Selected Detective
TREASURE ARCHIVE

Upon Khalifa's return from his meeting with Shaykh Omar he found that Mr. Muhammad Hasun, the official of the Egyptian bank whom he believed to inspect Jansen's high-value gold bullion, was sitting in Khalifa's workroom, awaits. The strapping, well-dressed man with greasy hair, wire glasses and glaring black shoes shouted in awe as the detective opened his study door. The man tightly hugged the small silver Samsonite suitcase on his chest, as if afraid that someone would snatch the bag from him. He was only able to relax a bit when he realized he was not being attacked, although repeated twitching in his left eye indicated he was not fully comfortable and relieved.

“You scared me,” scolded him, his eyes half glared and sharp like a car indicator light. “I brought ... you know..” He tapped his suitcase.

Khalifa apologized for surprising him. “Although I don't think anyone will attack you inside the police station,” he added.

The bank official threw a disapproving look.

“I have been attacked several times in many unpleasant places and by many unpleasant people anyway, inspector. Including once in a while, it was hard to say, by my own father-in-law. When it comes to gold, there is no term of being too cautious. Never was.” He looked Khalifa in the eye for a moment to emphasize the importance of the message he meant, then rose from his chair to Khalifa's desk and placed the suitcase on it.

“But, I've researched it for you. Very enticing. You got time?”

“Of course.”

“then if you have no objection..” He nodded towards the door. Khalifa turned around and closed it.

“And umh...” This bank official coughed nervously, winking his eyes at the door lock.

“For safe only.” Khalifa turned again, this time turning the key to lock the door.

“You want me to close the window curtain too?” Actually he was just kidding. But hasun took it for granted and said yes, under these conditions it is very likely a very good idea. Shaking his head in slight annoyance, Khalifa walked towards the window and closed the curtain, leaving the room half dark.

“ok?”

“Much better,” says hasun. “You really will never be the one whose name is too careful.”

He shook his body forward and turned on the table lamp, gazing around the room with a suspicious look as if, despite the evidence he saw himself, he still felt not entirely sure that they were alone in the room. He then unlocked the suitcase and opened the lid. His hand went in and lifted the steel bar, still wrapped in the black cloth Khalifa had found, placing it on the table under the lamp. Khalifa came to his side and lit a cigarette, inhaling a deep, gray-blue smoke.

“So, what did you find?”

“Quite a lot actually,” said the bank official, sambal pulled the cloth. The lens of his glasses glows yellow in light reflected off the glazed surface of the trunk. “Yes, yes, this is something related to education. Even after thirty years in the business, gold still retains the capacity to surprise. What an amazing thing. Really outside baisa.”

He grabbed and touched the steel bar with reverence, then straightened his body and, reaching for the crate again, pulled out a report typed from the deep drawer behind the lid.

“The basic details are all pretty clear,” he started. “The raw trapezoidal steel rod, twenty-six centimeters by nine by five, twelve quarter kilograms, nine-nine-five parts of gold, yes about twenty-four carats, maybe a little more.”

“Value?”

“Yahh, obviously the fluctuations depend on the market, but the current price I will say is about five hundred and twenty thousand Egyptian pounds. One hundred and forty thousand dollars.” Khalifa coughed, cigarette smoke billowing in front of her like torn curtains waving in the wind.

“Abody! Impossible!”

hasun shrugged his shoulders. “This is gold. high value gold. Especially gold with this quality.”

He reached out his hand again and patted the satisfied surface as if congratulating a pet who had displayed a certain impressive trick.

Khalifa leaned forward and watched the bar, both hands holding the end of the table.

“And the cap?” he moved his head towards the eagle and swastika on the steel surface. “Did you find anything related to it?

“Ya of course.” says hasun. “And this is where the stuff becomes interesting.” He straightened his hands, put them together and clenched his knuckles, like a concert pianist about to begin his recital.

“I've never found a stamp like that before,”

said. “So I have to dig a little. I won't bore you with all the details.”

He said this with some concern, as if making Khalifa bored with all the details was something that would give him pleasure. The detective felt this way and said nothing, only a little anxious.

“By the way,” continued the bank official after a short pause, while realizing he would not get an invitation expectantly to explain in detail, he said, “it seems that the eagle and swastika are a sign of the disappearance of the Prussian State Printing (Prussian State mint), which, until the end of World War II, was the national mint of German coinage. Based in Berlin.”

Khalifa looked intently at the steel bar, cigarette smoke billowing upward from the corner of her lips.

“So, by itself it is not too difficult to find.just by taking a quick look at the standard reference book, and making some phone connections. What and where this story becomes more complex” he grasps the bar with both his hands and, with a little effort, he turns it over” is here. It points to a small, almost invisible, line of numbers spitting into the metal at the top left corner of the bottom side of the rod.

Khalifa let out a mutter of surprise. He really missed paying attention to that number in the initial research on the gold bar that he admitted was done in passing.

“Series number?” he asked uncertainly.

“Accurate once. Some have it, others don't.

“And this one?”

“Oh, this one is so informative. Yes, yes, very informative. But it's not that easy. The numbers are not part of a universal system or anything else.they simply refer to the paper records on any institution to print multiple bars. I spent half my day yesterday and this morning calling Germany, trying to track it down. The Prussian State Printing Archives could have been destroyed or scattered after 1945.

The Bundesbank has no records. To be honest, I almost wanted to give up until someone at the Bundesbank museum advised me to try contacting..” He paused for a moment, opening his report. “Degussa Corporation's. In Dusseldorf, they used to be the main German smelting company.

A lot of work for the Nazis, in every way. It's really clear now of course. A wide range of different interests...”.

“Yes, yes,” cut Khalifa impatiently. “What did you find?”

“hmm, AN ARCHIVIST AT DE-GUSSA was kind and very polite, putting emphasis on this last word, he said, implying that archivists in Degussa would never dream of interrupting in the middle of a sentence that anyone was saying, as Khalifa had just done researching their entire record, and amazingly he managed to get a match on his serial number. Very efficient these German people.”

“Dan?” khalifa's face was immediately fixed on the bar, the long rotating ash endangering the tip of his cigarette.

“Yahh, it seems that this bar is one of the fifty produced by Degussa in 1944. may 1944 to be exact. they were then transferred to the State Printing on the 17th of that month and from there then continued to the Reichsbank, the forerunner of the founding of the Bundesbank.”

“And after that?”

“It looks like almost all were melted down and reassembled at the end of the war.”

“almost all?”

“Yahh, this one clearly still holds up. And according to the Degussa people, there are at least two others like this.” He stopped waiting for a reaction, pulling himself up like an actor who would give solilokui.

“They were found in Buenos Aires. In 1966, by Israeli secret agents. In a house of a man named...” He read the report again. “July Schechtmann. Nazi military officials who had fled to Argentina at the end of the war and lived there ever since, under pseudonyms, the Israelis were able to trace the man's whereabouts, bringing himself and the bullion back to Israel, they are now kept in the Central Bank of Jerusalem.”

“And Schechtmann?” Again pause for dramatic effect, which widens his shoulders.

“Israel hangs it.” There was a sharp clinging sound outside as the gas seller passed under the window with his donkey cart, hitting the metal cylinder on its spanner to make potential buyers aware of its presence. Khalifa's cigarette had burned to the ground and, after flicking it into the trash, she lit another cigarette, rubbing her eyes with her thumb and index finger. Whatever about the case, each new piece of information seemed to be increasingly swirling and confusing. He felt as if he was underwater and frantically trying to find a way to the surface, but the effort just made him mired deeper with his arms getting worse to move.

For a moment they were silent.

“There's another one?” he finally asked, there was an oddity in his voice, as if asking how much more shocking information might be received from this investigation.

Hasun shrugged his shoulders. “Not much.there are only a few technical details about the actual composition of gold, but it does not feel relevant enough.” He touched his hand on the rod again, removed the pieces of cigarette ash that fell on its shiny surface, then wrapped them back in a long black cloth.

“You want this stored here?”

Khalifa pulled the cigarette.

“Can you keep this in the bank for me?”

“By pleasure.”

Hasun put the bar back in her suitcase, then walked to the window and opened the curtain, her eyes flashing in the scorching light of the afternoon sun. From below came the boisterous and clinging sound of the gas vending train.

“Actually, there is one more thing,” hasun said, his voice suddenly sounded low and quiet. “Any. irritated, really. Kinda destructive.” He crossed his right leg behind his left leg and rubbed his shoes on his calf. “As I said, this serial number allows you to browse the date and place of manufacture of that bar. In some cases, the extra information was well recorded: the name of the person who handled the smelting process, the person in charge of the printing press at the time, that sort of thing. Small details.” He changed the position of his feet, rubbing the surface of his left shoe on his right calf. “Degussa Archive does not have that information. All they have is a note from which the fused gold came first.”

He finished wiping his shoes and looked back at Khalifa.

Slowly, his hands nervously twitched on the window court. The detective furrowed his brows full of questions.

“Actually this bar is from Auschwitz. Apparently, Mr. Inspector, the bar is made of gold extracted from the teeth of dead Jews.”

After the bank official left, Khalifa sat staring at the ceiling of her study, with legs crossed at the end of the table.

Cigarette smoke that was like a wreath swirled around his head like a turban. There was something else he had to work out: hasani urged him to report on the progress he had made so far; jansen's friend in Cairo was still not in touch and needed to be pursued; he said; and it probably wouldn't hurt if he called back that fucking Israeli colleague, checking that he had removed the fat on the back of his body and began making in-depth questions as asked about Schlegel's past. So many things to do. There are many things to cover. And all he could do was sit by looking up at the ceiling, thinking about the gold, and the scattered teeth, as well as a procession of colored numbers pegged to the arms of Hannah Schlegel.

He knew about the holocaust, of course, about Auschwitz.The general thing, the rumors, the incorrect details were not something he felt needed to look at more deeply. He certainly accepted that it did happen, the Israeli detective would have been wrong to accuse him of not believing it. At the same time, the event felt so distant, so abstract, not something of relevance to him or his world. Till now. Now, it seems to be relevant.

He dropped his head back and exhaled the next ring of cigarette smoke, a doughnut-like hole of water vapor chasing each other up to the ceiling, then it broke and no longer integrated into a dim smoke and did not disappear.

Five minutes passed, ten, the clock on the wall ticking moved its seconds hand like a mechanical heartbeat. Then, as if he had come to a decision, he swung his legs on the floor, grabbed his jacket and left the police station.

On the street he turned right, then left, breaking through the hustle and bustle of the afternoon towards the city's market center, past the cafes, through the cafes, a souvenir shop and a shop full of piles of hibiscus petals and red turmeric powder, before finally getting into a bright internet cafe with half a dozen computers lined up on the back wall. He nodded his head in greeting to his owner, a boy with a gel-soaked hair and a belt in the form of a motorcycle, who pointed him to the computer at the very end on the left side, and then to the left side, next to the European girl with sunburned shoulders. He headed there, sat down, and after a bit of hesitation, he accessed Yahoo! and typing “holocaust” in the subject box, frowned a little as he usually did, like a boy who was moving his finger into a fire of fear, but at the same time curious to know what fire feels like.