by Alan Furst
“In Épinal,” Gilbert answered.
“You better get him,” Khristo said. La Brebis was dying.
Lucien spoke. “We must bring them down there,” he said.
“No,” Gilbert said. “It’s impossible. The schleuhs will be all over the place—and they’ll be here soon enough. They’ve seen the Stens.”
“Where is the truck?” Lucien said.
“By the logging. On the other side of the road.”
“Is there gasoline?”
“A little.”
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Did you not hear me?” Gilbert asked.
“It doesn’t matter. We’re going. Christophe and Fusari, take La Brebis. Gilbert and I will follow with Daniel.”
“Lucien,” Gilbert said, grim, “they’ll get us all.”
“No they won’t.”
Daniel said, “I am sorry, Lucien. We didn’t …”
They waited while Lucien ran back up the path and warned the village that a German search party would be coming. The remainder of the maquis and the new recruits took the arms and ammunition and moved up the mountain. Alceste Vau was not told of his brother’s wound; he would have demanded to accompany them to Épinal and there were already too many of them for the old truck. When Lucien returned, they carried the wounded down the path, across the road, and loaded them carefully into the back of the truck. They covered themselves with a canvas tarp while Gilbert drove, alone in the cab.
The ride down the mountain road seemed to go on forever. The brakes were virtually useless on the steep curves and every time Gilbert downshifted, the flywheel screamed and threatened to blow the transmission all over the road. The truck swayed and bounced, Khristo lay on his side in the darkness beneath the tarpaulin and tried to keep La Brebis’s head from moving with the truck’s motion, but it was a losing battle. In the beginning, she cried out when they were jolted by a downshift, but as they went farther down the mountain she made no sound at all, and Khristo could feel her skin growing cold. Let her die, he thought. His training told him to sacrifice one in order to save another—and to stop might put all their lives in jeopardy.
But this was Lucien’s decision, he realized, and finally he shifted over next to him and, raising his voice above the truck’s roaring motor, said, “Lucien, Brebis is asphyxiating. She won’t make it.”
Lucien’s voice answered a moment later. “Are you sure?”
“No. But feel how cold she is.”
“It could be shock.”
“It could be, but I think it’s her windpipe closing up.” When there was no immediate answer, he tried to help Lucien make a decision. “We can still save Daniel, if we continue.”
“No,” Lucien said. He crawled along the truck bed, then reached out from beneath the tarp and pounded on the rear window of the cab. Gilbert slowed—they could feel him pumping the brakes gingerly—then pulled off the road onto the grassy shoulder. The truck was canted at a dangerous angle, and Gilbert raced the engine so it would not stall. On the other side of the road a German staff car and a truckload of soldiers tore past, but they paid no heed to the truck by the side of the road.
“Hold her head,” Lucien said.
Khristo cradled her head in his lap and pressed his hands against the sides of her face. Fusari crawled over next to him and raised the edge of the tarp to let in some light. Lucien reached into his pocket and brought out a cheap fountain pen. He unscrewed the two halves, then broke off the nib end and cleaned up the shattered edge as best he could with a knife. He pulled his shirttail out and wiped ink from the open tube he’d fashioned. Khristo could see that his hands were shaking.
“Ready?” Lucien said.
Khristo nodded.
“Open her mouth.”
Khristo pulled her teeth apart. He could see Lucien sweating in the cold air as he pressed Brebis’s tongue down with his left index finger. When he forced the tube down the back of her throat, the pain brought her back from stupor and she screamed, a hoarse, choking sound that made Khristo shudder. When Lucien withdrew his hand there was blood on it.
Lucien wasted no time. He pounded on the cab window again, and Gilbert moved back out on the road while Fusari resettled the tarp and they were in darkness once again. La Brebis tried to move her hand to her mouth, but Khristo held tightly to her wrist. “Just breathe,” he whispered by her ear. “Can you?” After a moment, she moved her head up and down to tell him that she could.
In Épinal, they heard the sounds of other vehicles and bicycle bells and the truck slowed, bumping along the cobbled streets. At last, Gilbert made as if to park, swinging over toward the curb. Then, suddenly, he took off quickly, with all the acceleration the old engine could muster. Khristo let go of the wounded girl and found the grip of his machine pistol.
But nothing happened. They drove for several minutes, then rolled to a stop. Khristo peeked beneath the tarp and saw the Épinal railroad station. At Lucien’s direction, Fusari checked out the other side and reported that Gilbert was entering the Hôtel de la Gare, which was, Khristo knew, to be found across the street from virtually every railway station in France. Some minutes later Gilbert appeared at the back of the truck and spoke in an undertone. “There was a geste car parked in front of the doctor’s office—they know there’s been a gunshot wound. I’m going to drive around to the back of the hotel. Once we get there, move quickly and get them inside.”
The truck inched down a narrow alley, cornered, and stopped. They threw the tarp off and saw two men in dark suits with pistols in their hands. Khristo immediately armed his weapon and covered them.
“What’s this?” Lucien asked.
“Pimps,” Gilbert answered, climbing up on the truck bed to help with the wounded. “We’re at the Épinal whorehouse. It’s the only place in town where the doctor comes—and no questions asked. They’ve already sent one of the girls to get him.”
They carried Brebis and Daniel through the small bar that adjoined the lobby, then upstairs to a dingy room with faded wallpaper. A mustached man in long underwear jumped out of the bed when they entered the room. “See here,” he said.
“Take a walk,” one of the pimps answered, showing the man his pistol, “this is for France.”
A heavy woman in a dressing gown appeared as they lowered the wounded to the rumpled bed. Without a word she handed the customer a sheaf of ten-franc notes. He, in turn, drew himself up to his full dignity, baggy underdrawers and all. “Never!” he said, with great solemnity. Slapped the money back into the woman’s hand, saluted crisply, and marched from the room.
February, in the mountains, was like a white island. Cut off from time, lifeless, inert. A place where snow showered from the pine boughs, a place where the wind died and the water froze to perfect crystalline ice.
In Cambras, Khristo Stoianev kept to himself. He lived, like the rest of the village, on turnips and rutabagas. Sometimes there was bread. Most of the recruits had been sent home—with instructions to return after the March thaw—because the village foodstocks could not support them. But Khristo and the Corsican, Fusari, were asked to stay.
The shooting of La Brebis and Daniel Vau continued to reverberate in Cambras and not in comfortable ways. They had both survived, for which everyone was thankful. But Daniel had been wounded in the spine, would never walk again, and Gilbert’s young wife had taken this very badly. She had been, everyone supposed, Daniel’s lover, and her broken heart showed for all to see. This situation oppressed Gilbert’s domestic life to a painful degree and he was rumored to have shifted his sleeping quarters to the bed of the strange servant girl who lived in the house.
The doctor had arrived within minutes that day at the Hôtel de la Gare, a white-haired professeur of a man who wore an old-fashioned silk vest beneath his suit. He had patched up La Brebis as best he could, then ordered both wounded removed to a convent near the town of Vittel, some twenty miles distant, and there operated on Daniel Vau. Both had remained and were said to b
e recovering as well as could be expected. The family of La Brebis—the Bonet clan—muttered continually of revenge on her behalf. Gilbert and Lucien resisted, reluctant to attack the Germans in this way, fearing what they would do to the village in return. The murder of an individual German soldier had elsewhere in France been repaid by the killing of more than a hundred civilians. A high price for the Bonet honor.
But the stalemate could not last indefinitely and late one afternoon an aristocratic Frenchman appeared in Cambras: tall, hawk-faced, silver-haired, even in February wearing a fine topcoat over his shoulders like a cape. He was accompanied by a bodyguard called Albert, a watchful man with lank brown hair parted in the middle, a café waiter’s mustache, and eyes the color of the winter sea. He carried a shortbarreled pump shotgun, a weapon never before seen in the village—what birds you could get with that—and wore a Walther pistol in an armpit holster. The Killer, they called him, when he wasn’t around to hear. He reminded Khristo of his past.
Which now, in February, seemed like another life lived by another man. With war in Russia, he thought, they must all be dead by now. Sascha, Drazen Kulic, all the others from Arbat Street. Perhaps not Ilya. Ilya would always find a way to survive. And he rather thought Voluta was alive somewhere; he was like air, hard to get hold of and thus hard to kill. What, he wondered, would they think of this American who called himself Lucien. For he was surely not French, no Frenchman ever walked like that, free-striding, body leaning forward. And he was not British. He did not have the British face, that odd, speculative stillness. He was, apparently, what Khristo had been. An intelligence officer, sent, no doubt, to organize and focus resistance to the Germans. And he was approximately Khristo’s age. Yet he was very different. His training was different—there was another angle to him. He was nothing like Sascha Vonets or Yaschyeritsa or Ozunov. Nor was he like Roddy Fitzware.
What made him distinct, in Khristo’s eyes, was his decision to save the lives of the two wounded villagers. At not so much jeopardy to his life—that was expected—as jeopardy to his mission. That was not expected. And it was wrong. An error. But it was the nature of the error that provoked Khristo’s curiosity. The man’s component parts, compassion interwoven with aggression, reminded him of Faye Berns, who could be sentimental one moment and entirely practical the next. He had thought her personality to be singular, but he now understood that she was one of a class. To which add Winnie Beale, who had, on the spur of the moment, committed an entirely altruistic act and could have died for her trouble. A wealthy bitch, suddenly swept away by unselfish courage in the face of a machine gun. The combination was attractive, very appealing, but, in the case of Lucien, he had to wonder how it managed to resolve itself to the crueler exigencies of intelligence work.
The French aristocrat, in Khristo’s experienced eyes, seemed to be Lucien’s superior, but that was not so very unusual; his own experience of being a non-national in another country’s service supported that observation. During the three days the man stayed at the village, he spent most of his time soothing one or another of the Bonet family, explaining to them the facts of life in regard to revenge killings. But he also sought Khristo out, chatted with him now and again in the most general sort of way, and finally invited him to have a brandy at Gilbert’s house. When Khristo arrived, after a turnip supper, he discovered that Gilbert and his family were absent, as was Lucien.
The brandy was a gift from heaven. He’d spent most of his nights in the mountains as close to a fire as he could get, but it was the first time in many weeks that both sides of him were warm at the same moment. It was private at Gilbert’s house. There was only the light of the fire—a big one, Gilbert was liberal with his wood—reflected in the frost flowers that covered the small windowpanes. As Khristo sipped at the aristocrat’s brandy and relished the warmth that crept through his body, the Frenchman took a pouch of tobacco from his pocket and rolled two cigarettes. The smell reached Khristo all the way from the man’s lap. Makhorka. Dark tobacco, strong, and there was no mistaking the aroma. Silently, the man handed him a cigarette, then extended a gold lighter.
“Do you like it?” the man said.
“Oh yes.”
“Just like home, eh?”
Khristo sat for a time and stared into the fire. There’d been no doubt in his mind that this would happen eventually, that he would be challenged to explain who he was. He would never be considered French—perhaps by the villagers but never by someone who knew the world. And you had to be somebody, you had to belong somewhere, you had to have a nationality of some sort. Even in heaven, he thought, where Saint Peter is the border guard. He discovered that he was angry, not so much at the Frenchman as at the circumstances of his own existence. He looked into the aristocrat’s eyes for a moment and realized suddenly that the man was in Cam-bras not to gentle the Bonet clan, but to find out about him. Very well, he thought, you shall find out. “I am not Russian,” he said, holding the makhorka cigarette in the air between them to show the man that his tactics were well understood.
“No?”
“No. I am from Bulgaria. A possession of Turkey for centuries, now an ally of the Germans, soon to belong to someone else. It is the bulwark of southeastern Europe—Christian Europe—against Islam. It is a neighbor and, often, an enemy of Greece, your conquered ally. It has always been greatly desired by Russia, your un-conquered ally. Romania, its northern neighbor and sometime enemy, was most recently the domain of British interests, even though the Romanian ruling class looks to France for their culture and has sided with Germany in this war. It is also part of the Balkans, and the southwestern area of the country has tended to be sympathetic to the interests of Macedonia—divided between Greece and Yugoslavia, a country presently occupied by Germany, with willing assistance from the Croatian minority, except for those Croats who are communist and fight with Tito, whose father was a Serb and mother a Croat. And yes, I like the tobacco quite well.”
The aristocrat nodded to himself for a moment, something or other had been confirmed. “You are, sir, something of a politician.”
“I am, sir, a lot of things, but that, thank God, is not one of them.”
The man across from him laughed appreciatively, then leaned forward. “I am not here to interrogate you, and I am not accusing you. I am only concerned with the politics at hand, not the politics of the Balkans. You must understand that in France there are several résistance movements, Catholic, communist, Gaullist, even those who would restore the Bourbon monarchy. We make common cause against the Germans, but the day is coming when the future of this country will be decided—and it will be decided by those who come out of the conflict with the greatest strength. The Cam-bras maquis is something of a Gaullist unit, as much as it’s anything, and if you would be happier in a different political setting, well, that can be arranged for you, and no hard feelings. Well, what about it?”
“My war is right here,” Khristo said. A connoisseur of traps, he felt that this was surely the softest one ever laid for him.
“Good. You’ll be of assistance—no question about it. On that basis, another brandy?”
“Thank you, yes.”
“Some day, you must tell me your story.”
“I think you would find it interesting,” Khristo said.
They busied themselves with the brandy for a moment. For Khristo, the room grew deliciously warm.
“This war,” the aristocrat said, “in some sense it makes you happy.”
“That’s true,” Khristo said.
“Why?”
“The world turned me upside down a long time ago. Now the world itself is turned upside down. For the moment, we—the world and I—are congenial.”
“But it must end.”
“Some day.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think about it. For now, a man with a gun can be whoever he likes. With any luck, I’ll be dead before the world turns right side up again.”
The ari
stocrat looked into his eyes for a moment, calculating. “I don’t think you really mean that.”
Khristo sighed. “No, you’re right. I don’t mean it.” “Don’t give up hope,” the aristocrat said. “Everything may be put right in the long run.” He handed Khristo the remaining tobacco, then rose from the chair and tossed a small log onto the fire. Khristo accepted that as a signal, chatted for a few moments more, and left soon after.
He walked across the tiny mud square of Cambras, back to the house where he slept and ate. The night was clear, the ground frozen rock hard. He looked up at the stars, sharp as diamonds in the black sky, and wondered what the Frenchman had meant by saying “everything may be put right in the long run,” because he had meant something by it.
The thaw came in late February and everything turned to mud as sheets of water ran across the mountain roads. In Épinal, a student named LeBeq was caught writing slogans on a wall. He was detained by the Gestapo and tortured. To make his comrades believe he had confessed—and thus get them running, out in the open—he was almost immediately released. He went home to his family, but was unable to speak. The following day, he walked up to a Gestapo sedan parked in the main square and drove a boning knife—all the blade and half the handle—into the driver’s chest. The other officer leaned across the seat and shot him several times. But he had the strength of a madman, and managed to walk several blocks to the doctor’s office where he collapsed and died on the front step. Immediately, a number of prominent citizens were rounded up and ten men and women were hanged from plane trees on the main street of the city. The doctor who had attended Daniel and La Brebis was one of them, as was the prostitute’s customer who had chanced to be in the Hôtel de la Gare. On the first day of March, friends of LeBeq stretched a wire across the road that passed below Cambras and decapitated—more or less—a motorcycle dispatch rider who had neglected to lie low over his handlebars.
