Around about now, an hour into the journey, Karl began to come out of his brain fog. “Ach,” he said with a little jerk. “Where are we?”
“Who knows,” said Wili. “No Ivans about, so wherever we are, it feels all right. How do you feel?”
“Like the hangover I had after the party in ’38,” he said. “I’ve got someone else’s head where mine used to be, and it’s stuffed with concrete.”
“I’ve always wanted to ask,” said Wili. “Did you actually sleep with Ginger Rogers?”
“A gentleman never tells,” Karl said. “I will say, though, I had a drink with her at a Monaco club and she was delightful, like all of them I suppose, somewhat more human in the flesh than on the screen. Got any Bayer?”
“In my kit. You’ll have to twist and dig to get it out. Wash it down with schnapps.”
“Excellent, Wili.”
Karl did exactly that as the truck gobbled up kilometers of emptiness in a universe largely of summer wheat under an immense Ukraine sky, though now and then they’d pass a farm or, more likely, some kind of Stalinist agricultural collective, and now and then a sullen peasant woman would watch them go, waving mildly to cheer them up. It was unclear if these poor souls thought they were German or Russian; more likely they didn’t care and just waved on the sound principle that, in a time of war, it was best to wave at any truckload of men with guns.
“We’re more or less on course,” said Wili. “I mean, we hold the mountains, and those are mountains, right?”
Karl looked and indeed they were. Somehow the Battlegroup Von Drehle had crept to the horizon dead ahead, a blue blur turning green as the sun rose, revealing a frozen sea of rolling landform, random and clotted, hill on hill, all carpeted in high pine.
This meant they were approaching their own zone of operations, where they knew the land and where the lines were soft and they could negotiate the front and get back to their comfortable palace in Stanislav for a few days of drunken recreation after this mission and before the next one.
“We’re pressing our luck in the truck,” said Wili. “Another few kilometers and we should dump it and get out on foot by night. We can rest tomorrow and cross between the lines tomorrow night.”
“An excellent plan,” said Karl. “I’m glad I thought it up.”
“It’s my plan,” said Wili. “I’m the clever one, remember? But go ahead, take credit for it. You always do.”
Interlude in Tel Aviv II
Platinum was mined mostly—but not entirely—in South Africa, where it was controlled by a corporation called AngloAmerican Platinum, AMPLATS. It was a dense precious metal, the metal of kings and conquerors, even if it lacked the sexy glow of gold and no one ever made a movie in which its dust drove Humphrey Bogart insane. It was mined north of Johannesburg in the Bushveld Igneous complex, then shipped to AMPLATS headquarters in Jo’burg for refinement, processing, and further distribution. The jewelry it yielded was, like so many things rich people adore, exquisite and dull. It had other uses, which was primarily why it was so aggressively traded. It was a staple of the catalytic converters used in American automobiles, where most of its production went; it was used in electronics, in turbine engines, in oxygen sensors, and in cancer treatment. It also had certain catalytic functions useful in production of certain widely applied compounds that were useful in the manufacture of other compounds, and on and on. Its advantage, also a disadvantage, on the world market was that it was highly liquid (and thus highly volatile), which made it a compact form of wealth to exchange for goods and services; second, being ubiquitous, it was considered banal and uninteresting so that it was not much tracked by various market monitors, including intelligence agencies, as were gold and blood diamonds and cash.
Gershon quickly made himself an expert on its mining, marketing, and usefulness, as well as its history, culture, and reputation. He saw that, like the world as a whole, recession had bitten deeply into the industry, with the giant AMPLATS in the process of cutting jobs, against the wishes of certain powerful South African labor union s, and much trouble was ahead, lowering the value even more. On the plus side, the Russians (the second largest producers) and the South Africans were looking into the possibility of starting a kind of regulation board and exchange, to bring discipline and steady pricing to the unruly business, which was swell but didn’t help the current downward trend.
Gershon saw that the peak he had detected was indeed anomalous, given the economic climate. In other weeks, maybe not. But in this week, unusual. So he ran his finding against market averages in other markets and confirmed his thesis: an unusually large amount of industrial-grade platinum had been purchased on a certain day in the last month, that was what the market was telling him. Demand drove up cost, the law of the universe. For one day, someone went a little platinum-crazy, gobble gobble hungry bird, and on that day the COMEX market showed gains of a little over half a percent, not much . . . but enough to demand scrutiny.