Kolchak's Gold (25 page)

T
hey drove me to a house on a height. In better weather it must have commanded a fine view of the city and the Black Sea beyond. It was one of those crenellated Byzantine houses, probably at one time the residence of Czarist aristocrats, somehow spared the destruction of the war.

Timoshenko's air was apologetic if not sheepish when we stopped and he quickly popped out to open my door. The driver came around and gave Timoshenko a suspicious sidelong glance before he gripped my arm.

The driver's arm pinched the nerve just above my elbow and I shook myself loose. Timoshenko cleared his throat pointedly and the driver didn't resume his grip on me; he only jerked his head toward the house and I stumbled through the rain with Timoshenko beside me, burly in his coat. The driver slid back into the Wartburg behind the wheel. I cannot remember what he looked like; only that he frightened me in spite (or perhaps because) of the fact that he hadn't said a word to me.

Timoshenko rang. After a brief wait a Judas hole at eye-level in the door opened, revealed a man's eye, and snapped shut; and the door opened.

The man was thickset and his flat face was expressionless; his eyes looked in two different directions at once. Timoshenko spoke my name and the man took our coats to a pole rack and then led us to a desk.

We were in a tall arched foyer. The closed shutters left it reduced to a greyish half-light. There was no furniture other than one hard wooden bench along the wall and the wall-eyed man's chair and desk placed across the center of the foyer. Bare, institutional, chilly.

The Russian pulled out his chair and settled behind the desk. “Papers.”

His polite insolence was the sort displayed by a clerk in an exclusive shop. He only glanced at me twice—once when we first entered and now when he compared my face with the photograph on my passport. He went thoroughly through my papers, made an entry on a ledger by his elbow and handed my papers back to me. Finally he nodded to Timoshenko and indicated a high carved door behind him.

Someone opened the door from within and Timoshenko waved me inside; he did not come with me. I stepped in and the man at the door pushed it shut after me.

I remember being struck by the room itself before paying much attention to the two men it contained. It had an elegant spaciousness, the rich warmth of the style of a century ago; the ceiling was very high and the walls were hung, museum-like, with dim pictures darkened by age—portraits of Russian gentry, representational scenes of Sebastopol Harbor filled with sailing ships, hunting scenes. Heavy linen drapes of deep-hued velvet were looped back from the lofty windows and a fire blazed beneath the high carved mantel.

It was warm inside; the edges of the window panes were steamed over.

The man at my shoulder looked on with a poker stare; within a few minutes I realized he was mainly a bodyguard and of no significance—I don't recall his ever speaking.

Across the room a man sat behind a large table in a chair massively upholstered in luxurious dark red fabric and by his manner he was obviously the man I had been brought to see, or to be seen by.

His chair was arranged—probably deliberately—with its back to a window so that ordinarily it would have been hard to see his face against the light but in this weather the room's only real illumination came from its lamps and the fire on the hearth. He was writing—filling in a form of some kind. He glanced at me, beckoned me forward and lowered his head. Then he went on writing.

I crossed the room hesitantly, my shoes silent on the pile.

His rudeness gave me a chance to appraise him. What little I gleaned from silent observation didn't reassure me. He looked about fifty, very thin but with wide Slavic cheekbones. He had a waxen face—rather pale. His clothes and hair and facial composure were carefully arranged. He wore a dark suit and a starched white collar with a square black bow tie; they made him look like a priest. Upon his lapel was displayed a discreet ribbon which represented some high Red honor.

He pushed the paper aside and looked up with startling abruptness as if to catch me off guard. “Mr. Bristow. Thank you for coming. It's necessary that I have a word with you.… My name is Zandor. Sergei Andreivitch Zandor.”

He rose as far as the edge of the table permitted and extended his hand to me. We shook hands formally and he did not at first offer me a chair. His hovering smile masked an odd detachment—perhaps disdain. I detected in him immediately an essential coldness; and his voice and expression betrayed his homosexuality. I disliked him immediately and, surprisingly because he didn't look the type, Zandor was sensitive to the dislike.

I could see the quick cataloguing mind at work behind the scrutiny he gave me. A year from now Zandor would be able to testify to the color of my tie and the state of my shoe polish, and it was quite possible he would remember what was said between us in the exact words. He had greeted me in English; he was proud of his English, it was almost perfect.

“How does your work proceed, Mr. Bristow?”

“Quite well.”

“Do you think you'll have time to finish within the limitations of your visa?”

In his circumspect manner Zandor somehow contrived to make the most innocuous remark sound like a threat. Uncertain of his objective, I said, “I think so. A bit more time wouldn't hurt.”

“My ministry has asked whether there's anything you require that we haven't provided. Perhaps I can help arrange for an extension on your visa. What would you say? A fortnight? Three weeks?”

“That's very kind,” I said. “Which ministry is that, Mr. Zandor?”

“Propaganda. The Ministry of Propaganda.” I didn't believe a word of it.

He added, “That's a word which has unpleasant overtones in English, does it not? Here we consider it an honorable calling.” There was a hint of asperity in his voice. His smooth smile tried to ingratiate but the eyes remained cold when they flicked casually across my face.

He waved me to a high-back wing chair near the corner of his table. While I was settling into it he said, “Would you care for coffee?”

“Thank you.”

Zandor made a signal and the bodyguard turned to the door, his chin tucked in with disapproval; and went out. At the table Zandor had turned his attention momentarily to a stack of papers. He used his thumb to flip through them the way a bank teller would count money. His expression was one of acerbic boredom: superior, suggestive of
weltschmerz
, irritated at having to devote his important time to a case as trivial as mine. Beyond him through the high windows the sky was as grey as a sheet of metal. The rain seemed to be diminishing.

He put a finger on the stack of papers. “You have examined some very interesting documents, Mr. Bristow.”

I froze up; I said, probably overcasually, “It's been a good opportunity—I'm very grateful to the Soviet government.”

“You seem to have very wide interests, judging by the material you've asked to see.”

A pulse thudded in my throat. I wondered if he noticed it. “Obsessive curiosity is the occupational malady of my profession.”

“And so it should be, I'm sure.”

He seemed given to the abrupt startling movement. He shoved his chair back, stood, went to the window and spoke with his back to me.

“Even today there are politicians in Bonn with a brown past, Mr. Bristow. The war is not a dead thing. Yet in Paris the young students ask, ‘Hitler—
connais pas?'
To the young, words like Fascist and Hitler are mere figures of speech, to be applied indiscriminately to anyone whose behavior displeases them. You know a year or two ago the British filmed a television program about Hitler in Berchtesgaden and Munich, and the actor who played the role was embraced by Germans in the streets. There were women who wept.”

“I know there are still Nazi sympathizers.”

“It could be stated rather more strongly than that, couldn't it? During the First War Germany was still a civilized nation. But no more. Not since Hitler. They stink of murder—they're a blight on our era.”

The words were more forceful than the voice; Zandor spoke with a sort of sepulchral enthusiasm and it didn't ring true. He went on:

“It's too soon for the world to forget these things. Those who cherish fascism are still in positions to acquire power in the West, where their ambitions frequently coincide with those of the evil corruptions of capitalism. The Nazis must not be pushed away down the gratings of history. We all have an obligation to keep the lesson of the war vividly before the minds of new generations.”

He turned to face me. My feeling was the one you get when you're sitting up late watching an old movie you've seen before. Not precisely
déjà vu;
more a sense that I had experienced this scene
too often
before—that the celluloid was brittle with age.

Zandor returned to his seat and stared—whimsically, I thought—at a point a yard above my head. “In the Soviet Union we were knocked to our knees by the Germans, Mr. Bristow. But we learned that an army could shoot very well from that position. Nevertheless it's an experience none of us ought to have to repeat. When the Germans took Russian prisoners they held them in concentration camps by the hundreds of thousands. The SS slaughtered thousands of Russians with machine guns. The Master Race hadn't the time to feed the rest of them so they starved them to death, about three million of them. The survivors turned to cannibalism and consumed the wasted corpses of their comrades. From Sebastopol alone, ten thousand Russian women were transported to the concentration camps in Germany. Most them went up the chimney at Auschwitz. Not Jews. Russians.”

It was tempting to riposte that conditions during the Stalinist pogroms and purges had been no different from what he was describing. But of course I didn't. He was watching me for a reaction—smiling slightly, but eyes at odds with his lips—and I only said, “I know these things, Mr. Zandor.”

He picked up a pencil and held it upright, bouncing its point on the table. “We Russians are known for xenophobia. Granted. But I think when it comes to distrusting Germans you must concede we have a just point.”

“All Germans?”

“Nearly all.”

I said, “Even during the war there were Germans—high-ranking officers—who tried to do away with Hitler.”

“Mr. Bristow, we're both aware that the plot to kill Hitler was carried out only after the plotters decided Germany was losing the war. The plot was hatched ten years too late, and it failed. It was hardly admirable. Since the war the Germans have done a remarkable job of convincing themselves that the treason of cowards cost Hitler the war—so that they have their excuse to exculpate the Nazis and restore Hitler's memory to untarnished greatness, which they have done.”

“You're talking about a minority of Germans today.”

Again the phlegmatic smile. “Perhaps. It's true that my aunt and two of my brothers were among those who did not return from Auschwitz.” He spoke precisely, relishing the dry phrases. Yet it was complete sham: how cold he really was, how faithless—like a priest who only wore the collar because it gave him a sinecure—never any question of belief or real feeling. He was one of those clever ones whose existence is limned by the words with which they play—the ones who have not very much reality outside the words. His sophistication was amoral, the artifice of one who hadn't ever experienced a real emotion. He spoke of tragic atrocities—he spoke for the victims—yet looking at him, his eyes mirroring arrogant contempt, you could see he had never known anything of pity.

Zandor tucked his chin in toward his tie, probably displeased with my lack of zealous agreement but determined to carry on with his argument. If he was aware of my silent antipathy he gave no indication of it; but it may merely have been his habitual remoteness.

He touched the pencil point to the stack of papers beside his blotter. “You've confined your investigations mainly to military operations with reference to the siege here?”

“That's right, yes.” A sudden new line of questioning: and I was afraid again.

Zandor gave a gloomy sigh. “To be sure it's desirable that the heroism of Russian soldiers be emphasized in your book——”

“I fully intend to do that.”

“——but isn't it equally important that you emphasize the crimes of the invaders? And don't you think——”

“I have no intention of whitewashing the Nazis.”

“——don't you think history demands that you make clear the moral distinctions between German and Russian, if that is the correct——”

“Mr. Zandor,” I said in an effort to be reasonable, “I think you're inferring too much from a glance at the kind of records I've asked to look at. The crimes of the Nazis have been documented ad nauseam and we have those facts available to us in the West, for the most part. What we don't have there is the details of the Soviet military campaigns which”—I added this as a palliative—“led to the great Red victory over the Third Reich. But you're mistaken if you've got the impression that I have any intention of ignoring the Nazi atrocities.”

Zandor leaned forward, intending me to listen to him; clearly I had provoked him and he retaliated with schoolmasterish pique. “I've tried to complete my statement three times, but you keep interrupting. Now please let me finish.”

I overturned a palm to indicate he had the floor. I caught a telltale twitch of his cheek muscle.

He said, “I have no doubt it's taken you many years' work to accrete your impression of the war here. If you hadn't been thoroughly grounded in your field, our leaders wouldn't have invited you to examine our archives. My government realizes you're a very serious student of history—that your views are of public importance in your own country and perhaps elsewhere in the world as well.”

I was tempted to point out that he overestimated my importance. But I didn't wish to interrupt him again.