by Alan Furst
Khristo chatted with their leader, holding the Tokarev below the sightline of the driver’s window. He was free. It had come slowly, but when comprehension overtook him his spirit soared with excitement. It was as though a hand had let go of the back of his neck and for the first time in years he could raise his head and see the horizon. So they would not take him back.
The Checa man at the window was very slow—he had all the time in the world. But Khristo drew an invisible line for him and waited for him to cross it and die. Yaschyeritsa would get no more satisfaction from him than dancing on his grave. The man talked on and on. It was interesting about his job that he got to meet so many different kinds of people who walked about in this world, who would have ever imagined that on this rainy night in November he would engage in conversation with a citizen of Soviet Russia, now that was why he found this job so very interesting. Finally Andres leaned across from the passenger seat and whispered that they had only an hour to spend with these girls here before they had to return to the fighting. The man’s face slid gradually into an immense leer. He winked, stood back from the car, and waved them through. Lascivious shouts of “Viva la Rusia!” followed them down the street.
For a time they traveled on the main road to Burgos. But they began to see men in suits standing by cars parked beside the road, so they moved onto the narrow lanes that went through the villages. In some nameless place in the vast wheat heartland north of Madrid the car stopped. They opened the hood and looked inside, but none of them knew anything about cars. The engine gave off a blast of heat that shimmered the air above it. It ticked in the silence and smelled of burnt oil. A small man appeared from nowhere, riding a bicycle with an infant in the basket. They spoke to him in Spanish but he did not understand Spanish, or perhaps he was deaf. He pointed to his ears again and again. He smiled at them. Showed them his baby. Then, almost as an afterthought, he reached into the engine and did something to something and signaled Khristo to start the car. It started. The man refused to take money, waved to them as they moved off. In the car they made plans for what they would do in Paris. What they would eat. Where they would go. Madrid, it began to be clear once they were away from it, had been a prison. Soon they would be in Burgos, it wasn’t so far from there to Bilbao. They would get on a fishing boat and sail away to freedom. The car stopped again, on a tiny road bounded by uncut wheat rotting in the fields.
There was nothing for miles. Khristo’s hand shook as he raised the hood. He wanted to throttle the engine hoses until the Citroën bowed to his will. This had never happened to him before, the car had always run perfectly. They decided to walk, to march crosscountry taking only pistols and whatever else would fit in their pockets. They started out, Andres sang a song to get them moving along. Suddenly, a German spotter plane appeared and swooped low to have a look at them. Faye waved to it and smiled. It disappeared over the horizon and they ran back to the car—some cover was preferable to being caught in the open. The plane returned and buzzed the car, then left. Khristo, for no particular reason, turned the ignition key one last time for luck. The Citroën roared to life and he very nearly wept with relief.
At dusk, they worked their way around the outskirts of Burgos. Found a shack with an ancient, hand-operated gas pump, and bought fuel from a suspicious peasant woman in black who overcharged them mercilessly. They had to pool their remaining pesos to pay her—Khristo had been kept on a small living allowance, most of his NKVD pay banked safely for him awaiting his return to Moscow. The woman watched all this with an eye like a hunting hawk. She went into the shack to retrieve some coins for change, and Khristo and Andres whispered briefly about doing away with her. They saw her watching them through a window. Andres looked about and discovered there were no telephone lines going into the shack, then realized suddenly that all she wanted to do was steal their change. They drove away without it. The road began to climb through forests and the Citroën stuttered and threatened to stall. Khristo pushed the gas pedal to the floor; the car faltered, then roared ahead. Bad gasoline, they thought, watered. Late at night they came to the Río Nervión, which ran eight miles to the Atlantic. They easily found the fishing boats, which had 101 mm fieldpieces mounted fore and aft. Andres got out of the car and wandered down the street of dockside bars, sailors’ haunts with anchors and sextants and curling waves painted on their signs. Khristo, Faye and Renata stayed in the car, too tired to talk, the burst of energy that had seen them through the long night had waned suddenly, replaced by depression and exhaustion. Khristo time and again caught himself fading out. “Where do you suppose he is?” Faye asked at one point.
Khristo shrugged. Told himself to keep watch, knowing how vulnerable they were. The American girl fell asleep, her head sliding along the upholstery until he felt its weight settle on his upper arm. In her sleep she turned slightly toward him, until the place where her mouth rested grew warm with her breath. He remained very still and fancied he could hear, in the rise and fall of her breathing, the progress of her dreams.
They were all asleep when a hand banged hard on the window. Khristo came to his senses in terror, then saw it was Andres, with a sea captain. He didn’t look like a sea captain, he was wearing a suit and tie. He had gotten married that morning, Andres explained. Khristo got out of the car and went with them to a bar down a little alley between warehouses—moving the Tokarev to the side pocket of his jacket and keeping his hand on it. The bar was only twelve feet long, with five stools. They drank a glass of wine and made their offer: the Citroën and two Degtyaryova machine guns in exchange for passage to France. Yes, good, the man said. He could take two of them for that. Which two would it be? He asked too much, they protested. He thought not. The Russians had come around, he explained, looking for them. The license plate and automobile were just as they had described. He had, this very day, become a married man. He now had responsibilities. And it was his wedding night. If he was to spend it on the high-running sea of the Gulf of Vizcaya instead of the high-running sea of the marriage bed, he must be well paid. The three of them returned to the car, Andres suggesting that the women carried extra pesos. Khristo saw his game without prompting. They would put a gun in this one’s ear and solve the problem that way. Back at the car, they told Renata and Faye about the captain’s demand. Andres suggested that the two women should go by fishing boat, he and Khristo would find a guide and use the smugglers’ trails across the Pyrenees. Faye took a little watch off her wrist and held it up to the captain. He took it in his hand. Listened to it tick. It was Russian, she explained, brought to America by her grandmother. All that time, she said, it worked perfectly. The captain agreed to take them and put the watch in his pocket.
They reached France the following day, wading ashore at the fishing village of St.-Jean-de-Luz. Shoes in hand, they walked up a narrow beach of brown pebbles to a low seawall. There was a policeman sitting on the wall, he had taken his hat off and set it on a page of newspaper to keep it from the tar, and was eating an apple with a small knife, and he arrested them.
Marquin and his three compatriots very nearly did reach Portugal. Their method was simple enough. They walked only at night. They walked near the road—so as not to lose their way—but never on it. They stole only vegetables, never chickens, to keep local anger to a minimum. A few missing vegetables, they knew, were not worth an encounter with the authorities. A mile short of the Portuguese border, their luck ran out. The army was running things in that region, and they were discovered sleeping under a bridge. The first interrogation was superficial, but in time they were taken by truck to a unit of Nationalist intelligence and there placed under the care of a Moroccan corporal named Bahadi, who specialized in getting answers to any and all questions. Marquin lasted the longest, about an hour. When the officer in charge was satisfied that he had everything he could get, they were taken out and shot in a courtyard. Never, following the session with Bahadi, were four men happier to die.
Thus the story of Kulic’s mercy made its way to N
ationalist intelligence headquarters in Toledo, and was there submitted for analysis to Oberstleutnant Otto Eberlein, one of the unit’s Abwehr advisers. Eberlein, recruited by the NKVD in 1934 under motivation of political idealism, passed the information to his contact in Toledo, a nurse in a podiatrist’s office—by 1938 he had surely the most pampered feet in Spain—and from there it soon enough reached Colonel General Yadomir Bloch, who called Maltsaev and told him to take care of the matter. Maltsaev simply moved the appropriate information back through the system to Nationalist intelligence: a time, a date, the name of the town—Estillas—then had Madrid Base radio Kulic and assign the mission.
From the beginning, the attack on the police station at Estillas went badly. He had two men sick with high fever and dysentery and they had to be left at the deserted village. Which meant he was down to fourteen souls. And the ammunition situation was beginning to pinch. Madrid Base had been informed by radio of the executions and sickness, and the need for resupply, but had confirmed the original order. Someone, somewhere, apparently thought that the Estillas police station was a critical target, and his was not to reason why. Still, a daylight attack. And with reduced forces. And with morale, after “justice” had been dealt to the four POUM traitors, at its lowest ebb. He was close, at one point, to canceling the mission and accepting in return whatever Madrid decided to do to him. Only one factor kept him from that. An initial reconnaissance persuaded him that Estillas was a rather easy place to attack. Just behind the police station lay the town cemetery, a place frequented only on Sundays, when the townspeople came out to place bunches of flowers on the gravesites. Scheduled to strike on a Wednesday afternoon, the raiding party could move up close before making themselves known.
They got as far as the cemetery, then all hell broke loose. Somebody knew they were coming. Because once the unit was in place, well spread out and awaiting his signal, the mortars and machine guns started in. And the mortars had been zeroed in. Accurately. Betrayed, he thought. The first shells raised enormous dirt plumes in the cemetery, smashing headstones to splinters and blowing the dead out of their graves—a fountain of whitened bones rising in the air, then raining down on the heads of the guerrillas. The sergeant, a brave man, stood up and waved the men forward. Machine-gun fire stitched him across the belly and he died howling. Kulic fired twice, at nothing in particular, then a blast concussion picked him up and slammed him senseless against the earth. His mind swayed back and forth, a sickening, dizzy rise and fall from one part of consciousness to another, and he found himself crawling. He meant not to be taken alive, felt around for his rifle but it had disappeared. He heard some of his men weeping, managed to get to one knee before the next shell came in, felt the shrapnel take him all along the left side, knew his left eye was blinded, knew nothing more after that.
In Catalonia, some way inland from the ancient spice city of Tarragona, in the valley of the Río Ebro, lay the village of San Ximene. In the late summer of 1938, a company of Nationalist infantry moved into the town and took it without a shot being fired. By then, the conquest of the province was no longer an issue, and nobody wanted to be the last to die. As the troops marched in, a little winded because the village stood high above the road, a few people lined the narrow lane, waved tiny Monarchist flags, and gave the cheer heard now all across the country. “Han pasado,” they called out. “Han pasado!” They have passed. Don Teodosio and Doña Flora and Miguelito the chauffeur were ceremoniously released from captivity. Both mayors, Avena from the PSUC and Quinto of the POUM, were ceremoniously shot. There wasn’t much else to do, so the captain ordered his men forward. They had liberated San Ximene, and he felt they ought to go on, to Calaguer or Santoval, before nightfall. Marching out of the village in good order, they passed through an orchard of fig trees. A sergeant was sent to reconnoiter, but there was no fruit to be had. The sergeant was a country man, and told the captain that the trees had not been pruned. Branches had broken off under the weight of the fruit, disease had spread into the trunks from the open wood, and that was the end of the San Ximene figs.
“STEADY ON!”
“Dear boy. Trod on your paw, have I?”
“Damn near.”
“I am sorry. Can’t see a thing with the lights off. Candles are lovely in a ballroom, but they do keep one in shadow.”
“Bloody Frenchies. If it ain’t a knife ’n’ fork they can’t work it.”
“Not the power, actually. One of Winnie’s effects I think. Makes it funereal.”
“Mmm.”
“I’m Roger Fitzware.”
“Jimmy Grey. West Sussex Fitzwares, is it?”
“C’est moi.”
“Mmm. Been in Paris long?”
“Live here, actually, most of the time.”
“Do you. I’m just in from Cairo. Over at the Bristol.”
“How do you find it?”
“Service gone to hell, of course, and full of Americans.”
“In Cairo on business?”
“Little of everything, really.”
“Hot as ever?”
“Yes. Damned filthy too.”
“Dear old thing.”
“Not my sort of place, all those little brown men running about and stabbing each other.”
“Oh well. One puts up with the little brown men. For the sake of the little brown boys.”
“Mmm. Wouldn’t know about that.”
“Ah, here’s the lovely Ginger.”
“Roddy Fitzware! You promised to call—Who’s this?”
“Ginger Pudakis, meet Jimmy Grey.”
“Delighted. Mmm. Yes, well, think I see somebody I know. Good to have met you, Fitzware.”
“See you.”
“Roddy! You are exceptionally bad. You terrified that poor man.”
“Oh well, it is Paris, after all.”
“Not here, my lamb. Here is a little corner of a foreign field, and that fellow, if I’m not mistaken, is something or other to Viscount Grey.”
“The 1914 man? ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our time.’ That the one?”
“Yes.”
“The lamps are certainly out here.”
“Where’s Mützi?”
“Home. In a great snit.”
“Oh Roddy, you mustn’t be cruel.”
“Me! Ginger dear, I’ve been an absolute bishop, really I have. But he snuck out while I was having me nap, taxied off to Gabouchard and bought himself the most impossible tie. Couldn’t let him wear it, could I, not to Winnie and Dicky’s. Had a sunset. Some dreadful peachy pinky sort of thing they sold him. Poor Mützi and his filthy Boche taste, he can’t help himself at all. When I left he was playing Mendelssohn on the Victrola and mumbling about Selbstmord or some such thing. Ending it all.”
“Too sad. All for a tie.”
“Told him not to get blood on the drapes.”
“You’re a horrid man, you really are.”
“C’est moi. Care to step onto the balcony?”
“And what would you do on the balcony?”
“Think of something, dear girl.”
“You probably would.”
“Speaking of that, where’s old Winnie and Dicky?”
“Grand entrance at midnight, one is told. From the ballroom elevator.”
“Too bad Mützi isn’t here to see this, he quite loves the Teutonic style. Draped candles, urns with cypress, roses painted black. Nobody actually dead, is there?”
“Heavens no. On the stroke of midnight, Winnie Beale turns thirty-nine. It’s a funeral for her youth.”
“Ah.”
“Really, one must love the Americans.”
“You married one, my dear, so you must. Whatever became of Mr. Pudakis?”
“In Chicago, as always. Where he does something with meat. Bloody old Europe didn’t agree with poor Harry.”
“Hello! Something’s up, the music’s gone queer.”
“It’s the funeral march. Is it? Yes,
I think it is. Sounds a bit odd from a jazz band.”
“Speaking of odd, regardez the elevator.”
“Good God. Now that is courage.”
“Ain’t it though? Throw yourself a birthday bash and make an entrance entirely bare-arsed. Bravo Winnie! Hurrah!”
“Well, not entirely bare-arsed. The hat is from Schiaparelli, my sweet, the pearls are Bulgari, and the little catch-me/fuck-me shoes are made by a little man in the Rue des Moulins.”
“Still, rather a decent set of flanks …”
“Now Roddy, don’t be boring.”
“Tell me, dear girl, who’s that hard-looking gent presiding over the salmon?”
“Him? You know him. It’s Mario Thoeni, the tenor, though one wouldn’t exactly say hard-looking …”
“Gawd not him. The waiter.”
“Oh who knows. Some dreadful Slav from Heininger. Winnie finds him decorative.”
“She’s right, you know. He’s quite thoroughly decorative.”
“Roddy Fitzware, you’re not to poach!”
“Dear girl, wouldn’t think of it.”
All his life he had handled tools, but this one had its own special set of perfections. It was made of silver, with a pleasing weight that sealed it to the hand, a broad filigree surface ending in a rounded point and a subtle edge of just the proper sharpness. He pressed it down through the pink flesh of the salmon—choosing a natural striation for the cut—deftly balanced the portion atop the server, then slid it neatly onto the maize-colored plate. With ceremony, he laid the server on a silver dish and took up a small ladle. He swirled it twice through the thick sauce diplomat—as though to banish some godlike impurity—then, from the left, drizzled a thin river to the salmon slice, paused to anoint the top with a decorative pool, as in a garden, then ran the river to a perfect delta on the other side of the plate, stopping just short of the thick gold banding. With a tiny silver trident, he fashioned a triangle of capers on the dryland north of the river, then, the dénouement, placed two black truffle “rocks” at the edge of the garden pool. White-gloved hand turned beneath the plate so that the intrusive thumb barely rode the edge, he proffered the masterwork, eyes down, speaking the words “Merci, madame” in a soft undertone.
