City of Thieves

by David Benioff

  All of the women of the house—Nina and Galina, Lara and Olesya—were prettier than Vika at first glance. Their hair was long and brushed; they had no dried mud on the backs of their hands; they even wore a bit of lipstick. They hurried in and out of the great room, carrying bowls of shelled walnuts and salted radishes. There was a new group of armed men to please—countrymen, yes, but still dangerous and unpredictable. One of them, sitting cross-legged on the floor by the fire, grabbed Galina’s chubby wrist as she leaned down to refill his glass of vodka.

  “You take a look outside yet? Is your boyfriend one of them lying on his face?”

  His friend beside him laughed and the partisan, encouraged, yanked Galina into his lap. She was used to rough treatment; she didn’t cry out or spill a drop of the vodka.

  “Did they bring you lots of tasty things to eat? They must have, eh, feel these cheeks!” He brushed a callused thumb across her soft pink cheek. “And what did you do for them? Anything they wanted, was that it? Danced naked while they sang the ‘Horst Wessel Song’? Sucked them off while they drank their schnapps?”

  “Get off her,” said Vika. She was lying on her back just as she had been, still looking up at the ibex head while her feet in their thick wool socks swayed to the beat of an unheard song. Her voice was uninflected—if she was angry, it was impossible to tell. As soon as the words were in the air I wished I had said them instead. It would have been a brave gesture, possibly suicidal, but Galina had been kind to me and I should have defended her—not because of my noble nature, but because it might have impressed Vika. But in the moment when I might have acted I froze, another act of cowardice to dwell on through the years. Kolya would have intervened without hesitation, but Kolya was in the back bedroom with Korsakov, looking over the colonel’s letter of safe transit.

  The partisan gripping Galina’s wrist hesitated before responding to Vika. I knew he was afraid. I’ve been afraid for so long I can spot the fear in other people before they know it’s there. But I also knew he would say something back, something cutting to prove to his comrades that he wasn’t afraid, even though they all knew he was.

  “What’s the matter?” he finally asked. “You want her for yourself?”

  It was a weak effort and none of his friends gave him a laugh. Vika didn’t bother responding. She never looked his way. The only sign that she had heard him at all was a slow smile that spread across her face, and it wasn’t clear if that was in response to his taunt or the ibex’s glass-eyed glare. After a few more seconds the partisan grunted, let go of Galina, and gave her a weak push.

  “Go on, serve the others. You’ve been a slave so long that’s all you’re good for.”

  If the partisan’s insults wounded her, Galina hid it well. She poured glasses of vodka for the other men in the room and all of them were polite, nodding their heads in thanks.

  After a minute to consider the odds of severe embarrassment, I walked over to the horsehair sofa and sat on the end of it, close to Vika’s feet in their gray wool socks. The ibex’s chin beard dangled above my head. I glanced up at it and then over to Vika. She was staring right at me, waiting to hear whatever ludicrous thing I was planning to say.

  “Was your father a hunter?” I asked. This was the question I had formulated while standing on the other side of the room. As soon as I said it I wondered why I had thought it was a good way to start a conversation. Some article I had read about snipers, something about Sidorenko shooting squirrels when he was a boy.

  “What?”

  “Your father . . . I thought maybe that’s how you learned to shoot.”

  I couldn’t tell if it was boredom or disgust in her blue eyes. Up close, by the light of the oil lamps and the fireplace, I could see a spray of small red pimples across her forehead.

  “No. He wasn’t a hunter.”

  “I guess a lot of snipers started out as hunters. . . . Anyway, I read something about it.”

  She wasn’t looking at me anymore, she was back to studying the ibex. I was less interesting than a stuffed animal. The other partisans watched me, elbowing each other and grinning, leaning close to whisper and laugh quietly.

  “Where’d you get that German rifle?” I asked her, a little desperate, a gambler who keeps on betting even as his hands get worse and worse.

  “Off a German.”

  “I have a German knife.” I pulled up my pants leg, unsheathed the knife, and turned it in my hand, letting the fine steel catch the light. The knife got her attention. She held out her hand and I passed it to her. She tested the edge of the blade against her forearm.

  “Sharp enough to shave with,” I said. “Not that you need to . . . I mean . . .”

  “Where’d you find it?”

  “On a German.”

  She smiled and I was very proud of the line, as if I’d said something massively clever, responding to her taciturnity with my own.

  “And where’d you find the German?”

  “Dead paratrooper in Leningrad.” I hoped that was vague enough to leave open the possibility that I had killed the paratrooper.

  “They’re dropping into Leningrad? It’s started?”

  “Just a commando raid, I guess. Only a few got through. Didn’t go so well for the Fritzes.” I thought that sounded right, offhand, as if I were the sort of killer who spoke casually of the enemies I’d dispatched.

  “You killed him yourself?”

  I opened my mouth, fully prepared to lie, but the way she looked at me, her lips curled into that smirk that both angered me with its condescension and made me want to kiss her . . .

  “The cold killed him. I just saw him falling.”

  She nodded and handed back the knife, stretching her arms behind her head and giving a tremendous yawn, not bothering to cover her mouth. Her teeth were like children’s teeth, very small and not quite matching. She looked content, as if she’d just eaten a nine-course meal served with the best wines, though all I’d seen her nibble on was a black radish.

  “The cold is Mother Russia’s oldest weapon,” I added, some line I’d heard a general spout on the radio. Immediately I wished I could retract it. Maybe it was true, but it had been a propaganda cliché for months now. Even mouthing the phrase Mother Russia made me feel like one of those stupid smiling Young Pioneers, marching in the parks in their white shirts and red ties, singing “The Little Joyful Drummer.”

  “I have a knife, too,” she said, slipping a birch-handled dagger out of a sheath tucked into her belt and offering it to me hilt first.

  I turned the slender blade in my hand. There was a pattern of fine lines on the steel, like ripples in disturbed water.

  “It seems a little flimsy.”

  “It’s not.” She leaned forward to run the tip of her index finger along the textured blade. “That’s Damascus steel.”

  She was close enough now that I could study the curling ridges of her ear or the creases that interrupted the smooth span of her forehead when she raised her eyebrows. A few stray pine needles were lodged in the thickets of her hair and I resisted the impulse to pluck them out.

  “It’s called a puukko,” she told me. “All the Finnish boys get them when they come of age.”

  She took the knife back from me and tilted it so she could admire the play of firelight on metal.

  “The best sniper in the world is a Finn. Simo Häyhä. The White Death. Five hundred and five confirmed kills in the Winter War.”

  “So you took that off some Finn you shot?”

  “Bought it for eighty rubles in Terijoki.” She slipped the dagger back into the sheath on her belt and surveyed the room, looking for something more interesting to occupy her attention.

  “Maybe you can be the Red Death,” I said, trying to keep talking because I knew if I stopped, I would never regain the courage to start again. “That was some fine sniping out there. I guess the Einsatzkommandos aren’t used to people shooting back at them.”

  Vika regarded me with her cold blue eyes. There
was something not entirely human about her gaze, something predatory, lupine. She made a circle of her lips before shaking her head.

  “Why do you think those were Einsatzkommandos?”

  “The girls told us that’s who comes here.”

  “What are you, fifteen? You’re not a soldier—”

  “Seventeen.”

  “—but you’re traveling with a soldier who’s not with his unit.”

  “Well, as he was saying, we have special orders from Colonel Grechko.”

  “Special orders to do what? Organize the partisans? Do I look so very stupid to you?”

  “No.”

  “You came here to visit the girls? Is that it? One of these is your girlfriend?”

  I was strangely proud that she thought one of the lovely girls in the house might be my girlfriend, even though I could hear the insulting tone in her phrasing, “one of these.” She was curious about me, that was a start. And she was right to be curious. Why should a Piter boy be all the way out here, twenty kilometers behind enemy lines, resting in a comfort house maintained for officers of the invaders?

  I remembered what Kolya had told me about enticing a woman with mystery.

  “We have our orders, I’m sure you have yours, let’s keep it at that.”

  Vika stared at me in silence for a few seconds. She might have been enticed, but it was hard to tell.

  “Those Germans out there with their brains in the snow? That’s regular Army. You’d think a man—sorry, a boy—working with the NKVD would know the difference.”

  “I didn’t get a chance to inspect their insignia because you people were pointing your rifles at us.”

  “We’re looking for Einsatz, though. That’s big game. We’ve been hunting this corpse-fucker Abendroth the last six weeks. Thought he might be here tonight.”

  I had never heard the curse “corpse-fucker” before. The phrase sounded brutally vulgar coming from her lips. I smiled for some reason, a smile that must have seemed odd and unprovoked. In my mind I pictured her with her pants off; the image was sharp and detailed, far more convincing than my imagined nudes usually were. Maybe Kolya’s pornographic playing cards really had helped.

  “Abendroth’s in a house in Novoye Koshkino,” I told her. “By the lake.”

  The information seemed to entice her more than anything else I had said. My inappropriate smile matched with my knowledge of the Nazi’s whereabouts made me momentarily intriguing.

  “Who told you that?”

  A more mysterious man would have known how to deflect the question, how to sidestep like a boxer, bobbing and weaving, never getting tagged. I knew something she wanted to know. For the first time I had a slight advantage over her. The words Novoye Koshkino gave my NKVD credentials a touch of credence, offered me some leverage I could exploit.

  “Lara,” I said, giving it all away with a word.

  “Which one is Lara?”

  I pointed her out. As Vika’s unblinking gaze shifted, I felt that I had somehow betrayed Lara. She had been generous—given us shelter from the cold, fed us warm food, ventured into the brutal winter night in her bare feet to help defend us from the suspicious partisans—and I had surrendered her name to this smirking blue-eyed killer. Vika slid her feet off the sofa, her toes in their wool socks grazing against my pants leg. She stood and walked over to Lara, who was crouched by the fire, adding another log to the blaze. With her boots off I saw how small Vika really was, but she moved with the kind of lazy grace you see in athletes when they’re relaxing away from the playing field. This is modern warfare, I thought, where muscle means nothing and a slender girl can halve a German’s head at four hundred meters.

  Lara seemed nervous when she saw the sniper smiling down at her. She rubbed the soot off her hands as she listened to Vika. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but I saw Lara nod, and from the way she gestured with her hands I figured she was giving Vika directions.

  Kolya walked into the room with Korsakov. Each had a glass of vodka in hand and they were laughing at some joke, best of chums now, the earlier hostility forgotten. I had expected nothing less— Kolya was a great salesman, especially when he was selling himself. He ambled over to the horsehair sofa and sat down with a sigh, slapping my knee and downing the last of his vodka.

  “You get enough to eat?” he asked me. “We’re ready to move.”

  “We’re leaving? I thought we’d sleep here tonight.”

  The gunfight had riled my system, but now that some time had passed since the bullets were flying, I felt the fatigue seeping back into my bones. We had walked all day through the snow and I hadn’t slept since Sonya’s apartment.

  “Come on, you’re smarter than that. What do you think is going to happen when those Fritzes out there don’t come back from their little party tonight? How long before they send a platoon to find out where their Oberleutnants disappeared to?”

  Vika had gotten what she needed from Lara. Now she spoke in low tones to Korsakov, the two of them standing in the corner of the room—the broad-shouldered, stubble-jawed partisan commander and his little assassin, lit by the flickering fire.

  The other partisans began to get ready, pulling on their dry socks and their felt boots, swallowing one more glass of vodka for the long march ahead of them. The girls of the house had disappeared to the back rooms where, I guessed, they would grab whatever they could carry and decide where to go next.

  “We could take the German cars,” I said, inspired by the idea. “Drop off the girls in Piter . . .” Like most ideas I considered inspired, the brilliance of it faded before I reached the end of the second sentence.

  “Drive a Kübel toward the Leningrad line,” said Kolya. “Hm, yes, that’s a thought. And when our own people blow us off the road and some Don Cossack country idiot pulls our smoking bodies from the wreckage, he’ll say, ‘Huh! These German boys look just like us!’ No, little lion, we’re not going back to Piter yet. We’ve got business in Novoye Koshkino.”

  17

  Twenty minutes later we were trudging through the snow again, the warmth of the farmhouse already slipping from memory. Flanked by mighty pines, we walked in single file with nine paces between each man, on Korsakov’s explicit orders. I didn’t understand the tactical significance of the formation, but trusted that these men were masters of the ambush and knew what they were doing. Kolya walked in front of me and with my head hanging low I was aware only of the hem of his greatcoat and his black leather boots. The rest of the bodies in our little caravan were phantoms, unseen and unheard except for the occasional crack of a stepped-on twig or the rasp of a canteen cap unscrewed for a sip of still-hot tea.

  I had never really believed that truism that soldiers learned how to sleep while they marched, but as we continued east, lulled by the rhythm of our boots rising and falling in the snow, I lurched in and out of wakefulness. Even the cold could not keep me alert. Novoye Koshkino was only a few kilometers from the farmhouse by road, but we were far from any road, circling around German encampments that Kolya and I would have stumbled into if we were unescorted. Korsakov had said the march would take four hours; before the first one was over I felt that someone had poured thick syrup into a hole in my skull. Everything I did I did slowly. If I wanted to rub my nose, I was aware of the brain’s command and the hand’s grudging obedience, the long journey the hand took on the way to the face, the search for the nose (usually an easy target), and the hand’s grateful return to its cozy little cave in the depths of my father’s navy coat.

  The more tired I got the more doubtful the whole scenario seemed. How could this be real? We were a band of enchanted mice, marching beneath the chalked moon on the blackboard sky. A sorcerer lived in Novoye Koshkino, a man who knew the ancient words that could transform us back into the men we once were. But there would be perils on the way, giant black cats scrambling over the ice, lunging for us as we scurried for cover, our long tails twitching with fear.

  My boot sank deep into a mound of soft
snow and I nearly turned my ankle. Kolya stopped and looked back when he heard me stagger, but I managed to right myself, give him a quick nod, and keep walking without any help.

  The girls who lived in the farmhouse had left at the same time we did. They did not have any overcoats or winter boots; the Germans had taken those items away after Zoya made her run. Without proper clothing the girls resorted to layering, throwing on every shirt they had, every sweater and pair of leggings, until they teetered beneath the weight, wobbling through the great room like drunk, obese peasants. Galina had brought up the idea of taking the Nazis’ overcoats, but she was quickly shushed—their chances were bad enough, if they were captured, but getting captured while wearing a dead officer’s coat was the end.

  Kolya and I had kissed their cheeks at the doorway. They had decided not to go to Leningrad; a few of them had family there, but the uncles and cousins might have died already or fled to the east. More important, there was no food in Leningrad for the residents and certainly no food for four girls from the villages with no ration cards. Leningrad didn’t make sense, so they were heading south. They had brought whatever provisions were left after the partisans took what they wanted. Korsakov let them keep two of the Germans’ Lugers for protection. Their odds were not good, but they seemed in high spirits as they walked out the farmhouse door. They had been prisoners there for months, had suffered their own tortures night after night, and now they were free. I kissed all eight cheeks, waved good-bye, and never saw them again or heard anything about them.

  Something jolted my shoulder, my eyes popped open, and I realized I’d been walking in a semiconscious trance. Kolya marched beside me now, his gloved hand gripping me through my coat.

  “You still with us?” he asked quietly, watching me with real concern.

  “I’m here.”

  “I’ll walk with you. Keep you awake.”

  “Korsakov told us to—”