Kolchak's Gold

by Brian Garfield

  The dawn sky had a bruised coloration and it promised to be another oppressive grey day; the trees were limp and heavy, the crumpled folds of the hills were blue with dull shadows. The truck’s window crank, designed by some sinister idiot, hammered the side bone of my knee.

  A small stone farmhouse on the left: Pudovkin swung the wheel and we angled across into its yard. I stiffened.

  “We’ll lay over here.”

  He drove it right into the barn and a man came down from the house, a big man with his face glowing in the chill wind. We dismounted from the truck and Pudovkin smiled but the farmer did not. Pudovkin had begun to utter a greeting but now suddenly his voice stopped, as if someone had shot it.

  I said, “What is it?”

  The farmer only shook his head and closed the barn behind us and took us to the house. He was reaching for a wide rake when I went inside with Pudovkin.

  The woman was stout and I heard the cry of an infant somewhere in the house. Pudovkin and I stood in the kitchen stamping and blowing through our cheeks. Pudovkin pulled off his gloves and blew on his hands. “Hello, Raiza.”

  “You’re still too thin,” she said.

  “Boris has a long face.”

  “He heard something. I don’t know.”

  Through a steamy window I saw the farmer raking the yard, obliterating the tracks our truck had made.

  Pudovkin said, “We haven’t eaten all night.” He took me through the house and showed me the bathroom. I heard his footsteps recede; the farmer banged into the house and they talked in the kitchen. I could hear the voices, not the words.

  I let the water run until the rust cleared out of it. The trickle spiraled down an icicle that hung from the spout. When I turned it off the waterpipes banged. I found a towel and scrubbed my face warm.

  I found Pudovkin at the kitchen table, his jaws ruminating bread. “We’ve had a little trouble. The man I was to turn you over to—he was to take you across to the mainland and drive you down the Caucasus. He’s been arrested.”

  I sat down very slowly as if the chair might break under me. “Then they know.”

  “No. The man’s a Jew, they arrest them for sport. It doesn’t mean this has anything to do with you.”

  The farmer stood at the stove, brooding, his nose tucked inside the upturned collar of his coat: “Perhaps you’d better change your plans, Mikhail.”

  Pudovkin said, “The car is ready on the other side?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we’ll have to go as planned. Our papers go with that car, not with any other.”

  “Suppose Leonid gives them the plate number?”

  “Will he?”

  The farmer turned. “He won’t volunteer it. But if they put pressure on him.… You can’t hold that against a man. Anyone would break.”

  Pudovkin said, “But they’d have to know what to ask him.”

  “They may know that he arranged for a boat. I don’t altogether trust the man he got the boat from. The man’s a gentile.”

  “So am I,” Pudovkin said.

  “I trust you, Mikhail, I do not trust this man who has the boats.”

  “Then why use him?”

  “In the winter our usual man takes his fishing boats to the yards at Yalta for refinish.”

  They excluded me. I was apart but not aloof. I couldn’t interfere; in any case the only thing I could do to change things would be to walk out. I considered it: at least it would take the burden off these people. It was none of their blame.

  Pudovkin said, “Suppose we tried to get a different boat tonight. From someone else.”

  “We might try. I doubt it would throw them off.”

  “It might keep us out of a trap. If the man’s informed they’ll be watching to see who comes to use his boat.”

  The farmer left the house almost immediately and without any further talk; it was settled.

  Pudovkin took me into a bedroom. “You’d better try to sleep. We’ll be leaving at night fall. I’m afraid you’ll be burdened with my company for another few days. I’ll have to take Leonid’s place with you. It will be all right.”

  I said, “You were planning to turn back here—do it. Just tell me where to find the car on the other side. I can drive myself.”

  “You wouldn’t get fifty kilometers. Put it out of your mind. And don’t be gallant—don’t run away to save the rest of us. If you’re caught we’re all caught. You need my help and I need yours. You see?”

  He was right; I had to give that one up.

  I slept through a snowfall and at dusk we had to shovel the barn doors clear before we could bring out the truck. A surly wintry evening; we ate quickly and washed down the food with strong local wine. I shook hands gravely with the farmer’s wife and then the three of us set off in the truck. I rode in the middle and tried to keep my knees out of the way of the shift lever. Boris, the farmer, was driving: he would drop us and take the truck back to his farm to await Pudovkin’s return.

  I said, “What about the load of coats?”

  “I delivered them this afternoon,” Pudovkin said.

  “You’ve had no sleep at all then.”

  “There’s plenty of time to rest when we’re dead.” He seemed pleased with himself.

  We reached the coast several miles south of the city of Kerch. A man stood on the stony beach holding the bow rope of a dinghy. The farmer introduced him and Pudovkin shook his hand; I saw money change hands and then Boris was bear-hugging all around and walking back up to the road. I felt lucky to be still wearing Vassily Bukov’s knee-high rubbers; we shoved the dinghy into the surf and clambered into it and the boatman picked up the oars. Above us the truck began to move back up the road and the weather swallowed its lights quickly. We pitched out through a crashing froth that soaked us with freezing spray but the boatman was superb with his oars—we never shipped a wave.

  The fishing boat lay at anchor without lights; we climbed over the low transom and the boatman fixed the dinghy to its davits and went forward to start his engine. Pudovkin and I went below. The crew cabin was tiny; there were four hammocks and it stank of fish. The engine came alive with a guttural growl and we heard the anchor cable scrape; a few moments later the cabin floor tipped underfoot as the stern went down with the screw’s bite.

  “It’s twenty-four kilometers by the route we’ll take,” Pudovkin said. “We’ll be about four hours.”

  “You’d better sleep, then.”

  “I intend to.”

  I left him cocooned in a hammock; I went up to the wheelhouse. I’ve never been a good sailor and I knew I couldn’t take the confinement of that stinking closed crew cabin; on deck in the air I might make it without losing my stomach.

  We ran without lights and the boatman kept her throttle at something like half speed because he didn’t want excessive noise and he didn’t want to throw too much of a visible wake. We were quartering across the current that flowed through the strait from the Sea of Azov into the Black Sea; it was a rough ride and I clung to handholds.

  For two hours we rode the bucking deck together and never learned each other’s names; I think we both felt it was better not to know. We exchanged meaningless small talk, neither of us giving anything away. He told me a little about fishing and a little about the waters hereabouts.

  In mid-channel we hit a crosschop of conflicting currents that was too much for me and I had to hang over the stern rail at one side of the dinghy and cat up my dinner. The rest of the ride was agony.

  Once he throttled down and I looked up in alarm; after a while I caught sight of lights moving past our port side in the distance. The boatman identified it as the night ferry to Kerch. We pitched derelict in the sea’s short chop until distance absorbed the ferry.

  After midnight we went ashore in the dinghy and Pudovkin paid the boatman the second half of his money. Again the handshake—in contrast to the ritual bear-hug of friends—and then Pudovkin and I climbed the steep rocks in a frigid wind. I could hear t
he chatter of my own teeth.

  “I’m afraid we have a walk ahead of us. I didn’t trust him enough to have him put us down too close to the car. Are you up to it?”

  “Is there a choice?”

  He laughed and went striding toward the coast road, setting an example I’d have been embarrassed not to follow since I was half his age. On the boat I’d been convinced I could survive anything so long as it was on dry land but now I found the bite of that arctic wind and the lash of driven snowflakes to be equally painful. I’ve never thought myself a hypochondriac but that night I had visions of trenchfoot and frostbite and pneumonia.

  I don’t know how long we walked. I had passed the point of exhaustion and had made a fine discovery: there was no such thing as second wind. But it was still dark when Pudovkin led us down a snow-covered side road that appeared to be nothing more than dirt-track ruts with tufts of weed sprouting from the center hump. We had a limited amount of light, reflecting down from the underbellies of the clouds; it had stopped snowing at some indeterminate time in the night and Pudovkin said the lights were those of a town beyond the ridge inland of us. Whenever the wind let up we could hear the crash of surf below to our left. There was a gothic wildness to the night: snow-mists swirled around us and the wind had a dismal voice.

  I bumped into Pudovkin’s shoulder before I realized he had stopped; belatedly I saw that the snow-covered mound in front of us was a car—a Volkswagen by its shape. We batted the two-inch white cake off the windshield and rear window and then Pudovkin opened the door to release the catch of the front hood.

  He stood looking into the orifice. “You’d think there’d be a shovel. Well we’ll have to make do.” He handed me the jack handle and went at it with his gloved hands. It was impossible not to admire his self-control. We shoveled snow clear of the exhaust pipe and scraped purchase-tracks for the wheels and then we let the wind blow us back to the car. At least there were chains on the rear tires.

  Pudovkin found the key under the seat and we had some trouble before the car would start. From the diminutive size of its oval rear window I assumed it was very old—early nineteen-fifties at best—but after a great deal of weak grinding it caught and Pudovkin revved it mightily. He made sure it was warmed enough not to stall before he tried putting it in gear.

  The night’s coat of granulated-sugar snow treacherously concealed an underlayer of glazed ice; we skidded loosely all the way out to the main road but the chains kept us moving. When we reached the road I said, “Shouldn’t we sweep over our tracks?”

  “The wind will do it for us.”

  We jingled slowly south and in a little while daylight began to flood across the ridges, scattering the shadows.

  I tried to navigate but the map of Georgia and the Caucasus was not of the finest scale and did not show all the back roads; often we reached intersections not indicated by the map and had to guess. We were trying to avoid the seaside resorts but at the same time we could not afford to take the main inland routes because they were summer roads high up in the Caucasus and if you got stuck in snowdrifts up there they would be carrying your body out in the spring. The late snowfall had been a bad break all around; it restricted our choices of routes, it slowed our travel and it left tracks.

  On the stretches between resort towns we tried to get down onto the main roads because they were plowed clear; along here we removed the chains and Pudovkin drove too fast for the roads, the tires leaving black smears on the oil-smudged curves, the beetle running along with a complaining rubbery whine.

  On the northern approaches to Tuapse we stopped at a government pump to fill the tank and put oil in the crankcase and Pudovkin asked the attendant about the weather to the south. There had been less snow down there, the man said; he heard Sochi was completely snow-free.

  We had come only a bit better than a hundred miles since dawn and it was already late afternoon. We’d last eaten at midnight—food we’d carried ashore from the boat—and we were famished; we bought bread and tinned herring and beer and I purchased a cheap composition suitcase because my paper-wrapped bundle had been ruined by last night’s weather. When we returned to the car Pudovkin said, “If we run straight through we’ll reach the border by tomorrow night. What do you say?”

  “I’ll take another turn at the wheel, then.”

  He’d been reluctant to let me drive before; he was still reluctant—he loved to drive, particularly on bad roads. “I should have been a taxi driver or a racer,” he said. “Isn’t it childish?”

  We ate on the move and then he spread the map across his knees and directed me to the left up a steep pitted asphalt street; we had to get around Tuapse because at this time of year the police would notice any strange car in the deserted streets.

  The detour took us well back into the hills before we could turn south again and the snow was deep along the shoulders; we had to put the chains on again.

  Darkness fell and there was no moon—the clouds were still with us. We crawled because it was hard to see: the line of definition was poor between what was road and what was not road. The country there is jagged and humpy and the hills are studded with low scattered trees. Down below along the coast it is semitropical with palmlike vegetation and white-roofed seaside houses but these hills, footing against the mysterious Caucasian Mountains, are as primitive as something in Nepal. It is twenty miles between habitations and there are no towns; the roads at best are farm-truck tracks and our game antique beetle had as much trouble as it could handle.

  Go a little higher in the mountains to the left and you would find yourself in valleys inhabited by tribes of prehistoric persuasion among whom the people grow to fantastic ages and technology is unknown. The hold of Soviet civilization is precarious on these fringes and nonexistent in the interior: like the role of colonial forts on an African frontier in the eighteen fifties. Bukov had elected this route for that very reason but it didn’t make the journey any less alarming: only the fragile heartbeat of our antique Volkswagen kept us alive. Chilled beyond the poor heater’s capacity we labored through the hills and I think privately both of us prayed, each in his own way, although I doubt Pudovkin was any more religious than I.

  In predawn murk we reached a signpost and found we were several miles southeast of where we thought we were. We had to backtrack to an intersection and turn west toward the coast to avoid being forced up into impassable mountains.

  We were beyond Sochi now, somewhere above Sukhumi, and there was no alternative but to drop straight along to the main coast highway and follow it south.

  “There is a checkpoint below Sukhumi. Too many arms smugglers trying to sell in Turkey. They have deliberately made this bottleneck—everyone who goes south must go through there. The alternate back roads have been closed off by explosives.”

  “Then we’ll just have to find out if our papers are good enough.”

  “I’m not concerned about the papers. But we’ve left possible leaks behind. Leonid, the one the police arrested. The man who has boats—the one Boris doesn’t trust. Or that one who took us across the straits. The checkpoint may have been warned.”

  “Why don’t you turn back, then. I’ll go on through alone. If they take me at least you’ll have time to get out of the country yourself.”

  He said, “I don’t wish to leave. It’s my home.”

  Ten minutes later he broke the silence again. “I had better tell you the plan in any case. You will have to do the last of it yourself since I am not going to cross the border with you.”

  “I thought I was just going to walk across through the fence.”

  “That used to be possible. But on account of the arms smuggling they have mined the border.”

  I took my eyes off the road to glance at him. Bukov hadn’t said anything about mines. I suppose he’d seen no point in alarming me more.

  “Batumi is the Soviet border city. A village, really. Just before you reach it there is a fork, and we will take the Armenian route to the left, towar
d Leninakan. At one point about five kilometers south of Batumi the road skirts very close to the fence. There are guard towers—machine guns and searchlights. About one kilometer past that point, I will let you out of the car and you will be on your own. You will be about five hundred meters from the fence. There are a good many trees but not close together enough to be a forest. There is a metal culvert in the road which marks our spot. If you walk toward the fence from that culvert you will find a narrow foot track marked by four trees which grow along an exactly straight line. You have to be looking at them from the culvert to see the line because from any other angle they are just four trees among many. If you walk that straight line, keeping just to the left of the trees—within arm’s length—you will not step on a mine. It is a route we have used several times. We had to dig up two mines and de-activate them, and replace them.

  “Now the time to cross is at dusk, because the searchlights are least effective and daylight is poor. If you move slowly and watch the lights you’ll get through. The nearest searchlight tower is about two hundred meters from the point where you will cross. The fence itself is nothing, a few strands of barbed wire like a cattle fence, but the top strand is electrified with a very high charge. You must go through between the bottom strand and the middle one. Then you are in Turk territory but you must cross about twenty meters of open ground into the trees beyond. You are safe once inside those trees. You understand all this? I’ll give it to you again before we get there, but I want you to be making yourself ready in your mind. The trick of survival is to move slowly. Slowly. Every muscle screams to run but you must remember to be slow. All right?”

  “Yes. I’ll remember.” My pulse thudded just thinking about it.

  “There is a goat track up the river valley on the Turk side. Follow that path to the left about three kilometers and you will come to a road. A dirt road, but it has a fair amount of traffic from the coast. From there you should be able to get a lift into the town of Trabzon, only be sure it is not a Turk army vehicle you try to flag down. You have the Turkish visa among your new papers?”