Chapter 27

New Orleans, 1951

 

 

It was Christmas vacation. I had almost two weeks. I intended to use this time studying for examinations, as the end of the semester and mid-year graduation approached. I wasn’t particularly interested in excelling in any of them. I only wanted a degree and to leave graciously. I had all but abandoned any idea of going on in physics, as I once had considered.

I had been in touch with two drilling companies and one diamond drill manufacturing firm. The diamond people wanted me, I suppose, because I was a little older and more mature. They wanted me as a sales representative. I would be on the road most of the time, and when home, I would be subject to call if a well was having trouble. By trouble, I mean if they ran into granite and needed a diamond bit or a wash-over shoe if they had a break in a drill pipe.

Lucy was happy with the way things turned out. She found another job, which was better than her last but never paid any more. We were still struggling financially, and would be for years to come.

In due course, Ralph acquired the diamonds we took from Merkers. This made Lucy happy, but not me. As far as I was concerned, the diamonds were unjustly taken from me. I felt the loss in the same way. And it made me more depressed than ever I had been.

That’s the way things were when, out of the blue, I received a call from Ralph. He said he was coming back to New Orleans and he had a surprise for me.

 

The three of us are heading east to one of those small cities in New Jersey named after an Indian tribe. What he wants to show us there is the surprise. He showed up with airline tickets and an offer to pay the expenses for this surprise trip of his. I was glad for an excuse not to study the full two weeks.

He asked me if I still intended to write a book about our adventure, and if I still intended to include the part about the gold and the SS. I told him I was. I got the idea he was not so much interested in my plans for a book as he was in looking for an opportunity to tell me something else about the gold.

“Red, I want the two of you to know something.” He was leaning over talking to me. Lucy was in the middle seat.

“I have not been completely honest with you. I went back to the place you called Ravensbruck; I uncovered the half we kept from General Patton and Colonel Bernstein, soon after we buried it. Now, I want to tell you I took half of what was left. The remainder is what I let the Commission eventually find and recover. You, of course, got the credit for remembering where you buried it. And for that they agreed to leave you alone. Well, they had no idea, at the time, how much was still there. And there was so much they thought they finally had it all. But they did not. I took almost a ton and left them the rest.

“Where is it now?” I asked.

“That is part of the surprise,” he replied.

I couldn’t help notice the expression change on Lucy’s face. Once again she wanted nothing to do with gold. To her it meant stealing, and she couldn’t reconcile it with her religious teachings. I’ve told you before: she believed it spelled trouble. It had already caused the death of her ex-husband and another of my friends, and had been the direct cause of her killing two men. She hadn’t gotten over any part of it; she was not looking for more trouble. Ralph, on the other hand, attributed the deaths of these people to the evil of the spear. He told me if it hadn’t been those killings it would have been something else. Once he had given it back to the museum and it had a new keeper, we had nothing to worry about. We could expect to have clear sailing for the rest of our lives. This was according to him, anyway. But Lucy was not buying any part of his hokum about it or the SS.

For the moment I was elated. I was in hog heaven again. My mind was going ninety miles an hour. He was going to give me some of what he had taken; maybe he would even split it with me, unbeknownst to Lucy.

But this euphoria was short-lived when I noticed the expression on her face. The look she gave me clearly meant it was either her or the gold, but not both. Anyway, it felt good for a moment. But the realization that it was all for naught put me further into a dark funk. I spent the hours before we landed feeling as bad as I ever had.

I was correct about Lucy and her feelings about the gold, but not Ralph; I had misjudged him. He had brought me here to show me he had not taken it for himself, and to offer again to make me rich or just well off. It was up to me. But really it was up to Lucy.

We stopped at a small warehouse and went in. There were two workmen unloading crates. They said hello to Ralph but didn’t stop their work to chat. They knew him. As it turned out, he was their boss.

He took us into a back room to show us some large polished granite rocks resembling squat teakettles. I couldn’t remember ever seeing anything quite like them, and neither could Lucy. He explained they were called stones, of all things, and they were used in the game of curling. He told me it was like a cross between bowling and shuffleboard. He said it’s a big time winter sport in Canada, the Northeast, and in the North as far west as North Dakota.

He locked the door behind us, then took us over to one of the shelves containing dozen of these stones. He checked the top of two of them.

“Look here at this brass plate. See this one. The last digit of the serial number is even. Now watch.”

He carried the forty-pound stone by the handle as though he was going to pour us a cup of tea. He set it on a bench and struck it sharply with a hammer. It was solid granite with a large hollow center or core. Inside the core was a gold ingot weighing approximately one third that of a regular gold block. I couldn’t have been more surprised.

Ralph had a big smile on his face as he watched me put two and two together. But Lucy was confused.

“Stop me,” I said, “if I’m wrong.” Ralph nodded, still smiling. He intended to give me some of it after all. But Lucy saw the smile on my face, and she started to frown again at what I was thinking.

“That bottom addition to Lothar Horner’s mother’s place in Siegesdorf is where you're putting these things together. You’re melting the large bars and recasting them into these smaller ones that are easier to smuggle. And you have these curling stones weighted to make them exactly the weight of those that are solid granite; the odd-numbered ones you are peddling to somebody else to be used in the game.”

“Right, again,” he said.

“You trust Lothar?”

“Completely. He is getting rich, though. He gets to keep the dust lost from the recasting process. The soft gold sheds. All the old-time gold miners knew this. Anytime you handle pure gold or change its shape or what have you, you lose a minute amount in dust. We simply set up a system to recover it. Lothar is satisfied. He is making a lot of money selling it at higher than world prices at places like Tangier, Spanish Morocco. He is happy, and so am I.”

And me too, if Lucy would change her mind.

“Incidentally, we have a legitimate business on the side. We distribute the odd-numbered stones to retailers in Montreal, Winnipeg, Minneapolis, and a half-dozen other large northern cities. We also have a healthy share of the Swiss and the recovering Austrian markets.

Heretofore, the Scots had a monopoly on curling stones, since the best granite was quarried on an island off that country. But we have quarries here that are just as good, with a cheaper supply of labor. Transportation costs are about the same, so we have been able to make inroads into what has always been their sole domain. I intend cutting you in on that end of the business if you will not take any of the gold.”

“What are you doing with it anyway?” I asked, surprised at what he just told me.

“Nothing yet. I collect it from our local vault periodically, and then hide it in the basement of a chalet I have in Utah. I intend giving it to Simon Wiesenthal, as soon as he has a system to return it to those who lost it, the ones who obviously survived the camps. Not an easy thing to do.”

Good idea, I thought, but said nothing. I just nodded my head and watched Lucy, who had changed her expression once again to one more positive.

Then all of a sudden, out of the clear blue, something jogged my memory. I can’t explain it, but there it was as plain as day. It was kind of uncanny the way it happened. One minute nothing–and then the next, the inside of my head seemed to light up–and I felt a tingle all over as a jolt of adrenalin coursed through my body. And if I was remembering things correctly, it might well be the solution to all my money problems. But regardless, this time I was keeping it to myself.

I don’t like the idea of accepting money from Ralph gratuitously. But that’s what he’s suggesting I do with his offer to make me his partner. And I certainly don’t want to work for him for wages, even though it might be a whole lot better than what I’m going to be doing. But working for the diamond-drill company at least has something going for it–we will be able to live in the South. Even if he offered me a partnership, we would be living in the frozen North. And I figure no amount of money is worth it.

But not to worry. I might just have discovered another mother lode that’s been right under my nose all the time. I might be rich again, thanks to the Waffen SS and that crazy spear of theirs. Maybe if things work out, I’ll be wealthier than I ever was. And my new book is going to be a best seller, too, because the first thing I’m going to do is buy a publishing house.

But then I thought about what happens when you relinquish your keeper position. Hadn’t everybody else lost everything? Why not me? Then I kicked myself. I’m starting to go screwy. I’m starting to think as Ralph does. But if this idea of mine doesn’t pan out–if I’m wrong about it, then I’m going to blame that crazy spear of Steinmann’s for throwing a monkey wrench into things and sabotaging my life. And this nutty thought will plague me for the rest of my life. And then maybe I’ll come to believe as the rest of them did down through the ages. I’ll come to believe it has this power; then, I too might be headed down that same road to the nuthatch. For sure, I’ll never be happy again. And for sure, I’ll become a true believer and blame the spear for keeping me poor. Nothing I have in mind, though, is for certain; the whole thing might very well amount to nothing. But then, if it does come a cropper, methinks another major disappointment, this one blamed on occult interference, might very well put me over the edge.