Night Soldiers

by Alan Furst

  Khristo imagined them in a room with Yaschyeritsa and smiled sadly at the thought.

  “Come on,” the young man urged, observing the smile.

  A group of women in uniform—white hats and gray capes—marched below a banner stretched across the street: NURSE WORKERS FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE.

  Omaraeff growled deep in his throat. “Go look up Comrade Stalin's rear end and see if you find justice,” he said—Khristo laughed despite himself—“and powder his balls while you're at it.”

  The nurses wore their hair severely cut, and their faces were plain and pale without makeup. He found them very beautiful. “Comrades,” one of them called out, “have courage.” So God speaks to me, Khristo thought. He would need courage to contend with Omaraeff. You might know a man fairly well, he realized, then suddenly he revealed his politics and turned into a werewolf before your very eyes. Could not one be just a waiter?

  The nurses were followed by the municipal clerks, angry, shabby men and women with grim faces. One imagined piles of tracts in their houses, learned by rote, and shotguns in closets. The day is coming, their eyes said. They would, Khristo knew, rule the world under Bolshevism—formerly despised, at last triumphant, paying back a list of slights that reached to heaven.

  “Who have we now?” Omaraeff asked.

  “The clerks of the city.”

  “They look dangerous.”

  “They are.”

  Omaraeff was tight-lipped. “You see what we face. When the marching begins, the next thing is throwing bombs. Well, we'll put a stop to that. Trust Djadja. For a long time I averted my eyes. This is not my country, I reasoned, let them go to hell in their own way, what do I care?”

  “What has changed?”

  “Everything has changed. Now there are strikes, here, in England, even America. And posters, and parades. And those NKVD devils are everywhere, stirring the pot. You know who I'm talking about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, you must share my view.”

  “Of course,” he said. Unconsciously, he shifted the packaged Radom to his other hand.

  “One might use it right now,” Omaraeff said. “And to good effect.”

  “Well …”

  “But I have bigger things in mind.”

  There was a stir across the boulevard. A man in the crowd had shouted something that reached the marchers' ears, and one of them strode menacingly toward his tormentor. A policeman stepped out into the street and swung his cape—weighted with lead balls in the bottom hem. The marcher danced away and made an obscene gesture with an adamant thrust of both arms. The marchers, a battalion of streetsweepers, some of whom carried their brooms like rifles, roared their approval.

  They were followed by the salesgirls of the grands magasins in their gray smocks. In their midst marched Winnie and Dicky Beale, arm in arm, faces set in pained but hopeful expressions, perfectly in keeping with the emotional atmosphere of the march. They were, Khristo noted, smartly dressed for the occasion. Winnie Beale had on a worker's peaked cap, properly tilted over one eye, and the squarish, broad-shouldered suit offered by Schiaparelli that was popular for communist events. Elsa Schiaparelli had journeyed to Moscow in 1935 to observe the workers' styles that would, it was felt, now take precedence in the fashion world. Dicky, careful always not to upstage his furiously engagé wife, had merely replaced shirt and tie with a turtleneck sweater beneath his London suit.

  Omaraeff shook his head in patient sorrow. “Lambs,” he said.

  A half hour later, they stood across the street from an elegant six-story building on the Place de l'Opéra, amid commercial luxury of every sort—marble banks, furriers, jewelers, and sociétés anonymes. Money and discretion mingled in the afternoon air. The restaurant interiors were subdued and richly decorated, and the shop windows showed the latest colors, Wallis Simpson Blue and Coronation Purple. The people in the street were perfectly barbered and smartly dressed, their complexions slightly pink after long, elaborate lunches.

  Omaraeff gestured toward the building with his head. “There it is,” he said. “Murderer's gold.”

  “That building?”

  “Yes. The top floor is owned by a firm called Floriot et cie. It is a gold repository, for those whose faith in banks did not survive 1929—the Credit Anstalt failure and all of that. In such times it can be very comforting to have some gold locked up in a private vault.”

  “I see.”

  “What you do not see is that the NKVD sells its gold there.”

  Khristo's response was brusque. He was, for a moment, an intelligence officer once again, and asked the intelligence officer's eternal question: “How do you know?”

  “Friends, Nikko. Friendship is our gold. The newspaper kiosk on the corner is owned by an old man called Leonid, who was a banker in St. Petersburg until 1917. Now he stands in his stall for sixteen hours a day, selling newspapers. And he is forced to watch Russians, coming and going at all hours, with black satchels. It is not so farfetched to say that it is his gold, formerly, that passes before his eyes. A cruel irony, but what can he do? He can come to Djadja Omaraeff, that's what he can do. And he has done it.”

  “And what do you propose?”

  “I propose to take it from them.”

  “And the pistol?”

  “Just in case. One may meet unfriendly persons anywhere, even in the Opéra.”

  “Who is to plan it?”

  “That's you, Nikko my boy.”

  Khristo shook his head. He felt like a man sliding helplessly down a sheer slope toward the cliff that would kill him. “How would I know such things, Djadja? I am only a waiter.”

  “Not a bad one, either, I've seen to that. What else does one know? Well, you are Bulgarian—but you are not in Bulgaria. Perhaps you do not like the situation there, the way the political wind blows. Yet you do not sit in the lap of the reds, either. You were in Spain, Vladi Z. has told me that, and I doubt you fought for the Falange. You are quiet, in great possession of yourself, everybody's acquaintance, nobody's friend. Marko the bartender tells me you take a different bridge across the Seine every night. And, at last, I ask you to get me a pistol—a test of friendship—and you do get it. And not at a pawnshop, either, I'll wager. What is one to think?”

  Khristo was silent.

  “Just so,” Omaraeff said, and patted him affectionately on the shoulder.

  A cab dropped them off in front of a tiny nightclub called Jardin des Colombes—the Garden of Doves—in a cellar near Montparnasse. One panel of the mirrored wall opened onto a long corridor, full of turnings, that led to a small steam room. They were the only patrons. An old woman took their clothes and gave them towels, turned the steam vent up and shuffled away. They had reached the nightclub in the last hour of the afternoon, as twilight gathered in the side streets, already late for work at the Brasserie.

  Omaraeff wiped the sweat from his shaven head and waved concern aside. “You are with me,” he said grandly, “so you need not worry. Marko will get everything under way, and Papa Heininger never shows his face until ten. Relax, my boy, relax. You'll work plenty in this life. Breathe deeply, take the steam inside yourself, let it cleanse this dirty city from your heart. Ach, Nikko, I was meant to live a country life—a little farm, a little wife, someplace in the mountains, where the birds sing at night.” “Birds don't sing at night, Djadja.” “On my place they would.”

  “Will you permit me to advise you on this matter?” “No! Nikko, no, please. Don't spoil this lovely steam.” Khristo sighed and lay back on the bench until his head rested comfortably against the wall—the wood was spongy and soft from years of steam. Every man has a destiny, he thought, and this must be mine. Everyone in Vidin believed that life worked in that way. A man might kick and thrash and struggle all he liked—it counted for nothing. The old Turkish saying had it right: so it is written, so it shall be. Even now his mind toyed and played with the building on the Opéra. The elevator. The hallways. Time of day. A crush of people. Where a
car would go. How many couriers could be taken. If he read Omaraeff properly, the crime was a gesture of politics. Very well, a small act would suffice. Just pray God there was not a river of greed running silently beneath the enterprise. That would make it dangerous. The Russians would not trust their couriers, of course. Their consignments would be small. There would be watchers. They bled the gold wherever in the world they could get their needle in, and there was no point in turning it into roubles. Dollars, pounds sterling, Swiss francs—that's what they would want. With that, one might actually buy something. There was so much timing to do. Did they wait at the embassy to send the next courier until the last returned? Or was it a telephone signal? Oh why did not some great devil come to the surface of the world and suck them back to hell? Aleksandra! We must fly.

  “A little refreshment? Something to drink, perhaps?”

  He opened his eyes. “No, thank you.”

  “You think too much, Nikko. You'll wear out your brains if you're not careful.” Omaraeff stood, adjusted the towel at his waist, walked to the opposite wall and knocked twice, then returned to the bench. “I have arranged a small entertainment,” he said, a slight edge to his voice. “Just something among friends—men of the world. You understand?”

  Oh God, whores, he thought. Omaraeff went too far—what he didn't need in his life right now was a dose of the ferocious Parisian clap. “I understand perfectly,” he said in what he hoped was a soothing voice. Let Omaraeff disport himself as he would—he had agreed to enough stupidity for one day, job or no job. One could always unload trucks at the market. The door opened and two naked boys appeared, perhaps fourteen, dark, sullen-faced, possibly Arab.

  “Ahh,” Omaraeff said lightly, “golden youth.”

  One of the boys walked toward Khristo and sat on his knee. “Get off,” he said. The boy did not move for a moment, then stood obediently.

  “Dear Nikko, I fear I have insulted you.”

  “Of course not. Every man to his pleasure.”

  “Yes, yes,” Omaraeff said. He took the other boy by the waist and turned him back and front, like an artist contemplating a sculpture. “Perhaps next time, little one,” he said, dismissing him with a wave.

  “We must be paid,” the boy said coldly in guttural French.

  “You will be paid,” Omaraeff said. His voice sounded, for a moment, faded, used up. The boys left the room. Omaraeff lay back against the wall and closed his eyes. “So you see, Nikko my boy. Gold is everything.”

  The Brasserie Heininger was quite mad that night, Khristo virtually ran from the moment he put on the waiter's uniform until the first light of dawn. It was a sumptuous place. One ascended a white marble staircase to find red plush banquettes, polished mirrors trimmed in thick gold leaf, and burnished copper lamps turned down to a soft glow. The brasseries had been started by competing beer breweries at the turn of the century and they retained a Victorian flavor, each one designed to be that ever so slightly vulgar place where one could behave in an ever so slightly vulgar way. A place where a glass of champagne might find its way down a daring cleavage. The waiters were blind to it, their expressions unchanging grins. “Be merry!” Papa Heininger insisted. They were always on the move, carrying silver platters of crayfish, grilled sausage, salmon in aspic. It was all far too overdone to be anything but deliciously cheap. A place to let your hair down.

  That night they had singing Germans, a table of fourteen, heavy red faces bawling out dueling songs as shoulders were thumped and backs thwacked with huge glee. They had an attempted suicide in the Ladies' Room. A Portuguese countess slashed her shoulder with a scissors, then howled for assistance before her dress was ruined. This was followed by a brief but excellent fistfight between two wine brokers from Bordeaux. Two American heiresses indulged themselves in a hair-pulling contest—something to do with a husband, one gathered from the accompanying shrieks. His Most Royal Highness the Prince of Bahadur descended the long staircase on his backside, a series of breathtaking bumps that ended with His Highness roaring with laughter—thank God—on the floor of the lobby.

  A night of madness, Khristo thought.

  Spring was coming, war was coming, perhaps nothing mattered very much. At dawn, in the room, Aleksandra sat pensively by the closed shutters, gray light spilling over her small breasts, the smoke from her cigarette rising lazily in the still air.

  Very quietly, he probed to see if he might get another job. There was no question of staying at Heininger if he denied Omaraeff assistance—the padrone system demanded favors in return for favors, that was just the way life was. But the search proved useless. Paris was a village, in some ways no bigger than Vidin. Everybody knew everybody, through some connection or other, so if it happened that you were not known, you did not exist. The peculiar French mentality, a system of locks and gates and weirs so joyously flowing in the matter of sexual undertakings was, in the area of jobs and money—as the proprietor of a small bistro on the Rue de Rennes put it—plus serré qu'un cul de guenon. Tighter than a monkey's backside. Who were you? they wanted to know. They hired, it seemed, only cousins. First cousins. Before word of his research could reach Omaraeff, he gave it up.

  And went to work.

  Not committed to it, not really. Expecting along the way the usual impossibilities that snagged the vast percentage of all proposed clandestine actions. Ozunov, at Arbat Street, had cautioned: “Nine times out of ten the answer will be no. And of course you'll not be given any such thing as a reason.”

  But so artfully fickle was the life of 1937, it seemed to Khristo, that the great snag absolutely refused to reveal itself. The operational people turned up by Omaraeff were not at all the corps of baboons he'd feared. In fact, they did quite well. Pazar, the cabdriver, perhaps an Armenian or a Turk; Justine, the stunning French wife of a Russian chocolatier; Ivan Donchev, a quaint old gentleman born in Sofia who had lived forty years in Paris, a retired bookkeeper who wore a rosebud in his lapel every day of his life.

  He ran them under a cover that was marginal at best, but you couldn't just tell people what was going on. It would give them, if nothing else, a story for the flics if everything went entirely to hell. He presented himself as a confidential agent in the employ of a man who ran a courier service. The couriers had taken to dawdling, visiting their mistresses or gambling or drinking or something. One had to know. Therefore these couriers would be closely observed on their routes. The story fooled nobody, of course, but it was there if they wanted it.

  In his heart he had to admit that he was happy in the work. He was slightly horrified to find it so, but there was no denying what he felt. The incessant groveling of his job as a waiter had begun to grate on him, and he could foresee a time when he would come to hate it.

  Aleksandra noted the change immediately—her barometer was perilously accurate. “You seem awfully pleased these days,” she remarked, head canted at an inquisitive angle. “Perhaps you have another lover? Surely her bottom is cuter than mine.” Such impossibilities were duly and demonstratively denied, but she'd sensed that something was going on. “I am thinking of starting a business,” he told her. Oh? Did he think that rubbing shoulders with café society made him one of them? No, no, nothing like that. He wished to better himself. “Ah,” she said. She believed she had some facility in the making of fashionable chapeaux, perhaps a small store, in a reasonably good neighborhood, where she could set up as a milliner. Her chum Liliane had done that very thing, her friend had arranged it. The bookstore was boring. The beards breathed Marxist endearments in her face. It was dusty among the shelves. She sneezed. Her wage was a humiliation. A business would get them out of this room into something more suitable. She would learn to cook. She would have a fat bébé. In no time at all, they would be the most grands of bourgeoises.

  At which point she laughed wildly and grabbed the tip of his nose so hard in her savage little fist that his eyes wept and he knocked her hand away. “What are you doing, petit chou?” she asked, hard as nails and s
mart as a whip. “Money,” he said, “it concerns money.” She lit a cigarette and turned away. “Well, then,” she said. But he knew she meant to find out the truth of it.

  There were four couriers moving from the Soviet embassy to the Floriot gold repository. They had no schedule, though charts were endlessly drawn up that clocked them and their visits. The operation seemed to him a hurried one. That made sense. What with Stalin and Yezhov attacking the Kulaks, the ongoing purges turning up treasure troves in walls and chimneys, and the infusion of Spanish bullion, there was a great deal of gold that needed converting.

  The observers were extremely faithful. Pazar sat by the hour in his cab, even when customers in the rain beat on his doors with umbrella handles and called him every sort of scoundrel. Justine shopped herself to exhaustion, wearing out two pairs of shoes but never once complaining. Old Ivan bought coffees for his cronies in a café across the street until he had to submit a plea for funds—and what oceans of l'express did to his digestive system a gentleman would not care to describe. They called the couriers A, B, C and D.

  B was a sad-looking fellow, with heavy jowls and downcast eyes, nicknamed Boris by the observers. He seemed to all of them so terribly unhappy, as though someone he'd loved had died. He stared at the ground as he carried his satchel through the streets, apparently caught up in a dialogue that went on in his mind. Sometimes his lips actually moved. To test his personality, Khristo ran a prostitute at him one afternoon on the Rue de la Paix, as he returned from making a drop at Floriot. But Boris merely snarled under his breath and avoided her with a wide swerve.

  Apparently, the job would have to be done right on the street. The couriers were chained to their satchels, but a small channel-lock bolt cutter could sever the chain quickly enough.

  Otherwise, things went more or less well. There were the normal irritations, of course, especially the grave communications problem they experienced. Khristo determined, at that point, that one simply could not be any sort of spy in France because it was impossible to use the telephones. But, all in all, there was nothing very troubling—unless you counted the ham sandwiches. They all had to eat while on the job, and soon discovered that the grand establishments of l'Opéra itself would quickly deplete the operations fund provided by Omaraeff. But Pazar found a family café hidden away in a side street where a reasonable ham sandwich could be obtained—eaten on the premises or carried away. Khristo had lunch there, in the second week of April, and the proprietress made an offhand remark that rang a bell. “Suddenly all the world eats ham sandwiches—one can hardly keep the stuff in stock anymore.” Someone else, it seemed, was eating ham sandwiches.