Hot Mahogany (7 page)

“There are only seven of these known to exist, apart from this one, and six of them are in museums or other institutions,” Barton was saying. “There are only two of them in private hands, and this is one of them. The other is said to rest in a private home near San Francisco that is built directly over the San Andreas Fault.”

“I wonder how the owner’s insurance company feels about that?” Holly observed.

“It’s probably self-insured.”

“How would someone authenticate a piece like this?”

“By being very familiar with other pieces from the same maker.” He pointed to the carved scallop shells at the top of the piece. “For instance, the cuts made in these figures can be matched to the work of a maker, by the tools he used and the strokes he made. There are no signatures, numbers or brass plates identifying the maker, and all the pieces are somewhat different from each other, often built to the specifications of those who commissioned them.”

Stone came over. “Barton, can we talk?”

Barton showed Stone and Holly to a little sitting area at one end of the shop, and they all took seats.

“Barton,” Stone said, “I want to ask you about a couple of people you were in the army with. Will you tell me what you can about them?”

“If my memory is working properly,” Barton said.

“The first is a Charles Crow.”

Barton looked thoughtful.

“You remember Bob Cantor?”

“Oh, yes. My best squad lead, later my best platoon leader. I got him a field commission.”

“Crow was a member of Cantor’s original squad.”

“Oh, yes. I remember him,” Barton said, looking enlightened. “A real hustler; he was always buying or selling something, for less than it was worth when buying and considerably more when selling.”

“Sort of like an antiques dealer,” Holly interjected.

Barton laughed, showing a lot of teeth.

It was the first time Stone had seen him even smile, and he wondered if the joke would have gotten as big a laugh if it had come from him instead of Holly. “Did you ever see Crow after your outfit was back in the States?”

“I threw a party during our last week together, as people were beginning to be discharged or transferred.”

“Was Crow discharged or transferred?”

“Why do I think you already know the answer to that question?” Barton asked.

“Sorry, Barton; I have to check your memory from time to time to see how it’s working.”

“Of course. Crow didn’t re-up, as I recall. Neither did Cantor, though I thought he would have had a future if he’d stayed in the Corps.”

“Do you have any idea what became of Crow after his discharge?”

“I remember that he was a New Yorker. I think he might have returned there, but I’ve no idea what he did after that.”

“Another name: Abner Kramer.”

“Ah, Ab,” Barton said, smiling again. “A great success story. He was a big cheese at Goldman Sachs, then started his own investment bank, and he has a colonial estate up here. He’s up practically every weekend.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” Stone said. “Do you think you might introduce me to him?”

“I could give him a call, I suppose. Why do you want to see him?”

“I’ll be frank with you, Barton,” Stone said. “I know about the, ah, transaction that took place among you, Cantor, Crow, Kramer and one or two others in Cantor’s old squad.”

Barton’s eyebrows went up. “Do you, now? How much do you know?”

“Just the broad outlines,” Stone said. “Will you fill in the gaps for me, tell me the whole story?”

“I think the whole business is better forgotten,” Barton said.

“You understand, don’t you, that you have no legal worries about that now. After all, it was back in the seventies, so the statute of limitations has expired, the government of South Vietnam no longer exists, and I very much doubt if the present government of Vietnam knows about the incident or has any interest in it.”

“You doubt that, do you?”

“Do you have any reason to believe that they could be involved in what happened to you recently?”

Barton sighed. “All right, Stone; I’ll tell you the story — under the protection of attorney-client privilege. And you, Holly, since you work for Lance, are unlikely to reveal this to anyone.”

They both nodded.

“When you’ve heard it, you can tell me who you think might be involved.” Barton settled into his seat, rearranged his features into a reminiscent mien and began to speak.

15

Barton settled himself and began. “We were pulling back from positions north of Saigon,” he said. “We knew it was almost over, and we were just trying to do it in an orderly fashion. Some of the South Vietnamese commanders were in much more of a hurry.

“There was a ragged column of their forces pulling out of our joint fire base very early one morning, and I saw a South Vietnamese unit in several vehicles pulling out, one of them a truck with a fairly large object in the back, covered with a tarp and tied down. Later in the morning, when we finally began moving our equipment down the road to Saigon, our last two trucks caught up with Bob Cantor, riding point in a Jeep, and he took me forward a few yards on foot and showed me something through the reeds.

“The truck carrying the object was mired to its rear axle, along a riverbank, and they had the blanket off and were cutting the ropes tying it down. It was a large safe, quite an old one, from the look of it. The truck was listing toward the river at an alarming angle, and it looked as if it might tip over any moment.

“As we watched, the commanding colonel ordered a dozen of his men to get hold of the safe and tip it into the river. It made a big splash and disappeared into the muddy water. They abandoned the truck and got into another one and headed south.

“We were in less of a hurry than they, so several of us went into the water, got some cable around the safe and, using a winch mounted on our truck’s front bumper, dragged it out of the river. We also had a wrecker with a crane, so we got it aboard a truck, covered it and began driving toward Saigon. We came under mortar fire twice and lost one man, but we finally made it to the city.

“I had rented a house there, with an attached garage, and Cantor and I, along with three enlisted men, got the safe in there and washed the mud off. Then we had to get the thing open, which turned out to be easier than I had imagined. It took Cantor about forty minutes to crack the safe. Who knew he had these skills?”

“Bob has many skills,” Stone said. He knew because he had employed many of them.

“What was in the safe?” Holly asked.

“A lot of papers, mostly in Vietnamese, and six large leather sacks, containing hundreds of gold Chinese coins. They had been crudely struck, probably during or shortly after World War Two, and they weighed about an ounce apiece. I locked them in the garage, and we agreed to meet the next evening for dinner to talk about what to do with them. Two of my men got the safe onto the wrecker, drove it down to the river and made it go away.”

“I don’t get it,” Stone said. “If the safe had gold in it, why didn’t the Vietnamese officer open it and take the gold with him?”

“I can only guess,” Barton said, “but I think he didn’t have the combination. It was probably his commanding general’s safe, and only he knew how to open it. I also think the Vietnamese colonel planned to go back for the safe when things cooled down. Fortunately for us, they never cooled down.

“Anyway, the city was pretty chaotic at the time, and when I happened to stop in at the headquarters of South Vietnamese intelligence to talk to an officer I knew there, I found them emptying their file cabinets and burning all the papers in their courtyard. The file cabinets were heavy and had combination locks. My officer friend was cleaning out his desk, and I asked him if I could have some of the filing cabinets. He was happy to give me six, along with the combinations, and I got a truck in there and took them back to the house.

“We put a sack of coins in each of the cabinets, then Cantor and I went to headquarters that night and typed up all the necessary shipping documents, put seals on the file drawers, secured them further with steel banding, labeled them as top secret and addressed them to me at my unit’s headquarters at Fort Ord, California. Empty, except for the coins, they weighed about what they might have if they had been filled with documents.

“We met the others for dinner, told them about the plan and agreed that we would meet in San Francisco after returning home and decide how to deal with our newfound wealth. The next morning I got the file cabinets aboard a C-130 that was flying a lot of similar stuff home, and off it went.

“Ten days later, our unit arrived at Fort Ord in Monterey, and there were the cabinets, in a storeroom, waiting for us. Then it got a little tricky. We couldn’t just walk into a coin dealer’s and dispose of a huge quantity of very odd coins, so I went to a man I had known who was in the antique business in San Francisco. He was also an engraver, as were three earlier generations of the men in his family. One of them had been the first engraver at the San Francisco Mint, when it opened to deal with the proceeds of the 1849 Gold Rush.

“He had the equipment to melt down the coins and turn them into ingots weighing a kilogram each, and by spreading them around we were able to dispose of them over a period of a month, without attracting too much attention. As a result we accumulated a large amount of cash, and I threw a party for the men and distributed the proceeds. Each man got about three quarters of a million dollars.”

“And you got considerably more,” Stone said. “Half of everything, wasn’t it?”

“That’s correct, but apart from pulling the original safe out of the water, I had done all the work, with Cantor’s help. He got a million dollars.”

“And there was an argument among the men about this?”

“I heard later that one of them had objected to the arrangement.”

“And what happened to him?”

“I don’t know, exactly, but I have my suspicions. I was told about it, in veiled terms, as I was about to get onto an airplane for Washington.”

“And that was it? Everybody was happy?”

“As far as I knew. There was one other facet to all this, though, and I’ve never told anyone about it.”

Both Stone and Holly sat silently and waited.

“I’m afraid this is going to require a history lesson,” Barton said finally.

16

Barton got up, went to his safe, opened it, opened a drawer inside and took out a small, suede pouch, closed with a drawstring. He came back and sat down, resting the pouch on his knee.

“After Franklin Roosevelt took office, in 1933, he took the country off the gold standard, in order to end the run on the banks and settle down the economy. All the gold coins were recalled and exchanged for paper money, and it became illegal to own gold coins, unless they were clearly rare and worthy of collecting. The last double eagles minted were the design by Augustus Saint-Gaudens; there were four hundred forty-five thousand five hundred minted, and they were dated 1933.

“Since gold coins were no longer circulated, all the Saint-Gaudens double eagles were melted down and converted to bullion. Two specimens were given to the Smithsonian. But somehow, examples of these double eagles began turning up here and there. It’s believed that a high-ranking employee of the mint kept twenty or more and replaced them with other double eagles, so that the accounts balanced, but nobody knows exactly how many were thus liberated.

“My engraver friend in San Francisco, whose name was Isaac Finkel, possessed a 1933 Saint-Gaudens double eagle. He wouldn’t say how he got it, but I think that probably a relative of his worked at the mint and managed to retain one before they were melted down. Isaac wanted me to sell it for him, and I agreed to do so, on one condition: Using his Saint-Gaudens as a model, he would cut a new die for the coin, strike two for me, and I would pay him one million dollars for it.

“Isaac did as I asked, and the resulting two coins struck were absolutely undistinguishable from his original coin. I sold one of the two coins, representing it as original, to a Japanese businessman who had something of a reputation for collecting the uncollectible, for three million dollars, and gave a million to Isaac.

“There were other examples about. A Philadelphia jeweler came into possession of nineteen of the Saint-Gaudens double eagles. He sold at least nine of them to collectors, and the government confiscated eight of those. The ninth apparently passed into the possession of King Farouk of Egypt, and when he was deposed it came onto the market. But when the U.S. Government made extensive efforts to recover it, it disappeared, and what with the Feds’ interest in the coins, dealers became reluctant to market them. In 2004, the Philadelphia jeweler’s daughter found her father’s other ten Saint-Gaudens among his possessions after his death, and she foolishly sent them to the U.S. Mint for authentication. I believe she may still be trying to get them back.

“But the most interesting story came when a British coin dealer turned up with the King Farouk Saint-Gaudens during the nineties in New York, where he tried to sell it to someone who turned out to be a Treasury agent.

“The government confiscated the coin, and the dealer promptly sued to get it back. During the lawsuit, which lasted for some years, the double eagle was deposited in the Treasury vaults at the World Trade Center. A couple of months before the 9/11 attacks the dealer and the U.S. Mint settled, agreeing to sell it at auction and divide the proceeds. The coin was removed from the vaults, monetized by the Treasury and sold at auction. It brought, including the buyer’s premium, seven million five hundred and ninety thousand dollars.”

“Holy shit,” Holly said.

“What happened to your two coins, Barton?”

“I kept them for many years, then sold one to a collector, for… well, shall we say, for something less than seven million dollars. I used the money — some of it, anyway — to buy the Goddard-Townsend mahogany secretary that Holly so admires.” He opened the suede pouch and emptied it into his hand. “This,” he said, holding a gold coin up between thumb and forefinger, “is the original Saint-Gaudens from Isaac Finkel.” He took Holly’s hand and placed the coin in it.