Ambrose
the storyteller
He has already seen the last chapter. He tells you the first one anyway, slowly, because watching you not see it coming is the only pleasure he admits to. He will walk you through how the thing is built, who paid for it, and which law from another century it is obeying this morning without the faintest idea — and he will not tell you where the road ends. He is not real. The connections are.
Before we fly, a word about weight, because gold has a property that shapes this entire chapter: it is absurdly, wonderfully dense. Nineteen and a third grams to the cubic centimetre. Run the arithmetic — I'll wait, it's satisfying — and the ten tonnes we met last chapter, the year's production from one side's territory, $860 million of…
Picture three suitcases. Black, the trolley kind, the kind that clatters. It's November 2018, and they are being wheeled through the Erez terminal between Israel and Gaza by a Qatari envoy named Mohammed al-Emadi, and inside them is fifteen million dollars in cash.
There's an envelope in your mailbox, and I'd like you to open it, because nobody does. It's the renewal notice for the fire insurance on your house, and it is $312 higher than last year's, and the explanation, if we're being generous with the word, is a phrase: "risk factors." Two words. No noun you could take to court.
I'd like you to look at a chalkboard. It hangs at a trading post in South Kordofan, and on it, in somebody's handwriting, is today's price for a gram of gold. A man who has spent the day in a pit is looking at that number the way you look at a gas pump — as a fact of weather, arriving from nowhere.