Casimir had a grand duke’s arrogance to go with his narrow, bladelike face. He strode along as if he owned the narrow, dusty streets and expected every pretty girl to grant him the droit du seigneur. Vasili clumped behind him like a weary retainer, which was how he felt.
A couple of tough guys with machine pistols made as if to block Casimir’s path. He wasn’t visibly armed, but he walked up to them and then past them as if they weren’t there. They fell back in disorder. One of them crossed himself. The other made a sign to avert the evil eye. Casimir impressed them so much, they didn’t even bother Vasili.
But just when Vasili began to think they’d get in, do their business, and get out again, a Russian soldier—or maybe he was an MGB man—recognized Casimir. He yelled “Hold it!” and reached for the Tokarev automatic on his belt.
Casimir had his own pistol hidden under his shirt. He fired first. The Russian went down with a howl, but he shot back. “My God! I am hit!” Casimir shouted, and fell over with a look of intense surprise on his face. By the spreading red spot on the left side of his chest, he wouldn’t get up again, either.
The Russian had friends. Vasili heard them running up. He didn’t wait around to meet them. He fled instead. He went left and right at random till he was sure no one was on his heels.
He was also in a big city, and quite lost. He waited till he saw a man with a halfway friendly face and asked him, “How do I get to Witold’s drugstore? The Russians are after me!”
Too late, he realized his mouth gave him away as a Russian himself. That didn’t faze the Pole, who gave quick, precise directions. The idea of Russians chasing other Russians, he took for granted.
Two blocks up, three blocks over, two more blocks up, one to the left…The Roman alphabet still didn’t come naturally to Vasili, but he saw an amateurish sign with Witold’s name on it fronting a building plainly made from mismatched pieces of older construction. He went inside.
The smell was instantly, achingly, familiar. Vasili’s nostrils twitched at the odors of camphor and mustard and camomile and all the other things that went into medicines. He figured he’d see a skinny bald man hunched over a brass mortar and pestle, grinding dust into finer dust.
But the person who looked up from the porcelain mortar and pestle was a blond girl a bit younger than he was. “Tak?” she said. In Russian, tak meant you know or that is or well. He had to remind himself it was yes? in Polish.
“I’m looking for Witold,” he said.
His accent made her frown, but she said, “He isn’t here right now. I’m his daughter. Can I help you?”
He didn’t know if she knew what all her father was involved in. He didn’t know what all Witold was involved in himself. He didn’t know if either one of them was to be trusted. But, unless you were Robinson Crusoe, you had to trust somebody. “I started to come here with Casimir,” he said. “A Russian shot him. He’s kaputt.” He turned a thumb down.
“Good God!” She crossed herself—the horizontal stroke went left to right, not right to left in Orthodox fashion. “That’s awful news! What do we do now?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me. I have no idea. Uh, I’m Vasili, by the way.”
“I’m Ewa.” She eyed him. “Why do you talk like a Russian?”
“I am a Russian. A White Russian—I mean, a Russian White.” Vasili explained how he’d started in Harbin and wound up in Warsaw. He didn’t fail to mention being a druggist’s son.
“I believe you,” Ewa said when he finished. “I have to believe you. No Chekist or spy would ever dream up such a stupid, unlikely story.”
“Thanks.” Vasili sounded hurt.
“Don’t mention it,” Ewa said absently. She thrust the mortar across the high counter at him. His hands knew what to do. The rye-bread odor of crushed caraway seeds floated up to his nose. Ewa nodded. “The way you use the pestle, you’re a druggist’s son, all right. I’ll get my father. Maybe he’ll have some idea of what we can do without Casimir.” She hurried out the back of the shop. Vasili went on grinding the caraway seeds. He wasn’t—he hoped he wasn’t—altogether alone.
—
Everyone said the knock on the door always came at midnight. You staggered out of bed and opened up. The lumpy-faced men in the ill-fitting suits or the sharp, dark uniforms hauled you away, and your life changed forever. Istvan Szolovits had lived under tyrannies of both the right and the left. They all worked the same way.
Now he was living in America, in a cheap flat somewhere near where Glendale turned into Pasadena. It might be cheap, but it had electricity, gas, and hot and cold water. It boasted a toilet and tub, as well as two sinks. It would have been an important man’s place in Budapest.
His alarm clock had hands that glowed in the dark. They showed him it was half past one, not midnight. But somebody was knocking on the door just the same—not loudly, but insistently. Ice ran up his back, as it would have at a bullet cracking past his head. They’ve come for me! he thought, long before But I didn’t do anything! crossed his mind.
The sofa in the front room unfolded to make a bed when you shoved aside the low table in front of it. The mattress wasn’t wonderful, but he’d slept on plenty worse: during basic training in the Hungarian People’s Army, for instance. He slid out of bed and went to the door in his undershirt and boxers.
“Who is?” he asked in English. Were burglars here so polite that they’d knock?
To his shock, the low-voiced answer came back in Hungarian: “Open up, you little rat, in the name of the people’s justice!”
They can’t know I’m here! was his first panicked thought. Then he realized, Even if they do know, they can’t get me here. Only after that did he recognize the voice. His fingers had already closed on the doorknob of their own accord and started to turn it. He finished opening the door with his will fully engaged.
There in the dimly lit hallway stood Sergeant Gergely, laughing as hard as a man could laugh while making a very little noise. As far as Istvan could recall, he’d never seen Gergely in civilian clothes before. Fury replaced both sleepiness and fear. “You goddamn son of a bitch!” he hissed. “A horse’s cock up your ass!”
Gergely didn’t quit laughing. “Christ on His cross, your expression was worth ten thousand dollars,” he wheezed, wiping tears away from his eyes with his sleeve. He pointed at Istvan’s skivvies. “You’re out of uniform, soldier.”
“Fuck you! Fuck your maggoty old whore of a granny and her clapped-out, stinking cunt,” Istvan said. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
“You aren’t going to invite me to come in?”
“I’ll invite you to take a long walk off a short pier, you shitstick. I have to go to work in the morning.”
“All right, all right. Keep your clothes on, kid, what you’ve got of them. Besides, I owe you one, don’t I? I was sitting in a POW camp outside of Strasbourg with nothing to do but play with myself till they sent me back to Hungary, and then this wiseass American Jew, Hungarian Jew, whatever the hell he is, he pulled me out of there and grilled me for a while. Next thing I knew, I was on a fucking airplane heading over here. You must have fed the Yankees my name, hey?”
“Was he a U.S. captain? Fellow named Kovacs?”
“That’s him, all right. Too fucking smart for his own good.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I told him they should shoot you out of hand if they caught you. If you didn’t commit war crimes this time around, you must have when you fought for Horthy and the Arrow Cross.”
Just for a second, Gergely rocked back on his heels. “Kid, everybody who fought the Russians last time committed war crimes. So did they,” he said quickly. Then he took another look at Istvan. “Ah, you little prick! You set me up for that. You really did tell the Kovacs item about me?”
“Yeah.” Istvan nodded. “If anybody knows who the Hungarian army’s worked for the last twenty years, you’re the guy.”
“I know it like a tapeworm knows a gut just before he gets shit out,”
Gergely said. “But thanks, I guess. Jesus, Stalin must’ve been as crazy as Hitler to take on a country as rich as this!”
“Tell me about it!” Istvan said. “Are they taking care of you? You have work and money and a place to stay and everything?”
“I’m fine. They treat me almost as good as if I were circumcised.” Gergely’s grin showed his bad teeth. He went on, “They’re still raking me over the coals. You were just a dumb fucking conscript. Me, though, I know how things went back in the day and how they are now—or at least till Rakosi gets strung up. You’re right about that. So I’ve got a flat and cash, and they say they’ll get me a job when my English is up to snuff. After German, it isn’t that hard, is it?”
“Not too bad, no.” Hungarians had to learn other languages if they were going to get a window on the wider world. Istvan said, “Ask you something?”
“Why not? I’m the one who came to you.”
“Boy, did you ever! What I want to know is, what’s your name? I don’t think any of us ever knew it. You were always just Sergeant Gergely to us.”
“That’s how it’s supposed to work.” Gergely bared his teeth again. “But I’m in civvies now, huh?” He wore a loud sport shirt and pale gray slacks—civvies indeed. “I’m Erno, just like Gero.”
“Lucky you,” Istvan said. Hungary’s foreign minister was cold and bloodless, a baby Molotov where his boss was a baby Stalin. Like Matyas Rakosi, he was also a Jew. Neither of them was even slightly observant, but that didn’t do anything to lessen ordinary Hungarians’ anti-Semitism.
“Lucky me is right. I fell in shit and got up smelling like a rose.” Erno Gergely reached out and patted Istvan on the cheek. “Go back to bed, darling. God knows you need all the beauty sleep you can get.” He slipped away, as silently as if he were on night patrol.
Shaking his head, Istvan took a leak and slid under the sheet again. He didn’t think he would get any more sleep, but he did. The alarm clock bombed him awake. For a few seconds, he wasn’t sure his encounter with the sergeant hadn’t been a dream. But he realized his imagination wasn’t that good. He couldn’t have made up the run-in with Gergely.
He threw two sausages in a skillet. They weren’t spicy enough to suit him, but they were what the market had. He fried three eggs in the grease. Washed down by a big cup of coffee white with cream, they’d keep him going till lunchtime.
When he got to Blue Front, he told Aaron Finch about the strange meeting. “This guy was a friend of yours?” Finch asked.
“Not exactly. I don’t know if he had any friends. As a person, he’s a shmuck,” Istvan said. “But he’s the best sergeant a sergeant could be, if you know what I mean.”
“I think so. I’ve known a few people like that.” The older man smiled crookedly. “You may find some who say I am a people like that. Lord knows my old man is.”
“You’ve been great with me.” Istvan meant it.
“Good. Here in a funny new country, you’ve got enough to worry about. Maybe that’s part of why my father is the way he is, too. But mostly I just don’t care. My wife likes me, my kid likes me, my boss puts up with me. What else do I need?”
“You make yourself out to be less than you are,” Istvan said.
Aaron only shrugged. “So maybe every once in a while I surprise somebody. But not too often. The less people have to say about you, the less trouble you wind up in.” He lit one of his ever-present Chesterfields. “Mr. Weissman’ll have something to say about me, and about you, too, if we don’t get cracking. C’mon.”
Come Istvan did. If he wasn’t wild about the work, he didn’t mind it, either. He wondered how small a shtetl Aaron’s folks came from. Aaron’s attitude certainly reflected parents who’d taught him to keep his head down because anything else was dangerous for Jews. Istvan’s parents, Budapest sophisticates, hadn’t thought that way. Then Hitler and Szalasi came along. All they proved was, everything could be dangerous for Jews.
—
Konstantin Morozov had never been in Lithuania before. The first thing he saw was that it was richer than Russia. People had nicer houses, better furniture, and more things generally than they did in the small town west of Moscow where he’d grown to manhood. The Lithuanians had them in spite of being annexed to the Soviet Union in 1940, overrun by the Nazis the next year, and going through more fierce fighting when the Red Army came back to liberate the Baltic republics in 1944.
The second thing he saw, right after the first, was that the people wanted to be liberated from the Red Army and the Soviet Union. Not to put too fine a point on it, they hated Russians and fought them tooth and nail. Konstantin had got some hint of what folk in the Baltic republics felt from serving with Juris Eigims. Seeing it with his own eyes made him realize how much Eigims had soft-pedaled it till he finally deserted.
For that matter, Konstantin counted himself lucky to be able to go on observing such things. After he and his crew bailed out of their wrecked tank, a Red Army patrol found them before the Lithuanian bandits did.
They had one more new tank. Actually, they had one more old tank: a T-34/85, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War. Konstantin didn’t scream the way he had in Germany. He wouldn’t, or he hoped like blazes he wouldn’t, be facing anything more modern here. The T-34/85, unlike his dead T-54, had a bow machine gun. The bow gunner who got added to the crew was a fresh-faced kid named Alexei Yakovlev.
“How old are you, anyway?” Konstantin asked him.
“Comrade Sergeant, I’m seventeen,” he answered proudly.
“Bozehmoi!” Konstantin covered his eyes with his hand. “Nobody’s seventeen. Nobody.”
That wasn’t true, of course. Plenty of fifteen- and sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds had served the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War. When you’d used up everybody older, you started going through your seed corn. Some of that got used up, too. And some of the children who’d lived were back in uniform this time around, now in their twenties. They’d earned a second chance to get killed.
“Can you shoot anybody who gives us trouble?” Konstantin asked.
“I sure can, Comrade Sergeant,” Yakovlev said. Seventeen wasn’t an age that came equipped with doubts. “If some bandit motherfucker’s trying to kill me, I’ll fix him, you bet.”
“Khorosho. Ochen khorosho,” Morozov said. How that would work once they went back into action was anyone’s guess. But Alexei seemed willing, anyhow.
It was an odd kind of warfare. The Red Army sat on all the major towns in Lithuania—and, Konstantin assumed, in Latvia and Estonia as well. Soviet troop convoys could go from one major town to another—as long as they were well protected. Soviet supply columns from Russia and Byelorussia could bring in food and munitions—as long as they were well protected, too.
The countryside belonged to the bandits. To a certain extent, it had for a long time. The group that called itself the Forest Brothers had stayed in the field since 1944. Convoys along the roads had to move slowly. So did trains. Land mines and derailments waited for the unwary.
And a stopped column was an invitation to bandits, the way a dead cow in a field was to vultures spiraling down out of the sky. The Lithuanians had rifles, pistols, submachine guns, a few machine guns and mortars. Against tanks, they should have been defenseless.
But anywhere the tanks didn’t go, the bandits roamed freely. They pushed back Red Army foot patrols with what seemed like contemptuous ease. Most of the men in Soviet service had had a bellyful of war. They went through the motions, no more. The Lithuanians showed both courage and initiative. If Konstantin stuck his head out of his tank’s turret for a better look around, some bandit would try to blow it off.
“Comrade Major, I can’t stay all buttoned up,” he complained to his regimental CO. “If I do, I’m like a turtle with its head pulled into its shell. I can’t see what I’ve got to do next. But if I keep coming out, those motherfuckets will kill me for sure unless the infantry keeps them farther away.”
Major Z
huk scowled. “You aren’t the first tank commander to report this problem to me. I’ve discussed it with the infantry officers.”
Konstantin waited for him to say what the infantry officers had promised to do about it. Instead, Genrikh Zhuk just stood there, still scowling. “Well?” Konstantin said at last. “Uh, sir?”
“Well, Sergeant, the reassurances they gave me are shit, pure shit, nothing but shit,” Zhuk ground out. “Their men have no interest in fighting. They don’t want to fight. The officers have no idea how to make them fight. They’re more afraid the Red Army men will desert to the bandits and fight hard for them. Things are much worse among the foot than for tankmen. Much worse.”
“Maybe the Chekists can put the fear of God in those worthless pussies.” Konstantin had never imagined a sentence like that coming out of his mouth, but there you were. Desperate times demanded desperate measures.
“It’s not that simple,” Major Zhuk said. “Three MGB men—two officers and a corporal—have been shot in the back since this division came to Lithuania. Two are dead; the other will be months getting over his wound. They aren’t so eager about pushing soldiers forward now.”
“No, eh?” Morozov’s voice was dry, not least to disguise the shock he felt. If the ordinary soldiers were losing their fear of the MGB, what would hold the Red Army together? Anything?
In the last war, knowing Hitler was even worse than Stalin had done the job. There was no foreign bogeyman like that now.
But if slacking off could get you killed, wouldn’t you at least pay enough attention to keep breathing? The Lithuanians lured a squad down an alley where a rusty old car sat. The car was packed with explosives, with wires leading from a house behind a stout stone wall. The Red Army men didn’t notice the cunningly hidden wires. When the bastard with the detonator got the signal, he let it rip. The blast took out the whole squad. As far as anyone could tell, not a single bandit got scratched.
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