Kolchak's gold

13

At some point along the drive back down from the heights to the city, I began to shake badly and I asked Timoshenko to stop the car. I felt faint and queasy; I stood by the side of the road getting a grip on myself. I’d faced up to Zandor with a cool aplomb that had taken me by surprise but now the reaction had set in and I was helpless to control it.

Timoshenko sat behind the wheel staring straight ahead. His knuckles were white on the wheel. If he looked at me it was only when my back was turned. I wondered how he sized it up.

Zandor was one of those men to whom deviousness is an entertainment. His threats had been obvious but he hadn’t said anything explicit and that could be maddening, as he knew well. I was on probation without having been told the crime of which I was accused or suspected. Now I understood the emotions of Kafka’s man on trial.

Were they onto my search for the gold? Or had they decided I was working with Bukov and his underground railway? Or did they suspect I was a CIA spy?

All my imagination needed was the knowledge that these wild things were at all possible. A year ago the Kremlin expelled a visiting American congressman* from the USSR after charging him, on the flimsiest suspicion, with spying for American secret police and planning to create subversion to incite Russians to betray their regime.

For all the talk of cultural exchange and dwindling barriers it’s still a fact that the Soviet Union is ruled by a dictatorship. Like any other tyranny it suffers from the paranoia that results from the precariousness of its leaders’ insecure positions. To maintain power they hand down arbitrary decisions from which their own citizens, let alone foreigners, have no appeal; and the mere suspicion of guilt is more than enough to lead to conviction and sentencing. Otherwise the dictators wouldn’t survive in office.

So it didn’t matter whether I’d done anything wrong; it mattered only whether I’d given them grounds for suspicion.

I didn’t think I had. If I were under serious suspicion they’d have expelled me or arrested me; they wouldn’t have turned me loose to go back to my work.

So they didn’t have anything concrete. But it was always possible an attack was shaping up; since they weren’t sure, they had to blanket all possibilities. So they warned me that I was under suspicion. It was a gesture; in specific terms meaningless. But I couldn’t know positively that it was meaningless and therefore I would be off balance, perhaps frightened into abandoning my attack-if I’d had one in mind. Or conversely the warning might provoke me into an overt act that would give them a reason to arrest me.

It took time to reason this out but finally I was satisfied.

The cold sweat had dried on my face. I noticed for the first time that it wasn’t raining. I had no idea how long it had been since the rain had stopped.

The church bells startled me, clanging from the city’s crenellated onion domes. It was noon.

Half a precious day gone. But Zandor had offered to extend the visa. Because they didn’t suspect me after all-or because they wanted to give me enough rope?

I had a misty pointilliste view from the edge of the hill road: the center of Sebastopol, the loop of the harbor. Here and there a surviving old building but most of them were square, modern, sterile: you didn’t feel you were in old Russia. The city reminds one somewhat of San Diego with its tremendous naval base spreading out along the arm of the bay.

Sebastopol. my mother’s birthplace. I had lived with its history for so long that it hardly seemed foreign to me. The bleak grey skies and the dark sea that lapped against it, the stubborn stolid pedestrians, the sadness of its atmosphere. It was a city that had suffered; but it wasn’t an ancient city. Grigori Potempkin created the port of Sebastopol in 1784 on orders from Catherine the Great.

The city was built to serve Russia’s new Black Sea navy; Catherine had sent Potempkin, her lover, to build the port after Russia seized the Crimea from the Ottoman Turks. In 1787 the Turks counterattacked and the infant city withstood its first siege.

The Crimean War of 1854-1855-British and French fighting for the Turkish cause-put Sebastopol under cannon fire again and for eleven months the city heroically resisted. In 1914 the Turks attacked yet again, their navy shelling the city. After Kolchak’s collapse in 1920 Sebastopol was Wrangel’s headquarters and had to withstand the onslaught of Red armies while the White Russians made their last stand; and then came the Germans in 1941.

Such a city has a character and a spirit. I was trying to find these things. I knew the dry facts, the dates and the numbers and the details of record; I did not yet know the people. This was what Zandor pretended not to understand when he complained of the insignificance of the persons I chose to interview.

I went back to the car and asked Timoshenko to drive me to the archives.

Zandor had made an appointment for me that night with a retired navy commander who told me very little and conformed religiously to the party line. I left early and Timoshenko and I drove slowly through a swarm of sailors who were coming ashore from a ship that had just docked. We stopped at a nightclub where the music was loud and the crowd raucous; we drank for half an hour, Timoshenko in very good cheer. It was past ten when I returned to the hotel.

When I opened a drawer to get a clean folded shirt to lay out for the morning I discovered someone had searched the room. The things in the drawers had been crumpled by hands that had pawed quickly through. Someone had made a quick but thorough search. Oddly my notes themselves seemed to have been undisturbed. Probably those who had been sent to search the place were not considered sufficiently literate in English to understand anything they might find in my writings. In fact it was probable that they hadn’t really expected to find anything. I took it to be a message from Zandor-punctuation to his earlier warnings.

There was more, in the morning when I went outside to wait for Timoshenko. The man in the car could have been waiting to pick someone up and the man at the shop window could have been looking for a gift to buy his wife but I didn’t think they were.

That day in the captured German files I found a document which confirmed everything I had assembled thus far about Kolchak’s gold. I can recall it exactly; it is imprinted on my brain.

CERTIFIED TRUE COPY

Ministry of Transport amp; Communication

Railway Department-City of Chelyabinsk

12 April 1944

Certificate Number S.D.C. 4/1628

This clearance certifies that the goods wagons Numbers 1708, 1765, 1900, 2171, 2177, 2509, 2510, 2518, 2523, 2834 have been reserved by this Ministry for the transport of State Properties to Lugansk, and that by Authority of the Supreme Soviet these wagons must be cleared with utmost priority and dispatch at all points of transit.

— F. G. Grizodubov

Director, Railway Department (stamp)

It was a forgery of course. But a good one. I saw no physical evidence to indicate it wasn’t genuine; it was only the fact that it appeared in the German files rather than the Russian ones. It was a copy; the original had disappeared with the train. From its location in the files I knew something else as well: it was in one of the von Geyr folders dated November 1943 and it wasn’t there by mistake; therefore the Germans had created the forgery well in advance of the need for it.

It was not the final clue I needed. But it was the last link. It gave me the date and the route; I needed only one more fact.

Getting that fact was going to be harder than I had anticipated: Zandor had made it harder. The detail I needed was to be found in a large stack of documents which Zandor could only think trivial. Railway schedules to Zandor were on a par with cafe menus.

By now I had managed to reassure myself that the Zandor interview had had a silver lining: I convinced myself it demonstrated they didn’t have any idea I was looking for the gold-that they didn’t even know of the gold’s existence, let alone my interest in it. I won’t take the trouble to spell out the chain of reasoning by which I came to that conclusion; at best it was rationalization. In any case I allowed myself to see no reason to abandon my pursuit of the treasure. The only problem was to misdirect Zandor’s attention.

There was no way to get the answer without looking at that stack of railway schedules. I couldn’t hide the fact that I was looking at them. The best I could do was sandwich the file number into the middle of a list of varied requests for all kinds of transport and supply records, so as to suggest I was analyzing the enormous job the Russians had done to supply their armies in the south (while Hitler let his troops starve to death). I even made awed remarks-along those exact lines-to the woman at the desk. I hoped my friend at the corner table overheard me.

I left the archives that day in a disoriented daze-half euphoric and half terrified. I had done something for which-by Soviet standards-I could be shot.

Timoshenko was sensitive to the vibrations. “You have found what you were looking for, yes?”

“I guess I did,” I confessed; and he beamed and insisted we have a drink to celebrate.

The drink became several drinks and we were both in high cheer that evening. But the hangover set in at about the time I returned to the hotel. I began to tremble when I pulled the three tightly rolled documents out of the sleeve of my jacket. They weren’t notes of mine. They were original documents and I had stolen them from the archives, rolling them like straws and sliding them up my sleeve like a cheap gambler hiding aces.

Unless they had seen me purloin the three papers-and they hadn’t, or they’d have arrested me on the spot-they weren’t likely ever to discover that they were missing. Railway schedules are not numbered individually. The same file number appears stamped at the top of every paper in the folder. With anything as commonplace as marshaling records they’d have had no reason to make a specific note of each sheet of paper. It was possible they had a notation of the total number of papers in the file but I doubted anyone would bother counting them-there had been at least five hundred in that file-and even if they did make a count they’d have no way of proving I was responsible for the discrepancy. Not if they didn’t find the documents on me.

I unfolded a map and studied it, and studied the papers I’d stolen; and then I destroyed the three documents by flushing them down the toilet in tiny pieces.

With them went the last written record of the final hiding place of Kolchak’s gold.

* Rep. James Scheuer, Democrat of The Bronx, New York.-Ed.