by Alan Furst
But in families everything comes out eventually, and Escaldo got drunk one night and let them in on part of it. He was, also, under some pressure to explain things. Some smart guy figured out that maybe Barbette banged the girls so hard to prove he wasn’t a fairy, which meant maybe he was, which meant that Escaldo and Sarda had sunk to a level where it was definitely out of the family. Escaldo couldn’t afford to let too much of that go on, so he sang.
The money they had now, he explained, was only the beginning. There’d be more—maybe a lot more, maybe the big one they all dreamed of and talked about. Barbette had taken them to an abandoned farmhouse somewhere to hell and gone outside Paris and he’d shown them these, ah, things, and run them through a little schooling and let them, even, use them a few times. Bon Dieu! Quelles machines! Quelles instruments! His eyes glowed as he talked, and it only took a few more glasses of marc to get the whole story out in the air.
Les machines à écrire de Chicago.
There it was, now they had it all. Chicago typewriters. That’s what Barbette had to show them on the broken-down farm outside Paris. Escaldo spread his long coat apart and took out two little pimp cigars and lit one for Sarda and one for himself. Did Bottles Capone, Al’s brother, or Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik have anything they didn’t? Not anymore.
Machine guns.
Around the table, nobody could say anything for a long time, thinking about that.
Khristo found a room deep in the Marais, on a dark side street off the Rue des Rosiers. It was an ancient building, narrow, seven flights to the top floor, with rusted iron pipes crossing the ceiling and a small window on a courtyard where it was nighttime from dawn to dusk. He rented the room from an old Jew bent in the shape of a C, with black sidelocks, beard, coat, and hat. “Who wants you, little one?” the man asked in Russian. “I don’t understand,” Khristo answered in French. The man nodded to himself. “Oh, pardon me then,” he said in Russian.
The thought of Aleksandra’s things in the treasure box, left to be pawed by the landlady, haunted him, but a return to the room was out of the question. Surely they had him spotted at Heininger as well, but it was less likely that they would snatch him there. He considered finding Yasin again, in the Turkish quarter out on the Boulevard Raspail, and acquiring another weapon, but he put it off. Ilya had given him a telephone number—that was his best weapon now. Had Ilya set him up? Kept him at the cemetery while Aleksandra was taken? Perhaps. Perhaps Ilya had been set up to set him up. At least he knew where he was now. On the NKVD chessboard, all his moves known and predicted, hostile knights and bishops dawdling while he figured out how to move onto the very square where they wanted him. Somehow, it didn’t matter. Fate was fate. He would play the game out to checkmate, they would all meet again in hell.
Sweating in the late June weather, he stood in a telephone cabinet at the neighborhood post office while the call was put through. They answered on the first ring. He merely said, “I want a meeting.” They told him to be at the church of St.-Julien-le-Pauvre at 6:30 the following morning.
For early mass, Ilya was in worker’s clothing, a copy of L’Humanité, the communist daily, folded under one arm. Khristo watched him move slowly down the aisle, kneel briefly, then enter the pew. They were virtually alone, the place was empty except for a few shawl-covered women in the front row and a priest who sped through the rite in mumbled Latin. The high ceilings held the church in soft gloom as the first sun touched the tops of the windows.
“You are very quick,” Ilya said, speaking in an undertone. He glanced at Khristo suspiciously. “Twenty-four hours,” he mused. “Have you considered a career in this business?”
“I want her back,” Khristo said, his voice tight with anger despite an attempt at neutrality. “Do what you like with me, but let her go.”
“Who?”
“She calls herself Aleksandra.”
“I’m sorry,” Ilya said, “I know nothing about this.”
“You lie,” Khristo said.
“No. Not true.”
“I may just cut your throat right here, Ilya. You’re close enough to heaven for a speedy trip.”
“Khristo!”
“Blasphemy? You don’t like it?”
“Stop it. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“To hell with you, then.” He stood, began to move down the pew toward the aisle.
“Khristo, wait, please,” Ilya called in a loud whisper.
He remained standing, but moved no farther.
“They are outside. All over the place. They’ll cut you down.”
“In front of a church? In the street in broad daylight?”
“Yes, of course. Just like Myagin.”
“Good. You’ll die first.”
“You think they care?”
Khristo sat down again and shook his head in disbelief. “You feel no shame, Ilya. How do you do it? ”
“Don’t attack me, Khristo. I am trying to help you. Fold up your scales of justice and put them away and don’t make judgments. I know nothing of this Aleksandra, but I promise to do whatever I’m able to do. There are so many of us, you see, each one under orders, and it is all compartmentalized, so one doesn’t always know—”
“Enough! We’re here to bargain …”
“We are not. There is no bargain.”
“Then what?”
“Give us Myagin’s murderer, Khristo.”
“First the girl.”
Ilya gestured no and closed his eyes for a moment. “Please,” he said gently.
“Omaraeff,” Khristo said.
“Who is he?”
“The headwaiter at Brasserie Heininger. A Bulgarian.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“I don’t know. Patriotism, perhaps. There is a chance the British are involved.”
“And you? Are you involved?”
“Marginally, Ilya. I did a small favor, then I walked away from it.”
“You didn’t like the plan?”
“No, Ilya, no. I had something. For the first time in my life, just living like a plain man. Working at a job. Coming home to a woman. Nothing I did mattered at all. It was a joy, Ilya. Incomprehensibly a joy.”
“I am sorry.”
“Can you get her out?”
“I don’t know. You remember how it is—all blind passages. But I swear to you I will try. I have friends, I’m owed favors. But I must be discreet.”
“Can I walk out of here?”
“No. I must leave first. Then you will be left alone.”
He thought about the signal, its simplicity. All Ilya had to do was let him go first, and he would be dead in a few seconds. “God help you, Ilya,” he said.
“Let me help you first. If this Omaraeff is pressed, will he sing your name?”
“A certainty.”
“Very well. That I can fix.”
“I don’t care.”
“So you say, but I want you alive. For the other …”
“You must,” Khristo said, pleading.
Ilya nodded, looked at Khristo for a moment, then stood. “Good-bye, my friend,” he said and offered his hand.
Khristo did not take it.
Ilya shrugged, tucked L’Humanité beneath his arm, and walked up the aisle.
He saw them as he left the church—some of them. One in a car. Another reading a newspaper in the little park that surrounded the church. A tourist couple—at seven in the morning!—taking pictures of the Seine on the other side of the quai. His picture too, no doubt. As he turned north, a car pulled out of a parking space and trailed him. It was the battered Simca that had appeared one night in early spring as he walked home. He remembered the driver, drunk and grinning as he aimed the car up the middle of the street. They had, he realized, been with him for a long time.
How long? Had Vladi Z., his companion in the internment camp, been one of them? If so, they had been running him, an unknowing provocateur, since the day he left Spain. And he had fl
ed from Madrid after a telephone call from none other than Ilya Goldman. Yet Yaschyeritsa’s threats had been real enough. Or maybe not. Had they tried to panic him that far back?
A bullet-headed thug, with pale hair sheared to a bristle, swung out of a doorway and matched his pace. All sorts of specialists, Ilya had said, were now operating in Paris. The city would be crawling with them. He knew that NKVD search brigades, the sort of units that descended on suspicious activity in the villages, could be ten thousand strong. Not that they would try anything like that in France, but they had people in abundance and they used them abundantly.
He wanted to go to the bookstore where he had met Aleksandra, and he wanted to go alone, so he lost the cars by taking the Métro for two stops. That left him with Bullet-head and a fat-faced man in the Moscow version of a business suit. They stayed with him as he wandered around the back of the Fifth—the university quarter—among students hurrying to early class at the various facultés of the Sorbonne scattered through the district. He entered one of the classroom buildings and moved through the corridors and up and down the staircases in a tight press of humanity. When he finally left the building, Fat-face was gone. Perhaps he had given the whole thing up, Khristo thought, humiliated by student derision at his colossal suit, and defected to the registrar. Khristo glanced behind him—not even deigning to use the standard shop-window-as-mirror—and saw that Bullet-head was sweating up a storm, the last man left. A passenger got out of a nearby taxi and Khristo waved it down. Then watched through the rear window as the NKVD man ran in frantic circles looking for another. He rode three blocks, paid the driver, and stood back in a doorway as Bullet-head sailed by in his own taxi, terrified, surely, that such an expense would not be approved by his bosses.
Later that morning, Khristo stood in the bookstore, browsing among the thick, uncut volumes on surrealism and Marx. On the far wall was a poster, in livid red and black, celebrating the Republican effort in the Spanish war. There were stark crosses above graves and a shadowed face of great determination and strength looking into the near distance. In fiery letters, lines from the poet John Cornford were spread across the paper. Cornford, a poet and Marxist from Cambridge, had died at twenty-one, a machine-gunner in one of the international brigades. “Nothing is certain, nothing is safe,” the lines read. “Everything dying keeps a hungry grip on life / Nothing is ever born without screaming and blood.”
He watched the clerks in their blue smocks, moving about the store. How had Aleksandra fitted into this milieu? Her politics, he knew, were the politics of survival, her own survival. Larger questions were not germane—theories bored her; passions belonged in bed, not on the speaker’s platform. Her absence stabbed him suddenly, and he said her name silently and dropped a book back onto a table.
“Captain Markov?”
At that name—his cover in Spain—he froze.
Turned slowly to the source of the voice and found Faye Berns. His first impression of her was long hair, washed and shining, and jade-colored eyes, lit up with recognition, meeting his own. On second glance, he saw that her face was sallow and exhausted, that life had not been easy.
“Did I startle you?” she said.
“Yes,” he said, “a little.”
She took his arm as they crossed the street to a café. The touch, at first, made him feel guilty, as though it desecrated his sorrow, as though it betrayed Aleksandra. But he could not deny its warmth, he could not deny how good it felt. They sat beneath a striped awning and drank cup after cup of coffee. She told him the story of her life those past few months, her eyes shining with unshed tears as she spoke.
Andres had died.
He had spent a long time dying, as doctor after doctor paraded through a rented apartment near the Parc Monceau that her father had paid for. Their plan, originally, had been to travel to Greece, where Andres had friends who would take them in. Perhaps they’d get married; at times they talked about it. Somehow, the tickets were never bought, there was always something else that had to be done. Renata Braun had left Paris in February, promising to write as soon as she was settled. They waited anxiously for a letter as the weeks went by, but it never arrived. Then Andres came down with a fever.
At first they ignored it. The Paris damp—one had to grow used to a new climate. But the fever was stubborn. Various doctors were consulted, medicines of all sorts were prescribed, but nothing seemed to work. Slowly, the sickness grew worse, until she had to stay up with him all through the night, sponging the sweat from his body, changing the wet sheets. At times he fell into a delirium, shouting and whining, often in languages unknown to her. He was in Anatolia, he thought, and pleaded with her to hide him from the Turkish soldiers—he heard them coming up the stairs. She would go to the door and look out, reassure him that they had just left. She said anything that came to mind, anything to calm him, because his terror broke her heart. She wept in the bathroom, washed her face, went back to the bed, and held his hands until dawn.
In times of clarity, he told her the truth about himself in great detail—where he had been, what he had done. His only regret, he said, was that the one thing in his life he had cared for, the Communist party, had turned on him. She argued with him about it—one could always care for humankind, could work for the oppressed. It had nothing to do with a printed card. But this line enraged him—she did not understand, he claimed—so she dropped it.
He became sly and strange. Would hide his medicine spoon among the covers so she couldn’t find it and accuse her of telling the concierge his secrets. When she cleaned the apartment in the morning, he would not permit her to leave his sight. On his good days, he spoke of marriage. Passionately. They must have a child, he said, to continue his work. He begged her to bring a priest, a rabbi, whatever she wished. She told him it would be wiser to wait until he felt better and was his old self again. Her hesitancy angered him, and he accused her of infidelity.
Then, with the coming of spring, he seemed to grow stronger. She took him on outings to the Parc Monceau, where he would walk with a jacket over his shoulders and lecture her on a range of political matters. He read the newspapers avidly and explained to her the historical implications of every event. Now, instead of hostility and suspicion toward her, he began to plot revenge against certain individuals in the Comintern who he believed had betrayed him. He became obsessed with the Russian poet Ilya Ehrenburg, claimed he was under strict NKVD supervision, and planned to write an article for a Parisian quarterly—the Nouvelle Revue Française—exposing Ehrenburg for what he was.
But then, suddenly, on a day when he’d planned a visit to a museum, on a day when he’d made a telephone call, eaten an omelette, laughed at one of her jokes, he died. She returned from shopping and found him sitting on the couch with an open book in his hand.
The tears came when she finished the story, and she was hunting through her purse when a waiter appeared with a clean white handkerchief, handed to her silently. “My God,” she said, “I will miss this city.”
“I am sorry,” Khristo said, “for Andres. And for you. For what happened. If my English was better …”
“Oh please,” she said, “I understand. And I didn’t mean to cry in front of you. It’s just … When I was sixteen, I used to daydream about a lover dying, to make myself feel sad, I think. But then it happened. It actually happened.” She looked around for the waiter, in order to return the handkerchief, but he was busy at another table.
“I think he wants that you keep it,” Khristo said, searching for a word. “It is his …”
“Gift?”
“Yes, a gift.”
She nodded that she understood and blew her nose. “Tell me about yourself,” she said.
He shrugged. “Some bad things, some good.”
“Andres explained to me about not telling people about yourself, how important that was, so I understand.”
“Yes,” he sighed. He wanted to tell her everything, resisted a desire to go on and on in riddles, telling
but not telling, like Sascha. “What for you now?” he asked instead.
“I am going home,” she said. “To America.”
“Ah. For the best, no?”
“I don’t know,” she said, uncertain. “Maybe. But the tickets are all bought and there’s no turning back now. I was in the bookstore looking for something to read on the boat—I really don’t want to listen to a bunch of Americans gossiping about their adventures in wicked old Europe.” She made a face at the thought. “Anyhow, I go up to Le Havre today on the train, I’m there overnight, board the Normandie tomorrow, seven days at sea, then it’s New York.”
“What train do you take?”
“Five-twenty from the Gare du Nord.” She was silent for a moment, not happy at the prospect of traveling. For a moment it seemed like she might cry again, a shadow crossed her, then, instead, she managed a gloomy smile. “How like Paris this is—to meet an old friend a few hours before going away forever.”
“Some day you will come back here.”
“Do you think so?” There was a real ache in her voice when she said it.
“I do,” he said.
“Funny, I don’t even know your name. I don’t suppose it’s actually Captain Markov.”
“Khristo is my name. Then Stoianev—like your ‘Stephens.’ ”
“Khristo,” she said.
“Yes. I have not heard it said for a long time. I use another name now.”
Her eyes suddenly lit up and she smiled to herself.
“Is funny?” he asked.
“No. It’s just that my name isn’t Faye Berns, not really.”
“Ah,” he said, “you have a cover.”
“My name is Frances Bernstein,” she said. “But that sounded too much like just another girl from Brooklyn, so I changed it to Faye Berns.”
He waggled a finger at her in mock reproof. “ Too much like true name,” he said. “Very bad espionage.”
She fell silent in wonder at all that had happened to her, her eyes sought his and he realized suddenly that he was the last link to a life she’d lived in Madrid and Paris, that saying good-bye to him was saying good-bye to that. “I don’t think,” she said sadly, “that I can ever tell anybody what happened to me here. I don’t think they would believe it. And I know they wouldn’t understand it. Most people pretend that exciting things happened to them—I’ll have to pretend they didn’t. That’s what I should do, isn’t it?”
