Kolchak's Gold (5 page)

I immediately said, “I'll go with you.”

I had written to the old man in Israel—his name was Haim Tippelskirch—and he had replied by air-letter that he would be happy to grant an interview if I should happen to visit his country. The invitation hadn't excited me; he said he had been a subaltern in Siberia and I'd had enough experience with old men's recollections to put very small stock in their veracity. It hardly seemed worth a long expensive trip merely to interview one man whose function in those historic events had been one of low-ranking unimportance. That his revelations would draw me into a terrible trap was something I had no way of suspecting until much later.

Nikki's trip changed my mind about Haim Tippelskirch's unimportance. I rationalized that there might be useful records in the Palestinian archives; I had never seen Israel; it might be worthwhile to talk to the old man after all; it was still a cool spring in Washington, cloudy all the time it seemed, and I looked forward to a blaze of desert sunshine; I had not been away in months; and so on. The truth was I wouldn't have gone without Nikki.

T
he old man lived in a modern block of flats in Tel Aviv. I hadn't expected such Scandinavian architecture or such crowds along the commercial thoroughfares; somehow I'd created a picture of Israeli austerity and was amazed by the hell-bent rush for consumer goods I saw on all sides. Certainly on the streets of the city there was no sense of fear; you didn't feel an Arab air force lurking beyond the horizon, you didn't suspect every alley of harboring an Al Fatah fanatic. It was almost as if all that must have been a fiction of the Western press. At the time of course I was unaware of what went on behind closed doors, except insofar as the government-censored newspapers covered it. The Jewish Defense League, which had terrorized New York so recently, was regarded as a pathetic joke; the press was filled with political cartoons ridiculing not only pompous Arab windbags but also the American Zionists and to some extent Israel's own politicians.

It was quite hot and the proximity of the Mediterranean only made it seem even drier than it was—like the parched feeling you get when you come in sight of a man-made lake in the middle of the Arizona desert.

Haim Tippelskirch had a tiny apartment on the fourth floor overlooking the playground of a modern school. He and Nikki were very glad to see each other; they embraced and their laughter mingled.

She had told me he had a great deal of vigor for a man in his seventies but to me he appeared alarmingly frail at that first meeting. He was very tall but thin as a sapling, with oversized grey slacks cinched up around his middle chest; he leaned on a polished cane. His wispy hair was in pewter-grey tufts and his cadaverous face appeared to have few teeth.

Yet there was dignified authority in the poise of his head, the angle of his physical attitude when he greeted me. With Nikki he had spoken Hebrew; we now had a brief go-round of tongues—he had no English—and we settled on German, with which we were both comfortable. He spoke with a good High German accent and did not need to hesitate in search of the right word.

Later after that first meeting Nikki told me how hard it had been for her to conceal her alarm: he had wasted badly since she had last seen him six months earlier. We had no way of knowing it but he was already quite ill with the cancer that would soon take his life. I don't know if he had the diagnosis yet; he knew he was ill.

She was remarkably good. She gave no sign. She teased him girlishly and the old man gave as good as he took. He was her surrogate uncle, they told me; he had known her mother well. They were not related but they might as well have been.

He didn't seem a religious man; there were no artifacts in the apartment. The furnishings were inexpensive and Scandinavian in style but hardly spartan; he had arranged the small flat pleasantly and the sun streamed in with clean strong light. One entire long wall of the sitting room was given over to bookcases and the volumes on the shelves were in several languages; I saw none in English but apparently he read French, German, Italian and two or three others besides Hebrew and Russian. There were the classics of Russian and Continental literature and philosophy; there was also a substantial library of history and military studies (including three of mine in translation); he had Clausewitz and an extensive shelf of Nietzsche and Goethe.

The two of them made tea and Nikki brought it into the sitting room on a silver tray. It looked quite valuable. I remember the old man catching my eye and smiling. “This is one reason I am no longer in Russia. I fear I lack proletarian sympathies. I enjoy as much comfort and luxury as I can afford—and I've never had anything against privilege.”

Nikki had to leave. We both saw her to the door. “Take good care of him,” she said to the old man; we kissed and she went.

He waved me to a chair and went to the bookcase where he took down a book. It was my first, the one on the Civil War in Russia. He laid it on top of the case; stopped to glance out the window at the sky and then pivoted on his cane to face me. “Of course I have read this.”

“A very youthful effort,” I said.

“It's quite well done. But it's seen from a great distance. You must have done it all from libraries.”

“Libraries and official archives,” I said. “I didn't know of any other sources then. It takes time to learn one's way around, in my craft.”

“In any craft.” He hobbled to a chair with wooden arms, settled into it and bent forward to pour the tea. “Do you take sugar? Cream?”

“No thank you.”

I didn't rush him with questions; I've learned they tend to close up on you if you do that. He knew what I was there for. I let him do it his way.

He indicated my portable cassette recorder. “Do you always use that?”

“When I can. It reduces the possibility of misquoting.”

He stared briefly at the machine. Recorders frighten some people. I said, “I won't switch it on if you prefer.”

“It doesn't matter. Please yourself.” He had a curiously engaging smile; it was a bit absent and never quite complete but there was a tremendous warmth in it.

He handed me the tea. The cup rattled on the saucer. He sat back and sipped his own, regarding me over the rim of his cup. “I confess you took me by surprise. From your book and your recent letters I took you to be an older man. What does a young American have to do with these events in Asia of so long ago? Are you Jewish?”

“No.”

“Of Russian parentage then?”

“My mother came from the Ukraine.”

“As did I,” he murmured.

“I've always had the feeling that we in the West need to know more about these things,” I volunteered. “Americans know nothing of the Russian Civil War. Nothing at all. Most of them never heard of it.”

“Perhaps that's just as well, isn't it?”

“Those who do not learn from history——”

“Yes yes. I know all that. But the fact that you teach them this history is no warrant they'll learn from it.”

“I only want to give them the opportunity. They can't make a choice if they don't know any facts.”

“Which facts? What do you expect this to prove?”

It was hard to answer; really I had no grand purpose. “I enjoy the act of discovery,” I said lamely. “Possibly my books don't do much more than entertain, but the readers do learn something. What they do with this knowledge isn't up to me.”

He wasn't particularly pleased with that. “This land where we are right now,” he said. “During the First World War this was Turkish territory. History shows us that the British promised Palestine to both the Jews and the Arabs, at different times, in return for Jewish and Arab help in capturing it from the Turks. So the British captured it from the Turks and now the Jews live on it and the Arabs want to take it. The fault is England's. The English know their history, they know this. Has it helped us?”

“It provides you with a scapegoat,” I said; and we both laughed at that.

“I have lived most of my life in Palestine,” he said abruptly. “I came here in nineteen twenty-four.”

“That long ago?”

“I'm something of a pioneer.” He was proud of it. But it was an endearing pride, not at all arrogant. He stabbed a finger in the general direction of my book on top of the case; the pointing finger was frail and avian. “That war of yours drove me here. But I suppose I can be thankful for that much. Although I can think of very little else to feel kindly toward, in that war.”

“It must have been horrible.”

“The cost,” he murmured. I noticed that his hand was shaking. He noticed that I noticed; he hid his hand in his lap.

I thought it was the right time to press gently. “I understand you were with Admiral Kolchak's gold train at the end.”

He looked up with dignified astonishment. At first he did not reply; he covered his confusion by drinking tea. When he set the cup down he cleared his throat. “I'm surprised Nicole would have told you that.”

“I'm sure she didn't mean to betray a confidence.”

“It isn't that. It only means she trusts you—more completely than I have known her to trust anyone in a long time. Nicole is … brilliant in many ways of course, a remarkable woman. But she can be very vulnerable and she knows this. That she chooses to trust you—I hope you will take that as the great compliment it is.”

“I do.”

He studied me before he nodded his head; then he said, “The gold train. Yes, I was with it. Up to the very end.” He went on appraising me, sizing me up; impulse wrestled with caution on his face, and finally won. “It should be told, I suppose.
Gott in Himmel
, if it had been told forty years ago my brother might still be alive.” An abrupt nod of decision. “I shall tell you, then. There are no longer any secrets worth keeping.”

He reached for his cane: balanced it on the floor between his knees and rested both hands over the curved handle. He leaned forward and nodded toward my recorder and I obeyed, switching it on, testing the levels.

“The treasure was only gold in part. The largest part to be sure. I have never forgotten the count we made. There were five thousand two hundred and thirteen wooden boxes containing gold bars. I believe the value of that bullion was stated at the time as being six hundred and fifty million rubles. In addition there were some sixteen hundred bags that contained securities and other valuables—one hundred million paper Romanovs, nearly four hundred millions in platinum, and what one could call a miscellany of state treasure. This was the entire treasury of Imperial Russia—the Czar's liquid reserves. The total value at that time was very close to one billion one hundred and fifty million rubles. In your dollars of that time this represented approximately nine hundred and fifty million, but some of the securities would be valueless today of course. The platinum and gold alone, however, would today be worth nearly two billion dollars on the world market.”

He tapped his chest. “I have made an amateur study of the gold market in my retirement. But you do not need to have a sophisticated knowledge of international monetary exchange to understand what this much raw wealth could do to the economy of nations if it were suddenly to appear.”

I said, “Not much likelihood of that, is there?”

His smile this time was edged with irony. “Herr Bristow, do
you
know what happened to the Czar's Imperial Treasury?”

“Not for an absolute fact, no. The published histories conflict. One suggests the Czech Legion got it, another insists Kolchak handed it over to the Bolsheviks. One of them even says the partisans mined a bridge over the Angara and the whole train went to the bottom of the river. But it seems obvious it ended up in Lenin's hands. They've got those underground vaults in the Urals.…”

“They do, yes, and those vaults contain great quantities of gold. But not the Imperial Treasury.”

I felt the first tingling of excitement. “Then what happened to it?”

“A great many things happened to it, Herr Bristow, but so far as I know, the entire treasure remains intact to this day—hidden.

“I will tell you about it—as much of it as I know.” He settled back now and let the cane lean against the chair; he spoke with self-assured candor and quiet composure.

“On the seventh day of February, nineteen-twenty,” he began, “I did not die.”