Night Soldiers ns-1

by Alan Furst

  The camp had been a vile place. The internees spent their days shuffling around the barbed-wire perimeter or playing cards-the deck made of torn strips of paper-for cigarettes. They huddled around stoves made of punched-out petrol tins and plotted endlessly in a stew of languages. After more than a month of it, Khristo had thought seriously of escaping. The Senegalese troops who guarded them sometimes did not bring water all day long and the inmates were tortured by thirst, pleading through the wire while the guards stared at them curiously. Sometimes a gate was left open-a clear invitation to escape. If one were caught, however, deportation back to Spain was automatic.

  Yet he’d had, in the camp, one great stroke of luck. He’d met a Russian called Vladi Z., a soldier of fortune from an emigre family in Berlin, former harnessmakers to the czar’s St. Petersburg household. Vladi Z. had worked for the Comintern, smuggling guns into Spain through the mountains. He’d taken to putting a bit of money aside for himself, but greed overtook his sense of propriety and he’d been caught at it. Snapped up by the Checa in Barcelona, he had managed to escape, bribing his guards with gold secreted “where the sun never shines.” After some days spent wandering helplessly in the Pyrenees, he had crossed into France at Port-Bou with a group of American journalists. There he claimed German citizenship, but he had shed his passport in fear of the Checa and thus was interned. No matter, he confided to Khristo, his family in Berlin would soon have him out. “You must go to Paris,” he said, “even the devil won’t find you there.” He had assumed, without being told, that Khristo was on the run. “In Paris,” he continued, “one sees Omaraeff. A Bulgarian like yourself. A great man. Headwaiter at the famous Brasserie Heininger. Tell him Vladi Z. sent you and give him my greatest respects. And if, perchance, you are some provocateur chekist piece of filth, then we, we, you understand, will have you in the ground by sundown.” On the train north, Khristo’s heart had pounded with excitement. Watching the winter countryside roll past, he touched the Nansen passport in his pocket a hundred times and hoped and dreamed more than he’d ever dared. Paris. Paris.

  The song ended; the dancers broke apart and applauded themselves. Toledo Red shifted the cigar stub to the other corner of his mouth and banged out the introduction to “The Sheik of Araby.” There were squeals of anticipation from the dance floor as the saxophone player, a great fat fellow with a gold-toothed grin, draped one of the Beales’ monogrammed damask napkins over his head in a make-believe burnoose. Winnie Beale had reappeared, after her dramatic entrance, dressed in emerald crepe de chine and now began dancing her own version of the desert slave girl-Valentino’s beloved in a Balenciaga gown.

  She gave Khristo an affectionate leer as she swept past him. Strange, he thought, these people of the night who glittered in the world of Heininger and the Beale mansion. Mood-swept, arrogant, insecure, yet at times unbelievably kind. They were the gods and goddesses of this city, from the smoke-filled jazz dens on the Rive Gauche to the chauffeured caravans that moved through the Bois de Boulogne at dawn. Yet they took a curious, backhanded pride in knowing a simple waiter. He had become, of all things, a minor feature of this world. Nick.

  Stranger still, he cared for them. He was younger than most, yet they played at being his children. “Nick, my button has torn loose!” “Be a good fellow, Nick, and help Madame with her lobster.” And even, “Oh Nick, I feel so blue.” They had, it seemed to him, bad dreams-bad dreams they did not understand. Premonitions. And they sensed, somehow, that he did understand. That he knew what was coming. And that, when it came, he would remember their affection for him, that he would protect them. They would never admit that they were the Jews of Berlin, the aristocracy of Russia, the wealthy Spaniards trapped in Madrid and forced to flee to the Finnish embassy, yet, deep down, they sensed that the world as they’d known it had only a little more time to run.

  “Dear boy?”

  Again caught in reverie, he was startled, and looked directly at the man standing before him. He was on the short side and quite handsome, with thick, reddish-brown hair swept across a noble forehead. His eyes at first seemed exhausted-dark and shadowed-then Khristo realized that makeup had been used to create the illusion.

  Looking down quickly, Khristo reached for the salmon server.

  “Not necessary, dear boy, I’ve had me supper.” He handed over a business card.

  “Give us a call, will you sometime? I’m a photographer, in a sort of way. Like to take your portrait.”

  Then he was gone.

  A fine, dry snow was falling on Paris as he walked home from the party. It dusted the cobblestones pale and sugary and hardened the yellow beams of the streetlamps into severe triangles-like a painted backdrop, he thought, for a street scene in a nightclub act. He watched a boulevard turn silver before his eyes, and some trick of the light made the spires of the churches seem disconnected, floating free in the windless night air. All for his hungry eyes, he thought, all this. He had only to open his heart a little and the city breathed itself into him, sent him climbing in a perfect, pointless, nighttime elation to a height that no sorrow could reach. A pair of policemen, rubber capes black and shining, rode past on their bicycles. A window of the Hotel St. Cyr squeaked open and a young man in gartered shirtsleeves stared up at the sky. Framed in the oval window of a taxi, idling at a corner of the Rue de Rennes, a man and a woman kissed lightly-lips barely in contact-then moved apart and touched each other’s faces with the tips of their fingers. At the all-night cafe on the Rue des Ecoles he saw a group of well-rouged old ladies, bundled into the collars of their Persian lamb coats, gathered at a table near the bar. Each one had a tiny dog on her lap or in the crook of her arm. From the way the women leaned across the table, they seemed like conspirators in a plot. It was, after all, well past three in the morning. What brought them together like this? The Affair of the Little Dogs, he thought. The oddest conspiracy of 1937, a year of conspiracies.

  But nothing here was what it seemed. Even the gray stone of the buildings hid within itself a score of secret tints, to be revealed only by one momentary strand of light. At first, the tide of secrecy that rippled through the streets had made him tense and watchful, but in time he realized that in a city of clandestine passions, everyone was a spy. Amours. Fleeting or eternally renewed, tender or cruel, a single sip or an endless bacchanal, they were the true life and business of a place where money was never enough and power always drained away. And, since the first days of his time there, he had had his own secrets.

  It was a long walk. From the Rue de Varenne in the Seventh Arrondissement, the heart of Paris fashion, to the rented room on a street of Jewish tailors and little shops that made eyeglass frames, out past the Place Republique, not far from the Pere Lachaise cemetery. It took him about two hours, usually, though he could make it last somewhat longer than that and sometimes did. He was accompanied, for a time, by Marko, the bartender, and his nephew Anton, who washed the crystal and the china service. All three carried parcels wrapped in brown paper and tied with string-though Khristo’s was rather heavier than the others’-the “extras” of the waiter’s profession. The sous chef had done the wrapping in the manner of patisserie clerks, who could fold paper into cones of sufficient strength that an elaborate pastry would survive a child’s trip to the store. Nestled inside the packets were slightly crumbled slices of pate of wild duck in a game jelly, white asparagus spears, and thick cuts of tenderloin beef from the Limousin, carved to the English taste. In addition, Marko kept a bottle below the bar to receive the remnants of the brandy service. The Beales had provided their guests with an Armagnac, a select vintage of 1896, and all three took sustenance from it now and again as they walked.

  They judged the party quite successful. Not a single fistfight and only two slaps-reportedly of political, not romantic, origin and therefore hardly worth discussion. The tulip-shaped elevator remained cranky, but no horrified shouts from between-floor guests had had to be attended to. Nobody jumped out a window, or set fire to the drapes, o
r tried to drink champagne by pouring it over female undergarments and squeezing them out like Spanish wine sacks. It was the Americans who drank from shoes, under the curious impression that romantic Europeans did such things. The chef, according to Anton, who worked in the kitchen, had been at his very best. Whistling and winking, he had performed with casual speed, directing his staff like a lion tamer in good humor. And hardly a curse all night long. This unusual sweetness of temper was attributed by the Beale staff to his near ceaseless screwing of one of Madame’s maids, a recent development. But which one? The shy little redhead from Quimper? Or the fulsome Italian, Tomasina, with haunches that could hurl a man into the air? Speaking of which, what of the naked Beale woman? Would the society columns consider it thrilling or declasse? “I served her champagne,” Marko said, in his sturdy Slavic French, “and her left tit looks toward Prague.”

  Together, they walked nearly the length of the Boulevard St. Germain, then Marko and Anton headed for their rooms by the Gare Austerlitz, the railroad terminal, while Khristo used the Pont de Sully to cross the river. Tomorrow night, he thought, he would take the Pont Marie. Well-learned instincts forbade the use of the same route night after night. One varied daily habits at every opportunity, one made prediction of time and place as difficult as possible, one did not, after all, shed Arbat Street quite so easily. His journey took him through the Marais, the Jewish quarter, a good place to quicken the footsteps. As the situation for Jews in Europe grew darker, the streets of the Marais seemed to him more and more like a maze, a trap. At the northern border of the district he paused to warm up by the exhaust vents of a baker-who had fired his pine bough ovens an hour earlier-then headed for home.

  A battered little Simca crawled up the Rue du Chemin Vert behind him, rather too slowly for his taste, and he stepped into a doorway and let it go past-eventually viewing the absurdly besotted driver with some amusement. But one had to be alert. Do not forget everything, was the way he put it to himself. And he had not. He read the Russian emigre papers, like thousands of others, with a hopeful heart. To the east, the NKVD-in fact the entire Soviet apparat-was stinging itself to death like a tormented scorpion as Yezhov, the redheaded dwarf, rolled down purge upon purge. Good! Let them rip each other to pieces, he thought. Let them sink into the swamp of bureaucratic confusion until not a single file remained in place. The simple defection of a junior intelligence officer would drift endlessly down their lists to the bottom of a clerical sea. Or so he hoped-though in fact he knew them much better than that. He had changed the parting of his hair, grown a thick mustache (all the brasserie waiters in Paris had to be well furred in some fashion; it emphasized the sense of midnight deviltry the proprietors wished to encourage), and, with remorse, destroyed the clothing he’d worn in Spain. Now he had an old sheepskin jacket, bought at a marche aux puces on the outskirts of the city. Beyond that, there was fatalism. Refugees from Eastern Europe and Germany now came to Paris in a steady stream, he was but one among them. He worked hard at being Nick the waiter, hid his money behind a loose light fixture in the hallway outside his room, and kept all acquaintance-with the exception of the Omaraeff connection-emphatically casual. He didn’t need much. He had his work, he had the city, and he had a great deal more than that.

  In the room, he undressed slowly, then made sure the shutters were firmly closed. The window faced east and the pale light of the winter sunrise would leak in through the slats, creating a shadow light that seemed to him peaceful and timeless.

  She was, as usual, pretending to sleep. But, if her eyes were closed, how did she sense the moment he was ready to enter the bed? Because it was, always, this very moment she chose to stretch and twist in such a way that she shaped her body for him in the softened outline of the blanket.

  “Aleksandra?” He spoke softly, standing by the bed.

  “I am sleeping,” she said, unbothered by this, or any other, contradictory statement.

  He slid carefully between the sheets next to her. A moment later, just as sleep began to take him, her hand came visiting.

  “You are moving in your sleep,” he whispered.

  “I am having a dream.”

  “Oh.”

  “A terrible dream.”

  “What of?”

  “That certain things, indescribable things, are to happen to me, just at dawn, it is far too wicked even to describe … my heart beats …”

  “Very well. You must go back to sleep.”

  “Yes. You are right.”

  “Aleksandra?”

  “What?”

  “It is dawn.”

  “Oh no! Say it isn’t!”

  Who was she?

  He was not entirely sure. Her passport gave her family name as Varin, probably French, possibly Russian, and she claimed it was not the true family name anyhow. What he did know was that she wanted to be a mystery to him, wished him to see her as a creature of the Paris night, a manifestation, without the claustrophobic bonds of family or nationality. It was self-conscious artifice, transparently so, but she refused to leave its shelter.

  “Who are you, truly?” he’d asked more than once.

  “Ah,” she’d say, triste as a nightclub singer, “if only one knew that sort of thing.”

  She spelled her name in the Slavic form, implied exotic connections-emigrant communities in distant corners of Europe, Trieste perhaps-and claimed that her spirit, her psyche, was Russian. In support of such claims, she owned a few rich Russian curses that were occasionally hurled his way. She was small, waiflike, unsmiling, with a thick shag of muted blond hair that whipped her forehead when she shook her head and cool, deep, enormous eyes like a night animal. Her coloring he found strange-dark beneath pale-as though a shadow lived inside her. She had a hot temper, would go to war on the slightest provocation.

  But there was also in her a peasant sharpness that he found very familiar, an echo of his part of the world. She could leave the room with a few sous and return with the most extraordinary amount of stuff. She spoke a tough Parisian street French-calling him “mec,” pal, when it suited her, in a hoarse, low voice-and bits and pieces of English she learned at the cinema. Would surprise him with lines memorized from American movies in which men with pencil-thin mustaches dueled over business deals and won the heiress. “Now see here, Trumbull,” she would say, black beret pulled down over her mop head.

  She had been born in the countryside, she said, somewhere in the South of France, but of a family, she claimed, from elsewhere. Arrived in Paris at sixteen, alone, without money, and survived. Her father, according to the time of day, had been a gangster, a poet, or a nobleman. She had never met him, she said, and had few memories of her mother-carried off by the influenza epidemic of 1919. She had been raised by an aunt, or rather, a woman who called herself aunt, or, perhaps, a woman who had known her aunt. None of her stories was ever told the same way twice and he finally gave it up-acknowledged inconsistency the only effective defense against a trained interrogator-and consigned her to the present moment, which was where she wanted to be in the first place.

  He had met her in a bookstore where she worked, lost in a billowing blue smock. She had fierce little hands, and he could not take his eyes off them as they whisked piles of books into order. She challenged him-What are you looking at? — he met the challenge. She demanded coffee. They went to a cafe. He waited for her after work. Eventually, they returned to his room. The following day, she appeared at his door with a cardboard suitcase. “I have brought a few things,” she’d said.

  She had, in her own way, taught him to be her lover. Using for instruction a great range of pouts and swoons and sly looks, attacks and retreats, an entire ragbag of stratagems. She teased him until he growled, then ran away. But not too far. Led him, subtly, to such special silky places as made her sing and showed him how, by example, to play lovers’ games.

  She seduced him. Sometimes this way, sometimes that. With rainy-day melancholy or by getting absurdly drunk on two glasses of wine. “D
id we do something vile? I swear I don’t remember.” She was clever at being “naughty” and making him “mad.” Sometimes, pretending to immense modesty, she let him have a peek at something he wasn’t supposed to see-quite by accident, of course, a stolen glimpse. She played at being his captive, squeaking for mercy. Or at being his captor, in the voice of a disciplinarian schoolteacher. At times, she was partial to costumes. Not intentional ones, it just happened that he would discover her in garter belt and silk stockings while she was looking for her earrings. Other times, he would get in bed to find her in the chaste cotton shift of a schoolgirl, on which occasion she chose to address him as uncle. She taught him this and she taught him that until at last it dawned on him that the only way a man ever becomes a lover is at the hands of a woman.

  Of her former lovers, whoever they might have been, he had no time to be jealous. The world seemed intent on rushing off its cliff, so, like everyone else, he lived for the moment and hung on tight. The lipstick grew crimson, hairdos were twisted about in bizarre shapes, and in some dresses a woman simply could not sit down. Affairs begun on Friday were over by Wednesday. And every woman in the world seemed to want him, sensing, he guessed, what went on in the little room. At Heininger, the screechy English girls pressed apartment keys into his hand, absolutely bent on having it off with the working class, and an evil-looking Slav at that. He smiled wistfully and returned the keys, regret for the lost opportunity showing clearly in his expression, hoping that such chivalry would spare him their anger.