by Alan Furst
“We’re at the Athenee Palace,” Serebin said. “Buying folk art for our shop on the rue de Seine.”
“Yes? That must be interesting.”
They managed to make small talk, just enough, Marie-Galante coming to the rescue each time it faltered, then Valentina excused herself-she must have a few minutes before the next show started.
When they’d gone, Serebin said, “Who is he?”
“A businessman,” Maniu said. “Very rich, one is told. And very private.”
Conversation continued, but Serebin’s mind wandered, here and there. The evening was winding down, he could feel it. Madame Maniu glanced at her watch and Colonel Maniu mentioned that he had a car and driver and offered them a ride back to the hotel, but Marie-Galante caught Serebin’s eye and he declined. Not long after that they said good night, and Serebin asked for the check.
As they headed for the door, Serebin looked back at the table. The waiter had collected what remained of the bottle of champagne, and the half-empty glasses, and was carrying them, very carefully, back to the kitchen.
It was long after midnight when they left. Snow was falling, soft and heavy in the night air, and the street lay in the still silence that comes with snow. A trasuri, a horse-drawn cab, stood alone in front of the Tic Tac Club.
Serebin helped Marie-Galante up the step. “The Athenee Palace,” he told the cabman. They sat close together on the old cowhide seat, and Marie-Galante rested her head on his shoulder. The cabman, in heavy mustache and crushed hat, flicked the reins and they moved off down the street.
It was so quiet they did not speak. The cold night smelled good after the smoky cellar. Serebin closed his eyes and, for a time, there was only the squeak of the turning wheels and the steady trot of the horse on the snow-covered pavement. When the horse slowed, abruptly, Serebin looked up to see where they were. They had come to an intersection, where the strada Rosetti met the Boulevard Magheru. Not far from the hotel, he thought. The horse went a little further, then stopped, its ears pricked for a moment, then flattened back against its head. Now what? The cabman made a clicking sound but the horse didn’t move, so he spoke to it, very gently, a question. Suddenly, Marie-Galante’s hand went rigid on his arm, so tight he could feel her fingernails, and he smelled burning. In the distance, a muffled snap, then another, and a third.
The cabman turned and looked at them. Calmly, Serebin waved him on, saying “Just go ahead” in French. The cabman called the horse’s name and it took a few steps, then stopped again. Now the cabman spoke to them. They didn’t understand the words but they could see he was frightened-of what lay ahead but, also, of disobeying well-dressed people who came out of nightclubs. “It’s all right,” Marie-Galante said. “It’s all right.”
He tried once more, this time cracking a green leather whip above the horse’s withers. The horse lowered its head and moved off at a fast trot. A minute went by, maybe whatever was going on, a few blocks away, was over. But it wasn’t. Somewhere in the next street, a sharp crack and a rolling echo, cut by the rhythmic thump of a machine gun, followed by shouted orders. The air above the cab sang for an instant and the horse twisted in its harness and reared up as the cabman fought the reins. The cabman’s eyes were wide when he turned around. “ Va rog, domnul, ” he pleaded. Serebin knew at least this much Roumanian, it meant “please, sir.” Up ahead, Serebin saw two shadows, running low from one doorway to the next. “ Va rog, domnul, ” the driver said, pointing to his horse. He repeated it, again and again, and Serebin could see he was crying.
“We have to get out,” Serebin said.
He climbed down, and helped Marie-Galante, who tried a few steps in the snow, then took her shoes off and walked quickly beside him. Behind them, the cabman turned the trasuri in a wide circle, then disappeared back down the street.
“I hate Bucharest this time of year,” Marie-Galante said, breath coming hard.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“For the moment.”
“Over there,” he said, heading toward the arched entryway of an apartment building. The arch covered a porte cochere, which ran some thirty feet back to a massive door with a griffon’s head on the iron ring that served as a handle. Serebin tried the handle, then pounded on the door.
He gave up, after a while, and they settled against the wall that supported the arch, deep in shadow. “I better put these back on,” Marie-Galante said, hanging on to Serebin and forcing one wet foot at a time into the suede heels. There was a brief silence, then the machine gun started up again, a series of three-round bursts that went on and on, and were joined first by scattered rifle shots, then a second machine gun, sharper and faster than the first.
The smell of fire intensified until Serebin’s eyes began to water, and a drift of black smoke floated over the snow. Across the street, a window on the top floor was cranked open, the creak of rusty metal absurdly loud against the background of gunfire. A silhouette with rumpled hair thrust itself out the open window, shook its fist, and shouted angrily. A second voice, a woman’s voice, shouted even louder, the silhouette disappeared, and the window was cranked shut.
Serebin laughed. Marie-Galante said, “And don’t ever, ever, let me catch you doing that again!” Then, a moment later, “You don’t suppose it’s going to be a long coup d’etat, do you?”
“What we want now is daylight, that usually makes a difference.” He looked at his watch. “Almost two, so…”
“Three hours. Want to beat on the door again?”
“No.”
“Sing ‘Frere Jacques’?”
A beam of yellow light appeared on the street. It swept from one side to the other, returned, and went out. From the same direction, back toward the nightclub, came the irregular beat of an old car engine. “ Merde, ” Marie-Galante said. “We’re on the wrong side of this thing.”
The car crawled toward them, they pressed themselves against the icy stone wall beneath the arch, as far as possible into the shadow. “Don’t cross over,” Serebin said.
The car came into view, then stopped almost directly in front of the entryway. Painted on the door was a fiery crucifix crossing a dagger. “The Iron Guard cavalry,” Serebin said.
“Shh.”
The searchlight was mounted on the roof. As the car idled, it snapped on, probed the entryway, crept up the side of the building, then went off.
“They know,” Serebin whispered. The door. A telephone call.
The car door opened, the dome light went on, somebody swore, and the door slammed. They heard footsteps crunching in the snow.
He was sixteen, Serebin thought. With a strange, elongated face-something wrong with him. Hair cut high above the ears, armband with symbol. He carried a rifle and, when he saw them, he lazily pointed it at Serebin’s heart and spoke a few words, his voice edgy and tight. They raised their hands. He beckoned, they stepped toward him, and he backed up until all three were just under the edge of the arch.
He stared at them for a moment, swung the rifle back and forth, from one to the other, then worked the bolt.
“’Bye, ours. ”
The boy spoke again, irritated. And again.
“What’s he want?” Marie-Galante said.
Serebin had no idea.
Pointed to his eyes, then away.
“He means,” Serebin said, “don’t look at me while I do this.”
“Fuck him.”
A voice from the car, a question.
An answer, fast, thick with tension.
Again, the voice from the car.
The boy with the rifle answered, querulous this time.
The car door opened, then slammed shut. Somebody spoke, and the searchlight hit Serebin full in the face. He had to close his eyes.
But he’d seen that the second one was older, and had a pistol of some sort in his hand. That meant command. “Lei,” the man said. “Francs, pounds.”
Serebin thought of saying “Reichsmarks,” which would save their lives, b
ut he didn’t have any. Instead, he reached slowly into his pocket and threw money, mostly lei, on the snow. Marie-Galante took off her watch and her necklace and dropped them on the money. The man pointed to her hand, she added her wedding band.
“Passportul.”
Serebin produced his passport and tossed it on the ground. Marie-Galante searched her small evening bag, swore, mumbled something about the hotel room, then found hers. The older man picked them up, along with the money and the jewelry. He paged through the passports, saw the Ausweis and other German documents, then said “Franculor,” French, and tossed them away.
He spoke to the boy with the rifle. It sounded like a man talking to someone he knows is crazy-soothing, but firm. The boy lowered the rifle. The commander turned to Serebin and Marie-Galante, said, “Hotel,” and jerked his head in the direction they’d been going in the cab. When he saw that Serebin understood, he said, “La revedere, domnul,” good evening, and the two returned to the car. The searchlight went off, the car turned around and drove away.
Serebin saw the boy again, a few days later. Or maybe not, there was no way to be sure. He’d been hung from an iron bar that held the sign for an umbrella shop, and the face was quite different, but Serebin rather thought it was him.
THE GREEN SALON
5 January, 1941.
They watched it go on, for the next few days, sometimes from the tall windows in their room, the red and gold drapes tied back with braid, sometimes through the doors in the lobby, which looked out on an empty square and a statue of a brass king on a brass horse.
No windows in the lobby itself, only yellow marble pillars, settees in raspberry plush, Bordeaux carpets, mirrored walls, and, through a pair of arches, a green salon, with foreign newspapers laid out on low marble tables, and a gold-framed photograph of King Carol on an easel. In the green salon, one ordered Turkish coffee and listened to the fighting; around the royal palace, just next door, or the nearby police station. It was old Europe in the green salon, it smelled of araby-the scent, like violets, worn by Roumanian men, smelled of leather, of Turkish tobacco.
Sometimes the fighting stopped, and in the silence some of the guests went out for a breath of air and wandered through the streets, though not too far, to see what they could see. At dusk, on the third day of fighting, in the strada Stirbei Voda, Serebin came upon a bloodstain on the snow and a burning candle. He walked another block and saw, chalked on a wall, Homo hominus lupus est. Hobbes’s phrase, “It is man who is the wolf of mankind.” And what heartbroken citizen had dared, in the hours of street fighting, to do such a thing? Well, he was Serebin’s friend for life, whoever he was.
When the attack began-the traditional occupation of the national radio station, followed by the traditional plea for public calm and the traditional proclamation of a new regime-the Bucharest police, armed with pistols and rifles, had fought back, but they were no match for the legionnaires. Then the army appeared. Much the subject of rumors in the hotel lobby- the army has refused to leave its barracks, the army has gone over to the Guard. But then, very late on the second night, Serebin woke to the sound of cannon fire and saw a spectral Marie-Galante, nude and pale, staring pensively out the window. “At last, the army,” she said.
He joined her. Down on the strada Episcopiei, a group of artillerymen, in the sand-colored uniforms of the Roumanian army, were firing a field gun; a tongue of flame at the barrel, a shell tearing through the sky, then a distant explosion. And, on both sides of the street, as far as he could see, infantry, running from doorway to doorway, one or two at a time, going wherever the shells were going.
“It’s over,” Serebin said.
And, a day later, it was. In Bucharest, anyhow. For the time being.
Elsewhere, it continued. There were maps in the newspapers every day, and in some apartments, all across the continent, there were maps pinned to the kitchen wall. So it could be followed, studied, day after day, the war that went here, then there. To Libya, where British troops fought Italian units at Tobruk, to Albania, where Greek troops pushed Italian divisions back across the Shkumbi River and headed for Tirana. To northern Italy, where British warships from Gibraltar entered the Gulf of Genoa, shelled the city’s port, and bombarded the oil refinery at Leghorn.
That story was in the Tribune de Geneve, which Serebin read in the green salon, while eating a large sugared bun studded with raisins. At the next table, a thin woman wearing bright red lipstick, a fur stole around her shoulders, spoke German to a friend. “My dear, I cannot abide this Marshal Antonescu, ‘the Red Dog’ I think they call him. Is that because he is a communist?”
“No, my dear, it’s his hair, not his politics.”
“Is it. Well then, I do so hope the Guard will, ah, put him down.”
They both laughed, gaily enough, but it was not to be, and, a day later, as the snow melted beneath a winter sun, the captured legionnaires were taken away in trucks, or dealt with in the street. Still, it wasn’t over yet, not according to the hall porter on the fifth floor, who shook his head and was sorry about the way people were now.
That afternoon, Serebin and Marie-Galante went to the strada Lipscani house to make telephone calls. Rather vague and general- an acquaintance in Paris suggested…Would so-and-so be at home? Then Serebin took a tram out to a neighborhood of opulent homes, where a retired naval officer had coffee served in the conservatory and said he had never heard of DeHaas AG.
Serebin got away as quickly as possible, and found Marie-Galante waiting for him at the Lipscani house, just back from an hour with a prominent lawyer.
“What did he say?” Serebin asked.
“He said that some people preferred to make love only in the afternoon.”
“And then?”
“That some women required a firm hand to make them passionate.”
“And then?”
“I mentioned DeHaas. He gave up on the firm hand in the afternoon, and explained that the Roumanian legal system was dynamic, not static, that it followed the French, not the English model, particularly with respect to contracts concerning the disposition of agrarian lands.”
“Well, good, I was worried about that.”
“He went on. And on. Eventually, he showed me to the door, told me I was beautiful, and tried to kiss me.”
Dr. Latanescu, the economist, was dead.
And the Hungarian bank employee had returned to Budapest. But Troucelle, the French petrochemical engineer, seemed pleased with a French telephone call-made by Marie-Galante, the native speaker-and invited them to lunch at the Jockey Club. “I’m free tomorrow. Can we say, one o’clock?”
He waved and smiled when they came through the door, clearly delighted at the prospect of lunch. Which was quite good; a puree of white beans, boiled chicken with sour cream and horseradish, and a bottle of white Cotnari, from Moldavian vineyards on the Black Sea.
“The Burgundy negociants needn’t worry,” he said, tasting the wine, “but they don’t do so badly here.”
He was terribly bright, Serebin thought. Young and brisk and competent, a classic product of the Sorbonne’s Polytechnique, wandering abroad, like so many Frenchmen, to make his fortune in foreign lands. Over lunch they followed, as best they could, the Gallic prohibition, no discussion of work or politics at table, and made it just past the chicken-a considerable achievement given the situation in the city. Then Troucelle said, “I have to confess, I’ve thought and thought, but I don’t believe I actually know this Monsieur Richard you mentioned.”
“No?” Marie-Galante said. “He was here maybe two or three years ago, with a company called DeHaas.”
“Hmm. Could he have used another name?”
“Well, he could have. But why would he?”
Troucelle had no idea. “Of course you never know, with people, especially abroad.”
“No, that’s true.”
And there she let it stay.
A waiter pushing a pastry cart arrived at the table. “Just coffee, I thi
nk?” the civilized Troucelle suggested. From Marie-Galante, the Genghis Khan of the dessert table, civilized agreement.
“After Poland,” Troucelle said, “I remember thinking, ‘I expect someone from DeHaas will turn up here.’ Appears I was right, no?”
“Logical, really, when you think about it.”
“I enjoyed my connection with Kostyka,” Troucelle said. “One only met his people, of course, he never appeared in person. Always the fusees. ” It meant fuses, in French political slang, intervening layers of aides and assistants who would “burn out” before an important person could be reached by the law. “And in the end,” Troucelle continued, “the whole thing didn’t amount to much, a few research reports on the petroleum industry. And they were quite generous about it.”
“Even more so, now, I would think.”
“Yes, it’s only logical, as you put it. What sort of information do you suppose they’d want?”
Marie-Galante wasn’t sure. “Perhaps what you gave them before, but it’s not for us to say. The war was a shock to the commercial world, even though everybody could see it coming, but business can’t just stop dead. So it’s mostly a matter of flexibility-I suspect that’s the way DeHaas would see it. Find a way to adapt, to adjust, then get on with life.”
The waiter brought tiny cups of coffee, a dish of curled lemon peels, and little spoons.
“Going up to Ploesti?” Troucelle said.
“Think it’s a good idea?”
“I don’t see why not. It’s all there, you know, it was a real, honest-to-God oil town before the war, Texas riggers and all. They used to have contests on Saturday night, get drunk and see who could shoot out the most streetlights. A little bit of Tulsa, east of the Oder.”
“We have business in Bucharest,” Serebin said, “and our time is limited. But, maybe, if we have the opportunity…”
“It would be my pleasure,” Troucelle said. “I’d enjoy showing it to you.”
“Nazi bastard,” Marie-Galante said-but by then they were out in the street, walking back toward the hotel.
