Night Soldiers ns-1

by Alan Furst

  Barbette stood at the entry to the stall, the door held open by his left hand, a 9 mm device of no particular distinction held loosely at his side, and contemplated the seated Omaraeff, who was bent well forward, his face hidden in his hands. Barbette’s mouth twisted in sorrowful irony.

  “Oh Djadja,” he said, not unkindly, “women do not take their skirts down to use the toilet, they pull them up. Is that possibly something you would not know? Yes? No? Or is it just the strain of the moment that’s confused you? Yes? Tell me, my friend, you must say something.”

  Omaraeff just shook his head, refused to uncover his face.

  “Poor Djadja,” Barbette said. From where he stood, the top of Omaraeff’s shaven skull offered a particularly tempting aspect and, without further discussion, he raised his hand and completed his mission. Omaraeff rocked back, then collapsed forward, still seated, his upturned hands resting motionless on the tile floor. It was a small facility, the ladies’ W.C. at the Brasserie Heininger, with marble walls and ceiling, and Barbette’s ears rang for hours thereafter.

  Roddy Fitzware’s favorite place in Paris was the center window table at the Tour d’ Argent. He loved the view of the Seine, best appreciated from the sixth-floor restaurant, well above the heads of the tourists. He loved the serious atmosphere-one came here to dine beautifully, period-which stimulated a deep, formal serenity in him, made him, he felt, his best self. Here he could do without the absurd eye makeup and stylish effeminacy that cloaked his persona in the cafe society in which, by direction, he’d taken up residence. He loved the caneton, and he loved the turbot. When it came time to spend some of His Majesty’s Secret Impres’t Funds, the Tour d’ Argent was where he liked to go. One had to scribble the odd voucher, of course, so he couldn’t just simply dine. He had to do His Majesty’s business.

  His Majesty’s business arrived on the stroke of 1:15. Fabien Theaud, a stiff-necked young Frenchman, surely somebody’s nephew, who moved in the upper circles of the DST-the French equivalent of MI5. In other words, a cop. But, Fitzware thought, a cop in a very good suit. He watched him march resolutely toward the table, chin raised, nostrils pinched, mouth slightly drawn down, as though the world disgusted him.

  Fitzware stood, they shook hands formally, in the French manner-a single, firm pump-and Theaud seated himself with ceremony. To the left of the elaborate luncheon setting on Theaud’s side of the table lay a brown paper parcel neatly tied with string. The Frenchman politely ignored the package. He had been treated to these lunches for more than a year and had learned to accept Fitzware’s sense of theater. Revelations were not to be made in the first act.

  Once ritual courtesies were done with and after the service of the wine, Fitzware came to the point. “Your people,” he said, “must be in a frightful uproar this morning.”

  “Oh?” Theaud seemed legitimately surprised.

  “Last night’s madness-the little war at Heininger.”

  “Hardly a war. No one shot back and only the headwaiter was killed. In any case, nothing very interesting for us.” Theaud waved it away.

  “Really?”

  “Les gangsters. Some sort of stupid criminal nonsense. Perhaps an extortion, perhaps a war between butchers for the beef concession, one can only imagine the truth of it. The prefecture already has the two machine-gunners. Trash. Low-grade pimps from Clichy. As for the headwaiter, shot in the toilet, I think that was what the Americans call a rub-out.”

  “Nothing much for you, then.”

  “No. The police and the justice ministry will see to it.”

  “Some prominent people injured, one reads.”

  Theaud indulged himself in a mighty Gallic shrug accompanied by an explosive “Pach!” Then smiled grimly. “The American socialite? The German racing driver? These people. They come to Paris to be decadent, by accident they come upon the real thing, and then they howl. Good stuff for the newspapers is all it is. As for Heininger’s, I wouldn’t try to go there for a week or two if I were you.”

  “They will close down, then?”

  “Close! Heavens no. You won’t be able to get in the door.”

  Fitzware smiled ruefully. “In any case, your efficiency is admirable, to have the assassins so quickly.”

  Theaud brightened visibly at being complimented for efficiency. “Nothing to it, mon vieux. In the British phrase, ‘information received.’ The criminals were sold out almost immediately. They won’t talk, of course-that would be to violate the code of the underworld. So what they’ll get is a nice quick little trial and, if they don’t give us the murderer of the headwaiter, the services of Dr. Guillotin. Truly, I don’t believe they’ll mind all that much. There is some honor to it in their society.”

  “In some countries they would be considered merely accessories.”

  “Perhaps. But this is France, and here they are murderers.”

  For a time they turned their attention to the food and the wine, then Fitzware asked, “May I ask the state of your progress in the matter of the Russian courier?”

  “Ach, you’ll ruin my lunch. A nest of snakes is what that is. Informants and counterinformants, power struggles in the emigre community, lies and wishful thinking and false confessions and rumors and every sort of unimaginable nonsense. I fear that one may be forever lost to us.”

  “You have found it,” Fitzware said simply.

  Theaud looked at him suspiciously. “Yes? I cannot believe my luck would be that good.”

  “But it is. Just to the left of your plat de salade.”

  “This package?”

  “Indeed. It is a Radom.”

  “Oh. A Radom. And that is …?”

  “An automatic pistol of Polish manufacture, a very serviceable weapon, greatly prized east of the Oder. You’ll find that it killed Myagin and, by accident, Ivan Donchev, the old man in the movie theater.”

  Theaud raised a hand and halted him right there. Called for the wine waiter and ordered the best Montrachet they could bring up. “Thus,” he said dramatically, “to those who serve France.”

  Fitzware inclined his head in a seated bow. He was clearly enjoying himself. “There’s a bit more,” he said. “The gun was obtained from a Turk, called Yasin, in the quarter out by Boulevard Raspail. The man who bought it is called Nikko Petrov, a Bulgarian, presently employed as a waiter at the Brasserie Heininger. There. Now I feel I have served France.”

  Theaud’s face collapsed. “Oh no,” he said, “you must not do this to me.”

  Fitzware was stunned.

  “You are telling me-if I were not deaf as a post and entirely unable to hear you-that some connection exists between the Myagin murder and last night’s frolic at the brasserie. Tit for tat. A plot in the restaurant results in the murder of a Soviet diplomat, thus the NKVD returns the favor by shooting the headwaiter and causing general consternation in the brasserie. They would assume, of course, that Heininger would not survive such an incident, being insensitive, for the moment, to cafe society’s appetite for scandal. If that is, indeed, what you are telling me, I do not hear it. You did not say it.”

  “In God’s name why?”

  “Politiques. Four days ago, as I am sure you are aware, Camille Chautemps, a radical socialist, succeeded Leon Blum, a plain old un-radical socialist, as the premier of France. This is, therefore, no time to anger our most formidable ally, the USSR, by accusing them of upsetting a bunch of rich foreigners in a restaurant. Not with Chancellor Hitler sharpening his teeth on our doorstep, it isn’t. My dear Fitzware, I think I am going to weep. With frustration. Right in front of God in the Tour d’ Argent. You have solved our most pressing case and taken it away from us in the same breath.”

  Fitzware bit the end of his thumb and thought for a time. “Well, then, may I suggest you don’t solve it? You may come part of the way, surely. Pick up this Petrov character, drop a curtain around him-matters of national security, trial in camera-and let it stand there. The Heininger connection need not come up, as long as you keep him we
ll away from the newspapers. And, in the case of the brasserie, at least you know what happened. That might mean something or other later on.”

  Theaud drummed his fingers on the table. “Perhaps. It becomes complicated, one has to find a way through, but it’s possible. There are those in the Ministry of Justice who would unravel the whole affaire, and they will have to be deceived. But it would not be the first time, and we could at least clear the internal accounting. One might ask, however, what this Petrov is to you, that such a fine lunch is served on the occasion of his, ah, delivery.”

  “Well, there one has to proceed by indirection-too much information will only confuse the issue. Let us say we are always anxious to be in your good books, and we know that he damaged one of our operations. For his own purposes, he traded one of our people to the Russians for someone he wanted back. Our operative had been of significant value, helping us to acquire information about the NKVD in Paris and elsewhere, a surprising amount of information. This Petrov found a way to ruin him, shall we say. You’re not going to feed him to Dr. Guillotin, are you?”

  “We might. If the Russians found out he was involved in the Myagin business we’d almost have to. But, on the other hand, execution always turns out to be a noisy business-the official sort of execution, at any rate. Still, if there’s a way …”

  Fitzware thought for a moment. “Oh well, serve him right if you did.” The Montrachet arrived.The cranes fly like summer nights,

  their shadows on the sun.

  No, not quite.The cranes fly like summer girls,

  here but an instant, then …

  No. One saw girls in the sky. Ridiculous.The cranes fly, like cranes.

  No. Now his mind was tormenting itself.

  The cranes fly like … How, in fact, did the fucking cranes fly? That was his problem. He’d never seen a crane or, if he had seen one, he didn’t know it was a crane. Someone had surely seen the cranes flying, for the accursed image had worked its way into the Russian mythos and stuck there like a dagger.

  He leaned back in the hard wooden chair and sighed, looking out through the wire at a flat field of weedy grass. Above the guard towers, the sky seemed to stretch to the end of the world. Sascha Vonets was not meant to be a poet, that’s all one could say. It was just that his stubborn soul had, somehow, got into the habit of making soulful noises, and one had to do something or other about that, so his instinct had always been to chop up the thoughts so that they trickled down the page instead of marching, margin to margin, like a shock battalion.

  He put the mutilated poem in a desk drawer and went back to his account ledger. The question was: what should the numbers say? This was harder, even, than cranes. One lived or died with this. So one had better get it right. Problem was, what did Brasovy want? To lie, the better part of the time, to tell Moscow what it wanted to hear just as he told Brasovy what he wanted to hear. Yet there had to be variation, otherwise the whole enterprise was simply too obvious, even for those straw-headed statues back in the Central Administration Office. Some days, one had to tell the truth so that, most days, one could tell the necessary lies. The analysis was correct, all right, but which day was today?

  The production norms for the Utiny gold fields, in the Kolyma River region midway between the East Siberian Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk, were in no way possible to fulfill. In winter, the temperature fell to sixty degrees below zero and the wind blew like a demon’s rage. The workers lived on translucent soup and a few ounces of gritty bread and died like flies. The work sucked their first strength out of them in a matter of weeks. After that, they began dying-not too fast, not too slow-and their ability to shift rock and sand declined rapidly. The previous spring they’d eaten a dead horse. The horse had been dead for a while, when they found it, and they ate the maggots as well. Others had received a barrel of axle grease for their wheelbarrows, and they’d eaten that down to the wood. Some ate Iceland moss, just to put something in their bellies. When they failed to meet the scheduled production norms, dictated by Moscow, they were stripped and watered down and left to freeze in the cold-though not quite to death. In summer they were tied naked to a pole so that the mosquito swarms could eat on them for hours. But what drove them crazy, they said, was the sound of it. The falsetto whirr in the ears.

  He had learned, somehow, not to know of such things.

  He had built a wall and lived behind it.

  He had survived. It was his grandmother who’d kept him out of the execution cellars in the Lubianka. There went the jewelry, the candlesticks, the silver, everything she had put by to survive in bad times. They had sent him east-to the northeast corner of hell, to be precise-with a thirty-year sentence. But he was alive. And he had a debt to pay, a debt to them, and by God’s grace he would stay alive long enough to pay it. To make them cry out in anguish, as they had made others cry out. To make them burn, as they had made others burn. To cut their hamstrings, as they had cut millions, and watch them come tumbling down.

  The cruelest thing he had to admit to himself was that, in some strange way, he had never been happier. Suddenly, in this necropolis of ice and flatness and dead gray light, he had a reason to live, for the first time in his life. At last, there was something he wanted. He wanted to hurt them as they had hurt him. How simple and childlike life turned out to be once it was pared down to the basic elements.

  And the funniest part of it-if anything could ever be funny again-was that they had been right!

  There they were, killing left and right on pretext. On the phantom basis of a hostile glance, an indiscreet word, a beard drawn on a poster, anything, and, the greedy swine, leaving him alive. The one who had truly spied on them and, better yet, continued to do so. Drunken old crazy poet Sascha wandering about in a daze with his absurd heart dragging behind him on a chain, this posturing fool, this poseur, was digging up their buried secrets every chance he got.

  First he had done it in Moscow, long before he’d gone to Spain, in Dzerzhinsky Square itself. Little nighttime trips to the files. What’s old what’s-his-face doing lately? This? Hmm. That? My, my. The other thing? Dear me. We’ll just write that down, in a private little code of our own, and make it into a word, and remember that word.

  And one could remember, once they were set into meter and rhyme, a thousand words.

  When he had first arrived at the camp, they had assigned him the job of general laborer. He was supposed to shift seven cubic yards of gravel a day. Wet gravel. He spit on his hands and set to it; it meant survival, a man was capable of anything when pressed. He shoveled till his muscles rang, till his heart squeezed like a fist. Worked as the mucus ran from his nose and his breath rasped and whistled. The trustee came around just before they were marched back to the camp. Vonets, he wrote, 503775, two yards.

  No!

  Yes. Truth was, perhaps a little over three, but one’s production had to be shared, with “others”-he’d get used to it, they had a system. What was he worried about? At that rate, he wasn’t going to last anyhow.

  He had managed to become a trustee before death got him, but it had been a close thing. One by one, he’d worked his way through the camp NKVD, looking for the right one, the one in whom a spark of ambition still glowed. And, at last, found him. I am, he’d said, a writer of reports. The old trick had worked again, just as it had back in Moscow. He couldn’t fly a damned crane to save his soul but when they needed drivel, and they needed drivel, he was their boy. Fair-haired.

  Transportational facilities on the above date were diminished by the reduction of one unit necessitating a restructuring of production goals on said date.

  Which meant the horse had died.

  They made him a clerk.

  That meant he lived in a room with four beds and a stove, that meant he worked in an office where they stoked logs into the stove as though tomorrow would never come, that meant he got a fishhead in his soup every night and twelve extra ounces of bread a day, which meant he could stay alive, and, in turn, that meant he cou
ld plunge the knife into their hearts and twist with all his might. In time.

  It meant, most important, that he had something to trade, because the little diary he had kept for so long had to grow, had to stay current, or it would be worth nothing. In the Kolyma it was as though time had stopped. The wind moaned in the fir trees and the world was white. Blank. Yet, somewhere, life went on, operations continued, changed, assumed new shapes, involved new people. All the little details kept piling up and he had to have them, he fed on them, and they kept him on fire and alive.

  So. He watched the new arrivals. The chekists were easy to spot, in their leather coats and boots and their smug, well-fed faces. They’d been interrogated, all right, but they’d put that nightmare behind them in the transit camps, on the cattle cars, and they came into the camp expecting to be treated, well, at least decently. They were, after all, party members.

  Then it was the gravel. Or pulling a sledge piled with rocks by means of ropes around their shoulders, like beasts. And that’s when Sascha would come around. Could they, perhaps, use a bit of help? A friendly hand? They could? Well, he’d see what he could do. They should hang on, meanwhile, drive that shovel into the wet gravel, take the weight on their forearms, grunt with the effort of it a thousand times a day. He was working on it. The old man responsible for counting the shoes was fading fast, on his last legs-how would they feel about doing such a job? Not too demeaning, counting shoes? He watched their eyes warm with anticipation, their tongues hang out like dogs’. Soon, soon, he would tell them. Just get up at four tomorrow morning in the icy blackness and slurp up a few ounces of soup and have at it one more day.