Günter stepped forward and extended his hand. “Please excu
se my appearance. This has been a trying experience.”
Emerson shook Günter’s hand and looked beyond him over the rim of the bluff.
“Area 51,” Emerson said. “Easy to imagine aliens down there. The salt flat is quite impressive.”
Riley nodded agreement.
“I’ve been down there and I didn’t see any aliens,” Günter said. “Unless you count Rollo.”
“Why are you here?” Emerson asked Günter.
“Good question. I don’t have a good answer. I’m trapped. I can’t get out of the country. I don’t have a passport. I can’t get help from law enforcement. I don’t know whom to trust. My brothers are hunting for me, and they’ll kill me if they find me. I guess I would like to do something to expose what’s going on here, but I haven’t a clue how to go about that. So I hang here and watch.”
“How did you get into this mess?” Riley asked him.
“Did either of you know Yvette Jaworski?”
Emerson and Riley shook their heads no.
“You wouldn’t have liked her,” Günter said. “No one did. She was not a likable person. She was disagreeable, negative, argumentative, opinionated, and belligerent. And I don’t say this just because she was a strong woman. If she’d been a man, people still would have called her a jerk.
“But there was something about her that touched me. Maybe it was that despite how intensely unpleasant Yvette was, all she really wanted was to be liked. To have friends. She just didn’t know how to go about it.
“So when she came back from Munich with a wild story about the gold trade being compromised, people didn’t pay attention, not only because the tale was wild and unbelievable, but because no one wanted to listen to anything Yvette Jaworski said.
“I was assigned by my brother to deal with her. He always gave me the bad jobs. It was his way of reminding me that I was lower on the totem pole than he was. What he didn’t understand was that I didn’t want to be higher on the totem pole. I didn’t want to be on the totem pole at all. I just wanted to make enough to live comfortably. And collect gold.
“I loved gold. Not money. Gold. I loved its history and its luster and its pure chemical makeup. I loved the stories of buried treasure, real or imagined. ‘The Gold-Bug’ by Poe. Treasure Island by Stevenson. The Sign of Four by Conan Doyle. And the real ones. The money pit in Oak Island. The Beale ciphers in Virginia. Mosby’s treasure. I never thought of finding them. I just loved that they were out there, so tantalizingly close and yet so far.
“And Yvette, she was a goldbug like me. So when I went to talk to her, we at least had that in common. We could trade stories of treasures and treasure hunting. In fact, she once gave me a replica of the gold bug from the story. It was quite beautiful. You should see it.”
“We have,” said Emerson.
“You’ve been to my home?”
“Yes.”
“How was my wife?”
“Coping. She’s thinking about selling the house.”
“Is she?” Günter was silent for a beat. “Is my boat still there?”
“It was at the dock when we visited last week,” Emerson said.
“That’s good,” Günter said. “I love that boat.”
“What was Yvette’s wild story?” Riley asked.
“Oh. Yes. It was the Germans that started it. When they began to talk about repatriating their gold.”
“Why did they want to do that?”
Günter shrugged. “It was their gold, and I guess they just wanted to see it.”
“Precisely,” Emerson said. “One should be able to see one’s gold.”