by Alan Furst
Now it was 7:10. There were candles on the tables of the tearoom in Otava Street. Morath studied the menu, mounted in a brass frame on a stand by the door. Inside, a Czech army officer watched him for a moment, then rose from his chair, leaving an uneaten pastry on his plate. To get to his feet, the officer used a stick, a good one, Morath saw, with a brass tip and an ivory head. He was not far from Morath’s age, with a soldier’s face and a neatly trimmed beard, blond and gray and red.
They shook hands in the street. “Colonel Novotny,” the officer said, with a motion of the head somewhere between a nod and a bow.
“Morath.”
An exchange of pleasantries. We are like, Morath thought, two provincial officials, meeting in the sleepy days of the old empire.
Novotny had a military car: the least expensive Opel, something like a Parisian taxicab, painted olive green. “We are going up toward Kreslice,” he said. “About forty kilometers from here.”
Morath opened the passenger door. On the seat was a holstered automatic pistol in a leather belt. “Oh, just put that on the floor,” Novotny said. “We’re in the Sudetenland here—it’s wiser to have something in the car.”
They drove on mountain roads, darker as they climbed, the beams of the headlights alive with moths. Novotny squinted through the windshield, the narrow dirt path twisted and turned and disappeared into the night. Twice they had to put branches under the wheels, and when they crossed bridges over mountain streams—built for wagons and oxen—Morath got out and walked ahead of the car with a flashlight. They passed one house only, a woodcutter’s hut. Up on the crest, something ran away from them; they could hear it, crashing through the underbrush.
“I brought my dog along once,” Novotny said, “coming up here. She went crazy. Ran around and around the car, scratching the windows with her paws.”
“What do you have?”
“Pointer bitch.”
“I’ve had them—couldn’t wait to go to work.”
“That’s her. She was crying because I wouldn’t let her out of the car. I’ve seen bear up here, and stag. Wild boar. The peasants say there’s lynx—kills their animals.”
Novotny slowed to a crawl, worked the car carefully around a hairpin curve. Morath could hear a stream a long way below them. “A shame, really,” Novotny said. “When we start fighting here, well, you know what happens to the game.”
“I know. I was in the Carpathians, in ’15.”
“This is, of course, where we want them.”
“In the mountains.”
“Yes. We watched them mobilize, back in May. Very educational. Tanks, trucks, cars, motorcycles. Big gasoline tankers. It’s not a secret, what they mean to do—read Guderian’s book, and Rommel’s. Everything’s motorized, that’s the sharp edge of the ax. After the first wave, of course, it’s all horses and artillery limbers, like everyone else. So, the logic goes, run them up the mountains, or make them go through the valleys.”
“Enfilade.”
“Yes. With registered mortars. And machine guns on the hillsides.”
“When will it start?”
“In the fall. We hold them two months, it starts to snow.” Up ahead, the road was cut into wagon ruts. Then it grew steeper, and Novotny shifted into a whining first gear. “What did you do, last time?”
“Hussars. The Sixteenth Corps, in the Second Army.”
“Magyar.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I was in the Seventh. First under Pflanzer, then Baltin.”
“Down in Moldavia.”
“To start with. Eventually—I’m an artillery officer—they sent me up to Russian Poland. Lemberg and Przemysl.”
“The forts.”
“Twenty-eight months,” Novotny said. “Lost them, got them back.”
Morath had never fought alongside the Czechs. The Austrian army spoke ten languages—Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Serbian, Slovene, Ruthenian, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, and German—and was normally divided into regiments based on nationality. But the history of the soldiers who defended the forts was well known. Twice they’d been surrounded and cut off, but the hundred and fifty thousand men in the blockhouses and bunkers had held out for months, while Russian dead piled up beneath their guns.
It was well after nine when they reached the Kreslice barracks—a set of long, low buildings in the imperial style, built of the honey-colored sandstone so loved by Franz Josef’s architects. “We can probably get something for dinner,” Novotny said, sounding hopeful. But there was a feast laid on for Morath in the officers’ mess. Roast goose, red cabbage with vinegar, beer from a small brewery in Pilsen, and a lieutenant general at the head of the table.
“To friendship between our nations!”
“To friendship!”
Many of the officers were bearded, the style among artillerymen, and many had served on the eastern front in 1914—Morath saw all the medals. Most decorated of all, the general: short and thick and angry. And fairly drunk, Morath thought, with a flushed face and a loud voice. “It gets harder and harder to read the goddamn newspapers,” he said. “Back in the winter, they couldn’t love us enough, especially the French. Czechoslovakia—new hope! Liberal democracy—example for Europe! Masaryk and Benes—statesmen for the ages! Then something happened. Back in July, I think it was, there was Halifax, in the House of Lords, talking about ‘impractical devotion to high purpose.’ Oh shit, we said, now look what’s happened.”
“And it continues,” Novotny said. “The little minuet.”
The general took a long drink of beer and wiped his mouth with an olive-green napkin. “It encourages him, of course. The Reichsführer. The army’s the only thing he ever liked, now he’s gotten tired of watching it march. Now he wants to see it fight. But he’s coming to the wrong neighborhood.”
“Because you’ll fight back.”
“We’ll give him a good Czech boot up his Austrian ass, is what we’ll do. This Wehrmacht, we have films of their maneuvers; they’re built to roll across the plains of Europe. It’s the Poles who ought to worry, and the Russians. Down here, we’ll fight in the mountains. Like the Swiss, like the Spaniards. He can beat us—he’s bigger than we are, no way to change that—but it will take everything he has. When he does that, he leaves the Siegfried Line wide open, and the French can march in with a battalion of café waiters.”
“If they dare.” There was laughter at the table.
The general’s eyes glowed. Like Novotny’s pointer bitch, he couldn’t wait to get at the game. “Yes, if they dare—something’s gone wrong with them.” He paused for a moment, then leaned toward Morath. “And what about Hungary? It’s all plains, just like Poland. You don’t even have a river.”
“God only knows,” Morath said. “We barely have an army. For the moment, we depend on being smarter than they are.”
“Smarter,” the general said. He thought it over: it didn’t seem like much. “Than all of them?”
“Hitler killed off the really smart ones, or chased them out of the country. So, for the moment, that’s what we have.”
“Well then, may God watch over you,” the general said.
They gave him a room of his own—above the stables, the horses restless down below—a hard bed, and a bottle of plum brandy. At least, he thought, they didn’t send along “the stableman’s daughter.” He drank some of the brandy, but still he couldn’t sleep. It was thunder that kept him awake, from a storm that never rained yet never moved away. He looked out the window now and then, but the sky was all stars. Then he realized that the Czechs were working at night. He could feel it in the floor. Not thunder, dynamite, the explosions rolling back and forth across the valleys. It was the engineers who kept him awake, blowing the faces off their mountains, building fortifications.
2:30. 3:00. Instead of sleeping, he smoked. He had felt, since he came to the barracks, a certain, familiar undercurrent. Together we live, together we die, and nobody cares which way it goes. He hadn’t felt
it for a long time. It wasn’t that he liked it, but thinking about it kept him awake.
*
Just after dawn they were back on the mountain roads, this time in an armored car, accompanied by the general and a pale, soft civilian in a black suit, quite sinister, with tinted eyeglasses and very little to say. A spy, Morath thought. At least, a spy in a movie.
The road was newly made, ripped out of the forest with bulldozers and explosives then surfaced with sawn tree trunks at the low spots. It would break your back but it wouldn’t stall your car. To make matters worse, the armored car rode as though it were sprung with steel bars. “Better keep your mouth closed,” Novotny said. Then added, “No offense meant.”
Morath never saw the fort until they were almost on top of it—cement walls, broken by firing slits, built into the mountainside, and independent blockhouses hidden in the natural sweep of the terrain. The general, clearly proud of the work, said, “Now you see it, now you don’t.”
Morath was impressed and showed it.
The spy smiled, pleased with the reaction.
Inside, the raw smell of new cement and damp earth. As they went down endless flights of stairs, Novotny said, “They have elevators in the Maginot Line. For people, elevators. But here, only the ammunition gets to ride.” A shaft had been carved out of the rock, Morath could see, with a steel platform on cables that could be operated electrically or cranked by hand.
The spy’s German was atrocious. “So many forts are blown up from their own magazines. It need not happen.”
Novotny was joined by a group of officers who manned the fort. As they moved down a long corridor, the general put out a hand so that Morath stayed back from the group. “How do you like my engineer?”
“Who is he?”
“A fortification expert—artist is a better word. From the Savoy. They’ve been building these things since the renaissance—tradition of Leonardo, all that.”
“He’s Italian?”
The general spread his hands. “French by passport, Italian by culture, though he would say Savoyard, and a Jew by birth.” The Savoy, a mountain country between France and Italy, had managed to keep its independence until 1860. “They’ve always permitted Jews to serve as officers,” the general said. “This one was a major. Now he works for me.”
At the end of a cement chamber, under a six-foot ceiling, an embrasure opened out above a forest valley. The Czech officers stood apart, hands clasped behind their backs, as the general and the spy and Morath approached the opening.
“Find a river,” the spy said.
This took time. A pale summer sky, then a ridge top dense with trees, then a green mountainside and a narrow valley that led to the upward slope where the fort had been built. Finally, Morath caught sight of a blue ribbon that wound through the pine trees.
“You have it?”
“Yes.”
“Here. Take.”
He handed Morath a fist-sized wad of cotton. Two soldiers rolled a 105-millimeter mountain gun up to the opening and ran a shell into the breech. Morath tore pieces of cotton from the wad and stuffed his ears, then covered them with his hands. Everyone in the room did the same. Finally, the general mouthed the word ready? Morath nodded and the floor trembled as a tongue of flame leapt from the barrel of the cannon. Even with the cotton, the report was deafening.
Downrange, a flash and a drift of dirty gray smoke. In the river, Morath thought, though he didn’t actually see it happen. Other guns began firing, some from the floor below them, some from the blockhouses, and puffs of smoke floated over the mountainside. The general handed Morath a pair of binoculars. Now he could see fountains of dirt blown forty feet in the air, trees torn from the ground or sheared in two. There was, in fact, a small road that led down to the river. As he watched, a cloud of orange tracers floated past his vision and churned up a storm of dirt spouts on the road.
The spy pointed to his ears. Morath took the cotton out, the room still rang with concussion. “Do you see?” the spy said.
“Yes.”
“All the firing lines intersect, and the forts cover each other, so an attempt to storm will be very costly.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and produced a few sheets of paper and a sharpened pencil. “Please,” he said. “Do best you can.”
The general said, “I can’t give you blueprints, of course, but we don’t mind if you sketch.”
The spy smiled. “My father always wanted to teach the espionage drawing. ‘So terrible,’ he would say.”
They left him to work, only Novotny stayed behind. “Well, now you’ve met our expert.”
“He seems a little—odd, maybe.”
“Yes. He is very odd. But a genius. An architect, a mathematician, a gunnery expert. Also he knows geology and mining science.” Novotny shook his head. “Likely there’s more, we just haven’t found out about it.”
Morath sketched, he wasn’t very good. He concentrated on showing how the fort and its independent firing points were fitted tight into the mountainside. They would be hard to bomb, he realized. Even a Stuka would have to fly directly at them, with machine guns tracking it the minute it appeared over the crest of the mountain.
“Draw the room,” Novotny said. “Don’t forget the elevator for the shells.”
His day had barely begun. They drove him to other forts. At one of them, overlooking a paved road that ran south from Dresden, the spy took a stick and drew semicircles in the dirt to show overlapping fields of fire. Morath crawled into two-man pillboxes, sighted along machine guns aimed down mown strips of cornfield, saw tank traps to fall in and tank traps made of cement posts, “dragon’s teeth,” wound in generous tangles of barbed wire. He squinted through Swiss sniperscopes fitted to Steyr rifles and fired a ZGB 33, the Czech machine gun made in Brno—used as the model for the British Bren, Brno/Enfield—assassinating eight feather pillows gathering for an attack at the far end of a wheatfield. “Good shooting,” Novotny said.
After Morath reloaded, the curved-box magazine locked in place with a loud metallic snap.
“When you talk about your trip to the mountains,” Novotny said, “don’t forget to mention that Europe would be better off if Adolf did not have control of the Czech machine shops.”
Morath agreed. “Of course,” he said, “if it should come to that, I imagine the workers here would be—prone to error.”
But his conspiratorial smile was not returned. “Just between us,” Novotny said, “if it should happen that we are betrayed by those who claim to be our friends, we may not be so quick to give our lives in their service. That sort of business is bloody, Morath. There is always interrogation, always reprisal—you can only create a resistance movement when people don’t care about their lives.”
Novotny drove him back to the Europa that evening. A fine summer dusk, flights of swallows swooping and climbing in the sky above the hotels. In the lobby, the mother and daughter smiled at him, looking warmer than ever. Who would know? On a leather couch, a man in muttonchop whiskers and mountaineering costume was reading the Völkischer Beobachter. CZECH POLICE BURN SUDETEN FARMS went the headline. DOZENS INJURED. Animals confiscated. Dogs shot. Three young women missing.
Dr. Lapp, wearing a flat-brimmed straw boater at a jaunty angle, was waiting for him in the room, fanning himself with a room-service menu.
“I didn’t hear you knock,” Morath said.
“Actually, I did knock,” Dr. Lapp said, slightly amused. “Of course, I’ll be happy to apologize, if you wish.”
“Don’t bother.”
Dr. Lapp stared out the window. The streetlamps were on, couples strolling in the mountain air. “You know, I cannot abide these people, the Czechs.”
Morath hung up his jacket, then began undoing his tie. He did not want there to be a war in Europe, but he was going to take a bath.
“They have no culture,” Dr. Lapp said.
“They think they do.”
“What, Smetana? Perhaps you like Dvorak
. Good God.”
Morath took off his tie, looped it over a hanger, sat on the edge of the bed, and lit a Chesterfield.
“I should mention,” Dr. Lapp said, “that I saw Count Polanyi not so long ago and that he sends his best regards. He said that you were considering, at one time, a vacation in Britain. Is it so?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Lapp nodded. “Can you still go?”
Morath thought about Cara. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”
“I see. Well, if you can, you should.”
“I’ll try,” Morath said.
“They’re weakening, the British. This morning’s London Times says that the Czech government ought to grant ‘self-determination’ to the Sudeten Germans, ‘even if it should mean their secession from Czechoslovakia.’ I would suppose that comes from Chamberlain’s office. We know he met American correspondents at a lunch at Lady Astor’s a few weeks ago and told them that Britain thought the Sudetenland ought to be turned over to Germany. In the interest of world peace, you understand. What his problem really is, is that he doesn’t trust the French, he doesn’t trust the Russians, and he fears, politically, the possibility that Britain might have to fight alone.”
“He doesn’t trust the French?”
Dr. Lapp’s laugh was dry, and delicate, and very brief.
It was almost dark, they sat in silence for a long time. Finally, Dr. Lapp stood. “There is something I want you to look at,” he said. “I’ll send it along tomorrow, if you don’t mind.”
He closed the door silently behind him. Morath left the room in darkness. He went into the bathroom and turned on the water. There was a bright green mineral stain below the spout. Good for the health. If you believed in it, he thought. The water ran slow, just then, and Morath waited patiently and listened to the distant thunder.
