THERE WERE DEFINITE ADVANTAGES to being the confidential secretary to a banker from the centuries-old house of Rapfenberg. The salary was good. There was a lot of travel. There was a sense of excitement and the feeling of being in on important things—even if, sometimes, they were a little too complicated to understand.
It was a sweet job, especially for a twenty-four-year-old American girl who had originally come to Zurich to ski. Eileen Hamblin told herself that again as she tried to convince herself that the last three months had not really been so bad.
There had been no traveling and that, she realized, was the source of her discomfort. She had been virtually chained to this awful desk for three months because Mr. Amadeus Rentzel had work to do in Zurich and that had, for the very first time, introduced in her the suspicion that banking might be dull. Just plain dull. Banking, she thought in a very un-Swiss-like manner, could be just a boring pain in the ass.
If she had been a better secretary, she might have tried to learn something about banking, finance and monetary policy, so she could perhaps share in the excitement others seemed to find in them. Gold was gold and silver was silver. They were used for jewelry. But money was used to pay the rent. She could find no possible relationship between the paper currency she used at the grocery store and somebody’s pile of gold buried in some fort somewhere.
Mr. Rentzel had tried to explain, but it was useless. And now he no longer tried. And for the past three months, he had been different somehow, spending more time at his desk, always deep in charts on cash and reserves and gold flow.
She remembered the day it had started, how he had come out of his office and said “Gold stocks are dropping on the New York Stock Exchange.”
“That’s nice,” she said.
“Nice?” he said. “It’s awful.”
“Is there anything we can do about it?”
“Not a damn thing,” he said, disappearing back into his office.
From that day on, her first job every day was to begin checking gold prices on major stock exchanges around the world. In the last month, they had been going up and so had Mr. Rentzel’s spirits.
Suddenly Mr. Rentzel became extremely popular. Formerly, he would travel all over the world—with Eileen—to see clients. But now the clients were coming to him. A regular United Nations in the last month. Orientals. Russians, even.
There was another one today. His card had read “Mister Jones.” Eileen had allowed herself a very small, very controlled smile. The man had an accent like Ludwig Von Drake, and if he were Mr. Jones, she was Jacqueline Onassis.
The man known as Mr. Jones was inside Mr. Rentzel’s office now, nervously fingering the catches on a black leather attaché case, which was fastened to his arm with an old-fashioned pair of handcuffs.
“I am glad your nation has decided to bid,” Rentzel told the man.
Rentzel was tall and sandy haired and looked younger than his fifty years. He wore conservative clothing, not because he liked it, but because a banker could wear nothing else. He was a very good banker.
The man he addressed—Mr. Jones of the business card—was a small, fat man with a bald head and thick, horn-rimmed eyeglasses. He watched Rentzel without speaking, with slightly less animation than that shown by a subway rider reading an overhead advertisement.
“Of course, the bombing demonstration at St. Louis was very impressive, was it not?” Rentzel said.
Jones grunted into the silence. Then there was more silence. Then Jones said, “I have the money here.”
“In dollars?”
“Yes.”
“And you understand the rules?”
“Please repeat them,” Jones said and reached for a pen in the inside pocket of his ill-fitting blue serge suit.
Rentzel raised a hand in a traffic-stopping gesture. “Please. Nothing in writing.” Jones slowly withdrew his empty hand while Rentzel walked around the desk and sat in his chair, facing Jones across the wide expanse of walnut.
Without waiting, he began to talk. “Your two million dollars will be held by me as a good-faith deposit on behalf of your country. The bidding will be conducted seven days from today in the New York offices of the Villebrook Equity Associates.”
“I have never heard of them,” Jones said.
“That is the proof of their quality,” Rentzel said with a smile. “They are bankers, not public relations men for themselves. At any rate, the bidding will be conducted there by me. Each nation will be allowed one bid and one bid only. The minimum price is, as you know, one billion dollars. In gold. The highest bid over one billion dollars wins.”
“One billion dollars,” Jones said. “It is an awesome figure.”
“What is for sale is also awesome,” Rentzel said. “Control of the government of the most powerful nation in the history of the world.” He went on. “By the way, you should know the competition. Besides your own country, I expect bids from Russia and China, Italy, France and Great Britain. And oh, from Switzerland too.”
“You Swiss always were adventurers,” Jones said with a chuckle.
“And you Germans always were fascinated by the possibility of controlling others. Oh, the bids must be in writing and sealed. All unsuccessful bidders will have their good-faith deposits returned to them by me. I will, of course, give you a receipt for it now.”
“It must be interesting to be able to sell a government,” Jones said. “Interesting, that is, for the person doing it. It would seem the only person who could do it would be the President,” he added somewhat clumsily.
“Who is doing it is unimportant,” Rentzel said. “The fact is that my client can do it. The incident with the nuclear weapon on St. Louis showed that. Tomorrow, there will be another incident. It will involve the Central Intelligence Agency. When you hear of it, you will recognize it. The power to accomplish such things will be yours if you are the successful bidder.”
“But one billion dollars in gold? Do you realize how much gold that is?”
“In the neighborhood of one thousand tons,” Rentzel said. “Don’t worry. In Switzerland, we have the facilities for storing it. And the trust of our client.”
“We may not bid,” Jones said sullenly, simply out of dislike for this man who knew all the answers.
“It would be your loss,” Rentzel said. “The other nations plan to. One can tell by the fact that gold mining stocks are moving up in value on their stock exchanges.”
He smiled. Jones knew that Rentzel had seen the price of gold stocks climbing in Germany too. Rentzel realized that Germany was already beginning to stockpile the gold needed to back up their bid.
“Well, we shall see,” he said lamely.
With his left hand, he quickly unlocked the handcuff on his wrist and placed the attaché case on the desk before Rentzel. “Do you wish to… ?”
“No, that’s not necessary,” Rentzel said. “In matters like this, we make no mistakes.”
He rose and shook hands with Mr. Jones, who quickly left. Rentzel opened the briefcase and looked at the neat piles of thousand dollar bills. Two million dollars.
With the nonchalance of the professional banker, he left the briefcase open on his desk and stepped into the outer office. Jones had gone. His secretary was cleaning her nails.
She looked up, and was disappointed when he said, “Pay close attention to mining stock prices in Paris and in London.” Then he smiled, and said, “And make us reservations for a flight to New York Sunday night.”
Without waiting for an answer, he turned and walked back into his office. He could not see the huge smile that illuminated her face.
Great, she thought. New York. Banking could really be fun, after all.
On the other hand, she could not see the smile on Rentzel’s face. The CIA incident, he thought. After that, all the countries will get in line to bid.