“In fact, a lot of nations have started talking about getting their gold back,” Günter said. “Switzerland. The Netherlands. Venezuela moved its gold to Brazil. Think of it. Venezuela thought Brazil was a safer place to store their gold than America.
“Maybe that was what started it. Plan 79. That crazy idea my brothers had. Maybe it started way before that.” Günter removed a gold coin from his pocket and showed it to Emerson and Riley. “My brothers have been minting these for years. From the stolen gold.”
Riley took it from Günter and held it in her hand. “Why coins? Isn’t it easier just to keep the gold in bars?” She handed the coin to Emerson.
Emerson examined the coin closely. “You can’t very well go to the grocery store and pay for a loaf of bread with a thirty-pound gold bar. The coins are meant to be used as currency.”
“Why does it have an image of Lord Voldemort dressed up like Julius Caesar on it?” Riley asked.
Günter looked a little embarrassed. “It’s difficult to see in the dark but my father’s face is engraved on this coin.”
“And,” Emerson continued, “Caesar was the first of the Roman emperors. The man responsible for ending five hundred years of democracy in the Roman civilization.”
Günter nodded. “I guess. My father never had much respect for democracy. Always said it was nothing more than mob rule. Anyway, I just discovered the coins by accident. My brothers never bothered to tell me about them or what they were intended for. It kind of hurt. They’ve excluded me from the family for my entire life.”
Emerson returned the coin to Günter. “Well, every form of currency needs a name. All the good ones, like Drachmas and Dinars are already taken so let’s call them Grunwalds.”
Günter looked appalled. “That sounds ridiculous. It makes them sound like some sort of funny money you’d get at Disney World to pay for souveneirs.”
“Well, your brothers should have thought of that before they put a picture of Lord Voldemort on the coins,” Emerson said. “Really, they have nobody to blame but themselves.”
“So, you began stealing coins?” Riley asked Günter.
“Yeah. They were kept in a vault in the D.C. office. I took just a couple at first. When no one said anything, I took more. I filled my briefcase with them. I guess I liked the idea of stealing from my brothers. I guess it was my way of getting back at them for all the times they’d slighted me over the years.
“I had to hide them somewhere, for safekeeping. In the beginning I put them in plaster statues of Saint Nicholas and buried them in my yard.”
“For Christmas?” Riley asked.
“Hardly,” Günter said with a sad smile. “Saint Nicholas is also the patron saint of thieves.”
“Of repentant thieves,” Emerson said.
“I guess I didn’t read the fine print.”
“Your wife said the gardener found some of them. She was in the process of exhuming one from a flower bed when we went to visit her.”
“I mostly buried them in the flower beds because it was easier digging. Not a lot of them. Maybe ten or twelve. It never occurred to me that at some point a bush would get replaced. When the first one got dug up I tried to find the others, but I was like a squirrel burying nuts. I couldn’t remember where I put the stupid things. I even went over the yard with a metal detector one night but obviously didn’t find all of them.”
“What about the rest of the gold?” Riley asked Günter.
“Underwater,” Günter said, putting the coin back in his pocket. “It was fun stealing from my brothers and hiding the…Grunwalds. It stopped being fun when two executives from Blane-Grunwald were tasked with calming the Germans down. Lawrence Tatum and Daniel Ferguson.”
“Those are the two men who committed suicide last month,” Emerson said.
Günter nodded, grim-faced. “The Germans were insisting on repatriating their gold. Not only that, but they were insisting that it not be recast. Gold has a fingerprint. By using a battery of techniques to look at the relative amounts of impurities, including platinum, palladium, lead, thallium, and bismuth, it’s possible to tell one horde of gold from another. But once it is melted down and recast, the print is erased.
“The Germans not only wanted the same amount of bullion they had deposited back in the 1950s, they wanted that precise gold.
“To the U.S., this seemed like an unreasonable demand. We dragged our feet. We returned only a paltry amount of gold. Tatum and Ferguson tried to persuade the Germans that everything was fine, that the gold would be returned to them eventually. Unfortunately for Tatum and Ferguson, they requested a visit to the Federal Reserve so they could personally assure the Germans that all was well.
“Two weeks later, they both ‘jumped’ out of the windows of office buildings, one in London, the other in Tokyo. That was when my friend Yvette got involved.
“She was in Munich, on another matter, when she heard about the suicides. She knew that the Germans were unhappy, but like everyone else, she thought Germans were always unhappy. She didn’t believe in conspiracies. Not at first. Then she began to investigate.
“By the time she came back to Washington, she was a full-fledged convert. And like any convert, she wanted to spread the word. The Federal Reserve was being looted, she said. And it may have been going on for the last twenty years.
“Everyone was used to tuning Yvette out, so nobody paid any attention. I was given instructions to listen to her calmly and shut her up. To humor her. So I did. I even went to New York, to the Fed, just to show her she was wrong.