The Prostitutes Ball

Chapter 40.

Jeb didn't want the assayer to know that we had two dead guards and a Brinks truck from an '83 bullion heist stashed in the deserted ambulance bay. He instructed us to escort Jose Del Cristo up to the fourth floor and tell him as little as possible.

Jeb had set up a work area for the assayer in the old hospital administrator's office.

The three of us waited on the ground floor for the elevator. When it arrived we stepped inside.

"I was told you guys wanted me to do a gold assay and that it's very hush-hush, but nobody will tell me what it's about," Del Cristo said as he dragged his rolling suitcase onto the elevator.

"That's right and that's how it's gonna stay," I replied.

" 'Zat why you're hanging out in this old deserted hospital?" he pressed.

"No comment."

I pushed the fourth-floor button on the elevator panel and we rode up in silence.

The doors opened and we stepped out into a long corridor with green walls and linoleum floors, with Jose pulling his rolling suitcase behind him. Jeb was at the end of the corridor waiting for us. I introduced him to Jose and we entered the office.

Jeb had chosen this room because it was spacious with a built-in desk and two badly functioning chairs. He had randomly selected a gold bar out of one of the strongboxes and had personally carried it up here. The brick was approximately the size of a paperback novel and was now sitting in the center of the large wooden desk, glittering in the flickering ceiling light.

Jose walked over and peered down at it. "London Good Delivery Bar," he said. "First test is the easiest. Just gotta lift it."

He picked up the bar. I could tell by the way he handled it that the brick was extremely heavy.

"So far so good. 'Bout the right weight," he said, setting it back down.

As he unpacked his equipment, he started a running monologue. Aside from being a character, Jose was also a nonstop talker.

"London Good Delivery Bars weigh exactly four hundred troy ounces, which, if anybody's interested, is about twenty-seven pounds."

"When I picked it up to bring it here, I wasn't prepared for how heavy it was," Jeb commented.

"Very few metals are as dense as gold," Jose rambled on. "For instance, gold is twice as dense as lead and two and a half times as dense as steel. That's why it's hard to counterfeit a gold bar. Even if there's a lead core, it's still way too light. One metal that's heavy enough to substitute is platinum, but its actually more expensive than gold, so what's the point?

"Tungsten has enough density but its impossible to work with because tungsten has a melting point one thousand degrees higher than most commercial furnaces or kilns can reach. Also its an extremely hard metal. Gold is very soft. You can actually scar it with a fingernail like this." To prove his point he did just that.

He took a scale about the size of a shoe box out of the suitcase, then a bunch of vials full of different-colored liquid and a black sanding stone.

"Another metal that would work from a weight standpoint is depleted uranium," he went on. "Its heavy enough, easy to melt down, and at its heart not too expensive, but there are other drawbacks. Unless you're a government with a nuclear program, it's real hard to come bv, and of course it's radioactive so if you make a mistake and touch it you're dead in a few days, which most counterfeiters tell me is a major drawback."

Jose lifted the gold bar onto the shoe box-sized scale that had PN 2100 PRECISION BALANCE stamped on the side.

"Four hundred troy ounces to the hair," he reported as he read the printout. "Means your bar here is most likely legit because it's soft like gold and it's exactly the right weight. But you can't be absolutely, positively sure without more tests."

"What's a troy ounce?" I asked.

"A troy ounce is 31.1 grams. A regular ounce, like the one they use at your grocery store or on your bathroom scale, is called an avoirdupois ounce and it only weighs 28.3 grams."

He took the bar off the scale and set it on a pad he'd just placed on the desktop.

"How do you want this?" he asked. "I can do a quick insurance appraisal or I can make you a big expensive enchilada with all the trimmings."

"I want to know exactly what we've got," Jeb told him.

"How about I do a standard viscosity X-ray fluorescence scan evaluation?"

"Can you do that here?" "No."

"I don't want to let go of this bar. It's evidence. Can you tell us anything without taking it out of here?"

Jose leaned down and studied the brick carefully, then turned it over. "Yeah, I can tell you a few things. For instance, the forges that make London Good Delivery Bars are all bonded. See this little trademark here?"

We all leaned in and peered at a small stamp on the back of the bar. It showed tiny crossed swords inside a circle.

"That's an old refinery called Oswald Steel. They used to be located in Michigan but they went out of business in the mideighties. It was one of the big forges that produced these gold bricks back in the day. That gives us a few interesting facts. For instance, we now know the bar is at least pre-eighty-five. Also, they had fewer testing techniques for gold in the eighties. There were no X-ray or viscosity tests. Back then it was a lot easier to counterfeit one of these guys."

"How do we find out if it's real gold and not something else without taking it out of here?" Jeb asked.

"I can file off some of the bar, use my acids to make a solution, and give you a quick content assay right now. That will tell us how many karats it is and how pure the karats are."

"Is that enough of a test to be certain?" Jeb asked.

"Along with the exact weight, that's generally good enough for most insurance companies that write the transport policies on this stuff. However, when I do it, if this is real gold, you're gonna lose a little, about a hundred dollars' worth."

"That's okay," Jeb said.

"If you were buying it for an investment, you might want to do a more complete evaluation like a mass spectrometer test, but those can get pricey," Jose went on. "If it was coins and not a bar, you might do a standard heat conductivity test. Gold conducts heat at a specific rate which can be timed with a stopwatch. Works great with something as thin as a coin but it's not too practical with one of these big heavy London bars."

"Let's start by just doing the quick insurance assay," Jeb said.

We watched while Jose picked up the little sanding stone from the table and began filing some gold off the edge of the bar. It made a small pile of yellow powder on the work cloth he'd placed beneath the brick. He kept talking the whole time.

"That should be enough… These vials contain different kinds of acid which I use in a mixture to break down the metal to measure it."

He picked up the filings with a small pen-sized battery-powered electromagnet and emptied them into a vial, mixing the gold filings with the acids from the smaller vials.

He set the mixed vial on the desk while he took a machine about the size of a small microwave out of his suitcase and plugged it into the wall socket.

"This reads the viscosity of the gold-acid mixture," he said as he put the mixed vial with the gold into the machine. "If we get the right viscosity we can assign purity. If your brick is a real LGD Bar and not a counterfeit, it should be at least ninety-nine point five percent pure. Could be more but it has to be at least ninety-nine point five to qualify as an official London Good Delivery Bar."

He flipped the switch on the machine and a minute later, read a printout. "Checks out. Twenty-four karat. Ninety-nine point seven."

"That can't be." I looked at Hitch, who also seemed puzzled. We'd all expected it to be fake. Why else would it have been left behind in that truck for all those years?

"You don't want this brick to be real?" Jose seemed surprised.

"Wait a minute," I told him. I pulled Jeb and Hitch into the hallway.

"We have to find out for sure," I said once we were out of Del Cristo's earshot.

"I thought we just did," Jeb said.

"He said there were more complete tests he could do. Let's have him take that one brick so he can do the X-ray scan. It should be safe to let him have it. He works for the Jewelry Mart. Alexa says he's bonded."

"What about our chain of evidence?" Jeb said. "Once I let go of it I can't swear it's the same bar if we ever get this case to court."

"It's just one brick. If you lose that one at trial, so what? You still got four strongboxes full to guarantee your chain of evidence."

But on principle, Jeb was torn. No cop likes breaking the chain of evidence on anything relating to a case, no matter the reason. Finally, he led us back into the office and faced the assayer.

"Jose?"

"Present and accounted for," the little man joked.

"How much do you think that gold bar is worth?"

"I can tell you to the penny. Gold today is about a thousand dollars a troy ounce. One thousand one hundred and six if you're a stickler for complete accuracy. I could do it exactly with a calculator, but throwing an ax at it, this one brick is worth about four hundred forty thousand dollars, give or take a Chevy Nova."

What a stitch, this guy.

"Excuse us again," Jeb said, and pulled me back into the corridor while Hitch stationed himself in the doorway, where he could keep Jose at a distance, but still hear what we were saying.

"We counted a hundred gold bricks in that truck," Jeb said. "At four hundred forty K a brick. That's forty-four million. According to Carters case notes, the load was insured by Axeis Cargo Insurance. ACI only had it valued at fifteen million. So what's with that? How can there be more gold now than when the truck was hijacked?"

It was a damn good question.

Then Hitch whispered in my ear, "Don't ya love this, dawg? We're standing here doing absolutely nothing and Act Three is getting better by the moment."