Kolchak's Gold

“Then you should have no trouble, but avoid the army while you are close to the border. Sometimes they tend to throw refugees back across to ingratiate themselves with the Soviets.”

“I understand.”

“In Trabzon there is a taverna run by a man called Pinar. Remember the name.”

“Pinar,” I said, and repeated it.

“He has worked with us for many years. He will see to your needs and provide transport for you at least as far as Ankara or Istanbul. After that you must make your own decisions.”

At half-past ten that morning, freshly shaved, we approached the checkpoint and were halted in the stalled queue of traffic awaiting clearance. There were half a dozen lorries and two or three cars ahead of us.

Pudovkin was rehearsing what he would say. He wasn’t speaking aloud but I could hear the tongue drumming against his palate.

He had the wheel now; he thought it would look better. He had an Intourist identification card and was going to try to pass as my guide and overseer.

It was raining now, the downpour slanting into the glossy pavement and melting what snow was left; the Soviet guards stood at the zebra-checked crossbar steaming in their heavy wool uniforms. I was rigid with fear: what if they didn’t like the look of the contents of my suitcase? The water-soaked note cards, the admixture of Russian and English script.…

We had scraped off our stubble in melted snow with hand soap for lather and my cheeks stung with shaving rash; my feet were frozen even though I had dried them repeatedly; we had eaten the last of the bread and herring and my stomach growled incessantly; I knew they would take one look at the pair of us and yank us out of the car.…

From the side of his mouth Pudovkin said, “Mainly they will look for weapons. The south of Russia has many arms factories—as you are supposed to know, Monsieur Lapautre—and this means that guns are easier to obtain here than in any other part of the Soviet Union. Workers try to sell them on the black market in Turkey.”

“What about that pistol of yours?”

“I left it where we shaved,” he said.

It only chilled me more: now we were weaponless. Then I realized how foolish the thought was. There were six guards at the checkpoint and each was armed with an automatic rifle slung across his back. One light pistol wouldn’t have made a tinker’s difference if it had come to shooting.

Then it was our turn. In their grey uniforms buttoned to the choke collars they leaned down at either door and asked us to step out of the car. The guard on my side was young, red-faced; I noticed the frayed cuffs of his uniform.

“Bumagi,” he said—papers.

Several of them were glancing at us. I tried to keep my hand steady when I reached for my—Lapautre’s—passport and documents. I heard Pudovkin saying we had nothing to declare, we were on our way to the small-arms assembly plant at Tblisi. I tried to find belief or disbelief in the soldiers’ faces but they only looked professionally stern. Beside me a lorry driver was offering one sentry a Russian cigarette while another sentry climbed into the back of the truck; evidently the driver was a frequent passerby and the sentry nodded and smiled in response to something he said, but then that sentry’s eyes came around toward me and his face turned cold. I endeavored to look impatiently bored with the bureaucratic idiocy of it but I was convinced the contrivance was transparent.…

The youth didn’t give the passport back to me. He held it in his hand and walked around to the front of the Volkswagen. I thought he was staring suspiciously at the front number plate and my throat turned hollow but then his partner reached in past Pudovkin to pull the release and the youth opened the trunk.

He removed my suitcase and set it down on the wet pavement, and pried up corners of the trunk lining. He took out the spare tire and shook it, weighed it in his hands and put it back. Then he opened my suitcase. I tried not to stare. He pawed through the single shirt and pair of wet socks I had replaced last night; he riffled two stacks of notes and then put one finger on the floor of the suitcase while he reached around under it with his other palm—testing the thickness for a false bottom. Finally he closed the suitcase and politely laid it back in the trunk. I breathed.

His partner was down on one knee on the far side of the car looking at the understructure, his rump showing past the front-sloping fender.

Pudovkin, yawning, patted his lips and turned to glance at the clock mounted on the side of the checkpoint shack. The truck beside me growled through, the gate came down again and another truck pulled in.

They gave us back our papers. Pudovkin had to sign something and then we got back in the car and drove through the raised gate. Sixty yards beyond it was a café-bar and Pudovkin pulled in there. “Hungry?”

“My God, I never want to go through that again.”

He gri

“I’d rather not have to.”

The place was obviously a popular pit-stop for those who had had to wait on the queue at the checkpoint; we had to wait again but finally we bought wine and cheese and bread and went outside to get in the car.

A sentry at the checkpoint shack was talking into a telephone, looking up and down the road. I began to freeze up. Pudovkin went around the front of the car to the driver’s door. I saw the sentry’s arm come up, pointing our way; he took the phone away from his ear and shouted something.

Pudovkin said under his breath, “You didn’t hear him. Get in—quickly.”

I jackknifed into the car and Pudovkin had it rolling before I had the door shut. We swung out into the road and his foot was on the floor. We were nearly through the bend before the first bullet starred the glass of the rear window.

We had a jump on them because they had to get to a car to chase us but the road ahead ran right into the town of Poti; they would telephone ahead to put us in a vise. We had to get off the coast highway and I unfolded the map with badly shaking fingers while Pudovkin wheeled recklessly past slow lorries on blind bends.

“Not the first left,” I said. “It loops back. Take the second turning.”

He pulled out to overtake a bus and there was a van coming toward us but Pudovkin kept the throttle down and the van nosed down under pressure of panic brakes; we squeezed through ahead of the bus and when I threw a wide-eyed glance at him Pudovkin’s lips were peeled back in a fierce glowing rictus. I clung to the strap with one hand and tried to keep the map in focus with the other. “It ought to be soon.”

The old car had a top of not more than a hundred kph—about sixty miles per hour—and Pudovkin was getting every ounce of that out of it. Once we hit the hills we wouldn’t be able to make even that much speed.

I kept glancing to the rear but the starred window made it hard to see. Pudovkin had an outside mirror on the door and he was using that. He said, “No sign yet. Those trucks are holding them on the bends back there.”

We had a straightaway now and at the end of it was the fork; I pointed wildly and he said, “I see it,” but he hadn’t even lifted his foot off the gas. He wanted every inch of space he could get between us. At the last instant he jabbed the brake and we swung up the hill violently, weaving on the springs, the tires wailing.

On the map there were choices and I said, “We could take the first right—it runs parallel to the highway. But they might look for us there.”

“What else is there?”

“If we stay on this road it bends south. There’s a turning about—” I measured the map’s scale indicator with my eye and transferred it to the road’s black line—“about fifteen kilometers. It goes back in the mountains but the map shows a river there—it may be a valley. It cuts back across toward Batumi beyond that.”