Kolchak's Gold (41 page)

The truck had been driven to pieces. We rattled around the village and went bucking and pitching down the country lanes, snarling through the gears. He said, “We're a little heavy. It really is a cargo of coats. I'm afraid it won't be a fast journey—we'll be lucky to make the coast by dawn. I've got to stay on the back roads.”

“Then we'll be crossing the straits by daylight.”

“No, it's better to lay over and cross by night. There's a house we'll use.”

It began to snow again. Through the batting windshield wipers I saw the forests slide past. We snored and growled up the low hills, the truck shuddering with the strain. There are thick woods inland on the peninsula; at the crests the wind has made the trees hunchbacked. The wind of our approach stirred the trees and pillows of snow fell with plopping crunches, now and then on our hood; several times we had to stop and get out to clean it off. Pudovkin said, “I have tire chains but I hope we won't need them.” His voice was thin against the racket.

There was nothing for me to do. He had to concentrate on his driving; the roads were narrow and steeply treacherous. I tried to doze. Into my inert grey weariness fell the occasional pebble of apprehension and retrospection: I was a fool, there was no way out of this, I'd been unforgivably callous in involving Bukov and his people in this because it meant I was no longer risking merely my own life but theirs as well.

We ran on into the snowy night along the narrow hill tracks. We crossed above a lake, faintly shining in the night—the ice on it gleamed where the wind had cleared the snow from it. The truck was not insulated and had a poor heater and its window seals were all gone; the wind bit my ears.

During the past three and a half days I had numbed myself with introspective rationalizing and fantasizing. At times I'd had to fight an overwhelming yearning for Nikki, whom I had tried to put out of my thoughts until then; I could see her clearly, her movements and poses and faces—I remembered the way her hair had looked against the pillow; I could hear the cadences of her voice. She was personal and specific in my vision. The nerve ends of my hands and lips remembered with exquisite agony the sweet warm textures of her body. Now Bukov's parting comment brought it all back again and I drowsed fitfully in the lurching truck with Nikki on my mind, wanting her and blaming her, loving and hating, and now wondering: would I seek her out, once I was out of the Soviets' reach? Would we meet—and how would it go? Did I have anything to say to her beyond accusations?

My anguish was the torture of questions without answers. The faces moved across the screen of my eyelids: MacIver. Haim Tippelskirch. Zandor. Timoshenko. Karl Ritter. Vassily Bukov. And Nikki. The faces I had never seen—Kolchak, Maxim Tippelskirch, Heinz Krausser—and the dream of gold.

The snow stopped falling before dawn but it had dropped heavily on the hills and we had to use the chains; it took a long time to wrestle them onto the tires and we were still west of our destination when the light came.

The dawn sky had a bruised coloration and it promised to be another oppressive grey day; the trees were limp and heavy, the crumpled folds of the hills were blue with dull shadows. The truck's window crank, designed by some sinister idiot, hammered the side bone of my knee.

A small stone farmhouse on the left: Pudovkin swung the wheel and we angled across into its yard. I stiffened.

“We'll lay over here.”

He drove it right into the barn and a man came down from the house, a big man with his face glowing in the chill wind. We dismounted from the truck and Pudovkin smiled but the farmer did not. Pudovkin had begun to utter a greeting but now suddenly his voice stopped, as if someone had shot it.

I said, “What is it?”

The farmer only shook his head and closed the barn behind us and took us to the house. He was reaching for a wide rake when I went inside with Pudovkin.

The woman was stout and I heard the cry of an infant somewhere in the house. Pudovkin and I stood in the kitchen stamping and blowing through our cheeks. Pudovkin pulled off his gloves and blew on his hands. “Hello, Raiza.”

“You're still too thin,” she said.

“Boris has a long face.”

“He heard something. I don't know.”

Through a steamy window I saw the farmer raking the yard, obliterating the tracks our truck had made.

Pudovkin said, “We haven't eaten all night.” He took me through the house and showed me the bathroom. I heard his footsteps recede; the farmer banged into the house and they talked in the kitchen. I could hear the voices, not the words.

I let the water run until the rust cleared out of it. The trickle spiraled down an icicle that hung from the spout. When I turned it off the waterpipes banged. I found a towel and scrubbed my face warm.

I found Pudovkin at the kitchen table, his jaws ruminating bread. “We've had a little trouble. The man I was to turn you over to—he was to take you across to the mainland and drive you down the Caucasus. He's been arrested.”

I sat down very slowly as if the chair might break under me. “Then they know.”

“No. The man's a Jew, they arrest them for sport. It doesn't mean this has anything to do with you.”

The farmer stood at the stove, brooding, his nose tucked inside the upturned collar of his coat: “Perhaps you'd better change your plans, Mikhail.”

Pudovkin said, “The car is ready on the other side?”

“Yes.”

“Then we'll have to go as planned. Our papers go with that car, not with any other.”

“Suppose Leonid gives them the plate number?”

“Will he?”

The farmer turned. “He won't volunteer it. But if they put pressure on him.… You can't hold that against a man. Anyone would break.”

Pudovkin said, “But they'd have to know what to ask him.”

“They may know that he arranged for a boat. I don't altogether trust the man he got the boat from. The man's a gentile.”

“So am I,” Pudovkin said.

“I trust you, Mikhail, I do not trust this man who has the boats.”

“Then why use him?”

“In the winter our usual man takes his fishing boats to the yards at Yalta for refinish.”

They excluded me. I was apart but not aloof. I couldn't interfere; in any case the only thing I could do to change things would be to walk out. I considered it: at least it would take the burden off these people. It was none of their blame.

Pudovkin said, “Suppose we tried to get a different boat tonight. From someone else.”

“We might try. I doubt it would throw them off.”

“It might keep us out of a trap. If the man's informed they'll be watching to see who comes to use his boat.”

The farmer left the house almost immediately and without any further talk; it was settled.

Pudovkin took me into a bedroom. “You'd better try to sleep. We'll be leaving at night fall. I'm afraid you'll be burdened with my company for another few days. I'll have to take Leonid's place with you. It will be all right.”

I said, “You were planning to turn back here—do it. Just tell me where to find the car on the other side. I can drive myself.”

“You wouldn't get fifty kilometers. Put it out of your mind. And don't be gallant—don't run away to save the rest of us. If you're caught we're all caught. You need my help and I need yours. You see?”

He was right; I had to give that one up.

I slept through a snowfall and at dusk we had to shovel the barn doors clear before we could bring out the truck. A surly wintry evening; we ate quickly and washed down the food with strong local wine. I shook hands gravely with the farmer's wife and then the three of us set off in the truck. I rode in the middle and tried to keep my knees out of the way of the shift lever. Boris, the farmer, was driving: he would drop us and take the truck back to his farm to await Pudovkin's return.

I said, “What about the load of coats?”

“I delivered them this afternoon,” Pudovkin said.

“You've had no sleep at all then.”

“There's plenty of time to rest when we're dead.” He seemed pleased with himself.

We reached the coast several miles south of the city of Kerch. A man stood on the stony beach holding the bow rope of a dinghy. The farmer introduced him and Pudovkin shook his hand; I saw money change hands and then Boris was bear-hugging all around and walking back up to the road. I felt lucky to be still wearing Vassily Bukov's knee-high rubbers; we shoved the dinghy into the surf and clambered into it and the boatman picked up the oars. Above us the truck began to move back up the road and the weather swallowed its lights quickly. We pitched out through a crashing froth that soaked us with freezing spray but the boatman was superb with his oars—we never shipped a wave.

The fishing boat lay at anchor without lights; we climbed over the low transom and the boatman fixed the dinghy to its davits and went forward to start his engine. Pudovkin and I went below. The crew cabin was tiny; there were four hammocks and it stank of fish. The engine came alive with a guttural growl and we heard the anchor cable scrape; a few moments later the cabin floor tipped underfoot as the stern went down with the screw's bite.

“It's twenty-four kilometers by the route we'll take,” Pudovkin said. “We'll be about four hours.”

“You'd better sleep, then.”

“I intend to.”

I left him cocooned in a hammock; I went up to the wheelhouse. I've never been a good sailor and I knew I couldn't take the confinement of that stinking closed crew cabin; on deck in the air I might make it without losing my stomach.

We ran without lights and the boatman kept her throttle at something like half speed because he didn't want excessive noise and he didn't want to throw too much of a visible wake. We were quartering across the current that flowed through the strait from the Sea of Azov into the Black Sea; it was a rough ride and I clung to handholds.

For two hours we rode the bucking deck together and never learned each other's names; I think we both felt it was better not to know. We exchanged meaningless small talk, neither of us giving anything away. He told me a little about fishing and a little about the waters hereabouts.

In mid-channel we hit a crosschop of conflicting currents that was too much for me and I had to hang over the stern rail at one side of the dinghy and cat up my dinner. The rest of the ride was agony.

Once he throttled down and I looked up in alarm; after a while I caught sight of lights moving past our port side in the distance. The boatman identified it as the night ferry to Kerch. We pitched derelict in the sea's short chop until distance absorbed the ferry.

After midnight we went ashore in the dinghy and Pudovkin paid the boatman the second half of his money. Again the handshake—in contrast to the ritual bear-hug of friends—and then Pudovkin and I climbed the steep rocks in a frigid wind. I could hear the chatter of my own teeth.

“I'm afraid we have a walk ahead of us. I didn't trust him enough to have him put us down too close to the car. Are you up to it?”

“Is there a choice?”

He laughed and went striding toward the coast road, setting an example I'd have been embarrassed not to follow since I was half his age. On the boat I'd been convinced I could survive anything so long as it was on dry land but now I found the bite of that arctic wind and the lash of driven snowflakes to be equally painful. I've never thought myself a hypochondriac but that night I had visions of trenchfoot and frostbite and pneumonia.

I don't know how long we walked. I had passed the point of exhaustion and had made a fine discovery: there was no such thing as second wind. But it was still dark when Pudovkin led us down a snow-covered side road that appeared to be nothing more than dirt-track ruts with tufts of weed sprouting from the center hump. We had a limited amount of light, reflecting down from the underbellies of the clouds; it had stopped snowing at some indeterminate time in the night and Pudovkin said the lights were those of a town beyond the ridge inland of us. Whenever the wind let up we could hear the crash of surf below to our left. There was a gothic wildness to the night: snow-mists swirled around us and the wind had a dismal voice.

I bumped into Pudovkin's shoulder before I realized he had stopped; belatedly I saw that the snow-covered mound in front of us was a car—a Volkswagen by its shape. We batted the two-inch white cake off the windshield and rear window and then Pudovkin opened the door to release the catch of the front hood.

He stood looking into the orifice. “You'd think there'd be a shovel. Well we'll have to make do.” He handed me the jack handle and went at it with his gloved hands. It was impossible not to admire his self-control. We shoveled snow clear of the exhaust pipe and scraped purchase-tracks for the wheels and then we let the wind blow us back to the car. At least there were chains on the rear tires.

Pudovkin found the key under the seat and we had some trouble before the car would start. From the diminutive size of its oval rear window I assumed it was very old—early nineteen-fifties at best—but after a great deal of weak grinding it caught and Pudovkin revved it mightily. He made sure it was warmed enough not to stall before he tried putting it in gear.

The night's coat of granulated-sugar snow treacherously concealed an underlayer of glazed ice; we skidded loosely all the way out to the main road but the chains kept us moving. When we reached the road I said, “Shouldn't we sweep over our tracks?”

“The wind will do it for us.”

We jingled slowly south and in a little while daylight began to flood across the ridges, scattering the shadows.

I tried to navigate but the map of Georgia and the Caucasus was not of the finest scale and did not show all the back roads; often we reached intersections not indicated by the map and had to guess. We were trying to avoid the seaside resorts but at the same time we could not afford to take the main inland routes because they were summer roads high up in the Caucasus and if you got stuck in snowdrifts up there they would be carrying your body out in the spring. The late snowfall had been a bad break all around; it restricted our choices of routes, it slowed our travel and it left tracks.