Kolchak's Gold

At least she was listening to me. I said, “You’re not one of them.”

After a time she whispered, “I should have been. Then I’d have been able to live with it.”

Her arms were folded. She leaned against me, moved her face, kissed me without stirring her arms. I put my hands softly on her cheeks, holding her without pressure. It was a kiss only of the lips, and gentle: yet it rocked me down to my feet.

She was still breathing warmly in my arms when I awakened at sunset. She wasn’t asleep.

I said, “Think of it this way. If you leave gold alone long enough it’ll sink right into the earth, grain by grain. Specific gravity.”

She tried to smile. “There’s that strange streak of old-fashioned gallantry in you. It’s always confounded me.” She had undone her hair before; now it flew and swayed when she sat up and shook her head in negation. “I suppose happiness exists only in the imagination.”

“You’re burnt-out and hungry and in desperate need of a drink, I think. It’s still better than dead. Why don’t we go down and eat?”

“MacIver is waiting down there.”

“All right.” I felt drained. “We may as well go down.”

“No. Harry—he doesn’t know about the documents you stole.”

“He doesn’t know,” she insisted. “He’s only guessing. Hoping. I’m the only one who knows. Bukov and I.”

I said, “So you didn’t really trust him after all.”

“No.…”

“Is that the only reason you kept it to yourself?”

She began to dress—the same travel-rumpled clothes. She was a long time answering; finally she looked at me. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“I kept your secret.”

“It won’t be our secret very long, Nikki. You can’t be Bukov’s only contact in Tel Aviv.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Then sooner or later they’ll query him and he’ll report to someone else next time. It may have happened already.”

“No—MacIver would be hammering at the door.”

“All right,” I said. “But that’s not the point. Look at it, Nikki, face up to it. You could have burned your bridges by telling MacIver about those documents. But you didn’t. You kept my secret.”

We went down into the smoky crowd and the woman with hairy legs—Pinar’s sister—brought us wine and soup and a small local fish, the rouget. I did not see MacIver. Pinar pirouetted in and out of the room. We didn’t speak of much of anything until after the meal. Then I said, “MacIver wanted you to seduce me into spilling it.”

“I suppose he did. He didn’t put it like that.”

“He thought it.”

“To hell with what he thought,” she said.

She was very quiet that night in the room. I kept trying to talk to her but she would shut me off.

In the morning with early sun streaming through the cracks between the curtains she said, “I’ll have to go down and talk to him.”

“Go ahead.”

“You’re trusting me again, Harry. Bad habit.”

“I seem to have become accustomed to risk-taking.”

“I won’t tell him. Not until you give me permission to.”

“Do you think I will?”

“You’ll get tired of having the world against you. I’m sorry but that’s the way it will be. It won’t be MacIver, Harry, it’ll be you. You’ll grind yourself down and finally you’ll give in.”

“I don’t think so. Eventually, to you, I might. Not to him. Not to any of them. But I’d be an old man. Like Haim was.”

“Or like Haim’s brother. What if they took me for a hostage?”

“I can’t answer that. Are you pla

“No.” She was hurt, badly hurt.

“I didn’t mean to be harsh. It’s another one of those things that’s become a habit.”

“I’ve earned it,” she said. “It’s too bad we don’t live in the same world, you and I.” She went downstairs to talk to MacIver.

I went out onto the sidewalk and watched the camels parade by. It was going to be a genuinely hot day—the first I could remember in more months than I wanted to recall.

When she met me there the liveliness was coming back into her; she was in a higher mood than before; the sun lit the blue of her eyes as she turned, and her smile was as good as a kiss.

“I’ve got a car,” she said. “He trusts me to watch you. Anyway you wouldn’t survive in this country on foot. I’m not to take the main highway. Maybe we’ll drive down to the shore.”

She hurried ahead, hips animated, fine legs scissoring; I caught up and took her arm.

The car was a Mercedes Benz coupe, the little one with a great deal of glass. She got behind the wheel and there was a satisfying rumble from the hood.

She drove three blocks to a filling station and had the tank topped up although it had been nearly three-quarters full and that was when I realized.…

Ten miles west of the town she stopped on the highway shoulder. I let her get out of the car. I didn’t open the door for her.

She wasn’t looking at me, her face was averted. We didn’t speak.

She slammed the door and I slid over into the bucket seat behind the wheel. I knew she would wait at least until sunset before walking back to town and telling them I’d overpowered her and taken the car.

In the mirror as I pulled away I saw her give a careless salute and walk away toward the sea, kicking stones with long languid thrusts of her feet.

EDITORS’ EPILOGUE

There is a postscript to Harry Bristow’s story.

The Central Intelligence Agency has refused to comment on the Bristow manuscript, only offering to read and criticize it before publication—an offer the editors declined. The CIA will not acknowledge that there is any Evan MacIver on their roster; it would be against Agency policy to do so.

Inquiries have been made of American consular officials in the Soviet Union and it would appear there is no such person as Vassily Bukov anywhere near Sebastopol. Quite possibly Bristow changed that name, and several others, for obvious reasons.

There is, however, a real Nicole Eisen. On June 14, 1973, Mrs. Eisen sold her co-op apartment in Tel Aviv, taking a loss because of the speed of the sale. On June 23 she left Tel Aviv at the begi

Since we received Bristow’s manuscript and letter from his agent we have had no communication from him.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1973 by Brian Garfield

cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

This edition published in 2011 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media