Kolchak's Gold (45 page)

I felt it return across my back: felt it because I'm sure I didn't see it. The daylight seemed to be strengthening with incredible haste. They would spot me now without the lights.…

Wait now until they've begun to turn and look another way—wait for the light to circle away. Now. Up. Three strides to the fence. I went against it prone—laid my knee across the bottom strand to bend it down; lifted the upper strand.

The sudden noise of a man's shout tore a gash through the fabric of the dawn. I could not look up: I
could not.
It was like burying my face in the pillow, that inability to look—as if by not looking I would prevent them from shooting.… I rolled through the narrow gap in the wire. My suitcase caught and jerked me around and I knew there was no way to free it and I left it there and ran—
ran
, diving and zigzagging with my soles slipping on the damp weeds, legs pumping, arms driving, my eyes only on the Turkish wood that meant life.

The stutter of the machine gun was curiously far off but then above the roar of my ears I heard the bullets whack past me and I learned that all the writings are wrong: bullets don't whiz or whistle or fan the air, they
crack
like explosives when they go by—a sonic boom. I listened with compulsive curiosity to this phenomenon and then I was tumbling, sliding in among the trees and the guns were chipping bark and twigs above my head: I scrambled and pawed into the wood and at some indeterminate moment the guns stopped and I was alive.

I crawled deep into the forest. A crescendo of pounding blood pulsed in my head. I stood up and kicked out, flexing legs and arms recklessly to find out if I'd been hit. Then I stood with the sweat drying on me and pressure drained out of my head and I had to sit down quickly and tense the muscles of my stomach to keep from passing out.

I fought it desperately. After a very long time I was able to get up. With a deep drained ache in all my fibers I began to limp toward the river.

T
rabzon. I caught a raw whiff of the sea. A bright light at the far side of the bay stroked the water with a pale rippling stripe. I was riding on the half-exposed springs of the seat of a ruined Dodge pickup truck beside a Kurdish woodman. The pickup bed was piled so high with cordwood that logs rolled off now and then and lay obstructions in the road behind. I was not trained to divide his language into words, nor he mine; we shared the word “Trabzon” and occasional sidewise smiles that strangers use to indicate to each other that they are not threatening.

A waterfront town: whitewashed stucco, bleached sidewalks constructed of cement and seashell. At the single loading dock a freighter stood with its hull broken amidships into a hinged loading ramp. Wiry workmen in greasy fezzes and white peon clothes made ant streams in and out of the hold, unloading her into a corrugated metal warehouse under high incandescent lights.

The woodman let me off in the center of town. Veiled moslem women peered from shuttered windows. A boy pedaled by on a bike. The cars parked at the curbs were mostly American-made and always very old: 1953 Plymouths, 1957 Chevrolets. One of them was pale green with TAXI painted freehand in yellow on the door. I approached the man who leaned against its fender.
“Taverna?
Pinar?”

He smiled at me as if I were a buffoon; shook his head and said something very rapid. But he was pointing at a doorway less than half a block distant. I nodded and smiled and said thank-you and went there. It all reminded me of Mexico—some fishing town on the Gulf of California coast. All except the profusion of straw-laden donkeys and the occasional camel. But the architecture and the smells were the same. Children plucked at my clothes.

And the smell in the taverna. Alcohol and tobacco: the spilled-beer aura of a bar anywhere. The room was crowded with dirty little checkerboard tables; it was near eight o'clock and midweek, the place wasn't teeming, but it was the kind of low-roofed room that felt crowded even with half a dozen people in it: the air was thick with heavy body heat.

There was a bar, topped with linoleum and bordered by dull chrome. The lights were weak. A full-bosomed woman came to wait on me. She had long wiry hairs on her legs. I said, “Is Pinar here?” and when she looked puzzled I tried it in German and in French. In any case she understood “Pinar” when it appeared in each language and finally she tapped my arm—
Wait here
—and went away through a rear door.

A tired gnome served me food and beer at one of the tables. Globules of fat swam in the soup but I ate ravenously. I wished I had my pipe to smoke afterward. I sat back to wait for the woman, for Pinar. I was fighting to keep awake: I was wound up too tightly, to the point where I was convinced everyone who spoke within earshot was shouting—at me. I'd gone too long without sleep and I felt drunk, in that stage of inebriation where nothing I saw quite made sense anymore: perspectives were off, shapes were out of kilter, lights were blurred and too bright.

I knew I had to keep a deliberate grip on sanity because I was close to losing it.

The wind kept a branch scratching on the side of the
taverna:
I was irritably aware of it until someone switched on a scratchy little radio and turned it up too loud—the heavy twanging racket that passes for rock-and-roll east of Brindisi: one of the many things like ouzo and kebab and olive oil which the Greeks and Turks deny they have in common.

A pulse drummed blood-red behind my closed eyelids. All my muscles were inflamed; my face was sore and scabbed from the glass cuts; my hands were skinned raw. I must have looked monstrous in my torn clothing. The beard stubble had grown perceptibly to the touch and my Russian shoes were scarred beyond repair.

Someone shook me gently by the shoulder and I almost bolted out of the chair. It was the buxom woman: she had a dark crickety little man with her. “Pinar,” she said proudly, and went away.

One eyebrow went up disdainfully as he looked at me. “Yes, luv?”

“You're Pinar?”

“Yes, luv. I have rooms, if that's what you've come to find. Can you pay?”

“I've got money.” It penetrated that he'd taken one look at me,
dishabille
and all, and instantly spoken English. “I've just come through the border. Pudovkin told me to come to you.”

Pinar sat daintily down on the edge of the chair beside me. He perched on it nervously. His hands fluttered when he spoke. “Pudovkin, luv? What did he say about me, then?”

“Only that you could help me.”

“Help you do what?”

It stopped me cold, that question. I'd sustained myself with a goal: the goal was this place, this man; it had been a long time since I'd thought farther ahead than Turkey, which meant freedom, and Pinar, who meant help.

Finally I said, “I've got a Turkish visa. I suppose I'll be all right here?”

“Of course, luv.” He touched a tear in the sleeve of my jacket. “What a frightful mess you are. We'll have to get you cleaned up. Do you have a name, luv?”

“Bristow. Harry Bristow.”

His face changed.

Pinar had half a dozen boardinghouse rooms on the floor above the
taverna.
By the time I had bathed and attempted to shave around the wounds, the dark woman had brought clean clothes for me from somewhere and a pair of Arab sandals. The clothes were a poor fit but I managed; anything would have done.

I stretched out fully clothed on the bed and was unconscious before I thought to turn off the light.

Two days in that place and I slept almost all of it away. Once—the second afternoon—I walked through the inferior regions of the town and bought a pipe and a pair of oxfords for my feet. I sorted the handful of note cards I'd had in my pockets—I'd lost a good many with my coat, unthinkingly leaving them in the pockets when I'd abandoned the coat. Most of the rest had gone with the suitcase on the barbed wire. The ones I'd kept in my pockets were those tracing my search for Kolchak's gold and I no longer needed most of them because the most likely hiding place was burned into my memory cells too brightly ever to be extinguished. Late that afternoon I took the cards downstairs and threw them into the black wood stove and watched them turn to ash.

Pinar caught me at it but concealed his curiosity. “Feel ready to talk, luv?”

“I think so.”

“Shall we have a drink then?” We had the place to ourselves. We took glasses of wine to a table and Pinar raised his drink in toast: “To your adventure.”

“I could do without any more of it.”

“Well, what now? Most of them I send straight on to Tel Aviv by way of Piraeus. I suppose I could arrange passage for you to the States, but you might find that more easily done at your own consulate in Ankara.”

“I'd rather not advertise my whereabouts to the consulate.”

“I see. Like that, is it, luv?” He had an insidious smile—as if we shared some clandestine purpose. Like an elbow nudge in the ribs. And always the single lifted eyebrow, the supercilious curl of lip. He reminded me a bit of Zandor, the aura of homosexuality; but Zandor was a mover. Pinar was only a connection: a man whose existence was like that of a crossroads, defined only in terms of those who touched his life briefly on their way to some other place.

He contrived to be dainty and motherly; he succeeded only in being somewhat sleazy and conspiratorial. “Well then. A ticket to the States, will that do it? Can you pay?”

I'd counted my remaining travelers checks; I could make it if I wanted to. For forty-eight hours I'd been asking myself about the next step. I hadn't answered yet. “Let me stay a few more days and get it sorted out.”

“No rush, luv. My house is your house.”

On the following morning after a predawn rain I went down to the rocky shore and watched the gulls. Trying to decide. If I went home would MacIver leave it alone? Not bloody likely. They would put on all the pressures—everything from the revoked driver's license and the IRS audits to the pressures on my publishers.

But if not home—where? Tel Aviv? Nikki?

I was a little old to run to a woman's arms for succor; and Nikki was no longer mine. Or at least I was no longer hers. Indirectly it was Nikki who'd got me out of Russia alive but I still felt that annoying suspicion, that accusatory anger. When I began to analyze it I saw how flimsy it had become but still I couldn't shake it off. I could go to her but would I ever trust her again?

What else was there? Bukov had said it:
Exile
—
a blind wandering to an unknown destination.

I had to think about the rest of my life. Planning like a college boy trying to decide on a profession the night before commencement. How real was Ritter's threat? Was I finished as a writer?

What if I flew to Washington and walked into MacIver's office and told him where to find the gold?

It would get them off my back. I was. sure of it.

But if I did that it would negate everything I'd done. Pudovkin would have died meaninglessly.

I recoiled at that reasoning: it was the justification all the fools had used for keeping the Indochina war going long after it had been patently lost.
Don't let the soldiers die in vain.
It's specious reasoning—contemptible.

And it had nothing to do with the issues. The facts hadn't changed in a week: the reasons for my keeping the secret were the same now as they had been in Sebastopol. There was enough gold in the cache to inflate currencies to starvation levels or to slaughter thousands of people and I had refused from the outset to be the instrument of any such catastrophe and that fact was still the same. I'd believed it and I'd been willing to sacrifice Pudovkin's life for that belief—and Bukov's and several others' along the way—if it had come to that—because at the time I'd been willing to sacrifice my own as well. This was what would have been in vain if I changed my mind now. And it was a guilt I couldn't face.

Nor was I ready yet to face the only real alternative. I returned to the
taverna
still having made no decision for myself and feeling like some dreary imitation of Hamlet.

Coming along the street I looked more closely at the front of the
taverna
than I'd done before and saw that it had been covered with a new façade. Somehow that made it look worse than the old buildings around it: renovation hadn't disguised its age, only shown someone wanted to disguise it.

It took a moment for my eyes to accommodate to the dimness inside. I was still by the door when Pinar greeted me there and led me through the room with the clandestine indifference of an arch headwaiter leading the way to an undesirable table. “I've got someone you'll want to meet.” We went through the back door and past the foot of the stairs and he twisted the knob of a door which I had assumed led into some kind of office. I hadn't been inside it before.

Pinar's hand fluttered at me. His cowardly half smile warned me. When the door swung out of the way I saw a bookcase, two empty chairs, a scrofulous little desk and a man sitting behind it with a rowdy grin on his face.