Kolchak's gold

7

The fall and winter of 1972 were disagreeably grey and rainy in the Northeast. It was a dreary time of record rainfalls, and after the Presidential election and its post-mortems there were no urgent topics of conversation around the capital. Of course this was before the Watergate revival. I was seeing a good deal of a gangly cheerful divorcee whose name it would be pointless to mention here. Nikki was on my mind almost constantly although it had been a year since we had last seen each other.

In Lambertville around the end of November I had a phone call from Washington. It was Evan MacIver. I was surprised to hear from him; I’d seen him four or five times at parties in the course of the past year but we hadn’t much to say to each other. He called to suggest we have lunch the following week; he named a time and a restaurant. I don’t recall the conversation; in substance he said he had something of interest to discuss with me and he made it intriguing enough for me to accept the invitation.

It was the middle of the week. Heavy rain had brought traffic to a crawl and I was late getting to the restaurant. MacIver was watching for me; he got my eye and waved me to his table and I found him spooning the skin that had formed on his cup of hot chocolate. When I sat down my nostrils informed me there was whiskey in the chocolate.

It was one of those mock-Polynesian restaurants with jungle decor where middle-class women in absurd hats took a lunch break from their holiday shopping; this was the week after Thanksgiving and the Christmas boom had started. Waiters were serving sweet potent concoctions in imitation coconut shells with drinking straws. I ordered a Bloody Mary to keep MacIver company.

He looked rumpled and jowly but there were traces of the old raffish humor in the lines that exploded from his eye-corners. “Well Harry, just between us suspicious characters, how are things going?”

For a while we reminisced about campus days-the bad food in the university cafeteria, the Japanese restaurant he’d taken me to once where I’d gagged on raw fish, the J. D. Salinger stories and Castro and the banning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Powers U-2 incident, and the swap of Powers for the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel. Memoirs which dated us both, and which led-as if by aimless free association-to the subjects of intelligence and espionage. MacIver was pretty good, he was at ease and casual; but the invitation had been his and I had let him guide the conversation and I was aware that it probably was no accident he led us to that point. Each for our own reasons we were interested in espionage but clearly his motives were more specific than that.

I found something vaguely edible from the menu; it was not until we were drinking coffee after the meal that MacIver began to come to the point.

“Well then how’s the little Sabra?”

“Nikki?” I gave him a closer look. I hadn’t spoken to him about Nikki at all since the night I’d first met her. Yet he knew.

There was a crafty gleam of guile in his eyes; I was meant to see it. “You do keep in touch, don’t you?”

Suddenly I was determined to know what he was getting at. I contrived to look curious.

But he refused to be drawn. “Well she wasn’t my cup of tea, I can tell you that.” He put his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and I watched it smoulder there. He said, “You know I got interested in something you were talking about a couple of months ago. Where was it, Huddleston’s party? You were talking about that far-fetched Russian gold story you’re writing. Sounded like a hell of a yarn. I’d like to know more about it.”

“And that’s why you arranged this lunch?”

“Partly. There was something else, but it can wait. You’re not in a hurry, are you? Am I keeping you from anything?”

“I’ve got some work to do this afternoon up at State. It shouldn’t take too long-no, I’m not in a big hurry.”

“State,” he said, and made the connection. “Sure. You’re still pushing for that Russian research visa, aren’t you? Maybe I could help.”

“You?”

“Us suspicious characters have a few contacts here and there. That’s our main excuse for existence, you know. I might be able to help pull a string or two.”

I knew he wasn’t referring to the State Department; he was talking about the “other side”-OVIR and the Russian Embassy-but you had to be circumspect in MacIver’s line of work. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might be in a position to exercise any influence over there; I still had no idea to which desk he was assigned at the Agency in Langley. All I really knew about his position was what little he had told me a year ago.

He said, “Where is it you’re trying to get to? Moscow?”

“Moscow and Sebastopol.”

“You figure to hunt for the Czar’s gold over there?”

He said it with a smile but he was waiting for an answer and I gave him a truthful one: I was doing a historical research, not chasing wild gilded geese.

“Well sure, Harry, but the way I’ve heard you talk about that gold, you seemed pretty excited about it.”

“It’s an interesting yarn. But that’s all it seems to be-a yarn.”

“What makes you so sure of that? The gold was real enough.”

“Yes …”

“And it’s never turned up, has it?”

“It has, though. The Germans found it during the war.”

“I thought you were telling Huddleston they found it and then lost it again.”

“It’s all speculation,” I said. “I’m getting pretty tired of that gold. It’s threatening to become a tail wagging the dog. This job’s hard enough without distractions.”

“Come off it, Harry. A good strong dose of gold bullion’s just what you need to beef up the book’s appeal. Otherwise who’s going to buy a thousand-page history of the siege of Sebastopol? Who the hell cares about Sebastopol, for Christ’s sake?”

There was truth in what he said. The story of the gold was dramatic and it was completely new; no other historian had come across it at all.

He scowled at me. “You won’t sell eight copies of a book on Sebastopol unless you’ve got a hell of a hook on it. Why kid yourself? I was listening to you at Huddleston’s-you weren’t talking about sieges and politics and Panzer battles, you were talking about gold. You’re trying to make yourself feel like an important scholar with all this serious research, but your stuff wouldn’t sell the way it sells if you were just writing textbooks for history department libraries. You’re a yarnspinner, Harry-you’re an entertainer. And now you want to tell me you’ve got your hooks into the biggest money-caper story in history and you don’t want to be sidetracked by it? Harry, I wouldn’t buy that if it came with an American Motors guarantee.”

He stubbed out his cigarette and beamed at me in triumph. “You know what I think, Harry? I think you get your nocturnal emissions from dreaming you’ll find that gold of Admiral Kolchak’s.”

“You’re pushing it pretty hard, aren’t you?”

“Am I? Why should I?”

“Suppose you tell me.”

“Tell me something first. Would you think of asking me that question if you didn’t know who my employer was?”

I saw his point.

“Okay,” he murmured. “Look, I just think you’re in danger of taking yourself too seriously. You could end up on the wrong track. I think I’ve read every one of your books-I read the first one or two because it was a cheap thrill to say I knew the author, but after that I got to be a fan of yours. I still am. I also think I’m kind of a friend of yours and I hate to see you talk yourself into a mistake.”

One of the crosses a writer must bear is well-meaning advice from people who know utterly nothing about the craft. But MacIver was leading up to something in his transparently devious way and I let him set his own pace.

“That lost treasure-that’s the dog, Harry, it’s not just the tail.”

He blew smoke at his chest. “End of kindly advice. Okay? Still friends?”

I didn’t think that was the end of it at all. I said, “You said you wanted to talk business.”

He toyed with the burning cigarette. “I’m sorry, I kind of did this wrong. I can be a bull in a china shop. You’re not in much of a mood to listen.”

“As long as it’s not another piece of literary criticism.”

“Why don’t we have a drink?”

“You talk like a man with bad news.” My mind leaped to his earlier remarks about my visa.

“Not bad news. A little off-the-record information and some advice, that’s all.”

“About what?”

“You want a drink? I’m going to have one.”

“I think I’ll pass.”

MacIver summoned a waiter who took some time reaching us; he didn’t say anything until after he’d ordered another bourbon. Then he plucked the cigarette pack from his shirt pocket, found it was empty, crushed it in his fist and excused himself to hunt for the cigarette vending machine. I saw him intercept a waiter who gave him directions.

He returned simultaneously with his drink order; he asked the waiter for the luncheon check and sat down stripping the cellophane from the cigarette pack. I said, “I gather your department doesn’t have close rapport with the Surgeon General.”

“I try to quit now and then. Every time I do, we get some kind of crisis. I figure if I keep smoking maybe it’ll deter the start of World War Three. It’s a small enough price to pay. That girl Nikki, she smokes, doesn’t she?”

I was taken aback. “Now and then.”

“You keep in touch with her, don’t you?”

“Why?”

“How deep and heavy did it get between you two? I’ve got a reason for asking. Somebody told me she was pretty deep in your guts, but that was a while ago.”

I was knotting up slowly, inside. “Evan, if you’ve got a point to make …”

“How much do you know about her, Harry? What she does for a living, I mean.”

I stared at him. “That’s a cheap shot.”

“I’m not trying to pry, Harry. I promise you I already know a lot more about it than you do. I’m not pumping you for private information, I only want to know how much she told you.”

“I don’t see where it’s any of your business.”

“Well it’s exactly my business, but you’re right-you don’t have to answer the question. Suppose I give you some information, instead. This is off the record-I want that understood. We’re not supposed to go around giving out information to people who aren’t in the Firm. But you look like you’re on the way to Russia on this book of yours, and I’d better set you straight. This wasn’t the Agency’s idea, my boss doesn’t know anything about it. I’m talking to you on my own. That’s why it’s off the record. You understand?”

“I don’t understand at all. You haven’t said anything yet.”

“Well I assume at least you know she works for the Israeli government. Specifically, she works for an agency that gets Jews out of Russia.”

“I know all that.”

“Uh-huh, it wasn’t likely you didn’t, but when people are working her side of the street you never know how much they’re willing to spill to their lovers. For all I knew she told you she was a fund-raiser.”

“She does that sometimes.”

“It’s only a cover, Harry. On the surface it’s a legitimate agency-they do raise funds, they agitate for publicity and demonstrations wherever they think they can arouse public opinion against Soviet policy. That’s on the surface. They also grease the wheels inside Russia-they get out pamphlets that tell Russian Jews how to get through all the red tape they have to go through to get an exit visa.”

“You haven’t shocked me yet,” I said. “I don’t see what you’re leading up to.”

“It’s an underground railroad. They work with Jews who can’t get official permission to leave the country. They print up false documentation and they falsify records in some of the local OVIR offices. They’ve got a fair-sized fifth-column staff inside the Soviet Union. It’s very Jewish and very efficient-an organized operation. It’s an agency of the Mossad, out of Tel Aviv.”

I had half guessed that much months before. I still wasn’t stirred much by his revelations; only by his intense air of conspiracy, which seemed an unjustifiedly melodramatic pose.

The waiter brought the check face-down on a saucer. MacIver took out a credit card. I said, “Expense account?”

“Sure.”

“Then I won’t fight over it.”

“Anyway, I invited you.” He signed the check and put his credit card on top of it. The waiter took it away. MacIver said, “You’re not Jewish.”

“Riddle me no games, Evan.” I was angry with his pointlessly roundabout attack-like a dog that turned several full circles before lying down: a ritualistic habit, indulged in whether there was a need for it or not.

“They break their asses to recruit non-Jewish help. You’d be a perfect courier if you got your visa. They need couriers badly.”

“And?”

“I just want to warn you. It’s off the record, as I said. Screw her eyes out if you want to, Harry, but don’t let the little bitch con you into joining her pack of running dogs. The chances are you wouldn’t come back from Siberia before the year two thousand.”