Kolchak's Gold

by Brian Garfield

  And the smell in the taverna. Alcohol and tobacco: the spilled-beer aura of a bar anywhere. The room was crowded with dirty little checkerboard tables; it was near eight o’clock and midweek, the place wasn’t teeming, but it was the kind of low-roofed room that felt crowded even with half a dozen people in it: the air was thick with heavy body heat.

  There was a bar, topped with linoleum and bordered by dull chrome. The lights were weak. A full-bosomed woman came to wait on me. She had long wiry hairs on her legs. I said, “Is Pinar here?” and when she looked puzzled I tried it in German and in French. In any case she understood “Pinar” when it appeared in each language and finally she tapped my arm—Wait here—and went away through a rear door.

  A tired gnome served me food and beer at one of the tables. Globules of fat swam in the soup but I ate ravenously. I wished I had my pipe to smoke afterward. I sat back to wait for the woman, for Pinar. I was fighting to keep awake: I was wound up too tightly, to the point where I was convinced everyone who spoke within earshot was shouting—at me. I’d gone too long without sleep and I felt drunk, in that stage of inebriation where nothing I saw quite made sense anymore: perspectives were off, shapes were out of kilter, lights were blurred and too bright.

  I knew I had to keep a deliberate grip on sanity because I was close to losing it.

  The wind kept a branch scratching on the side of the taverna: I was irritably aware of it until someone switched on a scratchy little radio and turned it up too loud—the heavy twanging racket that passes for rock-and-roll east of Brindisi: one of the many things like ouzo and kebab and olive oil which the Greeks and Turks deny they have in common.

  A pulse drummed blood-red behind my closed eyelids. All my muscles were inflamed; my face was sore and scabbed from the glass cuts; my hands were skinned raw. I must have looked monstrous in my torn clothing. The beard stubble had grown perceptibly to the touch and my Russian shoes were scarred beyond repair.

  Someone shook me gently by the shoulder and I almost bolted out of the chair. It was the buxom woman: she had a dark crickety little man with her. “Pinar,” she said proudly, and went away.

  One eyebrow went up disdainfully as he looked at me. “Yes, luv?”

  “You’re Pinar?”

  “Yes, luv. I have rooms, if that’s what you’ve come to find. Can you pay?”

  “I’ve got money.” It penetrated that he’d taken one look at me, dishabille and all, and instantly spoken English. “I’ve just come through the border. Pudovkin told me to come to you.”

  Pinar sat daintily down on the edge of the chair beside me. He perched on it nervously. His hands fluttered when he spoke. “Pudovkin, luv? What did he say about me, then?”

  “Only that you could help me.”

  “Help you do what?”

  It stopped me cold, that question. I’d sustained myself with a goal: the goal was this place, this man; it had been a long time since I’d thought farther ahead than Turkey, which meant freedom, and Pinar, who meant help.

  Finally I said, “I’ve got a Turkish visa. I suppose I’ll be all right here?”

  “Of course, luv.” He touched a tear in the sleeve of my jacket. “What a frightful mess you are. We’ll have to get you cleaned up. Do you have a name, luv?”

  “Bristow. Harry Bristow.”

  His face changed.

  Pinar had half a dozen boardinghouse rooms on the floor above the taverna. By the time I had bathed and attempted to shave around the wounds, the dark woman had brought clean clothes for me from somewhere and a pair of Arab sandals. The clothes were a poor fit but I managed; anything would have done.

  I stretched out fully clothed on the bed and was unconscious before I thought to turn off the light.

  Two days in that place and I slept almost all of it away. Once—the second afternoon—I walked through the inferior regions of the town and bought a pipe and a pair of oxfords for my feet. I sorted the handful of note cards I’d had in my pockets—I’d lost a good many with my coat, unthinkingly leaving them in the pockets when I’d abandoned the coat. Most of the rest had gone with the suitcase on the barbed wire. The ones I’d kept in my pockets were those tracing my search for Kolchak’s gold and I no longer needed most of them because the most likely hiding place was burned into my memory cells too brightly ever to be extinguished. Late that afternoon I took the cards downstairs and threw them into the black wood stove and watched them turn to ash.

  Pinar caught me at it but concealed his curiosity. “Feel ready to talk, luv?”

  “I think so.”

  “Shall we have a drink then?” We had the place to ourselves. We took glasses of wine to a table and Pinar raised his drink in toast: “To your adventure.”

  “I could do without any more of it.”

  “Well, what now? Most of them I send straight on to Tel Aviv by way of Piraeus. I suppose I could arrange passage for you to the States, but you might find that more easily done at your own consulate in Ankara.”

  “I’d rather not advertise my whereabouts to the consulate.”

  “I see. Like that, is it, luv?” He had an insidious smile—as if we shared some clandestine purpose. Like an elbow nudge in the ribs. And always the single lifted eyebrow, the supercilious curl of lip. He reminded me a bit of Zandor, the aura of homosexuality; but Zandor was a mover. Pinar was only a connection: a man whose existence was like that of a crossroads, defined only in terms of those who touched his life briefly on their way to some other place.

  He contrived to be dainty and motherly; he succeeded only in being somewhat sleazy and conspiratorial. “Well then. A ticket to the States, will that do it? Can you pay?”

  I’d counted my remaining travelers checks; I could make it if I wanted to. For forty-eight hours I’d been asking myself about the next step. I hadn’t answered yet. “Let me stay a few more days and get it sorted out.”

  “No rush, luv. My house is your house.”

  On the following morning after a predawn rain I went down to the rocky shore and watched the gulls. Trying to decide. If I went home would MacIver leave it alone? Not bloody likely. They would put on all the pressures—everything from the revoked driver’s license and the IRS audits to the pressures on my publishers.

  But if not home—where? Tel Aviv? Nikki?

  I was a little old to run to a woman’s arms for succor; and Nikki was no longer mine. Or at least I was no longer hers. Indirectly it was Nikki who’d got me out of Russia alive but I still felt that annoying suspicion, that accusatory anger. When I began to analyze it I saw how flimsy it had become but still I couldn’t shake it off. I could go to her but would I ever trust her again?

  What else was there? Bukov had said it: Exile—a blind wandering to an unknown destination.

  I had to think about the rest of my life. Planning like a college boy trying to decide on a profession the night before commencement. How real was Ritter’s threat? Was I finished as a writer?

  What if I flew to Washington and walked into MacIver’s office and told him where to find the gold?

  It would get them off my back. I was. sure of it.

  But if I did that it would negate everything I’d done. Pudovkin would have died meaninglessly.

  I recoiled at that reasoning: it was the justification all the fools had used for keeping the Indochina war going long after it had been patently lost. Don’t let the soldiers die in vain. It’s specious reasoning—contemptible.

  And it had nothing to do with the issues. The facts hadn’t changed in a week: the reasons for my keeping the secret were the same now as they had been in Sebastopol. There was enough gold in the cache to inflate currencies to starvation levels or to slaughter thousands of people and I had refused from the outset to be the instrument of any such catastrophe and that fact was still the same. I’d believed it and I’d been willing to sacrifice Pudovkin’s life for that belief—and Bukov’s and several others’ along the way—if it had come to that—because at the time I’d been willing to sa
crifice my own as well. This was what would have been in vain if I changed my mind now. And it was a guilt I couldn’t face.

  Nor was I ready yet to face the only real alternative. I returned to the taverna still having made no decision for myself and feeling like some dreary imitation of Hamlet.

  Coming along the street I looked more closely at the front of the taverna than I’d done before and saw that it had been covered with a new façade. Somehow that made it look worse than the old buildings around it: renovation hadn’t disguised its age, only shown someone wanted to disguise it.

  It took a moment for my eyes to accommodate to the dimness inside. I was still by the door when Pinar greeted me there and led me through the room with the clandestine indifference of an arch headwaiter leading the way to an undesirable table. “I’ve got someone you’ll want to meet.” We went through the back door and past the foot of the stairs and he twisted the knob of a door which I had assumed led into some kind of office. I hadn’t been inside it before.

  Pinar’s hand fluttered at me. His cowardly half smile warned me. When the door swung out of the way I saw a bookcase, two empty chairs, a scrofulous little desk and a man sitting behind it with a rowdy grin on his face.

  Evan MacIver.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You may as well shut the door and give us a little privacy.” He gave Pinar a look of ill-concealed revulsion and Pinar bowed his way into the corridor.

  I kicked it shut with my heel. The little room was filled with the stink of Pinar’s cloying after-shave. MacIver was puffing smoke into it.

  “Well, Harry.” He almost managed to make his voice sound cordial. His face didn’t match it. The wide grin had been triumphant, not friendly. He looked a little bloated and pasty as if he’d spent the past twenty-four hours sleepless on airplanes.

  “How did you find me here?”

  “We have ears everywhere,” he muttered. “You made a hell of a run. I never thought you had the guts for that kind of thing. How’d you manage it?”

  “One day I’ll put it all down in a book and send you a copy.”

  “Send me the very first copy, Harry. And put in it where you found the gold.”

  “I didn’t have it in mind to write fiction.”

  He made a tent of his fingers and peered through it slyly. “I had a long talk with Karl Ritter. He half believes you. But then he doesn’t know you the way I do. I remember a term paper you did on whether or not Hemingway stole his story ‘The Killers’ from some yarn by Stephen Crane.”

  “ ‘The Blue Hotel.’ ”

  “Yeah. You asked for an extension so you could do more work on it. The professor thought it was the usual undergraduate stall. It wasn’t, remember? You just couldn’t let go of it until you had the answer. You’re a reporter is what you are. Snout like a hound. No—you lied to Ritter. If you hadn’t already found it you’d still be up there looking for it. So let’s not play pretend, shall we?”

  “I’d still be there looking for it now if I had a choice. I had to run—I’d be on a prison hospital table now with scopolamine needles in me if I’d stayed.” I sank miserably into a wooden armchair: putting on an act for him. “Evan, I didn’t find any gold. But everybody’s convinced I did. I ran because I didn’t want to be tortured for something I don’t have. Of course I looked for anything that might tell me what happened to the gold. I found out a great deal. The Germans sent a commando team into Siberia to find it in forty-four. The commando team never came back. I can give you all the details you want, but that’s what happened. It won’t help us find gold. Dear God, all I want to be is left alone,”

  MacIver pasted a cigarette to his lip and gave me a bloodshot look before he lit it. “You went into Russia what, seven weeks ago? Sometime early February, right? So you haven’t been up on the news, I gather.”

  If he meant the sudden new tack to unbalance me then he succeeded. “What news?”

  “There’s been another monetary crisis. Raids on the dollar. We had to devaluate twice. The Bonn government had to buy up a hell of a lot of dollars. And we’ve had to agree to support the dollar with gold. To save us from financial humiliation. Us, Harry—the United States of America. Sticks in your craw a little, doesn’t it.”

  “Not particularly. If the States can’t compete with the rest of the world, we deserve devaluation.”

  “A six-billion-dollar trade deficit, currently,” he murmured, not with great conviction. “You know why? Because we’ve still got to pay for renewing our own outmoded factories. While Japan and Germany are out-bidding us on everything because we rebuilt both countries from scratch after the war with brand-new modern industries. We did that, Harry. General George C. Marshall and the United States of America.”

  “Don’t wave flags at me.”

  “Do you know what the U.S. gold reserves at Fort Knox amount to?”

  “No.”

  “Some of the bullion’s earmarked for foreign credits. Know how much we’re left with that we can call our own? About twelve billion dollars’ worth. Twelve billion. If we had that Russian gold it would increase our reserves by more than fifty percent. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Not a thing. Don’t feed me well-marinated platitudes, Evan. The dollar isn’t tied to gold anymore. Nobody cares if Fort Knox is empty.”

  “Wrong. Gold is power.”

  “That’s the disease, isn’t it. The overwhelming need for power.”

  “Would you rather see it pissed away to support the dollar so the Reds can take over everything?”

  “Frankly, Scarlett.…” I was in one of those reckless flip moods again.

  His congested face was becoming orange with fury: he wasn’t reaching me at all and he couldn’t stand that, he couldn’t get a grip and couldn’t find the right place to stand and he must have hated me then. I saw it wasn’t getting us anywhere and I began to get up to leave but he barked at me, “Keep your seat, Harry, I’m not finished with you,” and his voice pushed me back down into the chair.

  He was playing with an unlit cigarette as obstinately as a bored child, squinting through the smoke of the one that hung from his mouth. He peeled it off his lip and lit the new one from the stub of the old; stubbed the butt out and only then lifted his head. His glance came around toward me like the slowly swinging gun turrets of a battle cruiser. “It’s time for you to bite the bullet, Harry. You may think you’ve had a rough time up to now but you just haven’t got the slightest idea. You’ve subjected yourself to an incredible self-inflicted hatchet job out of some weird sense of principle, and I guess you’ve suffered a little, but if you don’t quit this game right now, there won’t be enough left of you to make a barbecue sandwich.”

  “Go to hell, Evan.”

  “I guess I’m on my way. For what I’m going to have to do to you.”

  “I suppose you’ll start by holding my hands out on the floor and stepping on my fingers.”

  He didn’t reply. He swiveled his chair until his back was to me. Smoke drifted around his head. He tipped back, the red neck creasing white. “It’s a dicey business, Harry. Individuals don’t matter at this level.”

  “I know. I’m expendable.”

  “So am I. If I don’t get what they want from you, my ass is grass.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The hell you are.” He still had his back to me. “But I am. The damnable thing is, to an outsider like you I look like a pretty big guy. I mean I’ve got a big job. They pay me a lot of money and I’ve got a rank that’s just about equivalent to lieutenant general. I whistle and twenty thousand people jump through hoops. People hold doors for me.”

  Now he swiveled to face me. He laid both arms out along the desk top. “But there are people in Washington—I’m not even big enough to see over their desks. You understand who I’m talking about?”

  “Yes.”

  “They know about you, Harry. They know about your train of gold. And they also know that you and I are friends.�
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  “Used to be friends.”

  “Yeah.” He dragged his hands back off the desk and unscrewed the cigarette from his mouth. “They expected I might go soft on you. Because we used to be friends. So they didn’t have any choice. We’re gladiators, you and me. They threw me into the arena with you and they locked the gate behind me. I’ve got no exits, Harry. The only way I can go back is with your scalp. Otherwise I might just as well join the Watergate crowd or bury myself right here in that faggot’s backyard.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

  “Bastard.” Then he reached inside his coat and withdrew a revolver. Its orifice swung toward me. “You still think I’m kidding, or bluffing.”

  “I know you are. That’s a stupid mistake. Don’t point that thing at me when you’re not ready to kill me with it. Kill me and you’d never have a chance of finding what you’re looking for.”

  Now he grinned. “Actually I wasn’t thinking of using it on you.”

  “What do you want me to do? Talk you out of suicide?”

  “Why don’t you try. Start by telling me where the gold is. Just think, Harry, you’ve got a chance to save an old friend’s life.”

  “Actually I’d rather you shot me with it.”

  “Shoot you? As you pointed out, Harry, who would that profit?”

  “Everyone but you,” I said. “Now who’s playing games? You thought the gun might scare me. It didn’t. Why don’t you put the damn thing away before it goes off.”

  He slid it back under his coat. Not sheepish: brash. He said, “Up till now I never realized what a tough hundred-proof son of a bitch you really are. You’d make one hell of an agent. Brains and guts. What’ll you take, Harry—Ritter’s job? My job? I’m due for the chop anyway.”

  “Do you mind if I go?”

  “In a minute. We’re waiting for someone.”

  “Is that all we’ve been doing? Stalling for time?”