“The president wanted to stop the hoarding and calm the markets by shoring up federal gold reserves,” Baxter continued, illustrating this with a series of increasingly animated hand gestures. “Executive Order 6102 prohibited people from owning gold and banks from paying it out.”
“Leaving coins like this worthless, I guess.”
“Exactly. Not having been told otherwise, the Philadelphia Mint produced 450,000 1933 Double Eagles in the months following the passing of this law. But there was nowhere for them to go.”
“So they couldn’t issue them?”
Baxter smiled. “They couldn’t do anything with them. Except melt them down, of course, which they eventually did in 1937. Every single one.”
He lowered his voice to a dramatic whisper.
“You see officially, Jennifer, the 1933 Double Eagle never existed.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
He’d had the shop’s frontage painted a treacly black, although the windows themselves were still obscured from the street by the thin coat of whitewash. Against this background the shop’s name, freshly painted in large gold letters in a semicircle across both large panes, seemed to stand out even more prominently. Tom read it proudly: KIRK DUVAL. His mother would have liked that. And then under it in a straight line and smaller letters: FINE ART & ANTIQUES.
He checked both ways and then crossed the street, stopping halfway as he searched for a gap in the traffic, eventually reaching the shop door. It opened noiselessly under his touch to reveal a jumble of hastily deposited boxes and half-opened packing crates, their contents poking resolutely through straw and Styrofoam. In one, an elegant Regency clock. In another, a marble bust of Caesar or Alexander, he hadn’t checked yet. Across the room, an Edwardian rosewood card table had been completely unpacked and a large Han Dynasty vase filled with dried flowers stood in the middle of the dark green felt. It was going to take weeks to sort it all out.
Still, that didn’t bother Tom. Not now. For the first time in as long as he could remember he had time on his side. He had thought about stopping before, of course, or at least toyed with the idea. After all, he hadn’t needed the money for years. But he’d never been able to stay away for more than a few weeks. Like gamblers ushered back to their favorite seats at the blackjack table after a brief absence, he had been sucked back in every time.
This time was different, though. Things had changed. He’d changed. The New York job had proved that to him.
And yet one name lurked beneath the thin veneer of normality that Tom had tried to build for himself over the past few days. Cassius. He wasn’t sure if Archie had been lying or not, using Cassius’s name perhaps to try and force Tom’s hand to follow through on the job. If so he was taking a big risk. But if it really was Cassius that had commissioned the theft, then Archie was rolling the dice without even properly understanding the rules or how Cassius played the game. Or even perhaps what was at stake.
But Archie wasn’t his responsibility. That’s what Tom kept reminding himself. Not now, not ever. If he had gotten himself into this mess then it was up to him to get himself out of it. Tom wasn’t being heartless. Those were just the rules.
He continued through the shop, the wooden floor freshly cleared of the debris that had coated it, until he reached the two doors at the rear of the room. Opening the one to his left, Tom stepped through onto the narrow platform that ran along the back wall of the large warehouse.
On the left-hand side, a metal staircase spiraled tightly down to the dusty warehouse floor some twenty feet below. A steel shutter in the opposite wall opened onto the street that ran down the hill and around the back of the building. There was a faint buzzing from the neon tubes that lined the warehouse ceiling and their primitive light made the flaking and stained white walls come out in a sickly sweat.
“How are you getting on?” Tom called out as he came down the stairs, the cast-iron staircase vibrating violently with each step where it had worked itself loose over the years. The girl looked up at the sound of his voice, brushing her blond hair aside.
“There’s still a lot to do.” She took her glasses off and rubbed her blue eyes. “How does it look?” Her English was immaculate, although spoken with the slight tightness of a Swiss-French accent.
“Great. You were right, the gold does look better than the silver would have.”
She blushed and put her glasses back on. Still only twenty-two, Dominique had worked for Tom’s father in Geneva for the last four years. After the memorial service, she’d volunteered to help him move all his father’s stock back to London and get the business up and running there. She’d done a great job. He was hoping she would agree to stay on.
“Is everything here?” Tom nodded toward the piles of crates and boxes that were stacked across the warehouse floor.
“I think so, yes. I just need to check those last few boxes off against my list.”
“These?” asked Tom, walking over toward the three crates she had pointed at.
“Uh-huh. Read off the numbers on the side, will you?”
“Sure.” He went to the first one and, bending his head slightly, read the numbers back to her.
“One-three-one-two-seven-two.”
She turned back to the laptop she was sitting in front of.
“Okay.”
Tom moved to the next crate.
“One-three-one-one—”
He was interrupted by a clipped, nasal voice that sank heavily from the platform above.
“My, my, we have been busy, Kirk. You must have knocked off Buckingham Palace to get your hands on this little lot.”
“Detective Constable Clarke,” Tom said flatly without bothering to look up. “Our first customer.”
Clarke robotically lit another cigarette from the one already in his mouth before flicking the sputtering butt over the railing and wedging the new cigarette between his teeth. It landed harmlessly at Tom’s feet.
“It’s Detective Sergeant Clarke now, Kirk,” he said as he took a drag on his cigarette and made his way down the stairs to the warehouse floor, the staircase strangely silent under his lazy step. “While you’ve been away, there’s been a few changes around here.”
“Detective sergeant? They really must be desperate.”
A muscle in Clarke’s neck began to twitch. He was quite a tall man, although his rounded shoulders made him seem shorter. He was also distressingly thin, his gray skin drawn tightly across his sharp cheekbones, his mouth pulled into a permanently grudging grimace, his hair fine and brushed forward to disguise how far it had receded. His wrist bones, especially, jutted out under translucent skin and seemed so delicate that they might snap if you shook his hand too firmly. The only color came from the broken blood vessels that danced across his sunken cheeks.
“I heard you were back, Kirk. That you’d crawled out from whatever hole you’ve been hiding in for the last couple of months.” His watery eyes flashed as he spoke. “So I thought I’d come and pay you a visit. A social call. Just in case you thought I’d forgotten about you.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, I’d certainly forgotten about you.”
Clarke clamped his mouth shut and Tom could see from the color rising to his face that he was focusing all his energies on not losing his temper. Eventually he turned away from Tom and indicated the room around him with his head.
“So, all this shit’s yours, then?”