Brian Garfield - Kolchak's gold

I looked up at her and she was leaning toward me, an eager posture. I said, “Does that make any sense to you, Nikki? Any sense at all?”

She walked away from me. Around to the far side of the bed. She sat down on it-sat there not moving for the longest time. Her face was tipped down, huddling; her hair fell around her ear and bared her white nape.

When she began to shake I went to her. She must have been weeping for quite a while-great racking silent sobs. “For myself,” she said. “For what I’ve let myself become, Harry. It’s a vile business.” Her hands wrenched at each other. “It contaminates everyone who comes in touch with it.”

“I have to know something, Nikki. Coming here-was it your idea or MacIver’s?”

“He told me you were here. He made it clear he wanted me to come. But I wanted to come.”

“All right. But to talk me into giving you the gold-was that your idea or his?”

“You’re asking me whether they forced me to do it, aren’t you?” She was still looking at her hands. Her cheeks were wet.

“Yes.”

For a little while she didn’t speak. I had no patience then; I said, “I’ve been wondering what sort of pressure they might use. Michele?” Michele was her little girl, in Switzerland.

Finally she said, “It’s kind of you to try to find excuses for me, Harry.”

“Probably being kind to myself. I didn’t think I was that good at misjudging people. Particularly people I had reason to believe loved me.”

“Maybe we’ve both always been too selfish to give up anything for each other. That’s what you used to say in your letters.”

“I said that because I hoped you’d try to talk me out of it.”

She wiped her face with a corner of the coarse sheet. “You just don’t understand about us.”

“ ‘Us’?”

“Israelis.”

“That’s true. I’ve always hated fanaticism. It gets in the way of everything real,” I said.

“Real-like love?”

“Yes.”

“In a utopian world there’d be no conflict between those things. But we don’t live in-”

“Stop it, Nikki. You’re only repeating all that about ends justifying means.”

“I know.” I could barely hear her. “A few days ago-you probably haven’t heard-there was a Libyan airliner. A civilian plane, forty or fifty passengers. It strayed off course over Israel. We’d had threats from Al Fatah-that they were going to fill an airplane with high explosives and crash it in Tel Aviv. So our air force shot the plane down. There weren’t any high explosives. Just passengers.”

I sat by her and felt her spine beneath my fingers. Her voice went a little sour then. “You and I-it’s a desperate thing with us, isn’t it? It’s fatal but it’s serious. I think I’m not enough of a professional, Harry-I’m too much in love with you.”

“Would you want to be professional? These agents I’ve seen-MacIver, Ritter, Zandor, all of them-they may be enemies but they’re co-professionals and there’s something sick about that. They’ve got the kind of mutual respect you’d have thought died with the aviators, the ones in silk scarves in the First World War. Their talents mean more than their allegiances. You don’t belong in that company. MacIver’s got the character of a billy goat. He’s spiritually color-blind. He doesn’t really betray people but he doesn’t know loyalty when he sees it. He doesn’t know truth when he sees it. The highest accolade any of them can pay another is to say he’s ‘a real professional’-even if he’s an enemy. All right, on a certain level that’s understandable, maybe there’s even a way to admire it romantically., But it’s got to put you in mind of the German rocket scientists who’re working for Moscow and Washington now-or the professional mercenaries who don’t care which side hires them.”

At least she was listening to me. I said, “You’re not one of them.”

After a time she whispered, “I should have been. Then I’d have been able to live with it.”

Her arms were folded. She leaned against me, moved her face, kissed me without stirring her arms. I put my hands softly on her cheeks, holding her without pressure. It was a kiss only of the lips, and gentle: yet it rocked me down to my feet.

She was still breathing warmly in my arms when I awakened at sunset. She wasn’t asleep.

I said, “Think of it this way. If you leave gold alone long enough it’ll sink right into the earth, grain by grain. Specific gravity.”

She tried to smile. “There’s that strange streak of old-fashioned gallantry in you. It’s always confounded me.” She had undone her hair before; now it flew and swayed when she sat up and shook her head in negation. “I suppose happiness exists only in the imagination.”

“You’re burnt-out and hungry and in desperate need of a drink, I think. It’s still better than dead. Why don’t we go down and eat?”

“MacIver is waiting down there.”

“All right.” I felt drained. “We may as well go down.”

“No. Harry-he doesn’t know about the documents you stole.”

“He doesn’t know,” she insisted. “He’s only guessing. Hoping. I’m the only one who knows. Bukov and I.”

I said, “So you didn’t really trust him after all.”

“No.…”

“Is that the only reason you kept it to yourself?”

She began to dress-the same travel-rumpled clothes. She was a long time answering; finally she looked at me. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“I kept your secret.”

“It won’t be our secret very long, Nikki. You can’t be Bukov’s only contact in Tel Aviv.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Then sooner or later they’ll query him and he’ll report to someone else next time. It may have happened already.”

“No-MacIver would be hammering at the door.”

“All right,” I said. “But that’s not the point. Look at it, Nikki, face up to it. You could have burned your bridges by telling MacIver about those documents. But you didn’t. You kept my secret.”

We went down into the smoky crowd and the woman with hairy legs-Pinar’s sister-brought us wine and soup and a small local fish, the rouget. I did not see MacIver. Pinar pirouetted in and out of the room. We didn’t speak of much of anything until after the meal. Then I said, “MacIver wanted you to seduce me into spilling it.”

“I suppose he did. He didn’t put it like that.”

“He thought it.”

“To hell with what he thought,” she said.

She was very quiet that night in the room. I kept trying to talk to her but she would shut me off.

In the morning with early sun streaming through the cracks between the curtains she said, “I’ll have to go down and talk to him.”

“Go ahead.”

“You’re trusting me again, Harry. Bad habit.”

“I seem to have become accustomed to risk-taking.”

“I won’t tell him. Not until you give me permission to.”

“Do you think I will?”

“You’ll get tired of having the world against you. I’m sorry but that’s the way it will be. It won’t be MacIver, Harry, it’ll be you. You’ll grind yourself down and finally you’ll give in.”

“I don’t think so. Eventually, to you, I might. Not to him. Not to any of them. But I’d be an old man. Like Haim was.”

“Or like Haim’s brother. What if they took me for a hostage?”

“I can’t answer that. Are you planning to suggest it to him?”

“No.” She was hurt, badly hurt.

“I didn’t mean to be harsh. It’s another one of those things that’s become a habit.”

“I’ve earned it,” she said. “It’s too bad we don’t live in the same world, you and I.” She went downstairs to talk to MacIver.