Alan Furst's Classic Spy Novels

by Alan Furst

  He looked around, saw an iron ring above the stove where implements were hung, carefully removed a giant ladle, and served up a heaping scoop of thick fat. Took a handful, and smeared it on the wooden countertop. Worked it onto the walls and the window frames and the doors of the cabinets. Then he laid the can on its side in one corner, sunk the corset stays halfway into the fat, lit a match, and tossed it in.

  The celluloid caught immediately; a hot, white flash, then the fat sputtered to life and a little river of liquid fire ran across the floor and began to burn its way up the wall. A few moments later, he saw the ceiling start to turn black.

  Now he had to wait. He found a broom closet by the entrance to the kitchen, stepped inside, and closed the door. Barely room for him in there, he discovered. He counted eleven brooms. What the hell were they doing with so many brooms?

  He told himself to stay calm, but the crackling sound from the kitchen and the smell of fire made his pulse race. Tried to count to a hundred and twenty, as he’d planned, but he never got there. He did not mean to die in a Viennese broom closet. He threw the door open and hurried down the hallway through a haze of oily smoke.

  He heard a shout from the guard in the lobby, then another. Christ, there’d been two of them in there. “Fire!” he yelled as he ran up the stairs. He could hear doors opening, running footsteps.

  Second floor. Third floor. Now he had to trust that the Austrian SS guards changed shifts like everybody else. Halfway up the stairs to the fifth floor he started yelling, “Police! Police!”

  A bullet-headed man in his shirtsleeves came charging down the corridor, a Luger in his hand. “What’s happening?”

  “Open these doors. The hotel’s on fire.”

  “What?” The man backed up a step. Open the doors?

  “Hurry up. You have the keys? Give them to me. Go, now, run, for God’s sake!”

  “I have to—”

  Morath the policeman had no time for him. Grabbed him by the shirt and ran him down the hall. “Go wake up your officers. Now. We don’t have time for monkey business.”

  That, for whatever reason, did it. The man shoved the Luger into a shoulder holster and went bounding down the steps, shouting “Fire!” as he went.

  Morath started opening doors—the room numbers, thank God, were on the keys. The first room was empty. In the second, one of the SS men, who sat up in bed and stared at Morath in terror. “What? What is it?”

  “The hotel’s on fire. You better get out.”

  “Oh.”

  Relieved that it was only the hotel on fire. What had he thought?

  There was smoke in the hallway. The SS man trotted past, wearing candy-striped pajamas and carrying a machine pistol by its strap. Morath found another empty room, then, next door, Kolovitzky, struggling to open the window.

  “Not like that,” Morath said. “Come with me.”

  Kolovitzky turned toward him. He wasn’t the same man who’d played the violin at the baroness’s party, this man was old and tired and frightened, wearing suspenders and a soiled shirt. He studied Morath’s face—was this some new trick, one they hadn’t tried on him yet?

  “I came here for you,” Morath said. “I burned down this hotel for you.”

  Kolovitzky understood. “Blanche,” he said.

  “Are they holding anyone else up here?”

  “There were two others, but they left yesterday.”

  Now they heard sirens and they ran, coughing, hands over mouths, down the stairs through the rising smoke.

  The street in front of the Schoenhof was utter confusion. Fire engines, firemen hauling hoses into the hotel, policemen, crowds of onlookers, a man wearing only a blanket, two women in bathrobes. Morath guided Kolovitzky across the Mauerplatz, then a little way down a side street. As they approached, the driver of a battered Opel started his car. Kolovitzky got in the backseat, Morath in front.

  “Hello, Rashkow,” Morath said.

  “Who is he?” Kolovitzky asked, later that morning, while Rashkow watered a tree by the roadside.

  “He’s from Odessa,” Morath said. Poor little Rashkow, Balki had called him, who’d sold Russian railroad bonds and Tolstoy’s unfinished novel and wound up in a Hungarian prison. Morath had gone to Sombor to get him out of jail. “He used to sell Russian bonds.”

  “The way he looks,” Kolovitzky said. “He should come to Hollywood.”

  Rashkow drove on farm roads through the Austrian countryside. A day in July, the beets and potatoes sprouting bright green in the rolling fields. It was only forty miles to the Hungarian border at Bratislava. Or Pressburg, if you liked, or Pozsony. In the backseat, Kolovitzky stared at the Austrian passport with his photo in it. “Do you think they’re looking for me?”

  “Of course they are.”

  They stopped well short of the Danube bridge, in Petrzalka, once a Czech border point, now in the Slovakian Protectorate. Abandoned the car. Went to a rented room above a café, where all three changed into dark suits. When they came downstairs, a Grosser Mercedes with Hungarian diplomatic registration was waiting for them, driven by the chauffeur of one of Bolthos’s diplomatic colleagues in Budapest.

  There was a swarm of Austrian SS gathered at the border crossing, smoking, laughing, strutting about in their high, polished boots. But the chauffeur ignored them. Rolled to a smooth stop at the customs building, handed four passports out the window. The border guard put a finger to the visor of his cap, glanced briefly into the car, then handed them back.

  “Welcome home,” the chauffeur said to Kolovitzky, as they crossed to the Hungarian side of the river.

  Kolovitzky wept.

  A midnight supper on the rue Guisarde.

  Mary Day knew the trains were late, crossing Germany, so she’d planned for it. She set out a plate of sliced ham, a vegetable salad, and a baguette. “And this was delivered yesterday,” she said, taking a bottle of wine from the cupboard and a corkscrew from the kitchen drawer. “You must have ordered it by telephone,” she said. “Very thoughtful of you, in the middle of—whatever it was, to think of us.”

  A 1922 Echézeaux.

  “It’s what you wanted?”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling.

  “You are really very good, Nicholas,” she said. “Really, you are.”

  READ ON FOR AN EXCERPT FROM

  MISSION TO PARIS

  BY

  ALAN FURST

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE

  IN PARIS, THE EVENINGS OF SEPTEMBER ARE SOMETIMES WARM, EXCESSIVELY gentle, and, in the magic particular to that city, irresistably seductive. The autumn of the year 1938 began in just such weather and on the terraces of the best cafés, in the famous restaurants, at the dinner parties one wished to attend, the conversation was, of necessity, lively and smart: fashion, cinema, love affairs, politics, and, yes, the possibility of war—that too had its moment. Almost anything, really, except money. Or, rather, German money. A curious silence, for hundreds of millions of francs—tens of millions of dollars—had been paid to some of the most distinguished citizens of France since Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933. But maybe not so curious, because those who had taken the money were aware of a certain shadow in these transactions and, in that shadow, the people who require darkness for the kind of work they do.

  The distinguished citizens, had they been willing to talk about it, would have admitted that the Germans, the political operatives who offered the bounty, were surprisingly adept. They knew how to soften a conscience, presented bribery as little more than a form of sophisticated commerce, of the sort that evolves in salons and offices and the private rooms of banks—a gentleman’s treason. And the operatives could depend on one hard-edged principle: that those who style themselves as men of the world know there is an iron fist in every velvet glove, understand what might await them in the shadows and so, having decided to play the game, they will obey its rules.

  Still, human nature being what it is, there will forever be somebody, won’t there, who wi
ll not.

  One such, on the fourteenth of September, was a rising political star called Prideaux. Had he been in Paris that evening, he would have been having drinks at Fouquet with a Spanish marquis, a diplomat, after which he could have chosen between two good dinner parties: one in the quarter clustered around the Palais Bourbon, the other in a lovely old mansion up in Passy. It was destiny, Prideaux believed, that he spend his evenings in such exalted places. And, he thought, if fucking destiny had a shred of mercy left in its cold heart he would just now be hailing a taxi. Fucking destiny, however, had other things in mind for the future and didn’t care a bit what became of Prideaux.

  Who felt, in his heart, terribly wronged. This shouldn’t be happening to him, not to him, the famously clever Louis Prideaux, chef de cabinet—technically chief of staff but far more powerful than that—to an important senator in Paris. Well, it had happened. As tout Paris left for the August migration to the countryside, Prideaux had been forced to admit that his elegant world was doomed to collapse (expensive mistress, borrowed money, vengeful wife) and so he’d fled, desperate for a new life, finding himself on the night of the fourteenth in Varna, the Black Sea port of Bulgaria. Bulgaria! Prideaux fell back on his lumpy bed at a waterfront hotel, crushed by loss: the row of beautiful suits in his armoire, the apartment windows that looked out at the Seine, the slim, white hands of his aristocratic—by birth, not behavior—mistress. All gone, all gone. For a moment he actually contemplated weeping but then his fingers, dangling over the side of the bed, touched the supple leather of his valise. For Prideaux, the life preserver in a stormy sea: a million francs. A soothing, restorative, million, francs.

  This money, German money, had been meant for the senator, so that he might influence the recommendation of a defense committee, which had for some time been considering a large outlay for construction on the northern extension of the Maginot Line. Up into Belgium, the Ardennes forest, where the Germans had attacked in 1914. A decision of such magnitude, he would tell the committee, should not be made precipitously, it needed more time, it should be studied, pros and cons worked through by technicians who understood the whole complicated business. Later, the committee would decide. Was it not wise to delay a little? That’s what the people of France demanded of them: not rash expenditure, wisdom.

  All that August, Prideaux had temporized: what to do? The suitcase of money for the senator had reached Prideaux by way of a prominent hostess, a German baroness named von Reschke, who’d settled in Paris a few years earlier and, using wealth and connection, had become the ruling despot of one of the loftiest salons in the city. The baroness spent the summer at her château near Versailles and there, in the drawing room, had handed Prideaux an envelope. Inside, a claim ticket for the baggage office at the Gare de Lyon railway station. “This is for you-know-who,” she’d said, ever the coquette, flirting with the handsome Prideaux. He’d collected the suitcase and hidden it under a couch, where it gave off a magnetic energy—he could feel its presence. Its potential.

  The senator was in Cap Ferrat, wouldn’t return until the third of September, and Prideaux sweated through hot August nights of temptation. Sometimes he thought he might resist, but the forces of catastrophe were waiting and they wouldn’t wait long: his wife’s ferocious lawyer, the shady individuals who’d loaned him money when the banks no longer would, and his cruel mistress, whose passion was kindled by expensive wines with expensive dinners and expensive jewelry to wear at the table. When unappeased she was cold, no bed. And while what happened in that bed was the best thing that had ever happened to Prideaux, it would soon be only a memory.

  He had to escape before it all came crashing down on him. Take the money, Prideaux’s devil whispered. The Germans have more where that came from. Go to, say, Istanbul, where a perfect new identity could be purchased. Then, on to exotic climes—Alexandria? Johannesburg? Quebec? A visit to a travel agency revealed that a Greek freighter, the Olympios, took on a few passengers at the Bulgarian port of Varna, easily reached by train from Paris. Stay? Or go? Prideaux couldn’t decide but then, after an exceptionally uncomfortable telephone call from one of his creditors, he took the money and ran. Before anyone came looking for him.

  But they were looking for him. In fact, they’d found him.

  The senator had been approached on September fifth, in his office. No, the package hadn’t arrived, was there a problem? His chef de cabinet was up at Deauville, he had telephoned and would return in a few days. The committee meeting? The senator consulted his calendar, that would be on the eleventh. Surely, by then …

  In Berlin, at von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry, the people at the political warfare bureau found this news troubling, and spoke to the bribery people, who were very troubled indeed. So much so that, just to make sure, they got in touch with a dependable friend, a detective at the Sûreté Nationale—the French security service—and asked him to lend a hand. For the detective, an easy job. Prideaux wasn’t in Deauville, according to his concierge, he was staying indoors. The concierge rubbed her thumb across the pads of her index and middle fingers and raised an eyebrow—money, it meant. And that gesture did it. At the Foreign Ministry they had a meeting and, by day’s end, a discussion—not at the ministry!—with Herbert.

  ——

  Slim, well-dressed, quiet, Herbert made no particular impression on anybody he met, probably he was some kind of businessman, though he never quite got around to saying what he did. Perhaps you’d meet him again, perhaps you wouldn’t, it didn’t particularly matter. He circulated comfortably at the mid-level of Berlin society, turning up here and there, invited or not—what could you do, you couldn’t ask him to leave. Anyhow, nobody ever did, and he was always pleasant. There were, however, a few individuals in Berlin—those with uncommonly sharp instincts, those who somehow heard interesting things—who met Herbert only once. They didn’t precisely avoid him, not overtly, they just weren’t where he was or, if they were, they soon had to be elsewhere and, all courtesy, vanished.

  What did they know? They didn’t know much, in fact they’d better not. Because Herbert had a certain vocation, supposedly secret to all but those who made use of his services. Exceptional services: silent, and efficient. For example, surveillance on Prideaux was in place within hours of Herbert’s meeting with his contact at the Foreign Ministry, and Prideaux was not entirely alone as he climbed aboard the first of the trains that would take him to Varna. Where Herbert, informed of Prideaux’s booking on the Olympios, awaited him. Herbert and his second-in-command, one Lothar, had hired a plane and pilot and flown to an airfield near Varna a night earlier and, on the evening of the fourteenth, they called off their associates and sent them back to wherever they came from. The Greek freighter was not expected at the dock until the sixteenth and would likely be late, so Prideaux wasn’t going anywhere.

  He really wasn’t.

  Which meant Herbert and Lothar could relax. For a while, at least, as only one final task lay ahead of them and they had a spare hour or two. Why not have fun in the interim? They had a contact scheduled at a local nightclub and so went looking for it, working their way through a maze of dockside streets; dark, twisting lanes decorated with broken glass and scented with urine, where in time they came upon an iron door beneath a board that said UNCLE BORIS. Inside, Herbert handed the maître d’ a fistful of leva notes and the one-eyed monster showed them to a table in the corner, said something amusing in Bulgarian, laughed, made as though to slap Herbert on the back, then didn’t. The two Germans settled in to drink mastika and enjoy the show, keeping an eye on the door as they awaited the appearance of their “brute,” as they playfully referred to him. Their brute for this operation, Herbert rarely used them more than once.

  Lothar was fiftyish, fat and jolly, with tufts of dark red hair and a red face. Like Herbert, he’d been a junior officer during the Great War, the 1914 war, but they never met in the trenches—with five million men under arms an unlikely possibility—but found each other lat
er, in one of the many veterans’ organizations that formed in Germany after the defeat of 1918. They fought a little more in the 1920s, after joining a militia, killing off the communists who were trying to take over the country. By the early 1930s Herbert had discovered his true vocation and enlisted Lothar as his second-in-command. A wise choice—Lothar was all business when it mattered but he was also good company. As the nightclub show unfolded, he nudged Herbert with an elbow and rumbled with baritone laughter.

  In a space cleared of chairs and tables, a novelty act from somewhere in the Balkans: a two-man canvas horse that danced and capered, the front and rear halves in perfect harmony. Done well, this was by itself entertaining, but what made it memorable was a girl, in scanty, spangled costume, who played the accordion as she stood center stage on a pair of very sexy legs. The men in the club found them enticing, bare and shapely, as did the canvas horse, which danced nearer and nearer to the girl, the head lunging and feinting as though to nuzzle her thighs, then turning to the audience: Shall I?

  Oh yes! The shouts were in Bulgarian but there was no question of what they meant. “Will it have her?” Herbert said.

  “I should think so,” Lothar said. “Otherwise people will throw things.”

  The one-eyed monster brought fresh mastika, the shouts grew louder, the accordion played on. At last, the horse found its courage and, having galloped around the girl a few times, stood in back of her on its hind legs with its hooves on her shoulders. The girl never missed a beat but then, when the horse covered her breasts with its hooves, and to the absolute delight of the audience, she blushed, her face turning pink, her eyes closing. As the horse began to move in a rhythmic manner familiar to all.