He took Andrew’s assurance with relief, and went on. “I feel it’s all my fault for letting you come out here. I got very worried. I began to think of that man in the garbage dump. I tried to raise Nimcik at his hotel, and he wasn’t there. I suspected last night that he was in England because of the Kusitch business. He told me he had a clue to some lost loot. I didn’t want to say anything about him till you’d seen this fishing craft. After lunch I got more and more worried. Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. I called up Detective Sergeant Stock.” Charley paused for breath. “It was just as well we went over that map last night. We didn’t have to lose any time.” He paused again. “I suppose you haven’t seen anything of Nimcik?”
Andrew composed a question, but did not ask it. He knew who Nimcik was. He said: “I’m afraid it’s not so good. He tackled Kretchmann and Haller with an empty pistol.”
Charley nodded. “I’ve heard him say a gun is a handy weapon till it’s fired. He wouldn’t want any trouble with foreign police.”
“He’s in trouble anyway. Kretchmann shot him.”
They went over the knoll and down to the landing stage. Nimcik was sitting up, with Ruth supporting him.
“He’ll have to go to hospital quickly,” she said. “The one in the head looks like a scalp wound but there’s another in the shoulder. Not too serious but he’s losing a lot of blood.”
Detective-Sergeant Stock came over the knoll in a hurry. He was obviously excited. He looked bewildered, too.
“What’s the meaning of it all?” he demanded. “Do you know what’s in the car that Kretchmann was driving?”
Andrew, attending to Mr. Jolly-Face, looked up.
“Pig iron,” he said. “They took it from the yawl. Pig-iron ballast.”
“Pig iron!” Stock exclaimed. “It’s bar gold! The car’s full of gold!”
Mr. Jolly-Face smiled faintly. “Gold,” he said. “A hundred thousand pounds worth of gold. It is now a matter for my legation.”
Inspector Jordaens came from the yawl, having assured himself that the still dazed Haller was safe. He stooped near the edge of the landing stage and picked up an object from the sand.
“This is what I want,” he asserted. “The revolver that shot Kusitch. One little test with the microscope, and my case is complete. Did someone say something about gold?”
Fourteen
Mr. Milan Nimcik, of the Yugoslav Special Investigation Bureau, said a lot about gold, as, propped up in a hospital bed, he talked to his old colleague, Mr. Botten, and to his new friends.
The story began during the two weeks’ campaign that shattered Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941. The Nazis poured across the northern frontier, flooding towards Lyublyana and Zagreb and Belgrade. They struck at the capital from Romania, too, and swept from Bulgaria into the Vardar Valley. They rushed on towards the Albanian frontier, they branched down towards Salonika in the south. Other forces engulfed Nish and Skopje. In six days Germans and Italians met at Struga, and the Yugoslav armies were divided and scattered.
Then there was chaos for the people. The fierce wind of the Wermracht tossed and whirled them all ways, and riding the storm came Kretchmann, a Feldwebel in charge of a small armoured reconnaissance patrol.
He was far out on the right flank of a motorised infantry division; his mission was to prevent the destruction of bridges and culverts on the transverse roads, and to feel for enemy forces reported to be reorganising to the north. He did not pause when the second vehicle in his patrol fell back with engine trouble. He had two motorcyclists and two men with him in the scout car, and that was plenty for the job in hand, even if there should prove to be some fight left in the local forces. Somewhere, in a patch of wooded country, they ran across a fleeing van. It was not an army vehicle, just a delivery van with a baker’s sign on the side of it, but it was important enough to have an escort of motorcyclists in uniform, and there was an officer on the seat beside the civilian driver. Here was transport commandeered in a moment of great urgency to carry something of high significance away from the invaders, — military secrets, plans, archives. Or treasure.
By then, Kretchmann and his men were trigger-happy. They shot up the van and the escort, and only one of the outriders got away. Kretchmann had a picked crew with him. They understood one another, and they understood their Feldwebel. Their wartime philosophy could be summarised in the word “loot,” and they had it in mind as they inspected the van. They lifted an old tarpaulin that had been thrown in a heap on the floor of the van. There wasn’t much under it; only seven great bars of gold.
Gold! The five men stared at one another. It was fabulous, a fortune. Not in all their dreams had they dared to conceive of anything like this. If they could get away with it, they would be rich. After the war they would live in comfort. To the victor, the spoils.
Kretchmann was the first to recover from the gratifying shock of discovery.
“It must be hidden,” he said.
It was a thought in the minds of all of them: to make it safe so that they might claim it for themselves when the opportunity occurred.
First they must push on; put distance between them and the scene of the incident. Eventually they would report a breakdown in their radio on the command network, but not for some time.
They transferred the gold to the scout car and rushed on. They were excited, and perhaps a sight of the Adriatic from the high hills suggested wild ideas of desertion. Perhaps they just went blindly on, to see what might be round the next corner.
Nightfall was near when they descended to the little port of Zavrana and came upon a small craft tied up to the pier of a re-pairing yard, a yawl with the strange English title of “Tender to Moonlight.”
Zavrana appeared to be almost deserted. Yet they waited for darkness, their vehicles concealed in an olive grove above the town. When they felt it to be safe, they carried their treasure on board the yawl. They saw all the auspices as favourable. Fate had tumbled a fortune into their laps and had then produced a craft to carry them away.
They were ready to cast off when the beam of a searchlight swung in from the sea and travelled over the port. Other beams cut through the darkness, sweeping sea and shore, and Kretchmann knew that the plan was hopeless. Vessels of the Italian fleet were on the prowl, watching for fugitive craft.
“We must go back,” he said. “In a few days the war will be over. We will be an army of occupation. Then we shall decide what to do.”
“Let us bury the gold on shore,” a man named Haller suggested.
“There’s no time,” Kretchmann objected. “Other units may be here any minute. If they catch us, we’ll lose everything, and maybe our lives as well.”
He took up the floor boards of the craft and inspected the ballast in the bilge. He raised seven pigs of iron and cast them overboard and replaced them with the bars of gold. Next he brought some tar from the yard and smeared it over the ingots and the remaining pigs of iron.
As he replaced the flooring, he said: “There’s our hiding place! The gold couldn’t be safer anywhere.”
“Fine,” Haller answered him. “What if someone runs away with the craft?”
“We shall come back before that can happen. Now there is no time for more.”
Haller was not satisfied. He removed the magneto and threw it into the harbour. He took a hammer and smashed parts of the engine. “That will make it safer,” he said, “but we must get back here very soon.”
“Don’t worry,” Kretchmann told him. “It will be easy.”
It was not easy. It was impossible. The Italians took over the occupation of the coast, and Kretchmann and his accomplices were sent to fight in North Africa.
“The next chapter,” Mr. Nimcik said, “does not begin till after the war, when we began to investigate cases of looting with the object of recovering our national treasures. And this is where Kusitch comes into the story, a clever man in some ways, a fool in others. You will understand there were all sorts of papers to examine and among those that came to the desk of Kusitch was a deposition made by the surviving motorcyclist of the gold convoy.”