Alan Furst's Classic Spy Novels

by Alan Furst

  Khristo did not think. He cleared the jam on his Sten, snapped in a fresh magazine from his jacket pocket, and made sure the safety was off. He pointed Lucien and Vigie toward the next roof down, then moved toward the edge of the roof to create the necessary diversion. It was simple training, a lifetime of it. One fires, others escape.

  Just before he reached the edge, a hand caught his ankle and stopped him. He pulled as hard as he could, then, in a rage, turned to see Lucien hanging on to him. He fought to suppress the curses rising to his lips, made a low angry sound instead. Lucien pulled on his ankle with such force that it moved him back a foot. Suddenly, a trapdoor in the roof opened. Khristo swung the Sten around and tensed on the trigger. A small face appeared. A boy, perhaps ten, beckoned to them urgently, then touched his lips for silence. They moved quickly. The face disappeared.

  There was a rough ladder below the door and they found themselves in the front room of a house. In the darkness, they could see a young woman in a nightdress standing terrified in one corner, hands in mouth. The boy materialized from another room, wearing a thin shirt and shorts, with an old French infantryman’s helmet on his head. He had to hold it on with one hand. He snatched Khristo by the sleeve and pulled him toward a back door. Then he turned suddenly and whispered, “Anglais?”

  “Non,” Khristo answered. “Américain.”

  “Bon Dieu!” the boy exclaimed softly, eyes widening with excitement.

  Then he turned and dragged Khristo through the door into a tiny garden plot in back of the house. The garden butted up against a stone wall topped by a sagging fence of rusted wire. There was a wooden barrel positioned at the base of the wall. The boy let go of Khristo, reached the top of the barrel with a practiced leap, then stepped up onto the wall and waved for them to follow. The wall was twelve inches wide with broken bottles cemented down the middle but there was just enough room to get a foot on either side of the jagged glass and the boy scuttled along quickly, crouched low, hanging on to his helmet with one hand. The German troops seemed to be all around them: they heard shouted commands, boots pounding on the street, the sound of a truck shifting between reverse and first gears as the driver attempted to get it turned around in the narrow street. They ran along the wall past four or five houses, then the boy jumped off onto another barrel—no doubt in the backyard of his wargame companion—and onto the ground. The moment Khristo landed, the boy took hold of his sleeve again, they ran forward a few feet, then stopped abruptly. They were at the twin of the alley that Khristo had seen earlier and the soldier game clearly called for scooting down the narrow space and crossing the street. But as they turned the corner the boy’s hand quivered and a small cry of fright escaped him. A German officer stood in profile at the end of the alley, waving both hands toward himself as though directing traffic. They flattened back against the wall while the boy thought it over. For a moment, Khristo knew the thing was finished, but the boy peered around the corner, then darted across the alley and, one by one, they followed him. On the other side, they found him straining at a cast-iron grating set level with the ground. Khristo bent to help him and together they pushed it to one side. The boy lowered himself down, then moved forward head first, sliding on his stomach. Khristo followed, listened to make sure Vigie could pull the grating back over by himself, then continued ahead.

  The stone beneath him was covered with slime, which eased progress, though the reek of long-stagnant water was nearly overpowering. A storm drain, he thought, with its other end somewhere well east of the Germans if they had any luck at all. He heard the scamper and the tiny squeaking somewhere up the sewer ahead of him—he knew what that meant but forced himself not to think about it. Suddenly, the stone moved beneath him and something roared above his head. He stopped, then realized they were under the street and a truck had just passed over him. He closed his eyes in order to concentrate and resumed crawling, slowly and in rhythm, elbow, knee, elbow, knee, and he could now begin to hear the sound of breathing, his own, and the others’, as the motion became an effort. His elbow touched the boy’s foot twice before he figured out that the boy was tiring and slowing down. “Moment,” he whispered, and lay still. He reached above him, found the ceiling just over his head. The drain had narrowed. He cinched the strap of the Sten tighter and tried to recover his strength.

  Behind him, Lucien’s voice was barely audible: “How far? Ask him.”

  Khristo did. The boy answered that he didn’t know. Khristo passed the word back to Lucien. Lucien asked Vigie if he’d heard. Vigie did not answer. Lucien, in a stage whisper, called out, “Vigie.” No answer. Lucien doubled his knees up to his chin and managed to get himself turned around. Khristo heard him belly-crawling down the pipe, his breath hoarse with effort. He was gone, it seemed to Khristo, a very long time. Finally, the sound of his progress returned, and Lucien arrived a minute later. He moved as close to Khristo as he could and spoke by his ear. “He’s not here.”

  “I heard him. He closed the grating.”

  “Closed it behind us.”

  “What?”

  “Perhaps he was afraid. Close spaces. Rats. I don’t know.”

  “Goddamn him,” Khristo said.

  “He’ll get out,” Lucien said.

  Khristo whispered to the boy. “Are you all right?”

  “Oui, Capitaine,” came the answer, but the voice told a different story. “C’est le tunnel interdit,” the boy explained. The forbidden tunnel, Khristo thought. Because you will get dirty? Because you will get lost or frightened? Or why? “You have been before?” Khristo asked. Yes, the boy said. Once. For a few feet only. Never this far.

  Khristo thought it over for a moment but there was no alternative. Unless to stay here until the following night, then try to escape through the streets. But Vigie’s absence made even that impossible. If he were caught, he would be made to show the Germans where they’d gone. For he had been seen by those in the police station, would not be able to talk his way out of trouble.

  On command from Lucien, they continued forward.

  For a long time, there seemed to be no end to it. His adrenaline from the attack was long dissipated, and when they stopped to rest he could feel that the skin on his knees and elbows was ripped and bleeding. The dead, oily water attacked the open skin like quicklime. How could the water be so stagnant, he wondered. If water still ran through the storm drain, it should renew itself every few days in the spring rains. Unless a diverter pipe had been removed from the entry and a grating fixed in its place. And the tunnel forbidden. Because its other end was sealed.

  An hour later, they came to a grating fixed over the end of the pipe. But the tunnel had widened, and the stone was soft and rotted, and both he and Lucien had knives, so they were able to dig the rusted staples out of the crumbled masonry. Khristo doubled his body back and kicked the grating out. They heard it crashing down a hill.

  Crawling out into the tangled underbrush of a hillside, they could hear the sound of the river just below them. For a time, Khristo sat with his head in his hands, breathing deeply, wanting more sweet air each time he exhaled. He was filthy, his trousers soaked with watery slime and, where the cloth had worn away, the skin of his knees showed through, bright red and beaded with blood. Lucien sat down beside him and beckoned the boy to join them. In the faint moonlight Khristo could see tear tracks that ran through the dirt on the boy’s face, but he’d made not a sound in the tunnel.

  “Where are we?” Lucien asked the boy.

  “Below the road,” he said, “on the hill in back of the barn of Madame Rossot.”

  “Do you have someone to go to?” Lucien asked. “Someone who will clean you up and take you home so the Germans don’t see you?”

  The boy pondered that for a moment. Then shook his head vigorously beneath the helmet. “Madame Rossot,” he said, “though she becomes very angry if we go behind her barn.”

  “Are you sure?” Lucien said.

  “The schleuh killed her husband, in the Great
War.”

  “You are very brave,” Lucien said. He stood and searched in his pockets.

  Khristo thought at first he was looking for money, then realized he wanted something to give the boy—something he could keep. Khristo knew the very thing and fished about for it in his pocket. His good luck charm. That he had kept with him in Spain. That had been stored in Santé prison with his civilian clothes. He stood, then waved the boy to his feet. “I decorate you for bravery,” he said, giving the boy what he’d taken from his pocket. He extended his hand and the boy shook it formally, very much like a soldier receiving a medal, then looked in the palm of his other hand, at the white pawn resting there.

  “Merci, monsieur,” he said.

  “You are dismissed,” Lucien said. “Now be careful, will you?” The boy moved off along a trail through the brush, and then he was gone.

  They rested for an hour, then, as dawn approached, worked their way cross-country to their emergency fallback position—a downed maple tree a mile short of Cabejac, on the road to Abonne. They waited the rest of the day for Vigie, eating a chocolate bar from Lucien’s pocket and, once darkness fell, cleaning themselves by the river. They hid out that night and all the next day, but Vigie did not appear. He was never seen again.

  In the town of Abonne there were three small pulp mills that processed wood fiber from the forests of the Vosges into newsprint and inexpensive papers of all kinds. It smelled dreadful, like all the wood-pulp towns of the world, and life there was lived amid a sulfurous haze of rotten eggs. Such conditions the Germans found sharply discordant with their vision of La Belle France and they tended to stay away from the place—occupying armies have a habit of discovering strategic value in towns where life is comfortable and pleasant, and the Germans were no exception to the rule.

  Left to themselves, the townspeople had organized a particularly predatory and efficient maquis, concentrated among the millworkers and led by the local union boss, a tough old bastard called Vedoc. When the remnants of the Lucien team walked back into Abonne, hollow-eyed and exhausted, they were taken immediately to Vedoc’s house. His wife and sister cleaned out the larder to feed them while Vedoc himself provided an ample supply of that year’s basement wine, aged all of eight months and considered pretty good for what it was. The one called Lucien was too quiet, too much inside himself, so Vedoc, who had seen this sort of thing before, kept him reasonably drunk and sent an old lady off on a series of local trains to Belfort.

  The Bugatti pulled up in front of Vedoc’s house a week later. Ulysse, shadowed as always by the cold-eyed Albert, was his usual elegant self: calm, aloof, an island of Gallic sanity in the stormy seas. Winter was gone and the pearl-colored topcoat with it; a stylish raincoat now served as cape. Only Khristo, perhaps, noted a tiny razor nick to one side of his Adam’s apple and inferred that Ulysse himself was having to withstand a storm or two.

  They were debriefed at length—first separately, then together—on the trap at Cabejac. Ulysse showed them a series of photographs, which Albert then carefully burned in the fireplace. They could identify only the “gendarme,” and he was, they both believed, likely dead. They talked for hours over a two-day period while the room turned blue with smoke. They told the story again and again. Ulysse listened with infinite patience, Albert took notes in some private code of his own.

  During this time, Khristo gained some understanding of the aristocrat’s character. He was obviously an acute observer of human beings, their strengths and weaknesses, what they could take and what they couldn’t. It was as though he had long ago ceased to judge behavior and had, instead, given himself over to the pure study of it. Further, it became clear to Khristo that war was this man’s time, that war ran in his blood, heritage of an aristocracy that had led men in battle for centuries and continued to do so. And that it was precisely this comprehension, this set of instincts, that Ulysse had put at the disposal of the American intelligence services in order to defeat his traditional enemy.

  Thus he was not at all surprised when Ulysse suggested a walk in the woods behind Vedoc’s house on an afternoon when the weather was cold and gray. Lucien had been sent off on a small errand. Albert, shotgun in hand, waited at the edge of the trees.

  Ulysse strolled slowly, hands clasped behind his back, and his mood was soft and tentative. With a rather arch apology for the lack of makhorka (“My tobacconist stocks it only once in a great while”), he offered Khristo a Gitane and lit it with a snap of his gold lighter.

  “Of course I must not ask you about Lucien,” he said as they walked.

  “No,” Khristo responded.

  “Loyalty to a comrade-in-arms is everything.”

  “Naturally, that is so.”

  “Americans, Americans,” he said, despair in his voice. “They do not accept casualties at all well, do they. They take it to heart, and they blame themselves. A kind of false pride, surely, yet one must admire them for it. Do you?”

  “Yes,” Khristo said, “I do.”

  “Yet a man of your experience must also see that it is their weakness.”

  “Perhaps a weakness. Or a strength. Or both at once, perhaps.”

  “Yes,” Ulysse mused. “Still, not an ideal trait for an officer class, you’ll admit that.”

  “I suppose not,” Khristo said.

  “Lucien has done very well, you know, in the way these things are judged. Quite a number of trains, and one must add what other groups have been able to do with his assistance, and what they will do in the future. Considered altogether, a most gratifying boil on Hitler’s backside. But, we ask ourselves, can he continue? I’ve not told Lucien, by the way, but the village of Cambras has been entirely decimated.”

  Khristo winced and shook his head in sorrow.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. A servant girl betrayed them to the Gestapo, and they were taken by surprise. She had been made pregnant by Gilbert, poor thing, and was terrified she would be cast out of the village, to live in the woods, and in her state of mind the Germans seemed like saviors, who could rescue her from her predicament. I don’t look forward, I must tell you, to the moment when Lucien learns of this.”

  “He has no lack of courage,” Khristo said.

  “Not remotely in question,” Ulysse said. “But do you suppose he would be willing to sacrifice the lives of others, should it become necessary?”

  Khristo was silent.

  “Please forgive me,” Ulysse said, “for having to ask you that.”

  “The world will go on,” Khristo said.

  “It will.” He paused to light another cigarette. “And then, where will you be?”

  “God may know that,” Khristo answered honestly, “I do not.”

  “In your homeland, perhaps? To marry and make a life? It is what most of us will do, in time.”

  “No,” Khristo said, “I do not think so. Though there are times when I would give anything to be back where I was born, even for one hour. But I have seen the world, and whoever runs that country will want to start fresh—they won’t have much use for people who have seen the world. It will be under the Russians, I think, and there won’t be anything we can do about it. Our history is a sharp lesson on the subject of borders.”

  Ulysse nodded in sympathy. “We’re going to exfiltrate Lucien to Switzerland, in a day or two. Would you like to come along?”

  They walked along the path through the mist; the sound of dripping trees filled the silence. “Yes,” Khristo said.

  “You’ll be interned, in a sort of way, so that our understandings with the Swiss will be, at least, nominally observed. But your circumstances can be most comfortable, and, who knows, you may just make some new friends. American friends. Would you like that?”

  “Yes,” Khristo said, “I would.”

  Long before dawn, the horse-drawn carts began lining up on the French side of the Vöernstrasse bridge. There wasn’t all that much produce to take into the Saturday market—you got little variety in early May—but the farmers bro
ught what they could: cabbage, broccoli, spinach, wintered-over carrots, and early greens of every sort. Across the bridge, in the well-swept squares of the city, the housewives of Basel awaited their French vegetables—one more Swiss cauliflower might well have driven them mad.

  The border guards came in two versions: the Vichy French, theoretically still in charge of their own boundaries, and the Germans—Gestapo or military—who considered the Swiss border far too sensitive to entrust to French authorities. In any event, there were far more Germans than French at this particular crossing and they milled about ceaselessly, sharp-eyed and suspicious—there was always some wretched idiot hidden away under the produce and fishing him out meant extra leave. So they took their time, while the horses stood patiently, and checked the farmers’ well-worn passports long before the wagons actually reached the bridge.

  Khristo held the reins loosely in his hand while Lucien appeared to doze at his side. Behind them, the old wooden cart was piled high with cabbages. The German corporal who approached them was no more than eighteen, a country boy with red cheeks and a stiff shock of blond hair who licked his callused thumb to turn each passport page. He looked from faces to photographs—up and down, up and down—a dozen times before he was satisfied.