Kolchak's gold

11

There were questions I should have asked Bukov but they didn’t occur to me until we were driving back to Sebastopol that night with rain oiling across the windshield and Timoshenko hunching over the steering wheel, peering out, trying to keep the car on the road. I should have asked Bukov exactly what Nikki had told him about me-exactly what instructions she had given him, and what kind of help he wanted from me. Wasn’t it possible that I was reading too much into it? Perhaps they only wanted inconsequential assistance from me-the sort of thing you would ask any friend who happened to be traveling in an area from which you required something.

I tried to believe that but it didn’t work. Any trivial favor in the area could have been done by Bukov himself or members of his group. If they wanted my help it meant they wanted to use my mobility-the fact that I was soon leaving the Soviet Union. It could only mean smuggling, whether of documents or something else: information perhaps, the sort of thing you could carry in your head-verbal messages.

No, it wasn’t that either. They already had lines of communication-otherwise how could Nikki have got the message about me to Bukov? It came back to espionage. The documents sewn between the layers of shoe soles; the microdot pasted onto your carnet; the spool of film imbedded in your bar of soap-all the tiresome rigamarole I had studied and written about.

I tried to find excuses but it was no good. She had tried to use me and it made me angry because it destroyed something precious.

Timoshenko was unaware that he’d been duped. He dropped me off at my hotel and from the shelter of the portico I watched the car take off in splashing shards, sweeping through rainy puddles and flinging up arched sheets of water like a destroyer’s wake.

On the opposite side of the street a dark car moved slowly, its tires hissing on the wet paving. It almost stopped opposite me. In the end it accelerated slowly and I watched it go out of sight. The rain made a black shine on the surface of the empty street and I felt anxiety: I realized it was probably the atmosphere but there had been something sinister about the slow passage of that second car and suddenly I was alarmed-wondering if it had been following us; if so, had Bukov and I been watched?

I retreated into the hotel. The woman at the desk nodded to me. I collected my key from her and went into the room. The chambermaid had turned down the bed and set the electric fire; it was warm and close and I was unpleasantly aware of the rank smell of my wet clothes. I opened the window a crack before I made ready to retire.

It had been a long and emotionally exhausting day but I was too keyed up to sleep. There was nothing to drink in the room. I lay staring at the darkness above me and listened to the rain trickle down the air shaft outside my window. There was fear in the room-I hadn’t found it an oppressive room before but I did now. Fantasies ran away with me: what if the KGB had a make on Bukov and knew him to be subversive? What if I was now tied in to him by today’s meeting? They would need no more evidence than that; I knew their methods. I wouldn’t be the first American visitor they’d charged with improper activities. I recalled One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and I pictured myself among Solzhenitsyn’s starving convicts.…

I raged against Nikki. She had not only betrayed an intimacy; she had filled me with fear. It didn’t matter that I had rejected Bukov’s request; it mattered only that the request had been made at all. Cleverly Bukov had told me too much: by telling me these things in confidence he had made me part of his conspiracy whether I worked for him or not. I had an obligation to him now-an obligation to silence and secrecy-which I shouldn’t have had if he hadn’t taken me into his confidence. Yet he’d told me nothing that could do important damage to his group. I knew the methods and the generic facts but not the details, not the names. He’d told me nothing the KGB didn’t already know, except perhaps his own identity-if they didn’t have him on file in the Arbat; and could I credit their total ignorance of his activities?

Bukov’s revelations had served only one purpose: to bind me to him in secrecy. Because of Nikki he knew I would not voluntarily betray him; to betray him would be to betray Nikki. They had counted on that.

It was contemptible. They risked very little in asking me to risk everything; they were using a means-my relationship with Nikki-to further an end which they thought vital. It didn’t matter whether they were correct about the morality and importance of the ends. It remained a cheap device and I was bitter. She had chosen this thoughtless way to bring us to a shabby ending. I felt hollow, emptied by a heartbreaking loss. There was no one, after all; in the dark room I heard the rain and my fear became terrifyingly lonely.

The work became a frenzy. It was all I had left. I sat hunched for uninterrupted hours at the long table in the archives with an endless rain beating at the high plate-glass windows. My tired eyes raced across the pages and I clawed each paper aside to get at the next. My knuckles ached from jotting; my eyes burned, everything throbbed. I ignored the relays of watchers who kept surveillance from their shadowed corners and quietly sifted my leavings.

I had interviews in the city both Monday and Tuesday evenings. There were no further communications from veterans outside the metropolitan area of Sebastopol and virtually all the referral contacts from my interviewees were either close at hand or impossible distances away in other parts of the Soviet Union. As a result I decided to revise my schedule and spend at least one additional week in the archives while conducting as many interviews as I could on the weekends and during the evening hours when I was barred from the documents.

By that Wednesday I was too exhausted to keep my evening interview appointment; I canceled it and rolled into bed shortly after dinner but once again I couldn’t fall asleep. Typewritten words-records, cipher decodes, dry matter-of-fact accounts of unspeakable atrocities-flashed against the insides of my eyelids like slides projected on a screen, painfully brilliant, confusingly rapid. I had worked myself very near a punch-drunk state of collapse. Reality had faded into vaguery and I had the strange sensation you sometimes have when you’ve gone too long without sleep or had a few drinks too many, that ordinary objects are just a bit too far away to be touched and that the voice which speaks to you from a nearby mouth is heard as if it issues from a distance away. When the chambermaid asked me a question I had to have her repeat it three times and still it came to me as if in a dream; finally I perceived she was asking if I would care for a flask of coffee and I nodded eagerly. But the coffee did not bring actuality any closer; it only kept me half awake during most of the night.

It may have been three o’clock in the morning or later; I was unconscious of time; images were still flashing in my mind. I was in that state in which associations flow most freely-half-waking, uninhibited, the brain able to make hitherto unrecognized connections between superficially unrelated things. And it came to me that in my scattered gatherings-a sentence here, a word there; clues and hints-I had accumulated enough information to solve the mystery of Kolchak’s gold, if only I could fit the segments together into the proper pattern.

I dragged myself to the desk and switched on the dim little lamp and examined the notes from my pillowcase. I spread the fragments out on the desk and moved them around the way a street-corner charlatan moves the three walnut shells in the old con game.

I had far more than three notes. There were dozens. Somewhere there was a completion I hadn’t seen-but whatever spark had shot into my mind in that half-dream had set fire to my awareness and I knew the pattern was there even though I hadn’t yet recognized its shape.

I must have hung over those slips of paper like a raw-eyed vulture for hours, a claw occasionally darting out to shift one of them from here to there. The obvious cliche is the jigsaw puzzle but this wasn’t that; it was more like a double acrostic in which a clue might not refer to the end reality; it might be merely a clue to another clue.

In the end I decided the best way to attack the problem was to do it right from the beginning by rewriting the entire thing. This would serve a dual purpose: it would force me to pay closer attention to every word and nuance, by copying all my scattered fragments into a continuum; and incidentally it would reduce my myriad scraps of notepaper to a workable one or two sheets, filled from margin to margin with tiny writing. Much easier to handle that way, and it gave me everything at a glance. I scribbled intensely and intently, fingers and head aching with splitting agonies; it took me back to college days-writing out the last notes for the finals. In the later stages I would have done this anyway; you try to get everything on a single sheet so that when you memorize it you do so visually: every item is remembered in its physical place on the page with relation to the other items so that you reinforce the process of memorization by a kind of visual cross-referencing. Soon I knew I would need to commit the entire thing to memory and destroy the documents before leaving the Soviet Union. By doing it now I would give myself more time to fix everything in memory.

I leaned on that reasoning because it meant that even if I came up empty-handed I wouldn’t have been wasting this time and work. But not more than half an hour before Timoshenko was due to come and collect me for the day’s servitude in the archives, I came up with hands filled: I found the elusive connection.

It didn’t tell me where the gold was. But it told me where to find the single document that would pinpoint the gold’s location. And I already knew that the document in question would be found in the archives: I had seen it listed in the card catalog at least a half-dozen times and I had passed over it blithely each time, never realizing its significance.

I bounced to my feet and strode back and forth in the little room, stopping to stretch; probably grinning like a fool. I throbbed with excitement. Five hundred tons of the Russian Czar’s gold-and within hours I would know precisely where to put my finger on it.

What had been a distracting game was now a formidable reality. I knew the gold had been hidden again in 1944 and I had good reason to believe it had not been uncovered since then. Not even in a society as constricted as that of the USSR would it be possible for such a hoard of treasure to come to the surface without the world’s knowledge. If the Soviets had found it and added it to their stockpile of gold, even without acknowledging the source, still the facts would have been reflected in their international trade dealings-and the word would have been spread by the world’s gold-trading fraternity, a zealous body of men who miss nothing and who are keenly attuned to the slightest hints. And a sudden “find” of that many billions of rubles in gold would have been attributed to the Kolchak treasure regardless of what cover story the Russians might have attempted. No; the Kremlin had not been enriched by five hundred tons of gold at any time since 1943; no other country could have spirited it away without Russian knowledge; therefore the gold was still where it had been secreted thirty years ago.

And I was going to find it. Because, in some curious way, it was all I had left. I don’t mean wealth; obviously I was not going to claim the treasure for myself. I was not thinking ahead far enough to worry about deciding what to do with, or about, the gold after I found it; it was enough to find it. Or so I thought. I must attribute my disregard of consequences to my confused mental state of that week-the reeling shock of Nikki’s behavior, the dulled state of my reason, the overwhelming elation of this spectacular intuitive discovery. It was a period during which I’m sure any licensed psychiatrist would have found me certifiably, if temporarily, insane.

I remember the rain that morning. It seemed it would never end. It was after sunrise but the room drifted in a formless dimness around the puddle of yellow light cast by the lamp on the desk; the clouds must have been impenetrable because no daylight relieved the darkness of the shaft beyond my window when I lifted the blind to find out if my wristwatch was correct. It might have been midnight; I was ready to curse my watch as if it had joined the legion which seemed bent on betraying me; but then the old hall porter knocked-my customary wake-up call-and I went to the door in relief to unburden him of his tray with the croissants and the fresh hot coffee that this simple hostelry took to be a Continental breakfast.

I showered vigorously and changed into completely clean clothes-partly because like the successful marathon gambler I have always suffered under the illusion that neat cleanliness is an aid to keeping awake and alert under exhausting circumstances, and partly because today was to be a climactic, vividly-to-be-remembered day in my life and the occasion deserved the best I could give it. A starched shirt, an unwrinkled tie, my cashmere pullover and-despite the rain-my best Hong Kong suit. I buffed my shoes before slipping them into the rubber overshoes; I picked a bit of discoloring fluff from my hat and went out into the lobby to await Timoshenko’s arrival in a euphoric condition of sartorial elegance. I even smiled at the forbidding woman at the desk.

Ordinarily Timoshenko’s Volga would draw up at the curb outside the door and I would dive out to meet it before he could trouble himself to get out of the car. But this morning when a car slid into the space it was not Timoshenko’s and I felt momentary irritation; it meant if I was to detect his approach I would have to wait outside in the rain and I was not prepared to ruin my clothing that way. No raincoat was proof against that downpour.

Then through the door’s glass I saw two men get out of the car at the curb-it was a grey Wartburg-and to my surprise one of them was Timoshenko. The other, the driver, was a stranger to me.

Timoshenko looked uneasy. I pushed the door open and he grunted something to the driver behind him; then he said to me, “You must come with us to meet someone. I’m sorry, there’ll be a delay getting to the museum today.”

The driver’s eyes pinned me back like a butterfly on a board. Timoshenko took my elbow and I slid into the rear seat of the car and stared at the noncommittal back of Timoshenko’s head in silent terror.