by Alan Furst
The final exercise was witnessed by the god Petenko himself, driven out that morning in an open staff car, a picnic hamper riding next to the officer who acted as chauffeur. This Petenko was a fabled personage—his telephone calls produced ashen-faced terror in subordinates—who sported one of those battering-ram titles in which the words deputy, assistant, minister, interior, state and security all appeared. The tolling of a frightful bell. The sort of high but not too high job where the incumbent could snip your balls off without signing for them. Beside the point, perhaps, that he had seven months to live, or that some of his former castrati were waiting for him when it was his turn to go to the Lubianka—that day he was the czar.
The assignment: assassinate General X as he enters the captured city. Citizens line the streets. Security is rife. This is a triumphal entry. Citizens and security were composed of the other thirteen units—one unit had to do the job. General Petenko deigned to take the role of General X. His flunkies were enacted (in every possible way) by three members of the judging committee. The part of the car was played by his car.
Unit Eight stayed up till dawn, blankets wrapped around their shoulders. They had been screwed, somehow, placed last on the schedule. By then, every other unit would have had its try, every possible variation, every deceit, trick, diversion and ruse would have been seen and identified. They pounded their heads to come up with something completely new. What made it worse was that their officers, the judging committee in the car and others in the street, were arrayed against them along with all the other units and they, of course, were looking forward to it, popping away at their students with blank 7.62 rounds, symbolically slaughtering the incompetent.
For the nineteenth time Captain Khristo asked Intelligence Officer Goldman what assets they had and for the nineteenth time was shown the two pistols Kulic had managed to weasel away from other units. He was, for such a heavy-shouldered brute, a surprisingly subtle thief. In addition, Goldman could make overtures to certain weak links, in other units, in search of covert assistance, but—who could know, they might well be delivering themselves into the nets of somebody's counterintelligence scheme. They themselves had played the traitor too often, in order to discern someone else's intentions, not to know that the prank could just as easily be played back on them.
“It's getting light,” Voluta said. “What can we do with two extra pistols and a few weak links? Or, really, five extra pistols, we'll only need one to shoot the bastard.”
“Weak links cannot be trusted.” Khristo spoke the axiom automatically.
Kulic agreed, nodding sadly. Completed the worn joke: “Trust the strong even less.”
When, at long last, it came their turn to try the assassination, weak was the word for their effort. It was getting on dusk, there were rumors of a splendid supper on their last night. Everybody was tired and cold and hungry—thirteen foiled assassinations made for a long day. Some units had come close, a few points awarded, but nobody had managed a clean kill.
General X rode into town in stately fashion, waving at the assembled multitude from the front seat of the open car. Irina Akhimova, hands choking the steering wheel, drove the car slowly, her face frozen in rigid concentration. Never mind murder, her expression seemed to say, just don't scratch the bodywork. Poor Goldman was caught flat-footed on the roof of the church (by Unit Two guards, of course!—points to them), his “bomb,” a sock full of white flour, still hanging down the front of his shirt. Kulic, absurdly disguised with a home-cut eyepatch, was pounced on a moment later. Voluta, attempting to hide in an open doorway, simply raised his hands. Why get your shirt torn on the last day? At the end of the street, two security guards stepped out of the crowd with Khristo held between them. Truly, a disappointing try, especially from the everingenious Unit Eight. Bomb-from-the-church-roof had already failed, and failed quite miserably, twice that day.
General X stood up in the front seat, became General Petenko, raised his hand for silence. The crowd gathered round for a blessing.
“On behalf of the security workers of this progressive nation,” he trumpeted, “I wish to bestow on you and your dedicated instructors compliments and congratulations. What I have seen here today is an inspiration to me, to all the proletariat everywhere. Perhaps not an inspiration of craft—for you are beginners, there is still great effort ahead of you—but an inspiration of effort, seriousness, and …”
Inspired, then, to silence.
Mouth frozen open.
Leaping backward as the electricity of fright jolted his heart. Crossing his hands in front of his closed eyes, turning his head away. A perfect statue of a man in the last instant of life.
Not real death.
Not real bullets.
But the move was so sudden, so blurred, he had no time to sort it out. There was an animal lying along the length of the hood. It had sprung like an animal, without warning or hesitation, and it had landed like an animal, crouched, coiled to spring again. Then it had flung itself flat, both fists spewing flame.
For Khristo, the realization was explosive. He really thinks he is being shot. He could see Petenko in exquisite focus—glossy jowls, drooping chin—and the man's terror opened a door in him. What burst through was a bright fountain of rage. This fat Russian bag of piss and vodka. Khristo ground his teeth and moaned in his throat and then heard hammers clacking on empty chambers.
There was rather a long interval.
Akhimova, her face a mask, stood up in the driver's seat for no apparent reason. Petenko lowered his arms, came out of hiding. His voice was high and thin the first time he screamed.
“Lieutenant!”
Dropped an octave on the second try.
“Lieutenant!”
Khristo heard Akhimova exhale a long breath.
“Yes, comrade General?”
“This man …” He pointed. Khristo could see his finger shaking. Petenko blinked, slowly lowered his hand. This man could not be forced to his knees and shot then and there. This man was a student, of a sort, reciting his lesson, of a sort.
Petenko cleared his throat. Students in the street murmured to each other. The urgent need to return to normalcy was everywhere. Khristo, careful of the paint, slithered cautiously backward until he stood before the car.
Petenko turned his head a little to one side. “What is your name, young man?”
“Khristo Stoianev, comrade General.”
“You are Bulgarian?”
“Yes, comrade General.”
“They are proud people,” Petenko said. There was proper admiration in his voice. The working classes needed no national boundaries, they were as one race. The concept had been clearly set down.
His eyes, of course, told a very different story, but only Khristo could see what burned there and he was meant to see it.
A different sort of train ride back to Moscow. The wooden benches they'd barely noticed on the way out were now discovered to be of a diabolical hardness. Heads drooped. There was coughing and sniffling. They were exhausted, worn down by the intensity of competition, lost sleep, country air, and cheap, throat-searing vodka knocked back, toast by toast, at the farewell party. One of the officers had brought forth a battered fiddle—he did it every year—and all danced and sang. What the Arbat Street officers called Belovian love affairs were consummated one last time behind, beneath and, in the cases of the truly brave, inside various huts. Farewell, my pretty one. Life back in Moscow was not so free. Oh, one could manage—clandestine training would serve for other than political purposes—but it wasn't the same, hiding out in the boiler room. Better not to be so forthright. Marike had carried on rather openly, and she'd not been seen since. Sent home, most thought.
Khristo tried sleeping but it wasn't possible. With windows shut tight it was getting close in the train, and he went between cars wanting fresh air and there found Kulic, curled up out of the wind in one corner of the platform. Kulic invited him to sit down and Khristo rested his back against the smooth wooden bo
ards. In the open air, the rail rhythms were amplified and white smoke from the locomotive streamed overhead. There was a strange sky, common for the Russian spring, with clouds and stars and a probing little wind from the south that stirred the birch groves.
“Well, comrade Captain,” Kulic said after Khristo had settled himself, “it wasn't for lack of trying.”
“We should have won it,” Khristo said.
Kulic shrugged. “It is different here.” His voice was without inflection.
The judging committee's decision had been announced at the farewell party. Unit Two and the smug Iovescu had come in first. They had been placed second, just ahead of Malya and the Hungarian captain and Unit Five. Khristo's unit had been awarded a full score for the assassination of General X—there was no way to deny their success. But the committee had awarded Unit Two the points for capturing Goldman on the roof. Goldman had challenged the decision—it was all a feint, right up to the point when the two bribed security guards had released Khristo's arms—but the challenge was turned aside: a political decision had been made and that was that.
The brownnoses won. That was always the way of it, Khristo thought, and there was a lesson to be learned there if one wanted to see it. Kulic was right, it was different here. Gazing at the cloudy, starry sky, he felt captivity as a slight pressure at the base of the throat and swallowed a few times, but it would not go away. Twenty years old. Life already twisted into a strange, contorted shape, like a tree growing in sand. When he'd been Nikko's age he had harbored a secret contempt for his father. A slave of the fish buyers, the landlords, the Holy Fathers, he'd seemed yoked to his life like a patient ox. Now and then a sigh, but never a protest, never a curse. Khristo had believed one could tear the yoke from one's neck, cast it into the Dunav, be free of the weight that had to be hauled from dawn to dusk every day of the year. He'd believed his father lacked the passion, the human fire, to shed his burden, and he was ashamed to be the son of such a willing beast. Now he knew differently, of course. He'd learned something about yokes.
“Do you hate them?” Kulic cut into his sorrow. Seemed almost to know what he had been thinking.
Khristo shrugged, not trusting his voice. Kulic punched him twice, lightly, on the upper arm. “Doesn't pay to think about it,” he said.
He didn't hate them. He didn't think he hated them. Though the fury that had possessed him when he'd “shot” Petenko would bear some thinking about when he could get away alone. But he didn't hate them. He was afraid of them. He was afraid of them because they were, in some sense, madmen. A boat carpenter in Vidin had gone mad with sorrow after his wife died and had spent all his days down by the river building endless mounds of stones, constantly correcting the height of the piles to make them all perfectly even. They were like that. They practiced a kind of witchcraft and called it science. When you went to get your papers stamped, you slid them beneath a curtain to a waiting official—you were not to see the faces of those who controlled your destiny. Like Veiko, they dealt in fear. Like Veiko, he thought ruefully.
Kulic continued, taking Khristo's silence for assent. “If you cannot go back, best go forward. What else is there?”
“You too?” Khristo said.
Kulic nodded sadly. “All of us. That's my guess.” He slumped backward and stared up at the sky. “I was one of the Komitaji. You know what that is?”
“The committee?”
“That's what the word means. Called the Black Hand in Macedonia, something else in Croatia—you know how it is where I come from. Back in November, they murdered the king of Yugoslavia in Marseilles, King Alexander. The assassination was managed by a man called Vlada the Chauffeur. That action was accomplished by Komitaji. Some call us bandits, others, partizans.” He shrugged and spread his hands.
“You knew the people who did that?”
“Not personally. But I knew who they were. My group was active on the river. From the Iron Gate all the way up to the Hungarian border, including the city, Belgrade. And the truth about us was that some days we were bandits, other days, partizans. But always Komitaji. Bound by the oath of blood. Tradition of centuries—all of that. When we bury our dead, we do not close the coffin until it is in the grave. How is this? the visitors say. Oh, we answer, too cruel to shut out the last glimpse of sky until the very, very end. They like that idea. But the truth is different. Komitaji have always hidden guns in coffins, so the king made a law, and now it's a good country to visit if you like to see the occasional corpse being carried through the street.”
He laughed for a moment, remembering a particular national madness that seemed, from a distance, endearing. “Up on the river we are mostly Serbian,” he said, “though part of my family is Macedonian. We marched with Alexander the Great, of course, but then all Macedonians will say that. Just as all Macedonians are revolutionaries.”
“Like the Russians.”
Kulic glanced around the platform, though there could be nobody else there. “Shit,” he whispered. He moved closer to Khristo and spoke in a low voice. “We are revolutionaries because we cannot stand any man who tells us what to do. The Turk sent his tax collectors, we sent them back a piece at a time. These people, they crave to be told what to do. A whole bloody revolution they had, but they never left the church. Not really. They aspire to be priests. Do this, do that, today is Tuesday, all turn their hats back to front. Someone says why? They answer because God told me it is so and then they give him nine grams.”
“Nine grams?”
“The weight of the bullet, Captain Khristo. What goes in the back of the neck. They worship their Stalin, like a god, yet he is no more than a village pig, the big boar, poking his great snout in everybody's corncrib. These Russians will come after us some day, that is foretold, and we will give them an ass-kicking worthy of the name.”
They were quiet for a moment. Letting the sweet smoke of treason blow and billow around their heads.
“Yet you are here,” Khristo said.
“I deserve no better,” Kulic answered. “The king sent special police to our town—which is called Osijek, there are hill forts above the river there—and some fool shot them down. This fool hid in people's haylofts when the police came—army police, with machine guns, not the local idiots—but they started poking bayonets into the hay. So the fool moved up into the mountains. But they followed him there as well. One day came a Russian. We like such fools, he said, and he had false documents, a Soviet passport, and a train ticket to Varna, in Bulgaria, and a ticket on a steamer across the Black Sea to Sebastopol. So this fool—like all fools he thought himself wise—believed the Russian promises and left the mountains. Now you find him playing baby games with blank pistols, now you find him cheated of his victory, even his victory at baby games. But he accepts it. He takes everything they give out because he has no choice. He is like a bull with an iron ring through his nose. Every day they find a new way to tug on it.”
He threw his hands into the air and let them fall back to his thighs with a loud slap.
For a time they watched the stars floating by, lulled by the engine's steady beat over the rails. Kulic took a small penknife from his pocket and began paring a thumbnail.
Khristo sighed. The night made him sad. The history of Kulic's nation was like that of his own. The fighting never stopped. The conquerors kept coming. Other Kulics, other Khristos, all the way back through time, wandered the world. Away from love, away from home. They were destined to be eternal strangers. Melancholy adventurers, guests in other people's houses. From now on, forever, there could be no peace for him, no ease, none of the small domestic harmonies that were the consolation of plain people everywhere.
His pleasures were to be those of the soldier in a distant outpost—a woman, a bottle, a quick death without pain. Those he could look forward to. And, though his heart might still swell with poetry at the fire of a perfect sunset, there would never be the special one beside him to share such joys.
Distracted by a slight scra
tching noise, he turned to see Kulic lying on his side and carving on the wooden wall of the railcar with his penknife. Kulic stood up, made space for Khristo, pointed with the knife toward the wall. Khristo slid over. The scratching was tiny, hidden away in the extreme corner, only an inch above the floor: A 825.
“What is it?”
“B for Brotherhood. F for Front. Eight, two and five for the proper order of finish in the Belov exercises of March 1935. Our group, Unit Eight, won it. Even though they fixed things so that their stooges came out on top. Unit Two should have been second, and Unit Five third. Thus, somewhere in the world, wherever this railcar travels, our victory will be celebrated.”
He stuck his hand out. Khristo stood and grasped it firmly, the hand was hard and thickly callused. Kulic gestured with the penknife in his other hand. “We could make a blood oath, but pricked fingers are the very sort of thing these sniffing dogs take note of.”
They sat down again. Khristo could see the scratched letters and numbers in his mind's eye. He had read in a history book that the early kings of Greece could not trust their own countrymen not to assassinate them, so they imported, as guards, northerners, blonds and redheads from lands far away where they wrote in runes, scratch writing. These guards, time heavy on their hands, had inscribed their initials on the stone lions that, in those days, kept watch over the harbor at Piraeus. He now understood those men. Even the eternal stranger needs to leave a mark of his existence: I was here, therefore I was. Even though, after a long time away, there is nobody left who especially cares whether I was or not.