When I opened a drawer to get a clean folded shirt to lay out for the morning I discovered someone had searched the room. The things in the drawers had been crumpled by hands that had pawed quickly through. Someone had made a quick but thorough search. Oddly my notes themselves seemed to have been undisturbed. Probably those who had been sent to search the place were not considered sufficiently literate in English to understand anything they might find in my writings. In fact it was probable that they hadn’t really expected to find anything. I took it to be a message from Zandor—punctuation to his earlier warnings.
There was more, in the morning when I went outside to wait for Timoshenko. The man in the car could have been waiting to pick someone up and the man at the shop window could have been looking for a gift to buy his wife but I didn’t think they were.
That day in the captured German files I found a document which confirmed everything I had assembled thus far about Kolchak’s gold. I can recall it exactly; it is imprinted on my brain.
CERTIFIED TRUE COPY
Ministry of Transport & Communication
Railway Department—City of Chelyabinsk
12 April 1944
Certificate Number S.D.C. 4/1628
This clearance certifies that the goods wagons Numbers 1708, 1765, 1900, 2171, 2177, 2509, 2510, 2518, 2523, 2834 have been reserved by this Ministry for the transport of State Properties to Lugansk, and that by Authority of the Supreme Soviet these wagons must be cleared with utmost priority and dispatch at all points of transit.
—F. G. Grizodubov
Director, Railway Department (stamp)
It was a forgery of course. But a good one. I saw no physical evidence to indicate it wasn’t genuine; it was only the fact that it appeared in the German files rather than the Russian ones. It was a copy; the original had disappeared with the train. From its location in the files I knew something else as welclass="underline" it was in one of the von Geyr folders dated November 1943 and it wasn’t there by mistake; therefore the Germans had created the forgery well in advance of the need for it.
It was not the final clue I needed. But it was the last link. It gave me the date and the route; I needed only one more fact.
Getting that fact was going to be harder than I had anticipated: Zandor had made it harder. The detail I needed was to be found in a large stack of documents which Zandor could only think trivial. Railway schedules to Zandor were on a par with café menus.
By now I had managed to reassure myself that the Zandor interview had had a silver lining: I convinced myself it demonstrated they didn’t have any idea I was looking for the gold—that they didn’t even know of the gold’s existence, let alone my interest in it. I won’t take the trouble to spell out the chain of reasoning by which I came to that conclusion; at best it was rationalization. In any case I allowed myself to see no reason to abandon my pursuit of the treasure. The only problem was to misdirect Zandor’s attention.
There was no way to get the answer without looking at that stack of railway schedules. I couldn’t hide the fact that I was looking at them. The best I could do was sandwich the file number into the middle of a list of varied requests for all kinds of transport and supply records, so as to suggest I was analyzing the enormous job the Russians had done to supply their armies in the south (while Hitler let his troops starve to death). I even made awed remarks—along those exact lines—to the woman at the desk. I hoped my friend at the corner table overheard me.
I left the archives that day in a disoriented daze—half euphoric and half terrified. I had done something for which—by Soviet standards—I could be shot.
Timoshenko was sensitive to the vibrations. “You have found what you were looking for, yes?”
“I guess I did,” I confessed; and he beamed and insisted we have a drink to celebrate.
The drink became several drinks and we were both in high cheer that evening. But the hangover set in at about the time I returned to the hotel. I began to tremble when I pulled the three tightly rolled documents out of the sleeve of my jacket. They weren’t notes of mine. They were original documents and I had stolen them from the archives, rolling them like straws and sliding them up my sleeve like a cheap gambler hiding aces.
Unless they had seen me purloin the three papers—and they hadn’t, or they’d have arrested me on the spot—they weren’t likely ever to discover that they were missing. Railway schedules are not numbered individually. The same file number appears stamped at the top of every paper in the folder. With anything as commonplace as marshaling records they’d have had no reason to make a specific note of each sheet of paper. It was possible they had a notation of the total number of papers in the file but I doubted anyone would bother counting them—there had been at least five hundred in that file—and even if they did make a count they’d have no way of proving I was responsible for the discrepancy. Not if they didn’t find the documents on me.
I unfolded a map and studied it, and studied the papers I’d stolen; and then I destroyed the three documents by flushing them down the toilet in tiny pieces.
With them went the last written record of the final hiding place of Kolchak’s gold.
* Rep. James Scheuer, Democrat of The Bronx, New York.—Ed.
THE NAZI SCHEME*
1.
BETWEEN THE WARS
[From 1920 until 1944 the gold of the Czars rested undisturbed in its hiding place in the Siberian mountains. Speculations and conflicting reports to the contrary, it did not fall into the hands of partisans, Atamans, Reds, Whites, or the remnants of the Czech Legion. Buried under the rubble of its caved-in hiding place, it remained undiscovered and untouched while the world changed.]
In the decade that followed the Russian Civil War the Soviet state did not, as Marx would have had it, “wither away.” Instead it became ever more totalitarian after the ouster of Trotsky and the death of Lenin made room for the imposition of the absolute dictatorship of Josef Stalin.
The Communist state was threatened by “capitalist encirclement” and Stalin used that rationalization to justify the intimidation of the populace, the imposition of extreme propaganda measures and the infliction of the great purges which disposed of all suspected opposition to his despotic regime.
Vast numbers of the original Bolsheviks were forced to fabricate “confessions,” were tried publicly (but hardly fairly) and were brutally executed. Ten million persons were sent to the forced labor camps of the NKVD. The purges eliminated the entire Lenin Politburo, the entire old Bolshevik movement, and the entire leadership of the army, the state police, the trade unions and the Communist Central Committee. All of them were replaced with men whose sole qualification for office was their loyalty to the vozhd (roughly, the führer), Josef Stalin.
Because Stalin’s purges weakened the Red Army and the nation disastrously by massacring most of their leadership, Stalin was not nearly ready for war when Munich came about.
But neither was Hitler. The Nazis wanted a guarantee of Soviet neutrality (in the event of a “dispute” between Germany and Poland) just as badly as Stalin wanted time to mobilize. As a result, on August 23, 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed to guarantee mutual nonaggression and divide eastern Europe into “spheres of influence” which placed Finland and the small Baltic states under Russian “protection.”
[In the meantime] the center of the universe was still Berlin. Foreign correspondents drank their days away at the Adlon Bar and occasionally went up along the Wilhelmstrasse to watch Hitler on the balcony review the troop lorries that rolled past. The dictator with his Chaplin mustache watched his thousands of mesmerized youths shout their “Sieg Heils” and spoke to them in his guttural hypnotic rant, rousing their apocalyptic fervor to a frenzy, preparing them in the moral twilight of the Third Reich for Mitteleuropa’s Götterdämmerung. The accumulated sadistic malice of human history, which was to find expression in such souvenirs as the human-skin lampshades of Ilse Koch, made the world a clinic for the grotesque evil of the Nazi experiments in racial purification and mass death; and found its voice in the cloying martial sentimentality of the Horst Wessel Song.*