‘I’d like that.’ She brushed her hand coquettishly through her hair.
‘Great.’ He beamed. ‘Please sit down.’ He nodded towards the leather armchair opposite him. ‘And you must call me Miles.’
‘Thank you Miles.’ She smiled warmly. ‘You must call me Jennifer.’
Baxter placed his hands together as if in prayer, his fingers sore and ripped where he had bitten his nails.
‘So, Jennifer, how can I help?’
She reached inside her jacket.
‘What can you tell me about this coin?’ She held the coin still sealed inside its protective plastic envelope, out to Baxter, who slipped on a steel-rimmed pair of glasses and angled it underneath the green shade of his desk light so that he could make out the embossed detail. He looked up, his eyes wide with amazement, his voice halting and for the first time uncertain.
‘Where … what … how did you get this?’ He shook his head in disbelief, the slack skin under his chin tracking his head movements like a small pendulum. ‘This is incredible. It’s impossible.’ His breathing was ragged, his hands trembling slightly as he turned the coin over and over in his fingers as if it was too hot to hold still.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well … it’s a 1933 Double Eagle, of course.’
She shrugged.
‘I’m not a coin expert, Miles.’
‘No, of course not. Sorry. Well, you see, the US government has been minting gold coins since the mid 1790s and twenty dollar coins, or Double Eagles, since the 1849 Gold Rush.’
‘Why Double Eagle? There’s only one eagle on the coin.’
‘Just one of those things, I guess.’ He sniffed. ‘Ten dollar coins were known as Eagles, so when the twenty dollar coins appeared, they were called Double Eagles. Most people can be very unimaginative if they try hard enough.’
‘I see.’
‘It’s all down to the date,’ he said, with a thoughtful look on his face.
‘You mean on the coin? Why, what happened in 1933?’
‘It’s more what didn’t happen in 1933,’ said Baxter, tapping the side of his pink nose enigmatically as the colour began to return to his cheeks and his voice grew more confident. He placed the coin on the desk and sat back in his chair. ‘The interesting thing about a gold coin minted in 1933 is that at the time America was in the grip of the Depression. And as a result, days after assuming the Presidency in March 1933, Roosevelt took the country off the gold standard and banned the production, sale and ownership of gold.’
Jennifer nodded as a long-forgotten high-school history project bubbled back to the top of her mind. The Wall Street Crash in 1929. The Great Depression that followed. A quarter of the nation out of work, the country in chaos. And in that hurricane of human misery, with stocks and bonds worthless and life savings wiped out, people had clung onto the only thing that they believed had any real value. Gold.
‘The President wanted to stop the hoarding and calm the markets by shoring up the 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 stranded, I guess.’
‘Exactly. By the time FDR passed this law, 445,500 1933 Double Eagles had already been minted and were just sitting in the Philadelphia Mint, ready to be put into circulation. Suddenly 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.’
Clerkenwell, London19th July – 2:05pm
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 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 a gambler ushered back to their favourite seat 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 spiralled tightly down to the dusty 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 blonde 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 silver would have.’
She