Kolchak's Gold

by Brian Garfield

  Finally she said, “I won’t give up my work, Harry. No more than you could.”

  There was more talk; it kept going in circles and after a while we sat in conflicting silences until she said, “Oh, dear, now you’re really angry with me.” She was watching me and I saw the shadow across her eyes; it was not the headache. I remembered something Haim had said to me once—probably one of his old sayings: Take care not to make a woman weep, for God counts her tears.

  I asked her how long she thought it might be; she said she had no idea. I said I could wait awhile until we found out; she said it might be months.

  “Look. Suppose I go back and finish up in the archives. I could bring my notes back here to write the thing.”

  “Could you really? Don’t you always need to go back to the archives to look up things you missed and double check other things?”

  That was true; it was the way I always worked and I’d told her that. Now I felt she was using my own words against me. “You want me to go,” I accused her.

  “No. My God, no.”

  “Do you love me, Nikki?”

  “With all my heart.” She turned her face against my chest; her words were muffled: “With all my heart, Harry.”

  Finally I said, “I’ll have to think about it. There must be some way.”

  But there wasn’t and she was right: after another week I was restless and growing irritable.

  It was a Sunday morning in her flat. The hot sun through the venetian blinds laid horizontal bars of light across the bedclothes. I remember her face, childlike with the drowsy innocence of first awakening. I said something cranky, something about the sun waking us up—why couldn’t she put drapes across those windows? And she got up without a word and padded to the chest of drawers and pawed through her open handbag until she found an envelope.

  It was an El Al folder with a ticket inside. The flight was scheduled to depart at two o’clock that day, that Sunday.

  “I bought it early in the week. I knew you’d be ready by today.”

  “You know me too well, Nikki.”

  “I know it’s possible to manage to live without the people you can’t live without.” She pressed the ticket into my hand. “I know how it is, Harry. I understand.”

  “Do you? Well, maybe you do—I guess I’m not the only idiotic fool you’ve ever met.”

  “Oh Harry …” And I stopped her with a kiss and we made a frantic kind of love and sometime afterward she said, “You’ll miss your plane—you’d better hurry.”

  “I suppose I’d better.”

  She went with me as far as she was allowed to the customs departure gate. “I’ll come soon, darling.”

  “Promise me that.”

  “Yes—it’s a promise I’m making to myself too.”

  “Wangle it, Nikki. You’re good at that—twisting men around your finger.”

  We both laughed but it was brief laughter. We understood, both of us, that it might be a long while.

  Abruptly I kissed her very hard. “That’s to make sure you don’t forget me.”

  “I have a very poor memory,” she said. “You’d better do that again.”

  I obeyed but when I kissed her I felt the warm tears on her cheek and then she was wheeling away from me: “Ciao, Harry …” and she was running away through the airport. They were calling the flight; I couldn’t follow her. I had the impulse to throw the ticket on the floor and go back with her but in the end I went through the customs and emigration line and boarded the flight with stinging eyes and an empty weight in my throat that wouldn’t go up and wouldn’t go down.

  I knew it was foolish, immature. But that didn’t ease it. I think I was sad because it made me realize we were not complete romantics at heart, either of us. If this love had been paramount we each should have been willing to make nearly any sacrifice for it but we hadn’t been willing to do that. We both understood we’d have no happiness together if it meant sacrificing our individual raisons d’être.

  She’d seen it faster than I had; she’d known the day when I would no longer reject the airplane ticket. Another month and we might have been bickering, at each other’s throats. Nikki had been wise enough to make the decision for us and I should have been grateful.

  Love is meaningless without dignity and it is self-destroying wherever one’s success means the other’s failure. Nikki and I were too well aware of that. I think we both regretted it. It seemed unfair and at times I grew angry with both of us, I felt we had made a selfish and petty decision; I felt we must be small people crippled by unheroic realism—it wasn’t that this was the wrong age for the grand passion; it was that we were the wrong people. We were too ordinary, too hidebound in our commitments to ephemeral occupations, too egocentric in our smaller-than-life way.

  In that manner I alternated between extremes, sometimes maudlin and sometimes confident that we had made the best decision. But underneath it always I felt we would find our way together again. I trusted that; I believed it with all my heart.

  I spent a good part of that sweating August at home in New Jersey avoiding getting splendidly drunk. I had a secretary in to transcribe the tape recordings from my talks with Haim Tippelskirch and the others to whom he’d introduced me in Israel; I went over that material as it came from her typewriter and I spent two or three weeks going back over the material on Sebastopol and the Kolchak retreat. I had been away from it all long enough to discover some new things in it; I made some notes to take with me to the archives and late in the month went down to Washington.

  My first act there was to visit the Soviet Embassy. There was some encouragement: they had not shut the door on the possibility of my visiting the Crimea for the purpose of looking at their archives and interviewing survivors. Neither had they opened it wide, however. There was a bureaucratic wall of rules behind which the embassy and OVIR (the office of visa registration) took refuge. There were more applications for me to fill out, more questions to answer. The Soviet hacks had thwarted my efforts for years but I was determined to outlast them.

  At the same time I had more procedural battles to fight in the Pentagon in my attempts to get access to several cartons of Wehrmacht and SS records, particularly the stenographic minutes of daily staff meetings—records that were essential to my Sebastopol book. These initially had gone into the West German central archives but some clerical mistake had moved them into the Political Archives of the Foreign Ministry in Bonn and a supervisory clerk had discovered them, decided they didn’t belong there and shipped them out to the Americans shortly before the end of the Occupation. So far as I knew they had never been examined in any detail. Nor would they ever be unless I could find some lever with which to pry them open.

  The machinery was in motion but there was no rushing it. I needed the records of British Intelligence and Expeditionary Force operations in the Russian Civil War for the Kolchak book; I flew to London in the fall and spent weeks in the Imperial War Museum and the archives of the Ministry of Defence in the Old Admiralty Building. I had it half in mind to swing down to Israel before going home; I put through an international trunk call and finally, in spite of everything the telephone service could do, I reached Nikki.

  It was a poor connection but it was wonderful to hear her voice. “They must have routed this call through Johannesburg.”

  “Oh, Harry, I can hardly hear you.”

  “I’m thinking of coming to Tel Aviv next week,” I shouted.

  “Oh dear—I won’t be here. They’re sending me to the Far East for several weeks. Oh crap.”

  “It’s a conspiracy against us. Christ.”

  “I’m so sorry. I’ll see if I can get it changed—can I call you back tomorrow?”

  We arranged that she would; and she did so but she hadn’t been able to change the schedule of her mission to Tokyo and Peking. There’s no purpose in recounting the details of our conversation; we said our disheartened farewells and I returned to my work with somnambulistic determination.


  She had never given me a clear picture of her position or function in the refugee organization. I knew she had to do with fund-raising but obviously there was more to the job than that. I took it for granted she was engaged in clandestine dealings to some extent—the efforts to get Jews out of Russia had always been tinged with the coloration of espionage and intrigue but the business of espionage was far more humdrum than the moviemakers would have us believe. Whatever her job, it didn’t put her in any evident physical danger. But what began to concern me now was the realization that her position in the organization must be a good deal higher than I’d taken it to be. Perhaps because of her youth and vivacity I’d taken it for granted she had an ordinary minor post of some sort; but you didn’t send your minor clerks off globetrotting to Washington and Tokyo and Peking. Nikki was nobody’s secretary.

  So it now appeared that I was in love with a person of some importance in the political scheme of things.

  I found this discouraging, not because it created any sense of competition but because it made me realize how seriously committed she must be. This was no mere youthful enthusiasm for a cause. She had to be fairly high up in her organization; it stood to reason she must have had decision-making authority. At any rate if I had used my head earlier I should have known she was no fuzzy-headed do-gooder. She was not merely serious; she was dedicated to whatever she was doing and it was no passing fancy. It was becoming very unlikely she would ever decide to throw it over and come rushing into my arms to stay.

  There was the alternative of continuing an intermittent affair but that held very few attractions for me. I’d had some success but my income wasn’t unlimited and I couldn’t afford to keep up a zany schedule of globetrotting, particularly since I had to conserve money for my possible trip to Sebastopol; and it looked as if Nikki had no idea when—or if—she would be able to come to the States.

  For nearly a year we kept in touch—long letters and the occasional extravagant phone call. We were neither of us at ease with gushy sexual prose; often it was a strain to write because I was too verbally inhibited to put my feelings on paper adequately, and writing long paragraphs to her about the progress of my work was no decent substitute. Nevertheless we looked forward to each other’s letters and I sometimes got angry when more than a week went by without a few pages from her. She kept me appraised of the unexciting doings of the handful of people I’d met in Israel; she wrote nice chatty letters about some of the eccentric characters who shared her suite of offices; at intervals she went off to Stockholm or Vienna or Belgrade and I would get incisively witty travelogues from her with those postmarks on them. She never talked about her work in any detail; only the occasional reference to a conference of Jewish organizations in Brussels or the rather proud statement that three hundred Jews had been able to emigrate from the USSR in a month’s time.

  After several months I began to fill with hopelessness. Gradually I started to suspect that there was no good end to this, that our long-distance affair was only a form of self-flagellation. The odds against us were high and I began to defend myself against ultimate heartbreak by thrusting Nikki away from the center of my emotions.

  I began making the rounds of the Washington parties again; in time it became a series of casual beddings that lasted a night or a fortnight. It didn’t work. I found no distraction strong enough to threaten Nikki’s place in my soul.

  I became talkative and argumentative and found myself slinging opinionated remarks into the smallest cocktail-party opening. I must have become a pill. I discovered that I had opinions on everything and anyone who didn’t share them was a fool.

  I offered pat simplistic solutions to the problems of crime and drugs and race relations. I insulted bureaucrats and diplomats with equal obliviousness. Curiously, I became something of a lion that season—very much in demand—and I suppose it was partly because I had a successful spy book on the market and partly because my outspoken brashness was taken to be forthright and refreshing at those gatherings of pious discreet woolgatherers. The only parties at which I ceased to be welcome were George Fitzpatrick’s; wit was too highly prized at those bacchanals and it appeared I had traded in my rapier on a broadsword—suddenly, literary celebrity or not, I was too gauche for Fitzpatrick and the invitations stopped. It was at this same time—the late spring and early summer of 1972—that my publishers booked, me onto several network television talk-shows and my forceful assertions about the Russians brought a ton of mail into the Dick Cavett offices while several officials—one of Cabinet rank—hinted to me that it would be wise if I tempered my pronouncements in view of the current Nixon rapprochement with Moscow.

  I hadn’t been making political remarks at all, but they were taken that way and with some justification: you can’t divorce nations from politics. But I wasn’t a political person. I’d grown up in the post-McCarthy era; it was no longer commonplace to be vocally anti-Communist and although I thought communism to be a system that was (if anything, and if possible) even worse than capitalism, I was not riding an ideological hobbyhorse. My outpourings were more like racist prejudices than political ones; at this time I was writing portions of the rough draft of my book on Kolchak and my feelings toward Russia were hardening. I was unable to find any consistent history of immorality in the West that matched the habitual behavior of the Siberian Cossacks, the Red Army and the Stalinists. I don’t cling to those views now. But my feelings at that time had an important bearing on the decisions I soon had to make. I think it’s important that in those days when I hadn’t yet begun to penetrate this nightmare I had got myself into the habit of making righteous distinctions between Us and Them. I was able to believe, somehow, that the longevity and numerical hugeness of Russian atrocities made them wholly different in kind from the American atrocities in Vietnam or the absolute and thorough corruption of the entire police department of New York.

  In retrospect I find it pathetic that I even made any pretense at objectivity in the things I wrote at that time. My bias was as clear-cut as the bias you find in the output of Soviet historians. It wasn’t long before I was deliberately seeking out evidences of Russian perfidy. That sort of selectivity can’t lead to a balanced report but when you’re in the grip of bigotry you don’t make those distinctions.

  The cause of it must have been my frustration with the way things were going between Nikki and me. I couldn’t bring myself to take out my anger on her; therefore I took it out on everything and everyone else. Yet perversely I chose as the main target of my hatred the very people whom Nikki herself regarded as The Enemy. Perhaps I was unconsciously trying to reassure her that I was on her side.

  A writer’s professional decisions often are the result of happenstance. Probably my mother’s nationality prefigured my interest in Russian history; but I didn’t hate my mother—the bias came from somewhere else. The shape of both projects—the Kolchak book and the Sebastopol book—had been changed considerably by several coincidences, mainly my chancing to meet Nikki and then, through her, my meeting Haim Tippelskirch.

  Because of these accidents my mind was attuned to things I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise: specifically the gold, in which I should have had a very limited interest had it not been for Haim’s obsession with it.

  Whenever I came across the remotest reference to Kolchak’s gold in my researches, my attention would rivet itself onto the reference. I ended up with a surprisingly thick file of notes on the subject.

  During the Second World War the German war machine made its deepest penetrations into southern Russia in the summer and fall of 1942. In the far south the Nazis had swallowed up the Black Sea and the Panzers were within striking distance of the shores of the Caspian. These penetrations took the Germans to a point nearly four hundred miles east of the longitudinal parallel of Moscow: the Wehrmacht pushed a great bulge into the lower belly of Russia.

  That year of 1942—as all the historians point out—marked the high point of Axis expansionism. We have wiped much of it from
our memories with the hindsighted rationalization that manpower and productivity made the Allied victory inevitable, but that was not necessarily the case in early 1942; the issue was still seriously in doubt before the strategic turning points at El Alamein, Stalingrad, Midway and the rest. Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo did have world conquest within their grasp for a brief while; it slipped quickly beyond reach but it was not inevitable that this happen.

  Nevertheless, even in those months there were noticeable weaknesses, in the German system of conquest. In spite of their masses of imported slave laborers from the conquered nations, the Germans had a limited manpower of “pure Aryans” who were thereby qualified, according to the sick standards of Nazi bureaucracy, for service to the Fatherland. Limited manpower meant limited productivity, even in a nation as highly industrialized as the German Reich. Technological advances and the use of slave labor helped to offset these weaknesses but technology was hideously expensive and the German economy became daily more unstable because its real productivity never matched its monetary needs for financing the war.

  The result was that Hitler was chronically broke. Theft—even the wholesale rape of national treasuries in the conquered lands—was not enough to feed the ravenous war machine. There were vital foreign products and raw materials which had to be imported from neutral trading countries. The neutrals always demanded hard currency and the Deutschmark was not considered a hard currency anywhere outside the Axis sphere. Hitler needed gold.

  He thought he had it in 1938: five hundred and ten tons of gold that had belonged to the Spanish Republic. Most of it was earmarked by Franco for payment to Germany in return for Nazi aid in the Spanish Civil War. But the Republicans in Spain had followed the example set by the Russian monarchists: they had taken their gold into exile with them. It went from Barcelona to Odessa aboard several ships and was taken to Moscow “for safekeeping.”*

  In 1940 the French treasury had been spirited to England via a roundabout route, a few jumps ahead of the blitzkrieg. The other occupied territories in Europe and Africa had no vast hoards of gold or hard currency with which to support Hitler’s needs. In the meantime steady inflation was doing morale no good on the home front and Berlin was increasingly hard pressed to meet its foreign-payment commitments.