Blood of Victory

by Alan Furst

  The crowd flowed around him, compliments and questions, a misspelled word in a long-forgotten article called to his attention, a question about a book someone else had written, a question about the screenplay for the sequel to Chapayev, the famous machine gunner in the tower who fought the White army.

  “A telephone call, Ilya Aleksandrovich.”

  As he worked his way over to the desk with the telephone on it, he saw that the cake was gone, some of it no doubt into people’s pockets. He picked up the receiver and said, “Yes?”

  “Can you meet me outside? Right away?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Kubalsky. Very urgent, Ilya.”

  “All right.”

  “See you in one minute.”

  It was cold outside. Serebin shivered in his jacket and tried to stay dry by standing next to the wall of the tannery. The smell of the place was heavy in the wet air, the smell of a century of hides and carcasses and offal. Growing impatient, he looked at his watch. Politics. Why in God’s name... He was staring at the front of the building when the windows blew out. A cloud of dirty smoke, glass and wood and pieces of the IRU office, the sound of it hitting the street lost in the echoes of the explosion which rolled away into silence as the screams began.

  There were two Serebins at that moment. One sat down. The other, the real one, ran as far as the foot of the stairs, where he was forced back by the crowd. He saw the girl, she had blood on her and her eyes were vacant, but she was there, stumbling down the stairs between a man and a woman. The woman had one hand pressed over her eyes while the other gripped the shoulder of the girl’s blouse. She was either pulling the girl away from what had happened in the office or holding on to her because she couldn’t see. Or, perhaps, both. To Serebin, it wasn’t clear.

  He waited, it seemed to take a long time, people were coughing, their faces stained with black soot. Eventually, the stairway cleared and Serebin climbed up to the office. The air was thick with smoke and dust—it was dark as night and hard to breathe—but the building wasn’t on fire. He didn’t think it was. There were three or four people walking around in what had been the office, one of them knelt by a shape beneath a table. Serebin stepped on a shoe, heard a siren in the distance. Goldbark always wore a silver tie, and so did what he saw on the floor by a cast-iron radiator, now bent in a vee aimed at the ceiling.

  “She’s alive, I think.” A voice in the darkness.

  “Don’t move her.”

  “What did she say?”

  “I couldn’t hear.”

  He went up to Besiktas, to the yellow house on the Bosphorus. Tamara wore a heavy coat and a sweater, and, knotted under her chin, one of those head scarves that all Ukrainian women had, red roses on a black background. She’d bundled up so they could sit on the terrace, where the wind made the lantern flicker on the garden table, because she knew he was one of those people who don’t like to be indoors.

  “It’s too cold for you,” he said.

  “No. I’ll be fine.”

  “I’m going in.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll be right here.”

  Stubborn. Like all of them. The word Ukraine meant borderland.

  One of the sisters appeared with a pot of steaming tea—Tamara had asked for that because she thought it might settle him—and a bottle of vodka, which would.

  When he told her the story she was silent for a long time, then shook her head slowly. She’d seen such things, been told such things, too often. Finally she said, “Was it Russians, Ilya? Special services?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why would they do this?”

  He shrugged. “Espionage, of some sort, maybe somebody running a network out of the IRU office. It’s a convenient setting, if you think about it. And nothing new—every spy service in the world tries to recruit émigrés, and every counterintelligence office tries to stop it. So, what happens next, is the local people see something they don’t like, and then...”

  “But they spared you.”

  Serebin nodded.

  “That didn’t just, happen.”

  “No.”

  She poured two cups of tea, took one for herself, held the vodka bottle over the other. “You want?”

  “A little.”

  He moved his chair back from the table and lit a cigarette.

  “You have family in it, no?”

  “My mother’s sister.” She had never been an aunt.

  Tamara thought it over for a moment, then said, “Ah, the Mikhelson girls.” She smiled—it was strange to remember a time when the world just went along, one day to the next.

  A well-known story in Odessa, the life and courtship of the Mikhelson girls. Frieda and Malya. Zaftig, smart, they smoked cigarettes, wore black, read French novels, went to Polish spas. Frieda got Serebin’s father, a son of the nobility—the real thing: handsome, brilliant, certainly a little crazy but who cared. So, now Frieda had a husband, Malya had to have one too, but it didn’t last a year. She wore him out, going off to screw her lovers whenever the mood took her. A dancer, a baron, a colonel. The husband shot himself in the front parlor and they couldn’t find the cat for days. And it was Serebin’s grandfather who wept, poor soul. He’d worked his heart out, selling agricultural machinery, for his darling girls, who gave him nothing but grief. In 1917, Malya joined her friends in the Cheka—the most stylish job in town that winter. “God forgive me,” Serebin’s grandfather whispered to him just before he died, “I should’ve gone to America with everybody else.”

  Serebin walked to the edge of the terrace and stared out at the lights on the Asian shore of the city. A ferry, then a train across the Anatolian steppe to Persia—he knew what was waiting for him in the lobby of his hotel. When he returned to the table Tamara said, “Hard to believe that your aunt is still alive, after the purges. Most of them disappeared.”

  “They did, but she climbed.”

  “Took part in it, probably.”

  “Probably.”

  “Had to.”

  “I would think.”

  The sea mist was clouding Serebin’s glasses. He took them off, pulled a handful of shirt out of his belt, and began to clean the lenses. “Of course, all that who and why business is a bubbemeisah.” A story made up for children. “Nobody knows what happened except the people who did it, and if they’re a halfway professional organization, nobody ever will.” He finished his tea, and poured some vodka into the cup.

  “Before you go, Ilya, I want you to see something.”

  The interior of the house had grown in complicated ways over time. Tamara led him to the back, then opened a door to reveal a stairway so narrow he had to turn his shoulders as he climbed. At the top, another door, and a room beneath the eaves, the ceiling slanting sharply down to a single, small window. A secret room. At first, Serebin thought he’d never seen it before, then realized it had been worked on. The piles of dusty shutters with broken slats were gone, replaced by a cot covered with a blanket. A battered table and chair had been set below the window, and every board, ceiling, walls, and floor, had been freshly whitewashed. All it lacked, he thought, was the tablet of writing paper and sharpened pencils on the table.

  “Of course you understand,” she said.

  “Yes. Thank you.” It had gotten to him.

  “Perhaps it’s not to be, right away, but who knows, Ilya, the day may come.”

  He couldn’t really answer her. That somebody should want to do this for him, that in itself was refuge. And what more, in this life, could anyone offer?

  He started to speak, but she pounded him gently on the shoulder with the side of her fist. Oh shut up.

  When Serebin was fourteen, he would swim with his friends off a jetty north of the Odessa docks. The whole crowd, naked and skinny, from the Nicholas I Commercial School of Odessa. Joined, one sweltering August afternoon, by Tamara Petrovna and her friend Rivka. Fearless, they stripped down and dove in and swam way out. Later, lazing on the rocks, Tamara caught Serebin staring at
her backside. She picked up a clamshell and heaved it at him—a lucky shot on the nose—Serebin’s eyes ran tears and he got red in the face. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” he shouted, hand pressed to his nose. “I’m not even wearing my glasses.”

  The taxi was slow, returning to Beyoglu, the melancholy driver sighed and dawdled in the back streets, lost in a world of his own. Meanwhile, in Serebin’s imagination, the Emniyet agents sitting in the lobby grew angrier and angrier when he didn’t show up, but there was nothing he could do about that.

  In the event, they weren’t there. He reached the hotel after midnight, to find that a note had been slipped under his door. A Russian note, typed on a Cyrillic typewriter, asking if he would be good enough to drop by the office—an address in Osmanli street—in the morning and see Major Iskandar in Room 412. So, for a long night, he was to have the pleasure of thinking about it.

  The desk of Major Iskandar. Born as conqueror’s furniture in the days of the Ottoman Empire, a vast mahogany affair with legs like Corinthian columns and ball feet. But time passed, empires drifted into ruin, coffee cups made rings, neglected cigarettes left burn scars, stacks of dossiers appeared and established a small colony, then grew higher and higher as a hostile world hammered on the national door. Or picked the lock.

  Major Iskandar, not very military in a rumpled uniform, had spectacles and a black mustache, with hair and patience thinning as he moved through his forties. He was chinless, with something waxy and unhealthy in his complexion, and reminded Serebin of an Armenian poet he’d once known, a great sensualist who died of drinking valerian drops in a sailors’ brothel in Rotterdam.

  Iskandar hunted through his dossiers until he found what he was after. “Well,” he said, “we’d planned to have a, a chat, with you when we saw the shipping manifest.” Suddenly annoyed, he snapped his fingers twice at the doorway to an outer office. That produced, a moment later, an orderly carrying two cups of black, sandy coffee. “But then, yesterday’s bombing on Rasim street...” He opened a dossier and turned pages. “Any theories? Who? Why?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Was Goldbark a friend of yours?”

  “An associate. I knew him as one of the directors of the IRU office.”

  “Been to his house?”

  “No.”

  “Met his wife?”

  “Maybe once. At some kind of event.”

  “The crate of eggplants was sent to him, specifically. Three other people died, there are five or six in various hospitals.” He offered Serebin a pack of cigarettes, then lit one for himself. “You got out, it would seem, just at the right moment.”

  “A telephone call.”

  “A warning?”

  “No.” Serebin’s voice was very cold.

  “Then what?”

  “‘Please meet me outside. It’s urgent.’”

  “And who was it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Really don’t?”

  “No.”

  “An unknown stranger calls, and you go charging off in the middle of a party held in your honor.”

  “‘An old friend’ is what he called himself. I thought that was possible, and the tone of the voice was serious, so I thought I’d better go.”

  The major tilted his head to one side, like a listening dog. What do I hear? Then decided that, for the moment, it didn’t matter. He leaned back in his chair and said, “This comes at a bad time for us, do you understand? There is a war going on in Europe, and we are under pressure from both sides. And in this country, and particularly in this office, we feel it. The more so because we know the thing is heading south. I could drive you up into Thrace, to the Bulgarian frontier, and there, in the border villages, you would see a new sort of tourism. Vacationing Germans, all men, in overcoats and alpine hats, with cameras or binoculars around their necks. It must be the birds, don’t you think? That makes them so passionate to be in the Bulgarian countryside in November?

  “And these days, where such tourists go, tanks follow. It isn’t far from here, maybe six hours. And much faster by aeroplane. It’s sad to see a city like London being bombed, night after night, terrible, a nice brick city like that. But here, of course, it wouldn’t be night after night. Because one night would be enough. A few hours’ work for the bomber pilots, and the whole thing would just, burn.”

  Serebin knew. Dense neighborhoods of old, dry, wooden houses.

  “So, we stay neutral, and treat every act of political violence as a potential provocation. A shooting, a stabbing, a bombing—what does it mean? Is it an incident? What comes next? Well, maybe nothing, in this case. It’s England and Germany we worry about these days. Russia maybe not so much—we’ve spent three hundred years worrying about them, so we’re used to it. Still, we have to be concerned, an attack of this sort, and our concern is, ah, concentrated by the fact that Goldbark was no virgin. There is at least some possibility that he asked for it.”

  Serebin said “Oh?” He meant fuck you.

  But Iskandar was ready for him. Slid a photograph from the dossier and laid it on the desk, like a playing card. A clandestine photograph, a gray man on a gray street on a gray afternoon. Hands thrust deep in overcoat pockets, brooding as he walked. Perhaps a Slav, grave lines in the face, the corners of the mouth pulled down, a sensitive man who had long ago chosen the wrong life, one where the Emniyet took his photograph.

  “Know him?”

  Serebin shook his head.

  “This woman?”

  She was buying oranges from a market stall.

  “No.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Goldbark knew them.”

  Did he?

  Iskandar laid down a photograph of Goldbark and the woman, leaning side by side on the railing of a ferry.

  “Who are these people?” Serebin asked.

  “Professionals—from the way they behave. Was Goldbark a Zionist?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Communist?”

  “Unlikely. He left the country, after all.”

  “All kinds of people leave all kinds of countries. How much pressure would it have taken to force him to work for Germany?”

  Serebin stared.

  “It is not unheard of. I am sorry, but it is not.”

  “He was too strong for that,” Serebin said. What remained of Goldbark was the memory of him.

  Major Iskandar raised an eyebrow. He drank down the last of his coffee and snapped his fingers. Perhaps a comment on Serebin’s answer, or maybe he just wanted more coffee.

  “Do you plan to remain in Istanbul?”

  Serebin thought it over. “For a week or two, maybe.”

  The major paged through an appointment book. “That would make it the twelfth. Of December.” He made a note by the date.

  They drank a second cup of coffee. The major said that it often rained, this time of year. Still, they hardly ever had snow. Spring, on the other hand, was pleasant, with wildflowers in the countryside. When Serebin left, a man he recalled, vaguely, from the IRU party, was sitting in the outer office. Their eyes met, for a moment, then the man looked away.

  My God, who is she? She was radiant, strange, had the face of an uncomfortably beautiful child. Twenty minutes from Major Iskandar’s office, in a tiny square with a fish market, Serebin sat at a table outside a lokanta, a neighborhood restaurant, and she came and sat on the edge of the other chair. When she pushed the hair back from her eyes he could see that her hand was shaking. She wet her lips, then spoke a few words—memorized, he thought—in guttural French: his friend, Monsieur Serge, wanted very much to see him. Then she waited, unsure of the language, to see if he’d understood her. She is Kubalsky’s lover, he thought.

  He nodded, tried to look encouraging. “In Tatavla,” she said.

  The Greek district.

  “At Luxe cinema, tomorrow night.”

  Her hands clutched the top of a purse, tight enough so that her knuckles we
re white and sharp. He said he understood and thanked her for the message, which earned him a sudden, luminous smile, on and off, then she stood and walked away, striding around the corner and out of sight.

  After that, he walked and walked. Writing sometimes, staring at faces, adrift in unknown streets, far away on his own private planet. The world gnawed at you, he thought, better to be, now and then, elsewhere—it would all still be there when you got back. He would send flowers to the hospitals, would call on Goldbark’s wife. Later, when Iskandar was done talking with her. She would lie to them, of course, as he had. One did.

  For the moment, he studied a handsome chestnut tree, spidery winter branches trimmed back to the pollard shape, circled by an iron fence. A pair of girls in school uniforms, kohl darkening their eyes—after-school femmes fatales. A sidewalk vendor, tending skewers of lamb and onions that sizzled and dripped onto hot coals. This made him violently hungry, but he couldn’t bear to stop walking. The neighborhood changed. To rows of elaborate stone buildings, five stories high, with brass plaques announcing important companies and banks. Standing restlessly in front, scowling doormen, Turkish wrestlers with brass buttons on their uniforms. Deutsche Orientbank. Banque de la Seine. At the end of the street: Société Ottoman des Docks et Ateliers du Haut Bosphore. Title! “On a certain cloudy morning in springtime, the bookkeeper Drazunov folded his newspaper under his arm and stepped off the Number Six trolley...”

  Yes, one lied to them. Always. “Today a man talks freely only with his wife”—Babel had said that, the last time Serebin ever saw him—“at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.”

  He stopped at a Karagoz show, puppets made of camel hide, and stood at the edge of the crowd. Serebin was a man who truly hated puppets—hated the way they leaped and skittered about, the way they shrieked—but he was also a man who could no more pass by theatre in the street than he could fly. The Karagoz companies (Karagoz was Punch) wrote contemporary characters into their skits, so Serebin, in past trips to the city, had seen Mickey Mouse, Tarzan of the Apes, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo. Greta Garbo? I’ll write you a puppet play about Greta Garbo—a love story. “Ow! Oh! Don’t punish me so, madame, I’m only the script girl!”