service with a capital bow.
It seems that everybody has a relative or friend who has exactly what you want.
They phone ahead.
And they're probably called gnomes because they work at any time, whether it is day or night.
A wonderful place. Their weather might be cold and their buildings gray, but Switzerland had all looked very rosy to me.
The customs chief had a relative who ran the armored trucks business. This relative had a brother who ran the Zorich Banking Corporation Gold Department. And this brother had a cousin who was the bank's assayer. And none of them minded leaving the opera or mistresses or wives and kiddies, no matter the time of night, to highball me through.
Wonderful. Nice people. Best on the planet.
Each time I went to the next place, I was known already and expected.
A whirlwind night. And it contained some wonderful high points. Gold, at the evening fix, had been $855.19 an ounce. The verified and assayed quantity, once the lead decoys were discarded, had come to 301,221 ounces. This added up to $257,601,186.99.
But that was not all of the good news.
My problem was that money could be robbed off me and my signature could be forged and all these hard-won gains could have been wiped out at any time in the future by a single misstep on my part. That had all been solved.
The interest, at a nominal 10 percent, on such an amount was $25,760,118.70 every year. That itself was more than I could even extravagantly spend. And so the bank had made a deal.
I had sold them the gold, for 515 one-half-million-dollar certificates and $18,527 pocket cash. Each separate certificate would earn 10 percent per annum until it was cashed.
All I had to do in the future was hand over one of these certificates to a Zorich Banking Corporation correspondent bank in any country and I would be given half a million U. S. dollars, plus the interest up to that date on the certificate. They were actually each a bank IOU for half a million dollars. They have a fancy name: they are called "bank demand debentures." It means simply a bank's IOU.
They were better than the gold. They were more valuable, because of interest, than the gold. And even more important to me, I could hide them much more easily.
It was a good deal for the bank as well. They now owned my gold and could make money with it at far more than 10 percent. They actually didn't have to pay for it right then. And it got around the fact that U. S. dollars, in banks, usually ride as figures in ledgers, not bills in a cash box. Had I demanded that many actual bank notes, I would have almost scraped Zurich clean and I would have needed a truck instead of this small attache case which was now fastened firmly to my wrist.
There had been two more stops after the bank.
The first had been at the Zurich agency for an Amsterdam precious-and-semiprecious-stone firm. It was run by the cousin of the head of the Zorich Banking Corporation Gold Department.
"I want," I had said, "a big sackful of junk stones."
He had not minded at all being dragged out of bed at three in the morning for a sale of just junk stones. He even called the janitor and asked him where he kept the trash bins.
For a thousand U. S. dollars I got the prettiest bag of discarded baubles you ever saw. It was the first time I learned that emeralds can be so worthless they are sold by the pound, that diamonds can be so synthetic they can't even be used in costume jewelry and that paste rubies can be so bad you can't even put them in stage regalia. But they glittered.
They were vital to my plans.
He poured them into a fancy sack with a rival company's name on it, I paid him and he went happily back to bed and I went to my last stop, the airport.
The charter jet people didn't the least mind getting a pilot and co-pilot up out of bed and the hangar crew didn't the least mind getting a hopped-up Grumman Gulfstream on the line for immediate launch.
And here I was, streaking for Istanbul with the vital
It seems that everybody has a relative or friend who has exactly what you want.
They phone ahead.
And they're probably called gnomes because they work at any time, whether it is day or night.
A wonderful place. Their weather might be cold and their buildings gray, but Switzerland had all looked very rosy to me.
The customs chief had a relative who ran the armored trucks business. This relative had a brother who ran the Zorich Banking Corporation Gold Department. And this brother had a cousin who was the bank's assayer. And none of them minded leaving the opera or mistresses or wives and kiddies, no matter the time of night, to highball me through.
Wonderful. Nice people. Best on the planet.
Each time I went to the next place, I was known already and expected.
A whirlwind night. And it contained some wonderful high points. Gold, at the evening fix, had been $855.19 an ounce. The verified and assayed quantity, once the lead decoys were discarded, had come to 301,221 ounces. This added up to $257,601,186.99.
But that was not all of the good news.
My problem was that money could be robbed off me and my signature could be forged and all these hard-won gains could have been wiped out at any time in the future by a single misstep on my part. That had all been solved.
The interest, at a nominal 10 percent, on such an amount was $25,760,118.70 every year. That itself was more than I could even extravagantly spend. And so the bank had made a deal.
I had sold them the gold, for 515 one-half-million-dollar certificates and $18,527 pocket cash. Each separate certificate would earn 10 percent per annum until it was cashed.
All I had to do in the future was hand over one of these certificates to a Zorich Banking Corporation correspondent bank in any country and I would be given half a million U. S. dollars, plus the interest up to that date on the certificate. They were actually each a bank IOU for half a million dollars. They have a fancy name: they are called "bank demand debentures." It means simply a bank's IOU.
They were better than the gold. They were more valuable, because of interest, than the gold. And even more important to me, I could hide them much more easily.
It was a good deal for the bank as well. They now owned my gold and could make money with it at far more than 10 percent. They actually didn't have to pay for it right then. And it got around the fact that U. S. dollars, in banks, usually ride as figures in ledgers, not bills in a cash box. Had I demanded that many actual bank notes, I would have almost scraped Zurich clean and I would have needed a truck instead of this small attache case which was now fastened firmly to my wrist.
There had been two more stops after the bank.
The first had been at the Zurich agency for an Amsterdam precious-and-semiprecious-stone firm. It was run by the cousin of the head of the Zorich Banking Corporation Gold Department.
"I want," I had said, "a big sackful of junk stones."
He had not minded at all being dragged out of bed at three in the morning for a sale of just junk stones. He even called the janitor and asked him where he kept the trash bins.
For a thousand U. S. dollars I got the prettiest bag of discarded baubles you ever saw. It was the first time I learned that emeralds can be so worthless they are sold by the pound, that diamonds can be so synthetic they can't even be used in costume jewelry and that paste rubies can be so bad you can't even put them in stage regalia. But they glittered.
They were vital to my plans.
He poured them into a fancy sack with a rival company's name on it, I paid him and he went happily back to bed and I went to my last stop, the airport.
The charter jet people didn't the least mind getting a pilot and co-pilot up out of bed and the hangar crew didn't the least mind getting a hopped-up Grumman Gulfstream on the line for immediate launch.
And here I was, streaking for Istanbul with the vital
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