Kolchak's gold

14

I could hardly go out into the mountains, dig around and find out if the gold was hidden where I thought it was.

And if I had done so, and found it-what could I have done about it?

The three yard-records which I destroyed were evidence that Train #S-1428-CB was en route from point X to point Y to point Z. It left X and arrived at Y; it left Y but never showed up at Z. There was no rail junction between the two points; the train could only proceed to Z, or reverse and return to Y. It did neither. Therefore the train must have been unloaded at some point between Y and Z, and the train then broken into two trains (it had two locomotives, one at either end); the two half-trains then went in opposite directions, each bearing a new designation number-forgeries provided by Berlin, again. These two empty trains were dispersed from points Y and Z, their rolling stock used in the assembly of new trains.*

By destroying the documents I made it impossible for anyone else to discover where the gold train had been unloaded.

It was a hazardous act; I knew that. It was also crucial; I only inferred that.

Self-evident: I destroyed the evidence to guarantee the secret would remain my own. Why? Perhaps sheer egoism, megalomania. I can’t account for all my motives, particularly in my recent actions; I’ve been too pummeled to retain much insight.

The act was an impulse. A Freudian would insist I had prepared for it by doing a great deal of unconscious reasoning. After all I had expected to find the gold, or at least hoped to; the solution was a sort of emotional triumph but not altogether a surprise. Destroying the evidence did surprise me in a way; I hadn’t premeditated it. But when I actually found those documents I knew I couldn’t leave them there. Couldn’t let anyone else find them. I had followed a chain of reasoning; anyone else could follow it too.

I gave myself several reasons to justify the act. I remember most of them. They were voiced in the encounters that took place during the next weeks; there’s no point in spelling them out twice. Basically my reasoning wasn’t all that different from the reason why Haim or his brother hadn’t ever revealed the location of the Sayan cache. What decided me was the same question that had decided the Tippelskirch brothers: to whom could I reveal what I knew? And why should I, and what purpose would it serve, and whom would it benefit; and so on.

The day after I destroyed the stolen documents I returned to the archives as usual and went to work. To do otherwise might have raised suspicion; I didn’t want to attract attention to the files I had requisitioned yesterday.

I told myself I’d solved the mystery of Kolchak’s gold; I told myself it freed me to focus on what was still the real job-reconstructing the story of Sebastopol.

But it wasn’t possible to keep from thinking about it. Working out schemes. Fantasies about going in search of the gold with a spade, a pick, hiking boots and a knapsack. I excused them by thinking of them as exercises.

I tried to throw myself into the work with renewed concentration. I divided the next several days between industrious file-riffling in the museum’s reading room and conversations with Zandor’s hand-picked interviewees. Three of them gave me surprisingly useful information. Timoshenko chaperoned me to the meetings with his customary good cheer, and continued my informal introduction to the city’s night life, such as it was.

Then a Thursday,* a day that remains as clear in my mind as the day of a marriage or birth or death.

I left the museum at noon to walk off tension and look for a tavern for a midday drink. It was a balmy day. The street was busy with lunch-hour pedestrians. They walk stolidly because they have to, they’re not strolling for exercise. There is never a great deal of motor traffic in Russian cities but the street was noisy with trucks and coaches and the poorly muffled growlings of Russian-built cars.

A man stood on the opposite sidewalk and his eyes flicked across me. Anywhere else I’d have thought nothing of it-a meaningless glance in a street. But it alarmed me. I sensed his eyes on my back when I turned to go down the street.

A block distant I looked back; he was no longer at his post.

I went fretfully on. I knew the neighborhood now; I carried my lunch into a small tavern on a side street and ordered the local wine. People milled in and out; I recognized none of them.

I examined my observational abilities: I set myself the task of reconstructing his appearance.

Unextraordinary. A large man but not huge. No hat, no topcoat. A blue suit cut to reduce a paunch. A somewhat rubbery face, dark hair combed straight back without a part. Round features. Nothing about his eyes; I hadn’t been close enough; I had the impression however that he had hairy hands. Not a Slavic appearance; neither square nor swarthy. Western European, then-or more likely a Russian from the White country to the northwest. But I came back to the suit: not Moscow serge. A little baggy but that was from lack of pressing; it had been a well-cut suit, probably a fairly decent fabric. Something German about it; something distinctly un-Russian.

Or was it one of Zandor’s people? I remembered his fastidious dress.

Then I remembered Vassily Bukov: the indulgently tailored slacks.

I finished the carafe of wine and left the place. The traffic was noisy. I didn’t hear his approach and I was startled when he spoke.

“Please don’t look at me, Bristow. Study that radio in the window.”

I saw his reflection ripple across the shop window as he moved past my shoulder and bent to try his key in the door lock of a parked Moskvitch. He seemed to have trouble getting the key in. He had too much of a belly on him to be able to bend down comfortably.

In the racket I could barely hear him. “I’m an American. You’re in trouble, Bristow. We’ve got to meet tonight. Half-past six, leave your hotel and turn right-north. Keep walking up the street until we pick you up. If you’re being followed we’ll spot it and you won’t be contacted. In that case stop and wait by the phone kiosk at the corner by the postal exchange-we’ll call you there with further instructions. Got it?”

“Yes. But what danger-”

“Shut up. Beat it.”

He got the door open and slid into the car. It pulled out into the traffic and I took my eyes off the display of radios and cheap clocks in the shop window.

Central Intelligence Agency, obviously. Their penchant for trench-coated melodrama is infamous.

But he’d scared me. I kept my fears buttoned down tight because if I let my imagination go I knew I could go to pieces.

The breeze blew the smell of diesel exhaust across my face. A block distant, smoke spurted from the tailpipe of the blue-suited man’s ramshackle Russian car. I remembered him stooping there, fiddling with the key and very carefully not looking in my direction; probably talking out of the side of his mouth like a ventriloquist. Something comical about it: the television absurdity of it.

I went back to the museum but my nerves were in a bad state.

The street meeting he’d proposed was one of the standard ploys to reveal shadows and make safe contact. Abwehr and MI-6 agents had used it in Madrid and Lisbon and Istanbul. It didn’t prove my blue-suited man had any imagination; it only proved he’d read the book. Mine or his agency’s manual.

I dismissed Timoshenko for the evening and at half-past six I left the hotel and went up the street as instructed. The postal exchange was nine blocks distant. The sky was heavy with clouds; it was cool and a bit steamy. Caution had led me to carry the most important of my notes in the pockets of my suit; they made bulges here and there but my coat concealed them.

A woman like a bosomy Druid waited patiently by a cable pole for her dachshund to finish. I went past her trying to gauge the light automobile traffic in the street beside me. I did not detect any sound or reflection of a car moving along behind me at walking pace, but then they wouldn’t have handled it that way. They’d be hanging back a few blocks watching me-watching what happened behind me.

I made no effort to disclose a tail. It was up to my contact to discover him. Those are the rules of that game.

I did not know what to expect. There were too many possibilities; guessing was pointless. Danger, he’d said.…

I reached the postal exchange without contact.

Suddenly I realized what a poor scheme it was. They disclose a tail on me.* So I’m under surveillance. Now I’m supposed to answer that telephone? They’re idiots. The minute it rings and I answer it, whoever’s watching me knows I’m making a contact.

If my erstwhile friends were watching me from a car-he had implied they were-it would take them a bit of time to get to a telephone. I turned abruptly and walked back the way I had come; I wanted to be away from that kiosk before the telephone in it began to ring.

Half a block ahead of me a man turned into the entrance of a building. When I passed it he was not there; he’d gone inside. He’d been vaguely familiar; I’d seen him before-possibly at the museum. One of Zandor’s? My backtracking had caught him off guard; I wasn’t supposed to have seen him.

A block farther I made a right turn and strolled down a side street. I didn’t check to see whether Zandor’s man was behind me; there was little doubt of it. I didn’t want to return directly to the hotel because he would have been puzzled by my direct hike to and from the corner where the postal exchange stood. This way I might still persuade him I was simply out walking, limbering up the joints, with no particular destination in mind. I took a circuitous and unhurried route back to the hotel.

I insert these details because it illustrates Ritter’s* clumsiness and helps to show why I later resisted his approaches. “Intelligence” is a poor word for the operations of most espionage and counterespionage organizations. An unpleasant number of their actions tend to serve as self-fulfillment of gloomy prophecy. On the way back to my hotel I had ample time to reflect angrily that even if I had not been in “danger” before, Ritter’s stupid plan would have guaranteed it in the end, if I’d obeyed his instructions.

By nature the operation of intelligence activities is supposed to be passive. All too often it fails in that objective because in the course of gathering intelligence the operative brings attention upon himself and his illegal behavior. This in turn creates exactly the kind of international “incident” which Intelligence, ideally, is supposed to prevent. If I had more time and felt more level-headed I could turn all this into an amusingly comic sequence; essentially that’s what it is, once you remove to a certain objective distance. But I was not, and am not, in that luxurious condition. I was afraid.

I was on my way out of the hotel to wait for Timoshenko’s arrival.* A familiar man was coming up the sidewalk toward me. I almost suffered cardiac arrest when he reached inside the lapel of his coat but what he produced was an envelope; he approached with the envelope extended toward me.

He identified himself stiffly as Yakov Sanarski and waited for me to open the envelope; I found that it contained a new, revised visa. It extended my permit by five weeks.

He asked if this was satisfactory and I tried to look pleased. “Tell Comrade Zandor I’m very grateful to the government.”

Sanarski bowed with a formal little twitch of a smile and walked away, back the way he had come, to a waiting car he had parked awkwardly at the very corner of the block, sticking out into the intersection. He drove away and I stuffed the new visa into my already overcrowded pocket.

Sanarski was the man who had been following me the previous afternoon, to the postal exchange and back. This morning connected him beyond question with Zandor; so at least I had confirmation-I knew who had me under surveillance. This relieved me somewhat. It makes things a bit easier when you know who your antagonist is.

Trepidation thundered through my blood through the whole morning. I couldn’t suppress the American agent from the center of my thinking, but there wasn’t a thing I could do that would alleviate the tension; the next move was his to make.

He made it at the same hour as yesterday. I went out during the lunch hour for that purpose-in case he was waiting for me as he had done before. I walked slowly along the exact route I’d followed yesterday. There was no sign of him. I reached the tavern and went in.

The place was not terribly crowded; about half its chairs were occupied. One of them was occupied by the American agent. He didn’t look at me.

I couldn’t very well sit with him; in any case I didn’t want to. By destroying state documents I had already committed a grave offense but there was a good chance it wouldn’t be discovered-ever. Unless that was what the agent had been referring to yesterday when he’d warned me of danger. But I’d just about convinced myself that couldn’t be it. If they knew about the theft of the documents they’d have arrested me, not given me an extended visa. I hadn’t done anything else to put me in trouble and I didn’t intend to, certainly not by making open contact with the American.

I took one glass of wine at the bar, intending to leave immediately.

From a corner of my vision I saw him get up to leave. He counted coins gravely in his palm and pressed them down onto the table singly, pocketing what was left; he still had his hand in his pocket when he came forward toward the door. His route took him immediately behind me. He jostled me. When I looked around I heard him mutter “Sorry” in Russian-not very good Russian, a terrible accent. He went on outside. His hand was no longer in his pocket.

I finished the wine, giving it a good five or six minutes. Then I went back to the men’s room. I was alone in it; I reached into the outside pockets of my coat and found the note, crumpled into a tight ball like something a schoolboy would put in a slingshot. I smoothed it out, read it, tore it up and flushed it away.

It told me to leave the museum at two o’clock and stroll down to the Square of Fallen Warriors, then take the tram up Nevsky Boulevard. There were detailed instructions, what to do step by step. The last sentence was, “Be careful-they are onto you.” It was signed K. Ritter.

I could only obey it or ignore it. The vague silly warning had its intended effect; I obeyed it, half in fear and half in anger because there was no need for such cryptic melodrama.

Procedures for disclosing and shaking a tail are numerous and they differ according to the purpose of the procedure. It is relatively easy to “ditch” clandestine pursuit if you don’t mind his knowing he’s being shaken. It is considerably harder to make the ditch look like an accident: that is, to put him off the scent and make him think it’s his own fault. He must not know that he has been spotted; he must not know that you have shaken him off deliberately. Yet all the same you must lose him. It isn’t easy but classic patterns have been laid down; fundamentally the choice of method must be determined by the number of shadowers who are in play.

I knew the textbook methods and Ritter’s was one of them. The instructions in his note had professional weaknesses and that was one reason for my anger. Had I obeyed his specifications methodically I wouldn’t have lost the tail. He hadn’t taken into account the possibility there would be more than two of them.

I threaded the bleak massive monuments of the Square of Fallen Warriors along a random choice of footpaths. A pale sun filtered weakly through the haze but it was not a cold afternoon; there were overcoated figures on the park benches. I kept an eye out for an approaching tram and when one came in sight I timed my stroll to meet it when it stopped at the corner of the square; I swung up onto the steps and eeled inside without looking over my shoulder but the reflection in the opposite window gave me a glimpse of two long-coated men jogging toward us from the footpaths of the square. Neither of them reached the tram; we were in motion before they reached the curb.

From my seat I saw a four-door Volga squirt across the boulevard; the two men climbed into it and it followed us.

My instructions were to leave the tram at its second stop, four blocks from the square; this would have been sufficient to lose a pursuer on foot but Ritter hadn’t counted on their having a car. They could keep up regardless of how far I chose to ride.

Better to risk missing the meeting than to let them see I was trying to lose them. Therefore I had to make it look as if I had a legitimate destination in mind; you can’t just ride a tram four blocks and then get off in the middle of nowhere.

As you follow Nevsky Boulevard across the horseshoe-shaped hillside that contains the city and harbor of Sebastopol, you enter the city’s commercial district. Here are the monolithic state-industries stores, the consumer-goods sales and services, the maritime offices and executive buildings from which the activities of the port are directed.

All right, I was on a buying expedition; what did I need that was important enough to take me away from the archives in the middle of the afternoon? I finally decided on a hat, since I wasn’t wearing one; I had one in the hotel room but I could get rid of it later and pretend I had lost it. The forecast called for snow and windy cold days ahead; obviously I needed a hat.

It was flimsy but it would have to do; in any case with luck I wouldn’t be asked.

In heavy centre ville traffic I dismounted from the tram and made my way into the crowded GUM emporium, threaded the throng, picked out a dark Russian hat with earflaps and a lining that was probably rabbit, and stood in the queue that you can’t avoid whenever you shop for anything in the USSR. With an expression contrived to combine impatience with boredom I let my glance flick from display to display and from face to face, turning on my heels with irritable restlessness; and spotted my two pursuers busily inspecting a table of yard goods where they looked as out of place as two bulls in a hen yard.

When my turn came I paid for the hat and walked through the store without hurry, ambling past counters of clothing and hardware, stopping now and then to examine something of passing interest. A pulse was battering in my throat but it was not so much fear as the excitement of challenge: the kind of thrill a small boy feels when he tries to get away with something against the rules. I was, I must confess, having fun.

It was fun only so long as I managed to disregard Ritter’s warning of danger. At the moment I was in no real and immediate danger because everything I did could be construed to have innocent plausibility; I was the only one who knew an adventure was taking place.

I had roved deep into the half-acre store and there were at least four street exits available, one on each side of the building. I knew there were two of them and a third man outside in a car, probably waiting at the curb by the door through which we had entered. The two on foot had to follow me because there were too many exits; otherwise they’d have posted themselves by the exits and simply waited for me to leave.

My purpose at this point was to get rid of that car. I did it by wandering out of the store through the back door. A stout woman was entering as I left; I held the door open for her and used that movement as my excuse to turn. Smiling in response to her “Thank you” I was able to pick up a glimpse of my two stolid watchers: one was coming idly toward me and the other was striding away purposefully toward the far end of the building, where obviously he would get in the car and come around the block.

Carrying the new hat in my hand I went up the sidewalk to the nearest corner and turned right. This put me out of their sight and I knew where all of them were: one man following me down the sidewalk, one getting into the car, one behind the wheel. I turned into the side entrance of the store and reentered it quickly, before the man on foot behind me had time to reach the corner and see me go inside.

For the first few paces I hurried; I went off at an angle from the side entrance into a crowded area of small refrigerators and television sets where citizens stood gaping at these marvels of consumer technology. As I entered the group I fitted the new hat onto my head and turned up the collar of my coat. The man following me was looking for a hatless man with his coat collar lying flat.

I pushed through the knot of gawkers and made my way through fifty yards of men’s clothing, neither idling nor hurrying; I went out the front door-the door through which I had originally entered the store-and of course by now the four-door Volga was no longer there, having gone around the block in search of me. I crossed the thoroughfare quickly and boarded the southbound tram which took me back along Nevsky Boulevard the way I’d come.

We made about two blocks and through the rear of the tram I saw the man who’d followed me afoot come out of the GUM and stand on the curb looking baffled. The car emerged from the side street and drew up before him. It was facing away from me. The second man climbed out of the car and the two of them stood there talking and gesturing disgustedly, and then we made the bend up the hill and they were out of sight.

At the next corner I left the tram and walked spiritedly uphill along a side street of cheap concrete apartment blocks; I crossed one intersection and paused to catch my breath from the climb. No car was turning into the street below me, nor was any pedestrian in sight. I went up another hundred yards to the next main boulevard which ran along parallel to Nevsky, and waited for the tram with my back to the corner of a building so that if they drove by along Nevsky and looked up along the side streets they wouldn’t see me.

The tram seemed forever coming. But my shadowers did not appear and finally I rode back toward the Square of Fallen Warriors, left the tram four blocks short of the Square and walked uphill along a silent street of two- and four-family houses with the Mediterranean roofs the Sebastopolites affect. I was now back on the route Ritter had specified in his letter of instructions; I was about a half hour late.

It was quite possible he wouldn’t wait for me but I didn’t hurry. Nothing attracts attention so quickly as the sight of a running man.

At the top of the hill I surveyed my backtrail and saw nothing alarming. A woman pushed a baby carriage along one sidewalk and three people were standing on a porch talking; a delivery van moved across my line of sight a block or two below; I saw no Volga sedan, no men in long coats. I turned into the People’s Park for Culture and Learning, followed the pathway around the perimeter of the auditorium and left the park at its upper end, following my assigned route. I was quite certain no one was following me now; I’d stopped twice in the park to scan the paths and although I was not alone in the park there was no one moving in my direction.

Two blocks along Maxim Gorky, then turn right and walk one block along Arbat, turn left. The car was there-the same little Moskvitch he’d had trouble unlocking yesterday.

“I’d about given up on you.”

“There were three of them and a car. I had to lose them first.”

“Then they’re serious about you. You can see for yourself you’re in trouble, Harry.”

He had an accent that wasn’t quite American and I gave him a close look as I pulled the passenger door shut. He stirred the shift lever and we moved away from the curb.

“I’m Karl Ritter. Born in Germany, if you were wondering-they tell me I still have a bit of an accent.”

“You’ve managed to half scare the pants off me. I’d like to know why.”

“Let’s go where we can talk. I can’t drive and talk at the same time. I’m one of those people who have to do one thing at a time.”

We went over the ridge toward the suburbs. The sky was becoming more heavily grey. Ritter looked overcrowded in the driver’s seat, his belly almost pressing the lower rim of the steering wheel. He kept banging his left knee on the column when he clutched to shift.

I said, “You almost railroaded me into trouble twice. I’d like an explanation.”

“You’ll get one, Harry.”

He got to first names too quickly; it was another thing I didn’t like him for. And the accent made me think of Henry Kissinger.

He drove the car with earnest aggressiveness but not well. He kept both hands rigidly on the wheel and tended to overcorrect; it wouldn’t have been a relaxing ride under any circumstances.

“Here we are.”

It was a featureless two-story block of flats, probably not more than ten years old but crumbly around the edges as if the building had been poured in one continuous dump of concrete and it hadn’t set properly. Ritter jammed the Moskvitch into a space at the curb and grunted getting out of the car. He walked me to the door and turned to survey the street before he came inside. He pointed to the stairs and we went up and along a narrow corridor with a bare concrete floor. It was reminiscent of American federally financed housing for the poor. Square, functional, bleak; there was no decor.

Ritter opened a door with a key and we went into an apartment furnished with a nondescript potpourri of battered chairs and tables; it looked like a careless bachelor’s residence and there was an unmade daybed, Scandinavian style-a platform with a thin mattress on it, the sheets and coverlet thrown back and rumpled. Two interior doors gave onto a tiny bathroom and a separate kitchen that was large enough to contain a small table and two chairs. Ritter went directly into the kitchen and beckoned me to follow; when I entered the small room he closed the door behind me and said, “Have a seat.”

I concluded he had chosen the kitchen because it had no windows. It was not a comforting conclusion.

Ritter said, “I swept it this morning. There are no bugs. I’m sorry if the precautions seem excessive, but nothing can be assumed to be private over here.”

He was one of those people who get too close: his nose was inches from mine and I could smell the tobacco on his breath. I sat down at the table to put breathing distance between us.

Ritter fixed me with baggy eyes. They were pale blue, rather watery. He turned to a cupboard and found a bottle of vodka inside. “Drink?” He seemed to feel a compulsion to act the host.

“Is this your apartment?”

“No.”

He seemed to be looking for drinking glasses; he wore a preoccupied look as if he couldn’t remember whether he had packed his underwear.

I said, “All right, damn it. Who the hell are you?”

“Me? I’m just a civil servant with a slight sinus condition.” The flash of a grin across his swollen face. He found tumblers and put them on the little table; sat down, took out a cigarette and flicked it against the back of his hand. Then he hung it in his mouth unlit and reached for the bottle to pour.

Finally he spoke. “It’s kind of a low-budget safe house. We borrow the place when we need it. The owner works days. He’s one of our people, works for my firm.”

“What firm would that be?”

He waved the cigarette. “Hell, you know.” Lit it with a wooden match and waved his hand to extinguish the match. “Just looking out for the interests of our citizens abroad.”

I was rigid with suppressed feelings. “I’m waiting.”

“Harry, you’re in trouble two ways. You know what they are.”

“Do I?”

“One, the Jews. The KGB already suspects you on that one. Two, the gold. They haven’t tumbled to that yet.”

I don’t know how well I concealed my consternation. He had chucked a hell of a big rock into the pond. I had to make an instant decision: how to reply, how much to give in.

His elbow was on the table and instead of lifting the cigarette he ducked his head to reach the cigarette with his mouth. His eyes were puckered by suspicion.

In the end I chose not to say anything.

He waited awhile; then he said, “Come on, Harry. You’re trying to hunt lion with a peashooter. You’re unimportant, you know that-you’re not hurting the Reds and you’re not hurting us. You’re just hurting yourself. A little while and Moscow’s going to have all the evidence they need to slap you in prison on some vague grounds and say it’s necessary in the interests of national security. You’d have a hell of a time proving it was a frame from inside a Siberian work camp. You’d just be an entry in a file someplace. And then they go to work on you with all those Manchurian Candidate techniques and whatever else they’re using to take the place of the rubber hose. When they start that you might as well give them everything you know because they’re going to get it out of you anyway. And then afterward they’re finished with you. You freeze to death or you have a fatal fall in the shower bath or you’re charged with assaulting a prison guard and attempting to escape, and they execute you. I could give you a list six pages long. Is that how you want it to end up? Don’t you see that you can’t …”

He blustered on until he heard himself; then he stopped, embarrassed because I hadn’t given him any visible reaction; I’d just waited him out.

Ritter dribbled ash on his coat; he brushed it off and sat back and crossed one fat leg above the other. It hitched up his trouser cuff: his sock had fallen down and the calf of his leg was pale and slightly hairy. “No comment? I’ll say this for you-you’ve got the balls of a brass gorilla.”

“Ritter, you’re certifiable, do you know that? I simply don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“A word of advice, Harry-the innocent act is contraindicated. It’s too late to do anything about the Mossad group, you’ve already been linked to them. Getting out of that mess would be like trying to get your virginity back. But the gold, that’s something else.”

“What gold?”

He shook his head in exasperation. “Look, as soon as you calm down and quit lying to me we’ll have a conversation.”

I said, “I find you amusing up to a point, Ritter, but you’ve passed it. I still don’t know what you’re talking about and I can only conclude that you’ve been making assumptions based on assumptions and you’ve reached some wild answers.”

But it wasn’t getting me anywhere and I saw I was going to have to put it so bluntly that he could not go on evading it without exposing the truth. I said: “You don’t seem to get this yet. I have no way of knowing who or what you are.”

“I told you. Just a civil servant trying to earn my gold watch.”

“All right, but whose civil servant?”

Suddenly he got it. Recognition was mirrored transparently in his eyes and his face dropped a foot. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“I’ve got to see some credentials.”

“I haven’t got any. I couldn’t very well, could I?”

“Then we’re at an impasse, aren’t we?”

I had only his word for it that he represented American interests. He could have been one of Zandor’s people trying to trip me up-testing me. Nothing he had said or done precluded that possibility. It would serve the interests of Zandor and his superior, Bizenkev in Moscow (who had opposed my visit from the beginning), to toll me into a trap by encouraging me to confess my anti-Soviet sins to a Soviet agent in the guise of an American.

He pushed his chair back against the little piece of wall beside the door; he sat with one knee bent, foot against the table, the other foot on the floor and his head resting back against the wall. He took a drink and then spoke in a voice made breathless by the vodka:

“What would it take to convince you?”

“I don’t know. That’s up to you.”

“The business about the Romanov gold reserves. I got that from Evan MacIver. The Russians don’t know about it yet.”

“Assuming we both know what you’re talking about, how would I have any way of being sure the Russians didn’t know about it?”

“If they did you’d be sweating out a torture cell right now.”

“And what am I doing right now?”

He smiled. “Your daddy must have been a lawyer.”

“What are you really doing here?”

“MacIver told me to bail you out.”

“What’s your title?”

“I’m a programming officer.”

“In the field?”

“Sometimes we work in the field.”

“What’s MacIver’s title?”

“Assistant Deputy Director of Programming.” He hacked out a dry smoker’s cough. MacIver was a heavy smoker too. “None of that proves anything, does it. I could have got all that from one of your books. Or if I was a KGB agent I’d know it. Look, I’d better spell it out for you.”

It was about bloody time.

Ritter was forty-nine years old. His parents had emigrated from Germany in 1937 when he was thirteen; they had settled in Boston and joined the German-American Bund, which he thought ridiculous. He broke openly with his parents at the beginning of 1942 when he was eighteen; he had not yet received his draft notice but he volunteered and was taken into the army.

According to what he told me, he was approached by OSS recruiters in 1943 but was turned down after an FBI security check revealed his parents’ affiliations. Ritter went into army intelligence instead and spent two years in Italy, France and Germany, mainly spying out soldiers who profiteered on the black market.

When the Central Intelligence Agency was formed in 1947 out of ragtag remnants of OSS, MI and other security groups he went in as a legman and was used extensively thereafter in foreign postings because with his German appearance and accent he was not likely to be taken for an American agent. But the fact that he was not a native American militated against his being promoted to any office of administrative importance within the excessively chauvinist agency.

In the sixties he got another black mark against him because he was one of Cord Meyer’s people engaged in recruiting for the CIA on U.S. campuses and when these activities were made public the pressure from the liberal wing had truncated several promising careers, Ritter’s among them. He had found himself doing tours of duty in Iceland, Chile and Thailand.

Then in late 1971 he had been recalled to Washington by Evan MacIver, whose protege Ritter had become, when MacIver was promoted to the post of Assistant Deputy Director of Programming.

In the Washington area one out of nine federal employees works for the Central Intelligence Agency. It is funded by vouchered but confidential Class “A” funds audited only within the Agency itself; the budget is hidden within various federal programs including the Defense Department, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and various executive departments. Called the Agency by outsiders and The Firm by insiders, CIA has its headquarters in the midst of four hundred acres of trees near the Memorial Parkway inside the belt Interstate Highway 495 near Langley, Virginia; the building is modern, imposing, suitably enormous (it rivals the Pentagon in size) and shaped rather like a gigantic Louis XVI palace with two vast courtyards and endless interior corridors. A significant part of its square footage is below ground level. It is an enormous satrapy under the director who controls the operations of some two hundred thousand employees who are engaged in espionage, deception, insurgency, dissemination of propaganda, analysis of intelligence, counterintelligence, “black propaganda” (the publication of forged documents to embarrass the enemy), “black documentation” (the preparation of false facts to be fed to enemy agents), and “political action”-the euphemistic term for disintegrating or overthrowing a nation’s government while leaving the appearance that the government collapsed from natural causes. The Programming Division is known informally as the department of dirty tricks and it receives the largest share of CIA’s budget and personnel.

The operations of such an organization are complex because it is not enough merely to attain an objective; in order to succeed, the Agency must also conceal the fact that the objective has been attained. Ideally the Agency should be able to conceal the fact that it has even tried to attain the objective.

Unfortunately these ideals are rarely met in practice.*

Ritter’s explanation-his “spelling it out”-was rambling and anecdotal. In substance what he said was that Evan MacIver had become concerned about me after my affair with a known Mossad agent ripened; that the Mossad connection began to worry the Agency when it became clear I was going to Russia; and that because of these things and the gold, the Agency took a bet on me-so they “ran” me in a sense, with MacIver serving as a sort of Control. (I recalled that lunch in Washington when MacIver had said, “I think you get your nocturnal emissions from dreaming you’ll find that gold of Admiral Kolchak’s.”) Ritter revealed that in November 1972 the Agency had assigned “a warm body, full time” to retrace my steps through the files of the National Archives, to find out what I’d found.

“Also,” Ritter said, “you were pretty specific about what you’d found, in your letters to Mrs. Eisen.”

I stared at him.

He said, “We didn’t get it from her.”

“Then you opened my mail.”

“Inside this room I’ll admit that. Outside I’d have to deny it.”

“How?”

“A man on your house in Lambertville. Raided your mailbox every morning. Look, we had to.”

My house in Lambertville is on a dirt road that serves half a dozen farms. It was my habit to go to the post office only to buy stamps; I mailed everything from my own mailbox, where the rural-route carrier picked it up.

I’d written about some of my discoveries to other friends as well, and to my agent and editor; I presume MacIver’s “warm bodies” prowled those as well.

I said, “Then you took this gold thing seriously.”

“Five hundred tons of raw bullion. How many dollars on the open market? Five billion? Maybe it sounds far-fetched to you, Harry, but we couldn’t afford not to take it seriously. Especially with you bedding down with an Israeli agent.”

I felt a hot suffusion of angry blood in my face and I was tempted to tip the table right over against his ballooning belly.

He must have begun to see cracks in my composure long before that but he hadn’t let on; now he said, keeping most of the sarcasm out of his voice, “You begin to get the picture. We can keep tabs on you. We can read everything you read in the free-world collections. We can even follow you right into the Sebastopol archives. But we can’t see the same stuff they’re letting you see. There’s just no way for us to get to that stuff, not with anybody who’d know what to look for.”

He stabbed a long cigarette at me as though it were a pistol. “But you know what to look for, Harry.”

I didn’t tell him I had destroyed the documents which could put “Paid” to the whole thing; I didn’t tell him much of anything. He was doing the talking. I was too stunned to do much more than absorb his revelations.

He said, “That’s about the size of it. You believe I’m who I say I am?”

“I do now.”

“Then why don’t you work for us?”

“I’m not that hungry.”

“I find that hard to believe, Harry. We know your financial picture. You had to stretch things to come over here at all. You’re going to have to sweat like a coolie when you get home, just to pay your back bills. Now, you can’t touch that treasure and you know it. What are you going to do, carry five hundred tons of gold bricks in a false compartment in the bottom of your suitcase?”

“You don’t really think I came over here to steal five hundred tons of gold?”

“No. But I think you came over here to find it. Now about working for us-there’d be a fat finder’s fee. A real fat one,” he said obliviously. “We’ll get you a Panama bankbook-Panama banks ask even fewer questions than Swiss ones.”

“You’d be buying a pig in a poke. I haven’t got any gold.”

“You can’t afford to stick to that line, Harry. It’s inoperative. The Organs* knows you talked to Bukov. They’re just biding their time, waiting until they get you pinned like a butterfly on a board where you can’t even keep flapping your wings. They mean to cancel your ticket, Harry, and here you’re trying to climb a greasy pole all by yourself. You’re just hastening toward doom, you know, and I can assure you you’ll catch something you weren’t chasing.”

“You mix a mean metaphor.”

“Sooner or later you’ll tell me where it is.”

“Sooner or later you’ll tell me why I should know where it is.”

“Because if you hadn’t found it,” he purred, “you wouldn’t deny you were looking for it.” And he beamed at me in triumph.

I am not expert at thinking on my feet. I do my best work at a typewriter when there’s time to reflect and to compose and to polish. This is one reason why I never would have made the grade as one of Fitzpatrick’s favored round-table wits.

What I said, with literal truth, was, “I haven’t found an ounce of gold, let alone five hundred tons of it. But let’s assume I did find it. What then?”

“Then you tell us where it is and you’re off the hook.”

“What do you mean off the hook?”

“Harry, at this moment in time you’re the only human being alive who’s had access to the records on both sides of the Iron Curtain.”

“So?”

“You’re the only human being alive who’s in a position to find that gold.”

“Suppose I couldn’t find any records over here to support my investigation.”

“You’d have said so a long time ago.”

“What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you all afternoon?”

“It’s a little late to ask me to believe it now,” he said, “but let’s get back to the original question-what happens now.…”

He was right. If I’d opened the conversation by admitting I’d been looking for the gold, but adding that I hadn’t been able to find it, he might have believed me. As it was I’d put my foot in it with too many palpably false denials.

“We’re onto you,” he went on, “and I rely on your own knowledge of the intelligence apparatus to tell you what happens next-or if not next, at least soon. How long does a secret stay secret, Harry?”

“Don’t play cat and mouse. I’m tired of it.”

“We have people in The Organs. Not higher-ups, but people. Double agents. That goes without saying, right?”

“Go on.”

“From extrinsic evidence”-he pronounced the phrase with a precise Germanic inflection that made it sinister-“we can assume they have people on our side. Once in a while, you know-a piece of fact gets into their hands that they couldn’t have obtained if they didn’t have double agents in our gang. I mean, a couple of hundred thousand employees, Harry, I don’t care what kind of security clearance you run, you’re bound to turn up a few rotten apples, aren’t you?”

“In other words if the CIA thinks I’ve found five hundred tons of gold, then it won’t be long before the KGB will think it too.”

“That’s the size of it.”

“You’re saying if I don’t play ball with you, you’ll turn it over to the KGB.”

“That’s unfair.”

“The hell it is. If the gold exists at all it’s in Russia. There’s no way for you to touch it anyway. If you knew where it was, you could only use that knowledge as a bargaining point. Trade it to the Russians for whatever you happen to need from them this month. So that’s the threat, isn’t it? — either I find the gold for you or you trade me to the KGB and let them get it out of me. That way your hands stay clean.”

He brooded at me; I said, “It doesn’t matter to you. You’ll trade them the gold or Harris Bristow, whichever’s easier. That’s what we’re really talking about, isn’t it?”

“You’ve got a low opinion of your country.”

“The CIA isn’t my country.”

“Is Nicole Eisen your country, then?”

“If I had that information do you really think I’d give it to the Israelis?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time a citizen betrayed his country for the love of a woman.”

“It’s not America’s gold,” I said. “Whose country would I be betraying?”

He was shaking his head in feigned exasperation. “You’ve got a hole in your argument. What makes you think the only thing we could do with that gold would be to turn it over to the Russians?”

“I suppose you’d just send in a fleet of trucks under the cultural exchange program and cart it off to Washington?”

Ritter said, “Well there might be ways. Didn’t the Germans almost succeed? If you forge proper-looking papers you can get away with all sorts of things. If we did it right and did it fast enough they wouldn’t even get curious until it was gone. Then all they’d find out is they should have got curious a lot earlier.”

“Is that what MacIver thinks? You people are incredible.”

“Just tell us where to look, Harry.”

“Even if I knew, why should I tell you?”

An insidious assumption hid behind Ritter’s coaxing. It was the same flummery used by the witch-hunters who insist that if you don’t cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, you are perforce a traitor. Such illogical reasoning ridicules the democratic concepts of liberty: it denies any right to privacy-the essential freedom without which there are no others.

I was no longer prepared to accept my-country-right-or-wrong simplifications. To study and write the history of CIA blunders and atrocities is to put an end to innocence.…

In January 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, the American freighter Absaroka was torpedoed just outside the harbor of Los Angeles. A month later a submarine shelled an oil refinery near Santa Barbara. In one of my books* I reported that the two attacks, as well as several other incidents along the West Coast of the United States and Alaska, were perpetrated by Japanese I-class submarines. As a result of these shellings the California Hearst press began a banner campaign against the “yellow peril” on our beaches and not only was the reality of war brought home to American soil, but thousands of Japanese-born American citizens were rounded up and herded into concentration camps in the Southwestern desert for the duration of the war. Subsequently I learned that the Japanese navy had no fleet submarines in American waters at that time; and recently declassified Pentagon files prove that the attacks on the West Coast were ordered by Washington and that the high-explosive shells were fired by American ships. At the time, Harold Ickes privately justified these cynical acts as being necessary to morale. (They have a Watergate ring to them: there is nothing new under the sun.)

Then of course there was the incident of the American shipload of mustard gas which blew up in an Italian harbor and killed a thousand people. And the OSS-Mafia alliance in Sicily. And then the overthrow of the Guatemalan regime by the CIA in behalf of an American corporation. And the Bay of Pigs, the Powers U-2 fiasco, the Dominican Republic, the abortive CIA attempts to bomb Duvalier’s palace in Port-au-Prince, the Agency’s overthrow of Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia, the Air America bomb-runs over four nations in Indochina, the CIA-IT amp;T attempt to overthrow the elected government of Chile, all the chilling secret maneuvers designed to make Latin America safe for the United Fruit Company, the Bolivian and Venezuelan fiefdoms of American oil companies, the massive CIA support of feudal despots in Arab oil basins while the right hand of the Administration gave lip service and jet planes to Israel.…

I knew that Haim had been right after all. In South Russia squatted a motionless pile of metal which in its way could be as destructive as fissionable uranium: on the open market, several billions’ worth of gold bullion-enough to topple governments, enough to decide wars.

In November 1968 the Western monetary system depended for survival on the strength of the West German Deutschmark which was backed by a gold treasury no greater than Kolchak’s.

Put it in CIA hands and who could be sure what use it might be put to? Or allow the CIA to put it in Soviet hands: same question. Or perhaps more so: Russia has always been, and still is, a nation in which all policy is controlled by a small band of totalitarian leaders who are restrained by no law, answerable to no one, and educated abysmally in the realities of the outside world.

My question put Ritter at a loss: evidently it hadn’t occurred to him that I wouldn’t recognize my obligation to prove my patriotism by handing over the gold to the CIA. He tried to conceal his indignant outrage; he tried to act contemptuous: “I’m empowered to offer you a sizable finder’s fee.”

He said it too loudly.

I must have been in a state of emotional idiocy-an aberration from which I would soon recover in terror-but just then I was acting far more professional than he was and that was another thing he couldn’t take. He’d been prepared to deal with a garden-variety scholar and we both knew what that was: probably gutless and naive, certainly eager to bow before the whim of Authority. He found himself dealing with a self-assured lunatic who wouldn’t knuckle under. It had to be disconcerting; had I been in his position I’d have burst a blood vessel.

“Listen to me, Harry. I’m making you a hell of an offer. Millions. If you turn it down there’s nothing I can do for you. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I understand threats. You’re very handy with the rack and thumbscrew, aren’t you? You use bribes and blackmail and threats, and then you tell me I ought to do it because it’s the right thing to do. Good God, Ritter, you can’t preach patriotism and morality at gunpoint.”

He became very sibilant and German again. “I would suggest you consider the fact that you are in no position to dictate to me concerning such things as morality and patriotism.” I waited for him to call me Herr Bristow but of course he didn’t, that was only the black comedy inside me.

“I don’t know where your gold is. You may believe that or not-I don’t much care. But you can’t trade me to the Russians if I haven’t got anything they could use. You can’t turn me over to them if I’m worthless-all that would do is destroy your credibility with them.”

Of course I was bluffing but he couldn’t know that.

I stood up. “They’re going to wonder where I’ve been. It’s almost five.”

“You went for a walk to soak up the atmosphere of the city. After all you’re writing a book about it. It isn’t your fault they lost sight of you.”

He hadn’t risen from his chair; the back of it was against part of the door and he had my way blocked. I said, “If the way you handled my getaway this afternoon is an example, you’d never get near that gold-even if I found it for you.”

“It must have been the first day they used the car and the third man on you. I’ve had them under the eye for forty-eight hours. The plan would have worked perfectly well if they’d followed yesterday’s pattern.”

That began to bring me back to earth. I put both palms flat on the table and leaned toward him. “Ritter, what made them change the operation today?”

“You must have done something to alert them.”

“I did nothing. It had to be you. They spotted you, you clumsy bastard.”

“Don’t be an idiot. I’ve been in this game long enough to know when I’ve been blown.”

“Sure you have.”

“You’re rattled after all.” He was pleased. “It wasn’t me, you know. Probably they observed your little ballet of indecision around the telephone kiosk last night. That might have been enough to make them increase their suspicions.”

“And just who set up that charade?”

“I did. I was mistaken. I’m to blame, I accept the responsibility, and I apologize.”

“I don’t want your apology,” I said. “I want your absence.”

“I’m afraid that wouldn’t conform with my orders.”

“And you’re a good German, aren’t you.”

He tried to ignore that. He said, “You opened a door a moment ago. You said, ‘Even if I found the gold for you.’ “

“Figure of speech. An army of searchers might find it, if they had twenty years to search for it.”

He levered himself to his feet, grunting, one hand against the table for support. “I don’t believe you.”

“Ritter, I’m not responsible for your speculations.”

“Think about this, Harry. In their country the incumbents get to count the votes. In their country ten million of you may get purged out of existence any minute, at the whim of some fool with red stars on his epaulets. You can’t publish what you want to. You can’t even think if your thoughts don’t conform to the party line. You can’t go where you want to go, you can’t even have a conversation without worrying about whether somebody’s going to inform on you. You can’t agitate for reform, you can’t defend yourself against phony charges. The freedoms you take for granted — ”

It was all true and I was tired of it because it was beside the point. I cut him off: “The freedoms which you’re asking me to give up so that I can safeguard my freedom. Aren’t you bombing the hamlet in order to save it?”

“Nuts. I’m asking you for only one thing-a piece of information which isn’t rightfully yours anyway.”

“What makes it rightfully yours?”

“We’re both Americans.”

I laughed in his face.

He said patiently, “Harry, it does make a difference. I won’t torture you or throw you in prison. I draw the line at that.”

“There are heroin pushers who draw the line at rape. I’m not impressed by people who draw lines.”

“You ought to be. If you were having this conversation with Zandor there’d be blood coming out from under your fingernails.”

He led the way out of the dreary apartment and we went down the stairs. I said, “And now?”

“Now I take you back to your neighborhood and you walk back to your hotel.”

“Just like that?”

“What did you expect me to do? Hold you prisoner until you capitulated?”

The temperature had dropped sharply under a pewter sky. We crowded ourselves into the little car and he got the engine going and waited for it to warm up. Our breath fogged the windshield. Ritter said, “Do you mind if I make a suggestion? It’s for your own good. I think you ought to inform Comrade Zandor of the location of the treasure before you leave the Soviet Union. If the information was already out of your hands, your government wouldn’t have reason to harass you.”

I said, “What have you got to gain by advising me to spill everything to Zandor?”

“Just cutting my losses, Harry.”

“No.” I reasoned it out. “You’d have to inform Zandor in advance that I was going to volunteer the gold to the Soviets-as a favor to you. That way you’d get the credit, you’d still get reciprocity from Moscow. One good turn.”

“The KGB might get that impression,” he murmured. He switched on the defroster fan but it didn’t work very well. “Actually the way you’d better do it is write the information in a letter and mail it just before you fly out of the country. That way you’d avoid the tedium of questioning. No point taking unnecessary risks, is there.”

“I wonder how many people you’ve blackmailed into doing the right thing.”

“Then you’ll do it?”

“I told you before. I have no idea where the gold is. The whole thing’s a fantasy. Yours and MacIver’s.”

He put the Moskvitch in gear.

* Elsewhere, in a section deleted earlier by the editors, Bristow speculated on how’ the gold might have been hidden: “Several possible methods. (A) Much industry had been moved to Siberia. Spur rail lines remained, now unused. Some went through tunnels. Unload gold inside tunnel, then demolish both openings at ends of tunnel as if air-raid bomb damage. (B) Old smelters-numerous in South Russia. Slag piles-enormous. Pile up gold in area of slag heaps, cover it with layer of slag. (C) Several lakes and reservoirs adjacent to spur RR lines. Sink gold in one of them. It won’t corrode. (D) Several new highways then being laid amp; paved for military transport. Lay gold in road-fill, then pave over it. (E) The traditional way: dig a hole and bury it.”-Ed.

* Probably March 22, 1973.-Ed.

* Italics supplied by the editors. Written in growing haste, some of these passages are characterized by muddled verb tenses and uncertain syntax. As much as possible, we have left the wording alone, feeling that the best editing is the least editing.-Ed.

* Ritter, of course, is the name of the man in the blue suit. Below, Bristow gives him more of a formal introduction. As mentioned earlier in the notes, these passages were added as insertions in the manuscript after Bristow had completed the basic structure; they are written on odd scraps of paper with such indices as “page 382-A, — B,” and so on, to indicate where Bristow wanted them to appear.-Ed.

* This is the next morning-probably Friday, March 23.-Ed.

* It is probably clear from the context that Bristow added this passage and inserted it here. Henceforth such insertions will not be pointed out unless it seems important to do so.-Ed.

* “The Organs” is professional argot for the Soviet KGB.-Ed.

* The reference is to Harris Bristow’s The War in the Aleutians (New York, 1969). Clearly Bristow felt compelled to explain why he refused to cooperate with the CIA’s Karl Ritter; therefore he added this passage to the manuscript. It appears to be one of the last segments he wrote.-Ed.