‘Why the high price in India?’ Bond didn’t really want to know. He thought M. might ask him.
‘It’s a long story. Briefly, India is shorter of gold, particularly for her jewellery trade, than any other country.’
‘What’s the size of this traffic?’
‘Huge. To give you an idea, the Indian Intelligence Bureau and their Customs captured forty-three thousand ounces in 1955. I doubt if that’s one per cent of the traffic. Gold’s been coming into India from all points of the compass. Latest dodge is to fly it in from Macao and drop it by parachute to a reception committee – a ton at a time – like we used to drop supplies to the Resistance during the war.’
‘I see. Is there anywhere else I can get a good premium for my gold bar?’
‘You could get a small premium in most countries – Switzerland, for instance – but it wouldn’t be worth your while. India’s still the place.’
‘All right,’ said Bond. ‘I think I’ve got the picture. Now what’s your particular problem?’ He sat back and lit a cigarette. He was greatly looking forward to hearing about Mr Auric Goldfinger.
Colonel Smithers’s eyes took on their hard, foxy look. He said, ‘There’s a man who came over to England in 1937. He was a refugee from Riga. Name of Auric Goldfinger. He was only twenty when he arrived, but he must have been a bright lad because he smelled that the Russians would be swallowing his country pretty soon. He was a jeweller and goldsmith by trade, like his father and grandfather who had refined gold for Fabergé. He had a little money and probably one of those belts of gold I was telling you about. Stole it from his father, I daresay. Well, soon after he’d been naturalized – he was a harmless sort of chap and in a useful trade and he had no difficulty in getting his papers – he started buying up small pawnbrokers all over the country. He put in his own men, paid them well and changed the name of the shops to “Goldfinger”. Then he turned the shops over to selling cheap jewellery and buying old gold – you know the sort of place: “Best Prices for Old Gold. Nothing too Large, Nothing too Small”, and he had his own particular slogan: “Buy Her Engagement Ring With Grannie’s Locket.” Goldfinger did very well. Always chose good sites, just on the dividing line between the well-to-do streets and the lower-middle. Never touched stolen goods and got a good name everywhere with the police. He lived in London and toured his shops once a month and collected all the old gold. He wasn’t interested in the jewellery side. He let his managers run that as they liked.’ Colonel Smithers looked quizzically at Bond. ‘You may think these lockets and gold crosses and things are pretty small beer. So they are, but they mount up if you’ve got twenty little shops, each one buying perhaps half a dozen bits and pieces every week. Well, the war came and Goldfinger, like all other jewellers, had to declare his stock of gold. I looked up his figure in our old records. It was fifty ounces for the whole chain! – just enough of a working stock to keep his shops supplied with ring setting and so forth, what they call jewellers’ findings in the trade. Of course, he was allowed to keep it. He tucked himself away in a machine-tool firm in Wales during the war – well out of the firing line – but kept as many of his shops operating as he could. Must have done well out of the G.I.s who generally travel with a Gold Eagle or a Mexican fifty-dollar piece as a last reserve. Then, when peace broke out, Goldfinger got moving. He bought himself a house, pretentious sort of place, at Reculver, at the mouth of the Thames. He also invested in a well-found Brixham trawler and an old Silver Ghost Rolls Royce – armoured car, built for some South American president who was killed before he could take delivery. He set up a little factory called “Thanet Alloy Research” in the grounds of his house and staffed it with a German metallurgist, a prisoner of war who didn’t want to go back to Germany, and half a dozen Korean stevedores he picked up in Liverpool. They didn’t know a word of any civilized language so they weren’t any security risk. Then, for ten years, all we know is that he made one trip a year to India in his trawler and a few trips in his car every year to Switzerland. Set up a subsidiary of his alloy company near Geneva. He kept his shops going. Gave up collecting the old gold himself – used one of his Koreans whom he had taught to drive a car. All right, perhaps Mr Goldfinger is not a very honest man, but he behaves himself and keeps in well with the police, and with much more blatant fiddling going on all over the country nobody paid him any attention.’
Colonel Smithers broke off. He looked apologetically at Bond. ‘I’m not boring you? I do want you to get the picture of the sort of man this is – quiet, careful, law-abiding and with the sort of drive and single-mindedness we all admire. We didn’t even hear of him until he suffered a slight misfortune. In the summer of 1954, his trawler, homeward bound from India, went ashore on the Goodwins and he sold the wreck for a song to the Dover Salvage Company. When this company started breaking the ship up and got as far as the hold they found the timbers impregnated with a sort of brown powder which they couldn’t put a name to. They sent a specimen to a local chemist. They were surprised when he said the stuff was gold. I won’t bother you with the formula, but you see gold can be made to dissolve in a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acids, and reducing agents – sulphur dioxide or oxalic acid – precipitate the metal as a brown powder. This powder can be reconstituted into gold ingots by melting at around a thousand degrees Centigrade. Have to watch the chlorine gas, but otherwise it’s a simple process.
‘The usual nosey parker in the salvage firm gossiped to one of the Dover Customs men and in due course a report filtered up through the police and the C.I.D. to me, together with a copy of the cargo clearance papers for each of Goldfinger’s trips to India. These gave all the cargoes as mineral dust base for crop fertilizers – all perfectly credible because these modern fertilizers do use traces of various minerals in their make-up. The whole picture was clear as crystal. Goldfinger had been refining down his old gold, precipitating it into this brown powder and shipping it to India as fertilizer. But could we pin it on him? We could not. Had a quiet look at his bank balance and tax returns. Twenty thousand pounds at Barclays in Ramsgate. Income tax and super tax paid promptly each year. Figures showed the natural progress of a well-run jewellery business. We dressed a couple of the Gold Squad up and sent them down to knock on the door of Mr Goldfinger’s factory at Reculver. “Sorry, sir, routine inspection for the Small Engineering Section of the Ministry of Labour. We have to make sure the Factory Acts are being observed for safety and health.” “Come in. Come in.” Mr Goldfinger positively welcomed them. Mark you, he may have been tipped off by his bank manager or someone, but that factory was entirely devoted to designing a cheap alloy for jewellers’ findings – trying out unusual metals like aluminium and tin instead of the usual copper and nickel and palladium that are used in gold alloys. There were traces of gold about, of course, and furnaces to heat up to two thousand degrees and so forth, but after all Goldfinger was a jeweller and a smelter in a small way, and all this was perfectly above-board. The Gold Squad retired discomfited, our legal department decided the brown dust in the trawler’s timbers was not enough to prosecute on without supporting evidence, and that was more or less that, except’ – Colonel Smithers slowly wagged the stem of his pipe – ‘that I kept the file open and started sniffing around the banks of the world.’