Kolchak's Gold (16 page)

I said, “That's kind of cryptic.”

“He didn't mean it to be. He was having difficulty holding the pad. He only made enough of a note so that I would remember what it meant. This General von Geyr had something to do with the Nazi effort to find the White Russians' gold during the Second World War.”

“And?”

“He thought you might want to find this man and talk to him.”

“What for?”

“To find out what happened to all that gold, of course.”

“He had an obsession with that, didn't he?”

She began to say something, but curbed her tongue. “I suppose he always felt he had a vested interest in it.” It wasn't what she had meant to say.

She tapped the note. “This general was also at Sebastopol during the German evacuation. You'd want to talk to him about that, wouldn't you?”

“If I could find him. Bavaria's pretty populous. I'm not a detective.”

“Of course you are. What else would you call what you do?”

I put the note in my pocket. “If I get to Germany I'll try to look him up. Was that all there was to it?”

“The Germans found the gold, you know.”

“Yes, he told me about that.” I didn't add that it was not the kind of thing you could put in print on the unsupported testimony of one old man who hadn't even been there at the time.

“Aren't you curious what happened to it after that?”

“I suppose I am. I'm not burning up with it. It's only a sideshow at most. I mean, millions—”

“I know,” she said, amused. “Millions of people were dying. Just the same, they're dead and there isn't a thing you can do to bring them back to life. But the gold is still there, somewhere. You
could
do something about that.”

“Like what?”

“You could try to find it.”

I laughed at her and in lovemaking we both forgot about von Geyr and Sebastopol and the gold and everything else that was not of the flesh and of the moment.

We had come to our lusty passion fiercely and quickly and without reluctance; if there was a level beyond which we did not delve, I was not aware of it then. We played the games of children in love, sometimes courtly and sometimes bawdy. Nothing prudent or fearful about it: love turned the two of us into one, in the way that two sheets of glass lie one on the other—hard to distinguish where one ends and the other begins, and harder still to pull apart.

Yet a night or two later—it was the night after we packed up the books in Haim's silent flat—we came home from dinner and she threw herself across the couch in an abandoned sprawl. “Do you think you could be an angel and get me some aspirin from the loo?”

She'd had a headache for hours; I'd seen the pain across her eyes. I brought the aspirin and a glass of water. “Ready to serve milady at all times.”

She sat up to swallow and when she lay down on her back with her breasts diminished she looked girlish. Her eyes were closed. “Harry you can't stay in Israel forever.”

“My work's finished here. I'm only waiting for you, you know that.”

She took a breath. “You'll have to go without me.”

It was her job, she said; they weren't going to let her go back to the States for a while—she had too much to do here and she wasn't needed in Washington just now. She didn't know how long it might be before she could come to America.

She sat up and talked rapidly at me: “It would be ridiculous your staying here much longer. Your work isn't here.”

“I don't want to leave without you, Nikki.”

“We've got to be sensible. You'd come apart if you stayed.”

I folded her hand between my palms and she drew the back of my hand against her side; I could feel the soft rhythm of her breathing. She didn't open her eyes.

Finally she said, “I won't give up my work, Harry. No more than you could.”

There was more talk; it kept going in circles and after a while we sat in conflicting silences until she said, “Oh, dear, now you're really angry with me.” She was watching me and I saw the shadow across her eyes; it was not the headache. I remembered something Haim had said to me once—probably one of his old sayings:
Take care not to make a woman weep, for God counts her tears.

I asked her how long she thought it might be; she said she had no idea. I said I could wait awhile until we found out; she said it might be months.

“Look. Suppose I go back and finish up in the archives. I could bring my notes back here to write the thing.”

“Could you really? Don't you always need to go back to the archives to look up things you missed and double check other things?”

That was true; it was the way I always worked and I'd told her that. Now I felt she was using my own words against me. “You want me to go,” I accused her.

“No. My God, no.”

“Do you love me, Nikki?”

“With all my heart.” She turned her face against my chest; her words were muffled: “With all my heart, Harry.”

Finally I said, “I'll have to think about it. There must be some way.”

But there wasn't and she was right: after another week I was restless and growing irritable.

It was a Sunday morning in her flat. The hot sun through the venetian blinds laid horizontal bars of light across the bedclothes. I remember her face, childlike with the drowsy innocence of first awakening. I said something cranky, something about the sun waking us up—why couldn't she put drapes across those windows? And she got up without a word and padded to the chest of drawers and pawed through her open handbag until she found an envelope.

It was an El Al folder with a ticket inside. The flight was scheduled to depart at two o'clock that day, that Sunday.

“I bought it early in the week. I knew you'd be ready by today.”

“You know me too well, Nikki.”

“I know it's possible to manage to live without the people you can't live without.” She pressed the ticket into my hand. “I know how it is, Harry. I understand.”

“Do you? Well, maybe you do—I guess I'm not the only idiotic fool you've ever met.”

“Oh Harry …” And I stopped her with a kiss and we made a frantic kind of love and sometime afterward she said, “You'll miss your plane—you'd better hurry.”

“I suppose I'd better.”

She went with me as far as she was allowed to the customs departure gate. “I'll come soon, darling.”

“Promise me that.”

“Yes—it's a promise I'm making to myself too.”

“Wangle it, Nikki. You're good at that—twisting men around your finger.”

We both laughed but it was brief laughter. We understood, both of us, that it might be a long while.

Abruptly I kissed her very hard. “That's to make sure you don't forget me.”

“I have a very poor memory,” she said. “You'd better do that again.”

I obeyed but when I kissed her I felt the warm tears on her cheek and then she was wheeling away from me:
“Ciao
, Harry …” and she was running away through the airport. They were calling the flight; I couldn't follow her. I had the impulse to throw the ticket on the floor and go back with her but in the end I went through the customs and emigration line and boarded the flight with stinging eyes and an empty weight in my throat that wouldn't go up and wouldn't go down.

I knew it was foolish, immature. But that didn't ease it. I think I was sad because it made me realize we were not complete romantics at heart, either of us. If this love had been paramount we each should have been willing to make nearly any sacrifice for it but we hadn't been willing to do that. We both understood we'd have no happiness together if it meant sacrificing our individual
raisons d'être.

She'd seen it faster than I had; she'd known the day when I would no longer reject the airplane ticket. Another month and we might have been bickering, at each other's throats. Nikki had been wise enough to make the decision for us and I should have been grateful.

Love is meaningless without dignity and it is self-destroying wherever one's success means the other's failure. Nikki and I were too well aware of that. I think we both regretted it. It seemed unfair and at times I grew angry with both of us, I felt we had made a selfish and petty decision; I felt we must be small people crippled by unheroic realism—it wasn't that this was the wrong age for the grand passion; it was that we were the wrong people. We were too ordinary, too hidebound in our commitments to ephemeral occupations, too egocentric in our smaller-than-life way.

In that manner I alternated between extremes, sometimes maudlin and sometimes confident that we had made the best decision. But underneath it always I felt we would find our way together again. I trusted that; I believed it with all my heart.

I
spent a good part of that sweating August at home in New Jersey avoiding getting splendidly drunk. I had a secretary in to transcribe the tape recordings from my talks with Haim Tippelskirch and the others to whom he'd introduced me in Israel; I went over that material as it came from her typewriter and I spent two or three weeks going back over the material on Sebastopol and the Kolchak retreat. I had been away from it all long enough to discover some new things in it; I made some notes to take with me to the archives and late in the month went down to Washington.

My first act there was to visit the Soviet Embassy. There was some encouragement: they had not shut the door on the possibility of my visiting the Crimea for the purpose of looking at their archives and interviewing survivors. Neither had they opened it wide, however. There was a bureaucratic wall of rules behind which the embassy and OVIR (the office of visa registration) took refuge. There were more applications for me to fill out, more questions to answer. The Soviet hacks had thwarted my efforts for years but I was determined to outlast them.

At the same time I had more procedural battles to fight in the Pentagon in my attempts to get access to several cartons of Wehrmacht and SS records, particularly the stenographic minutes of daily staff meetings—records that were essential to my Sebastopol book. These initially had gone into the West German central archives but some clerical mistake had moved them into the Political Archives of the Foreign Ministry in Bonn and a supervisory clerk had discovered them, decided they didn't belong there and shipped them out to the Americans shortly before the end of the Occupation. So far as I knew they had never been examined in any detail. Nor would they ever be unless I could find some lever with which to pry them open.

The machinery was in motion but there was no rushing it. I needed the records of British Intelligence and Expeditionary Force operations in the Russian Civil War for the Kolchak book; I flew to London in the fall and spent weeks in the Imperial War Museum and the archives of the Ministry of Defence in the Old Admiralty Building. I had it half in mind to swing down to Israel before going home; I put through an international trunk call and finally, in spite of everything the telephone service could do, I reached Nikki.

It was a poor connection but it was wonderful to hear her voice. “They must have routed this call through Johannesburg.”

“Oh, Harry, I can hardly hear you.”

“I'm thinking of coming to Tel Aviv next week,” I shouted.

“Oh dear—I won't be here. They're sending me to the Far East for several weeks. Oh crap.”

“It's a conspiracy against us. Christ.”

“I'm so sorry. I'll see if I can get it changed—can I call you back tomorrow?”

We arranged that she would; and she did so but she hadn't been able to change the schedule of her mission to Tokyo and Peking. There's no purpose in recounting the details of our conversation; we said our disheartened farewells and I returned to my work with somnambulistic determination.

She had never given me a clear picture of her position or function in the refugee organization. I knew she had to do with fund-raising but obviously there was more to the job than that. I took it for granted she was engaged in clandestine dealings to some extent—the efforts to get Jews out of Russia had always been tinged with the coloration of espionage and intrigue but the business of espionage was far more humdrum than the moviemakers would have us believe. Whatever her job, it didn't put her in any evident physical danger. But what began to concern me now was the realization that her position in the organization must be a good deal higher than I'd taken it to be. Perhaps because of her youth and vivacity I'd taken it for granted she had an ordinary minor post of some sort; but you didn't send your minor clerks off globetrotting to Washington and Tokyo and Peking. Nikki was nobody's secretary.

So it now appeared that I was in love with a person of some importance in the political scheme of things.

I found this discouraging, not because it created any sense of competition but because it made me realize how seriously committed she must be. This was no mere youthful enthusiasm for a cause. She had to be fairly high up in her organization; it stood to reason she must have had decision-making authority. At any rate if I had used my head earlier I should have known she was no fuzzy-headed do-gooder. She was not merely serious; she was dedicated to whatever she was doing and it was no passing fancy. It was becoming very unlikely she would ever decide to throw it over and come rushing into my arms to stay.