by Alan Furst
It was said as an afterthought, almost, we know you don’t require an inducement, but here’s one anyhow. The man’s expression, in that moment, had something of the philosopher about it, suggesting he knew all too well that people accepted such missions for reasons of the heart, and that material rewards were of no consequence once the real danger was considered. Thus Khristo found himself bribed and flattered in the same moment. Wily old bastard, he thought, enjoying the performance for the pure virtuosity of it. “Someone has to do it,” the man said, shaking his head in wonder at what the world seemed to demand of both of them.
And the restaurant bills were nothing compared to what they spent on him after the operation got under way. The NKVD, he thought, would have woven an elaborate conspiracy to achieve the same results, using coercion, ideology—whatever human pressure point could be laid bare. The Americans, on the other hand, fought with money and technology, and they were extravagant with both.
They flew Khristo down to OSS headquarters in Bari, Italy, and trained him in the use of the new J-E radio. The Joan-Eleanor communications system had been the brainchild of Lieutenant Commander Steve Simpson, an engineer from RCA, who named the invention after a certain Joan, a WAC major he quite liked, and Eleanor, the wife of his associate, DeWitt Goddard. Clandestine communications to that point had depended on the self-descriptive suitcase radio. The J-E radio was six inches long, had an aerial that unfolded to one foot in length, and transmitted to a receiver in a British De Havilland Mosquito—a fast little two-man fighter-bomber with a range of 1800 miles—circling above the transmission point. And the German radio réparage could not locate a J-E radio.
On a quarter-moon night in early January, Khristo Stoianev was parachuted into the Czech countryside south of Prague, the insertion achieved by a B-24 Liberator specially modified for agent drops behind enemy lines. The bomber was painted matte black, making it nearly invisible, even when tracked by German searchlights. The exhaust flame was shielded, the ball turret normally found on the belly of the plane had been removed—altering its silhouette—and a hinged plywood panel installed in its place to serve as exit hatch for the parachutist. The navigator’s compartment in the nose of the airplane was sealed off in such a way as to create the total darkness required for visual navigation at night. On a normal bombing run, great numbers of planes flew over a target at 20,000 feet, protected by fighter squadrons.
Agent insertion technology demanded that the plane fly alone, 500 feet above the ground, at the slowest possible speed—sometimes less than 120 miles per hour—the sort of contour aviation that demanded some moonlight and a cloudfree night. The navigator followed roads, or moonlight reflected from rivers or lakes. Some of the runs used German concentration camps as beacons, since they were lit brightly all night long to discourage escapes.
Khristo landed without difficulty, in the proper location. His papers were excellent forgeries, typed on German typewriters, stamped properly with German inks, and the legend created for him—a fictitious life cycle from birth to present—was indeed as the man with the pipe had suggested it might be. He was a Yugoslav conscript worker of Croatian origin, a machine tool expert and drill-press operator, a valuable asset to the Reich. He carried a thick wad of German Reichsmarks and Czech crowns and an additional sum in gold coins. His map was perfect, guiding him into Prague along the Vltava River in something under six hours once he had stolen a bicycle. He made his way to a safe house, owned by a mathematics teacher, where he was received with cheese dumplings and eggs.
The objectives of the FELDSPAR mission were not complicated: he was to collect and transmit data on bombing effectiveness and war factory production in Bohemia, the region of Prague, and prepare for the reception of additional agents. The J-E radio would work very nicely from a roof, and the Mosquito would be circling 35,000 feet above him at certain prearranged hours of the night, unseen by German antiaircraft crews. There had been no arrangement made for exfiltration; General Patton’s Third Army was headed that way at a good clip and they would come to him. If he got into trouble, the Czech underground could move him to the protection of units fighting in the Tatra Mountains to the south.
Hundreds of man-hours had clearly been spent on this mission and, to the extent possible, the nature of the operation shielded him from excessive peril. That gave him a certain confidence, reinforced by his NKVD schooling and experience, which trained one to rely on guile and ruthlessness because there was no J-E radio and not enough aviation gasoline for an airplane to fly in circles over the communicating agent.
Concentrate, the briefers told him. Know where you are and whom you are with every second of every day, and if you experience fatigue, treat it as you would a dangerous sickness. Keep incriminating evidence as far away from you as possible—hide everything. When you are out in the streets of Prague, you must be a Yugoslavian conscript worker. They used chemicals to remove the nicotine stain from his index finger because cigarettes were sufficiently scarce in Occupied Europe that the yellowish discoloration was now rarely seen. The Czechs you’ll be working with, they told him, are very good, espionage has been a high art in Central Europe for hundreds of years. FELDSPAR certainly was, he thought, a mission guaranteed for success as much as any operation of that type could ever be.
Perhaps his nerve slipped.
He accused himself of that more than once, as January became February and Prague lay under a blanket of dirty ice in the coldest winter in Europe for forty years. He’d left the teacher’s house after three days. He had no objective reason to do so—it was simply that the neighborhood felt wrong. He moved to a burned-out warehouse on the eastern edge of the industrial district, a place where barrels of cooking oil had been stored. The building stood three stories high, scorch patterns flared out on the plaster walls above and below the broken windows, and when the rains came in early March, oil that had leached into the cinder loading yard over the years returned to the surface and the smell of it, singed and rancid, hung in the wet air. He lived in what had once been the warehouse office, where a small stove still functioned, bought black market coal at an exorbitant price and lugged it back to his hideout in a metal bucket. And, anytime he went anywhere, he carried a small snub-nosed VZ/27 he’d picked up from his coal supplier. That was something no Yugoslav conscript worker would dare to have, but he had no intention of being taken alive here, not by these Occupation troops, not by this Gestapo. It was a cheap, shoddy weapon, a 7.65 automatic with a miserly eight-round magazine and a plastic grip, produced under Occupation, with Böhmische Waffenfabrik Prag replacing the usual Czech manufacturer’s mark. This pistol was made in German Bohemia—the inscription implied—there is no such thing as Czechoslovakia.
But there was. The Czechs had insisted on that.
And the well-dressed people in Bern and Bari who had paid for the lunches hadn’t told him about Prague. Oh, they’d told him, in so many words, in rather cool, unemotional language, what the situation was, describing the political climate, analyzing the cultural and economic conditions, characterizing weather, food, religion, local customs—all the empirical data you could want.
But Prague, in the winter and early spring of 1945, would have required a chorus of the damned to do it true justice. Khristo, when he was out among the people, believed he could actually feel it, like a sickness, a cold, gestating rage that swelled toward the moment of its birth. And the harder the Germans bore down, the more they whipped and tortured and executed, the more it grew. “The day will come,” one of his agents had told him, “when we will hang them up by the feet and soak them with gasoline and set them alight. Upside down, you see, so that they do not die too quickly from breathing the smoke. You will be here,” the man said. “You will see it.”
Khristo believed him. It was not a fantasy of the oppressed, it was a plan, a lucid, thought-out ritual of justice, and the day of its reality was not far off. In the Staroměstské Square, in the old part of the city, there was a medieval clock high on the fa
çade of the town hall. When the hour struck, a painted Christ and twelve apostles would appear one by one in a little window below the clock, followed by the figure of hooded Death, whose bell sounded for the passing of time, then the Turk, the Miser, the Vain Fool, and, at last, the Cock. The Germans found it fascinating—Bohemian folklore displayed for their pleasure—and they would gather below the clock when it struck the hour and point and smile and take photographs. They seemed able to ignore the faces of the Czechs who surrounded them: taut, watchful faces, pale amid the dark clothing that everyone seemed to wear, pale in the perpetual dusk of cloudy days and coal smoke that hung above the city.
His principal contact with the Czech underground was named Hlava, a stolid, heavy man who wore eyeglasses with clear plastic frames, a man whose hoarse, measured breathing seemed, to Khristo, a kind of audible melancholia. They sat one seat apart in movie theaters, bumped shoulders in the street as they made brush passes—a scrap of paper moving invisibly from one to the other—urinated side by side in metal troughs in railway stations, shook hands like old friends in shopping streets just after dark. In one week in February they saw the same German newsreel three times: Hermann Göring, having just shot a bison in his private game preserve, distributed the meat to refugees on the road as they streamed in from Soviet-conquered territories in East Prussia.
Hlava was employed as chief bookkeeper in a factory that repaired shot-up Messerschmitt fighter planes. Now and then they were able to meet in a situation where actual conversation was possible, and Hlava revealed himself to be a man who told a certain kind of joke. “Three Czechs—a Bohemian, a Slovakian, and a Moravian—meet in heaven. The first one says …” He never laughed at the jokes, simply gazed at Khristo, awaiting a reaction, his breath rasping in and out in a slow, methodical tempo.
There were, at any given time, about a dozen other agents. Khristo spent his days bicycling around the city, hard-pressed to make his treffs—as the Russians called clandestine meetings. There was a violin teacher whose pupils were mostly the children of German officers, and she had a way with papers—letters, reports—left lying atop desks in studies. There was a police detective, apparently enough trusted by the Germans to see marginal intelligence distributions. Four or five factory workers, a factory physician, a clerk in the electric utility who fed him data on the daily rise and fall of power usage in certain industrial facilities critical to the German war effort.
But then, on March 20, he was offered information of a very different sort. It reached him in bed, amid a jumble of sweaty blankets in a hotel room that rented by the hour, reached him as he smoked a cigarette and stared at the waterstained ceiling above him, numb and mindless for the moment, in a blank daze that passed for tranquillity.
Magda, she was called, buxom and fat-hipped and exceptionally pink, with a thick yellow braid that fell to the small of her back. Had his controllers known about her, they would have told him he was signing his own death warrant. And she was not the only one; there were others, who drifted into his life, then disappeared: one was dark and looked like a Gypsy, another was very young and brought him small gifts. There was a seamstress who scented herself with lilac water, and a soldier’s widow who dressed all in black.
Together, they constituted yet another step into the forbidden zone. Like the burned-out factory where he slept. Like the pistol beneath the horsehair pillow on the hotel bed. He’d been driven to it, somehow, he did not understand why, but something had its fist in his back and forced him into acts which, in his particular circumstances, amounted to dancing blindfolded at the edge of a cliff. The women he knew were not prostitutes, they simply needed money and needed to make love and weren’t averse to going to bed with a generous man. And he was generous. “Here,” he’d say, “make sure and eat a good dinner tonight, you look worn out.” He knew that he was calling attention to himself, easily the worst thing he could do, but he couldn’t stop. Maybe, he thought, his nerve really had slipped. Or was it, perhaps, some premonition about the future that compelled him to a kind of greed, compelled him to take from life anything it might give him. Christ, he thought, you are acting like Sascha Vonets.
“Hey you, dreamer,” said Magda, rolling onto her ample stomach and propping her chin on her hands. “I met an old friend of yours. He said, ‘That black-haired fellow you see, we used to be pals.’ ”
Magda was much given to fancy, he didn’t take it too seriously. “Oh?” he said. “What did he look like, then?”
“Mm, like Death in a play.”
She was evidently going to spin a tale. Amused, he turned on his side to see her face. “How strange. He carried a scythe, perhaps?”
“No, you stupid man. He was thin as a skeleton, with staring eyes and long, bony fingers. A scythe indeed! I was at the Novy Bor restaurant, at the buffet. He just came right up to my table and spoke to me. ‘Say hello to him for me,’ he said.”
She moved her face close to his. “Now give me a great big kiss,” she said.
The truth of it began to reach him and his body tensed. “What are you saying?” he asked, eyes searching her placid face.
She made popping noises with her lips. “Kissy,” she said, running a fingernail down his flank.
“Is this true? What else did he say?” His voice was quite different now.
She pouted for a moment and rolled her eyes—she’d gotten his attention, but it wasn’t the sort of attention she’d wanted. “Some silliness about a postal box. B, F, uh, eight something. I don’t remember. But there is no such address in Prague. We don’t use the alphabet, just numbers. One of your black market friends, no doubt. Now, ungrateful man …”
“That’s it, all of it?” he said, every nerve in his body humming.
“Yes, my little king,” she sighed, sorry now that she’d bothered to bring it up, “that’s all of it.” She snuggled against him and cooed on his chest, her hand walking on two fingers down his belly.
He made himself respond, and the cooing became mock-surprised, then appreciative. “Witch!” he said softly by her ear, “you turn a man into a tomcat.” He reached across her shoulder, pressed his cigarette out in an ashtray on the bedside table, stroked her back. Novy Bor restaurant, he thought, at the buffet.
“Meow,” she said.
Lunch and dinner at the Novy Bor on March 21.
A long, narrow room, windows white with steam so that people in the street passed like ghosts, black and white tiles of the floor awash with water from muddy boots, over a hundred people talking in low voices, the clatter of trays, a portrait of Hitler on the yellow wall above the bubbling tea urn.
And again on March 22, this time aborting a pass from Hlava scheduled for noon.
A pass successfully managed at the fallback location on the morning of March 23, a page torn from a copybook pressed into his hand:
1. New plant directives specify that workers absenting themselves from the factory for any reason shall be charged with economic sabotage against the Reich and hung without trial, such hangings to take place directly outside the factory as example to all workers.
2. Two N40 milling machines down after gears sabotaged with emery grit.
3. Repair of six ME-109 fuselages delayed by oxyacetylene shortage. Resupply promised for week of 9 April. Old-fashioned metal brazing techniques used instead of welding and parts shipped.
4. ME-110 wing trucked in on 18 March appears to have taken intensive ground fire from small-bore weapons. Number 770 1-12 on wing.
Lunch on March 23 at Novy Bor. Khristo sat against the wall opposite the buffet counter. As he was stalling through the last of his beer, Josef Voluta appeared at the table with a bowl of soup on a tray. Almost immediately after he sat down, two old men joined them at the table.
“Salt, please,” Voluta said, handing him a slip of paper beneath the table. Khristo passed him the salt.
“Thank you,” Voluta said.
Khristo waited a few minutes and sipped his beer in silence, then rose from the
table and went into the toilet, locked the door, and read the small slip of brown paper. When he emerged, Voluta was gone. He sat back down at the table and finished the beer before leaving.
Could this be the man, he wondered, that he had known at Arbat Street? His face was gray and lean, features sharpened, eyes too bright. The backs of his hands showed patches of glossy red skin, the mark of recently healed burns. He had eaten his soup hunched over, face close to the bowl, holding the spoon in his fist, moving with a steady, constant motion—a man servicing a machine. Khristo fought the sudden urge, nearly a compulsion, to find a mirror and look at his face.
On one edge of the message from “An NKVD Colonel” a different hand had written the word Sascha. In writing that Khristo took to be Voluta’s, a message had been penciled on the back of the paper: Jiráskuv bridge, March 24, 8:05 P.M., then 9:1 j, then 10:20. If not, good luck. The message was written in Russian.
My God, Khristo thought. Sascha.
On the night of March 24, 1945, a De Havilland Mosquito circled at 35,000 feet above the city of Prague. All armament had been removed from the airplane, marginally increasing its range. Even so, the plane would land at the OSS field at Bari with its fuel tank nearly empty, the round trip between the two cities barely within its capacity. The pilot and navigator wore fur gloves and sheepskin jackets and breathed from an oxygen tank—their problem was altitude, not hostile anti-aircraft fire. Even if the Germans could hear them, they couldn’t see them that high up.
A four-minute message from the FELDSPAR operative, crouching somewhere on a roof down below, was recorded on a wire-spool machine and flown back to OSS headquarters in Bari. The FELDSPAR committee, responsible for oversight of the operation, was waiting anxiously for the recording. They spent fifteen minutes discussing the information, then sent it on to the typists and clerks. Data on German war production capabilities in Occupied Czechoslovakia was immediately prepared for distribution to various analysis groups. A rather peculiar addition to the message, concerning an NKVD colonel offering material on Soviet intelligence operations in exchange for exfiltration from someplace in Romania, was only briefly discussed. Someone said it sounded like a provocation, somebody else wondered what the hell the FELDSPAR operative was doing with stuff like that—who was he talking to?
