Kolchak's Gold (3 page)

The Soviets still hadn't budged. I was making pleas through intermediaries by then—old friends of my father's, people in the diplomatic corps—but none of it had worked; the Russian archives were still closed to me. It was going to take years, if it was to happen at all. To the Soviets history is not a source, not a tool, but a god. Like all gods its interpretation is subject to revision—periodic expedient changes to fit the requirements of the present. No crime, regardless how heinous, can be condemned if it is performed in the service of Red history—a system of rationalization which is reminiscent of the Inquisition and the Crusades. But as long as history is the Red religion it is small wonder that the Soviets resist incursions by outside students, and I had few illusions about my chances.

So I turned to the Aleutian campaigns and spent two years on them (1966–1968), after which I assembled the vignettes that went into
The Master Spies.

Those were years when my daughter died in a stupid accident and my marriage broke up. I mention those things only to explain why I did not devote more wholehearted efforts to opening Russian doors a crack. I had too many problems. For a while my work took a back seat; in fact for more than a year I was drinking too much to do decent work. But I don't mean this to be a confession or an
apologia;
my personal life has only a limited bearing on the facts that must be divulged here.

For one reason and another it was near the end of 1970 before I returned to Washington to begin work on what I intended to be the definitive popular history of the Siberian Civil War in 1918–20—Kolchak's War. It was shortly thereafter that all this began. I remember the date quite clearly: January 26, 1971.

George Fitzpatrick, who has a Boston Irish sense of humor and a practical joker's temperament, was throwing one of his bacchanals. He detested the hoary Washington practice of throwing every party “in honor of” someone. This one, I recall vividly, was thrown in commemoration of the date of Oscar Wilde's death.

I had been weeks sorting the boring files of Graves' Expeditionary Force in Siberia and I welcomed Fitzpatrick's invitation in the hope the party would pull me out of my dulled mood.

Fitzpatrick is a Boston lawyer, a registered lobbyist; he keeps a suite of rooms year-round at the Hay-Adams. In the lobby that evening, conventioneers with name-tags on their pockets swarmed like prisoners of war and it was with great difficulty that I made my way to the bank of elevators.

A man arrived there just ahead of me; he put his finger on the depressed plastic square and it lit up. He turned and we looked at each other with the tentative smiles of people who think they recognize each other but aren't quite sure.

Then he said, “Harry Bristow.” He pumped my arm in a politician's handshake, left hand on my elbow. “Been a hell of a long time.”

I still didn't remember him well enough to put a name with the face.

“I didn't realize I'd put on
that
much weight. I'm Evan MacIver. Remember?”

I had to do the self-deprecating laugh and disbelieving head-shake; he was right, I should have remembered him—we'd roomed together one semester at Columbia.

MacIver brightened; we asked each other how we were, after which he said something complimentary about my books.

I remembered him as a self-possessed jaunty youth; a magpie with a raffish way. Now he had the somewhat defeated air of a worn-out roué: a big rumpled man with the jowls of a bulldog, the rheumy eyes of a bloodhound and a hard round belly on him. In profile his nose was an exact right triangle with a bit of a point on it. He was only two years older than I but he looked badly used at thirty-five. He wore a beet-hued tie and a gray flannel business suit as if he had been born in them; there'd been a day when he wouldn't have been caught dead in conventional attire. And his manner somehow suggested that the good education he'd once absorbed had gone stale through shiftless indifference.

At Fitzpatrick's floor the elevator doors slid open with a soft scrape. The hallway was wide and carpeted, intersected at intervals by painted doors. MacIver said, “You going to the Fitzpatrick bash? You know the way?”

“I've been here before,” I admitted and led him along the corridor. I made conversation: “What have you been up to?”

“Oh hell, you know how it is. A little of this, a little of that. I did time at grad school after you left. Few years overseas—Kyoto and Darmstadt, mainly. Married a German girl while I was stationed over there, got my inactive papers, came back here.”

“Any kids?”

“I got my wife and she's got me.” It was wry because, evidently, there was truth in it. “Other than that no, no children. How about you?”

“No ties at the moment.” I saw no point in going into detail. I rang the bell and a laughing girl let us in.

Among those who know, an invitation to a Fitzpatrick party is a privilege. There is always a White House crisis or a Capitol Hill scandal to fuel conversations and the guest list insures that a good number of animated and heated disputes will break out in the course of the bibulous evening.

You never see quite the same crowd there twice; you're kept on your toes by the presence of strangers who throw lethal darts into your best set-piece opinion speeches. A bore never gets a second invitation. There's a slight artificiality to it—Fitzpatrick's principal aim is to recreate the Algonquin round table—but nobody minds. The best sarcasms are honed here. Tomorrow's political-humor newspaper columns often have their geneses around George's bar. I believe it was at one of his early parties that the phrase was coined, “Would you buy a used car from this man?” Or at least legend would have it so.

Evan MacIver and I were separated almost instantly on entry; I found myself marched into the center of the main room with George Fitzpatrick's thick arm thrown across my shoulders. Around me vied the fumes of his Black Label Cologne and Cutty Sark whiskey. George stopped to introduce me to a trio of allegedly beautiful people and left me there to find my own way to the bar; I don't recall speaking to him again at all that night.

I was in the wrong mood for it; I knew that right away. I'd been immersed in dry research too long; wit, like love, is something you have to keep working at—otherwise it withers. I constructed some sort of drink and found a neutral corner in which to swizzle it reflectively. Across the room I saw a glamorous woman, the wife of a young Senator who wasn't here with her, take offense at something someone said to her; she took a reef in her floor-length dress and swept straight out the door. When it closed behind her the entire room burst into raucous laughter: there was no such thing as an embarrassed silence at one of these bashes. Manners were suspended; anything went; she had broken the house rules and nobody had sympathy for her: the room echoed with ridicule when she returned for her forgotten coat.

A columnist buttonholed me and tried out a funny idea he was thinking of using. Evidently he was speaking to me but he seemed to be aiming somewhere over the top of my head. I laughed in the right places.

Another drink, too fast. I saw MacIver drifting through the crowd, looking curiously like an eavesdropper: he was out of place here, the company was too fast for him. I wondered where Fitzpatrick could have come across him. What did MacIver do nowadays? He hadn't said. I had thought he was taller than he seemed now; perhaps events had shrunk him. He was burning his cigarettes away in long drags.

I found a chair in the lee of conversations; someone had just vacated it to charge into the midst of a spirited argument nearby. Laughter hung in the room in waves that bounced from one end to the other; the various knots of joke-tellers seemed to have found synchronization. I settled into the chair and went through the time-consuming ritual of getting my pipe going.

For a little while I let things drift by me. Then my attention drifted toward a young woman who sat in the corner opposite me, beside the window. Her head was bowed so that her dark hair shielded her face; people went by and there was an undrunk glass of something in her hand but she paid nothing any notice.

“She's Israeli. Separated from her husband, not divorced. Twenty-eight, I think.”

It was Evan MacIver, suddenly at my side, sitting down hipshot on the arm of my chair. “She's got a son in some Swiss boarding school. She's staying in a consulate apartment out in Georgetown.”

“Why tell me all that?”

“Because you wanted to know.” His smile was cynical: he had a salesman's knowledge of human weaknesses. “She speaks five or six languages but as far as I know she doesn't know how to say ‘yes' in any of them.”

“I gather you don't like her much.”

“I can't stand argumentative women,” MacIver said. “Her name's Nikki something, I forget exactly. Weinstein, Eisenstein, something like that.”

“Nikki?”

“She's only half Jewish. French mother, I think. Probably short for Nicole. She's over here with some kind of fund-raising group, trying to get shekels out of the New York Jews to help spring Jewish emigrants out of Russia.”

I drained my drink down to the ice cubes and set the glass down.

MacIver said, “You really ought to talk to her about that Russian stuff you're always writing about.”

I could tell by the way the girl squinted at her newspaper that she was nearsighted. I looked at MacIver. “Why?”

“She's hipped on it. Talk your ear off. You don't know what depressed is until you've listened to her number on pogroms and atrocities. You've never met such a relentless memory for dismal facts and figures.”

“How'd you meet her?”

“On business. I should have left it there.”

The girl had opened her handbag. She took out a pair of large dark-rimmed glasses to read the news more closely. She was quite oblivious to her surroundings. She looked bright and quick; MacIver's droll attempt to characterize her didn't quite jibe with her appearance. Her eyes, magnified behind the glasses, seemed slanted with a somewhat rancorous irony—wary, suspicious, but the sort of face that would hide sooner behind clever mockery than behind heavy literal fact-mongering.

MacIver's lip-hung cigarette bobbed up and down when he spoke. “What are you working on right now? Another spy book?”

“No. I'm doing a book on the Russian Civil War.”

“You already did one. Didn't you?”

“This one's on Kolchak. I passed him over lightly in the first one.”

“The admiral, I remember.” He beamed as if proud of his memory. “You do pick the grim ones, don't you?”

I let it lie. “What kind of line are you in these days?”

“Cloaks.” He dragged avariciously on his cigarette and poured thick slow rivers of smoke from his nostrils, and gave me the familiar grin for the first time. “Cloak-and-dagger business. I'm in the cloak end of it. Civil service, you know. Years ago I decided I was the sort of bureaucratic hack the civilian world would eat alive, so I stayed with the government when I got out of the army. Now I'm just another fool exercising my petty authority around Langley.”

His candor surprised me. It was not
de rigueur
for people in that line to advertise their calling. This was long before the celebrity of E. Howard Hunt.

He seemed to feel he'd gone far enough. He changed the direction of the conversation: “Some of us at The Firm were reading your last book. We got a few yocks here and there, but you didn't find half the jokes in that Haitian business. Not half.”

I grunted to encourage him and after he found a place to stub his cigarette he went on: “It was Lansky, you missed that part.”

“Meyer Lansky?”

“Let's say people associated with him. Miami types.” He lit up and blew smoke at his match. “Come on, Harry, you should've figured out that Papa Doc knew what our mental retards were up to. Lansky had a little meet with the Duvalier people to talk about those Mickey Mouse exiles we had flying B–Twenty-fours over Port au Prince.”

“You're kidding.”

“Why should I? Look, the mob was looking for beach resorts for their casinos, and Papa Doc offered to trade beach-front property for antiaircraft guns. Where'd you think he got his artillery on the roof of the palace?”

“The
Mafia?”

“Shot down two Liberators, too. Those clowns trying to fly airplanes—eighteen tons of bombs and they never hit the palace once.” His chuckle grew into a bray of laughter.

“Why tell me all this?”

“Ancient history. It's what you write about, isn't it?”

But it was something else, I knew. I had a feeling he was doing it to establish his bonafides but I couldn't fathom what reason he had for doing that.

The girl in the corner was quite indifferent to the party swirling around her; it wasn't an act.

MacIver said, “Remember old Gilfillan, the time he mimeographed that fake sociology exam and hooked half the class on it?” And then he was off on a rambling discourse of nostalgic reminiscence which I endeavored to curtail by making a gesture with my empty glass and carrying it away toward the bar.

He came along unshakably. “You had dinner yet?”

“Yes,” I lied.

It made him pause. “Too bad. There's a place down the block, the steaks aren't too bad. Christ, I don't know about you but I can only take so much of this ruckus. I think I'll take off. Listen, we ought to have dinner soon—have a few yocks over the old times.”

“I'd like to,” I said politely.

He gave me a card after scrawling a ballpoint number on the back of it. “That's the home phone. I've got a little house just the other side of Arlington. Come out and visit sometime. The little lady makes a hell of a sauerkraut.”

I looked at the card as if I really intended to call him sometime.

MacIver drifted away through the smoke; I was still waiting my turn at the bar. He stopped by the young woman's chair in the corner and I saw her stiffen and nod with recognition but not pleasure. MacIver spoke briefly and the Israeli woman's eyes turned toward me. I had no choice but to smile and wave my glass in their direction.