the ultimate questions of good and evil without feeling ludicrous.
And so we talked. Sometimes the two of us, sometimes the three; sometimes whole groups-friends and associates of my two companions. We thought it might be possible by puzzling out the Russian destiny to know whether the Russian urge toward self-destruction could determine the odds for, or against, the Kremlin’s willingness to risk war. We asserted that it was no good studying the political and rational counterpressures in the Middle East without taking into account the character of Russian leadership and its relationship to the Arab neurosis. Reason was seldom a guiding principle in international affairs and never was it less so than when you were dealing with peoples as volatile as the Jews, the Arabs, the Russians, the Americans. How much was behavior predictable on the basis of biological urges toward domination and aggression? How much was peculiar to the nations individually? Was it possible the Russians were no more aggressive or self-destructive than anybody else- that they’d simply had more provocations and opportunities than, say, the Brazilians or Canadians? Was it possible, by the same reasoning, that the French or the British, given their Versailles and their Hitler, would have been as murderous as the Germans had been? How much different would the Soviet Union have been without Stalin?
They were questions for cocktails and cigarettes and charades; but for the first time in my life I was sincerely looking for the answers.
Partly it was Nikki’s influence; partly it was the fact that I was well into my thirties and it was no longer possible for me to subsist on the kind of critical notices that inevitably began by saying, “For a writer so young, Harris Bristow has produced a remarkably impressive output. The latest of his many books is …” After more than ten years writing professionally I could no longer use my youth and prolificity as accomplishments of importance; I needed to do something solid-and churning out more and more summaries of historical events had become too easy because I knew how to do it, I knew which levers to press and which narrative gimmicks to employ.
I wanted more from the old man than dry facts about the burial of Kolchak’s gold. He and his brother had spent those times in the company of officers of the old Russia and I wanted to know about those men-their sensibilities, their behavior, their attitudes. Russia and its leadership were still in the hands of men like those: their sons and brothers. The Soviet generals who fought the Wehrmacht in 1941 were former Czarist officers, most of them; the Kremlin leaders of 1970 were men who had grown up in a Russia that was still feudal or near to it. Especially among the leaders, old traditions of thought and attitude slip away only slowly. The psychologies of the men in the Kremlin today could be measured according to the prejudices of their fathers, I believed; I wanted to know about those men with whom the old Jew had lived and fought and survived.
But he didn’t give me much satisfaction during the first few weeks of our interviews. He withheld judgments even when I asked for them. He kept coming back to the gold:
“You must understand this. The gold is of the utmost importance today-more than at any time ever before. As I have told you, I have made a study of this thing. As recently as July of nineteen seventy the price of gold on the free market was not far out of line with the official monetary price of thirty-five dollars U.S. But today suddenly there is inflation throughout the world, there are devaluations everywhere you look, the currency exchanges are madhouses of profiteers. No one trusts the currencies anymore, you see. And loss of confidence in national currencies is the entire basis for the gold market. Currencies today are in a state of collapse, and the farther they fall the farther gold rises. The price of gold has already gone up to something like forty-two dollars, which is an increase of some twenty percent in one year. You understand what I am saying?”
I suppose I understood well enough; I understand it more vigorously today than I did in June of 1971, when these interviews took place; in the interim the free-market price of gold has shot up to seventy dollars a troy ounce, and on the clandestine exchanges of Beirut and Macao it is selling at nearly a hundred dollars an ounce.* This means the Kolchak treasure today is worth at least twice what it would have been worth in 1971, in dollar- exchange terms; the five hundred tons of bullion would command somewhere near five billion dollars today, depending on who sold it to whom.† There is more than one nation whose entire national treasury is only a fraction of that.
“You must understand what this means.” His hand made a loose fist. We were at a small table in a dairy restaurant, the three of us, eating blintzes. “What it must mean to any government which still has the pretense of a gold basis for its currency-even unofficially.”
“Like the United States, you mean.”
“The United States, or the Soviet Union. Yes.”
“A large sum in gold has a way of pyramiding its power,” he went on. “You can’t merely think of it as two billions or two and a half billions. It is not paper currency, subject to inflation. In Beirut where the world black market has headquarters and the trading is for opium and heavy weapons, gold is the only accepted medium of exchange-they have been stamping out new gold sovereigns for years, and the transactions are in millions and hundreds of millions of dollars. This is true in all the smuggling capitals of the Near East and the Orient-only gold is used. No currencies at all. Can you imagine the effect of
I said I could hardly picture a private gang of smugglers and thieves trying to heist five hundred tons of gold bullion for criminal purposes. The logistics alone were prohibitive; it would require the manpower and transportation facilities of a national government.
“Or a big corporate enterprise,” he countered.
“On Russian soil?”
“I have not said the gold is still on Russian soil, Harry.”
“Oh? Then where is it?”
He drew back. “I have not said it is
Nikki said, “You shouldn’t play games with us, Haim.”
“The truth is I do not know where the gold is. I have an approximate idea. Very approximate-you must measure it in thousands of kilometers. But that is not the point. I only mentioned the smugglers’ black market as an illustration of the power that can be exercised with this much gold. An even more telling illustration is the use to which a government might put it.”
I was dubious. “There are departments of the American government that spend that much money in a matter of days.”
“In
“Gold or not, it’s still purchasing power.”
“You mistake it, Harry. The leverage of bullion wealth is many times its value. For how many years did your government support a three-hundred-billion-dollar economy on the official basis of thirty or forty billions in gold reserves? The political and economic power of large sums of gold is a factor of eight or ten times the actual value of the gold. A small country with two or three billions in gold reserves is in a position to wield the same economic pressures as a substantial but gold-poor country with an economy of twenty or thirty billions a year. Do you understand the reasons for this?”
“I’m not sure.”
“It’s a question of credit, more than anything else. A nation with piles of gold in its vaults gives the appearance of being a solid credit risk. When the world money market is uncertain, when currencies can’t be depended on to hold their values for any length of time at all, a reserve of gold becomes magnified out of all proportion to its real value-simply because it is there. It isn’t going to wear out, it can never be inflated to the valuelessness of a Weimar Deutschmark. It is always gold, always measurable by the troy ounce, always valuable.”
Nikki caught my eye and made her private signals of love. The waiter’s arm flashed in past our shoulders; he took away the plates and replaced them with
He said, “A country with that much uncommitted gold in its vaults could go a long way toward destroying the economies of neighboring states. It might behave very boldly because it would know that no internationally sanctioned blockade could succeed against it when every greedy trader in the world was eager for gold credits. Or it could buy munitions-enough to build the most powerful and modern small army on the face of the earth. Do you begin to see what I’m driving at?”
I said, “You’re talking about Israel now, aren’t you.”
He made no reply; he only watched me until Nikki broke the silence: “If the shoe fits.”
