by Alan Furst
The wind sharpened as night fell, and Serebin left the open deck. The Empress had a searchlight mounted atop the pilot cabin, which threw a tight yellow circle on the water ahead of the boat. Maybe it kept them from running into the shore, he thought, but not much else-staying afloat more likely depended on a helmsman’s knowledge of the shoals and sandbars. A wooden handle that operated the searchlight was set next to the wheel, and Erma reached over and swept the beam along the bank, turning trees into gray ghosts, and, then, revealing a stone kilometer marker with the number 1090 carved on it. Later on, Serebin watched a forest appear in the middle of the river-an island. Erma spun the wheel to the left and the Empress curved slowly around the shore, their wake breaking white against the tangled tree roots. “Ostrovo island,” she said.
There was a bonfire onshore, sparks rising in the air to the height of the trees, and three men in silhouette who stood watching the flames.
Serebin asked if they were hunters.
“Who knows what they are.”
In the light, jagged granite rocks rose from the river. The boat passed within ten feet of one of them, which towered high above the cabin. Beyond the rocks, a fishing village, dark and silent, small boats tied up to a dock. Erma pointed an index finger at the ceiling, bobbing it up and down for emphasis. “Hear that?” she said.
He had to listen for a moment before he heard it-soft at first, then growing, the low, steady drone of aircraft, a lot of them. He leaned forward and squinted through the cloudy glass of the cabin window, but there was nothing to see. The sound went on and on, rising and falling, for more than a minute. “Luftwaffe,” Erma said. She had to raise her voice so he could hear her.
Was it? They were headed southwest, he thought, which meant Greece, or Yugoslavia-maybe even North Africa. If it was the Luftwaffe, they had to be flying from airfields in northern Roumania. To bomb who? British troops in Greece? “Somebody’s going to get it,” Erma said.
Sometimes the RAF flew over Paris at night, on their way to bomb targets in the Ruhr-steel mills, arms factories. People stopped talking when they heard the sound, and, in a silent cafe or shop, waited until it faded away. Paris. Sad, how doors closed behind you. He stared out at the river. Some people would wonder about him. Not Ulzhen, not Anya Zak, they knew, but others might. Or might not-it was no longer very interesting, when people went away. Marrano had told an odd story, over dinner, about Elsa Karp, Ivan Kostyka’s mistress. She too was gone. Had left London, nobody knew why. There were rumors, Marrano said, as always. Stolen money? A secret lover? Connections with Moscow? Some people said that she’d left England by steamship, a freighter flying the flag of a neutral country. Serebin had wanted to hear more about it, but Gulian started to tell stories about Kostyka. “We’re not so different,” he said. Came from obscurity, both of them, no family, no money, on their own before they were sixteen. Serebin didn’t think they were at all like each other, he knew them both, not well, but he’d…
“Up there,” Erma said.
Serebin could just see lights, shimmering in the haze that rose from rivers in the evening.
“Bazias,” Erma said.
First came a sign marking Roumanian territory-on the north bank of the river. Erma throttled the engine back to its slowest speed, barely making way, letting the tug and its barges drift to a stop, and Zolti threw a line to a Roumanian soldier who made them fast to a thick, wooden post. There were two boats docked on the upriver side of the canal-a Bulgarian tug hauling bargeloads of grain, maybe wheat, and a small river freighter, flying the Soviet flag, likely coming up from a Black Sea port. Two Russian sailors sat on the freighter’s deck, dangling their legs over the side, smoking, and watching people go in and out of the customs post.
Not much more than a weathered board shack with a flag on a pole in the front yard. Erma said, “You must bring all the papers with you.”
Serebin patted the envelope in the pocket of his coat.
It was warm inside the customs shack, a coal stove in one corner, and surprisingly busy. Serebin couldn’t sort them all out-men from the tugboat and the freighter, two or three customs officials, an army officer, trying to make a telephone call-tapping the bar beneath the receiver and waiting for an operator.
One of the customs officials took his feet off a deal table, sat up straight, and beckoned to Serebin and the others. Zolti knew him-said something funny in Hungarian, obviously kidding him. The official grinned, looked at Erma, nodded toward Zolti, and shook his head. Ahh, that guy.
“Hello, Joszi,” Erma said. “Busy night?”
“Who’s your passenger?” the official said, stretching an open hand toward Serebin.
“Business type,” Erma said.
The official took Serebin’s passport, wrote the nationality, name, and number in a ledger, opened a drawer in the table and stared down for a moment, then closed the drawer. “Cargo documents, please,” he said to Serebin. Then, to Erma, “Where you’ve been, darling?”
“Esztergom. Over to Bratislava, in December. Froze our you-know-whats off.”
The official nodded in sympathy as he went through the cargo documents, checking the signed approval stamps franked into the upper corners of each page. “What are you doing with these things?” he said to Serebin.
“Mining iron ore, up near Brasov. There’s a mill going in as well, and a foundry.”
“In Brasov?”
“Near there.”
“Where?”
“Sighisoara.”
“There’s iron ore in Sighisoara?”
“Domnul Gulian is told there is.”
“Oh.” The official looked back down at the documents and found the Marasz-Gulian letterhead. Then he turned halfway around in his chair and called out to the officer trying to make a telephone call. “Captain Visiu?”
The captain, young and rather smart looking, with a carefully clipped mustache, returned the telephone receiver to its cradle. He didn’t slam it down, exactly, but used enough force to produce a single note from the bell.
Zolti, in Hungarian, asked the official a question.
The answer was brief.
“What is it?” Serebin said.
“The army’s checking things, tonight,” Zolti said.
The captain presented himself to Serebin with a military half bow. He carried a large flashlight, and gestured toward the dock. “Shall we go and take a look?” he said, in good French, then followed Serebin out the door.
Zolti undid the sailor’s knot at one corner of the tarpaulin and raised it to reveal the iron wall of the turbine. The thing looked terrible, blistered paint, a savage dent, a large patch of rust shaped like a map of South America. The captain put a finger on it and a large flake fell off.
“We have to buy used,” Serebin said.
“Very old, isn’t it?”
“Nothing our machinists can’t fix.”
The captain paused, but decided not to comment. The three of them walked around the turbine, then, using the dock, moved to the second barge, which held the industrial monster late of the Esztergom Power Authority. Loaded at a dock in Budapest, it appeared to have been torn loose from its concrete base. The captain squatted and ran his flashlight underneath, looking for machine guns or Jews or whatever interested them in Bazias that night. Then he stood up and, when he moved back to let Zolti replace the tarpaulin, his heel landed on the hatch cover, which rocked beneath his weight. He looked down to see what it was, then stepped nimbly aside, as though he were afraid he’d damaged something. “So now, the next,” he said.
He was quite thorough, Serebin thought. Even went up into the pilot cabin and had a look around. When he was done, the three of them returned to the customs post, where the official at the desk stamped their papers.
“Tell me, Joszi,” Erma said, “what’s the army doing up here?”
The official didn’t answer with words, but his face wasn’t hard to read. Endless bullshit. “When you coming back, love?”
Er
ma thought it over. “A week, maybe, if we can get a cargo in Giurgiu.”
“If?” The official laughed as he handed Serebin his passport. “See you in a week,” he said. Across the room, the captain stood brooding over the telephone, tapping away.
With Zolti at the helm, they moved cautiously down the canal and out onto the river. “How far now?” Serebin asked.
“Maybe forty kilometers,” Erma said. “So, figure something under three hours. The Yugoslavs have a border post at Veliko Gradiste, about an hour from here, but we may not have to stop, we’ll see. Basically, if you’re leaving the country, the Serbs are glad to see you go.”
“Do we stop for a pilot?”
“Normally, we don’t.”
“Good.” Serebin was relieved. “Better not to deal with somebody like that if we don’t have to.”
“We do what we want,” Zolti said. “Pretty much they leave us alone-we’ve been at it for a long time.”
After that, it grew quiet in the cabin. The hills were tight to the shore now and the current ran fast and heavy under the keel, taking them downstream. When the boat swung around a broad shoal at midriver they could hear the rush of the water, churned to white foam by the gravel beneath it. 9:20. Not long now. They saw a single Roumanian tugboat, without a tow, working its way up to Bazias, a high wave riding the bow. “Strong, tonight,” Zolti said, resettling his hands on the wheel, then glancing over his shoulder at the barges.
“…in the arms of Danubio,” Erma said. Her voice suggested the words of a song, recited by somebody who can’t sing.
“Who’s that?”
“The river god.”
An amusing idea-in daylight, on dry land. But this thing, this energy, beneath him deserved a god about as much as anything he’d ever experienced.
9:44. Kilometer 1050.
It was Erma who saw the searchlight.
Behind them somewhere, she said. Only a flicker, then it was gone-just in time for Serebin and Zolti to spin around and search the river astern and ask her if she was really sure about this. Because, when they looked, they couldn’t see it. But there were rock walls for riverbanks now and a slight shift of direction would be enough to conceal anything.
Zolti looked once more, then again. “Can’t be,” he said.
But it was.
And in a little while they could all see it. A strong white beam, growing slowly brighter as it caught up to them.
“How deep is it here?” Serebin asked.
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“Very deep.”
“Too deep?”
Zolti only now understood what he was getting at. “Do you want to see the chart?”
No, he didn’t need to see anything-these people knew the river. Don’t panic, he told himself. It might be nothing.
It was not, however, nothing. It was, fifteen minutes later, a steel-hulled launch with 177 painted on the bow, a Roumanian flag flying above the stern, and a pair of heavy machine guns, fitted with a curved shield, mounted just forward of the deckhouse. And, in addition, a siren, which wound up and down for a time, to be replaced by an officer with a loud-hailer-the amplified voice of authority intensified as it echoed between the cliffs above the river.
“Empress of Szeged,” it said.
That much Roumanian Serebin could understand, but for what came next he had to ask for translation.
“They’re telling us to pull into the pilot station at Moldova Veche,” Erma said.
“Not for a pilot.”
“No.”
The patrol boat took up station off their stern quarter, which provided a clear field of fire through the gap, some thirty feet, between the tug and the first barge. Zolti pulled a cord fixed to the ceiling above his head, producing two bleats of the boat horn. “That means we’ll do what they want,” he said.
Using the side of her fist, Erma smacked the wooden skirting that ran below the wheel and a panel fell open, revealing a string bag nailed to its back. In the bag, a huge Mannlicher, the Mauser-style pistol of the Austro-Hungarian Empire-long barrel, ammunition magazine a box by the trigger guard-which gave off an oily shine in the glare of the searchlight. “Just so you know,” she said to Serebin, pushing the panel back in place.
“What if,” Serebin said, “we went aground. On the Yugoslav side of the river.”
“Aground?” Zolti said. Serebin saw what he meant-off the starboard bow, a granite wall rose from the water.
“And it wouldn’t stop them,” Erma said.
Not much to say, after that. They chugged on through the night toward the pilot station. Inside Serebin, a mixture of rage and sorrow. All that work. And a memory of the river pilot, his red satin smoking jacket and his Marseilles apartment. Betrayed, he’d said. You have to remember where you are. “I’m sorry,” Serebin said quietly.
Erma said “Ach.” In a way that forgave him and damned the world for what it was and, in case he didn’t understand all that, she dropped a rough hand on his shoulder.
The pilot station at Moldova Veche was set up like the customs post-a canal dug out of the bank beside the river, a dock, and a sagging one-story shack with a shed roof. Tied up at the far end of the canal were three or four small motor launches, clearly meant to ferry officials back and forth on the river. On the land side of the shack, a dirt path climbed a wooded hill, probably to the Szechenyi road.
There was a welcoming committee waiting for them on the dock: two Roumanian gendarmes, rural police, both with sidearms. Erma threw a line to one of them, and he secured the tug to an iron post. The barges drifted up behind the Empress and banged into the old tires lashed to the stern-even in the canal, the current on this part of the river was strong. The patrol boat docked behind the last barge, its engine running in neutral, thin smoke, heavy with the smell of gasoline, rising from its exhaust vents.
Inside, the pilot station was bare and functional, lit by two small desk lamps and a wood fire. A desk, a few wooden chairs, charts tacked to the wall, a coal stove. In one corner, staying well out of the way, an official in a simple uniform, probably the station supervisor. Well out of the way, perhaps, in deference to the two civilians in overcoats, one with briefcase, who rose to meet them. Clearly a chief and his assistant, the latter a well-barbered thug, stocky and powerful, a red and black swastika pin prominent on the lapel of his overcoat.
With a wave of the hand, the chief sent Zolti and Erma off to the custody of his assistant and led Serebin to a pair of chairs on the other side of the room. He was tall, with a fringe of gray hair, heavy rimmed glasses, and the face-the snout-of an anteater; long, curved and curious, built to probe. He wore a red, vee-necked sweater under his suit jacket, which served to temper his official demeanor. “Shall we speak German?” he said courteously. He could speak Swahili, if it came to that, or whatever you liked. When Serebin nodded he said, “So then, may I have your passport, please?”
Serebin handed it over, and the man took his time with it, touching his finger to his tongue to turn the pages, saying “Hm,” and again “Hm,” as he read. Followed the Paris representative of Marasz-Gulian on a series of logical business trips-Basel and Brussels, that kind of thing, had a look at the travel and work permits, slid them into the fold of the passport, slapped it against his palm a few times, then, not persuaded one way or the other, gave it back. “Very good,” he said, meaning either very good fake or everything is in order. “But we don’t concern ourselves with documents, this evening.”
Serebin waited to see what came next. The man had slid his chair to a position where he blocked Serebin’s view of the other side of the room, but Serebin could hear Zolti’s voice. Not precisely angry. Argumentative.
“We have here only some administrative difficulties. Not major, but they must be resolved.”
Across the room, Erma. He couldn’t hear the words, but the tone was indignant.
The chief glanced over his shoulder, then returned to Serebin. “My name is Schreiber, I am the
second secretary at the legation in Bucharest, and I’ve come up here this evening to inform you that we must, regretfully, impound your shipment to Giurgiu. We will inform Herr Gulian of this action-we trust he will respect our decision. But, in any case, it’s no longer your responsibility.”
“All right,” Serebin said.
“As for yourself, we will take you back to Bucharest, where all this can be worked out. A technicality-I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you.”
“No?”
“No.”
“And the owners of the tugboat?”
From Schreiber, a dismissive shrug. Who cared?
Across the room, a certain metallic rattle, and an anguished cry from Erma. Schreiber grunted with irritation and looked around to see what all the fuss was about.
Serebin heard a pop and, instinctively, both he and Schreiber ducked their heads. Serebin stood up, could now see the assistant, thrashing and moaning on the floor. Beside him, a pair of handcuffs. Erma took two steps, leaned over the man and, with two more pops, put an end to the thrashing and moaning.
Schreiber leaped to his feet, arms flung wide, shouted, “Oh for God’s sake…,” on his way to asking what somebody possibly thought they were doing, but he never got there. A small hole, the size of a coin, appeared in the back of his overcoat, where a shred of fabric now hung by a thread. He sank to his knees and coughed, hand politely over his mouth, then fell on his face, with a soft thud as his forehead hit the brick floor.
The room was dead still. Both gendarmes and the station supervisor were backed against the wall, hands high above their heads, eyes wide with terror. In the middle of it all stood Erma, small pistol in hand, trying to figure out what came next.
Serebin knew. He ran for the door, hit the dock in full stride. On the bow of the patrol boat, outlined in the glare of the searchlight, a Roumanian sailor was shouting at him. Had they heard the shots? Above the noise of their engines? Not possible. But, one of the people who’d been taken off the tugboat was now running back toward it. That couldn’t be right. The sailor went for the holster at his belt and shouted an order, but he didn’t quite have it right, because Serebin wasn’t going back to the tugboat.
