Kolchak's Gold

“Actually I’d rather you shot me with it.”

“Shoot you? As you pointed out, Harry, who would that profit?”

“Everyone but you,” I said. “Now who’s playing games? You thought the gun might scare me. It didn’t. Why don’t you put the damn thing away before it goes off.”

He slid it back under his coat. Not sheepish: brash. He said, “Up till now I never realized what a tough hundred-proof son of a bitch you really are. You’d make one hell of an agent. Brains and guts. What’ll you take, Harry—Ritter’s job? My job? I’m due for the chop anyway.”

“Do you mind if I go?”

“In a minute. We’re waiting for someone.”

“Is that all we’ve been doing? Stalling for time?”

“It’s a way to pass the time. But don’t think I wasn’t telling the truth. They’ve got my ass in a crack, old buddy. You’re the only one who can get it out. You’re forcing me to make it hard, but hard or easy I’m going to make you do it.”

“Who are we waiting for, Evan?”

It was as if he hadn’t heard the question. He went on:

“You could still do it easy. Think about whether you’d rather have it in the Kremlin or the White House. Think about democracy—corny as that may sound. The i

“That good trustworthy American Christianity. It wasn’t the man in the street who ordered the bombing of Nagasaki.”

“You really don’t believe in it, do you.”

“The apple pie way of life? Sure I do.”

“Democracy.”

“I don’t believe power can be trusted. I don’t trust Brezhnev and I don’t trust Mao and I don’t trust Nixon.”

“Right now this minute, Harry, you’ve got more power than most people in this world.”

“No. You only think I have. I’ve got no gold mine in the sky. I’m sorry you convinced them I did. It’s backfired on you, but there isn’t a thing I can do about that.”

“You make me sick. Aren’t you tired of this yet?”

“Tired to death of it.”

“Then quit it, Harry. Tell me when the auction was supposed to start.”

Of course that was it. They had sat around a great long table at the CIA Director’s conference one morning and they had come up with the auction because it smelled right: it fitted their conspiratorial way of thinking, it was exactly what each one of them would like to do if he had the chance. They were people so corrupted by their own cynicism they couldn’t credit anyone else with a morality any higher than their own. Somebody had said, Sure, that’s exactly the way Bristow will do it, and they’d all nodded in agreement because it was just plausible enough and it sounded dirty enough to appeal to them.

It was a mark of my own naïveté that I hadn’t thought of it myself. I wouldn’t have done it—I wasn’t gaited that way, wealth wasn’t my goad—but if my mind had been working more clearly I’d have known that was how they were thinking and I’d have known why all of them were taking me so seriously: they didn’t want me to get loose where I could force an auction. I hadn’t anticipated it at all, so I was just as shortsighted as they were.

I said, “No. No auction, Evan. Think about it and you’ll see why it couldn’t be done.”

MacIver cleared his throat. He sat there with his hands intertwined across his incipient paunch. “God damn it.”

“You’re all clowns,” I said. “You’ve done it again, Evan. The CIA working in mysterious ways its blunders to perform. You see how fu

“Do I look amused?”

“I wish you had the grace to. You used to have a pretty good sense of humor.”

“I never laugh when there’s a gun jammed up my ass.”

“You put it there yourself.”

“Please don’t tell me it’s poetic justice, Harry.” He spat something out; I saw that he had bitten his cigarette cleanly in two.

He said, “You win that round on points, Harry, but I still have to win the fight. Now either you throw the fight or I knock you out. Your choice. And I still don’t think you want——”

An obsequious knock at the door cut him off. Pinar opened the door.

“Here?” MacIver asked.

Pinar nodded. “Upstairs, as you wished.”

MacIver nodded. “About time. Harry, go up to your room. I’ll see you again later. But one thing first. This building is surrounded by our people. If you try to leave and they haven’t had a signal from me, they’ll turn you back. As painfully as you make necessary.”

“That could be a bluff.”

“Try it and see. You’re welcome to.”

“You’ve laid on an expensive production here.”

“It’ll be cheap at the price,” he drawled. “Go on upstairs like a good boy.”

He’d regained his self-confidence. It was more than I could say for myself. I went along the hall with Pinar; he left me at the foot of the stairs.

When I put my foot on the step a new realization grenaded into my mind: I knew what I would find in my room. It had to be; it was the only way MacIver could have known I was in this town. I went upstairs with slow uncertainty and hesitated outside my door with my hand on the knob.

I opened it and stepped inside and suddenly I was face to face with Nikki.

“Hello, Harry.”

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-gu

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 begi

“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 begi

“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.”