Kolchak's Gold

“Five hundred and ten.”

“All right. There are two plans, really. One is to persuade the Russians to give that gold back to Spain. The United States and Israel will get a substantial portion of it from Spain in what will be written up as repayment of foreign-aid loans.”

“I didn’t know Israel had lent money to Spain.”

“It would fu

“What was the second plan?”

“Repayment for World War Two lend-lease. Direct payment, in gold, from the Kremlin to Washington. To equal exactly half the value of the gold we led them to.”

“And you think the Russians will go for either one of those?”

“Either they will, or they don’t get the gold. Half of it is still a lot of gold for them to keep. More than two billion dollars’ worth.”

I said, “And Tel Aviv ends up splitting fifty-fifty with Washington, whatever the Russians pay?”

“Yes. We’re a silent partner. The Russians might not go for it if they knew we were involved. We’re not exactly political bedfellows.”

“An unwise turn of phrase, Nikki.”

She flushed to her hairline. “Harry——”

“Let me tell you something. I didn’t find the gold. That leaves all of you looking pretty foolish, doesn’t it? Maybe it makes it a little easier to see things clearly—what you’ve really done.”

“To you?”

“To both of us. All of us.”

“It was worth the cost. It had to be.”

“The Nazis and the Communists have a phrase for it. To use a knotty overworked saying, the ends justify the means. Any means.”

“Don’t try to put words in my mouth, Harry. You act as if you’re the only one who’s got a right to principles. I’ve got principles too—things that come higher than my feelings about you or anyone else.”

“It ain’t the principle, it’s the money.”

“I hate you when you make cheap jokes, Harry. It’s beneath you.”

“So is theft.”

But I remembered the documents I’d stolen and destroyed.

“Theft from whom?” she said. “Whose gold is it? The Czar’s?” She stood up. Her shoulders went up and her face lifted. “Let’s talk about another principle. We made it possible for you to do your research, Harry. Without us you wouldn’t have found a thing. You probably wouldn’t even have got clearance into the Soviet Union at all. It was a sort of bargain, even though you were forced to sign the contract without reading it. That’s regrettable, but we kept our part of the bargain. You got everything you wanted. You’ve got your book to write. You’ve got the fantastic story of the gold to tell the world. Nobody will stop you from doing that—as long as it’s not published before we complete our arrangements with the Russians and the gold changes hands. You’re alive, you’ve had an adventure——”

“And Pudovkin is dead, and my notes are hanging on a barbed wire fence in Russia.”

“We’ll get them back for you. We’ll make it part of the deal with Moscow.”

I thundered at her. “What deal with Moscow? Don’t you understand? Don’t you listen? I found no gold. No gold.”

“You’re lying, Harry,” she said. She turned her bitter face toward the window. “And how about that for principles.”

“You all keep telling me I’m lying. As if by saying it you can make it so.”

“Don’t you think I know you well enough to know when you’re keeping things back, Harry? You were never a good liar.”

“I thought I knew you pretty well too, Nikki. We do make mistakes about people, don’t we?”

“You found the gold, Harry. If you hadn’t you wouldn’t have stolen those papers from the archives.”

“It was one of Vassily’s men. He was in the room watching you. He saw you roll them up and slip them into your sleeve. Now you didn’t steal them for the information they contained—you could have taken notes. You stole them to keep anyone else from finding what you’d found. It had to be the gold, Harry. Nothing else would have made you do that.”

I had sagged into the chair; she came to me and the touch of her fingers on my shoulder was electric. She murmured, “Harry, you’re destroying yourself. You take it all upon yourself and it’s not even your responsibility to bear. Would the world fall down if you kept your part of the bargain? Harry, what have you got to gain from sticking this out? What will it accomplish?”

“Sometimes you can’t go by that. Maybe it’s just the rationale of a lost cause.” I was whispering, I think. “Something stupid. But you go along all your life thinking you’re honorable and principled, and then just once you’re up against it. You can’t turn away. You can’t even pretend it didn’t happen. You just have to go ahead. Stubborn. Just because it’s a matter of principle. Even if it doesn’t accomplish a damned thing except your own destruction.”

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.”