Midnight in Europe: A Novel

by Alan Furst

  “Hostages are a real nuisance,” de Lyon said. “We’ll just have to keep him until the last moment.”

  After the freight rolled out of the yard, Ferrar and de Lyon took turns shoveling coal into the locomotive’s firebox, and soon enough their hands and faces were powdered with coal dust. When it was de Lyon’s turn, Ferrar stood next to the engineer and stared out over the nighttime countryside. Not much to see, beneath a quarter moon low on the horizon; now and then the distant light of a farmhouse, occasionally a local station, dark and deserted. At Chelmno, there was a crowd of passengers on the platform, waiting for a night train headed north to the Baltic coast, idly watching the freight as it clattered past. A few miles later they slowed for a railroad bridge, where the sound of the train deepened as it crossed the river. “We’re coming up on Terespol station,” the engineer said. “There’s a switch that has to be thrown, so we move to another track.”

  As the train stopped, a railwayman with a lantern came out of the station house and approached the locomotive. “What’s this?” he called out to the engineer. “It can’t be the eleven fifty-six.”

  “It’s a Special,” the engineer replied. “Freight going to the port.”

  The railwayman walked up the track and, using both hands, moved a lever from one side to the other. Then he raised the lantern twice and the locomotive was shunted onto the track to Gdansk.

  11:25, Gdansk. The bar stood at the foot of a wharf in Gdansk port, where the lights of the quayside buildings were reflected in the still, black water. Inside, in clouds of cigarette smoke, off-duty stevedores were drinking vodka or beer or both until it was time to load another freighter. Ferrar and de Lyon—Nestor was still battling the Polish roads—had cleaned up at the Bernhof, then found the bar where they were to meet de Lyon’s friend, called Bolek, who ran the Polish longshore union in the city. They took an empty table, then were joined by two young stevedores, Zigi and Ivo, blond, snub-nosed, and hard to tell apart; both wore brimmed caps down over their eyes and had unlit stubs of cigarettes pasted to their lower lips. “Bolek said to tell you he’s been held up,” Zigi explained. “He’ll be here as soon as he can.” He took a sip of his vodka and said, “You got here right on time, any trouble on the way?”

  “Some,” de Lyon said. “Our boxcars are ready to be unloaded, do you know when that will be?”

  Zigi shrugged. “What ship?”

  “The Sabina, out of Valencia.”

  “Maybe after midnight … they’ll let us know when they need us.”

  Ferrar was drinking beer. He would have preferred a vodka, but in his present state of exhaustion that might have knocked him out cold. He lit a Gitane and offered one to Ivo, sitting next to him. Ivo, who spoke a bit of French, thanked him and said, “So, you’re in Max de Lyon’s gang.”

  Ferrar nodded. “I am,” he said.

  “You must be busy, with the war going on.”

  “We are,” Ferrar said.

  “Fucking fascists,” Ivo said. “The union gave a big party last week, proceeds to Aid for Spain. We made plenty, believe me.” Something across the room caught his attention and he said, “What’s he doing here?” Then tapped Zigi on the shoulder and with his eyes pointed out a man having a drink at the bar.

  “Somebody you know?” Ferrar said.

  “German crane operator. Germans don’t come in here, this is the Polish bar.” Gdansk was a German city, ten percent Polish.

  “He’s just having a drink,” Ferrar said.

  “For now. You know Bolek?”

  “I don’t, he’s Max’s friend.”

  “He’s the boss of our union, and he’ll make sure your shipment gets into the hold … the Germans don’t like to load freight that’s going to Spain.”

  Zigi said, “Now look at this.” Two men entered the bar and stood next to the crane operator. “What do they think they’re doing?”

  Ivo shook his head. “Making trouble, maybe.”

  “They better not,” Zigi said.

  A minute later, de Lyon went over to the bar and bought a bottle of vodka. As he turned to go back to the table, the crane operator bumped against him. De Lyon stared at the man, who said, “You made me spill my drink,” and poured some beer on the bar. The bartender said, “Hey, take it easy.” The man sneered. De Lyon returned to the table.

  “He push you?” Zigi said.

  “Forget it,” de Lyon said. “He’s drunk.”

  “Looking for a fight,” Ivo said.

  “He’ll find it,” Zigi said. “I haven’t hit a German for days.”

  “Ignore him,” de Lyon said.

  From Zigi, a certain laugh, as though I could. Two more men came into the bar, some of the stevedores stopped talking. Outside, a ship’s foghorn cut through the sound of the engines that ran the loading machinery.

  De Lyon unscrewed the cap of the vodka bottle and said, “Who’s ready?”

  Zigi and Ivo drank off their vodka and de Lyon refilled their glasses. “Cristián?”

  “I better stay with beer.”

  De Lyon grinned. “It’s been a long day.”

  Zigi stood up and walked to another table where a man, a little older than the other stevedores, was talking to his friends. He had a tough face, scars by his eyes, his nose broken, maybe more than once. Zigi stood by his shoulder and said something, the man looked around the room. He didn’t like what he saw.

  De Lyon said to Ivo, “Tell Zigi not to start anything. We’re going to need you to load our freight on the ship, we don’t want you locked up.”

  Ivo said, “We won’t start it. But, if they do …”

  Another man came into the bar. He had a beard that traced his jawline and wore a loden jacket and a green hat. “Hessler,” Ivo said.

  “Who is Hessler?” de Lyon said.

  “German politician, Nazi party leader.”

  Hessler spoke briefly to the man next to the crane operator, then left the bar. “I guess he’s not staying for the fun,” Zigi said.

  From the bar: “Hey! What the hell?” The front of the man’s shirt was wet. “Watch what you’re doing.”

  “You watch,” the crane operator said.

  The man swung and connected, the crane operator hit him back. The bartender vaulted over the bar, the bottom half of a pool cue in his hand. A table went over with a crash of broken glass. Somebody swore, another fight started, this time close to de Lyon and Ferrar. Zigi came on the run and said to Ivo, “Tomasz says to get them out of here.” Then he grabbed Ferrar by the shoulder, hauled him to his feet, and started to shove him toward the door, as Ivo did the same thing with de Lyon. But two big men came running through the door, and a group of stevedores went for them, hitting hard, Ferrar could hear the meaty thuds of body punches amid snarled curses. One of the Germans had blood running from his nose, another one swung at de Lyon, who blocked his hand with his forearm, then Zigi grabbed him by the head. The two struggled for a few seconds, then another man broke a vodka bottle over the German’s head and he said, “Ach,” and went to one knee. He started to rise and Zigi kicked him in the stomach. He folded in half and something fell from his hand. Ferrar saw that it was a knife and tried to reach for it but there was somebody in his way so he kicked it across the floor.

  Then Ferrar and de Lyon were pushed out into the street.

  It was after two in the morning when de Lyon and Ferrar stood with Bolek and watched crates of anti-tank shells in cargo nets being lowered into the hold of the Sabina. Toward the bow of the ship, the stevedores were using a winch to roll the anti-tank cannon up a gangplank. Ferrar should have felt satisfaction but he was too tired to feel much of anything. The first wisps of a nighttime fog drifted through the glare of the dock’s floodlights.

  “What happened in the bar?” Bolek said. He was a balding man with a paunch and an educated voice.

  “A fight …,” de Lyon said.

  “It was certainly a fight,” Ferrar said. “A fistfight, a bar fight, but one of them had a knife
and went after Max. So maybe the whole thing was staged, to get rid of my friend here.”

  “In Gdansk? Here it’s usually in the back, down an alley,” Bolek said.

  “Your stevedores saved us,” de Lyon said. “Ivo’s at the hospital getting sewed up.”

  “They’re tough kids,” Bolek said. “I had a feeling you might be better off with a little protection. You never know, right? And, any day now, this city is going to explode, and we’ll be fighting them with guns. Hitler has started screaming ‘Danzig! Danzig!’ and his propaganda machine has been turned on. You see it in the British press: ‘To die for Danzig?’ As in, who would be so stupid to go to war over some Polish city nobody ever heard of? And it’s working; the party has technicians who study public opinion and they’re usually right.” For a time they watched the loading, then Bolek said, “By the way, we’ve got the Bydgoszcz stationmaster at the union office, he’ll be on a train in the morning.”

  “Did he ask for the police?”

  “Not that I know of. He had a bad experience and now he just wants to go home.”

  “How long until our shipment is loaded?” de Lyon said.

  “Six boxcars? Maybe another half hour.” Bolek looked at his watch. “The Sabina sails at five-thirty, are you going to stay here until then?”

  “I might,” de Lyon said. “I’d at least like to see the loading done, then we have to go back to the hotel and make sure Nestor got there. He drove up from Bydgoszcz last night.”

  “At night?” Bolek laughed. “Good old crazy Nestor.”

  “There when you need him,” de Lyon said.

  Bolek looked at his watch again and said, “I have to be somewhere, so …” He shook hands with Ferrar, then with de Lyon. “Coming back any time soon, Max?”

  “Maybe not for a while.”

  “Then I’ll say goodby, because if this war starts you won’t see me again, likely never again.” He shrugged and said, “But we did some good work together, and that’s what matters.” They shook hands once more, then Bolek turned and walked away down the dock.

  The Sabina left the dock at six-thirty, working through a heavy sea in light fog. Her original destination was the port of Valencia, which meant sailing through the Straits of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean. And that would have been the end of her—an Italian submarine was waiting at the Nationalist port of Palma de Majorca, with orders to torpedo the Sabina as she approached the Spanish coast. But now, because the French had opened the border, she would make for the port of Bordeaux, 938 nautical miles from Gdansk, where the shipment would come under the control of the Army of the Republic, then be sent south by rail. The Sabina was an old ship, for years a tramp steamer, and nine knots per hour was the best she could do. So, five days to Bordeaux, then on to Salou, the base of the Republic’s Fifth Army Corps, now rearming for a stand at the river Ebro.

  If it failed, the war was lost.

  A PLEASANT DAY IN PARIS, THE NINTH OF APRIL, THE SUN IN AND OUT of the billowy white clouds that blew across the city from the North Sea. Cristián Ferrar was in the walled garden of the Hungarian legation: gravel paths, well-barbered shrubs, and a fountain where a green-stained face of Pan produced a trickle of water that formed a puddle in the marble basin. He had come to the legation to work with the Count Polanyi on a nefarious love letter to the nephew in Budapest, which they started to write in Polanyi’s office—portraits of fierce Magyar kings staring down at them from the walls—but Polanyi said, “It’s been too long of a winter, I can’t stay indoors anymore, I’m tired of it,” so they moved to the garden.

  Ferrar liked Polanyi, a diplomat/spy now in his sixties, and a gentleman from another time. He was a large, heavy man with thick, white hair, who wore suits cut by London tailors and smelled like bay rum, cigar smoke, and the excellent Burgundy he drank with lunch. Once they were settled in garden chairs, Polanyi said, “So, are we really going to do this?”

  “It’s a long shot, Count Polanyi, but unless we can get the Belesz nephew into court, the future of your bank is … questionable. He intends, I think, to destroy it.”

  “Tell me why, for heaven’s sake! It does him no good that I can see.”

  Ferrar agreed. “All I could sense in Belesz was malice, a kind of pure hatred with God knows what cause. But then, when I was trying to reason with him on the telephone, he said that he belonged to the Arrow Cross.”

  “Yes, you told me. We too, in Hungary, have our Nazi party. In fact, last week, my steward only just got away from them.”

  “There is a good possibility that his malice is political. Fascism is a revolutionary force, it wants to destroy the established order and take its place—take its money, its businesses, everything it has because, to these people, the governing class in Europe is hesitant, ineffective, effete. So, destroy it. That’s what they’ve done in Germany and Italy and what they will do in Spain, with the excuse that they’re fighting Bolshevism.”

  The count looked grim, with the insights of a diplomat and a spy, he believed Ferrar was right. “Very well then,” he said. “Let’s write the damn letter.”

  Ferrar stared at the pad of lined paper on his lap, tapped it speculatively with the eraser of his pencil, and said, “We’ll need an address, so that he can write back to her. Should we use poste restante?” It meant general delivery.

  “Like a spy novel from the twenties?” Polanyi was amused. “No, he’ll surely smell a rat.”

  “Well, not American Express.”

  “Hardly—she’s no tourist. Actually, this comes up in my work from time to time, and I use a little hotel on the rue Chemin Vert, not far from Place Bastille. Hotel Victoria, it’s called, we give the manager the names we’re looking for and he brings the letters over here.”

  “Then it should be on hotel stationery.”

  “I wonder if they have such a thing? But, a nice touch. I’ll have some made up.”

  “Cheap paper, poorly printed.”

  “I know, Monsieur Ferrar,” Polanyi said gently.

  “So, from Celestine, umm … her married name? Perhaps Duval, something common, not foreign. Then, to start out, ‘My dear Fabi’?”

  “ ‘Dearest.’ ”

  Ferrar nodded and made the change. “I wonder if she had a pet name for him?”

  “Maybe, you never know, with love affairs. Shall we say, ‘I hope you will remember me, and the times we had together’? No, ‘Perhaps you will remember me, I hope you do.’ And ‘sweet times’—meaning times in bed.”

  “ ‘Intimate times’?”

  “Rather elevated, for her.”

  “I have it! We say ‘our nights together.’ ”

  “Ahh.”

  “ ‘Our nights together’ and she often thinks of him now and wishes, no, dreams, that they could once again have such pleasure.” Ferrar wrote that down, then inspiration struck and he looked up from the paper and said, “Perfume!”

  “Yes, of course, good idea. A perfumed letter. Nice perfume, not cheap, and plenty of it.”

  “Cheap perfume can be seductive.”

  The count laughed; a deep, bass rumble. “What a pair of scoundrels we are. You’re right, she hasn’t any money, so it’s what she uses now. Cheap perfume, filthy nights of lovemaking, all modesty abandoned. White Ginger, something like that. He’ll like it, my nephew will, a poor girl at his mercy.”

  Ferrar was impressed, the count remembered the name of a perfume. He smiled and said, “I suspect you’ve been down this road before.”

  Polanyi nodded. “Haven’t we all?”

  “Those of us who love women, and how they go about things, yes.”

  “White Ginger,” the count mused. “I wish she’d write to me.” Then he sighed and looked at his watch. “There is something I must do, I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Ferrar was content to wait in the garden. For the marquesa, what perfume? He tried to recall if she’d worn scent, and rather doubted she had. He’d been close to her, kissed her hand as they parted—wouldn�
��t she have worn it on her wrist? On her pulse? Of course, in the excitement of the moment …

  This wistful thought was suddenly interrupted by three vizsla dogs, who came bounding through the French doors into the garden, quivering with outdoor freedom, the two males seeking the right shrub to water while the bitch squatted on the gravel. “Yes, here they are, the dogs my nephew meant to sell,” Polanyi said.

  “How did they get here?”

  “Nephew Fabi organized a kind of raid on my castle in Hungary. The steward grabbed the dogs and escaped through an old tunnel, eventually he got them to Paris, where they’ll be safe.” Polanyi watched as the males marked the shrubs and said, “The legation gardener is not happy about this but I’ll be damned if I’ll take them out to the street and stand there while they do their business.”

  One of the males, done with business, galloped up to Ferrar and, wanting to play, smacked his forepaws on the ground. The vizsla was a hairless breed, all muscle and sinew in visible motion beneath a reddish-brown coat, but the irresistible features of the vizsla were its soft, floppy ears, velvet to the touch. Ferrar couldn’t resist, playing with the dog’s ears, rumpling them gently, and saying, “What a handsome fellow you are, yes you are,” in a talking-to-a-dog voice. The dog sprinted away, leapt easily into the fountain, and began to lap up the puddled water. The other two followed. The bitch, who was quicker than her brothers, stood on her hind legs and licked at the water coming from Pan’s mouth.

  Polanyi took a gray tennis ball from his pocket and tossed it to one side of the fountain. The vizslas were immediately in hot pursuit, one of the males skidded on the gravel but snatched up the ball in his mouth, then brought it back to Polanyi and waited for the next throw.

  “Did you see, Ferrar? The finest breed there is, a pointer/retriever, finds the game, waits for you to shoot it, then brings it to you with a soft mouth. A great hunter’s dog.” He flipped the ball to Ferrar, who threw it high in the air. All three jumped, ears flying.

  “Now I’ll have to find an excuse to hold talks with you here,” Ferrar said as the bitch dropped the ball at his feet.