Kolchak's Gold Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’d have known that English wasn’t her native tongue but I’d have been at a complete loss to identify the accent.
    She looked amused but not impatient. She was under no compulsion to hurry into conversation; silence was not awkward to her, she was too self-assured.
    I said, “MacIver warned me against you.”
    â€œI’m an iceberg and a bore, yes?”
    We both laughed; she took off her glasses and squinted her big nearsighted eyes at me. “I’m afraid I disliked him instantly. I took him for FBI—I assumed they’d sent him to keep tabs on me.”
    â€œWhen was this?”
    â€œOh, six weeks ago I suppose. Two months. It was soon after I came over. I’m afraid I must have taken a blowtorch to the poor man. He was trying so desperately to be a man of the world. At one point he started to talk about some Czechoslovakian Communist friend of his. It might as well have been a Jew, or a black man—you know? Some of my best friends.… I’m afraid I slapped him in the face with a cold fish—I reminded him of the half-million Soviet troops that invaded Czechoslovakia in the summer of sixty-eight and I reeled off a few statistics on the women and children they murdered in Wenceslas Square. The gang that contrived the so-called suicide of Jan Masaryk. Then I spent ten minutes telling him how the Russians exposed Dubček to a massive dose of radiation to give him leukemia. I’m afraid he wasn’t amused. But he seemed so—banal, so gullible. He infuriated me, his small unconvincing arrogance. It was only the conceit of a petty man, trying to believe he deserves better than life has granted him. But I was new here, I’m sure I was on the defensive. I treated him badly. Why am I telling you this?”
    â€œMaybe I look harmless enough.”
    â€œAnyway you’re a good listener. Do you live in Washington?”
    â€œNo. I have an old farmhouse on the Delaware River in New Jersey—more or less across the river from New Hope, if you know the area.”
    â€œBucks County. Someone took me to the playhouse there once. It’s lovely.”
    I waited for a burst of party laughter to subside. “Have you lived in Czechoslovakia?” It sounded lame.
    â€œNo. I have an annoying memory for facts, that’s all. Particularly facts that show the Soviets in a bad light.”
    â€œThat’s candid enough.”
    â€œI do hate them. But I don’t limit my being to that alone. I’m afraid I let MacIver think I did, and I’d prefer to have him go on believing that.”
    â€œMy lips are sealed.”
    â€œDo you know him well?”
    â€œWe roomed together in university for a few months. But I didn’t remember him when he introduced himself to me tonight.”
    She changed the subject abruptly. “Are you writing another book on the Civil War in Russia?”
    â€œOn Kolchak. He was the Czarist admiral who——”
    â€œI know who he was.” She didn’t snap; it was a kindly rebuff: Don’t waste time explaining things that don’t need explaining. “Do you think you can add much to what’s already been written about him?”
    â€œWe have quite a bit now that wasn’t available before. I’ve gone through Deniken’s papers, for example—the family only turned them loose a few years ago.”
    â€œAh, but he was only another general. You really should talk to the survivors who really knew.”
    â€œThey’re a bit hard to find. It was more than fifty years ago.”
    â€œI know a man in Israel,” she said.

H er name, it turned out, was Nicole Eisen, née Desrosiers; it was her father, not her mother, who had been French. (Her mother had been a Ukrainian Jew.) She did in fact have a seven-year-old daughter, a severely retarded child, in a Swiss institution; but there was no husband. Ben Eisen had been dead for nearly two years. When I