Blood of Victory

by Alan Furst

He’d seen knives, once or twice. One time in particular, in Madrid, during the civil war, he could never quite forget. It had been very sudden, when it happened, or he would have looked away. But, once you saw what you saw it was too late. The idea bothered him. Too easy to imagine, to imagine what went on, just at the moment, what it would feel like.

  He could hear them, back there. Their steps. That’s how quiet it was. Run.

  Couldn’t quite get himself to do that. Almost, but it seemed crazy, to take off down the street. Still, he could hear them. One of them talking, low and guttural. The other one laughed. At him? Because he’d speeded up? He came to a corner, now it was the rue Guzac. Ugly name. A bad street to die on. He looked up at the windows, but they were dark. Behind him, the conversation was louder.

  He crossed the street, head down, hands in pockets, and headed back where he’d come from. Toward the café. Easy enough to see it, earlier in the evening. Even with blackout curtains over the windows, light showed around the edges. Where was it? Had he taken another street? No, there it was, but it was dark now. Closed. Somewhere behind him, the two men crossed the street and were now walking in the same direction he was.

  The man in Madrid had screamed, he had really screamed, loud. But then it was cut off sharp, because of what happened next. Serebin took his hands out of his pockets, could feel his heart hammering inside him. Why was this going to happen to him? Jean Marc. He walked faster, but it didn’t matter.

  He turned a corner and started to run, then he saw a woman standing in the shadow of a doorway. Broad flat face, with lipstick and rouge, and stiff, curly hair. She wore a leather coat, had a bag on a shoulder strap. When their eyes met, she tilted her head slightly to one side, a question.

  “Bonsoir,” he said.

  “All alone, tonight?”

  “Yes. Can we go somewhere?”

  “It’s fifty francs,” she said. “Why are you breathing like that? Aren’t sick, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Those your pals?”

  The two men waited. Felt like standing in the street and talking to each other, nothing wrong with that.

  “No, it’s just me.”

  “Salops,” she said. She didn’t like the type.

  “Your man around?”

  “Across the street. Why?”

  “Let’s go see him.”

  “Why? He won’t like it.”

  “Oh, he’ll like it all right. Costs money, for me to get what I want.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Maybe another girl. Maybe somebody watches it.”

  “Oh.”

  “All right?”

  “Sure. Whatever you want, it’s only money.”

  “Three hundred francs, how does that sound?”

  The woman gave a sharp whistle and her pimp stepped from a doorway. About eighteen, with a cap slanted over one eye and a smart little face.

  That did it, the two men started to walk away. They were very casual, just out for an evening stroll. One of them looked back over his shoulder and grinned at Serebin. We’ll see you some other time. Could they simply have intended to rob him?

  The pimp was paid the three hundred francs, and all he had to watch was Serebin, disappearing down the stairway of a Métro station.

  By post:

  Zollweig Maschinenfabrik AG

  Gründelstrasse 51

  Regensburg

  Deutsches Reich

  28 February, 1941

  Domnul Emil Gulian

  Enterprise Marasz-Gulian

  Strada Galati 10

  Bucuresti

  Roumania

  Dear Sir:

  We are pleased to accept your offer of Reichsmarks 40,000 for two Model XIV Rheinmetall turbine steam boilers. You may have complete confidence that these have been regularly inspected and maintained to a high order and we trust you will find them in perfect working condition.

  On receipt of your draft in the above-named amount, we will ship, according to your instruction, by river barge, no later than 14 March, with arrival at the port of Belgrade expected by 17 March. All export permissions and licenses will be obtained by our office.

  We wish you success in your new venture and, should you have further inquiries, please address them to me personally.

  Most respectfully yours,

  Albert Krempf

  Managing Director

  Zollweig Maschinenfabrik AG

  A Vidocq/Lille steam turbine was available in Bratislava, manufactured in 1931, rated at 10,000 kilowatts of power delivered, 33 feet in length, 13 feet wide, 11 feet high, weighing 237,000 pounds. The Czech manager of the foundry guaranteed performance, documentation, and shipping. And well he should, Polanyi thought, at the price they were paying. Polanyi wondered how they would go about replacing it, with the war using up production capacity at an astonishing rate, but that wasn’t his problem. Maybe it was a backup system, maybe this, maybe that—in the event, the opportunity was too good to pass up and no doubt they had something in mind.

  As in Budapest, where agents for Marasz-Gulian located three turbine boilers, of similar dimension, with one old fellow, formerly the pride of the Esztergom Power Authority, weighing in at “over four hundred thousand pounds.” They rather thought. And rescued, just in time, from the scrapyard.

  “Let’s see them haul that great fucker off the bottom,” Stephens said, at the restaurant overlooking the wharves. He handed Polanyi a page cut from an old Hungarian catalogue. A photograph of a giant turbine. A little man with a mustache, wearing a gray uniform, stood beside it, dwarfed by its size. “From London, by diplomatic pouch,” Stephens explained. Then added, wistfully, “Such strange and lovely things they have in London.”

  Six turbines, then, with a seventh available in Belgrade, from a Serbian steel mill. “Fourteen years old and no longer suitable to our needs, but perfectly reliable.” The decision to use steam turbines, a race of giants in the Land of Industry, had come after some consideration. Bagged cement would break loose from its load and tumble away in the current long before it turned to concrete, and there was no credible reason to ship concrete block to Roumania, where some of it, at least, was manufactured. Similarly, fire brick for blast furnaces, which weighed, as it happened, substantially less than common brick. “And locomotives,” Stephens had said, “are, alas, far too likely to be traveling by rail.” Scrap iron was currently in demand for German tanks, stone was quarried in Roumania. “The world is lighter than one thinks,” Polanyi grumbled, poking at his eggplant.

  And the cursed river could never really decide how deep it was, they found. Still, everyone, Herr Doktor Finkelheim, the Roumanian pilot, and specialists at universities in Birmingham and Leeds, agreed that the Stenka ridge was the place. Kilometer 1030. Dangerously shallow at the end of winter, before the spring rains left the river swollen and high in its banks. So, a barge with six feet of draft and six feet above the waterline, crowned with an eleven-foot-high turbine, would come to rest at twenty-three feet. A menace to navigation. Even if, in the course of the accident, one of the barges turned on its side—disaster!—they’d have six more down there, pulled under by the sinking tug. A great navigational mess, surely, but an expensive one to arrange.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Stephens said. The Special Operations Executive had a considerable imprest from Treasury, and he was, for the time being, their fair-haired boy.

  It was Ibrahim who was sent to Bucharest to meet with Gulian. “Stenka ridge,” he said. “No question. An Austrian company dredges the ship canal and, in the present state of politics, now more than ever. They are always at it.” As for the appropriate cargo, Gulian shrugged and said, “Well, a steam boiler.” He laughed. “If what you want is sheer clumsiness, the most frustrating beast you could imagine, that’s the steam boiler. Monsters, those things, ask your local industrialist.”

  Bought new?

  “No, impossible. They take months to order, to build, to deliver—a cauchemar.”

>   Then?

  “In all commerce there are shadow markets, informal dealings between buyer and seller. In all products, machinery as much as any other. I can think of at least two agencies who work this area. And the war has made no difference to them—believe me, they prosper in war. They live on the margin, these men. Hang around your outer office, read the newspaper, discuss the day’s events with your secretary. There used to be one—Brugger, was that it? Always with a toothpick in the mouth. He’d wait for me to go out for lunch. Hello, how are you, heard the one about the plumber and the midget? Want to buy something? Got anything you want to sell? Truth is, you don’t need them, until you need them, and then you really need them.”

  So then, who will actually buy the turbines?

  “That’s a problem. A paper company won’t work, because the people who watch these things—import licenses and so forth—are not stupid. ‘XYZ,’ they’ll say, ‘who’s that?’ Which means, if you don’t have months to build up a shell business, you’ll need the real thing. So, it’s either me, or someone like me.”

  And what happens after the “accident”?

  “Delay, temporize, misunderstand, deny, pull your hair out, declare bankruptcy, then run like hell. After all, what makes you think that what works in business won’t work in war?”

  Yes, but there’s no history of Gulian, doing things like that.

  True. “But go see my enemies, they’ll tell you they always knew it would come to that. So, finally, they’ll be right.”

  A lot of enemies, were there?

  “I’m rich and successful,” Gulian said. “You fill in the rest.”

  So, through various banks, in Geneva and Lisbon, the money began to move.

  28 February. At the IRU office, a quiet morning. On the radio, an endless suite and variations for guitar, accompanied, now and then, by the rattle of a newspaper, and an occasional, mournful, ping from the tepid radiator, remembering better days. In the window, a lead-colored sky. Serebin dropped by that morning because he had nowhere else to go and nothing to do. This was called, in the parlance of the clandestine world, waiting. He needed urgently to speak with Polanyi—to tell him what had happened at the café by the abattoirs, to warn him, perhaps, of a dangerous change of heart, or to be scoffed at, gently, for seeing things that weren’t there. But, short of an emergency wire to Helikon Trading, there was nothing he could do. He’d been left in Paris, awaiting assignment, dangling. Had the operation been, for whatever reason, canceled? Maybe. And the way he would be told about it was—silence. No further contact. Would Polanyi do that? Yes, that was precisely what he would do. That was, he suspected, the traditional, the classical, way it was done.

  He considered the wire. Wrote and rewrote it in the Aesopian language they used, oblique and commonplace—representative important principal currently unwilling to proceed. In other words, the bastard tried to kill me. No, it wouldn’t work. Or, worse, it would work, and stop everything cold for no good reason.

  He spent the morning pretending to be busy, seated in front of a stack of problem papers—letters to be answered, forms to be filled out—that he shared with Boris Ulzhen, but mostly thinking about things that were bad for him to think about. Then the telephone rang, and a man called out, “Ilya Aleksandrovich? A call for you.”

  “Who is it?”

  After a moment, the man said, “Madame Orlov.”

  The name meant nothing—another lost soul. Serebin hesitated, he was tired of the world, of people who wanted things. Finally, he lost the battle with his conscience and walked over to the desk. “Yes?” he said. “Madame Orlov?”

  “Hello, ours.”

  Four-thirty, she’d said.

  But by five-thirty she still wasn’t there. Serebin waited, looked at his watch and waited. Sometimes he stared out the window, at people passing by on the street in front of the hotel. Sometimes he tried to read, gave up, walked around the room, went back to the window. So she’s late, he told himself, women do that in love affairs, it’s nothing new. But this was an occupied city, and sometimes people didn’t show up when they said they would. Sometimes, it turned out, they’d had to stand on line at a passport contrôle, and sometimes they were taken away to be questioned. And, sometimes, they just disappeared.

  Then, after six, he heard footsteps in the hallway, almost running, and waited by the door until she knocked. She was breathless and cold, said she was sorry to be so late, put a chilled glove on his cheek and, eyes closed, lips apart, waited for him to kiss her. He started to, then didn’t. Instead, from the curve between her neck and shoulder he inhaled a great, deep breath of her—perfume, plain soap, the scent of her skin, and, when he exhaled, it was audible; half growl, half sigh, a dog by a fire.

  She knew what that meant. Held him tight for a moment, then said “God, it’s freezing in here,” and ran for the bed, shedding her coat and kicking her shoes off on the way, burrowing under the covers and pulling them up to her nose. He sat beside her, and she gave him her jacket and skirt, then her sweater and slip. A brief struggle beneath the blanket produced first an oath, then a stocking.

  “How long?” he said.

  She handed him a second stocking. “The weekend. Labonniere’s in Vichy, at the foreign ministry. So...”

  “Are you...is it work? For us?”

  She wriggled briefly beneath the covers and gave him a garter belt. “No, love, it isn’t.” She unhooked her bra, put it on his lap with everything else, then slid her panties off, reached out from her den and, turning them upside down, pulled them over his head.

  “I dread going back there,” she said later. They were warm beneath the snarled covers, the room dark, the city silent. “Awful place, the Trieste. One of those border towns where everybody’s got it in for everybody else.”

  “It’s not forever,” he said.

  “Mean and dreary, and it rains.”

  “But”—he paused—“you have to stay.”

  She yawned and stretched, pulled the blankets around them. “Don’t tempt me, ours. Really, don’t.” He had the BBC on the radio, tuned low for caution—it was against occupation law to listen to it—and a tiny symphony played away on the night table. “I’ve convinced myself that it matters, what I do there.” She didn’t sound convinced. “Salon intelligence, so-called. Poor Madame X, how she pines for her friend, the Minister of Y, off in frigid Moscow for a week. Labonniere’s pretty good at it.”

  “You’re careful, of course.”

  “Oh yes, very. But...”

  She didn’t like talking about it, didn’t want it in bed with them. She traced a finger down his back, began, lazily, to make love to him.

  “Maybe better, in the spring.”

  She put a finger to his lips.

  “Sorry.”

  She rolled delicately over on top of him so that her mouth was close to his ear and said, in a voice so quiet he could only just hear her, “We will survive this, ours, and then we will go away together.”

  Only when morning came and they were dressed could he bring himself to tell her what happened at the café. “Strange,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t like saying this, but, if they’d really wanted to do something, they could have done it.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe they were just trying to frighten you. A warning.”

  “Maybe. Still, whatever it was, Polanyi should hear about it.”

  “I can manage that,” she said, “when I get back.” She put on her coat, they were going out for coffee. “By now, you know, Polanyi and the people he works for, and the people they work for, have all got themselves committed to this.”

  For a moment, they were silent.

  “So,” she said, “it’s too late to stop.”

  Very unwise to be seen together at the Gare de Lyon but he wouldn’t let her leave him at the hotel. They looked for a taxi, but there was none to be found, so they leaned against each other on the Métro, then got off a stop before t
he station, found a café, held hands across the table, and said good-bye.

  20 March. The parks still brown and dead, branches bare and dripping, rain cold, light gone in late afternoon, and hours and hours until the dawn. Yes, the last days of winter, the calendar didn’t lie, but up here it died hard and took a long time doing it. On the Pont Royal, the émigré writer I. A. Serebin leaned on a balustrade and stared pensively down into the Seine.

  Writing lines on a reluctant spring? Lines for a lover in a distant city? The river was flat, and low in its banks, it barely moved. Or was it, perhaps, just beginning to swell, just beginning to grow, from thawed fields and hillsides in the south? He couldn’t tell, didn’t know, was ignorant of water. All those years of idle staring at the stuff, the very essence of everything, and he knew nothing about it. Nonetheless, he studied the river and tried to read it because, if the spring tide had started to run here, it was running also at another river, south and east of here, at the Stenka ridge, at kilometer 1030. Certain individuals, in Istanbul and London, had to be gazing at their own rivers, he suspected. So then, where were they?

  He needn’t have worried.

  When he left the bridge he walked over to the IRU office, then, eventually, back to the Winchester, and then, as was his custom, to a small restaurant in the quarter, where his ration coupons allowed him a bowl of thin stew, turnips and onions and a few shreds of meat, and a piece of mealy gray bread. Which he ate while reading a newspaper, folded by his bowl, to keep him company. He moved quickly past the political news—Hitler had issued an ultimatum to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia—to “The Inquiring Reporter.” Yesterday, our question was for men with long beards: Sir, do you sleep with your beard on top of the blanket, or beneath it?

  “Monsieur?”

  Serebin looked up to see a woman in a black kerchief and coat. A plain soul, small and compact, unremarkable.

  “All the tables are taken, would you mind terribly if I joined you?”

  Why no, he didn’t mind. All the tables were not taken, but why fret over details. She ordered a small flask of wine and the stew—there was nothing else on the blackboard—handing over her own coupons. And, when the waiter left, said, “I believe we have a friend in common, in Istanbul.”