Night Soldiers

by Alan Furst

  The New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has, once again, been dragging its feet and is as unresponsive in this project as it has been in all others. No report from that office to date on RFE, but same will be forwarded once it arrives—if it ever does. Can't Col. Donovan do something about this?

  On April 17 I telephoned RFE at his office in the guise of Mr. Hamilton's secretary and arranged a lunch for the following Monday, April 20, at Luchow's. According to the headwaiter, he asked for “Mr. Hamilton's table” and waited twenty minutes before asking the headwaiter “if Mr. Hamilton had called.” (He had been given no “Hamilton” telephone number.) He was told that Mr. Hamilton had telephoned the restaurant, apologizing for the inconvenience and requesting that RFE meet him for lunch at the Coleman Hotel on East 23 rd Street and Fifth Avenue. On arriving at that location and discovering no such hotel, he consulted a telephone directory and proceeded to Coleman's, a restaurant on East 25 th Street, where he asked for “Mr. Hamilton.” Informed that no such person was there, he made a telephone call (in all probability to his office, since “Hamilton's secretary” had reached him there earlier), then ate lunch at the counter and left the restaurant, returning to work.

  My recommendation is to accept this candidate for further COI screening.

  Signed: Agatha Hamilton

  COI—New York

  April 24, 1942

  P.S. Hub, my friend Maria de Vlaq is someone you might consider taking to lunch when you are next in New York. She is formerly the Countess Marensohn—Swedish nobility—divorced two years ago, and moves easily in society. She rides and shoots excellently, is lethally charming and of a rather daring disposition. She is of Belgian citizenship and descent, and I believe would be amenable to recruitment. Her connection to Belgian, German, and Swedish circles remains strong, and her relationship with her former husband, and his family, is cordial.

  P.S.S. Not to end on a sour note, but here it is April and there is only silence from Washington on my February vouchers. While it is the case that fortune has smiled on me in this world, I cannot by myself assume the cost of the war effort.

  In Washington, D.C., Lieutenant Colonel H. V. Rossell leaned his elbows on the scarred wooden desk and stared at the man seated on the other side. Eidenbaugh, Robert F. His fourteenth interview of the day. He knew that if he were charming and likable the candidate would be put at ease, and the consequent forthrightness would help in making a proper decision. But he simply hadn't the strength for charm. He'd been working twenty-hour days since Pearl Harbor, and his initial burst of high-tension energy was long since dissipated. He was out of gas. What he really wanted to do was push his lips into an extended pout and make ishkabibble sounds by flapping them with his fingertips. That would prove everybody right. Since Colonel Donovan had persuaded Roosevelt that America needed an intelligence service, life had come to resemble a lunatic asylum. Rossell had some considerable experience in this work, a career in army intelligence going back ten years. As early as 1937—when war had seemed inevitable to him—he'd run small preparatory operations when his superiors would allow it, stockpiling European clothing, for instance, by purchasing it from incoming refugees, then storing it in a warehouse under squares of cardboard marked DO NOT CLEAN! Because of his foresight, agents going into Europe would, at least, not be dressed by Brooks Brothers.

  But if he knew his way around the profession, few others did. Above him were Donovan and a bunch of Ivy League lawyers, bankers, and Wall Street types. They would, he knew, work out well over time. Once these people got going, the Axis powers would be subject to ferocious trickery of every kind, the sorts of things lawyers and bankers might do if they were able to give in to their cruelest fantasies. Now they were being encouraged to do that very thing. Just that morning, a memo had crossed his desk recommending that a million bats be put aboard a submarine, then released off the Japanese coast in daylight, each one equipped with timer and minute incendiary bomb. They would fly into the dark spaces of a million Japanese homes and factories and, he supposed, blow up, spattering everyone in the neighborhood with exploded bat. He could just hear one of his superiors giving him the good word: “Oh, Rossell. Be a good fellow and get me a million bats, will you? By lunch? Thanks loads!”

  But that wasn't the worst of it. Donovan—with Hoover and the FBI fighting him every step of the way—was in the process of acquiring an extraordinary zoo of people. “The successful intelligence service,” someone had said, “is one which can best turn eccentricity to its own advantage.” Well, they'd have that, all right. They'd hired Marxists, led by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Playwrights—Robert E. Sherwood and others. Academicians, recruited by Archibald MacLeish. John Ford, the film director. A young actor named Sterling Hayden who would, he thought, eventually be sent to fight with Yugoslav partisans. Then there was John Ringling North, of the circus family, and a large, vivacious woman named Julia Child. There was Virginia Hall, about to be parachuted into occupied France with her artificial leg held under one arm lest it break when she landed. The pile of file folders on his desk climbed toward the sky. Tom Braden, Stewart Alsop, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walt Rostow, Arthur Goldberg. Ilya Tolstoy and Prince Serge Obolensky, the hotel baron married to an Astor. He had them from Standard Oil and Paramount Pictures, he had Mellons and Vanderbilts, Morgans and du Ponts. Union organizers and tailors. He had everything. And more coming in every day.

  Meanwhile, they had just been renamed. COI, the Office of the Coordinator of Information, was now to be called the Office of Strategic Services—OSS. Which local wags lately referred to as Oh So Silly, Oh So Secret, and Organization Shush-Shush. Even Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, had got in on the fun. Knowing that the OSS offices were next to the experimental labs at the National Institute of Health, he had stated in a recent radio broadcast that the organization was composed of “fifty professors, twenty monkeys, ten goats, twelve guinea pigs—and a staff of Jewish scribblers!” Hey, Dr. Goebbels, Rossell thought, you left out the bats.

  Slowly, his mind returned to business and he realized that the poor soul across from him probably thought he was being tested in a cold-eyed staredown, not a daydreaming contest. Rossell was in his late forties, with gray hair cut in a military brush, big shoulders and thick arms. His tie was pulled down, jacket off and shirtsleeves rolled up in useless defiance of a steam radiator that would grow orchids if they let it. And here it was May. Couldn't somebody get them to turn the goddamn thing off?

  “Well,” he finally said to the man across from him, “say something.” If you couldn't manage charm, discomfort would serve.

  Eidenbaugh stared at him for a long moment, then, from a face composed in utter seriousness, came a singsong “M-i-s, s-i-s, s-i-p-p-i.”

  “Oh yeah?” Rossell said. “Is that supposed to get you a job here?”

  “No sir,” Eidenbaugh answered, “that's supposed to help you spell Mississippi.”

  To Rossell, the laugh felt better than a week of sleep and seemed to serve the same purpose. He launched himself—once again, into the breach!—into the usual interview format. This Eidenbaugh wasn't so bad. He wasn't much to look at, but he had a nimble mind. Would he do the job? Difficult to guess until the situation presented itself. But he found himself enjoying the man, and that weighed heavily in his favor. One of those slippery qualities, hard to quantify, that could really count in the world he was about to enter.

  Then there was luck.

  It just so happened that while the two of them chattered away, a fly settled on the edge of Rossell's desk. Slowly, he picked up a file folder—it happened to be that of Merian C. Cooper, producer of the film King Kong—and swatted it dead.

  “See that?” he asked.

  “Yes sir.”

  “That, son, is technical intelligence at work.

  “I always get 'em,” he continued, “because I know that flies take off backward. So you swat in back of them, see?”

  “Yes sir. Will I be all
owed to swat Hitler, sir?”

  Rossell rubbed his eyes for a moment. Christ, he was tired, and he looked like hell. But he didn't feel so bad. He really liked to do the fly trick—it put him in a good mood. “I think so, son,” he said. “We just may allow you that privilege.”

  In Paris, in the early hours of June 11, 1940, Khristo Stoianev lay awake in his cell in the Santé prison and planned his “escape.” Staring at the opaque window with the tiny hole in its upper corner, he smoked up a week's tobacco ration and watched the short, summer darkness fade into early light. In two days' time it would be thirty-six months that he had spent in captivity.

  He could bear no more.

  His had been, he knew, a classic descent. He had braced his mind early on, willed himself to meet imprisonment as he had met other events in his life. “A man can survive anything.” He did not know where he'd heard it but he believed it, believed in it, a religion of endurance. Thus he had taken his formless days and nights and imposed on them a rigid system of obligations. Exercise—physical strength can forestall psychological collapse, a universal and timeless prisoner's axiom. Use the mind. He created a private algebra of propositions and wrestled with their solutions, mining his past life for usable circumstance: How long would it take for a man carrying his own food and water to walk in a straight line from Vidin to Sofia? From mental images of maps he contrived a route, crossing roads, streams and mountains, estimated the weight of water and food, determined the point of efficiency that lay somewhere between thirst and starvation and exertion of strength: the goal of the exercise was to arrive at the outskirts of Sofia carrying no provisions, crawling the final hundred feet.

  Keep a diary. They would give him no paper, so he used the surfaces of opened-up matchboxes he bought from the prison store with his meager stipend, and kept records in pin-scratched hieroglyphs—a plus or minus sign, for instance, indicated success or failure in the two-hour mental exercise period for that day. Control is everything. He permitted himself only one hour a day for daydreaming, which was always erotic, violently colored, tones and textures scrupulously perfected by his imagination. Retain any connection at all with the world. Every moment of his time in the exercise yard he spent talking with other prisoners. Dédé the pimp from Montparnasse. Kreuse the wife-murderer from Strasbourg. He did not care who they were or what they said—to connect, that was what mattered. Read. Religious tract or boys' adventure, he sucked them dry of whatever particle of entertainment they could provide. Regret will kill you. A concept he embraced to a point where any thought that presented itself for contemplation had to be inspected for traces of hidden anger or sorrow before he would allow his mind to pursue it.

  For the first year, as 1937 faded into 1938, the regime worked. He did not think of the future, he did not think of freedom, and achieved a level of self-discipline he had never imagined possible. But time—hours that became days that became months—was a killer of extraordinary stealth, and his spirit slowly failed him. He began to die. He watched it with slow horror, as a man will observe an illness that consumes his life. He would come to himself suddenly and realize that his mind had been on a journey into a violent universe of shimmering colors and bizarre shapes. He understood what was happening to him, but his understanding counted for nothing. Without the daily texture of existence to occupy it, he learned, the human soul wavers, wanders, begins to feed upon itself, and, in time, disintegrates. He saw them in the exercise yard, the clear-eyed, the ones who had died inside themselves. Thus, at last, he came upon the prisoner's timeless and universal conclusion: there is nothing worse than prison.

  From the gossip in the exercise yard, he knew that Wehrmacht columns were approaching Paris and that the country would fall in a matter of days. In shame, he prayed for this to happen. Bulgaria had joined Germany, Italy, Hungary and Romania in an alliance against Western Europe. He was, no matter the Stateless Person designation of the Nansen Commission, a Bulgarian national, thus nominally an ally of the Germans. When they took Paris, he would send them a message and offer his services. Initially, he would make his approach as Petrov, the former waiter, imprisoned for striking a blow against the Bolshevists. They would approve of that, he knew, despite their treaty of convenience with Stalin, and would more than likely accept him on that basis. If, perchance, they knew who he really was, he would brazen it out. Yes, he had fought them in Spain. But witness, Herr Oberst, this change of heart. Witness this attack on the NKVD itself—could they doubt his sincerity after that? He marveled at how the past could be refigured to suit the present, at how fragile reality truly was when you started to twist it.

  Once he was out of prison, he would return to Spain, a neutral country, by deceit—a notional mission, perhaps, that he would lead them into assigning him—or by underground means: the mountains or the sea. He thought of the little towns hidden back in the hills, with too many young women who could not find a husband after the slaughter of the civil war. They would not look too closely at him, he was sure, if he worked hard. That was how they measured people down there and to that—if the blessed day ever came—he was more than equal.

  But, on the night of June 12, everything changed.

  At dusk, the mashed lentils and the gritty bread were shoved through the Judas port and his “quarter” filled up with drinking water. Between the mound of lentils and the tin plate lay a slip of paper.

  In roman letters it said BF 825. Then the numerals 2:30.

  The shock of it nearly knocked him to the floor.

  For the intervening hours he dared not sit down, pacing the small cell and hurling his body about as he pivoted at the far wall. Then the door whispered open to reveal a man in black who stood in the shadowed corridor and waited to enter. Two words, spoken quietly, came from the darkness: “Khristo Stoianev?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  The man stepped forward. He was a priest. Not the prison chaplain, a fat Gascon with a wine-reddened face, but a thin, ageless man with paperlike skin whose hands hung motionless at his sides.

  “Is there anything here you will want?”

  He grabbed his matches, a few shreds of tobacco folded in paper, his two letters and the matchbox diaries. He had nothing else.

  “Let us go,” the priest said.

  Together they walked through the darkened corridors, past the night sounds of imprisoned men. There were no guards to be seen. All the doors that would have normally blocked their path were ajar. In the reception area, a long wooden drawer sat at the center of a rough table. He found his old clothing and all the things that had been in his pockets on the day of his arrest. Also, a thick packet of ten-franc notes.

  The priest took him to the front entry of the prison, then pushed at the grilled door set into one of the tall gates. The iron hinges grated briefly as it swung wide. For a moment, the city beyond the prison overwhelmed him with the sounds and smells of ordinary life and, for that instant freedom itself was palpable, as though he could touch it and see it and capture it in his hands. Then his eyes filled with tears and he saw the world in a blur.

  “Blagodarya ti, Otche.” He needed, in that moment, to speak the words in his own language. Then added, in French, “It means ‘thank-you, Father.' ”

  The priest closed his eyes and nodded, as though to himself. “Go with God,” he said, as Khristo walked through the door.

  In the autumn of 1943, on a cold October night with a quarter moon, Lieutenant Robert F. Eidenbaugh parachuted into the Vosges mountains of southeastern France.

  He landed in a field north of Épinal, breaking the big toe of his left foot—by doubling it over against the ground when he landed with his foot in the wrong position—and splitting the skin of his left index finger from tip to palm—he had no idea how. Limping, he chased down the wind-blown chute, wrestled free of the harness straps, and paused to listen to the fading drone of the Lancaster that circled the field, then turned west toward the OSS airbase at Croydon. From a sheath strapped to his ankle he took a broad
-bladed knife and began digging at the ground in order to bury the chute. Fifteen minutes later, sweat cooling in the mountain chill, he was still hard at it. This was not the same turf he had encountered in practice burials at the old CCC—Civilian Conservation Corps—camp in Triangle, Virginia, a few miles east of Manassas, where he had trained. This grass was tough and rooty and anchored well below the surface of the ground. At last he abandoned the knife and began ripping up large sods with his hands—holding his split index finger away from the work—until he'd exposed a jagged oval of dark soil. Next he gathered up the silk and shrouds of the parachute, forced the bulk into a shallow depression, and covered it with a thin layer of dirt. He laid the sods back over the dirt and stamped them into place, then walked away a few feet to see what it looked like. It looked like someone had just buried a parachute.

  Typically, there would have been a reception committee on the ground and their leader would have bestowed the chute—the silk was immensely valuable—on one of his men, a spoil of war bestowed for bravery in a tradition as old as the world. But this was a “cold” drop. There were no maquisards triangulating the drop zone with bonfires, there was no container of Sten guns and ammunition dropped along with him—to be carried away by men and women on bicycles—and he had no radio. The mission, code-named KIT FOX, called for him to contact a loosely organized group of French resistance fighters in the village of Cambras, direct their sabotage efforts, turn them into a true réseau—headquarters—for underground operations, and extend, if possible, a courrier—secret mail system—throughout that part of the Vosges. His contact for supply was code-named ULYSSE (after the Homeric hero Ulysses), a senior officer of the résistance and his one resource on the ground, based in the small city of Belfort, not far from Switzerland. His only direct line of communication with OSS was to be coded messages personnels from the foreign service of the BBC.