The involuntary rictus of his smile betrayed him: he had known the answer before he’d posed the question. He’d only been watching to see how I would couch it. But knowing that only left me more baffled than before. What was he driving at?
He slid cup and saucer across the table and I had to get up to take it. The coffee was not very good.
He said, “I was trying to make the point that we’ve become quite concerned. I’d like your assurances that your account will be something more than mere journalism—something a good deal more substantial than the ‘human interest’ I mentioned.”
“I’ll be glad to give you those assurances. But I’m sure you know what sort of work I do. I’m sure that was clear before your government allowed me to come here.”
Zandor stared at me for a dubious moment. Then he made a gesture—a movement of shoulders and facial muscles. It was as if to say, Of course I know all this, but one has one’s orders. I still couldn’t fathom his purpose.
I tried to drive the nail home. “I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to get clearances and come here to do this work. Is it logical that I’d go through all that for the sake of a superficial story?”
“Logic is a test of consistency, not truth. The publishers for whom you write are all subsidiaries of giant capitalist corporations. We’re concerned about the risk of negative propaganda value in your work—perhaps not so much in what you wish to write, but in what your employers wish to publish. I’m sure you wouldn’t willingly act as a lackey of corrupt imperialism, Mr. Bristow, but they’ve always had their ignorant tools, haven’t they?”
“My publishers make no changes in my work without my permission.”
“Yes. But American books are sold in West Germany, aren’t they. The German translation rights can be quite lucrative for English-language authors, I’m told. And I don’t find it inconceivable that someone might suggest to you, merely in the interests of increasing the market for your book, that it would be politic perhaps to minimize the truths of Germany’s crimes and to fill that space, instead, with charming trivial incidents out of the recollections of inconsequential foot soldiers and civilians. Isn’t that possible, Mr. Bristow?”
I disliked him anyway; now I was annoyed and it made me reckless. “I didn’t realize the common foot soldier was inconsequential in the proletarian state, Mr. Zandor.”
He was taken aback. He had no sense of humor; he was stung by the rebuff. “I’m not a member of the Communist Party,” I said. “I’m not even a fellow traveler. I intend to write as accurate and unbiased an account as I possibly can. Those are my assurances—they haven’t changed since I came here. That’s the most we would expect of any Soviet historian who came to the United States.”
“You’re suggesting——”
“I’m suggesting I came here under certain terms and conditions, and I’ve lived up to them. That’s all.”
Zandor picked up his coffee, sipped from it and peered at me over the rim of the cup. After he put it down in the saucer he spoke. “It’s not for you to make terms, Mr. Bristow. It’s for you to accept them.” He spoke the sharp words as if they had been chipped out of hard steel.
“What terms am I to accept?”
“Perhaps I should remind you that Article Seventy of the Russian criminal code makes it a crime, punishable by seven years in prison, for any writer to disseminate slander concerning the Soviet Union—to disseminate it in the Soviet Union or abroad, it makes no difference.”
I didn’t reply to that; it would have been pointless. If the Soviet Union had expected me to slander them they wouldn’t have let me into the country in the first place. Zandor was only throwing raw meat on the floor. And I was beginning to suspect his threats were empty; I wasn’t sure of his position in the government but I doubted he carried the guns for it. It hadn’t escaped my attention that there was every likelihood he had been sent here by the KGB to intimidate me; Bukov had told me that Bizenkev had been against my visit from the first and this might be merely the KGB’s way of keeping their oar in.
Zandor used the excuse of drinking his coffee to let the pause extend. Finally he put the cup down again, empty now, and put his cold eyes on me. “In the spirit of friendship I feel I must advise you that when the records of your researches are examined in Moscow—and that will take place before your departure from the Soviet Union—when the investigation is made, it will look much better for you if it is clear that the preponderance of your ‘obsessive curiosity,’ as you put it, has been devoted to matters of consequence. I would prefer not to have to add more long lists of menus and railway schedules to these summaries.”
He tapped the stack of papers meaningfully, and continued:
“By the same token you may decide to agree that it would be wise to continue your personal interviews with veterans who occupied more significant positions during the war than those you’ve seen fit to meet thus far. I’m sure men like the tank driver you interviewed, and the postal clerk Bukov, can contribute very little toward a real understanding of the German criminals and the genius of those Russian strategists who defeated the German war machine.”
I might have pointed out Bukov’s record as confidant of a key Russian general but I didn’t; there was no point arguing with Zandor and furthermore I did not want to bring up Bukov’s name. It was enough for Zandor to have mentioned it; it had struck a chill into me.
Zandor said, “I’ve taken the trouble of making a small list of names and addresses. These are all people of great distinction who have been asked to cooperate with you by granting interviews from their busy schedules. We’ve arranged tentative times and places for the meetings—you’ll find it all here.”
He produced a sheet of paper, neatly typed with names, places, dates and times; while I glanced at it I heard him say viscously, “I do hope you’ll take advantage of this opportunity, Mr. Bristow.”
There was the unspoken warning that if I didn’t take advantage of it I was in great trouble.
I folded the list and slipped it into my pocket. “Thank you. I’ll be happy to meet them.”
There was a drawer on his side of the table. He pulled it open and swept the stack of reports into it, and snapped it shut. Then he stood up. “I wouldn’t want to keep you any longer from your work, Mr. Bristow.”
He walked me as far as the door. We shook hands and I went out into the foyer; Timoshenko broke out in a wide grin—as if he were relieved to see me again. I glanced back toward the door. The silent overpolite way Zandor closed it was an indication of his dislike.
“You had a good meeting, yes?” Timoshenko was eager.
“It was very good.” I saw no reason to terrorize him. One of us was enough.
At some point along the drive back down from the heights to the city, I began to shake badly and I asked Timoshenko to stop the car. I felt faint and queasy; I stood by the side of the road getting a grip on myself. I’d faced up to Zandor with a cool aplomb that had taken me by surprise but now the reaction had set in and I was helpless to control it.
Timoshenko sat behind the wheel staring straight ahead. His knuckles were white on the wheel. If he looked at me it was only when my back was turned. I wondered how he sized it up.
Zandor was one of those men to whom deviousness is an entertainment. His threats had been obvious but he hadn’t said anything explicit and that could be maddening, as he knew well. I was on probation without having been told the crime of which I was accused or suspected. Now I understood the emotions of Kafka’s man on trial.
Were they onto my search for the gold? Or had they decided I was working with Bukov and his underground railway? Or did they suspect I was a CIA spy?
All my imagination needed was the knowledge that these wild things were at all possible. A year ago the Kremlin expelled a visiting American congressman* from the USSR after charging him, on the flimsiest suspicion, with spying for American secret police and planning to create subversion to incite Russians to betray their re
gime.
For all the talk of cultural exchange and dwindling barriers it’s still a fact that the Soviet Union is ruled by a dictatorship. Like any other tyranny it suffers from the paranoia that results from the precariousness of its leaders’ insecure positions. To maintain power they hand down arbitrary decisions from which their own citizens, let alone foreigners, have no appeal; and the mere suspicion of guilt is more than enough to lead to conviction and sentencing. Otherwise the dictators wouldn’t survive in office.
So it didn’t matter whether I’d done anything wrong; it mattered only whether I’d given them grounds for suspicion.
I didn’t think I had. If I were under serious suspicion they’d have expelled me or arrested me; they wouldn’t have turned me loose to go back to my work.
So they didn’t have anything concrete. But it was always possible an attack was shaping up; since they weren’t sure, they had to blanket all possibilities. So they warned me that I was under suspicion. It was a gesture; in specific terms meaningless. But I couldn’t know positively that it was meaningless and therefore I would be off balance, perhaps frightened into abandoning my attack—if I’d had one in mind. Or conversely the warning might provoke me into an overt act that would give them a reason to arrest me.
It took time to reason this out but finally I was satisfied.
The cold sweat had dried on my face. I noticed for the first time that it wasn’t raining. I had no idea how long it had been since the rain had stopped.
The church bells startled me, clanging from the city’s crenellated onion domes. It was noon.
Half a precious day gone. But Zandor had offered to extend the visa. Because they didn’t suspect me after all—or because they wanted to give me enough rope?
I had a misty pointilliste view from the edge of the hill road: the center of Sebastopol, the loop of the harbor. Here and there a surviving old building but most of them were square, modern, sterile: you didn’t feel you were in old Russia. The city reminds one somewhat of San Diego with its tremendous naval base spreading out along the arm of the bay.
Sebastopol. my mother’s birthplace. I had lived with its history for so long that it hardly seemed foreign to me. The bleak grey skies and the dark sea that lapped against it, the stubborn stolid pedestrians, the sadness of its atmosphere. It was a city that had suffered; but it wasn’t an ancient city. Grigori Potempkin created the port of Sebastopol in 1784 on orders from Catherine the Great.
The city was built to serve Russia’s new Black Sea navy; Catherine had sent Potempkin, her lover, to build the port after Russia seized the Crimea from the Ottoman Turks. In 1787 the Turks counterattacked and the infant city withstood its first siege.
The Crimean War of 1854–1855—British and French fighting for the Turkish cause—put Sebastopol under cannon fire again and for eleven months the city heroically resisted. In 1914 the Turks attacked yet again, their navy shelling the city. After Kolchak’s collapse in 1920 Sebastopol was Wrangel’s headquarters and had to withstand the onslaught of Red armies while the White Russians made their last stand; and then came the Germans in 1941.
Such a city has a character and a spirit. I was trying to find these things. I knew the dry facts, the dates and the numbers and the details of record; I did not yet know the people. This was what Zandor pretended not to understand when he complained of the insignificance of the persons I chose to interview.
I went back to the car and asked Timoshenko to drive me to the archives.
Zandor had made an appointment for me that night with a retired navy commander who told me very little and conformed religiously to the party line. I left early and Timoshenko and I drove slowly through a swarm of sailors who were coming ashore from a ship that had just docked. We stopped at a nightclub where the music was loud and the crowd raucous; we drank for half an hour, Timoshenko in very good cheer. It was past ten when I returned to the hotel.
When I opened a drawer to get a clean folded shirt to lay out for the morning I discovered someone had searched the room. The things in the drawers had been crumpled by hands that had pawed quickly through. Someone had made a quick but thorough search. Oddly my notes themselves seemed to have been undisturbed. Probably those who had been sent to search the place were not considered sufficiently literate in English to understand anything they might find in my writings. In fact it was probable that they hadn’t really expected to find anything. I took it to be a message from Zandor—punctuation to his earlier warnings.
There was more, in the morning when I went outside to wait for Timoshenko. The man in the car could have been waiting to pick someone up and the man at the shop window could have been looking for a gift to buy his wife but I didn’t think they were.
That day in the captured German files I found a document which confirmed everything I had assembled thus far about Kolchak’s gold. I can recall it exactly; it is imprinted on my brain.
CERTIFIED TRUE COPY
Ministry of Transport & Communication
Railway Department—City of Chelyabinsk
12 April 1944
Certificate Number S.D.C. 4/1628
This clearance certifies that the goods wagons Numbers 1708, 1765, 1900, 2171, 2177, 2509, 2510, 2518, 2523, 2834 have been reserved by this Ministry for the transport of State Properties to Lugansk, and that by Authority of the Supreme Soviet these wagons must be cleared with utmost priority and dispatch at all points of transit.
—F. G. Grizodubov
Director, Railway Department (stamp)
It was a forgery of course. But a good one. I saw no physical evidence to indicate it wasn’t genuine; it was only the fact that it appeared in the German files rather than the Russian ones. It was a copy; the original had disappeared with the train. From its location in the files I knew something else as well: it was in one of the von Geyr folders dated November 1943 and it wasn’t there by mistake; therefore the Germans had created the forgery well in advance of the need for it.
It was not the final clue I needed. But it was the last link. It gave me the date and the route; I needed only one more fact.
Getting that fact was going to be harder than I had anticipated: Zandor had made it harder. The detail I needed was to be found in a large stack of documents which Zandor could only think trivial. Railway schedules to Zandor were on a par with café menus.
By now I had managed to reassure myself that the Zandor interview had had a silver lining: I convinced myself it demonstrated they didn’t have any idea I was looking for the gold—that they didn’t even know of the gold’s existence, let alone my interest in it. I won’t take the trouble to spell out the chain of reasoning by which I came to that conclusion; at best it was rationalization. In any case I allowed myself to see no reason to abandon my pursuit of the treasure. The only problem was to misdirect Zandor’s attention.
There was no way to get the answer without looking at that stack of railway schedules. I couldn’t hide the fact that I was looking at them. The best I could do was sandwich the file number into the middle of a list of varied requests for all kinds of transport and supply records, so as to suggest I was analyzing the enormous job the Russians had done to supply their armies in the south (while Hitler let his troops starve to death). I even made awed remarks—along those exact lines—to the woman at the desk. I hoped my friend at the corner table overheard me.
I left the archives that day in a disoriented daze—half euphoric and half terrified. I had done something for which—by Soviet standards—I could be shot.
Timoshenko was sensitive to the vibrations. “You have found what you were looking for, yes?”
“I guess I did,” I confessed; and he beamed and insisted we have a drink to celebrate.
The drink became several drinks and we were both in high cheer that evening. But the hangover set in at about the time I returned to the hotel. I began to tremble when I pulled the three tightly rolled documents out of the sleeve of my jacket. They weren’t notes of mine. They were original
documents and I had stolen them from the archives, rolling them like straws and sliding them up my sleeve like a cheap gambler hiding aces.
Unless they had seen me purloin the three papers—and they hadn’t, or they’d have arrested me on the spot—they weren’t likely ever to discover that they were missing. Railway schedules are not numbered individually. The same file number appears stamped at the top of every paper in the folder. With anything as commonplace as marshaling records they’d have had no reason to make a specific note of each sheet of paper. It was possible they had a notation of the total number of papers in the file but I doubted anyone would bother counting them—there had been at least five hundred in that file—and even if they did make a count they’d have no way of proving I was responsible for the discrepancy. Not if they didn’t find the documents on me.
I unfolded a map and studied it, and studied the papers I’d stolen; and then I destroyed the three documents by flushing them down the toilet in tiny pieces.
With them went the last written record of the final hiding place of Kolchak’s gold.
* Rep. James Scheuer, Democrat of The Bronx, New York.—Ed.
THE NAZI SCHEME*
1.
BETWEEN THE WARS
[From 1920 until 1944 the gold of the Czars rested undisturbed in its hiding place in the Siberian mountains. Speculations and conflicting reports to the contrary, it did not fall into the hands of partisans, Atamans, Reds, Whites, or the remnants of the Czech Legion. Buried under the rubble of its caved-in hiding place, it remained undiscovered and untouched while the world changed.]
In the decade that followed the Russian Civil War the Soviet state did not, as Marx would have had it, “wither away.” Instead it became ever more totalitarian after the ouster of Trotsky and the death of Lenin made room for the imposition of the absolute dictatorship of Josef Stalin.
The Communist state was threatened by “capitalist encirclement” and Stalin used that rationalization to justify the intimidation of the populace, the imposition of extreme propaganda measures and the infliction of the great purges which disposed of all suspected opposition to his despotic regime.
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