That'll be twenty-four carat -what we call a thousand fine. Never mind for the moment where you got it from - stole it or inherited it or something. Supposing you have a bar of gold in your pocket about the size of a couple of packets of Players. Despite his prosiness, Bond was beginning to take to Colonel Smithers. Bond knew the voice well, the voice of the first-class Civil Servant. It said that he knew most things connected with that line and that he could make a good guess at all the rest. It was the voice of the specialist in a particular line of law enforcement. 'All right.' Colonel Smithers now talked in the soft, tired voice of an overworked man in the service of his Government. Of those at least five hundred, including my little outfit, are engaged in controlling the illicit movements of valuta, the attempts to smuggle or to evade the Exchange Control Regulations.' We employ three thousand staff at the Bank, Mr Bond, and of those no less than one thousand work in the exchange control department. Well, to begin with, and taking only England and the sterling area, it's a very big business indeed. How ever' - Colonel Smithers waved these minor irritations aside - 'as you say, time to get on to the smuggling. As if I hadn't got enough to do with the annual gymkhana coming on. I've just had the women's hockey team thrown into my lap. Sports and welfare are becoming almost too much of a fetish at the Bank. He thought M might ask him.Ĭolonel Smithers took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead. 'Why the high price in India?' Bond didn't really want to know.
Isn't there enough to go round? Isn't it just like any other black market that disappears when the supplies are stepped up, like the penicillin traffic after the war?' 'Isn't all this only a temporary phase? Why should this shortage of gold go on? They seem to be digging it out of Africa fast enough.
Have to watch the chlorine gas, but otherwise it's a simple process. This powder can be reconstituted into gold ingots by melting at around a thousand degrees Centigrade. 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. They were surprised when he said the stuff was gold. When this company started breaking the ship up and got as far as the hold they found the timbers ingregnated with a sort of brown powder which they couldn't put a name to. 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. We didn't even hear of him until he suffered a slight misfortune. '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 have to make sure the Factory Acts are being observed for safety and health."Ĭolonel Smithers broke off. "Sorry, sir, routine inspection for the Small Engineering Section of the Ministry of Labour. 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. Figures showed the natural progress of a well-run jewellery business. Income tax and super tax paid promptly each year. Twenty thousand pounds at Barclays in Ramsgate. Had a quiet look at his bank balance and tax returns. But could we pin it on him? We could not. Goldfinger had been refining down his old gold, precipitating it into this brown powder and shipping it to India as fertilizer. 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 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 CID to me, together with a copy of the cargo clearance papers for each of Goldfinger's trips to India.
'You could get a small premium in most countries -Switzerland, for instance-but it wouldn't be worth your while.
He said, 'What else ought I to know before we get down to your immediate problem?' In the days when Bond had been after the diamond smugglers he had had first to educate himself in the fascination, the myth of the stones. He might just as well wallow in the stuff. This man lived gold, thought gold, dreamed gold. I can't understand these dollar swindles.'īond smiled at Colonel Smithers's eloquence. 'Can you give me an example of smuggling? In gold. 'That's a lot.' Bond measured it against the Secret Service which had a total force of two thousand.
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