Night Soldiers

by Alan Furst

  The truck inched down a narrow alley, cornered, and stopped. They threw the tarp off and saw two men in dark suits with pistols in their hands. Khristo immediately armed his weapon and covered them.

  “What's this?” Lucien asked.

  “Pimps,” Gilbert answered, climbing up on the truck bed to help with the wounded. “We're at the Épinal whorehouse. It's the only place in town where the doctor comes—and no questions asked. They've already sent one of the girls to get him.”

  They carried Brebis and Daniel through the small bar that adjoined the lobby, then upstairs to a dingy room with faded wallpaper. A mustached man in long underwear jumped out of the bed when they entered the room. “See here,” he said.

  “Take a walk,” one of the pimps answered, showing the man his pistol, “this is for France.”

  A heavy woman in a dressing gown appeared as they lowered the wounded to the rumpled bed. Without a word she handed the customer a sheaf of ten-franc notes. He, in turn, drew himself up to his full dignity, baggy underdrawers and all. “Never!” he said, with great solemnity. Slapped the money back into the woman's hand, saluted crisply, and marched from the room.

  February, in the mountains, was like a white island. Cut off from time, lifeless, inert. A place where snow showered from the pine boughs, a place where the wind died and the water froze to perfect crystalline ice.

  In Cambras, Khristo Stoianev kept to himself. He lived, like the rest of the village, on turnips and rutabagas. Sometimes there was bread. Most of the recruits had been sent home—with instructions to return after the March thaw—because the village foodstocks could not support them. But Khristo and the Corsican, Fusari, were asked to stay.

  The shooting of La Brebis and Daniel Vau continued to reverberate in Cambras and not in comfortable ways. They had both survived, for which everyone was thankful. But Daniel had been wounded in the spine, would never walk again, and Gilbert's young wife had taken this very badly. She had been, everyone supposed, Daniel's lover, and her broken heart showed for all to see. This situation oppressed Gilbert's domestic life to a painful degree and he was rumored to have shifted his sleeping quarters to the bed of the strange servant girl who lived in the house.

  The doctor had arrived within minutes that day at the Hôtel de la Gare, a white-haired professeur of a man who wore an old-fashioned silk vest beneath his suit. He had patched up La Brebis as best he could, then ordered both wounded removed to a convent near the town of Vittel, some twenty miles distant, and there operated on Daniel Vau. Both had remained and were said to be recovering as well as could be expected. The family of La Brebis—the Bonet clan—muttered continually of revenge on her behalf. Gilbert and Lucien resisted, reluctant to attack the Germans in this way, fearing what they would do to the village in return. The murder of an individual German soldier had elsewhere in France been repaid by the killing of more than a hundred civilians. A high price for the Bonet honor.

  But the stalemate could not last indefinitely and late one afternoon an aristocratic Frenchman appeared in Cambras: tall, hawk-faced, silver-haired, even in February wearing a fine topcoat over his shoulders like a cape. He was accompanied by a bodyguard called Albert, a watchful man with lank brown hair parted in the middle, a café waiter's mustache, and eyes the color of the winter sea. He carried a shortbarreled pump shotgun, a weapon never before seen in the village—what birds you could get with that—and wore a Walther pistol in an armpit holster. The Killer, they called him, when he wasn't around to hear. He reminded Khristo of his past.

  Which now, in February, seemed like another life lived by another man. With war in Russia, he thought, they must all be dead by now. Sascha, Drazen Kulic, all the others from Arbat Street. Perhaps not Ilya. Ilya would always find a way to survive. And he rather thought Voluta was alive somewhere; he was like air, hard to get hold of and thus hard to kill. What, he wondered, would they think of this American who called himself Lucien. For he was surely not French, no Frenchman ever walked like that, free-striding, body leaning forward. And he was not British. He did not have the British face, that odd, speculative stillness. He was, apparently, what Khristo had been. An intelligence officer, sent, no doubt, to organize and focus resistance to the Germans. And he was approximately Khristo's age. Yet he was very different. His training was different—there was another angle to him. He was nothing like Sascha Vonets or Yaschyeritsa or Ozunov. Nor was he like Roddy Fitzware.

  What made him distinct, in Khristo's eyes, was his decision to save the lives of the two wounded villagers. At not so much jeopardy to his life—that was expected—as jeopardy to his mission. That was not expected. And it was wrong. An error. But it was the nature of the error that provoked Khristo's curiosity. The man's component parts, compassion interwoven with aggression, reminded him of Faye Berns, who could be sentimental one moment and entirely practical the next. He had thought her personality to be singular, but he now understood that she was one of a class. To which add Winnie Beale, who had, on the spur of the moment, committed an entirely altruistic act and could have died for her trouble. A wealthy bitch, suddenly swept away by unselfish courage in the face of a machine gun. The combination was attractive, very appealing, but, in the case of Lucien, he had to wonder how it managed to resolve itself to the crueler exigencies of intelligence work.

  The French aristocrat, in Khristo's experienced eyes, seemed to be Lucien's superior, but that was not so very unusual; his own experience of being a non-national in another country's service supported that observation. During the three days the man stayed at the village, he spent most of his time soothing one or another of the Bonet family, explaining to them the facts of life in regard to revenge killings. But he also sought Khristo out, chatted with him now and again in the most general sort of way, and finally invited him to have a brandy at Gilbert's house. When Khristo arrived, after a turnip supper, he discovered that Gilbert and his family were absent, as was Lucien.

  The brandy was a gift from heaven. He'd spent most of his nights in the mountains as close to a fire as he could get, but it was the first time in many weeks that both sides of him were warm at the same moment. It was private at Gilbert's house. There was only the light of the fire—a big one, Gilbert was liberal with his wood—reflected in the frost flowers that covered the small windowpanes. As Khristo sipped at the aristocrat's brandy and relished the warmth that crept through his body, the Frenchman took a pouch of tobacco from his pocket and rolled two cigarettes. The smell reached Khristo all the way from the man's lap. Makhorka. Dark tobacco, strong, and there was no mistaking the aroma. Silently, the man handed him a cigarette, then extended a gold lighter.

  “Do you like it?” the man said.

  “Oh yes.”

  “Just like home, eh?”

  Khristo sat for a time and stared into the fire. There'd been no doubt in his mind that this would happen eventually, that he would be challenged to explain who he was. He would never be considered French—perhaps by the villagers but never by someone who knew the world. And you had to be somebody, you had to belong somewhere, you had to have a nationality of some sort. Even in heaven, he thought, where Saint Peter is the border guard. He discovered that he was angry, not so much at the Frenchman as at the circumstances of his own existence. He looked into the aristocrat's eyes for a moment and realized suddenly that the man was in Cam-bras not to gentle the Bonet clan, but to find out about him. Very well, he thought, you shall find out. “I am not Russian,” he said, holding the makhorka cigarette in the air between them to show the man that his tactics were well understood.

  “No?”

  “No. I am from Bulgaria. A possession of Turkey for centuries, now an ally of the Germans, soon to belong to someone else. It is the bulwark of southeastern Europe—Christian Europe—against Islam. It is a neighbor and, often, an enemy of Greece, your conquered ally. It has always been greatly desired by Russia, your un-conquered ally. Romania, its northern neighbor and sometime enemy, was most recently the domain of Bri
tish interests, even though the Romanian ruling class looks to France for their culture and has sided with Germany in this war. It is also part of the Balkans, and the southwestern area of the country has tended to be sympathetic to the interests of Macedonia—divided between Greece and Yugoslavia, a country presently occupied by Germany, with willing assistance from the Croatian minority, except for those Croats who are communist and fight with Tito, whose father was a Serb and mother a Croat. And yes, I like the tobacco quite well.”

  The aristocrat nodded to himself for a moment, something or other had been confirmed. “You are, sir, something of a politician.”

  “I am, sir, a lot of things, but that, thank God, is not one of them.”

  The man across from him laughed appreciatively, then leaned forward. “I am not here to interrogate you, and I am not accusing you. I am only concerned with the politics at hand, not the politics of the Balkans. You must understand that in France there are several résistance movements, Catholic, communist, Gaullist, even those who would restore the Bourbon monarchy. We make common cause against the Germans, but the day is coming when the future of this country will be decided—and it will be decided by those who come out of the conflict with the greatest strength. The Cam-bras maquis is something of a Gaullist unit, as much as it's anything, and if you would be happier in a different political setting, well, that can be arranged for you, and no hard feelings. Well, what about it?”

  “My war is right here,” Khristo said. A connoisseur of traps, he felt that this was surely the softest one ever laid for him.

  “Good. You'll be of assistance—no question about it. On that basis, another brandy?”

  “Thank you, yes.”

  “Some day, you must tell me your story.”

  “I think you would find it interesting,” Khristo said.

  They busied themselves with the brandy for a moment. For Khristo, the room grew deliciously warm.

  “This war,” the aristocrat said, “in some sense it makes you happy.”

  “That's true,” Khristo said.

  “Why?”

  “The world turned me upside down a long time ago. Now the world itself is turned upside down. For the moment, we—the world and I—are congenial.”

  “But it must end.”

  “Some day.”

  “And then?”

  “I don't know. I don't think about it. For now, a man with a gun can be whoever he likes. With any luck, I'll be dead before the world turns right side up again.”

  The aristocrat looked into his eyes for a moment, calculating. “I don't think you really mean that.”

  Khristo sighed. “No, you're right. I don't mean it.” “Don't give up hope,” the aristocrat said. “Everything may be put right in the long run.” He handed Khristo the remaining tobacco, then rose from the chair and tossed a small log onto the fire. Khristo accepted that as a signal, chatted for a few moments more, and left soon after.

  He walked across the tiny mud square of Cambras, back to the house where he slept and ate. The night was clear, the ground frozen rock hard. He looked up at the stars, sharp as diamonds in the black sky, and wondered what the Frenchman had meant by saying “everything may be put right in the long run,” because he had meant something by it.

  The thaw came in late February and everything turned to mud as sheets of water ran across the mountain roads. In Épinal, a student named LeBeq was caught writing slogans on a wall. He was detained by the Gestapo and tortured. To make his comrades believe he had confessed—and thus get them running, out in the open—he was almost immediately released. He went home to his family, but was unable to speak. The following day, he walked up to a Gestapo sedan parked in the main square and drove a boning knife—all the blade and half the handle—into the driver's chest. The other officer leaned across the seat and shot him several times. But he had the strength of a madman, and managed to walk several blocks to the doctor's office where he collapsed and died on the front step. Immediately, a number of prominent citizens were rounded up and ten men and women were hanged from plane trees on the main street of the city. The doctor who had attended Daniel and La Brebis was one of them, as was the prostitute's customer who had chanced to be in the Hôtel de la Gare. On the first day of March, friends of LeBeq stretched a wire across the road that passed below Cambras and decapitated—more or less—a motorcycle dispatch rider who had neglected to lie low over his handlebars.

  This action produced, in turn, a platoon of garrison troops and some SD officers snooping about at the foot of the mountain trails that led up to Cambras. Nobody would have been foolish enough to commit such a murder virtually on his own doorstep (the Cambras maquis suspected a rival resistance group, jealous of their armaments—airplanes didn't come for just anybody), but counter-insurgency investigation is given to a kind of plodding momentum, a leadfootedness that will in fact not dismiss, out of hand, the owner of said doorstep.

  Vigie, posted across the road, watched the SD officers in conference at the foot of the Cambras trail and began to mistrust his ability to outflank and outdistance them—to warn the village before the troops arrived—so set his fire selector on single shot and popped off a round over their heads. This produced frantic radio calls and an intense ratissage, but Vigie melted through the woods like a faun and the only result of the sweep was a few turned German ankles and a good deal of ammunition expended on swaying tree limbs. The fuss was, as well, more than enough to send the Cambras maquis scuttling up the mountain with weapons in hand.

  Ulysse heard about the business, through his own sources, and the final result of LeBeq's wall writing was that Lucien was pulled out of Cambras. The KIT FOX mission was about to move into a new phase, and Ulysse smelled lots of trouble in the air around Épinal. It was, he thought, the thaw itself, which had melted self-control as well as snowbanks and let loose passions that had remained too tightly wound throughout the winter. KIT FOX was, after all, not a guerrilla campaign, it was a sabotage mission, and there was a feeling in the General Staffs that all-out partizan operations, such as the Russians applied to the invading Germans, would lead to the sort of bloodbath that would eliminate a lot of German non-coms—but at the cost of much of the maquis leadership. It was not entirely put aside, but was reserved for the week of the grand invasion itself if it was going to happen at all.

  At Ulysse's direction, Lucien became the wandering pedagogue of the Belfort Gap, an ancient and traditional attack route up the valley of the Rhine River between the French Vosges and the German Schwarzwald. Two cities, Belfort and Basel, the Swiss border point for France, sit athwart this opening between mountain ranges like stone lions guarding a palace. In the early spring of 1944, the intelligence planners had one objective that led all others: the German high command was now to be exquisitely sensitized to every soft point in Europe that might serve as an Allied invasion route. There was the Balkan route, the Italian route, the beaches of southern France, which led to the Belfort Gap, and the beaches of northern France. Each area had to show heightened levels of sabotage: strategic assets damaged, repaired, then damaged again. Just the sort of thing that goes on before a fleet looms on the horizon.

  The Lucien team included Khristo, Fusari, and Vigie, each chosen by Ulysse for a different reason. Khristo, at first, because Ulysse wanted to keep an eye on him. Later, it became apparent that he had a considerable knowledge of the craft in his own right and shared instructional chores with Lucien. Fusari was appointed security chief and bodyguard, their official thug. Dark and suspicious, he looked the part, and in fact had Union Corse connection in his background. He was forever cutting an X into the nose of each 9 mm round, dumdumming it so that what went in the size of a fingernail flattened out, by the time it exited, to the diameter of the circle made by thumb and forefinger. He was, like many professional criminals, violently patriotic, and focused all his attention on giving the Germans a proper screwing. On the other hand, he made it clear that should Ulysse require the abduction of a bank manager o
r the interdiction of a payroll, he would be only too pleased to lend his wisdom and experience to the cause.

  As for Vigie, Ulysse had recognized his special value early on. He looked younger than his sixteen years and had the scrubbed innocence of an altar boy. He could go anywhere, seemed always a natural part of the environment, and a lie in his mouth was like a hymn. In short, a born lookout. He had, also, an uncanny knack with women—what they did with Vigie didn't really count as infidelity, for some reason, and he returned from his nightly tomcatting with various morsels of pillow talk. These never particularly served the Allied intelligence effort, but they might have, and they did function to keep everybody's spirits up, so Vigie retained a permanent dispensation, denied the other three, from Ulysse. They bitched about that, referring to their leader as “Mother Superior,” but the point of it was later to be driven home in an extremely ugly way.

  Like itinerant scholars of an earlier time, the unit crisscrossed the back roads of the Belfort countryside. It was hard, boring work, completely without glamour and very dangerous. There were young Frenchmen who served the Germans as milice, militia, and they maintained loose networks of spies and informants who might not themselves wish to be seen collaborating with the enemy. People had their own reasons—sometimes, alas, very good ones—for making backchannel arrangements with la geste, thus the possibility of betrayal was constant.

  But the mission of the Lucien team was of critical importance. The knowledge they provided turned plain men and women into sharp weapons against the Occupation infrastructure. If you knew enough to cut an electrical plug off its cord—perhaps stuff a piece of rag in the end so the flash wouldn't burn your hand—you could use any convenient wall socket to blow all the power in a building. It could take half an hour to replace the fuses—a long time if, for instance, the building housed ground controllers for the German air defense system.