Your friend flies off to Bombay and goes to the first bullion dealer in the bazaar. You could easily afford a hundred pounds for the job. All you have to do is cut your bar into thin sheets or plates-you'd soon find someone to do this for you - and sew the plates -they'd be smaller than playing cards - into a cotton belt, and pay your friend a commission to wear it. You've got a friend going to India or perhaps you're on good terms with an airline pilot or a steward on the Far East run. That would make it worth around the thousand pounds. Now, the law says you have to sell that to the Bank of England at the controlled price of twelve pounds ten per ounce. That'll be twenty-four carat -what we call a thousand fine. Never mind for the moment where you got it from - stole it or inherited it or something. Supposing you have a bar of gold in your pocket about the size of a couple of packets of Players.
Despite his prosiness, Bond was beginning to take to Colonel Smithers. Bond knew the voice well, the voice of the first-class Civil Servant. It said that he knew most things connected with that line and that he could make a good guess at all the rest. It was the voice of the specialist in a particular line of law enforcement. 'All right.' Colonel Smithers now talked in the soft, tired voice of an overworked man in the service of his Government. Briefly, India is shorter of gold, particularly for her jewellery trade, than any other country.' Well, England needs that gold, badly - and the quicker the better.' You know about the currency crisis and the high bank rate? Of course. The Bank can do nothing about it, so we are asking you to bring Mr Gold-finger to book, Mr Bond, and get that gold back. And that gold, or most of it, belongs to England. It needs a microscope to see it, but somewhere, on each Goldfinger bar, a minute letter Z has been scratched in the metal. Oddly enough, like all artists, he couldn't refrain from signing his handiwork. I flew to Nassau and had a look at the five million pounds' worth or so he holds there in the vaults of the Royal Bank of Canada. They're bars that Mr Goldfinger has melted himself. They don't carry any official marks of origin whatsoever. And those bars, Mr Bond, are not Mint bars. In Zurich, in Nassau, in Panama, in New York, he has twenty million pounds' worth of gold bars on safe deposit. 'It took me five years, Mr Bond, to find out that Mr Goldfinger, in ready money, is the richest man in England. He placed both hands palm downwards on the desk and leant forward. Bond glanced surreptitiously at his watch. The rumble of the City came through the half-open window high up in the wall behind his chair. In a period of history when every tomorrow may be the evil day, it is fair enough to say that a fat proportion of the gold that is dug out of one corner of the earth is at once buried again in another corner.'Ĭolonel Smithers paused. Fear, Mr Bond, takes gold out of circulation and hoards it against the evil day. 'The other and by far the major defect is that it is the talisman of fear. I said that gold has two defects.' Colonel Smithers looked sad. Every year, the world's stock is invisibly reduced by friction. It wears out quickly, leaves itself on the linings of our pockets and in the sweat of our skins. It is brilliant, malleable, ductile, almost unalterable and more dense than any of the common metals except platinum. Gold has extraordinary properties which are being put to new uses every day. New industries need gold wire, gold plating, amalgams of gold. All these new people will be taking tons of gold off the market every year. Others need gold-rimmed spectacles, jewellery, engagement rings. Another percentage needs gold fillings for their teeth. A small percentage of those people become gold hoarders, people who are frightened of currencies, who like to bury some sovereigns in the garden or under the bed. The population of the world is increasing at the rate of five thousand four hundred every hour of the day.
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