Kolchak's gold

20

She was sitting on my bed with her knees drawn up against her breasts and her head tipped to one side on her folded arms, watching me. She’d been sitting that way for quite a few minutes, I thought, burying her face in her arms.

I pushed the door shut behind me-slowly, almost reproachfully. “Then it’s true what they say. It really is the crossroads of the world. Wait long enough in Pinar’s taverna in Trabzon and sooner or later everybody you know will come by. Mazel tov, Nikki.”

“Please don’t make jokes.”

She wasn’t wearing her glasses. The nearsighted agate eyes squinted at me, pressing at me curiously like diamonds etching against glass. She looked very slender and very tense, hungry for something: information? Forgiveness?

Her soft and always slightly breathless voice: “Harry. Please let me talk to you.”

Now she uncoiled. She stood up hesitantly, her fingers at her throat. Her dark hair was plaited at the side of her head. I hadn’t really remembered how gamine and lovely she was: I thought I had, but I hadn’t. Even now-bedraggled and dispirited, rumpled and untidy and too tired to care-she was so very lovely.

“Somebody had to tell MacIver where to find me,” I said. “I didn’t think it was Vassily Bukov. And it couldn’t have been Pudovkin, he’s dead.”

Her head jerked back as if I’d slapped her; she swung away from me and swung back again, her face crumpling.

“He was driving. They machine-gunned him. I was lucky, they missed me.”

I watched her face adjust to it. I said cruelly, “You and MacIver.”

She pinched her lower lip with her teeth. I said, “I liked Pudovkin. He was a gentle old man. How well did you know him?”

“Well enough to like him. I’m sorry, Harry, I didn’t know.”

“You knew the risks. You set the whole damned thing up. Didn’t you.”

Taut anger ground itself into the lines around her lips. “I’m responsible for it, yes. For his death. Yes.”

“Don’t get maudlin. It’s a privilege I’d just as soon not see you luxuriate in. How long have you been in this with MacIver? From the very beginning?”

“Yes.”

“From the night we first met?”

“Yes.”

“MacIver set it up for us to meet there as if it were an accident. Is that the way it worked?”

She nodded her head.

“And Haim Tippelskirch. It must have been his idea at the beginning. He was the one who’d been obsessed by the gold for fifty years.”

“Harry, you don’t understand. Please-”

“I will not be your wailing wall, Nikki. You hung me on puppet strings and made me dance across an emotional minefield. I owe you nothing.” I stood there with my fists clenched at my sides. “Nothing.”

She lifted her chin. Very soft: “Are you the only one with principles? Are you the only one with a private line to God? How are things on Mount Olympus, Harry? Will you let me talk to you? Will you listen to what I came here to say to you?”

“When you’ve said it, you’ll go,” I said. “And you’ll take MacIver and his wolf pack with him.”

“I’ll go, yes. I can’t answer for him.”

“You sicced him onto me. You can get him off me.”

“It’s not like that. We had the plan but it was MacIver who provided you. That wasn’t my idea. I’d never heard of you.”

“Sure. I was a total stranger. That made it a whole lot easier to play your badger game-you didn’t have to worry about feelings. All you had to do was act like a hooker, the hundred-dollar kind who says I-love-you between humps.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “Please. That’s not true. Dear God it wasn’t like that, Harry. Falling in love was the worst thing that could have happened, but it did happen and I wasn’t acting. It wasn’t supposed to happen. All I was supposed to do was to get you to Israel so that-”

“So that Haim could work on me. He wasn’t really retired from the Mossad at all, was he. He was right up in the top echelons-right up to the day of his death.”

“Yes. That’s true.”

“Fifty years he schemed to get at that gold.”

“No. It wasn’t until the nineteen fifties. After there was an Israel.”

“It had to be someone above suspicion. Someone acceptable to both the Americans and the Soviets. Certainly not a Jew. Someone who could get access to the records in both countries-and someone who had an interest in the gold so that he’d know what to look for, and look for it. Was it MacIver who picked me? Or was it Haim? He knew my books.”

“I don’t know, Harry. I can’t answer that. I wasn’t there when they had their first meetings. It was several years ago, I’m sure. I only came into it a little while before you met me.”

“Well you sure as hell made up for lost time, didn’t you?” I swung away heavily; I couldn’t bear to go on looking at her.

“Wait.…”

“I won’t leave,” I said. “Not until I’ve heard the whole story. You’ve got the floor.”

Her words came in a headlong rush as if she were talking compulsively to hold herself together.

It must have seemed an even more fantastic scheme at the outset than it had proved to be in actuality. The fountainhead was Haim Tippelskirch.

“Haim said there must never be forgetfulness or forgiveness of evil,” she said. “He said it was a debt we owed the dead and the living equally. The Russians must not have that gold. Nor the Germans. Too many Jews died for it. I remember one of those foolish old men saying something about God’s will. Haim reminded them of their Torah-God does not intervene to redeem man’s duties to his fellow men.”

The gold belonged to Israel by moral right. That was Haim’s idealism. His realism was that it would be a cold day in hell before the Soviets would let a Jewish researcher into their archives. An innocent dupe had to be found. Nikki did not use the word dupe but it was what she meant.

It was all such a long chance. Haim was the only one with faith in it because he was something of an amateur historian himself: a student of military history, a student of Germans and Russians. He knew the German penchant for record-keeping and he knew if they’d moved the gold they’d have left paper tracks. He also knew one other thing he’d never told me:

“Our people went into Siberia in nineteen sixty-two to look for that old iron mine. It was empty. That was how we knew the gold had been moved.”

Another thing they hadn’t told me: Haim himself had sought access to the American files, on the pretense of writing an article for some European quarterly on the subject of World War II in Russia. They hadn’t let him in because as soon as the security check began they discovered he was an agent of the Mossad and that was what put MacIver on him.

MacIver wanted to know what interest the Mossad had in those records and Haim told him the truth because he knew it was never going to work without outside help; and the United States was the firmest ally Israel had, despite suspicions and reservations on both sides. Clearly the dupe had to be an American historian and sooner or later the American authorities would have to be brought into it because too many of the documents were classified.

It was no wonder I’d got access to so much material that had never been exposed before: The CIA had been opening all the doors ahead of me, unseen by me.

It was CIA agents in Moscow who confirmed that the Soviets were ignorant of the gold-its original hiding place as well as the fact that it had been moved sometime between 1920 and 1962. Since the Soviets didn’t have it and no other country or individual had produced it, it could only have been rehidden, and probably still inside Russia. All this merely confirmed what Haim had already intuited.

I had to be kept ignorant of the scheme because there was always the chance the Soviets would tumble to what I was doing; that they would either shut down the archives to me or interrogate me. In either case the gold would be lost again but if the Soviets interrogated me and found out that the CIA and the Mossad had put me up to it there would have been hell to pay. At least if I didn’t know who was calling the shots I couldn’t tell the Russians.

The best my puppeteers could do for me was put me under the protective wing of Vassily Bukov because he had a far more viable organization in the Crimea than the CIA had. Unfortunately this had backfired because my visit with Bukov had inflamed the Soviets’ suspicions.

In the end I was to have been persuaded by the CIA to turn over to them whatever I discovered about the gold. Originally this debriefing was not to take place until I was safely out of the Soviet Union after having completed my research there. But Bukov had reported that Zandor was breathing down my neck too closely; that the Russians might lock me up at any time; and therefore Ritter had gone in, ahead of schedule, to find out as much as he could.

“What if I’d told him I knew where the gold was? What if I’d specified a location?”

“What do you mean?”

“He’d have killed me, wouldn’t he? To keep the Russians from squeezing me.”

“No,” she said vehemently. “He had orders to get in contact with Vassily. Together they were to smuggle you out safely.”

Something had convinced Ritter that I’d found it. Probably the poor way I handled the meeting with him. I’d given it away, or Ritter thought I had-it amounted to the same thing. The screw was cranked a few turns tighter and I did what I had to do: I broke and ran, and was delivered onto MacIver’s doorstep, or Nikki’s, on schedule.

“All right,” I said. “What’s supposed to happen now?”

“To you? You were supposed to tell us where the gold is.”

“I didn’t find it, Nikki.”

She had nothing to say to that.

I said, “Suppose I’d found it. Suppose I told you, or MacIver, where to find it. What would have happened then?”

“They expect to make a trade with the KGB. It’s a lot of gold, Harry.”

“Yeah. I know it’s a lot of gold. One million pounds of it. Troy. What was the trade for?”

“Gold.”

“Trading gold for gold?”

“Have you ever heard of washing money?”

“Like gangsters?”

“Yes. That was the plan.”

Organized crime takes in enormous sums of money but it can’t be spent overtly because that would bring the Internal Revenue people down on the spenders. It has to be “washed” first-funneled through a Mafia-owned legitimate enterprise, such as a gambling casino, where it can show up as acknowledged gross receipts, then be balanced off against operating losses so that the income tax is minimized.

Nikki said, “The Russians have five hundred tons of Spanish gold in the Ural vaults.”

“Five hundred and ten.”

“All right. There are two plans, really. One is to persuade the Russians to give that gold back to Spain. The United States and Israel will get a substantial portion of it from Spain in what will be written up as repayment of foreign-aid loans.”

“I didn’t know Israel had lent money to Spain.”

“It would funnel through Washington.”

“What was the second plan?”

“Repayment for World War Two lend-lease. Direct payment, in gold, from the Kremlin to Washington. To equal exactly half the value of the gold we led them to.”

“And you think the Russians will go for either one of those?”

“Either they will, or they don’t get the gold. Half of it is still a lot of gold for them to keep. More than two billion dollars’ worth.”

I said, “And Tel Aviv ends up splitting fifty-fifty with Washington, whatever the Russians pay?”

“Yes. We’re a silent partner. The Russians might not go for it if they knew we were involved. We’re not exactly political bedfellows.”

“An unwise turn of phrase, Nikki.”

She flushed to her hairline. “Harry-”

“Let me tell you something. I didn’t find the gold. That leaves all of you looking pretty foolish, doesn’t it? Maybe it makes it a little easier to see things clearly-what you’ve really done.”

“To you?”

“To both of us. All of us.”

“It was worth the cost. It had to be.”

“The Nazis and the Communists have a phrase for it. To use a knotty overworked saying, the ends justify the means. Any means.”

“Don’t try to put words in my mouth, Harry. You act as if you’re the only one who’s got a right to principles. I’ve got principles too-things that come higher than my feelings about you or anyone else.”

“It ain’t the principle, it’s the money.”

“I hate you when you make cheap jokes, Harry. It’s beneath you.”

“So is theft.”

But I remembered the documents I’d stolen and destroyed.

“Theft from whom?” she said. “Whose gold is it? The Czar’s?” She stood up. Her shoulders went up and her face lifted. “Let’s talk about another principle. We made it possible for you to do your research, Harry. Without us you wouldn’t have found a thing. You probably wouldn’t even have got clearance into the Soviet Union at all. It was a sort of bargain, even though you were forced to sign the contract without reading it. That’s regrettable, but we kept our part of the bargain. You got everything you wanted. You’ve got your book to write. You’ve got the fantastic story of the gold to tell the world. Nobody will stop you from doing that-as long as it’s not published before we complete our arrangements with the Russians and the gold changes hands. You’re alive, you’ve had an adventure-”

“And Pudovkin is dead, and my notes are hanging on a barbed wire fence in Russia.”

“We’ll get them back for you. We’ll make it part of the deal with Moscow.”

I thundered at her. “What deal with Moscow? Don’t you understand? Don’t you listen? I found no gold. No gold.”

“You’re lying, Harry,” she said. She turned her bitter face toward the window. “And how about that for principles.”

“You all keep telling me I’m lying. As if by saying it you can make it so.”

“Don’t you think I know you well enough to know when you’re keeping things back, Harry? You were never a good liar.”

“I thought I knew you pretty well too, Nikki. We do make mistakes about people, don’t we?”

“You found the gold, Harry. If you hadn’t you wouldn’t have stolen those papers from the archives.”

“It was one of Vassily’s men. He was in the room watching you. He saw you roll them up and slip them into your sleeve. Now you didn’t steal them for the information they contained-you could have taken notes. You stole them to keep anyone else from finding what you’d found. It had to be the gold, Harry. Nothing else would have made you do that.”

I had sagged into the chair; she came to me and the touch of her fingers on my shoulder was electric. She murmured, “Harry, you’re destroying yourself. You take it all upon yourself and it’s not even your responsibility to bear. Would the world fall down if you kept your part of the bargain? Harry, what have you got to gain from sticking this out? What will it accomplish?”

“Sometimes you can’t go by that. Maybe it’s just the rationale of a lost cause.” I was whispering, I think. “Something stupid. But you go along all your life thinking you’re honorable and principled, and then just once you’re up against it. You can’t turn away. You can’t even pretend it didn’t happen. You just have to go ahead. Stubborn. Just because it’s a matter of principle. Even if it doesn’t accomplish a damned thing except your own destruction.”

I looked up at her and she was leaning toward me, an eager posture. I said, “Does that make any sense to you, Nikki? Any sense at all?”

She walked away from me. Around to the far side of the bed. She sat down on it-sat there not moving for the longest time. Her face was tipped down, huddling; her hair fell around her ear and bared her white nape.

When she began to shake I went to her. She must have been weeping for quite a while-great racking silent sobs. “For myself,” she said. “For what I’ve let myself become, Harry. It’s a vile business.” Her hands wrenched at each other. “It contaminates everyone who comes in touch with it.”

“I have to know something, Nikki. Coming here-was it your idea or MacIver’s?”

“He told me you were here. He made it clear he wanted me to come. But I wanted to come.”

“All right. But to talk me into giving you the gold-was that your idea or his?”

“You’re asking me whether they forced me to do it, aren’t you?” She was still looking at her hands. Her cheeks were wet.

“Yes.”

For a little while she didn’t speak. I had no patience then; I said, “I’ve been wondering what sort of pressure they might use. Michele?” Michele was her little girl, in Switzerland.

Finally she said, “It’s kind of you to try to find excuses for me, Harry.”

“Probably being kind to myself. I didn’t think I was that good at misjudging people. Particularly people I had reason to believe loved me.”

“Maybe we’ve both always been too selfish to give up anything for each other. That’s what you used to say in your letters.”

“I said that because I hoped you’d try to talk me out of it.”

She wiped her face with a corner of the coarse sheet. “You just don’t understand about us.”

“ ‘Us’?”

“Israelis.”

“That’s true. I’ve always hated fanaticism. It gets in the way of everything real,” I said.

“Real-like love?”

“Yes.”

“In a utopian world there’d be no conflict between those things. But we don’t live in-”

“Stop it, Nikki. You’re only repeating all that about ends justifying means.”

“I know.” I could barely hear her. “A few days ago-you probably haven’t heard-there was a Libyan airliner. A civilian plane, forty or fifty passengers. It strayed off course over Israel. We’d had threats from Al Fatah-that they were going to fill an airplane with high explosives and crash it in Tel Aviv. So our air force shot the plane down. There weren’t any high explosives. Just passengers.”

I sat by her and felt her spine beneath my fingers. Her voice went a little sour then. “You and I-it’s a desperate thing with us, isn’t it? It’s fatal but it’s serious. I think I’m not enough of a professional, Harry-I’m too much in love with you.”

“Would you want to be professional? These agents I’ve seen-MacIver, Ritter, Zandor, all of them-they may be enemies but they’re co-professionals and there’s something sick about that. They’ve got the kind of mutual respect you’d have thought died with the aviators, the ones in silk scarves in the First World War. Their talents mean more than their allegiances. You don’t belong in that company. MacIver’s got the character of a billy goat. He’s spiritually color-blind. He doesn’t really betray people but he doesn’t know loyalty when he sees it. He doesn’t know truth when he sees it. The highest accolade any of them can pay another is to say he’s ‘a real professional’-even if he’s an enemy. All right, on a certain level that’s understandable, maybe there’s even a way to admire it romantically., But it’s got to put you in mind of the German rocket scientists who’re working for Moscow and Washington now-or the professional mercenaries who don’t care which side hires them.”

At least she was listening to me. I said, “You’re not one of them.”

After a time she whispered, “I should have been. Then I’d have been able to live with it.”

Her arms were folded. She leaned against me, moved her face, kissed me without stirring her arms. I put my hands softly on her cheeks, holding her without pressure. It was a kiss only of the lips, and gentle: yet it rocked me down to my feet.

She was still breathing warmly in my arms when I awakened at sunset. She wasn’t asleep.

I said, “Think of it this way. If you leave gold alone long enough it’ll sink right into the earth, grain by grain. Specific gravity.”

She tried to smile. “There’s that strange streak of old-fashioned gallantry in you. It’s always confounded me.” She had undone her hair before; now it flew and swayed when she sat up and shook her head in negation. “I suppose happiness exists only in the imagination.”

“You’re burnt-out and hungry and in desperate need of a drink, I think. It’s still better than dead. Why don’t we go down and eat?”

“MacIver is waiting down there.”

“All right.” I felt drained. “We may as well go down.”

“No. Harry-he doesn’t know about the documents you stole.”

“He doesn’t know,” she insisted. “He’s only guessing. Hoping. I’m the only one who knows. Bukov and I.”

I said, “So you didn’t really trust him after all.”

“No.…”

“Is that the only reason you kept it to yourself?”

She began to dress-the same travel-rumpled clothes. She was a long time answering; finally she looked at me. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“I kept your secret.”

“It won’t be our secret very long, Nikki. You can’t be Bukov’s only contact in Tel Aviv.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Then sooner or later they’ll query him and he’ll report to someone else next time. It may have happened already.”

“No-MacIver would be hammering at the door.”

“All right,” I said. “But that’s not the point. Look at it, Nikki, face up to it. You could have burned your bridges by telling MacIver about those documents. But you didn’t. You kept my secret.”

We went down into the smoky crowd and the woman with hairy legs-Pinar’s sister-brought us wine and soup and a small local fish, the rouget. I did not see MacIver. Pinar pirouetted in and out of the room. We didn’t speak of much of anything until after the meal. Then I said, “MacIver wanted you to seduce me into spilling it.”

“I suppose he did. He didn’t put it like that.”

“He thought it.”

“To hell with what he thought,” she said.

She was very quiet that night in the room. I kept trying to talk to her but she would shut me off.

In the morning with early sun streaming through the cracks between the curtains she said, “I’ll have to go down and talk to him.”

“Go ahead.”

“You’re trusting me again, Harry. Bad habit.”

“I seem to have become accustomed to risk-taking.”

“I won’t tell him. Not until you give me permission to.”

“Do you think I will?”

“You’ll get tired of having the world against you. I’m sorry but that’s the way it will be. It won’t be MacIver, Harry, it’ll be you. You’ll grind yourself down and finally you’ll give in.”

“I don’t think so. Eventually, to you, I might. Not to him. Not to any of them. But I’d be an old man. Like Haim was.”

“Or like Haim’s brother. What if they took me for a hostage?”

“I can’t answer that. Are you planning to suggest it to him?”

“No.” She was hurt, badly hurt.

“I didn’t mean to be harsh. It’s another one of those things that’s become a habit.”

“I’ve earned it,” she said. “It’s too bad we don’t live in the same world, you and I.” She went downstairs to talk to MacIver.

I went out onto the sidewalk and watched the camels parade by. It was going to be a genuinely hot day-the first I could remember in more months than I wanted to recall.

When she met me there the liveliness was coming back into her; she was in a higher mood than before; the sun lit the blue of her eyes as she turned, and her smile was as good as a kiss.

“I’ve got a car,” she said. “He trusts me to watch you. Anyway you wouldn’t survive in this country on foot. I’m not to take the main highway. Maybe we’ll drive down to the shore.”

She hurried ahead, hips animated, fine legs scissoring; I caught up and took her arm.

The car was a Mercedes Benz coupe, the little one with a great deal of glass. She got behind the wheel and there was a satisfying rumble from the hood.

She drove three blocks to a filling station and had the tank topped up although it had been nearly three-quarters full and that was when I realized.…

Ten miles west of the town she stopped on the highway shoulder. I let her get out of the car. I didn’t open the door for her.

She wasn’t looking at me, her face was averted. We didn’t speak.

She slammed the door and I slid over into the bucket seat behind the wheel. I knew she would wait at least until sunset before walking back to town and telling them I’d overpowered her and taken the car.

In the mirror as I pulled away I saw her give a careless salute and walk away toward the sea, kicking stones with long languid thrusts of her feet.

EDITORS’ EPILOGUE

There is a postscript to Harry Bristow’s story.

The Central Intelligence Agency has refused to comment on the Bristow manuscript, only offering to read and criticize it before publication-an offer the editors declined. The CIA will not acknowledge that there is any Evan MacIver on their roster; it would be against Agency policy to do so.

Inquiries have been made of American consular officials in the Soviet Union and it would appear there is no such person as Vassily Bukov anywhere near Sebastopol. Quite possibly Bristow changed that name, and several others, for obvious reasons.

There is, however, a real Nicole Eisen. On June 14, 1973, Mrs. Eisen sold her co-op apartment in Tel Aviv, taking a loss because of the speed of the sale. On June 23 she left Tel Aviv at the beginning of a paid three-week vacation from the Israeli tourist office, which employed her on the record. She boarded an El Al flight with connections to Rio de Janeiro, traveling alone and with only hand luggage. On June 24 she left her hotel in Rio de Janeiro and has not been seen since, apparently. Official Israeli sources have refused to comment on her disappearance.

Since we received Bristow’s manuscript and letter from his agent we have had no communication from him.