Kolchak's Gold

Bukov was adamant about one thing. I was not to cross through any international checkpoints in the Crimea. In the first place the Crimea was where they were looking for me; in the second place if I were caught too close to home it could bring down Bukov and his entire cell and he was quite right in refusing to take that risk. But it made our pla

It meant a journey of nearly two hundred miles across the Crimea by road, followed by a ten-mile boat crossing and then the run down through the Caucasus which would be about five hundred miles of mountain roads to the Turkish border. There were OVIR barriers at several points to check travelers’ internal passports; we would be able to avoid some but not all of them and I had to have papers. Therefore I became Georges Lapautre, a Communist labor-union functionary from the St. Chamond small-arms factory near Lyon. I was visiting the Soviet Union to learn about the fine points of worker organization in small-arms plants, of which there are a great many in the southern part of the USSR.

The suit was a cheap ready-to-wear one of Marseille manufacture; the hat was marked Italie—indicating it had been imported into France—and I asked Pudovkin where the devil they had found it but he only shrugged it off as if the wardrobe department had ten warehouses of clothes for every specification. That was not the case and I knew it and after a while it occurred to me that perhaps they had chosen the French identity because that was the one they had clothes for.

The shirt and underwear were French products but the shoes were Russian. “I’m afraid your feet were the wrong size,” Pudovkin said. “If you are asked, you mistakenly stepped in fresh tar and it ruined your old shoes, and you bought these here. You won’t be asked.”

I had a look at the French passport—the photo was mine, Bukov had taken it. The rest looked completely authentic except for a few details. According to the passport Georges Lapautre was forty-two, where I was thirty-four; Lapautre was some two inches shorter than I, but weighed nearly the same; Lapautre had blond hair.

I considered the evidence before me. Finally I said to Pudovkin, “Georges Lapautre is real, isn’t he.”

“Why?”

“The only false thing about this passport is my photograph in it. And the suit is a little too big in the waist and a little too short in the trousers. And it’s an ensemble—he bought the tan shirt and the brown tie to go with the brown suit. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

Pudovkin smiled. “You don’t think we would murder a man merely to provide you with a suit of clothes and a French passport?”

“I’m not too happy about wearing a dead man’s clothes.”

“They’re not contaminated. He wasn’t diseased. Anyhow we’ve cleaned them.”

“How did he die?”

“He fancied himself a swimmer. He died in the Black Sea last summer—of drowning. It happens every few weeks in the resorts. I’m afraid we make it our business to make off with the property of such people. It’s a bit ghoulish—but no one’s harmed.”

“Don’t the Soviet authorities know he’s dead? Hasn’t this passport been canceled or revoked or something?”

“This one died in Sochi,” Pudovkin said. “The commissar of the police in Sochi is one of us. The deceased was buried under some other name. Of course his OVIR visa expired months ago, and his travel permits from point to point. Yours are forgeries.”

“Where are they?”

“We’ll have them ready by the time we leave tonight.”

“I’ll be passing right through Sochi. What if I meet someone who knew him?”

“He only went there for a week’s holiday at one of the pensions. I believe he died his third day there. Not many people would have known him—or are likely to remember.”

An hour later Pudovkin returned to collect my own clothes. “What do you want with them?”

“One of our people will leave them in the lavatory of the railway station in Sebastopol.”

I felt I was in competent hands.

The hair bleach was crude stuff but it made me blond enough. I had been using it since the day before Bukov had taken my picture for the Lapautre passport. “You’ll have to shave as often as you can. The darker stubble would give you away.”

“I’ll remember,” I said. He’d packed a razor in my kit. I was to wear heavy-rimmed glasses at all times: they contained plain glass lenses. Pudovkin instructed me to slouch my shoulders and walk with short strides; it would make me appear shorter. And to let my mouth hang open all the time. “It gives you a vacant expression of i

He wrapped the razor and my notes in brown paper and tied it with string. “You’ll have to leave the briefcase. Do you have everything?”

I had transferred things out of my old pockets. I said, “Everything I need, yes.”

“We might have made it a suitcase but a man with a package draws less attention.”

“You’ve thought of everything.”

“Let’s hope we have.”

Pudovkin wore black stovepipe boots up to his knees. Cord trousers and a heavy short coat and a soft motoring cap. He looked like a truck driver; he was supposed to. “Let’s go down,” he said, and we left the chamber. I found I was moving with a prowler’s predatory silence, my heart pounding, watching the deaf informer’s door; we slipped past it and went down the stairs into Bukov’s flat.

The lights were out and it was dim, the windows defined by dreary winter twilight. Pudovkin shut the door and produced an automatic pistol—one of those flat dull nine-millimeter guns stamped out in a Czech works. He popped the clip into his hand and worked the action with the air of a man who knew his weapons. When he put it away again I saw that he carried it in his belt, without a holster. That was according to the rules: it’s not impossible to ditch a gun but you can’t hide a holster when it’s attached to your belt.

Bukov was an amorphous shape in the poor light. “It’s time.”

I said, “I don’t know how to——”

“Never mind that. You’d better come over here.”

He led us to the front window and pointed across the way. I had not been out of the cell in three full days and the heavy lie of snow on the square took me by surprise. It was not snowing at the moment. The shadow was where he had to be, on the right-hand side of the square just inside the window of a café, at a table near the door with money by his wine so he could leave instantly without arousing the waiter’s ire.

Bukov said, “He wouldn’t recognize you as you are now, but he knows everyone who’s entered this building. He didn’t see you enter it. He can’t see you leave it.”

“Is there a back door?”

“No. There are windows.”

“All right,” I said.

“Pudovkin will have to leave alone by the front door—the man saw him come in. You understand?”

I turned to Pudovkin. “Where do I meet you then?”

“Remember where you parked Timoshenko’s car?”

“Of course.”

“That street. Fifty meters farther along it. You’ll find an old grey lorry standing there. Get in behind the wheel and wait for me.”

Bukov said, “If you’re challenged you’re just waiting to pick up a friend. The cargo is wool coats, the destination is Kerch. If anyone wants to see the shipping documents they’re in the glove box with the keys to the truck.”

“That gun you offered me when I first came. Maybe I’ll take it now.”