by Alan Furst
Was this a shrewd choice, Serebin wondered, or the only Russian book in the store? Maybe shrewd, he thought, as the train clattered toward Sofia. Lermontov had been banished from the Guards Hussars, after writing a poem that attacked the Russian oligarchy for the death of Pushkin, and exiled to the Caucasus as a regular army officer. Was there cited for bravery, in 1837, but the Czar refused him the medal. Eventually, he was killed in a duel, as witless as any in literary history, at the age of twenty-six. A disordered life, in detail not anything like Serebin’s, but chaotic enough.
“Have you spent long in Cechnia?”
“I had about ten years there with my company in a fort near Kamenny Brod. Do you know it?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Ah, those cutthroats gave us a time of it! They’re quieter now, thank heavens, but once you went a hundred yards from the stockade there’d be some shaggy devil on the lookout, and you’d only to blink an eyelid and before you knew where you were you had a lasso round your neck or a bullet in your head. Grand chaps!”
He looked up to see a girl with a basket waiting for the train to go past. Well, whatever else might be true, Polanyi had chosen a book that every Russian had read, but that every Russian liked reading again. And, by the time he reached Subotica, in Yugoslavia, the Balabukhi plums were more than welcome, to Serebin and his fellow travelers, since there’d been practically nothing to eat at the station buffets where the train stopped.
28 January. In Istanbul, Janos Polanyi sat at a table on the second floor of a waterfront lokanta called Karim Bey. He drank a glass of raki as he waited, staring out at a long line of Turkish porters, struggling up the gangplank of a freighter beneath immense burlap sacks.
He was not at all pleased to be there, and he did not look forward to lunch—with the fattish and soft-spoken Mr. Brown and his relentless pipe. His infuriating pipe, a device used to stretch silent pauses out to uncomfortable intervals where disapproval hung in the air amid the fruity smoke. Polanyi unfolded his napkin and refolded it, he was tense and apprehensive and he didn’t like it. What he had to offer Mr. Brown was the best that could be offered but he feared, expected, the usual reaction: a cold, tolerant silence seasoned with contempt. For who he was, for what he did, and for the quality of his proposals. As a social attitude it was, of course, beneath him: an aristocrat from a thousand-year family need not concern himself with the Mr. Browns of the world. But, applied to secret work, this contempt could kill.
Polanyi had always suspected that Mr. Brown was an amateur of chess. That he saw a world of pawns and bishops and helpless kings. But the people who did what Polanyi asked of them were not pawns. They lived, Serebin and Marrano and Marie-Galante and the rest, and he meant for them to keep living. But it would better suit Mr. Brown, he believed, if he could be made to suppress this instinct and sacrifice the occasional pawn for a stronger position on the board.
Polanyi was on the verge of making himself really angry when Mr. Brown approached the table. Fortunately for everyone, perhaps, he was not alone. “This is Mr. Stephens,” he said.
Polanyi stood up and, as they shook hands, the man said, “Julian Stephens.”
A first name! A minor adjustment in the introduction, but it implied a change of style, a change of attitude, and Polanyi’s spirits rose. Stephens took the floor immediately. He was pleased to meet him, had heard such good things about him, was anxious to work with him, Istanbul was an extraordinary city, was it not, and so forth, and so on. Social talk. But, as he spoke, Polanyi began to understand who he was.
A man of some depth, and some cruelty. No, not quite, more the capacity for cruelty. He was maybe thirty-five, a boyish thirty-five, pale, with thin lips and straight hair, straw-colored, cut short above the ears and combed back from a part on the side. And there was something in his manner that brought to mind a story Polanyi had heard long ago, to do with savage contests of intellect that took place at high table at Oxford. No quarter asked and none given, a reputation made or ruined, in a world where reputation meant everything. Had he, in fact, come from the university? Not really any way to know that. Law, or banking, or commerce, the possibilities were endless but, whatever it was, he had been to the wars, and, Polanyi sensed, won them.
“I believe,” Mr. Brown said, “that the two of you will get on well together.”
“I would think so,” Polanyi said.
“What we’ve done,” Mr. Brown said, “is to create a new and different kind of office. At the direction of the prime minister himself, I should add. That will specialize in operations meant to damage the enemy’s industry—particularly war-related industry, his transport, and communications.”
“An office for sabotage,” Polanyi said.
“Yes,” Stephens said. “With the kind of technical support that will make it work.”
Polanyi nodded. This was a good idea, if they meant it. “In the Balkans?”
“Everywhere,” Stephens said. “In the occupied countries.”
“So Switzerland will be left alone.”
“For the moment,” Stephens said, with a thin smile.
“My office will continue as it always has,” Mr. Brown said. “But we will deal strictly with intelligence. In that regard, you and I may work together again, but, for the present, Mr. Stephens is your man.”
Mr. Brown rose and offered Polanyi his hand. “I will leave you to it,” he said. His demeanor was amiable enough, but Polanyi wasn’t persuaded. Whatever else this was, Mr. Brown took it as defeat. Somewhere, in some distant office in the green and pleasant land, there’d been a battle of meetings and memoranda, and Mr. Brown’s side had come off second best.
Stephens watched as his colleague left. Then he said, “So then, here we are. I’d better tell you right away that I’m new to this, ah, this sort of thing. I expect you know that. But, I tend to learn quickly, and the people in London will let me do pretty much whatever I want. For the time being, anyhow, so we’d best take advantage of the honeymoon, right?” He opened the menu and peered at it. “I suppose we should order lunch.”
“Probably we should.”
He read down the page and closed the menu. “Haven’t the faintest idea what any of it is, would you order for me? Nothing too ambitious, if you don’t mind.”
“Perhaps a drink, to start.”
“I daresay. What are you having?”
“Raki.”
“Is it very strong?”
“It is.”
“Splendid.”
Polanyi signaled to the waiter, standing idle in the corner. “And then, lamb?”
“Yes, lamb, good.” He folded the menu and placed it beside him, then took a pen and a small pad from his pocket, unscrewed the top of the pen, and opened the pad to a clean page. “Now,” he said, “on the way down here I had an idea.”
A quiet afternoon in January. The Parisian weather, lately come to its senses, cloudy and gray and soft. One of the city’s favored weathers, this gloom, good for making love, good for idle speculation and small pleasures. This was at heart a southern city, a Latin city, its residents forced to live in the north, between Englishmen and Germans, energetic souls who liked bright sunshine and brisk mornings. Well, they were welcome to it. The true Parisians, and Serebin was one of them, woke happily to damp twilight and, even in an occupied city, believed that anything was possible.
In a narrow street by the Place Bastille, the elegant Brasserie Heininger was closed on Mondays, its red and gold affluence lost in darkness, its gallant waiters home with their wives, its glorious platters of langouste and sausage only aromatic memories in the still air. At the infamous Table Fourteen, where a bullet hole in the mirror served as memorial to a Bulgarian headwaiter assassinated in the Ladies WC, the chairs leaned forward, propped against the table. All was silent, waiting for Tuesday.
But not quite. The kitchen was alive. By some vaguely defined droit de chef, the talented but fulminous Zubotnik served Monday lunch, a banquet of leftovers, to his émigr
é friends. Zubotnik had never actually thrown his cleaver at anybody but he shook it, often enough, and screamed in six languages. He had ruled the kitchen at the Aquarium restaurant in St. Petersburg, made his way to Paris in 1917, worked as a sous-chef for a month, then, when the incumbent chef fled to Lyons, crying out as he went through the door, “No human man can turn that color,” had, at a horrendous rise in salary, agreed to replace him. Papa Heininger had regretted that decision for twenty-three years but Zubotnik was a genius and what could you do.
Serebin attended the Monday feast whenever he could. He had, since childhood, a passion for second-day delicacies. They got better overnight, and tasted better yet when eaten in the kitchen instead of the dining room.
“Here, you,” Zubotnik said from his white beard. “Take some of this.”
Serebin carefully sawed a slice off half a beef Wellington, the crust still flaky after a night in the refrigerator. He put a teaspoon of Zubotnik’s brutal mustard beside it, and considered a second until Zubotnik growled, “Don’t murder it, Serebin. And give Anya some mousse.”
“Thank you but no, Ivan Ivanovich,” Anya said.
“Just do what I tell you,” Zubotnik said to Serebin.
“Only a little,” Serebin said, commiserating. The salmon mousse had been chilled in a fish-shaped mold and Serebin gave her one of the tail fins.
“While you’re up,” Ulzhen said, extending his plate.
They sat at the long wooden table in the kitchen. Serebin, Boris Ulzhen, the poet Anya Zak, the taxi driver Klimov and Claudette, his Franco-Russian girlfriend, and Solovy the robber.
Serebin poured himself a glass of red wine from the large flask. There were various appellations and vintages in the flask, blended by chance from bottles unfinished by Sunday night’s patrons. Zubotnik and his friends could eat whatever they wanted at the Monday lunch but Papa Heininger would clutch his heart in an alarming way when Zubotnik visited the cellars so the chef, realizing that life would go better if the propriétaire remained aboveground, had forsworn the bins.
“To the Zubotnik ’41,” Klimov said, raising his glass.
“Na zdorov’ye!”
“Na zdorov’ye!”
“Ilya Aleksandrovich,” Anya Zak said, “please to continue your story.” She waited attentively, her bright, nearsighted eyes peering at him through old-fashioned spectacles. Solovy began to roll a cigarette, taking long strands of tobacco from a cloth pouch.
“So,” Serebin said, “we came to Bryansk at dawn. We’d heard that Makhno’s people had occupied the city, but we didn’t hear anything. They were always loud, those people, fighting or not, women’s screams and pistol shots and great shouts of laughter. But it was very quiet in the city. A little smoke from the burnt-out houses, not much else. ‘Take a squad,’ the captain said, ‘and go see what’s what.’ So off we went, using whatever cover we could find, just waiting for the snipers, but nothing happened. You could see the looters had been there, stuff they didn’t want dropped in the street. Clothes and toys and pans, half a painting. Then I saw the goat, it came walking toward us, casually enough, staring at me with those strange eyes, just going about its business until somebody came and put a rope around its neck. Something funny about this goat, I thought. I looked closer, and saw a long shred of yellow paper hanging out of its mouth, with the printed words Genius and Dissipation. My sergeant saw it at the same time I did and we both started to laugh, almost couldn’t stop. We’d been fighting for a day and a half and we were a little crazy, the way you get. He had to sit down in the street, there were tears running down his cheeks. All this made the goat self-conscious and it began to finish the paper, Genius and Dissipation rolling up into its mouth as it chewed.
“One of the men called out from a doorway, ‘The hell’s gotten into you?’ but we couldn’t answer. I mean, go try and explain something like that. And we really couldn’t figure it out, just then, not for about thirty minutes. Then we got into the center of the city and saw the posters. Stuck up on the wall of a theatre with flour glue, which goats like. The posters announced the appearance of the actor Orlenev, coming to Bryansk to play the role of the English tragedian Edmund Kean in the play called Kean, or Genius and Dissipation.”
Solovy snorted with laughter, but he was the only one.
“Bryansk was the worst,” Ulzhen said.
“Berdichev,” Zubotnik said. He cut a piece of baguette, put smoked salmon on it, then a drizzle of oil, and handed it to Claudette.
“Still,” she said to Serebin, “you miss it, your terrible Russia.”
“Sometimes.”
“They all came through Berdichev,” Klimov said. “Taken and retaken twenty-seven times. Makhno’s band, Petlyura’s band, Tutnik’s partisans. ‘And,’ they used to say, ‘Nobody’s Ninth Regiment.’”
“You remember everything,” Solovy said.
“I remember,” Klimov said. “Jewish prayer shawls used as saddlecloths.”
Claudette ate her salmon with a knife and fork. Serebin poured wine for Ulzhen and Anya Zak. “Oh, thank you,” she said.
“The winter Harvest was a great success,” Ulzhen said to Serebin. “I’ve been wanting to tell you that but you haven’t been around.”
“Yes, very good,” Solovy said.
“The Babel, of course,” Ulzhen said. “Everybody talked about it. That, and Kacherin’s poem to his mother.”
“No,” Serebin said. “You’re joking.”
“Not at all.”
“It had feeling,” Zubotnik said. “Real feeling, sincerity, what’s wrong with that? Didn’t you have a mother?”
“So now,” Ulzhen said, “you have only to worry about spring.”
“Anya Zak will be in that one,” Serebin said. He knew better. Zak published only in the best quarterlies, she would never, never, submit to a magazine like The Harvest.
“Will she?” Zubotnik said. He gave money to the IRU.
Her glance at Serebin was covert, and not amused, how could you? “I wish I had something,” she lamented. “I’ve been working on a long piece, for weeks, the whole winter, but, we shall see, maybe, if I can finish...”
“We would, of course, be honored,” Ulzhen said, lingering on the would.
“You should try the salmon, Tolya,” Claudette said to Klimov.
“Mm,” Zubotnik said. He cut some bread and salmon and passed it across the table.
Ulzhen set his napkin down. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said. As he stood up, he met Serebin’s eyes, come with me.
Serebin followed him from the kitchen out to the bar that bordered the darkened restaurant, then into the men’s room. Ulzhen looked for a light switch on the wall but he couldn’t find it.
“I’ll hold the door for you,” Serebin said.
“Doesn’t matter.”
Serebin held the door ajar while Ulzhen used the urinal. “Ilya Aleksandrovich,” he said, his voice echoing faintly off the tiled wall, “we need your help.” He finished, began to button his fly.
“All right,” Serebin said.
“A committee,” Ulzhen said. He went to the sink and turned the water on. “Only four of us.” He mentioned two people that Serebin barely knew—the widow of a German industrialist, very rich, who had come to live in Paris years earlier, and a thin, serious, older man who hardly said a word to anybody. To Serebin, this made no sense at all.
“Committee?”
“She has the money,” Ulzhen said. “And he was an officer in the military intelligence.”
“To do what?”
“For our Jews, Ilya.” He washed his hands, then began to dry them with a towel from the stack on the attendant’s table. “Eighty-nine of our members, as far as we can determine. And their families, that number we don’t know. But we’ve decided to get them out, if they want to go. First into the Unoccupied Zone, the Vichy zone, in the south, then to Nice. There are still boats that will take passengers, we’ll provide documents and whatever money we can manage. We know we can
get them to Spain, at least that far, then, maybe, South America. So, it’s a very quiet committee.”
“Secret.”
“Yes.”
Serebin felt ill. He had to go to Marseilles in two days, then God only knew where after that. He heard laughter from the kitchen.
“Why me?” That loathsome phrase, out of his mouth before he could stop it.
“Why you?” Ulzhen had heard it loud and clear. “Because you don’t flinch, Ilya. Because the fact that you can take care of yourself means that you can take care of people who can’t, and, most of all, because I want you there with me.”
“Boris,” he said.
To tell? Not to tell? Excuses poured through his mind like water, this lie or that, one worse than the next.
“Yes? What?” Ulzhen dropped the towel in a basket by the table.
“I can’t.”
“Of course you can.”
Now he couldn’t say anything.
“What is it, some business you’re doing with Ivan Kostyka? Is that it? You want money, all of a sudden?”
Serebin didn’t answer.
“Look, this has everything to do with Poland, I don’t need to tell you the stories, and it’s coming here. Nothing wrong with chess tournaments and magazines, Ilya, but we’re responsible for these people. They’re coming to me, they’re asking for help. What am I to tell them? You’re busy?”
“Boris, I have to do something else. I am doing something else. For God’s sake don’t make me tell you more than that.”
“You are?” He was going back and forth—truth or cowardice?
“Yes.”
“Swear it to me.”
“I swear. On anything you like. Please understand, as long as I’m in Paris, I’ll do whatever you want. But I cannot promise to be in such and such a place at such and such a time, and, in what you’re talking about, that’s everything.”
Ulzhen took a deep breath and let it out. It meant concession—to disappointment, betrayal. That betrayal came for some noble reason, ghostly, beyond explanation, did not matter.