Brian Garfield - Kolchak's gold

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 sacrifice 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 facade. 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.”