Brian Garfield: Kolchak's gold

I drained my drink down to the ice cubes and set the glass down.

MacIver said, “You really ought to talk to her about that Russian stuff you’re always writing about.”

I could tell by the way the girl squinted at her newspaper that she was nearsighted. I looked at MacIver. “Why?”

“She’s hipped on it. Talk your ear off. You don’t know what depressed is until you’ve listened to her number on pogroms and atrocities. You’ve never met such a relentless memory for dismal facts and figures.”

“How’d you meet her?”

“On business. I should have left it there.”

The girl had opened her handbag. She took out a pair of large dark-rimmed glasses to read the news more closely. She was quite oblivious to her surroundings. She looked bright and quick; MacIver’s droll attempt to characterize her didn’t quite jibe with her appearance. Her eyes, magnified behind the glasses, seemed slanted with a somewhat rancorous irony-wary, suspicious, but the sort of face that would hide sooner behind clever mockery than behind heavy literal fact-mongering.

MacIver’s lip-hung cigarette bobbed up and down when he spoke. “What are you working on right now? Another spy book?”

“No. I’m doing a book on the Russian Civil War.”

“You already did one. Didn’t you?”

“This one’s on Kolchak. I passed him over lightly in the first one.”

“The admiral, I remember.” He beamed as if proud of his memory. “You do pick the grim ones, don’t you?”

I let it lie. “What kind of line are you in these days?”

“Cloaks.” He dragged avariciously on his cigarette and poured thick slow rivers of smoke from his nostrils, and gave me the familiar grin for the first time. “Cloak-and-dagger business. I’m in the cloak end of it. Civil service, you know. Years ago I decided I was the sort of bureaucratic hack the civilian world would eat alive, so I stayed with the government when I got out of the army. Now I’m just another fool exercising my petty authority around Langley.”

His candor surprised me. It was not de rigueur for people in that line to advertise their calling. This was long before the celebrity of E. Howard Hunt.

He seemed to feel he’d gone far enough. He changed the direction of the conversation: “Some of us at The Firm were reading your last book. We got a few yocks here and there, but you didn’t find half the jokes in that Haitian business. Not half.”

I grunted to encourage him and after he found a place to stub his cigarette he went on: “It was Lansky, you missed that part.”

“Meyer Lansky?”

“Let’s say people associated with him. Miami types.” He lit up and blew smoke at his match. “Come on, Harry, you should’ve figured out that Papa Doc knew what our mental retards were up to. Lansky had a little meet with the Duvalier people to talk about those Mickey Mouse exiles we had flying B-Twenty-fours over Port au Prince.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Why should I? Look, the mob was looking for beach resorts for their casinos, and Papa Doc offered to trade beach-front property for antiaircraft guns. Where’d you think he got his artillery on the roof of the palace?”

“The Mafia?”

“Shot down two Liberators, too. Those clowns trying to fly airplanes-eighteen tons of bombs and they never hit the palace once.” His chuckle grew into a bray of laughter.

“Why tell me all this?”

“Ancient history. It’s what you write about, isn’t it?”

But it was something else, I knew. I had a feeling he was doing it to establish his bonafides but I couldn’t fathom what reason he had for doing that.

The girl in the corner was quite indifferent to the party swirling around her; it wasn’t an act.

MacIver said, “Remember old Gilfillan, the time he mimeographed that fake sociology exam and hooked half the class on it?” And then he was off on a rambling discourse of nostalgic reminiscence which I endeavored to curtail by making a gesture with my empty glass and carrying it away toward the bar.

He came along unshakably. “You had dinner yet?”

“Yes,” I lied.

It made him pause. “Too bad. There’s a place down the block, the steaks aren’t too bad. Christ, I don’t know about you but I can only take so much of this ruckus. I think I’ll take off. Listen, we ought to have dinner soon-have a few yocks over the old times.”

“I’d like to,” I said politely.

He gave me a card after scrawling a ballpoint number on the back of it. “That’s the home phone. I’ve got a little house just the other side of Arlington. Come out and visit sometime. The little lady makes a hell of a sauerkraut.”

I looked at the card as if I really intended to call him sometime.

MacIver drifted away through the smoke; I was still waiting my turn at the bar. He stopped by the young woman’s chair in the corner and I saw her stiffen and nod with recognition but not pleasure. MacIver spoke briefly and the Israeli woman’s eyes turned toward me. I had no choice but to smile and wave my glass in their direction.

When I’d got a fresh drink I looked again and MacIver was still there with her. He waved at me and I dodged through to the corner.

MacIver made some sort of blurred introduction and hurried away while the young woman stared at me out of cool agate eyes.

I glanced back through the room. MacIver reached the door, turned and smiled with conspiratorial viciousness, and left; as if to say, I really stuck you with one this time, old buddy.

“Well then,” I said.

The girl’s femininity, MacIver to the contrary, was not sufficiently atrophied to enable her to resist what I thought of as my fetching smile; she gave me a deep and luminous smile, albeit brief, in reply.

“MacIver tells me you’re steeped in Russian Civil War lore,” I said. I smiled again to show I was ribbing her and she smiled to show she understood that.

Then her face changed. “Oh of course. You’re that Bristow.”

“You’ve heard of me. That’s too bad-I was hoping we could be friends.”

“It’s a hell of an obstacle,” she said, “but maybe we can overcome it.” She moved subtly into the corner of the chair-she was quite tiny-making room on the overstuffed arm so that I could sit down there.

She had a soft and slightly breathless voice; I had expected something with more bite to it. The accent was minimal: without MacIver’s briefing I’d have known that English wasn’t her native tongue but I’d have been at a complete loss to identify the accent.

She looked amused but not impatient. She was under no compulsion to hurry into conversation; silence was not awkward to her, she was too self-assured.

I said, “MacIver warned me against you.”

“I’m an iceberg and a bore, yes?”

We both laughed; she took off her glasses and squinted her big nearsighted eyes at me. “I’m afraid I disliked him instantly. I took him for FBI–I assumed they’d sent him to keep tabs on me.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, six weeks ago I suppose. Two months. It was soon after I came over. I’m afraid I must have taken a blowtorch to the poor man. He was trying so desperately to be a man of the world. At one point he started to talk about some Czechoslovakian Communist friend of his. It might as well have been a Jew, or a black man-you know? Some of my best friends.… I’m afraid I slapped him in the face with a cold fish-I reminded him of the half-million Soviet troops that invaded Czechoslovakia in the summer of sixty-eight and I reeled off a few statistics on the women and children they murdered in Wenceslas Square. The gang that contrived the so-called suicide of Jan Masaryk. Then I spent ten minutes telling him how the Russians exposed Dubcek to a massive dose of radiation to give him leukemia. I’m afraid he wasn’t amused. But he seemed so-banal, so gullible. He infuriated me, his small unconvincing arrogance. It was only the conceit of a petty man, trying to believe he deserves better than life has granted him. But I was new here, I’m sure I was on the defensive. I treated him badly. Why am I telling you this?”