Brian Garfield: Kolchak's gold

She was sitting on my bed with her knees drawn up against her breasts and her head tipped to one side on her folded arms, watching me. She’d been sitting that way for quite a few minutes, I thought, burying her face in her arms.

I pushed the door shut behind me-slowly, almost reproachfully. “Then it’s true what they say. It really is the crossroads of the world. Wait long enough in Pinar’s taverna in Trabzon and sooner or later everybody you know will come by. Mazel tov , Nikki.”

“Please don’t make jokes.”

She wasn’t wearing her glasses. The nearsighted agate eyes squinted at me, pressing at me curiously like diamonds etching against glass. She looked very slender and very tense, hungry for something: information? Forgiveness?

Her soft and always slightly breathless voice: “Harry. Please let me talk to you.”

Now she uncoiled. She stood up hesitantly, her fingers at her throat. Her dark hair was plaited at the side of her head. I hadn’t really remembered how gamine and lovely she was: I thought I had, but I hadn’t. Even now-bedraggled and dispirited, rumpled and untidy and too tired to care-she was so very lovely.

“Somebody had to tell MacIver where to find me,” I said. “I didn’t think it was Vassily Bukov. And it couldn’t have been Pudovkin, he’s dead.”

Her head jerked back as if I’d slapped her; she swung away from me and swung back again, her face crumpling.

“He was driving. They machine-gunned him. I was lucky, they missed me.”

I watched her face adjust to it. I said cruelly, “You and MacIver.”

She pinched her lower lip with her teeth. I said, “I liked Pudovkin. He was a gentle old man. How well did you know him?”

“Well enough to like him. I’m sorry, Harry, I didn’t know.”

“You knew the risks. You set the whole damned thing up. Didn’t you.”

Taut anger ground itself into the lines around her lips. “I’m responsible for it, yes. For his death. Yes.”

“Don’t get maudlin. It’s a privilege I’d just as soon not see you luxuriate in. How long have you been in this with MacIver? From the very beginning?”

“Yes.”

“From the night we first met?”

“Yes.”

“MacIver set it up for us to meet there as if it were an accident. Is that the way it worked?”

She nodded her head.

“And Haim Tippelskirch. It must have been his idea at the beginning. He was the one who’d been obsessed by the gold for fifty years.”

“Harry, you don’t understand. Please-”

“I will not be your wailing wall, Nikki. You hung me on puppet strings and made me dance across an emotional minefield. I owe you nothing.” I stood there with my fists clenched at my sides. “Nothing.”

She lifted her chin. Very soft: “Are you the only one with principles? Are you the only one with a private line to God? How are things on Mount Olympus, Harry? Will you let me talk to you? Will you listen to what I came here to say to you?”

“When you’ve said it, you’ll go,” I said. “And you’ll take MacIver and his wolf pack with him.”

“I’ll go, yes. I can’t answer for him.”

“You sicced him onto me. You can get him off me.”

“It’s not like that. We had the plan but it was MacIver who provided you. That wasn’t my idea. I’d never heard of you.”

“Sure. I was a total stranger. That made it a whole lot easier to play your badger game-you didn’t have to worry about feelings. All you had to do was act like a hooker, the hundred-dollar kind who says I-love-you between humps.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “Please. That’s not true. Dear God it wasn’t like that, Harry. Falling in love was the worst thing that could have happened, but it did happen and I wasn’t acting. It wasn’t supposed to happen. All I was supposed to do was to get you to Israel so that-”

“So that Haim could work on me. He wasn’t really retired from the Mossad at all, was he. He was right up in the top echelons-right up to the day of his death.”

“Yes. That’s true.”

“Fifty years he schemed to get at that gold.”

“No. It wasn’t until the nineteen fifties. After there was an Israel.”

“It had to be someone above suspicion. Someone acceptable to both the Americans and the Soviets. Certainly not a Jew. Someone who could get access to the records in both countries-and someone who had an interest in the gold so that he’d know what to look for, and look for it. Was it MacIver who picked me? Or was it Haim? He knew my books.”

“I don’t know, Harry. I can’t answer that. I wasn’t there when they had their first meetings. It was several years ago, I’m sure. I only came into it a little while before you met me.”

“Well you sure as hell made up for lost time, didn’t you?” I swung away heavily; I couldn’t bear to go on looking at her.

“Wait.…”

“I won’t leave,” I said. “Not until I’ve heard the whole story. You’ve got the floor.”

Her words came in a headlong rush as if she were talking compulsively to hold herself together.

It must have seemed an even more fantastic scheme at the outset than it had proved to be in actuality. The fountainhead was Haim Tippelskirch.

“Haim said there must never be forgetfulness or forgiveness of evil,” she said. “He said it was a debt we owed the dead and the living equally. The Russians must not have that gold. Nor the Germans. Too many Jews died for it. I remember one of those foolish old men saying something about God’s will. Haim reminded them of their Torah-God does not intervene to redeem man’s duties to his fellow men.”

The gold belonged to Israel by moral right. That was Haim’s idealism. His realism was that it would be a cold day in hell before the Soviets would let a Jewish researcher into their archives. An innocent dupe had to be found. Nikki did not use the word dupe but it was what she meant.

It was all such a long chance. Haim was the only one with faith in it because he was something of an amateur historian himself: a student of military history, a student of Germans and Russians. He knew the German penchant for record-keeping and he knew if they’d moved the gold they’d have left paper tracks. He also knew one other thing he’d never told me:

“Our people went into Siberia in nineteen sixty-two to look for that old iron mine. It was empty. That was how we knew the gold had been moved.”

Another thing they hadn’t told me: Haim himself had sought access to the American files, on the pretense of writing an article for some European quarterly on the subject of World War II in Russia. They hadn’t let him in because as soon as the security check began they discovered he was an agent of the Mossad and that was what put MacIver on him.

MacIver wanted to know what interest the Mossad had in those records and Haim told him the truth because he knew it was never going to work without outside help; and the United States was the firmest ally Israel had, despite suspicions and reservations on both sides. Clearly the dupe had to be an American historian and sooner or later the American authorities would have to be brought into it because too many of the documents were classified.

It was no wonder I’d got access to so much material that had never been exposed before: The CIA had been opening all the doors ahead of me, unseen by me.

It was CIA agents in Moscow who confirmed that the Soviets were ignorant of the gold-its original hiding place as well as the fact that it had been moved sometime between 1920 and 1962. Since the Soviets didn’t have it and no other country or individual had produced it, it could only have been rehidden, and probably still inside Russia. All this merely confirmed what Haim had already intuited.