by Alan Furst
“A nervous time for you, then,” Kulic remarked.
“Yes. And I am unappreciated,” Maltsaev said. “My poor backside has no business on a horse.”
He handed the paper to Kulic, then pressed the layers of the shoe tongue back together again as best he could. “Of course,” he said, almost to himself, “one may not carry glue.” Kulic noted that he wore fine silk socks.
“What’s this?” Kulic asked, studying the paper. There were four names on it. Four of his men.
“We have discovered a plot,” Maltsaev said.
“Another plot? Shit on your plots, Maltsaev, these men are not Falangistas.” He thrust the paper back at Maltsaev, who was busy putting on his shoe and declined to take it.
“Nobody said they were, and please don’t swear at me. Give me a chance, will you. You field commanders have short fuses. A little bad news—and boom!”
“Boom is what it will be,” Kulic said.
“Shoot me, comrade, by all means. There’ll be ten more tomorrow, Spetsburo types, Ukrainians—just try reasoning with them.”
“Very well, Maltsaev. Say your piece and ride away.”
“If that’s how you want it. These four are members of POUM—there’s no question about it, we have copies of the lists, right from Durruti himself.”
“Durruti? The anarchist leader? He claims these men?”
“Well, from his office.”
“And so?”
Maltsaev made his hand into a pistol—bent thumb the hammer, extended index finger the barrel—then pulled the trigger with his middle finger.
“Are you insane? Is Madrid? Moscow? These men are fighters, soldiers. You don’t execute your own soldiers. Only for cowardice. And these are not cowards. They’ve stood up to gunfire, which is more than I can say for some people.”
“Yes, yes. I’m a coward, please do abuse me, I don’t mind. But you must take care of the problem—that’s an order from Madrid.”
“Marquin, the second name on this list, climbed to the roof of a convent and poured gasoline down the chimney, which enabled us to blow up a Falangist armory. Is this the behavior of a traitor? Besides, all these men are of the UGT, not the POUM.”
“Kulic … no, Lieutenant Kulic, you’ve been given an order. Have a trial if you like—just make sure it comes out right. The sad fact is that the POUM—Trotskyites, to give them their proper name—are fouling up this war. Sometimes they refuse to fight. They won’t take orders. They roam about like a herd of wild asses and cause everybody trouble. Generalissimo Stalin has determined to purify the Spanish effort, and Director Yezhov has ordered that the POUM be purged. These four men claim UGT association, but their names appear on POUM membership lists obtained by our operatives in Barcelona.”
“You’re ruining me—you know that, don’t you?”
“Four men amount to nothing.”
“You believe the other sixteen, having witnessed their comrades’ unjust executions, will fight on?”
Maltsaev thought about that for a time, studying the ground, pushing a pebble around with the toe of his shoe. “Your point has merit,” he said. Then he brightened. “One could report, ahh, yes, well one could report that the disease has spread throughout the group, and it was determined to be of no further operational use. I could try that, Kulic, if it would help you. They would transfer you elsewhere, but your record would be clean at least. Better than clean, now that I think about it. Fervor. That’s what it would show. It’s just the sort of thing Yezhov likes, you know, going it one better.”
Kulic stared down the hill at his men. A word to Maltsaev and they’d all be dead. Julio Marquin, the spiderlike little shipfitter who’d climbed the convent drainpipe, was poking at a pot of rice over a bed of coals. They cooked by day—there could be no fires at night in the Guadarrama. The fool! Why had he gone and gotten his name on the wrong list? He despaired of the Spaniards, their instinct for survival had been eaten alive by their political passions. The Spanish Legion, under Yagüe, had a regimental hymn announcing to the world that their bride was death, and the Republican side was no better. Thus they slaughtered each other. What did it matter if four of them went to heaven early? His own pride was in his way, surely. How he protected his men. Took every care to protect them, to keep them from getting hurt.
He recalled, suddenly, that he’d killed his first man when he was fifteen, in a tavern brawl in Zvornik. Such strength and determination it had taken to do that. Where was it now?
“Well,” Maltsaev said, “how shall it be?”
“The best time,” he took a deep breath, “is during battle. All sorts of things happen. It could not be arranged for all four at once, of course, but over time, in a few weeks say, they would be honorably slain in action against the enemy.”
“I’m sorry. I appreciate your thinking, but it just won’t do.”
“Who gave this order, Maltsaev?”
“I can’t tell you that and you know it.”
“Then you do it.”
“Me? I’m a political officer. I don’t shoot anybody.” He took off his straw hat and examined the inside of the crown; the leather band was sweatstained and he blew on it to dry it out.
Kulic knew he was trapped. He wanted to cut Maltsaev’s throat. But then they would all die. The Ukrainians would come and, once they arrived, all the talking was over. So it was four now, or twenty-one tomorrow.
He stood up. “Sergeant Delgado,” he called. Delgado stood up naked in the stream. He was a boilermaker by profession, a man in his forties. His arms and neck were burned by the sun, the rest of his body was white.
“Yes, comrade?” the sergeant called up the hill.
“I need a patrol of four men,” he answered in his rough Spanish. He called out their names. “To gather wood,” he added.
“We have plenty of wood,” the sergeant responded.
“Sergeant!” Kulic yelled.
Nodding to himself that officers were crazy, Delgado picked his way delicately among the rocks in the streambed and went off to gather the patrol.
Maltsaev was finished blowing on his hat. “You’ll see,” he said, “everything will work out for the best.” He put the hat back on, carefully adjusting the angle of the brim so that his eyes were shaded from the sun. They went up the mountain to gather firewood. Kulic was armed with his pistol and, slung over his shoulder, a Spanish bolt-action Mauser rifle, the basic weapon of the Spanish war. The four men were not armed, the better to carry the wood. They chattered among themselves, enjoying their holiday, drawing pleasure from the work detail. Now and then they looked over their shoulders at Kulic, but he waved them on. At last he found what he was looking for. A small glade, an utterly peaceful place where no people had been for a long time.
They began to gather wood, snapping dead limbs off fallen trees, bundling up twigs and sticks for kindling. They worked for an hour, tying the wood with hempen cords in such a way that it could be harnessed to their shoulders, leaving their hands free. It was the way he had taught them to do it. He knew, also, that once they were laden in this way, it would be nearly impossible for them to rush him successfully.
When they were ready to go, he held up a hand and unslung the rifle, holding it loosely at port arms. They stood there for what seemed like a long time, watching him, their faces slowly growing puzzled. One of them finally said, “Capitán?”—a term of honor they had granted him.
“I am sorry,” Kulic said, “but I must ask you to sit down for a moment.”
Carefully they knelt, balancing their loads, then sat, lying back against the wood bundles.
“I am told, by the Russian who came to the camp this afternoon, that you are members of the organization known as POUM, an anarchist group. Is this true?”
“Our politics are complicated,” Marquin answered, making himself spokesman for the group. “We are members of the UGT, the Communist party, but we have all attended meetings of the POUM in order to hear the thoughts of comrade Durruti, who is a
greatly gifted man and a fine orator. ‘If you are victorious,’ he has said to us, ‘you will be sitting on a pile of ruins. But we have always lived in slums and holes in the wall … and it is we who built the palaces and the cities, and we are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their world before they leave the stage of history. But we carry a new world in our hearts.’ ”
Kulic was impressed with the speech. “You can remember all that?”
“All that and more. So many of us do not read or write, you see, that memory must serve us.”
“But you are not members.”
“No, but we do not disavow them. They too are our brothers in this struggle. We attended their meetings, before we came out here to fight the fascists, gave them a gordo for the coffee, signed petitions in favor of freedom for the working classes. Can this have been wrong?”
“I am afraid so.”
Sitting next to Marquin was a fat man. How he had managed to remain so, despite forced marches and the unending physical demands of partizan life, Kulic had never been able to figure out. He had, when he spoke, the piping voice of a fat man. “Then we are to be shot,” he said.
Kulic nodded yes.
Two of the men crossed themselves. Marquin said, “We are ready to die, it is in the nature of this work we do. But to die dishonored, by the hand of our leader …” The pause became a silence as he realized that nothing he could think of would finish the thought.
“You are not dishonored, and I myself do not understand this, and I do not agree. I am, like you, a soldier, and I have been given an order, and because I am a good soldier, I will carry out that order even though I believe it is wrong. All I know is that we are involved in a great revolution. It began a long time ago, far from here, and it will go on for a long time after we are gone. The POUM is in the way, it would seem, of victory in Spain. A sacrifice will have to be made. That is everything I can say.”
One of the men struggled suddenly to get up but the wood borne by his shoulders held him back, and the fat man, seated next to him, put a hand on his shoulder, making it impossible for him to move. “No, no,” the fat man said, “let it be. Our enemy is not in this place.”
Marquin spoke up, his voice absolutely calm. “I wish to be the first,” he said, “but I want to stand up.” He wrestled the load of wood from his shoulders and stood. Straightened his mono overall so it hung properly, combed his hair into place with his fingers as though his photograph were about to be taken. His eyes looked directly into Kulic’s. Kulic worked the bolt on the rifle and brought it to his shoulder, sighting on the man’s heart. He had never known the name of the man in the tavern in Zvornik—that had all happened too quickly for any but a perfectly instinctive reaction. The man had rushed at him with a piece of wood, Kulic had plunged a knife into the very center of him, he had seemed to swell up suddenly to the size of a giant, then twisted away, wrenching the knife from Kulic’s hand and falling upon it so that the steel hilt banged against the cement floor. After that there was only the sound of the last breath rushing from his lungs. Kulic tightened his finger on the trigger. The Spanish Mauser was a simple weapon, made to work for a long time, and there was nothing delicate about its mechanism. The trigger was on a hard spring and it had to be pulled with force.
Slowly, Kulic lowered the rifle. He forced the bolt back and, as the ejected cartridge spun into the air, caught it cleverly in his right hand. Then he put it in his pocket.
Slowly at first, and then more rapidly as they understood what was happening, the other three men unburdened themselves and stood up. Kulic nodded his head toward the west. “Portugal is that way, I believe.”
“But we have no guns,” one of the men said.
“You will draw less attention without them,” Kulic said.
He was not to hear Marquin speak again. The man studied him as his friends walked slowly west along the curve of the mountainside. There was no gratitude in his eyes. Perhaps a veiled smile, perhaps the faintest hint of contempt. It occurred to Kulic then that Maltsaev might have been right in ways he had not understood, but it was much too late to have thoughts like that so he turned his attention to other matters.
He waited until he could no longer hear the departing men and, when the forest was again silent, waited another twenty minutes, sitting with his back against a tree and smoking a cigarette. He enjoyed the cigarette immensely. When it was finished, he took the clasp knife from his pocket, used it, then put the cartridge back in the rifle, stood up, and fired into the air. This act he repeated three more times. His remaining men could make a small but important difference behind the lines in this war, but they could not keep a secret. As the echo of the final shot rang away down the side of the mountain, he shouldered the rifle and headed for the camp. Looking back for a moment, he saw four bundles of well-bound firewood arranged in a line in the middle of a clearing. Whoever might chance to come this way would find them and think himself lucky that day. In all likelihood, he would make no sense at all of the Cyrillic letters and numerals carved into the trunk of a pine tree. A 825.
At five in the morning, Khristo made his way to the Citroën, parked in front of the hotel. Across the street, the Neva’s stacks showed curls of dark smoke as the boiler room got up steam for the 6:30 departure. He had not really slept—Yaschyeritsa’s face and voice hammered against his consciousness all night long—and had climbed out of bed in the last hour of darkness with a sick stomach and hot, sandy eyes. At the car, the new sublieutenant awaited him, sitting at attention behind the wheel.
“Good day to you, Lieutenant Stoianev. Allow me please to introduce myself. I am Sublieutenant Lubin, reporting for duty.” It was rehearsed and formal, a squeaky little whine of a voice. Khristo took a step backward and stared at the boy in the car. He had the face of a malevolent baby—a grossly overfed baby—with rat-colored hair combed and pomaded to a stiff pompadour that rose above his glossy forehead and tiny china-blue eyes. A mama’s boy, Khristo thought, perhaps seventeen, who would sit on Yaschyeritsa’s knee and tattle at every opportunity.
“Yes, hello,” Khristo managed. “Usually I drive,” he added.
“Begging your pardon, Lieutenant Stoianev, but I have been instructed, by Colonel General Bloch, that as junior officer it is my duty to drive the car. Let me assure you that I have been trained extensively in the proper driving of automobiles.”
At a steady twenty-five miles per hour they left Tarragona at dawn, Lubin holding the wheel with both hands and driving like a puppet, correcting—Khristo counted spitefully—eight times in a single slow curve. They would be all day getting to Madrid.
“Stoianev. I believe that is a Bulgarian name?” Lubin said.
“Yes. I am Bulgarian.”
“Then you will not have heard of my family. My father is associate director of the All Soviet Institute of Agronomy. Leonid Trofimovich Lubin is his name. Is it known to you?”
“No,” Khristo said, “I don’t know it.”
“It is not important.”
As Khristo stared glassily ahead at the endless road, however, he did recall something of the All Soviet Institute of Agronomy. Sascha had one evening told him the story of one of its most prominent members, O. A. Yanata, the Ukrainian botanist who had set up the first chair of botany at the Academy of Sciences. He had proposed to the academy that certain chemicals could be used for the destruction of weeds. This was an entirely new concept, since the only known method to date was continual use of the hoe. A lengthy political investigation of Yanata was instituted, at the end of which he was accused of attempting to destroy all the harvests of the Soviet Union by the use of chemicals and was subsequently tried and shot.
At the end of an hour, Lubin pulled to the side of the road and stopped. He got out of the car, walked around it three times, then returned and drove away.
“Why did you do that?” Khristo asked.
“A rule of driving, Lieutenant,” Lubin answered
proudly. “To maintain concentration, one must dismount the vehicle hourly and exercise lightly.”
Khristo put his head in his hands.
Buenas noches, mis amigos. Buenas noches, todos los peleadores bravos que puedan oír ma voz. Y buenas noches, Madrid. Hay veinte horas, y la hora para el jazz hot. La selección primera esta noche es una canción del Norteamericano, Duke Ellington, lla-mada “In a Sentimental Mood,” con Louis Vola tocando el vio-lón, trum-trum-trum, Marcel Bianchi y Pierre Ferret en guitarras, Django Reinhardt en la guitarra sola, y, entonces, el grande Stephane Grappelli tocando el violín. Gusta bien, todo el mundo, gusta bien.
The Emerson, in a tan wooden case with white dials and a little light that made the station band glow green, played best on a table beneath the window. Faye angled it slightly to the left, then fiddled with the tuning knob until the signal came in clear. Andres had gone out to yet another meeting, she was exhausted, and she was going to wrap herself up in a quilt, listen to the radio, and read a Djuna Barnes novel that Renata had discovered somewhere. All day at work, mailing out fund-raising letters for various defense committees, she had planned to spend the evening this way. She really liked the Ellington song, it boded well for the radio program, and for her private evening. Lately too many people, too many rumors, too much jittery bravado. The antidote: spend some time alone, doing things one liked, the more the better, and do them all at once. She would have made herself a cup of tea, but lately, inexplicably, there was no tea to be found. She would go to bed early, she didn’t have to man the machine gun until 5:30 the next morning, and that was hours away.
“In a Sentimental Mood.”
The music that Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli made was very spare—compared to the lush crooning of the big bands it was thin and plain, hardly anything at all. The rhythm guitars and bass plunked away on the same note; a one-two, one-two beat on the chord that changed rarely, and the tempo of it was peculiar. Should you dance to it in an embrace, you’d have to move quickly, a foxtrot in a hurry. But if you danced apart, like the Charleston, it would be much too slow for the dancers to do any tricks at all.
