by Alan Furst
That afternoon, carrying silver trays of hors d’oeuvres covered with brown paper upstairs to the kitchen that served the ballroom, he had observed the Beales’ chef preparing the sauce diplomat. Fish stock, cream—too thick to pour, it had to be spooned from the bottle—lobster butter, brandy and cayenne. Now, in a crystal bowl by his right hand, the sauce’s combined scents drifted up and tormented him. Normally, when he worked at the Brasserie Heininger, he could manage a discreet sample somewhere between kitchen and dining room, but here one was in the public eye.
For a moment, there was no one to serve—a group of rosy-cheeked men favored the roast—and he gazed out into the crowd with the particular dead-eyed, unseeing servant’s stare he’d been taught, suggesting that only the ritual of the salmon could bring him to life. Yet he did see.
A clever play. Written out moment to moment by the guests themselves as they moved about the polished black linoleum in candlelight. Each one, he thought, achieved a sort of glossy sainthood in a special and individual way. Yes, there were trembling hands and bulging eyes and mighty bosoms and shiny pates. No different than Vidin, really. Yet here, by way of some magical process these people had thought up, the common pranks life played upon the body mattered less. The old ladies had big rings and naughty eyes. The fat men were highly polished and told jokes. The chinless girls laughed and shook their little breasts. The wispy young men with wispy mustaches leaned over cleverly and seemed watchful and intelligent. Thank God, he thought, for Omaraeff. Who had brought him to such spectacles.
He served a plumpish, fair-haired man who seemed lost and friendless and on his way to being very drunk in a very depressing way. Then a tall dowager with heavily rouged cheeks who glared down at him with apparent anger. That he would dare to serve her? Perhaps. These were, for the most part, English people, a tribe that swathed its rituals in mystery and seemed perpetually annoyed at the world, offended, perhaps, at humanity’s never-ending attempts to discover what they wanted.
He did not care. He had only salmon to offer, and sauce diplomat. The American woman, Winnie Beale, floated through the room, principally nude and entirely without shame. Clothed only in social position. Which, curiously, sufficed. He had served her table at Heininger several nights in a row—during the opera season, late suppers at Heininger were virtually compulsory—and Omaraeff had informed him that he was now to work at private parties in the Beale mansion on the Rue de Varenne.
Informed him on other subjects as well. Told him, for instance, that Winifred Beale had in fact begun life as Ethel Glebb, daughter of a trolley motorman in a smoky Ohio town on a lake. Worked as a telephone operator. Contrived to meet, and ultimately marry, Dicky Beale of Syracuse, the heir to an immense fortune acquired by his grandfather through the manufacture of stovepipe.
Omaraeff knew everything.
Had thus prepared him for the inevitable grappling match, precisely foreseen and described. The summons to the house. The taxi ride across a rainy Paris afternoon with a tray of langoustines on his lap. The maid’s direction to “bring them upstairs.” The small library that overlooked the Rodin gardens. The flowered cotton shift so accidentally open. The sly look, the giggle, the teasing wordplay of a young girl. The balletic sweep into his arms. The rolling around on the Oriental carpet. “Meet the attack,” Omaraeff had said, “respond to each sortie, but do not advance. Should she wish the cannon rolled out and fired, let her see to it, but do not permit yourself to be provoked. A single sign of passion on your part, dear Khristo, and you will work here no more.” Those instructions he had followed to the letter. She was, up close, frightfully plain. Her face apparently beaten into neutrality over the years, so oiled, patted, painted, baked, kneaded and creamed that it ultimately had neither expression nor feature. It had become a blank canvas, to be turned into whatever she wished. The act was not consummated. She let him up. Kissed him like a fond aunt. He became again the waiter, smoothed his hair, busied himself for a moment with the arrangement of langoustines on the tray, then returned to the restaurant by Métro, pocketing the cab fare.
Some of the guests were dancing. A clickety-clack step to the fast foxtrot produced by the band, four American Negroes who performed most nights at Le Hot Club. The leader, chopping rhythmically at the white piano with thick fingers, was called Toledo Red, his trademark, an unlit stub of cigar, clamped in his teeth as he played. The dancers leaned their upper bodies together, eyes vague, flopping about like unstrung puppets. Khristo watched for a time, seeming to look through them, in fact studying their dance in the smoked-glass mirrors that lined the walls. He noticed that the drapes—black for this occasion, normally violet—had fallen open at one of the tall windows, and he thought he could see snowflakes drifting slowly past the glass. It was the last week in March.
“Hallo there, Nick.”
He snapped to attention. “Madame,” he said, bowing slightly.
“A bit of salmon?”
“Bien sûr, madame.”
He took up the silver salmon knife. She was so pale and pretty, this one, like a movie star, a fragile flower in the last decline, dying in the final reel. She was often at his table at Heininger and, as the champagne bottles emptied—“More shampers, Nick!” they would call out—her cheeks blushed red and she became excited and clapped her hands and shrieked with delight at anything anybody said.
“Merci, madame.”
“Thanks ever so much.”
Nick.
At the internment camp near Perpignan, where the French had detained him while the socialist government chased its tail in circles over what was to be done about the Spanish war, Khristo had decided to become a Russian. He was alone at the camp; his three fellow fugitives had fled into the night, having decided that safety lay in ignorance of each other’s intentions. Renata and Faye Berns had been released almost immediately. Andres had been held for a day, then produced a Greek passport from the lining of his jacket and was freed.
But Khristo was officially without documents—the Russian passport with the nom de guerre Markov was nothing but a danger to him and now lay beneath four inches of earth in a Spanish field—so was designated by French officials a Stateless Person. A Russian, he believed, could more easily lose himself in a city like Paris. A Bulgarian would stand out; the Parisian émigré community from that country was not large. But the plan did not work. The League of Nations official who finally processed him, in the last week of 1936, was a Czech, and Khristo dared not try to fool him. Thus he left the camp under his brother’s name, Nikko, and the last name Petrov, common in Bulgaria. The English patrons of the restaurant had shortened Nikko to Nick.
The camp had been a vile place. The internees spent their days shuffling around the barbed-wire perimeter or playing cards—the deck made of torn strips of paper—for cigarettes. They huddled around stoves made of punched-out petrol tins and plotted endlessly in a stew of languages. After more than a month of it, Khristo had thought seriously of escaping. The Senegalese troops who guarded them sometimes did not bring water all day long and the inmates were tortured by thirst, pleading through the wire while the guards stared at them curiously. Sometimes a gate was left open—a clear invitation to escape. If one were caught, however, deportation back to Spain was automatic.
Yet he’d had, in the camp, one great stroke of luck. He’d met a Russian called Vladi Z., a soldier of fortune from an émigré family in Berlin, former harnessmakers to the czar’s St. Petersburg household. Vladi Z. had worked for the Comintern, smuggling guns into Spain through the mountains. He’d taken to putting a bit of money aside for himself, but greed overtook his sense of propriety and he’d been caught at it. Snapped up by the Checa in Barcelona, he had managed to escape, bribing his guards with gold secreted “where the sun never shines.” After some days spent wandering helplessly in the Pyrenees, he had crossed into France at Port-Bou with a group of American journalists. There he claimed German citizenship, but he had shed his passport in fear of the Checa and thus was interned
. No matter, he confided to Khristo, his family in Berlin would soon have him out. “You must go to Paris,” he said, “even the devil won’t find you there.” He had assumed, without being told, that Khristo was on the run. “In Paris,” he continued, “one sees Omaraeff. A Bulgarian like yourself. A great man. Headwaiter at the famous Brasserie Heininger. Tell him Vladi Z. sent you and give him my greatest respects. And if, perchance, you are some provocateur chekist piece of filth, then we, we, you understand, will have you in the ground by sundown.” On the train north, Khristo’s heart had pounded with excitement. Watching the winter countryside roll past, he touched the Nansen passport in his pocket a hundred times and hoped and dreamed more than he’d ever dared. Paris. Paris.
The song ended; the dancers broke apart and applauded themselves. Toledo Red shifted the cigar stub to the other corner of his mouth and banged out the introduction to “The Sheik of Araby.” There were squeals of anticipation from the dance floor as the saxophone player, a great fat fellow with a gold-toothed grin, draped one of the Beales’ monogrammed damask napkins over his head in a make-believe burnoose. Winnie Beale had reappeared, after her dramatic entrance, dressed in emerald crêpe de chine and now began dancing her own version of the desert slave girl—Valentino’s beloved in a Balenciaga gown.
She gave Khristo an affectionate leer as she swept past him. Strange, he thought, these people of the night who glittered in the world of Heininger and the Beale mansion. Mood-swept, arrogant, insecure, yet at times unbelievably kind. They were the gods and goddesses of this city, from the smoke-filled jazz dens on the Rive Gauche to the chauffeured caravans that moved through the Bois de Boulogne at dawn. Yet they took a curious, backhanded pride in knowing a simple waiter. He had become, of all things, a minor feature of this world. Nick.
Stranger still, he cared for them. He was younger than most, yet they played at being his children. “Nick, my button has torn loose!” “Be a good fellow, Nick, and help Madame with her lobster.” And even, “Oh Nick, I feel so blue.” They had, it seemed to him, bad dreams—bad dreams they did not understand. Premonitions. And they sensed, somehow, that he did understand. That he knew what was coming. And that, when it came, he would remember their affection for him, that he would protect them. They would never admit that they were the Jews of Berlin, the aristocracy of Russia, the wealthy Spaniards trapped in Madrid and forced to flee to the Finnish embassy, yet, deep down, they sensed that the world as they’d known it had only a little more time to run.
“Dear boy?”
Again caught in reverie, he was startled, and looked directly at the man standing before him. He was on the short side and quite handsome, with thick, reddish-brown hair swept across a noble forehead. His eyes at first seemed exhausted—dark and shadowed—then Khristo realized that makeup had been used to create the illusion.
Looking down quickly, Khristo reached for the salmon server.
“Not necessary, dear boy, I’ve had me supper.” He handed over a business card.
“Give us a call, will you sometime? I’m a photographer, in a sort of way. Like to take your portrait.”
Then he was gone.
A fine, dry snow was falling on Paris as he walked home from the party. It dusted the cobblestones pale and sugary and hardened the yellow beams of the streetlamps into severe triangles—like a painted backdrop, he thought, for a street scene in a nightclub act. He watched a boulevard turn silver before his eyes, and some trick of the light made the spires of the churches seem disconnected, floating free in the windless night air. All for his hungry eyes, he thought, all this. He had only to open his heart a little and the city breathed itself into him, sent him climbing in a perfect, pointless, nighttime elation to a height that no sorrow could reach. A pair of policemen, rubber capes black and shining, rode past on their bicycles. A window of the Hôtel St. Cyr squeaked open and a young man in gartered shirtsleeves stared up at the sky. Framed in the oval window of a taxi, idling at a corner of the Rue de Rennes, a man and a woman kissed lightly—lips barely in contact—then moved apart and touched each other’s faces with the tips of their fingers. At the all-night café on the Rue des Écoles he saw a group of well-rouged old ladies, bundled into the collars of their Persian lamb coats, gathered at a table near the bar. Each one had a tiny dog on her lap or in the crook of her arm. From the way the women leaned across the table, they seemed like conspirators in a plot. It was, after all, well past three in the morning. What brought them together like this? The Affair of the Little Dogs, he thought. The oddest conspiracy of 1937, a year of conspiracies.
But nothing here was what it seemed. Even the gray stone of the buildings hid within itself a score of secret tints, to be revealed only by one momentary strand of light. At first, the tide of secrecy that rippled through the streets had made him tense and watchful, but in time he realized that in a city of clandestine passions, everyone was a spy. Amours. Fleeting or eternally renewed, tender or cruel, a single sip or an endless bacchanal, they were the true life and business of a place where money was never enough and power always drained away. And, since the first days of his time there, he had had his own secrets.
It was a long walk. From the Rue de Varenne in the Seventh Arrondissement, the heart of Paris fashion, to the rented room on a street of Jewish tailors and little shops that made eyeglass frames, out past the Place République, not far from the Père Lachaise cemetery. It took him about two hours, usually, though he could make it last somewhat longer than that and sometimes did. He was accompanied, for a time, by Marko, the bartender, and his nephew Anton, who washed the crystal and the china service. All three carried parcels wrapped in brown paper and tied with string—though Khristo’s was rather heavier than the others’—the “extras” of the waiter’s profession. The sous chef had done the wrapping in the manner of pâtisserie clerks, who could fold paper into cones of sufficient strength that an elaborate pastry would survive a child’s trip to the store. Nestled inside the packets were slightly crumbled slices of pâté of wild duck in a game jelly, white asparagus spears, and thick cuts of tenderloin beef from the Limousin, carved to the English taste. In addition, Marko kept a bottle below the bar to receive the remnants of the brandy service. The Beales had provided their guests with an Armagnac, a select vintage of 1896, and all three took sustenance from it now and again as they walked.
They judged the party quite successful. Not a single fistfight and only two slaps—reportedly of political, not romantic, origin and therefore hardly worth discussion. The tulip-shaped elevator remained cranky, but no horrified shouts from between-floor guests had had to be attended to. Nobody jumped out a window, or set fire to the drapes, or tried to drink champagne by pouring it over female undergarments and squeezing them out like Spanish wine sacks. It was the Americans who drank from shoes, under the curious impression that romantic Europeans did such things. The chef, according to Anton, who worked in the kitchen, had been at his very best. Whistling and winking, he had performed with casual speed, directing his staff like a lion tamer in good humor. And hardly a curse all night long. This unusual sweetness of temper was attributed by the Beale staff to his near ceaseless screwing of one of Madame’s maids, a recent development. But which one? The shy little redhead from Quimper? Or the fulsome Italian, Tomasina, with haunches that could hurl a man into the air? Speaking of which, what of the naked Beale woman? Would the society columns consider it thrilling or déclassé? “I served her champagne,” Marko said, in his sturdy Slavic French, “and her left tit looks toward Prague.”
Together, they walked nearly the length of the Boulevard St. Germain, then Marko and Anton headed for their rooms by the Gare Austerlitz, the railroad terminal, while Khristo used the Pont de Sully to cross the river. Tomorrow night, he thought, he would take the Pont Marie. Well-learned instincts forbade the use of the same route night after night. One varied daily habits at every opportunity, one made prediction of time and place as difficult as possible, one did not, after all, shed Arbat Street quit
e so easily. His journey took him through the Marais, the Jewish quarter, a good place to quicken the footsteps. As the situation for Jews in Europe grew darker, the streets of the Marais seemed to him more and more like a maze, a trap. At the northern border of the district he paused to warm up by the exhaust vents of a baker—who had fired his pine bough ovens an hour earlier—then headed for home.
A battered little Simca crawled up the Rue du Chemin Vert behind him, rather too slowly for his taste, and he stepped into a doorway and let it go past—eventually viewing the absurdly besotted driver with some amusement. But one had to be alert. Do not forget everything, was the way he put it to himself. And he had not. He read the Russian émigré papers, like thousands of others, with a hopeful heart. To the east, the NKVD—in fact the entire Soviet apparat—was stinging itself to death like a tormented scorpion as Yezhov, the redheaded dwarf, rolled down purge upon purge. Good! Let them rip each other to pieces, he thought. Let them sink into the swamp of bureaucratic confusion until not a single file remained in place. The simple defection of a junior intelligence officer would drift endlessly down their lists to the bottom of a clerical sea. Or so he hoped—though in fact he knew them much better than that. He had changed the parting of his hair, grown a thick mustache (all the brasserie waiters in Paris had to be well furred in some fashion; it emphasized the sense of midnight deviltry the proprietors wished to encourage), and, with remorse, destroyed the clothing he’d worn in Spain. Now he had an old sheepskin jacket, bought at a marché aux puces on the outskirts of the city. Beyond that, there was fatalism. Refugees from Eastern Europe and Germany now came to Paris in a steady stream, he was but one among them. He worked hard at being Nick the waiter, hid his money behind a loose light fixture in the hallway outside his room, and kept all acquaintance—with the exception of the Omaraeff connection—emphatically casual. He didn’t need much. He had his work, he had the city, and he had a great deal more than that.
