Kolchak's Gold

The bullets had taken him straight through the temple and the neck. I had never seen a man shot dead but there was no question he might still be alive; nevertheless I tried to find a pulse and of course there was none.

Breathing deeply and regularly in a feeble attempt to calm myself, I left the car and staggered to the crumpled edge of the road where the Skoda had gone over. I doubted any of them in that car could be alive; something else concerned me and I needed to check it because I didn’t trust my memory—all I’d really had were frightened glimpses of the car.

The wreckage was crumpled and distorted. It had come to rest on one side wedged into the boulders more than a hundred feet below me. It was too steep a pitch to climb down without wasting a great deal of time. Nothing but boulders and loose sliding shale chips of rock, slightly reddish in the grey daylight. At the bottom a sinuous stream glittered and on the opposite slope a high tower of raw stone loomed like a gallows.

What I was looking for on the Skoda was a whip aerial; I didn’t recall seeing one but I needed to know. If it had an ante

There was none in sight but then I realized it would have been the first thing to break away.

The Skoda had been crushed flat; its entire front axle had come away with one wheel and tire attached—it lay in the stream below—and the squashed condition of the roof left no likelihood anyone had been left alive. The doors had sprung open but from this angle I couldn’t see inside the wreckage: the rear deck-lid had come awry and lay across the upper side of the car.

On rubber knees I climbed back to the Volkswagen. We had left great ruts in the soft road. They veered close to the edge at several points. I remembered in a jumbled way that the gun had been firing before we stopped and I realized that Pudovkin had died while we were still moving: only the ratchet on the handbrake had kept us from going over after his lifeless thumb had gone slack on the button.

The bullets had shattered both windows, his and mine; the interior of the car was jagged with splintered glass and I had no recollection of that happening. When I touched my cheek my fingers came away sticky with blood that was already begi

Of course the engine had stalled out—the car was still in third gear—and I didn’t know if it would run again. I saw no bullet holes in the rear engine area. Both sides of the car were riddled and when I began to pull Pudovkin out of the car I saw that the expanding bullets had exploded away fist-sized chunks of the driver’s door. He had great wounds in his upper chest and shoulders that I hadn’t seen earlier. The gun had been firing down and I had been slumped below the sill of my window; the bullets had angled above me and down.

I handled the old man with gentle care—it’s odd how gently we treat the dead—and now my mind was working with a curiously cool detachment: my reasoning was ruthless and clear. I couldn’t take the time to bury him, I thought, but then I knew I couldn’t leave him in the road for the birds to pick at. I carried him to a trough in the shale above the road and piled some rocks on him and then went up above him and kicked at the shale until a little slide started. It covered most of him and I did the rest with slabs of loose rock.

The car started and I jockeyed back and forth to get it turned around. I had a last look at his grave and dragged a hand down my face and then I began to go to pieces: the shakes hit me.

I had to sit there with my fists locked on the wheel and ride it out. The car stalled but I didn’t try to restart it. I went a little mad. Flashing visions like DTs veered kaleidoscopically across my eyes. I was like something at sea in a hurricane. The only thing to do was hold on tight.

The bottle of wine we’d put in the car a moment before they’d identified us from the checkpoint was still intact on the floor of the back seat. I drank a good part of it and gulped air in long drowning spasms. My face was stinging with thick fever-sweat that ran into my eyes and dripped off my nose.

I scrubbed my face with a cloth and it came away dark with half-scabbed patches of blood. I threw it down amid the broken glass where I had been sitting before; I cranked the starter and after a long time the engine caught, and I drove shakily up the way we’d come.

The car had no fuel gauge but I was sure there was at least a half tank. By the map it wasn’t much more than a hundred kilometers to Batumi on the border. The tank hadn’t been punctured and the engine was ru

With shattering violence freshly implanted in my mind I drove the hill roads like an old woman, stopping at frequent intervals to question the map. The country became steadily more barren, vegetated by what in the States I would have taken for clumps of piñon and scrub oak and juniper. I was in the lower mountains with the Black Sea’s floodplain down to my right, occasionally visible through notches in the hills; the roads were narrow dirt tracks, still muddy in low spots. If it hadn’t been a Volkswagen it might not have got through some of them; I had to rock it out of the mud twice.

This was the border country between Georgia and Armenia and it was so sparsely inhabited that the map showed every farm cluster and hamlet as a town. It was possible to avoid them all by judiciously selecting secondary roads which crossed at junctions between settlements; but this took time and added miles. I passed only four or five moving vehicles in the course of the entire afternoon: they all gave me terror but they were local people, farmers and deliverers, and none challenged me. It is a country filled with fear of strangers and although they must have been curious about the battle-torn condition of my car they’d been conditioned by a brutal life to mind their own business.

It was not going to be possible to reach the border in time to go through the wire at twilight as Pudovkin had counseled. The next best time would be dawn, so I had the hours of the night to use; this being the case I knew it would be wisest to abandon the car somewhere on this side of Batumi. The car was more easily identifiable than I was. They were looking for two men in an old black Volkswagen; alone and on foot I’d have a better chance in the populated area. I’d have all night to walk it.

…. I found a rutted driveway that seemed long disused; I left the car there, far enough into the scrub to be invisible from the road. I took the suitcase and the map and walked, eating cheese, finishing the wine, clinging to the hem of hope.

Batumi has the weary look of dusty jaundice peculiar to arid bordertowns everywhere. The buildings are shabby stucco in faded pastel colors—tile roofs and splintered grey doors, filthy windowpanes and rammed-earth streets. Grimy people sit on the porches in the last of the day’s warmth, drinking beer or smoking opium. Red slogans are daubed everywhere. The only vehicles I saw were the occasional small decrepit bus and now and then a military sort of police vehicle sliding among the town’s lights.

It is a river-delta town and there are clumps of mossy trees. I stayed close to these, in deep shadow under the valedictory light of dusk. I judged it the best time to move through the town: people were still abroad. The suitcase was in my hand, tacky with sweat; every hundred feet or so I changed it to the other hand. My groin itched with fear but I kept moving.