In the lobby I found Yakov Sanarski and Timoshenko playing chess.
Sanarski greeted me without smiling and I explained my disappearance when he requested the explanation. I was not sure if he believed my story but he didn’t challenge it. He would report to Zandor and it would be up to Zandor to decide.
I did not want to be alone in my room. I pulled out a chair and watched the chess match. Timoshenko was an aggressive but careless player and Sanarski mated him easily. Then the KGB man went off, to a phone or a car, and Timoshenko asked what might be my pleasure for the evening; we had no interviews scheduled for the day. I was in a stage of delayed shock, the tremor starting in; I left the decision to him and resorted to my room to clean up and change. I remembered to put the old hat in one of my coat pockets and when we got to the restaurant I managed to leave it on the hat rack there.
I kept up with Timoshenko drink for drink until it occurred to me that if I had ever needed a clear head in my life it was now. The music was frenetic and earsplitting in the place and Timoshenko was enjoying it hugely, stamping both feet to keep time. There was no need to make conversation with him. The vodka in my blood made it easier to shut out the frenzy of the place; it helped to clear the nervous fears from my head and allow me to concentrate.
In the beginning the gold had been an orphan abandoned on my doorstep and I’d had the freedom to accept or ignore the responsibility of it. But I hadn’t covered my tracks well enough and the CIA was onto it, and Ritter was right-it wouldn’t be very long before Moscow got onto it too.
It meant I was under pressure of time. How long did I have? I didn’t know. I might have a month; I might not have forty-eight hours. The KGB was behind MacIver and Ritter, but how far behind?
At intervals I was disgusted by my own smug and pious moralizing. The rest of the time I thought myself a man of principle. But the road to hell.… I had to consider the temptations of chucking it in. I could still turn back; I still had options. I could give it to Ritter or give it to Zandor and I would be off the hook.
But it was too late for that because I’d taken the baby in off the doorstep and now it was my child.
I did not sleep. The rest of my life hung on the decisions of that night: I vacillated but I couldn’t procrastinate because soon they would take the decision out of my hands. I had to decide now.
But there were so many sides to it and I was cursed with vision that was too clear. I began to see myself contemptuously as a fool who insisted on equivocating about the state of the exact temperature while the building was burning down over my head. I entertained so many but-on-the-other-hands that by the dark small hours I was ready to take any decision at all merely for the sake of having it done with: remember the Kurosawa scene where the Samurai warrior reaches a crossroads, tosses his staff spinning in the air and walks off in the direction indicated by the fall of the staff? The toss of a coin had distinct appeal.
In the end I had to capitulate. As long as two conditions were met I could evade the final decision until I’d had time to study it. The two conditions: I had to keep the secret and I had to keep my freedom.
The one depended on the other, so that I really had to meet only one condition: I had to remain free. Free of coercion, free to move about, free to think, and free to put into execution whatever decision I arrived at concerning the gold.
Reduced to that simplicity, my course of action became clear. I had to get out of the Soviet Union.
The afternoon with Ritter was a Friday and I had the weekend ahead. There were three Saturday interviews on the schedule: a morning interview in the city and two meetings later in the day in Crimean towns.
The plan I worked out was simple enough to work. I got somehow through the morning interview with Timoshenko sitting bored off to one side; when we left the retired navy commander’s house I suggested lunch and it was no great challenge to make sure Timoshenko consumed several beers before we left.
It was a bitter cold day but the snowfall which had been forecast was holding off. We drove past the suburban rubble which hadn’t yet been rebuilt; we went north and occasionally from the hilltops the sea would come in view, overhung by heavy clouds.
According to plan Timoshenko pulled over to the side of the empty road and got out of the car to relieve himself. There were farm fields on either side of the narrow stripe of road. When Timoshenko turned his back to the car to unbutton his fly I climbed across into the driver’s seat and drove away, leaving him staring at me in the rearview mirror with confounded amazement, shouting and waving.
It was a rotten trick to have played on him but I hadn’t been able to work out a better plan.
I used the Intourist map to guide myself in a wide semicircle to the east and south around Sebastopol. It took me nearly three hours to reach the village of Bykovskiy; I kept to the back roads, most of them unpaved. Several times my passage drew the stares of farm people who rarely saw automobiles.
I entered Bykovskiy along a side street and parked the car in a quiet corner that wasn’t visible from the square, the station or the main road. When I got out of the car I felt bulky; my pockets were crowded with everything I dared take with me. The main bulk of the notes was in the briefcase in my right hand but I hadn’t trusted the gold notes off my person in weeks and these were in my pockets.
I had the new hat pulled down over my head, the coat collar turned up; I put the car keys in my pocket-I might need it again-and went along behind the row of buildings that fronted on the village square.
I had to show myself on the square briefly but no one seemed to take an interest in me; it was cold and those who were abroad were intent on their own business. I entered the building and went directly up the stairs, turned along to the door and knocked.
There was no reply. I tried the knob; it was not locked; I let myself into Bukov’s patrician quarters.
He wasn’t home. I laid my coat across my briefcase and sat down to wait for him.
Twice I heard trains come to the depot, stand hissing awhile and proceed. It grew dark; I didn’t dare light a lamp. After a while I found myself standing beside the front windows watching the occasional vehicles that moved in and out of the square. Timoshenko would have thumbed a ride by now and Zandor would know I had broken my tether; the search would be on, and they’d think of this place soon. If Bukov was away for the night I couldn’t wait him out but if I left this place there was no other place to go.…
I kept vigil, watching for Bukov, watching for anything that looked like an official car.
In the beginning the plan had seemed simple and foolproof but now I saw all the things that could go wrong with it. In the cold room sweat stood out on my face. Now and then something snapped in the dark and I had to take a very careful grip on myself and not relax it for an instant: if I fell apart it would be all the way. A tic set in at the corner of my mouth, my sphincter contracted, I had to keep wiping my palms dry against my hip pockets; and time seemed to distort itself in an Einsteinian way, terror affecting the speed of time in an inverse geometric ratio. It became a kind of marijuana atavism: all the senses drawn to their taut limits, a fine alertness to every subliminal sound and movement-and the conviction that I could parse each passing second.
As a trick of preserving sanity I kept reassuring myself it was the right gamble, the best odds: I kept telling myself I hadn’t made a mistake by not simply applying for an early exit visa and a new Aeroflot ticket.
I reviewed the reasons a dozen times. The answer did not always come up the same. The trouble was I had to deal with probabilities rather than facts. Logic is no better than its premises and mine were uncertain. I’d had to make assumptions and act as if they were facts; but suppose they weren’t true?