by Alan Furst
“How did this happen?” Ulzhen said, defeat in his voice.
“I got involved,” Serebin said.
Ulzhen wanted to argue, then thought better of it. “Well, you have to do what you think is right,” he said.
“I know.” Serebin looked for words, to somehow bridge the space that had opened between them, but all he could say was, “I’m sorry, Boris.”
Ulzhen shrugged. So life went.
It was almost five when they left. Klimov and Claudette, Anya Zak and Serebin walking together for a time, then parting at the rue de Turenne, where Anya Zak headed off into the Eleventh and Serebin went with her. To a street that reminded Serebin of the tenement districts of Russian cities, old and poor and silent, where Anya Zak had a room above a tailor shop. “It isn’t much,” she said, “but you can come up if you want.” He did. He was very lonely, and he couldn’t face going back to the Winchester just to be by himself.
A small room, cluttered and warmed with things she liked. A fish bowl filled with mussel shells on an upturned crate, Bal Musette posters and Victorian silhouettes tacked to the wall. Books everywhere, a glass of dried weeds, a copper lion.
They talked idly for a while, then she read him a poem. “No title yet,” she said. “For me, that is always difficult.” She settled herself into the corner of an easy chair, drew her feet up beneath her bulky skirt, and read from a paper in one hand while the other held a Sobranie, its blue smoke curling straight up in the airless room. The poem was intricate, about a lover, more or less, the lines simple, declarative, and opaque. She’d been, sometime, somewhere, easy prey. Was still? Didn’t care? “But the heart was blind that summer,” she recited, inhaled the cigarette, spoke the next line in puffs of smoke. Loss in a crowded room, in a storm, a dream, a shop. She had long dark hair, with a few silver strands, that hung down around her face, and, as she read, she would tuck one side of it behind her ear but it didn’t stay. She looked up at him when she finished and said, “Awful, isn’t it.”
“No, not at all.”
“A little awful, admit it. One’s intimate self is, you know.”
She was narrow-shouldered and lean on top, broad below the waist, heavy-legged. On the windowsill by the bed, half a burned candle, its wax congealed in a saucer. “You are looking at me,” she said.
“True.” He smiled at her.
“Tell me, are you working?”
“I wish I could, but life takes sharp corners, lately, so all I do is watch the road. A line sometimes, now and then, but who knows where it belongs.”
She understood. “They are killing us,” she said. “One way and another.”
“What will become of you, Anya?”
“Such a question!”
“Forgive me, I didn’t mean...”
“No, it’s all right,” she said. “I know what you mean. In fact, I think I’ve been offered a way out, if things go wrong here. About a year ago I met this couple. Nice enough, haute bourgeois types, but sweet. They were rich and social, before the occupation. Likely still are, now that I think about it. Anyhow, they somewhat adopted me, the saintly poetess, poor as a mouse, you know how it is. Sunday afternoons, they would have me up to their apartment, in Passy, all kinds of sexy nonsense in the air though nothing said, of course. Then, about a month ago, they told me that they had a little house in a village, in Normandy somewhere, at the end of a road, and if life went bad in Paris, I was invited to go up there and hide out for as long as I needed to.”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Serebin said. “Still...”
“What about you?” she said.
“I don’t think I’ll have to run,” he said. “Of course, you can never be certain.”
“No you can’t. Not about anything, ever. You and I know all about that.” She took her spectacles off, blinked at a fuzzy world, folded them up, and put them on the table beside her.
More would come off, he imagined. Everything. By the light of the candle on the windowsill. And, as time went by, she would wear the very same smile she wore at the moment, opening, as her eyes closed, to a shape he dearly loved to see. Stripped, languid, appetitious, a true partner in crime, no saintly poetess at all and very pointed about it. Oh, his heart might be a little somewhere else, but that he couldn’t help and there was no way on earth she could know about it.
“Well,” she said.
As he stood up, she leaned her head back against the top of the chair. “Getting late,” she said. “Would you like to come and kiss me good night?”
As he walked toward the hotel, a long way away, it occurred to him that maybe she did know. Sensed it, understood him better than he thought possible. But, whether she did or she didn’t, it had been a long kiss good night, warm and elaborate, and a lot happened while it was going on. Was it possible they’d had a love affair? A thirty-second love affair? Well, why not. He stopped at the far end of the Pont Marie. I’ll do anything you like. She hadn’t said it out loud but even so she’d told him that. He wasn’t wrong. He could turn around, go back, she’d be waiting for him. No, he thought, that’s crazy. Don’t think about it, go home to bed.
A direct order, half of which he obeyed.
Polanyi’s Orchestra.
Performing the Roumanian Symphony, Opus 137.
Was it 137? One hundred and thirty-seven operations? He’d tried, now and then, to count them all, but it never worked. What to include? What to leave out? It wasn’t always clear, so, in the end, he declared it to be, over thirty years, some number not far from that, then burned the notes—jotted initials and dates, typically on the backs of envelopes—and got rid of the ashes.
This one had, at least, a name. Medallion. Or, Operation MEDALLION, as it would appear in the records. Not that any of the people involved would ever be allowed to know it, that was for him and Stephens, and the warlords in London. Medallion. He hoped it sounded noble and enduring, in English. It certainly sounded damned strange in Hungarian, but then what didn’t.
It was by his own initiative that Jamie Carr played in the orchestra. In fact, he belonged to a different operation, with another name, yet, even so, he played. When inspiration struck he was with Girlfriend Three, a tall Polish nightclub dancer with penciled eyebrows. They were alone in an office, the street outside deserted on a Sunday morning.
Time to leave, they’d told him. The British legation in Bucharest would close down on the 10th of February, be gone by then. So, he’d packed. Taking along much more than he’d planned—what a lot of stuff he’d acquired! Clothes and books and papers and whatnot from the apartment. The iron lamp in the parlor, for example. Lots of memories in that lamp, couldn’t just leave it behind. And, of course, he’d take a few things from his desk at the office, good friends, with him for two long years of writing and conniving.
Once in the office—Girlfriend Three had spent the night and come along to keep him company—he thought, well, pity to leave all these files. Press clippings, cabinets packed with them. He wanted, at first, a few for his own purposes. He liked them. Taken together, they constituted a sort of surreal history of his life in Roumania. Here was Zizi Lambrino, King Carol’s paramour and the subject of great scandale before Lupescu snatched the king for her own. And here was Conradi, chief of the Gestapo in Roumania. Crippled below the waist, with the head of a Roman emperor and a huge chest, he lay in bed all day long and received a steady stream of informants.
The stack grew higher and higher. “What good this?” Girlfriend Three said, looking through the columns of newsprint glued to yellowing paper. He wasn’t entirely sure, but how else to remember Sofrescu and Manescu and Emil Gulian? For a moment, he had visions of taking it all—let the porters come and put the cabinets on the train. These offices were going to close, forever, these offices were going to be in the middle of a fiery war. But then, he thought better of that and took only the best, the strangest, stacking them carefully as a sullen Girlfriend Three sat in a swivel chair and shot paper clips out the window with a ru
bber band.
Marrano, after a difficult night at sea, was in Beirut.
In the bar of a small hotel near the harbor. A lizard slept on the wall, strips of flypaper hung from the ceiling, a French naval officer in the corner was drinking absinthe, and Professor Doktor Finkelheim, late of Vienna, sat across the table, a cup of tea cooling in front of him. Finkelheim, wearing a brown shirt and a green tie with a stain on it, looked like a hamster.
At the moment, a gloomy hamster. Sad to say, he told Marrano, his research materials had been abandoned in Vienna, he’d escaped with his life and little else. Yes, it was true that he’d been preeminent in his field, geology, and had specialized in riparian formations—that is, the structure of rivers—especially those that drained into the Danubian basin. The tributaries; the Drava, the Tisza, the Morava and the Mlava, and the mighty and magnificent Danube itself.
“But not the water,” he said. “Don’t ask me about the water. For that you would see my former colleague, Doktor Kubel, who remains in Vienna. If, on the other hand, you are interested in the banks of the rivers, then you’ve got the right fellow.”
What about, say, depth.
That would be Finkelheim. Seasonal flow, current, rock strata, all Finkelheim. Micro-organisms? Salinity? Fishes and eels? Kubel.
“Perfectly understood,” Marrano said. And he understood, as well, that research materials would be crucial to any study that the professor might agree to undertake. However, it just so happened that he was in possession of certain maps, good ones, that showed the rivers in detail. Would the professor, he wondered, be willing to review these maps, especially with regard to those characteristics that made navigation on the rivers possible?
Or, sometimes, impossible?
Oh yes.
Serebin played in the orchestra by going to Marseilles.
He stopped by the Gestapo office on the rue Montaigne to apply for the permit, was politely stalled, went again, then managed on the third try. They had finally, after some hesitation, accepted his Reason for Travel, as the form put it: an important émigré in distress—the name lifted from the files in the IRU office—a mission of mercy. He could have sought help from Helmut Bach, the Wehrmacht intellectual, but he sensed a turning point in his relations with Bach. The moment of truth—the time has come for you to do a little favor for us—was close at hand, and Serebin badly wanted to avoid the confrontation. In fact, they’d been uncomfortably polite to him at the rue Montaigne office. Fascism famously stomped around in jackboots, but it sometimes wore carpet slippers, padding about softly on the edges of one’s life, and in a way that was worse. And, he thought, they knew it.
So it went. It was the 10th of February by the time he got on the train. Crossed into the Unoccupied Zone below Lyons at midday, reached Marseilles at night, and kept his appointment with the émigré, a senior civil servant in the Czar’s last days. After ten years in France, his wife had abandoned him, taking the children with her, so he’d gambled all his money away, was thrown out of his apartment, and drank himself into the hospital. Otherwise, all went well.
This he explained to Serebin at some length, in a room in a boardinghouse in the Arab quarter. He’d never really liked the wife, the children were almost grown and he still saw them, money was money it came and it went, and, as for the vodka, he’d learned his lesson. “From now on I will follow the French example,” he told Serebin, “and drink wine.” A question of geography, he believed. In Russia, the weather, the air, the water, the very nature of life, was elementally antidotal to vodka, but, if you changed countries, you had to change drinks. “As a journalist, Ilya Aleksandrovich, this might be useful to you.” Serebin tried to look intrigued, an interesting idea. In fact, the man was either completely unhinged or far too sane and, in the end, Serebin realized, it didn’t matter. He gave him money, a copy of The Harvest, and all the sympathy and encouragement he could bear, then went off to a small hotel in the back streets of the city’s Old Port.
The following morning, he was to see a Roumanian called Ferenczy, formerly a Danube river pilot. Polanyi had given him the details in the hotel room in Edirne. In the spring of 1939, when Hitler had taken the remainder of Czechoslovakia and war seemed inevitable, the French Service de Renseignements had tried to interrupt Germany’s oil supply by bribing the Danube river pilots to leave the country. Some had, some hadn’t, and the operation failed. Which left the French intelligence service with a number of Roumanian pilots scattered across Europe. In Ferenczy’s case, they’d tried to help, restarting his life in Marseilles, where he’d become a trader; first in opium, then in pearls. The man’s name, Polanyi said, indicated Hungarian descent. Which had likely, now and again, made life hard for him, so he was perhaps never all that loyal to the Roumanian state. “A man with allegiance only to himself,” Polanyi suggested. “If it was me, I’d start with that assumption, but, as usual, you’ll have to make your own way.”
Using the Marchais alias, Serebin telephoned the pilot. He was, he said, “a friend of your good friends in France.” Ferenczy, after some desultory sparring, accepted that explanation and agreed to see him in an hour.
Serebin was surprised to find himself invited to the man’s apartment—a café would have been the traditional place to meet a stranger—but, as soon as the door opened, he understood why. Ferenczy meant him to behold the trappings of success. And so he did, pausing at the threshold of a parlor that virtually groaned with trappings. New and expensive furniture, shimmering fabrics, a splendid radio, a Victrola and a long shelf of records, a marble nymph, her hand reaching languorously for a crystal lamp. Ferenczy, in red velvet smoking jacket and emerald green ascot, beamed as Serebin took it all in and offered him a very old cognac, which he declined.
“Yes,” he told Serebin, answering an unasked question, “fortune has smiled on me.”
“Clearly it has, even in the midst of war.”
“Business has never been better.”
“Still, the fall of France...”
“A catastrophe, but she will rise again, monsieur. She is indomitable.”
Serebin agreed.
“Always I admired this nation,” Ferenczy said. “Then, by a stroke of luck, I was given a second chance at life. So I have, in effect, married my mistress.”
“Well, your mistress needs your help.”
Ferenczy’s smile vanished, his expression now stern and patriotic.
“We are seeking information,” Serebin said. “Firsthand information, the kind of thing known only to somebody with practical experience. You spent much of your life on the Danube, you know its habits, its peculiarities. That’s what concerns us at the moment. Specifically, those stretches of the river where navigation is difficult, those areas where an accident, to a tug or a barge, would tend to disrupt the normal flow of commerce.”
“Commerce in petroleum.”
“Yes. As in ’39.” Serebin produced a pencil and a notepad.
“It’s a long river,” Ferenczy said, “much of it broad and flat. From Vienna down to Budapest, all the way past Belgrade, the major hazard is flooding, and that depends on the spring rains. So, for your purposes, what you want is the Kazan Gorge, where the river passes through the Carpathians. Using the common method of calculation, distance from the Roumanian delta on the Black Sea, that would be from kilometer 1060 down to 940. At that point, the river runs south, and forms the border between Yugoslavia and Roumania, and the section from Golubac, on the Yugoslavian side, down to Sip, turns into sixty-five miles of rapids, where the river sometimes narrows to a hundred and sixty yards. At the end of this stretch is the Djerdap, in Roumanian Portile de Fier, the Iron Gates. After that, the river widens, and runs on a flat plain to the sea, and there you can do very little.”
“And the depth?”
“God knows! In some places, fifteen hundred feet, in others, depending on the season, it can be as shallow as thirty feet, especially over what’s called the Stenka ridge, where narrow channels are marked by buoys.
You’re actually in the mountains, you see, passing over submerged peaks and valleys. And it’s dangerous—all shipping must take on a river pilot, that’s the rule of the Danube Commission. Going downstream, the pilot boards at Moldova Veche, on the Roumanian shore across from Golubac. If you’re headed the other way, the ship station is at Kladovo, but the Iron Gates, just north of there, are no longer the problem they used to be. After the Great War, Austrian engineers dug the Dezvrin ship canal, about two and a half kilometers in length, to bypass the rapids. But, even with the canal, the current is so strong that the engineers had to build a section of railway on the road above the canal, in order to use a towing engine that pulls traffic upstream by means of a cable.”
“So, then,” Serebin said, staring down at his notes, which made no sense at all.
Ferenczy rose abruptly, sat next to Serebin on the couch, and took his pad and pencil. “Here is Golubac,” he said, writing 1046 next to the name. A specific kilometer? Of course. He probably knew it meter by meter. With some amazement, Serebin watched as a river pilot emerged from the persona of a middle-aged French fop. Ferenczy drew with a firm hand, using dashes down the center of the river to show the border, printing Dunav on the Serbian side, Dunarea on the Roumanian, for the river changed languages along with its depths and channels. The pilot drew teardrop-shaped rocks, an island, a road. “Here is Babakai rock,” he said. “In 1788, the Austrians stretched a chain across here to trap the Turkish navy. It’s a red rock, you can’t miss it.” At 1030, the Stenka ridge, three kilometers to 1027. In the middle, another rock. Next came Klissura. “Greek word,” Ferenczy said. “Means, ah, crevice. Very narrow, maybe too deep.” And down and down, here it curved, then curved back again, the river Czerna joined at 954, then the course twisted violently south, ten kilometers northwest of the Iron Gates. “After this,” Ferenczy said, “the ship canal.”