"Are you sure? Are you sure, Mr. Caldwell?"
Then they saw Harrison Caldwell nod ever so slightly. If they didn't know him, they would not even have known it was a nod. But that was the Caldwell nod. Three times the assistant asked the same question, and three times there was the nod.
After the assistant bowed his good-bye, he stumbled back to his own office. There he sat down, cleared his desk, and set the telephone directly in the middle of it. Next, he ordered that no phone calls were to be put through to him unless they came from Mr. Caldwell himself.
Then he waited, staring at the telephone, as the perspiration formed on his forehead. For what Mr. Harrison Caldwell, the most conservative broker in a conservative business, had just told him was that when he phoned, Caldwell and Sons was to immediately sell twice as much gold as they had, or possibly hoped to have. And this plan was to be carried out in seven languages in seven countries.
Harrison Caldwell left his office humming and entered his chauffeur-driven limousine, promptly giving his driver an address in a part of Harlem few whites ever entered.
For Harrison Caldwell, Harlem was one of the safer places in the world, because he understood the black ghetto. It was not unsafe; it was just unsafe for people without guns or unwilling to use them. During the riots of the sixties when stores and buildings went up in flames, several buildings were left unscathed. And these were not black-owned places, but those owned by the mob.
While commentators throughout the country placed the blame of the riots on deprivation, racial injustice, and all manner of social ills, Harrison Caldwell and the Mafia knew a far more basic reason for the destruction. A very human reason. The rioters knew they were not going to be shot, except when they entered mob-run stores.
These remained as peaceful as Fifth Avenue.
And so would Harrison Caldwell's warehouse. It was a bastion neither riot nor arson nor anarchy could penetrate. Nevertheless, Harrison Caldwell took his precautions one step further when he ordered that everything being brought into his warehouse be delivered in giant drums, drums so large that only a crane could move them. Since nothing could be snatched and run with, even the random street crime that plagued the neighborhood would not affect him.
He entered his warehouse at noon and went to a glassenclosed booth high above the floor. Beneath him were bubbling vats of molten lead and sulfur. He looked at his watch. The trucks should be arriving soon, he thought. Time for a final check. As he requested, each door was guarded by a man with a shotgun. These were rented by Caldwell from a local gangster. Outside there was the growl of heavy trucks, coughing their way to a halt. The guards checked their weapons and glanced toward the booth. Caldwell nodded for them to let the trucks in. The heavy metal doors to his warehouse creaked open and three trucks lumbered into the building and parked near giant hoists. Immediately the hoists dropped metal claws into the backs of the trucks and picked up, drum by drum, the yellow barrels marked with the black crosses that signified nuclear danger, careful to set them right, without spilling. What pleased Harrison Caldwell most was not how perfectly the hoists set each drum in its preordained position, nor how the warehouse staff functioned as one, but the very fact that the trucks had arrived on time. For it had taken him months to gather this material, to put together all of the small and large quantities that made up the contents of three trucks. Harrison Caldwell was watching months and a dozen little acts all coming together at the specified time to join the bubbling vats of lead and sulfur in proper proportions. He was watching himself become the richest man who ever lived. As he saw the trucks unload tons of the one material the ancient alchemists lacked, he felt his ancestors were applauding in their royal way. They were right-it was possible to make gold from lead and mercury. All they had to do was add the ingredients symbolized on the stone, an element incredibly rare in their age, but plentiful today. All they needed was uranium, and all the Caldwells could have forged their futures on the philosopher's stone. After all, the secret to how he knew the stone and its one ancient flaw was the very history of his family.
As was the adage: "He who holds gold holds the soul of the world." Not that Harrison Caldwell wanted the soul of the world. He only dealt in what was of value.
He himself directed the emptying of the drums into a vat, watching it fill up to a mark he had made on its side. Harrison Caldwell had taken the formula inscribed on that stone now beneath the Atlantic and multiplied it by twenty thousand. The proportions were immense. What had been a mouse-hair's pinch in alchemic terms was now exactly five tons of uranium. The lead was seventy-three-point-eight, by weight. The sulfur would only act as a catalyst.
Three chrome-plated steel funnels twenty yards long all led to a white-faced wall and a single funnel. No one in the mixing room would see what came out the back.
Harrison Caldwell returned to his office and entered the only passage to the back room, a small man-size circular stairway. There were no doors to that room. He flicked on a light. A vast cavern lit up. The floor beneath him, one hundred yards by one hundred yards, looked like a checkerboard run amok. And on that floor, thousands of oblong molds were laid out at a precise angle, so that those closest to the funnel were slightly higher than those farther away.
A lesser man might have sweat or yelled. But Harrison Caldwell simply threw a switch. On the other side of the wall the vats tilted. Molten lead flowed alongside burning sulfur and mercury; then came a stream of the uranium, called so quaintly by the alchemists, "owl's teeth." Uranium, of course, had nothing to do with teeth at all. Professor Cryx had given his life to explain that to Harrison Caldwell.
The hot metals made a cracking sound as they joined at the wall and went on through, gray and pink and red. But when they came out mixed, they had turned magnificent yellow, with a light white coat of dross skimming the top. What was now pouring out into the thousands of molds was gold. Twenty-four karat gold. Exactly seventy-eight-point-three tons of it, forming at his feet a floor full of gold bars in a world where that simple, soft metal sold for $365 an ounce.
In the offices of Caldwell and Sons, the assistant, on his eighth tranquilizer of the hour, got a phone call. He remained as calm as if Mr. Caldwell were ordering biscuits.
"Sell," came the aristocratic voice of Harrison Caldwell.
In Bayonne, New Jersey, the three drivers who had made a routine delivery of uranium for the federal agency controlling it were pulled over by a car with a blinking bubble on top.
A man with a badge hopped out of the car and asked the three drivers their names. Then he asked where they were taking the trucks.
"Back to the garage," said a driver. The man with the badge wrote down the address of the garage.
"Have you been carrying uranium?"
"Sure. What do you think those trucks are lined with lead for? Stops radiation. What do you think we wear radiation cards for? Why the questions?"
"We've had a problem. Large quantities of uranium have been missing from plants across the country. We're checking all transport."
"We got our bills of lading."
"I'd like to see them," said the man, putting his badge away. "All of them."
The three drivers returned to their trucks. It was a cold gray sort of day, and they had been looking forward to parking them for good and getting a beer. The trucks idled their big diesels on Kennedy Boulevard, a well-traveled road. Several people stopped to watch.
The man with the badge looked at the bills of lading and mentioned that nowhere did they show a stop in Harlem.