I’d written about some of my discoveries to other friends as well, and to my agent and editor; I presume MacIver’s “warm bodies” prowled those as well.
I said, “Then you took this gold thing seriously.”
“Five hundred tons of raw bullion. How many dollars on the open market? Five billion? Maybe it sounds far-fetched to you, Harry, but we couldn’t afford not to take it seriously. Especially with you bedding down with an Israeli agent.”
I felt a hot suffusion of angry blood in my face and I was tempted to tip the table right over against his ballooning belly.
He must have begun to see cracks in my composure long before that but he hadn’t let on; now he said, keeping most of the sarcasm out of his voice, “You begin to get the picture. We can keep tabs on you. We can read everything you read in the free-world collections. We can even follow you right into the Sebastopol archives. But we can’t see the same stuff they’re letting you see. There’s just no way for us to get to that stuff, not with anybody who’d know what to look for.”
He stabbed a long cigarette at me as though it were a pistol. “But you know what to look for, Harry.”
I didn’t tell him I had destroyed the documents which could put “Paid” to the whole thing; I didn’t tell him much of anything. He was doing the talking. I was too stunned to do much more than absorb his revelations.
He said, “That’s about the size of it. You believe I’m who I say I am?”
“I do now.”
“Then why don’t you work for us?”
“I’m not that hungry.”
“I find that hard to believe, Harry. We know your financial picture. You had to stretch things to come over here at all. You’re going to have to sweat like a coolie when you get home, just to pay your back bills. Now, you can’t touch that treasure and you know it. What are you going to do, carry five hundred tons of gold bricks in a false compartment in the bottom of your suitcase?”
“You don’t really think I came over here to steal five hundred tons of gold?”
“No. But I think you came over here to find it. Now about working for us—there’d be a fat finder’s fee. A real fat one,” he said obliviously. “We’ll get you a Panama bankbook—Panama banks ask even fewer questions than Swiss ones.”
“You’d be buying a pig in a poke. I haven’t got any gold.”
“You can’t afford to stick to that line, Harry. It’s inoperative. The Organs* knows you talked to Bukov. They’re just biding their time, waiting until they get you pinned like a butterfly on a board where you can’t even keep flapping your wings. They mean to cancel your ticket, Harry, and here you’re trying to climb a greasy pole all by yourself. You’re just hastening toward doom, you know, and I can assure you you’ll catch something you weren’t chasing.”
“You mix a mean metaphor.”
“Sooner or later you’ll tell me where it is.”
“Sooner or later you’ll tell me why I should know where it is.”
“Because if you hadn’t found it,” he purred, “you wouldn’t deny you were looking for it.” And he beamed at me in triumph.
I am not expert at thinking on my feet. I do my best work at a typewriter when there’s time to reflect and to compose and to polish. This is one reason why I never would have made the grade as one of Fitzpatrick’s favored round-table wits.
What I said, with literal truth, was, “I haven’t found an ounce of gold, let alone five hundred tons of it. But let’s assume I did find it. What then?”
“Then you tell us where it is and you’re off the hook.”
“What do you mean off the hook?”
“Harry, at this moment in time you’re the only human being alive who’s had access to the records on both sides of the Iron Curtain.”
“So?”
“You’re the only human being alive who’s in a position to find that gold.”
“Suppose I couldn’t find any records over here to support my investigation.”
“You’d have said so a long time ago.”
“What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you all afternoon?”
“It’s a little late to ask me to believe it now,” he said, “but let’s get back to the original question—what happens now.…”
He was right. If I’d opened the conversation by admitting I’d been looking for the gold, but adding that I hadn’t been able to find it, he might have believed me. As it was I’d put my foot in it with too many palpably false denials.
“We’re onto you,” he went on, “and I rely on your own knowledge of the intelligence apparatus to tell you what happens next—or if not next, at least soon. How long does a secret stay secret, Harry?”
“Don’t play cat and mouse. I’m tired of it.”
“We have people in The Organs. Not higher-ups, but people. Double agents. That goes without saying, right?”
“Go on.”
“From extrinsic evidence”—he pronounced the phrase with a precise Germanic inflection that made it sinister—“we can assume they have people on our side. Once in a while, you know—a piece of fact gets into their hands that they couldn’t have obtained if they didn’t have double agents in our gang. I mean, a couple of hundred thousand employees, Harry, I don’t care what kind of security clearance you run, you’re bound to turn up a few rotten apples, aren’t you?”
“In other words if the CIA thinks I’ve found five hundred tons of gold, then it won’t be long before the KGB will think it too.”
“That’s the size of it.”
“You’re saying if I don’t play ball with you, you’ll turn it over to the KGB.”
“That’s unfair.”
“The hell it is. If the gold exists at all it’s in Russia. There’s no way for you to touch it anyway. If you knew where it was, you could only use that knowledge as a bargaining point. Trade it to the Russians for whatever you happen to need from them this month. So that’s the threat, isn’t it?—either I find the gold for you or you trade me to the KGB and let them get it out of me. That way your hands stay clean.”
He brooded at me; I said, “It doesn’t matter to you. You’ll trade them the gold or Harris Bristow, whichever’s easier. That’s what we’re really talking about, isn’t it?”
“You’ve got a low opinion of your country.”
“The CIA isn’t my country.”
“Is Nicole Eisen your country, then?”
“If I had that information do you really think I’d give it to the Israelis?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time a citizen betrayed his country for the love of a woman.”
“It’s not America’s gold,” I said. “Whose country would I be betraying?”
He was shaking his head in feigned exasperation. “You’ve got a hole in your argument. What makes you think the only thing we could do with that gold would be to turn it over to the Russians?”
“I suppose you’d just send in a fleet of trucks under the cultural exchange program and cart it off to Washington?”
Ritter said, “Well there might be ways. Didn’t the Germans almost succeed? If you forge proper-looking papers you can get away with all sorts of things. If we did it right and did it fast enough they wouldn’t even get curious until it was gone. Then all they’d find out is they should have got curious a lot earlier.”
“Is that what MacIver thinks? You people are incredible.”
“Just tell us where to look, Harry.”
“Even if I knew, why should I tell you?”
An insidious assumption hid behind Ritter’s coaxing. It was the same flummery used by the witch-hunters who insist that if you don’t cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, you are perforce a traitor. Such illogical reasoning ridicules the democratic concepts of liberty: it denies any right to privacy—the essential freedom without which there are no others.