Alan Furst's Classic Spy Novels

by Alan Furst

  “These friends … are all NKVD friends.”

  “And you, Drazen.”

  “Perhaps someone wonders just what really goes on with you, where your heart is. You walked away from the Russians in 1936. Or maybe not.”

  “Horseshit,” Khristo said.

  “Yes? Could be. All apologies, and so forth, but explain to me why you are not the bait in an NKVD trap? You go up into that godforsaken Bessarabia—some little fishing village, a place beyond the end of the world. Romania now belongs to the Russians, so what you are trying to do is draw OSS operatives onto Sovietoccupied soil. Where they will be gobbled up and put on show. Somehow, heaven only knows how, American newspapers learn of this. ‘Oh-ho!’ they say. ‘This bunch of wild asses in the OSS now spies on our great ally in the war. Off with their heads!’ ”

  Khristo stood up. There was silence in the room.

  “Sit down, sit down,” Kulic said, making calming motions with his hand. The old woman returned and poured beer into his tin can from a pitcher. “Very well,” he went on, “you are a virgin.”

  Khristo sat down on the bench. His hands were shaking so he put them between his knees.

  Kulic leaned forward and spoke very quietly. “It is politics. The American government is going to shut down the OSS. The minute the Axis surrender is final—that’s the end of it. Some sections will be moved around to other departments, some of the networks will be salvaged, but …”

  “And so?”

  “So there is no guarantee, even if you should manage to slip through the Russian nets on this river, that there will be anybody to help you in Romania.”

  “Even if you tell them that I am not a traitor?”

  “Even then. You could be unknowing, no sort of traitor at all, yet still bait. You’ve seen such operations.”

  Khristo was silent. It had happened in Paris: he had been drawn into a scheme to stir up the Soviet intelligence apparat in Western Europe, and he had never known about it until too late, until Aleksandra was gone.

  Kulic’s expression changed. There was suddenly discomfort in his face, regret, as though he had determined to do something that he did not want to do, but that he knew he had to do. “Khristo Nicolaievich,” he said quietly, “you are my old friend. I know your heart. But we are both part of something that is larger than two individuals and sometimes, in war, individuals cannot matter. There are times when a sacrifice has to be made. But, for one time, maybe we should try to let friendship win. Let us take you south, through the mountains. We’ll put you on a boat, give you a passport of some kind, and leave you in Trieste. It’s not a bad place, you can live there if you like. Or go to Paris and drive a cab. Live your life, stop fighting, have your politics over a coffee if you must have them, but for God’s sake do not delude yourself about Americans. They change, Khristo. One minute they are excited, the next cool. What point is there in having two useless corpses in Sfintu Gheorghe instead of one? They may decide to leave you sitting there like a fool, untrusted, a provocateur for the Soviets, and such a thing would be too sad for an old friend to see. I will get you down the river, if you feel you must go, but my heart tells me that tragedy is waiting for you there.”

  Khristo lay on a blanket in the corner of the room but he was too cold to sleep. From time to time someone got up and fed the fire and he stared into the flames and wondered what to do. Lying next to him was a girl, perhaps seventeen, with a blanket pulled over her head like a shawl. Awake, she would be soft and pretty, he knew, but in sleep her face was aged and frightened. Her eyelids flickered, then her lips moved as though she were speaking in a dream.

  He was so cold. He had lived a cold, wasted life, he thought. Blown about in storms from Vidin to Moscow to Spain and then Paris. Santé prison had put an end to that, a white blank in his life. And what was the point? To end up dead in some little Bessarabian village? Was that why he had been put on this earth?

  The end of the war was coming; it would be like a dawn, the living would sigh with relief and set about to change the world. He wanted to see it. He wanted to live. It would be the best of times to start a new life. Trieste. A part of Aleksandra’s fantasy. Something about the place had always intrigued her. Perhaps she had been right. In Trieste, he knew, there were Slavs and Italians living side by side—he would not have to be an émigré, an alien, he could just be a man.

  Looking into the fire, he could see it. Little streets with radios playing behind shuttered windows, bakeries, dogs napping in the sun. He could walk beside the Adriatic with a newspaper folded beneath his arm. He could stop at a café and read the news. About the mayor and his deputies and the scandal over the contract for the repair of the local streets. Out at sea, a freighter would move slowly across the horizon.

  The girl sleeping beside him mumbled some words and, for a moment, her face was touched by sorrow.

  In the morning it was raining and wisps of fog hung in the tops of the pine trees. Someone gave him a cup of hot water flavored with tea and he felt much better after he’d drunk it. Then Kulic took him some way up the mountain—they had to walk very slowly, and Khristo helped him in the difficult places—to an open meadow, a sloping field with mist lying above the long grass and a row of wooden boards set in the ground. One of them was marked Aleksandra—1943

  Khristo stood with his hands in his pockets, his face wet in the rain. “She came down here in ’37,” Kulic said. “When Ilya got her released, he bought her a ticket and put her on a train. He sent along a letter. ‘Keep her out of sight,’ he said. ‘Encourage her to live quietly.’ She did just that. Stayed in a village and worked in a shop, kept to herself. She was someone whose fire had gone out, though you could see, every now and then, how she’d been. But she seemed to have promised herself to be that way no more, to make the world pay for what it had done to her by withholding her light from it. Then we were invaded and went to war. In the strange way of things, it brought her back to life. She fought with us, first as a courier, then with a rifle. We took a German supply column in October of 1943—mules with mortar rounds strapped to them. And when the thing was finished we found her curled up behind a tree and she was gone. The magazine of her rifle was empty, Khristo, she bore her share of it and more.

  “While she was with us, she used the cover identity that Goldman had provided for her. But then, as the war went on, she began to call herself Aleksandra. So, when we brought her up here, we marked her grave with that name only, as we believed she would have wished. From Ilya, I knew her story, but she never spoke of you, or of Paris, but neither did she take a lover.”

  “Thank you for bringing me here,” Khristo said.

  “I spoke to you from the heart last night, about Trieste, but I could not let you go away without seeing this. It is another side of things, something between you and me, only that.”

  “It’s better for me that I found out,” he said.

  “There are meadow flowers this time of year,” Kulic said. “I’ll wait for you if you like.”

  Three days later, he went east on the river.

  Kulic found him a berth on a tug called the Brovno, bound for Belgrade to pick up a bargeload of iron pipe destined for the rebuilding of the transfer station at Galati, in Romania, the final staging point for oil going to Soviet Black Sea ports. Obtaining export stamps for the pipe had been, according to the pilot of the Brovno, “like a fire in a whorehouse—everybody running around in circles and screaming at everybody else.” The city of Belgrade had been virtually leveled by the Wehrmacht, and whatever pipe they did manage to fabricate was, they felt, better used to supply water for Yugoslavian toilets rather than fuel for Soviet tanks. And as for the Romanian state trading company, which had to be pounded on the back until it coughed up the import papers, well, that was even worse. A fire in a whorehouse on a Friday night. “All spies up there,” the pilot said. “Romanians.”

  For Khristo, there was little to do aboard the Brovno. Ivo, the pilot, stayed in the wheelhouse while his brother-in
-law, Josip, ran the engine down below and his son, called Marek, served as second engineer. The Brovno was a big, powerful river tug, built just before the war. They’d run her up an inlet in 1940, built a shack around her, dismantled the diesel engine and hidden the parts in three separate attics, then gone off to the hills to fight the Germans.

  Khristo spent most of his time leaning on a railing and watching the land go by. Kulic had taken him off to the Osijek town hall and obtained, using forged identification papers, a Yugoslav work permit as a deckhand. So he was officially part of the Brovno’s crew, but the captain wanted no part of him as a worker. “What do you want me to do?” he asked as they got under way at dawn.

  Ivo thought for a time. “Coil a rope,” he said.

  “And then?”

  Ivo shrugged. “Put it in the rope locker, if you like.”

  He did neither. The river was taking him home, and he wanted to stand at the railing and gaze at the countryside. The hundred and twenty miles from Osijek down to Belgrade passed quickly, and by nightfall they’d pulled into the river Sava and tied up while Ivo went off to the dockside office of the harbormaster. He was gone for a long time. When he returned, he rang for three-quarter power and nosed the Brovno through a forest of tugs and barges with such speed that their wake drew curses all across the harbor. “What did they say?” Khristo asked.

  “He said he’d throw me in the river. I said I’d throw him in the river. Then he signed over the barge.”

  “That took three hours?”

  “We said it many different ways.”

  They located the pipe-laden barge and tied up to it, positioning themselves at a point just forward of the stern on the starboard quarter, then, at Ivo’s direction, resecured the load, tightening the cables down with a Stillson wrench. It was after midnight by the time they pushed the barge out of the Sava and back onto the Danube, turning east by north into the foothills of the Carpathians. How you came across the Hungarian plain, and then into the Serbian mountains, on a river that ran downhill, Khristo had never really understood, but the mountain shapes rose bulky and dark on either side of the river and the air grew sharp as they moved through the night. Ivo navigated by the beam of a powerful searchlight that swept the river ahead of him, revealing shoals and sandbars where the water foamed white. Somewhere past the giant fort at Smederevo, the light fell upon a pair of bodies, a man and a woman, joined together at the wrist by rope or wire, shifting slowly downriver on the current. “Collaborators,” Ivo said, his cigarette glowing red in the darkened pilothouse.

  Khristo slept for a time, after Marek relieved Ivo at the helm, swaying in a hammock in the crew cabin, waking at dawn to a moment of panic as he tried to remember where he was. On deck, he saw that the Brovno had tied up to a small dock, for customs and passport stamps and to take on a Romanian pilot, a small man in a suit and tie. “For the Iron Gate,” Marek explained.

  “Who is this?” the Romanian said, staring at Khristo.

  “Deckhand,” Marek answered, winking at Khristo above the man’s head.

  Taking the hint, he went off and coiled a rope in the stern. Ivo, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, appeared and took the helm, and they were off at slow speed through the Kazan pass into Romania.

  It was the strangest piece of river he’d ever seen, sculptured columns of rock thrust up in midstream and the mountains closed in like high walls. There were sudden dips and falls in the river, and the Brovno and its barge plunged and bucked past rocky outcrops that looked close enough to touch and echoed back the throb of the pistons above the water. As morning came, the passage filled with strange light. He kneeled in the stern, a piece of tarry rope forgotten in his hands, and watched a line of sunlight crawl up the slope of a mountain, turning the mass of dark shapes into a forest of evergreen trees, their branches hanging with the weight of morning rain, droplets glittering as the sun caught them.

  The Bulgarian border station was a sagging dock at the mouth of the river Timok. Two army captains came on board and sat at a table in the crew cabin. Glasses and brandy were produced. One of the captains was dark-skinned and wore a thick mustache, the other was fair-skinned, with black hair and blue eyes. When they had finished their brandy, Khristo and Marek were brought in together to have their papers stamped. The pale captain looked at him curiously. “He’s new,” he said.

  “Yes,” Ivo said, “a hard worker. My sister’s boy.”

  The man glanced down at the Yugoslav papers, then back up at Khristo. “He looks like a Bulgarian,” he said. “Who’d your sister marry?”

  Ivo shook his head. “Do not ask,” he said, voice filled with mock sorrow. They laughed together.

  The captain stamped his papers. “Good luck to you,” he said, using an old-fashioned Bulgarian idiom. Khristo smiled uncertainly and nodded his way out of the crew cabin.

  Under way once more, they drew close to Vidin, and when the river turned south at the chalk cliff hollowed out by curving water, he was home. They chugged past the shacks by the river with grapevines that looped over the reed roofs, the pole-built docks, the minarets, and the Turkish fortress on the beach. He stood like a sailor, leaning on his elbows, one foot hooked in the lowest rail, and a woman in black waved from the shore. He waved back. Then the town receded in the distance, a small place lit by a weak April sun, the river turned east again, and it was gone.

  The days and nights blended together on the river, it was as though the rules of ordinary life were suspended and hours no longer mattered. There were high guard towers on the Romanian shore—sometimes the glint of binoculars—and twice they were boarded from patrol boats and searched. But there was nothing to be discovered, only some Yugoslav river sailors and a load of iron pipe on a barge. Europe was lost behind them—after the Iron Gate they were in a different land, a different time, running along the great plain that reached to the edge of the Black Sea. At Silistra, the Brovno left Bulgarian territory and moved north toward the Romanian delta. A day later, they crossed the southern boundary of the strange land known as Bessarabia. Officially it was Romanian territory, called Moldavian Romania, lying south of the Ukrainian SSR, which was part of Russia. But the name Bessarabia was older than the official borders, and it had always been a lost place, home to ancient Russian religious sects expelled from the interior, home to Jews and Turks and Gypsies and Tatars and tribes so lost they no longer had any name at all. It was a place for people that nobody else wanted.

  The spring wind blew hard from the west and the sky shifted gray and white and blue above them. Along the shore, birch and poplar groves were leafing out, softening the empty fields that ran to the horizon and vanished in the distant hills. At dawn, herons worked at fishing in the shallows. Khristo felt he was sailing on the edge of the world, east of the Balkans. At dusk, the mountains of Transylvania were silhouettes, backlit by the setting sun, and where the land fell away from the river he could see lakes that turned violet as night came on and great clouds of birds that rose from the shore and wheeled across the evening sky. The nights were black, with not a single light to be seen. Late one night they saw a bonfire on an island, with human shapes dancing slowly before it. Ivo shut the engines down but there was no music to be heard, only the sounds of insects and water sweeping by the hull and a deep silence.

  In April of 1945, in Palestine, Jewish refugees arriving by freighter from Cyprus came first to the northern port of Haifa, where they sat on benches in a large shed and waited to be processed. They were called by number, and each held tightly to a worn scrap of paper and waited, patiently or impatiently, to see one of several men and women who sat at old school desks facing the benches. They came from everywhere—from Jelgava in Latvia, from Wilno in Poland, from Strasbourg in France—everywhere. They had survived Hitler in a number of ways. Some had spent years in an attic or a cellar—having never seen the sun for all that time. Others had lived in the forests like animals. Still others had hidden themselves by the use of deception—assuming non-Jewish identities,
sometimes resorting to blackmail or bribery of officials to ensure that identity checks confirmed their false papers.

  It was hot under the metal roof of the shed and there were flies, and the people waiting on the benches were exhausted. Heshel Zavi tried to be kind, to be patient, but he was not young anymore and these were difficult people, suspicious, often hostile. They had saved their lives, a miracle. They had reached Palestine, another miracle. They had dreamed of oranges and joyous rabbis. Now they were confronted with Heshel Zavi, an old man with a short temper who had to ask them questions and write things down on paper. To the people on the benches, those who sat behind desks and wrote things on paper were enemies.

  Heshel Zavi didn’t look much like an enemy—he was a burly old man in an open-neck shirt with a yarmulke set precariously atop stiff, wooly curls—but some of their other enemies had not looked like enemies either. Well, he thought, it’s to be expected. He glanced at the chalkboard in the corner and saw that the next number was 183. He called it out in Hebrew. There was no answer. Too much to hope for, he thought. He grumbled to himself and tried it in Yiddish. Again, no answer. What next, Polish? Russian? He tried Russian. Ah-hah, he said to himself.

  This one was youngish, with a week’s growth of stubble on his face. He wore the long overcoat and the traditional hat and shuffled to the desk, shoulders stooped, eyes lowered, much the usual thing, yet Heshel Zavi was not so sure. This one looked like a yeshiva bucher, a dedicated student of the Torah, yet there was more to him than that. He had small, clever features, there was something of the rat in him. Not quite a bad rat—Heshel Zavi amended his impression—a good rat, a wise rat, a rat in a children’s story. But not a mouse. Definitely not a mouse.