It may have been three o’clock in the morning or later; I was unconscious of time; images were still flashing in my mind. I was in that state in which associations flow most freely-half-waking, uninhibited, the brain able to make hitherto unrecognized connections between superficially unrelated things. And it came to me that in my scattered gatherings-a sentence here, a word there; clues and hints-I had accumulated enough information to solve the mystery of Kolchak’s gold, if only I could fit the segments together into the proper pattern.
I dragged myself to the desk and switched on the dim little lamp and examined the notes from my pillowcase. I spread the fragments out on the desk and moved them around the way a street-corner charlatan moves the three walnut shells in the old con game.
I had far more than three notes. There were dozens. Somewhere there was a completion I hadn’t seen-but whatever spark had shot into my mind in that half-dream had set fire to my awareness and I knew the pattern was there even though I hadn’t yet recognized its shape.
I must have hung over those slips of paper like a raw-eyed vulture for hours, a claw occasionally darting out to shift one of them from here to there. The obvious cliche is the jigsaw puzzle but this wasn’t that; it was more like a double acrostic in which a clue might not refer to the end reality; it might be merely a clue to another clue.
In the end I decided the best way to attack the problem was to do it right from the beginning by rewriting the entire thing. This would serve a dual purpose: it would force me to pay closer attention to every word and nuance, by copying all my scattered fragments into a continuum; and incidentally it would reduce my myriad scraps of notepaper to a workable one or two sheets, filled from margin to margin with tiny writing. Much easier to handle that way, and it gave me everything at a glance. I scribbled intensely and intently, fingers and head aching with splitting agonies; it took me back to college days-writing out the last notes for the finals. In the later stages I would have done this anyway; you try to get everything on a single sheet so that when you memorize it you do so visually: every item is remembered in its physical place on the page with relation to the other items so that you reinforce the process of memorization by a kind of visual cross-referencing. Soon I knew I would need to commit the entire thing to memory and destroy the documents before leaving the Soviet Union. By doing it now I would give myself more time to fix everything in memory.
I leaned on that reasoning because it meant that even if I came up empty-handed I wouldn’t have been wasting this time and work. But not more than half an hour before Timoshenko was due to come and collect me for the day’s servitude in the archives, I came up with hands filled: I found the elusive connection.
It didn’t tell me where the gold was. But it told me where to find the single document that would pinpoint the gold’s location. And I already knew that the document in question would be found in the archives: I had seen it listed in the card catalog at least a half-dozen times and I had passed over it blithely each time, never realizing its significance.
I bounced to my feet and strode back and forth in the little room, stopping to stretch; probably grinning like a fool. I throbbed with excitement. Five hundred tons of the Russian Czar’s gold-and within hours I would know precisely where to put my finger on it.
What had been a distracting game was now a formidable reality. I knew the gold had been hidden again in 1944 and I had good reason to believe it had not been uncovered since then. Not even in a society as constricted as that of the USSR would it be possible for such a hoard of treasure to come to the surface without the world’s knowledge. If the Soviets had found it and added it to their stockpile of gold, even without acknowledging the source, still the facts would have been reflected in their international trade dealings-and the word would have been spread by the world’s gold-trading fraternity, a zealous body of men who miss nothing and who are keenly attuned to the slightest hints. And a sudden “find” of that many billions of rubles in gold would have been attributed to the Kolchak treasure regardless of what cover story the Russians might have attempted. No; the Kremlin had not been enriched by five hundred tons of gold at any time since 1943; no other country could have spirited it away without Russian knowledge; therefore the gold was still where it had been secreted thirty years ago.
And I was going to find it. Because, in some curious way, it was all I had left. I don’t mean wealth; obviously I was not going to claim the treasure for myself. I was not thinking ahead far enough to worry about deciding what to do with, or about, the gold after I found it; it was enough to find it. Or so I thought. I must attribute my disregard of consequences to my confused mental state of that week-the reeling shock of Nikki’s behavior, the dulled state of my reason, the overwhelming elation of this spectacular intuitive discovery. It was a period during which I’m sure any licensed psychiatrist would have found me certifiably, if temporarily, insane.
I remember the rain that morning. It seemed it would never end. It was after sunrise but the room drifted in a formless dimness around the puddle of yellow light cast by the lamp on the desk; the clouds must have been impenetrable because no daylight relieved the darkness of the shaft beyond my window when I lifted the blind to find out if my wristwatch was correct. It might have been midnight; I was ready to curse my watch as if it had joined the legion which seemed bent on betraying me; but then the old hall porter knocked-my customary wake-up call-and I went to the door in relief to unburden him of his tray with the croissants and the fresh hot coffee that this simple hostelry took to be a Continental breakfast.
I showered vigorously and changed into completely clean clothes-partly because like the successful marathon gambler I have always suffered under the illusion that neat cleanliness is an aid to keeping awake and alert under exhausting circumstances, and partly because today was to be a climactic, vividly-to-be-remembered day in my life and the occasion deserved the best I could give it. A starched shirt, an unwrinkled tie, my cashmere pullover and-despite the rain-my best Hong Kong suit. I buffed my shoes before slipping them into the rubber overshoes; I picked a bit of discoloring fluff from my hat and went out into the lobby to await Timoshenko’s arrival in a euphoric condition of sartorial elegance. I even smiled at the forbidding woman at the desk.
Ordinarily Timoshenko’s Volga would draw up at the curb outside the door and I would dive out to meet it before he could trouble himself to get out of the car. But this morning when a car slid into the space it was not Timoshenko’s and I felt momentary irritation; it meant if I was to detect his approach I would have to wait outside in the rain and I was not prepared to ruin my clothing that way. No raincoat was proof against that downpour.
Then through the door’s glass I saw two men get out of the car at the curb-it was a grey Wartburg-and to my surprise one of them was Timoshenko. The other, the driver, was a stranger to me.
Timoshenko looked uneasy. I pushed the door open and he grunted something to the driver behind him; then he said to me, “You must come with us to meet someone. I’m sorry, there’ll be a delay getting to the museum today.”
The driver’s eyes pinned me back like a butterfly on a board. Timoshenko took my elbow and I slid into the rear seat of the car and stared at the noncommittal back of Timoshenko’s head in silent terror.
12
They 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.