Night Soldiers

by Alan Furst

  “I heard him. He closed the grating.”

  “Closed it behind us.”

  “What?”

  “Perhaps he was afraid. Close spaces. Rats. I don't know.”

  “Goddamn him,” Khristo said.

  “He'll get out,” Lucien said.

  Khristo whispered to the boy. “Are you all right?”

  “Oui, Capitaine,” came the answer, but the voice told a different story. “C'est le tunnel interdit,” the boy explained. The forbidden tunnel, Khristo thought. Because you will get dirty? Because you will get lost or frightened? Or why? “You have been before?” Khristo asked. Yes, the boy said. Once. For a few feet only. Never this far.

  Khristo thought it over for a moment but there was no alternative. Unless to stay here until the following night, then try to escape through the streets. But Vigie's absence made even that impossible. If he were caught, he would be made to show the Germans where they'd gone. For he had been seen by those in the police station, would not be able to talk his way out of trouble.

  On command from Lucien, they continued forward.

  For a long time, there seemed to be no end to it. His adrenaline from the attack was long dissipated, and when they stopped to rest he could feel that the skin on his knees and elbows was ripped and bleeding. The dead, oily water attacked the open skin like quicklime. How could the water be so stagnant, he wondered. If water still ran through the storm drain, it should renew itself every few days in the spring rains. Unless a diverter pipe had been removed from the entry and a grating fixed in its place. And the tunnel forbidden. Because its other end was sealed.

  An hour later, they came to a grating fixed over the end of the pipe. But the tunnel had widened, and the stone was soft and rotted, and both he and Lucien had knives, so they were able to dig the rusted staples out of the crumbled masonry. Khristo doubled his body back and kicked the grating out. They heard it crashing down a hill.

  Crawling out into the tangled underbrush of a hillside, they could hear the sound of the river just below them. For a time, Khristo sat with his head in his hands, breathing deeply, wanting more sweet air each time he exhaled. He was filthy, his trousers soaked with watery slime and, where the cloth had worn away, the skin of his knees showed through, bright red and beaded with blood. Lucien sat down beside him and beckoned the boy to join them. In the faint moonlight Khristo could see tear tracks that ran through the dirt on the boy's face, but he'd made not a sound in the tunnel.

  “Where are we?” Lucien asked the boy.

  “Below the road,” he said, “on the hill in back of the barn of Madame Rossot.”

  “Do you have someone to go to?” Lucien asked. “Someone who will clean you up and take you home so the Germans don't see you?”

  The boy pondered that for a moment. Then shook his head vigorously beneath the helmet. “Madame Rossot,” he said, “though she becomes very angry if we go behind her barn.”

  “Are you sure?” Lucien said.

  “The schleuh killed her husband, in the Great War.”

  “You are very brave,” Lucien said. He stood and searched in his pockets.

  Khristo thought at first he was looking for money, then realized he wanted something to give the boy—something he could keep. Khristo knew the very thing and fished about for it in his pocket. His good luck charm. That he had kept with him in Spain. That had been stored in Santé prison with his civilian clothes. He stood, then waved the boy to his feet. “I decorate you for bravery,” he said, giving the boy what he'd taken from his pocket. He extended his hand and the boy shook it formally, very much like a soldier receiving a medal, then looked in the palm of his other hand, at the white pawn resting there.

  “Merci, monsieur,” he said.

  “You are dismissed,” Lucien said. “Now be careful, will you?” The boy moved off along a trail through the brush, and then he was gone.

  They rested for an hour, then, as dawn approached, worked their way cross-country to their emergency fallback position—a downed maple tree a mile short of Cabejac, on the road to Abonne. They waited the rest of the day for Vigie, eating a chocolate bar from Lucien's pocket and, once darkness fell, cleaning themselves by the river. They hid out that night and all the next day, but Vigie did not appear. He was never seen again.

  In the town of Abonne there were three small pulp mills that processed wood fiber from the forests of the Vosges into newsprint and inexpensive papers of all kinds. It smelled dreadful, like all the wood-pulp towns of the world, and life there was lived amid a sulfurous haze of rotten eggs. Such conditions the Germans found sharply discordant with their vision of La Belle France and they tended to stay away from the place—occupying armies have a habit of discovering strategic value in towns where life is comfortable and pleasant, and the Germans were no exception to the rule.

  Left to themselves, the townspeople had organized a particularly predatory and efficient maquis, concentrated among the millworkers and led by the local union boss, a tough old bastard called Vedoc. When the remnants of the Lucien team walked back into Abonne, hollow-eyed and exhausted, they were taken immediately to Vedoc's house. His wife and sister cleaned out the larder to feed them while Vedoc himself provided an ample supply of that year's basement wine, aged all of eight months and considered pretty good for what it was. The one called Lucien was too quiet, too much inside himself, so Vedoc, who had seen this sort of thing before, kept him reasonably drunk and sent an old lady off on a series of local trains to Belfort.

  The Bugatti pulled up in front of Vedoc's house a week later. Ulysse, shadowed as always by the cold-eyed Albert, was his usual elegant self: calm, aloof, an island of Gallic sanity in the stormy seas. Winter was gone and the pearl-colored topcoat with it; a stylish raincoat now served as cape. Only Khristo, perhaps, noted a tiny razor nick to one side of his Adam's apple and inferred that Ulysse himself was having to withstand a storm or two.

  They were debriefed at length—first separately, then together—on the trap at Cabejac. Ulysse showed them a series of photographs, which Albert then carefully burned in the fireplace. They could identify only the “gendarme,” and he was, they both believed, likely dead. They talked for hours over a two-day period while the room turned blue with smoke. They told the story again and again. Ulysse listened with infinite patience, Albert took notes in some private code of his own.

  During this time, Khristo gained some understanding of the aristocrat's character. He was obviously an acute observer of human beings, their strengths and weaknesses, what they could take and what they couldn't. It was as though he had long ago ceased to judge behavior and had, instead, given himself over to the pure study of it. Further, it became clear to Khristo that war was this man's time, that war ran in his blood, heritage of an aristocracy that had led men in battle for centuries and continued to do so. And that it was precisely this comprehension, this set of instincts, that Ulysse had put at the disposal of the American intelligence services in order to defeat his traditional enemy.

  Thus he was not at all surprised when Ulysse suggested a walk in the woods behind Vedoc's house on an afternoon when the weather was cold and gray. Lucien had been sent off on a small errand. Albert, shotgun in hand, waited at the edge of the trees.

  Ulysse strolled slowly, hands clasped behind his back, and his mood was soft and tentative. With a rather arch apology for the lack of makhorka (“My tobacconist stocks it only once in a great while”), he offered Khristo a Gitane and lit it with a snap of his gold lighter.

  “Of course I must not ask you about Lucien,” he said as they walked.

  “No,” Khristo responded.

  “Loyalty to a comrade-in-arms is everything.”

  “Naturally, that is so.”

  “Americans, Americans,” he said, despair in his voice. “They do not accept casualties at all well, do they. They take it to heart, and they blame themselves. A kind of false pride, surely, yet one must admire them for it. Do you?”

  “Yes,” Khris
to said, “I do.”

  “Yet a man of your experience must also see that it is their weakness.”

  “Perhaps a weakness. Or a strength. Or both at once, perhaps.”

  “Yes,” Ulysse mused. “Still, not an ideal trait for an officer class, you'll admit that.”

  “I suppose not,” Khristo said.

  “Lucien has done very well, you know, in the way these things are judged. Quite a number of trains, and one must add what other groups have been able to do with his assistance, and what they will do in the future. Considered altogether, a most gratifying boil on Hitler's backside. But, we ask ourselves, can he continue? I've not told Lucien, by the way, but the village of Cambras has been entirely decimated.”

  Khristo winced and shook his head in sorrow.

  “Yes, I'm afraid so. A servant girl betrayed them to the Gestapo, and they were taken by surprise. She had been made pregnant by Gilbert, poor thing, and was terrified she would be cast out of the village, to live in the woods, and in her state of mind the Germans seemed like saviors, who could rescue her from her predicament. I don't look forward, I must tell you, to the moment when Lucien learns of this.”

  “He has no lack of courage,” Khristo said.

  “Not remotely in question,” Ulysse said. “But do you suppose he would be willing to sacrifice the lives of others, should it become necessary?”

  Khristo was silent.

  “Please forgive me,” Ulysse said, “for having to ask you that.”

  “The world will go on,” Khristo said.

  “It will.” He paused to light another cigarette. “And then, where will you be?”

  “God may know that,” Khristo answered honestly, “I do not.”

  “In your homeland, perhaps? To marry and make a life? It is what most of us will do, in time.”

  “No,” Khristo said, “I do not think so. Though there are times when I would give anything to be back where I was born, even for one hour. But I have seen the world, and whoever runs that country will want to start fresh—they won't have much use for people who have seen the world. It will be under the Russians, I think, and there won't be anything we can do about it. Our history is a sharp lesson on the subject of borders.”

  Ulysse nodded in sympathy. “We're going to exfiltrate Lucien to Switzerland, in a day or two. Would you like to come along?”

  They walked along the path through the mist; the sound of dripping trees filled the silence. “Yes,” Khristo said.

  “You'll be interned, in a sort of way, so that our understandings with the Swiss will be, at least, nominally observed. But your circumstances can be most comfortable, and, who knows, you may just make some new friends. American friends. Would you like that?”

  “Yes,” Khristo said, “I would.”

  Long before dawn, the horse-drawn carts began lining up on the French side of the Vöernstrasse bridge. There wasn't all that much produce to take into the Saturday market—you got little variety in early May—but the farmers brought what they could: cabbage, broccoli, spinach, wintered-over carrots, and early greens of every sort. Across the bridge, in the well-swept squares of the city, the housewives of Basel awaited their French vegetables—one more Swiss cauliflower might well have driven them mad.

  The border guards came in two versions: the Vichy French, theoretically still in charge of their own boundaries, and the Germans—Gestapo or military—who considered the Swiss border far too sensitive to entrust to French authorities. In any event, there were far more Germans than French at this particular crossing and they milled about ceaselessly, sharp-eyed and suspicious—there was always some wretched idiot hidden away under the produce and fishing him out meant extra leave. So they took their time, while the horses stood patiently, and checked the farmers' well-worn passports long before the wagons actually reached the bridge.

  Khristo held the reins loosely in his hand while Lucien appeared to doze at his side. Behind them, the old wooden cart was piled high with cabbages. The German corporal who approached them was no more than eighteen, a country boy with red cheeks and a stiff shock of blond hair who licked his callused thumb to turn each passport page. He looked from faces to photographs—up and down, up and down—a dozen times before he was satisfied.

  But he could find nothing amiss because the French passports were in every way perfect, legitimately issued to real French citizens and full of exit stamps from previous market Saturdays. He next turned his attention to the two farmers, forcing them to empty their pockets onto the seat of the cart and pawing through a collection of string, wire, horseshoe nails, a few strands of pipe tobacco, half-used ration cards, and a miscellany of French and Swiss coins—all gloriously redolent of horse manure. But the corporal was a farm-boy and did not mind at all.

  At last, he turned his attention to the huge whitish-green mound of cabbages piled in the cart. He lifted them up, rolled them aside, peered down among them, and seemed intent on spending the rest of his days in contemplation of a pile of cabbages. Finally, the driver turned halfway round in his seat and called out to the corporal in a loud voice, his market German cut by a strong French accent:

  “Hey back there! What are you doing? Counting the farts?”

  The Germans roared with laughter and waved him ahead—any mention of such matters hit them hard in the funny bone.

  And somebody knew that too.

  In December of 1944, Robert Eidenbaugh was transferred to administrative duty in the United States, with a thirty-day furlough to precede his appearance at the OSS offices in Washington, D.C. He flew from Croydon airfield on a MATS C-47, landed at a military air base on the eastern seaboard, and made his way to Boston to see his family.

  It was a happy, emotional reunion, lacking only his younger brother, who was serving as a gunnery officer on a destroyer in the Pacific. The family had devoted themselves to the war—his father's firm now entirely taken up with designs for a new battle cruiser, his mother managing blood donor drives for the Boston Red Cross, various cousins and uncles spread across the globe in a variety of uniforms. One of his mother's Wiscasset nephews had died in New Guinea but they were thankful that, otherwise, the casualty lists had not touched them, and the grace said before meals was no longer the casual mumble it had once been.

  The family found Robert leaner, stronger, and a good deal older than when he'd left, and they made a considerable fuss over him. Privately, Arthur and Elva Eidenbaugh thought their son had changed. He seemed lonely, edgy, isolated and, sometimes, angry for no discernible reason. They decided that what he needed was to raise a little hell and, to that end, slipped ten ten-dollar bills in a new wallet and shooed him off to New York.

  Before he was even out of Grand Central Station he'd treated himself to an elaborate dinner at the Oyster Bar. He managed to promote a special serviceman's room at the Biltmore and was given, a privilege of uniform, a ticket to a Broadway show. For two days he wandered around midtown Manhattan, bought a few Christmas presents, and enjoyed the anonymity of being part of a busy city; looking at faces, listening to conversations, trying to pick up the thread of American life. Walking down the street he was only one uniform among many, yet now and again he did sense the quiet approval of strangers.

  He called some old friends, but most were not around. Dropped in at the OSS office on Madison Avenue, where Agatha Hamilton, the genteel lady who had been involved in his recruitment, treated him to the lunch at Luchow's he was supposed to have had three years earlier. Walking back up to the Biltmore—it was a sunny, cold day—he ran into one of the J. Walter Thompson telephone operators, and she invited him to the big Christmas party that Thompson was throwing late that afternoon.

  When Eidenbaugh arrived, just after five, there were already more than a hundred people milling about. The Thompson staff had made a major effort for the party. By marshaling their considerable design resources, they had managed to make the rather utilitarian space seem festive and seasonal. There were no balloons—latex had been declared a st
rategic material for the duration—but there was everything else: streamers of colored crepe paper, red and green Santas driving paper-bag cutout reindeer across the walls, and a huge Norfolk pine tree cut from the Stamford property of one of the senior partners—so fulsomely decorated its lower boughs touched the linoleum floor. There was every sort of liquor and large trays of sandwiches, cookies and fruit cake—the entire office had pooled sugar rations for the party. The opaque green glass that divided the cubicles was decorated with posters done by Thompson for various wartime campaigns: recruiting, blood donation, war bonds, aluminum collection, and the cautionary ones advising defense plant workers not to talk about what they did.

  When Eidenbaugh arrived, they made him very welcome indeed. He felt like a hero. He was kissed and hugged and slapped on the back, a triple-strength Scotch and soda appeared in his left hand, a giant Christmas cookie in his right. Looking about, he could see several uniforms moving through the crowd. He was in the midst of earnest conversation with a young woman from Barnard, who did something in the production department, when Mr. Drowne, his old boss, stood on a desk at the center of the room and banged on a drinking glass with a knife.

  “Oh Gawd,” his new friend said, “here goes Drownie.”

  Mr. Drowne cleared his throat. “On behalf of the J. Walter Thompson Company, I want to take special notice of some of our fighting men and women who are here with us tonight. Some of them are former employees, their friends, whoever you may be, all are welcome! We think it would be fitting if each of you would step up and say a little something and give us folks on the home front a chance to express our appreciation.”