Blood of Victory

by Alan Furst

  “Oh yes. Tolerated every night—I know you, Ilya.”

  “Well, it’s different now. And Paris isn’t the same.”

  “The Germans leave you alone?”

  “So far. I am their ally, according to the present arrangements, the Hitler-Stalin treaty, and a literary celebrity, in a small way. For the moment, they don’t bother me.”

  “You know them?”

  “Two or three. Officers, simply military men assigned to a foreign posting, that’s how they see it. We have the city in common, and they are very cultured. So, we can have conversation. Always careful, of course, correct, no politics.”

  She pretended to shiver. “You won’t stay.”

  He nodded, she was probably right.

  “But then, perhaps you are in love.”

  “With you.”

  Her face lit up, even though she knew it wasn’t true. Or, maybe, only a little true. “Forgive him, God, he tells lies.”

  Fifteen years old, in empty apartments, on deserted beaches, they had fucked and fucked and slept tangled up together. Long summer evenings in Odessa, warm and humid, dry lightning over the sea.

  “And do you walk?” he said.

  She sighed. “Yes, yes, I do what I must. Every day for an hour.”

  “To the museum? To see our friend?”

  She laughed at that, a loud, raucous caw. When she’d first come to Istanbul they had visited the neighborhood attraction, a naval museum. Exquisitely boring, but home to a twenty-three-ton cannon built for an Ottoman sultan called Selim the Grim. A painting of him hung above the monster gun. His name, and the way he looked in the painting, had tickled her wildly, though the laughing fit had produced a bright fleck of blood on her lip.

  One of the Ukrainian ladies stood at the door to the terrace and cleared her throat. “It is five-thirty, Tamara Petrovna.”

  Serebin rose and greeted her formally—he knew both sisters’ names but wasn’t sure which was which. She responded to the greeting, calling him gospodin, sir, the genteel form of address that had preceded comrade, and set a tray down on the table, two bowls and a pair of soup spoons. Then she lit an oil lamp.

  The bowls were heaped with trembling rice pudding, a magnificent treat for Serebin when he was a child. But not now. Tamara ate hers dutifully and slowly, and so did Serebin. Out on the Bosphorus, an oil tanker flying the swastika flag worked its way north, smoke rising from its funnel.

  When they finished the pudding, she showed him where the roof tiles had cracked and come loose, though he could barely see them in the failing light. “That’s why I wrote to you,” she said. “They must be repaired, or water will come in the house. So we asked in the market, and a man came and climbed up there. He will fix it, but he says the whole roof must be replaced. The tiles are very old.”

  Is that why you wrote? But he didn’t say it. Instead, standing at the dark corner of the house, waves breaking at the foot of the bluff, he asked her why she’d said one last time.

  “I wanted to see you again,” she said. “That day I feared, I don’t know what. Something. Maybe I would die. Or you.”

  He put a hand on her shoulder and, just for a moment, she leaned against him. “Well,” he said. “As we seem to be alive, today anyhow, we might as well replace the roof.”

  “Perhaps it is the salt in the air.” Her voice was soft.

  “Yes. Bad for the tile.”

  “It’s getting cold, maybe we should go inside.”

  They talked for an hour, then he left. The taxi was waiting in front of the house, as Serebin knew it would be, and on the way back to the hotel he had the driver wait while he bought a bottle of Turkish vodka at a café.

  A practical man, the driver, who had contrived to learn a few crucial words for his foreign passengers. When Serebin returned from the café he said, “Bordello, effendi?”

  Serebin shook his head. The man had watched him, in the rearview mirror, as he’d rubbed his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket. Well, the driver thought, I know the cure for that.

  No, no cure. She had that damn photograph on her dresser, cut from a newspaper and framed, amid sepia portraits of her mother and grandmother, and snapshots of her Polish lieutenant, who’d disappeared in ’39, and her dog Blunka, descendant of every hound that roamed the alleys of Odessa. She showed Serebin the small room where she slept, and there was the famous photograph.

  Taken at a railway station captured from Denikin’s cossacks on a grainy April morning. A gray photograph; the station building pocked with gunfire, one side of the roof reduced to blackened timbers. The young officer Serebin, looking very concentrated, with two days’ growth of beard, wears a leather jacket and a uniform cap, the open jacket revealing a Nagant revolver in a shoulder holster. One hand holds a submachine gun, its leather sling hanging down, the other, bandaged with a rag, points as he deploys his company. Bolshevik intellectual at war. You could smell the cordite. The photograph had been taken by the renowned Kalkevich, who’d chronicled young dancers, backstage at the Bolshoi, for Life magazine. So it was very good, “Bryansk Railway Station: 1920.” Was reproduced in French and British newspapers, appeared in Kalkevich’s New York retrospective.

  “We remember your photograph, Ilya Aleksandrovich.” Stalin said that, in the summer of 1938, when Serebin, certain that he was headed to the Lubyanka, was picked up by two chekists in a black Zil and whisked off to the Kremlin at midnight.

  To be praised, it turned out, for the publication of Ulskaya Street, and to eat salted herring and drink Armenian champagne. He could barely get it down, could still taste it, warm and sweet. Beria was in the room, and, worse, General Poskrebyshev, the chief of Stalin’s secretariat, who had the eyes of a reptile. The movie that night—he’d heard they watched one every night—was Laurel and Hardy in Babes in Toyland. Stalin laughed so hard that tears ran down his face. As the torch-bearing hobgoblins marched, singing, out of Bo-Peep’s shoe.

  Serebin went home at dawn, and left Russia a month later.

  And when the writer Babel was taken away, in May of ’39, knew in his heart that his name had been on the same list. Knew it because, at a certain point in the evening, Poskrebyshev looked at him.

  Back at the hotel, the night clerk handed him an envelope. He took it up to his room, had a taste of the vodka, then another, before he opened it. On cream-colored paper, a note. A scented note, he discovered. And not only did he recognize the scent, he even knew its name, Shalimar. He knew this because he’d asked, the night before, and he’d asked because, everywhere he went, there it was, waiting for him. “Mon ours,” she wrote. Friends for drinks, at the yacht club, slip twenty-one, seven-thirty. She would be so pleased, so delighted, if he could join them.

  A cloudy morning in Istanbul. From Serebin’s window, the Bosphorus was gray as the sky. The room service waiter was long departed, and Serebin had become aware that Turkish coffee was only a partial ameliorant for Turkish vodka—a minor lapse in the national chemistry—and had to be supplemented with German aspirin. The fat slice of pink watermelon was an affront and he ignored it.

  In Constanta, waiting eight days for the Bulgarian steamship to make port, he’d wired the IRU office in Istanbul and let them know he was coming. Life as an executive secretary had its particular demands; Serebin had learned this the hard way, which was pretty much the way he learned everything. As a writer, he’d been a free spirit, showed up where and when he liked, or didn’t show up at all. A visit from the muse—or so people wanted to believe, a permanent excuse. But, as an administrator, you had to announce yourself, because a surprise visit implied inspection, you were trying to catch them at it, whatever it was. The last thing Serebin ever wanted, to catch anybody at anything.

  10:20—time to go. He made sure to take his briefcase—emblem of office—though there was hardly anything in it. No matter, they were sure to give him paper enough to fill it up. He only then realized, too late, that he had no paper to give them. He went downstairs to the lobby, started tow
ard the main entrance, then changed his mind and left by the back door. Hurried down a side street and out onto the avenue, then put ten minutes of distance between himself and the Beyoglu. Forgive me, my friend, I do not mean to cause you difficulties. Truly, he didn’t know why he’d evaded the driver. Nameless instinct, he told himself, let it go at that, stepped into the street and hailed a taxi.

  In heavy traffic, they crept across the Golden Horn on the Galata Bridge to the old Jewish district of Haskoy. This was only the most recent address of the IRU office. It had moved here and there since its founding, in 1931, as had the offices in Belgrade, Berlin, and Prague, finding its way to Rasim street a year earlier, across from the loading yard of a tannery.

  They were now in two comfortably large rooms on the second floor, at one time the office of the émigré Goldbark, who’d become rich as an exporter of tobacco and hazelnuts and was now one of the directors, and chief financial supporter, of the International Russian Union: Istanbul chapter. The building itself was ancient and swelled alarmingly as it rose, leaning out over a cobblestone lane.

  At the top of the staircase, a sign on the door in Cyrillic, and one in Roman letters. Inside, magnificent chaos, Russian chaos. A steamy room with a radio playing and two women seated at clacketing typewriters. Two old men with long white beards were working at a bridge table, addressing envelopes with nib pens and inkwells. On one wall, drawings from the Russian kindergarten, mostly trains. Flanked by Pushkin in profile, and Chekhov in a wicker chair in the yard of a country house. A dense oil painting of the Grand Bazaar, in vibrant colors. A brown and black daguerreotype of a steppe.

  On the adjacent wall, a mimeographed schedule for the month of November, which Serebin, for the moment left alone, felt he might as well read. A lecture about wool, a meeting of the stamp club, Turkish lessons, English lessons, meeting for new members—please sign up, memorial service for Shulsky, and a film, Surprising Ottawa, to be shown in the basement of the Saint Stanislaus church. Tacked up beside the schedule, underlined clippings, news of the Russian community cut from the IRU Istanbul’s weekly newspaper.

  “Serebin!” Kubalsky, the office manager, hugged him and laughed. “Don’t tell anybody you’re here!”

  Kubalsky took him around the office, introduced him to a bewildering assortment of people, sat him down at a table, pushed aside stacks of newspapers and files, and poured him a glass of tea from an ornate copper samovar.

  “Life’s being good to you?” Serebin said, offering Kubalsky a Sobranie.

  “Not too bad.” Kubalsky had a long, narrow face and deep-set eyes that glittered like black diamonds. Twice, in Berlin, he’d been beaten up as a Jew, which made him laugh, through split lips, because his grandfather had been a Russian Orthodox priest.

  Serebin blew on his tea. Kubalsky, prepared for the worst, drummed his fingers on the table. “So, what brings you to Istanbul?”

  “Truth?”

  “Why not?”

  “I had to get away from Paris.”

  “Oh. Claustrophobia.”

  Serebin nodded.

  “Have you seen Goldbark?”

  “Not yet. How is he?”

  “Crazy as a bedbug. Says he lies awake all night, worrying about money.”

  “Him?”

  “‘I make a fortune,’ he says. ‘Where is it? Where is it?’”

  “Where is it?”

  Kubalsky shrugged. “Thank God for the wife, otherwise he’d make us all crazy.” He tapped cigarette ash into a cracked cup used as an ashtray. “The real problem here, of course, is the politics.”

  Serebin agreed.

  “It’s a zoo. The city’s crawling with spies—Nazis, Hungarians, Zionists, Greeks. The German ambassador, von Papen, is in the papers every day, but so are the British. The Turks are scared. Hitler went through the Balkans like shit through an eel. Now he’s got Bulgaria—maybe he stops there, maybe he doesn’t. The Turks are neutral, officially, but, so far, they’re neutral on our side. Still it’s difficult to navigate. That old business about the Middle East—to walk across a square you have to make three moves.”

  “What if they sign on with Germany?”

  “We run. Again.”

  Serge Kubalsky knew all about that. In 1917, he’d been a successful “boulevard journalist” for one of the St. Petersburg newspapers that lived on gossip and innuendo. Then came revolution, and the husband of the woman he was sleeping with that week rose, overnight, from clerk to commissar. Kubalsky got away with eighty roubles and a canary. Settled in Berlin but couldn’t tolerate the Nazis, so he went to Madrid in 1933. The Republican secret service booted him out in ’36, he went to Lisbon, was hounded by Salazar’s thugs and left in ’37. Tried Switzerland—sorry, no residence card. Sofia the following autumn, wrote the wrong thing about the king, so off to Amsterdam, sneaking in the back door just about the time the Wehrmacht was breaking down the front. “I no longer,” he once told Serebin, “speak any language whatsoever.”

  An old woman with a cane came over to the table, kissed Kubalsky on both cheeks, then disappeared into the other room. Kubalsky finished his cigarette and stood up. “Well,” he said, “you’d better take a look at the finances.” He went to a file cabinet and returned carrying a ledger filled with spidery bookkeeping.

  Serebin ran his finger down the expense column. Ah, Sanskrit. But he worked at it, found the stamps, the ink and paper and envelopes, the lifeblood, then came upon an entry for rent. “What’s this?” he said.

  “Rental of office space.”

  “I thought Goldbark gave us this place.”

  “He does. But we pay the rent and he donates the money. It helps him with his taxes, he says. Turks are old-fashioned about taxes. The strangling cord may be out of style, but the point of view hasn’t changed.”

  The following pages were given over to loans and gifts, it went on and on, small amounts, the names not only Russian but Ukrainian and Jewish, Greek and Tatar, many others, a history of migration, a history of flight.

  “So many,” Serebin said, subdued.

  “People wounded in the war. Sick. Drunk. Or just broken. We come from a brutal place, Ilya. The list would double, if we had the money.”

  Serebin knew. In Paris, he gave more than he could afford.

  “What we try to do,” Kubalsky said, “is to help the Russian community as a whole. The Turks are basically fair-minded people, cosmopolitan. Hospitality to strangers is a religion with them. That’s what Kemal was all about. He outlawed the fez, changed the alphabet, kept Islam out of government. Everybody had to have a last name—they had lists of suggestions nailed up in the public squares. Still, foreigners are foreigners, and Russia and Turkey have always fought wars. So, the community is suspected of harboring Stalinist agents, the NKVD is active here, and every time some plot blows up and hits the newspapers, we all get blamed. Old story, right?”

  Kubalsky sighed. Why did life have to go like this? “Christ,” he said, “you have to live somewhere.”

  The yacht club was in the village of Bebek, just north of the city, where Istanbul’s wealthiest citizens had summer homes. Serebin, with Marie-Galante’s note in his pocket, visited a bar by the ferry dock in Eminonu, thought about not going, then decided he might as well. It had been a long, long day in the world of the International Russian Union. He had left Kubalsky to have lunch with Goldbark, followed by a visit to the eighty-five-year-old General de Kossevoy, in a tiny room so hot it made him sweat, and by the end of the afternoon he’d had all the émigré business he could bear. He stood at the rail of the crowded ferry, watching the caiques and the feluccas sliding through the water, the oil lamps on their sterns like fireflies in the darkness.

  He found the yacht at slip twenty-one. Sixty feet of teak and polished brass. La Néréide—Tangier was painted in gold script on the bow and two crewmen, in green uniforms with the yacht’s name on the bands of their sailor hats, waited at the gangplank. He wondered about the nationality of the Néréide, sea ny
mph, but Tangier, in the Vichy French colony of Morocco, could have meant anything, and he knew, from talk on the docks of Odessa, that some yachts never called at their home ports. A flag of convenience—the legal words better, for a change, than poetry.

  One of the sailors led him onboard, down a corridor, and into the salon. The 16th Arrondissement. At least that, Serebin thought. Black lacquer tables, white rattan furniture. The cushions had red tulips on a pale red background, there was lemon-colored Chinese paper on the walls. People everywhere, a mob, chattering and yammering in a dense fog of cigarette smoke and perfume.

  The aristocrat who hurried toward him—he could be nothing else—wore blazer and slacks. Trim body, sleek good looks, ears tight to the head, graying hair combed back and shining with brilliantine. The Duke of Windsor, as played by Fred Astaire. “Welcome, welcome.” An iron grip. “We’re honored, really, to have you here. It must be Serebin, no? The writer? God I thought you’d be, older.” The language French, the voice low and completely at ease. “I am Della Corvo,” he said. “But Cosimo to you, of course, right?”

  Serebin nodded and tried to look amiable, was a little more impressed by the whole thing than he wanted to be. His life drifted high and low, but up here he found the air a trifle thin.

  “Marie-Galante!” Della Corvo called out. Then, to Serebin: “A Bulgarian freighter. Extraordinary.”

  Marie-Galante broke through the edge of the crowd, a drink in each hand, a cigarette held between her lips. “You’re here!” His stunning caramel. Little black dress and pearls. She raised her face for bisoux and Serebin kissed each cheek in a cloud of Shalimar.

  “We’re having Negronis,” she said, handing Serebin a glass.

  Campari and gin, Serebin knew, and lethal.

  “You’ll take him around?” Della Corvo said.

  Marie-Galante slipped a hand under his arm and held him lightly.

  “We must talk,” Della Corvo said to Serebin. “All this...” A charming shrug and a smile—he’d invited all these people, now, here they were. Then he disappeared into the crowd.