by Alan Furst
This announcement was received with cheering, and the parade began. Marine Captain Bruce Johnson from the billing department, who had lost a leg at Tarawa. Army Lieutenant Lee Golden, former account executive, now instructing pilots in Oklahoma. Naval Lieutenant Howard Bister, from the copywriting department, who had participated in the D-Day landings the previous June.
Bister, looking sharp in his dark blue officer's uniform, faced the crowd and waited that brief moment which usually signals that the speaker has something significant to say. As prelude, he thanked Mr. Drowne and the Thompson management for one helluva fine party, as well as for their hard work in bond drive and recruiting campaigns. Then he placed his drink on the desk next to him and took off his glasses.
“On D-Day,” he said, “I found myself aboard the U.S.S. Bigelow, an APA, which, for the uninitiated, is an attack transport that loads assault troops into landing craft for their final run to the beach. We were carrying several hundred reserves, whose job it would be to replace casualties taken in the first day of the attack. My job—it sounds important but let me tell you people that every job is important in an operation like this, from the mess stewards all the way to the admirals—my job was flag signals officer to Rear Admiral Orville G. Brants. At dawn, the sixth of June, I brought the admiral his coffee on the bridge, where he was standing with the ship's captain as we circled out in the Channel. Just as I reached the bridge, we were bracketed by two shells from a shore battery. I won't say it was close, but I did get some spray on me. ‘Careful, Lieutenant,' Admiral Brants said to me, ‘don't spill that java.' Not a word, you understand, about the shore batteries. Well, I spent most of the day up on that bridge, while the battle raged ashore, and I just want to say that I've never been so proud to be an American. Thank you.”
Applause thundered out for Bister's speech. The young woman from Production, standing next to Eidenbaugh, squeezed a cocktail napkin tightly in her fist and her eyes followed Bister as he walked away from the table. Mr. Drowne cleared his throat before he was able to speak again. “Thank you, Howard,” he said. “We are all very proud of you. Next”—he peered out over the crowd—“I think I see Bob Eidenbaugh. Bob?”
Eidenbaugh moved slowly to the front of the room, then turned and looked into the expectant faces before him. “I'm Captain Robert F. Eidenbaugh,” he said. “I used to work in the copy department. And I want to thank the Thompson people for a terrific party. As for my war, well, I was involved in staff work in London, lots of details, nothing very glamorous I'm afraid. Anyhow, I do want to wish everyone a merry Christmas.”
There was a scattering of polite applause as he made his way through the crowded room and Mr. Drowne stepped in quickly to fill the gathering silence. “And I'm sure that work was important!” he said firmly as his eyes sought the next speaker.
Eidenbaugh returned to his new friend as a Marine corporal described the landing at Okinawa. “Well,” she said, much too cheerfully, sensing his mood, “someone's got to do the paperwork.”
Robert Eidenbaugh stayed at the party for a half hour, then he went back to the Biltmore.
In Basel, Khristo Stoianev lived in a rooming house on the Burgenstrasse and walked to work every morning on little streets shaded by lime trees. Legally, he had been interned in neutral Switzerland for the duration of the war. In fact, he read Bulgarian newspapers and transcripts of radio broadcasts and fought the Germans with scissors and paste.
His task involved abstracting the truth from the Nazi-controlled Bulgarian press and radio. If they said a certain fact was true, he was to comment on the degree of falsity in the claim. Would the Bulgarians believe it? Which ones would know it to be false? Did he think it true? His English improved as he wrote copious, longhand answers to these questions, and he became adept at working through systems of lies: the shades and tones, the subtleties, the tiny crumb of truth that sweetened the digestion of a falsehood. He dealt also with the “hammers”—designed to bash the population on the head with information until some of them at least believed that two and two made seven and weren't they the lucky ones to have so much.
This particular approach—studying newspapers and transcripts—had been severely maligned by the NKVD instructors at Arbat Street. At the direction of Comrade Stalin himself. All worthwhile intelligence, razvedka, had to come from secret channels, undercover agents, and suborned informants. The rest—the use of open sources—was deemed mere research, women's work, not befitting the heroic Soviet intelligence apparat. The dictum, as put by Western intelligence services, ran, we only believe what we steal.
For Khristo, the work was boring and repetitive—a long, difficult test, he rather thought. He worked for a former college professor from Leipzig, a gentle soul who watered his plants every day, and neither praised nor criticized—simply accepted his work as though it were, each day, each time, a happy surprise, saying “Ah!” when he appeared in the doorway to hand in a thick batch of reports.
But it was clean where he lived and where he worked, quiet, Swiss, and it would be warm, he knew, in the wintertime. He had a casual woman friend who entertained him on Thursday nights. He had become entirely addicted to Rösti, a crisp pancake of fried potatoes and onions. He lived in a room of his own, and he had a radio. When the people he worked for asked him questions—about his former life and work—he answered them. As the summer turned hot and silent, he burrowed to the center of his circumscribed life and nested safe and sound. He thought about Aleksandra only now and then, when the summer nights were too quiet for sleep.
In late August, communist partizans rose in Bulgaria and threw the Germans out. Bulgarian fascists were executed. The Bulgarian Communist party immediately allied itself with the Soviet Union, and the newspapers and radio transcripts took an entirely different line—the propaganda remained much as it had under the Germans but was, Khristo felt, more artfully developed. The massed children's choirs who had “spontaneously” sung carols in Hitler's honor the previous Christmas now sang anthems dedicated to Joseph Stalin. By the ninth of September, 1944, the change of government had been completed. Parades were held. A news photograph from Vidin came across Khristo's desk. The old Turkish post office, on the same street where his brother had been murdered by fascists, was hung with two-story banners: portraits of Lenin, Stalin, and Dmitrov.
Then, as the summer ended and the German armies of occupation fled east from Paris, a curious thing happened. A coincidence. He opened a folder of news clippings and saw that a mistake had been made. This folder contained news items not from the Balkans—but from the United States. He glanced at the clipping on top of the pile and saw a photograph of Faye Berns.
The article was taken from the business page of a newspaper in Manhattan, and it said that Miss Faye Berns had been appointed fund-raising director of the New York office of the World Aid Committee, which would seek to assist Displaced Persons in returning to their homelands once the war ended. The article was brief, but it did give the address of the World Aid Committee, and he copied it out on a piece of paper.
In the photograph, a three-quarter angle, he could see the changes. Her hair was shorter, there was a line to her jaw that hadn't been there before, and she had smiled for the photographer in a way that he didn't recognize. It was an artificial smile, posed and official.
For a long time he stared at the photograph, shocked by the degree to which memory had betrayed him, deceived him. Because he had always remembered her as she was in Paris, on the afternoon they had met by accident in the bookstore. He had, unwittingly, frozen her in time, kept her as she had been on a June day in 1937. He remembered her as she cried for Andres, remembered her as someone who would dare to love a man like Andres, who did not desert him, who paid the price of that love, and then survived. He remembered her as a girl who had flung herself against the world without caution, without a care for her safety. Now she was a woman who had grown up to accept the artifice of a smile, poised and confident, for a newspaper.
He rememb
ered, particularly, both times they had touched: when she had slept on his shoulder in the car parked at the Bilbao docks, and when she had held his hands while they waited for the train to depart at the Gare du Nord. Did men and women ordinarily remember the times when they'd touched each other? He did not know.
Once again his eye ran over the article. Miss Faye Berns. So she had not married the man she had mentioned in the letter that had reached him in prison.
He decided to write to her, and spent the better part of an hour at his desk, composing in English. But it was not to be. The letter seemed to him, when he drew back from it, strange and wrong: a man she had once known, briefly, writing poorly in a language not his own and apologizing for it. He tore it up. The girl he had known in Paris might respond to such a letter, but the fund-raising director of the World Aid Committee would, he feared, find it awkward, even pathetic.
He took the folder into the professor's office. “This is not for me,” he said in explanation, setting the folder on one corner of the desk. “Ah!” the professor said, surprised that such a thing could happen.
And why, he wondered, returning down the hall to his little room, are they toying with me? The “misdelivered” news clipping was no coincidence. It was a provocation. It was their way of letting him know that they were aware of his relationship with Faye Berns. What could that matter to them? What could they mean by it? And how had they known about it? More important, what did they expect of him now that he'd seen the clipping?
He didn't know. And decided to ignore the incident. If this were something truly significant, they'd press him further. He turned his attention to other matters, determined to put the entire episode out of mind. He bore down on his work for the rest of the afternoon, then, since it was Thursday, went off to visit his woman friend.
She was, as usual, responsive, falling in with his mood and treating him with a certain casual tenderness that he'd always found very comforting. Yet he was not his best self, distracted by the image of a woman with a professional smile in a grainy photograph. He imagined himself a great realist, and that passion without sentiment suited him perfectly. But at work on Friday morning he experienced a surge of emotion, more gratitude than love, and sent his friend a bouquet of flowers. For which she thanked him, with a certain casual tenderness, the following Thursday.
In Basel, the autumn came on quickly, and by October the mornings were frosty and clear. One such morning he arrived punctually for work and, on opening the vestibule door, came upon Ulysse and Albert and two other men he did not know. They were rolling down their sleeves and putting on their jackets and yawning—he had the impression they had been up all night and working hard.
Ulysse's eyes lit up when he saw Khristo and he smiled broadly. “Well, well,” he said, in perfect American English, “look what the cat dragged in.”
Khristo grinned sheepishly, a little taken aback, and they shook hands warmly. Ulysse turned to leave, his overcoat, as always, worn capelike over his shoulders, and his bodyguard followed. As Albert moved past, he winked at Khristo and banged him affectionately on the shoulder with his fist.
“Hey buddy,” he said.
IN DECEMBER OF 1944, AT THE UTINY GOLD FIELDS ON THE Kolyma River, in a far southeastern corner of the Siberian USSR, Captain Ilya Goldman sat before a table of unpeeled birch logs in one of the interrogation rooms of Camp 782. Alone for the moment, he held his head in his hands, closed his eyes to shut out the world, and listened to the timbers creak and snap in the frozen air. A light wind blew in off the East Siberian Sea, sighing in the eaves, rising and falling. Otherwise, there was nothing.
On the table before him were two stacks of files, which represented prisoners already processed and those yet to be seen. A bare bulb dangled from the ceiling on a long cord. At his feet, a malevolent cold flowed up through the floorboards, seeping through his boots and socks, a kind of icy fire that caused the skin to itch and burn simultaneously. This he accepted. Traveling the Utiny camps, he had come to admire the cold, a cunning predator that used the human body as a wick, crawling upward in search of the center of warmth. The heart—that was what it wanted.
And welcome to it, he thought.
He took a deep breath, closed his mind to anger, and tried to concentrate on the notes he had just completed. They were scratched on the stiff, waxy paper native to Soviet bureaucracy—wood-flecked, pale brown stuff meant to last for a thousand years. The millennium, therefore, would know that at least one inmate of Camp 782 had claimed that the bread ration was more than adequate, perhaps excessive, and gone on to suggest that food allocations be reduced, so that the heroic men and women of the patriotic Red Army might better strengthen themselves for the fight against the fascist invader. So said Prisoner 389062, a nameless yellow skull that had sat nodding and trembling before him, twisting a cap in his hands in the ancient gesture of the peasant and attempting, toothless mouth stretched to its limits, what could have been taken for a smile. The statement had been dutifully recorded and signed by Captain I. J. Goldman, Office of the Inspector General, Bureau of Labor Camps, Fourth Division, Sixth Directorate, NKVD.
Thus, in bureaucratic terms, he had been buried alive.
Since the inception of his service in Spain, Ilya Goldman had moved exclusively in the upper echelons of the NKVD—First Chief Directorate, Fifth Department—the prized Western Europe posting. Ideologically, he was trusted. Professionally, he was considered clever and sharp-witted, a man who played the game and avoided the pitfalls: protecting his friends and protected by them, gaining influence, banking favors every day. Words of thanks were, casually, waved away. Some day, he would tell his newfound friends, you can help me out.
But when the great day came—a punitive transfer to the office responsible for the labor camps—his friends did not answer their telephones, and down he went. Into an abyss where grace and wit counted for nothing. Here you needed only a steel fist and an iron stomach, though it helped to be blind and deaf. He despised himself for allowing such a thing to happen, for not comprehending that it could happen. He had stood so high in his own opinion: brilliant, deft, an intelligence officer who belonged in Madrid, in Paris, in Geneva. A smart little Jewboy from Bucharest—he mocked himself—sophisticated and urbane, in NKVD argot a cosmopolite, deserved no less. The service would never send such a fine fellow off to the Gulag, to listen to memorized speeches from a parade of exhausted skeletons. Oh no, they'd never do that.
But he had failed them, had tried to deceive them, and they'd found out and punished him.
His downfall had come about in Romania, of all places, the homeland he had not seen for ten years. Sad, wretched place, backwater of southeastern Europe with its ridiculous decayed nobility and peasants who had believed, truly believed, Iron Guard leader Codreanu to be the reincarnation of Christ. Their leaders had sided with Hitler, and the Romanian divisions had fought bravely enough, in the Crimean peninsula and elsewhere, before the massive Russian counterattacks had inevitably rolled them back.
The country had surrendered early in September. To the United States, Great Britain, and the USSR, theoretically, but the Russians were little interested in the diplomatic niceties of shared power and, within days, had presented their bill to the Romanians. Then sent NKVD personnel, Ilya Goldman among them, to make sure it was paid. In full. And on time.
It was, for a country that had just finished fighting four years of war, a bill of some considerable magnitude. Seven hundred million lei—about fifty million U.S. dollars—easily exceeding the contents of the Romanian treasury. But this was merely the first item on the bill. The government had to provide, in addition, the following: all privately owned radios, 2,500,000 tons of grain, 1,700,000 head of cattle, 13,000 horses, and vast tonnages of vegetables, potatoes, and cigarettes. All telephone and telegraph lines were to be torn down and shipped east in boxcars—once the latter had been refitted to accept the Russian rail gauge. Twelve divisions to be formed immediately to fight the Germans and the Hun
garians. The list went on: ambulances, doctors, gold, silver, watches, timber—whatever they had, the entire national wealth. Further, the USSR would now control all means of communication, the merchant marine, all utilities and industries, all factories and storage depots, and all radio stations. If the Romanian population couldn't listen to them, with all the radios shipped east, foreign monitors could.
The directives went out and the peasants, by and large, obeyed. Ilya saw them shuffling into the villages and market towns with their livestock and the contents of their granaries and root cellars—even next spring's seed grain. God had directed their leaders, they seemed to feel, now God had forsaken them. Ilya watched their faces, and the sight broke his heart. To his superiors, of course, he was not a Romanian, he was a Jew—that was a nationality, a race—and they saw no reason he should feel allegiance to a country adopted in the distant past by some wandering peddler and his family. He was supposed to know these people, their little tricks and deceits, and he was supposed to squeeze them.
Not that his bosses meant him to do any of the rough stuff himself. No, they had special personnel for that, many of them former Iron Guardsmen who had now “seen the light” of progressive socialism. No more than thugs in uniforms, but they served a purpose. When there was shooting to be done, they did it. But Ilya heard it, and saw the bodies sagged lifeless on the posts behind the barracks. Sometimes one didn't have to shoot, a simple beating would suffice. When the peasants were beaten, they cried out for mercy from the lord of the manor—an old tradition. Clearly, they did not understand what was happening to them, protested their innocence, swore it before God.
Most of them, however, did as they were told. Brought in everything they had, garlanded their beasts before they were led away so that they might make a good impression on their new masters and be treated with kindness. One old man, parting with his plowhorse, slipped a carrot in Ilya's pocket. “He's a stubborn old thing,” he'd whispered, believing Ilya to be the new owner, “but he'll work like the devil for a treat.”
