were thinking and I’d have known why all of them were taking me so seriously: they didn’t want me to get loose where I could force an auction. I hadn’t anticipated it at all, so I was just as shortsighted as they were.
I said, “No. No auction, Evan. Think about it and you’ll see why it couldn’t be done.”
MacIver cleared his throat. He sat there with his hands intertwined across his incipient paunch. “God damn it.”
“You’re all clowns,” I said. “You’ve done it again, Evan. The CIA working in mysterious ways its blunders to perform. You see how funny it is?”
“Do I look amused?”
“I wish you had the grace to. You used to have a pretty good sense of humor.”
“I never laugh when there’s a gun jammed up my ass.”
“You put it there yourself.”
“Please don’t tell me it’s poetic justice, Harry.” He spat something out; I saw that he had bitten his cigarette cleanly in two.
He said, “You win that round on points, Harry, but I still have to win the fight. Now either you throw the fight or I knock you out. Your choice. And I still don’t think you want-”
An obsequious knock at the door cut him off. Pinar opened the door.
“Here?” MacIver asked.
Pinar nodded. “Upstairs, as you wished.”
MacIver nodded. “About time. Harry, go up to your room. I’ll see you again later. But one thing first. This building is surrounded by our people. If you try to leave and they haven’t had a signal from me, they’ll turn you back. As painfully as you make necessary.”
“That could be a bluff.”
“Try it and see. You’re welcome to.”
“You’ve laid on an expensive production here.”
“It’ll be cheap at the price,” he drawled. “Go on upstairs like a good boy.”
He’d regained his self-confidence. It was more than I could say for myself. I went along the hall with Pinar; he left me at the foot of the stairs.
When I put my foot on the step a new realization grenaded into my mind: I knew what I would find in my room. It had to be; it was the only way MacIver could have known I was in this town. I went upstairs with slow uncertainty and hesitated outside my door with my hand on the knob.
I opened it and stepped inside and suddenly I was face to face with Nikki.
“Hello, Harry.”
20
She was sitting on my bed with her knees drawn up against her breasts and her head tipped to one side on her folded arms, watching me. She’d been sitting that way for quite a few minutes, I thought, burying her face in her arms.
I pushed the door shut behind me-slowly, almost reproachfully. “Then it’s true what they say. It really is the crossroads of the world. Wait long enough in Pinar’s
“Please don’t make jokes.”
She wasn’t wearing her glasses. The nearsighted agate eyes squinted at me, pressing at me curiously like diamonds etching against glass. She looked very slender and very tense, hungry for something: information? Forgiveness?
Her soft and always slightly breathless voice: “Harry. Please let me talk to you.”
Now she uncoiled. She stood up hesitantly, her fingers at her throat. Her dark hair was plaited at the side of her head. I hadn’t really remembered how gamine and lovely she was: I thought I had, but I hadn’t. Even now- bedraggled and dispirited, rumpled and untidy and too tired to care-she was so very lovely.
“Somebody had to tell MacIver where to find me,” I said. “I didn’t think it was Vassily Bukov. And it couldn’t have been Pudovkin, he’s dead.”
Her head jerked back as if I’d slapped her; she swung away from me and swung back again, her face crumpling.
“He was driving. They machine-gunned him. I was lucky, they missed me.”
I watched her face adjust to it. I said cruelly, “You and MacIver.”
She pinched her lower lip with her teeth. I said, “I liked Pudovkin. He was a gentle old man. How well did you know him?”
“Well enough to like him. I’m sorry, Harry, I didn’t know.”
“You knew the risks. You set the whole damned thing up. Didn’t you.”
Taut anger ground itself into the lines around her lips. “I’m responsible for it, yes. For his death. Yes.”
“Don’t get maudlin. It’s a privilege I’d just as soon not see you luxuriate in. How long have you been in this with MacIver? From the very beginning?”
“Yes.”
“From the night we first met?”
“Yes.”
“MacIver set it up for us to meet there as if it were an accident. Is that the way it worked?”
She nodded her head.
“And Haim Tippelskirch. It must have been his idea at the beginning. He was the one who’d been obsessed by the gold for fifty years.”
“Harry, you don’t understand. Please-”
“I will not be your wailing wall, Nikki. You hung me on puppet strings and made me dance across an emotional minefield. I owe you nothing.” I stood there with my fists clenched at my sides. “Nothing.”
She lifted her chin. Very soft: “Are you the only one with principles? Are you the only one with a private line to God? How are things on Mount Olympus, Harry? Will you let me talk to you? Will you listen to what I came here to say to you?”
“When you’ve said it, you’ll go,” I said. “And you’ll take MacIver and his wolf pack with him.”
“I’ll go, yes. I can’t answer for him.”
“You sicced him onto me. You can get him off me.”
“It’s not like that. We had the plan but it was MacIver who provided you. That wasn’t my idea. I’d never heard of you.”
“Sure. I was a total stranger. That made it a whole lot easier to play your badger game-you didn’t have to worry about feelings. All you had to do was act like a hooker, the hundred-dollar kind who says I-love-you between humps.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “Please. That’s not true. Dear God it wasn’t like that, Harry. Falling in love was the worst thing that could have happened, but it did happen and I wasn’t acting. It wasn’t supposed to happen. All I was supposed to do was to get you to Israel so that-”
“So that Haim could work on me. He wasn’t really retired from the Mossad at all, was he. He was right up in the top echelons-right up to the day of his death.”
“Yes. That’s true.”
“Fifty years he schemed to get at that gold.”
“No. It wasn’t until the nineteen fifties. After there was an Israel.”
“It had to be someone above suspicion. Someone acceptable to both the Americans and the Soviets. Certainly not a Jew. Someone who could get access to the records in both countries-and someone who had an interest in the gold so that he’d know what to look for, and look for it.
“I don’t know, Harry. I can’t answer that. I wasn’t there when they had their first meetings. It was several years ago, I’m sure. I only came into it a little while before you met me.”
