, it would be terribly risky if he disappeared. Or would it? Risky to whom? Whoever had staged this attempt on his life was running much greater risks than killing an obscure financial journalist.

One thing had become much clearer: there was definitely something to know about this report of mine sabotage. The attack against him verified his suspicions that more than the market scam was at stake.

Nor did the anger leave him. It supported his already strong convictions about getting at the truth. For the first time in his life, he felt ready to defy any danger to get a story.

~

Richard Corrello looked through the tinted glass to the bright sky outside. A slight haze hung over the city of Atlanta, but there was green farmland surrounding it. His office on the thirteenth floor offered the view of a distant horizon.

Corrello didn’t usually spend much time gazing out the window, regardless of the view and the splendid Georgia weather. But Drew’s call had disturbed him. He knew he had to go to Madison immediately, and he was dreading the encounter.

Drew had called him from the airport in Paris, just before eleven o’clock.

“It was MacLean. I could identify him tentatively, and the dental records confirm it.” Drew’s voice was as clear as an interoffice call.

“Shit,” Corrello said.

“There’s more, Rich,” Drew continued. “I’ve had a very disturbing lunch with an old banking source of mine here. He raised the question of whether the sabotage report was accurate.”

Corrello was quiet. He suppressed his defensive reaction because the question was too realistic. After all, United Press had reported the end of World War I three days before the fact. Reporters made mistakes.

“We weren’t the only ones who reported it,” Corrello said coldly.

“We were the only ones who had a separate source,” Drew said. “Notice the past tense—the separate source seems to have vanished.”

Corrello listened as Drew told him why he wanted to go to South Africa.

“I’ll have to clear it with Madison.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow from London. They’re boarding my flight.”

Corrello was in charge of news in an organization that lived off the news. But it was the money men who ran the show. Madison, trained as a certified public accountant, was chairman and chief executive officer.

It fell to Corrello to maintain and defend the group’s journalistic standards. He picked up his phone and pressed one of the buttons along the bottom. “Rita, it’s me. Is he free?” No frills, no useless chatter. Madison’s secretary knew the voice of everyone who had access to that line. She knew as well that it must be urgent simply because Corrello wanted to talk to Madison right now.

“In ten minutes,” she said.

“What’s up?” Madison snapped when Corrello entered the office. Madison could be quite charming when he saw the need to be. Seeing less and less need, he was charming less often these days.

“Drew called,” Corrello said.

“Is he still gallivanting around in France.” It wasn’t a question. For being one of the shrewdest managers in the country, Madison still had the old-fashioned notion that any American traveling in Europe was on vacation.

“It was our man who was murdered,” Corrello said.

“Drew’s man, you mean.”

“In point of fact, he was already on board when Drew took over,” Corrello said. Whatever Madison’s faults, he did not demand a yes-man. Corrello never hesitated to contradict him. “There’s more.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. What more?”

“One of Drew’s bankers is asking whether we have verification on the story.”

At this, Madison looked up from the papers he had been shuffling. He gave Corrello the stare that had chilled boardrooms across the country.

“Do I really have to listen to this?” he said evenly.

“Drew wants to go to South Africa.”

“Drew can go straight to hell,” Madison snapped, standing up. He started around the desk, thought better of it, returned to his seat, and sat down.

“Look, Rich, isn’t this a bit out of our line? I mean, aren’t we supposed to be taking pork belly prices in Chicago and delivering them to the meat packers in Kansas City?” He paused and continued in a more natural voice. “Of course the story is accurate. Every newspaper in the country reported it. The godamned South African government confirmed it. And just because some queerbait European banker thinks he knows something, I’ve got a managing editor who wants to go traipsing off halfway across the world.”

“Drew’s worried about the stringer who reported the news,” Corrello said. He knew the best way to get through to Madison was just to keep on a straight tack to his objective.

Madison snorted. “Is he dead too?”

“We’ve never been able to reestablish contact with him.”

“I wish to hell we never had in the first place,” Madison said with feeling. “So we had a scoop. If the story’s fake, we’ll lose more business than we gained.” He thought for a minute. “If this thing blows up in our faces, I’ll have Drew’s ass.”

Madison did not have to say to Corrello who else’s ass was on the line.

“If Drew did go to South Africa, he could get some verification of the sabotage and find that stringer,” Corrello suggested, after what he deemed an appropriate pause to let Madison know he had gotten the message.

“What are Dow Jones and Reuters doing? Don’t they have stringers in South Africa?”

“They’re much more prominent; their people were kicked out first,” Corrello said. He didn’t add that the other two agencies had been paying staffers in South Africa, not relying on a stringer for one of the most important commodities markets in the southern hemisphere.

“What if Drew finds this stringer? Then what?” Madison asked. He was weakening.

“Well, I suppose he’ll find out his source. Confirm the accuracy of the report.” Corrello smiled. “Knowing Drew, he’ll dig up a scoop or two of his own while he’s there.”

Madison frowned. Corrello understood his dilemma. The last thing in the world Madison wanted was further complications from another scoop. On the other hand, the agency’s sales manager couldn’t stop talking about how the sabotage beat had lifted subscriber sales.

“What kind of scoop?”

“If he gets a visa at all—and he thinks, the situation being what it is, he might—he’d be one of the few journalists allowed in since the state of siege was declared,” Corrello said. A former reporter, he was on Drew’s side, uneasy himself about the gold selling in the market.

“What are we going to do about this corpse?”

Corrello was used to Madison’s shifts. “Nothing just yet. The British papers will tumble to it first, because Scotland Yard was involved. We’ll wait and see if the American papers pick it up. Anyway, it’ll seem a small footnote.”

“Let’s keep it that way,” Madison declared. “Tell Drew to go on to South Africa but not to do another goddamn thing on the story without clearing it with us.”

NINE

Drew’s Swissair flight arrived punctually; within fifteen minutes he was comfortably installed in Kraml’s BMW. It had been only two hours since he telephoned Corrello from Roissy airport in Paris.

“Nothing like Swiss efficiency,” Drew said to the trader, as the two of them sped along the Autobahn through the flat farmland surrounding Kloten, the Swiss village that gave its name to Zurich’s airport.

Kraml grunted. “The Swiss are boring,” he said with an Austrian’s automatic disdain for efficiency. But the young dealer was clearly nervous. Drew had noticed this the moment they met when he emerged from the gate.

Kraml ignored the exits for Zurich. Drew was to spend the night at Kraml’s home south of Zug.

“You’ve put on weight, Hannes,” Drew said, to make conversation.

“Family life,” said Hannes, making a joke.

“How is your wife?” Drew continued the formalities.

“She likes it here. She’s Swiss, you know.”

The banalities only seemed to increase the tension. The two men continued in silence.

“I’m worried,” Kraml finally said. “I think Marcus is working some kind of fiddle, but I can’t figure out what it is.”

“What’s going on?”

“Well, Marcus and Blacky seem to be controlling the gold price. They’re playing the market, but always in control.”

“How do they do it?”

“That’s what I can’t figure out. Either they have some gold stashed away somewhere or they’re pretending they do.”

“What’s the feeling in the market?”

“Always nervous, very nervous,” Kraml paused. “Then today, Marcus got even funnier. He started shorting gold in the futures market.”

Officially, Kraml did not even know this, but he had uncovered the transactions during the afternoon.

“There’s something else strange,” Kraml continued. “He’s not the only one. Another Swiss group seems to be shorting gold. No telling who they’re trading for.”

“What do you think is behind it?”

Kraml shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Could Marcus have built up a position in gold?”

“It’s too big. Not even Marcus could afford to stockpile that much gold.”

“Somebody else?”

“No, no. It’s too much.” Kraml showed his frustration. “The only ones who could have that much gold are the producers.”

Drew thought for a while. “Do you think it’s possible that South Africa is the source of the gold?”

“But their mines have been bombed.”

“What if they had stockpiled some gold?”

“Impossible. Everyone knows the South Africans were selling every ounce of their production when the attacks took place.”

“What about the Russians?”

“They’re selling, all right,” Kraml said. “And our visitor the other day points to Marcus as their dealer.”

“Could they be the source of the gold?”

“Dammit, Drew, you know better than that. Everybody knows both the Soviet Union and South Africa desperately need hard currency, so they were producing to the maximum and selling everything they produced. And then the South African mines got bombed. So there should be a lot less gold on the market, unless some goddamn trader has developed a Midas touch.” Kraml took the exit for his lake road.

“You know how the markets work,” Drew said. “We don’t really know how much gold the Russians can produce, or how much they’re selling. We make guesses. Then we see if the transactions in the market are in line with those guesses. It’s like physicists with the laws of nature. They make hypotheses and then test them empirically. For a long time, a hypothesis can look like it’s right, and then something happens that proves it to be wrong. So you come up with a new hypothesis.”

“What’s your hypothesis?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Drew hesitated. “Granted, it would be very hard to accept that South Africa had stockpiled any production.”

Kraml just grunted.

“But maybe all our estimates about the Russians are wrong. Maybe they’ve made a new find we don’t know about yet. Or maybe the South African sabotage wasn’t as bad as we were led to believe,” Drew concluded. “There are any number of reasonable hypotheses.”

“Yeah, real reasonable, if you know about them.” Kraml wasn’t satisfied. “I think Marcus does know. I think he may be the only one who does.”

“And I think you’re right about that,” Drew said. “Look, can you poke around some more?” He saw the Austrian grow even more tense. “Don’t get yourself into trouble, though.” For some reason, he had a flash of that corpse in Annecy.

“I’ll be careful,” Kraml said.

“I’m going to try to go to South Africa and see what I can find out,” Drew said. “I haven’t talked to our stringer since he sent us the telex about the sabotage.” The telex he had never seen, Drew thought guiltily.

Kraml turned into a well-manicured drive, leading to a two-story house. Drew realized suddenly he was looking forward to a relaxed evening and hoped that the presence of Hannes’s wife would steer the conversation away from the gold market. The thought of Carol flashed quickly through his mind.

~

“I don’t like it,” Carol said, as they sat together in the Cock and Bull. “Central bankers have no more to do with murder than journalists do.”

Drew had just finished telling Carol about his trip to Annecy, his visit to the morgue, and the Renault in Paris.

“I think we should just report all this to Halden and Guinness and let them pass it on to the proper government authorities,” she said.

“Pass on what? MacLean got involved with some thugs who swindled the market. Financial markets are jittery because there’s more gold than there’s supposed to be, and I was daydreaming when I crossed a street in Paris. What’s the CIA going to make of all that?”