Night Soldiers

by Alan Furst

  There was, in the otherwise joyous proceedings, one sour note. Sometime on the afternoon of the twelfth a few Bucharest types, tough guys in city clothes, showed up at Sfintu Gheorghe accompanied by a big, nasty-looking Russian in a leather coat, with his hair sheared off so you could see the big nasty bulge at the back of his skull. They were looking for the madman, though they weren't very specific about it. This threatened to put a severe damper on matters, for if they took the madman they would also, clearly, take those who had aided him. But the people of Sfintu Gheorghe had not survived the horrendous regimes of their country for nothing. The city types weren't going to be a problem—their eyes lit up when they saw the bounty and they immediately went to work on the peaches. The Russian was another matter. He was the sourest thing they'd ever seen, so they determined to sweeten him up in a very traditional way. A couple of dark little girls with black eyes took him off somewhere and fucked him senseless. To begin with, they teased him into drinking a bottle of champagne which, instead of slamming a lid down on his feelings or making him explode like a bomb, as the vodka tended to do, rendered him giddily lightheaded and merry as a goat. He took a little black-haired girl under each arm and vanished in a swirl of giggles and wasn't seen again for two days, at which time he was discovered sitting in the mud in his un-derdrawers, holding his head with one hand and his balls with the other.

  At 8:30 on the evening of the twelfth, the Brovno pulled into Galati harbor and Khristo walked up a long ramp onto the quay, Ivo at his side. The docks were lit by dazzling floodlights, and he could see a small army of welders crawling around in the skeletons of newly raised cranes, showers of blue sparks raining down through the girders.

  “Good luck,” Ivo said. He reached into a pocket and handed over a thick packet of Romanian lei.

  Khristo was a little taken aback, it was a great deal of money.

  “From your friends,” Ivo said. “It's a cold world without friends.”

  “It is from Drazen Kulic?”

  “Him. And others.”

  “You will thank him for me?”

  “Of course. There is also this: it is suggested that you take a taxi to Sfintu Gheorghe—no need to walk with all that money. Best to show the driver that you have sufficient means for the ride. Then, on your way back, use the same taxi. Lake Murigheol is one place you ought to see, as long as you've come this far. Quite beautiful in the spring, it's said. And you should have it all to yourself—tourists are not expected.”

  “Is it close to Sfintu Gheorghe?”

  “Some few kilometers. The man who drives the taxi ought to be able to find it.”

  They shook hands. “Thank you,” Khristo said.

  “My pleasure. Now the work begins—a hundred papers to be stamped by idiots, then we'll have to shove this wretched pipe all the way back to Yugoslavia. Up stream.” He grimaced at the thought.

  “No. Really? For God's sake, why?”

  Ivo shrugged. “We need it more than they do. Let them be satisfied with a fraternal gesture.”

  “A lot of work for a fraternal gesture.”

  “Yes, but there's nothing to be done about it.” He nodded back toward the pipe-laden barge, his expression a parody of helplessness. “Wrong gauge,” he said.

  There was a bonfire in Sfintu Gheorghe. Four men in shirtsleeves, ties pulled down, were dancing to the music of a violin, each holding the corner of a white handkerchief. The men were very drunk, and it was not a large handkerchief. But the violin was rapturous, the crowd was banging knives and forks and tin pots, and the dancers made up in gravity what they lacked in grace. Two of the men were wearing tinted glasses, and all had holstered pistols beneath their armpits.

  Khristo Stoianev, still vibrating from a three-hour taxi ride over a cart track, stood quietly at the edge of the crowd. A heavy woman turned partway toward him and stared uncertainly. He smiled warmly, clapped his hands to the rhythm with broad enthusiasm, and was rewarded with a shy smile in return. He spent some time in this way, letting them notice him, letting them accept him as someone who did not mean them harm. Villagers, he knew, could communicate without speaking—a subtle defense mechanism—and somehow come to a silent decision about the intentions of strangers. You had to let them read your character.

  When they began to lose interest in him, he looked over the crowd and picked out the village priest. There would be, in such a place, a triumvirate of leadership: a headman or mayor, a queen of wives, and a local priest. Any one of them would know where Sascha was—if they did not know of him, he was not there. When people grow up in a small village, they learn all the hiding places.

  The priest was not hard to find. He was a young man, with hair and beard worn long in the Greek Orthodox manner, and his black cassock fell to the tops of his shoes. Khristo circled the crowd casually until he stood next to him.

  “Praise God, Father,” he said, using very slow French.

  “My son,” the man acknowledged.

  He was flooded with relief. He could not speak Romanian, but he knew that most educated people in the country had a second language—German or French. “A feast,” he said. “Is there a wedding?”

  “No, my son,” the priest said. “The village has been blessed today. A good deed has returned to us.”

  “And you have guests,” he said. The men with the pistols, sweating in the night air, moved with slow dignity as the violin encountered a brief period of melancholy.

  “We are all countrymen,” the priest said. “Praise God.”

  Khristo heard clearly the relief in the latter statement. “Is there one guest missing?” he asked gently. “A man with dark hair? A man who has seen the world?” Now he had put himself at the priest's mercy and feared what he would do next. One shout would be sufficient, he thought, yet who would shout at a feast?

  The priest's eyes sharpened in the firelight and Khristo knew that Sascha was somewhere in the village. His fingers dawdled for a moment by the pocket where the money nested, but instinct told him that such an offer would not be well received. The music picked up and he shouted “Hey!” and clapped his hands.

  “Are you a believer?” the priest said.

  “I am, Father,” he answered matter-of-factly, “though I have strayed more than I should these last few years.”

  The priest nodded to himself. He had been forced to make a decision and he had made it. “You should attend church, my son,” he said, and pointedly broke off the conversation, walking forward a pace or two to be nearer the dancers.

  Khristo could see the church; its silver-painted dome reflected light from the bonfire. He moved slowly away from the crowd in the opposite direction, then circled around behind a row of little houses, climbing over garden fences and groping ahead of him for beanpoles and twine. The local dogs loved a feast as well as the villagers, for which he was thankful—the last thing he needed was a dog to wear on his ankle and these yards, he knew, were their sacred territories.

  The church was dark and silent. He watched it for a time but it told him nothing—an old mosque, built under Turkish rule, with a cross mounted atop the dome when Christianity returned. He opened the door a few inches, then stepped inside and let it close behind him. It smelled musty, like old straw, and there wasn't a sound to be heard. “Sascha,” he whispered.

  There was no answer.

  He regretted, now, leaving his little automatic on the Brovno, but his cover would not allow for it. A Yugoslav river sailor just might turn up in Sfintu Gheorghe—an armed Yugoslav river sailor had better not. There was the faintest trace of light in the church, filtering in from a high window. He moved slowly down an aisle between wooden benches until he reached the altar. “Sascha?”

  There was no answer.

  To the left of the altar, out of the sightline of the benches, was a pole ladder. He walked to the base of it, slowly, and looked up to see the edge of a loft. “Sascha, it's Khristo. Stoianev. I've come to take you away, to take you to freedom,” he said in Russian.


  There was no answer.

  Had he left the church? Perhaps the meaning of the priest's statement had been innocent, the man simply telling him to go to church more often for the good of his soul. He took a step back from the ladder, his thoughts settling on the taxi that waited for him at the edge of the village.

  “Sascha Vonets.” He said it in a normal voice. “Are you in this church?”

  There was only silence, the muffled sound of the violin, a shout of laughter, barking dogs. He was going to have to climb the ladder. He put one foot on the bottom rung and bounced to make sure it would take his weight, then moved up a rung at a time. “I'm coming up to talk to you,” he whispered into the darkness. A fool's errand, he thought. The man was likely a thousand miles away while he whispered nonsense into an empty church loft. Still, he kept climbing. He reached the point where he could see over the edge of the loft, but it was very dark, walled off from the high window. He went up another rung and swung one foot onto the boards of the loft. He kicked something, a plate by the sound of it, which went skittering away across the floor. There was an orange flame and a pop and he fell backward, landing on his back and taking the ladder down with him. “Oh no,” he said. He got to his hands and knees and crawled past the altar, down the aisle between the benches, shouldered the door open and rolled himself down the three steps to the dirt street, then wedged himself between the steps and the wall of the church.

  He tore at his clothes until he found it. He couldn't see very well, but it was midway up his left side, just below the ribs, a small hole like a nail puncture, with blood just beginning to well from the center. As he watched, the blood made a droplet that swelled until it broke loose and ran slowly down his skin. He covered the wound gently with a cupped hand, as though it embarrassed him. It hurt a little, like a cut, but there was a frightening pain on the left side of his chest and he realized that he was gasping for air.

  From within the church there was a crash, then the sound of running footsteps. Here they come, he thought. But there should have been more of them—in the houses, among the crowd, everywhere—the NKVD used scores of people to set a trap. A man threw open the door and ran down the steps into the street, a pistol in his hand. His hair and beard were wildly disarrayed, his motions frantic and abrupt. “Satans! Where are you? Murderers!” he mumbled, as though to himself. Suddenly he discovered Khristo, ran toward him and peered into his face. “Is it Khristo?” he said, seemingly stunned at finding him crumpled between the steps and the wall of a church.

  “You killed me,” Khristo said, voice sorrowful and tired. The pain in his chest was fierce and there was no air to breathe. In the distance, the violin began to play a new kind of song. It was a jazz song, one he'd heard before, but he could not remember its name.

  The man knelt above him. “Oh God,” he said. “It is you.”

  He shrugged. He no longer cared about anything.

  “Why did you speak Russian? You frightened me.”

  He coughed, spit something on the ground. “Sascha?”

  “Yes?”

  “Look what you did.”

  From his kneeling position, Sascha fell backward and sat on the ground and began to sob, clutching his face in his hands.

  He began to have a dream, and in this dream Lake Murigheol was violet, like the lakes he had seen from the deck of the Brovno. Such a place seemed to him remote, difficult to approach. The driver of the taxi would argue and say there was no road and the rest of the money would have to be given to him and still he would not go and finally Sascha would put the gun against the back of his neck—the old place—and call him names in Russian until he turned the key in the ignition. Then later Sascha would remember that the “Red Banners” poem had been left in the church and they would have to go back and then start all over again. Then they would drive across fields on flat tires with the driver howling and swearing and Khristo bleeding and Sascha crying and waving the gun around and finally they would reach Lake Murigheol. There would be a seaplane, of course, with the usual freckle-face American pilot and some gangly fellow in a blue suit and vest and tie, and eyeglasses that made him look like an owl, standing there like a diplomat and holding a submachine gun away from his side so the grease wouldn't get on his suit, and he would be tense as the pilot fired up the engines and they began to move across the darkness of the violet lake, and he would ask if the villagers of Sfintu Gheorghe had enjoyed the party which he—fortunate one indeed—had given them. And he would see that Khristo was shot and he would be concerned and Khristo would pass out and come to and pass out again and wake to a moment when the plane quivered and roared and made white plumes of the violet surface until they lifted up and just barely over the tops of the trees and he realized that he was going home now on a new river and that only when he got there would he find out where home was and what it was like and how that river ran and the last thing he thought was that he hoped he would like it there.

  In late September of 1945, in Manhattan, Muriel Friedman walked from her apartment building on West End Avenue up to Cake Masters bakery on Broadway, where she purchased two dozen jelly doughnuts, then hailed a cab and returned to West End Avenue, where Estelle Kleinman was waiting in front of her building on the corner of Eighty-third Street. The cab was then directed south, to Forty-sixth Street and Twelfth Avenue, the area of the docks. The two women were volunteers for the USO, the organization which, among other things, greeted servicemen returning from overseas on troop transports, serving them coffee and doughnuts as they disembarked. In most cases, the transports carried hundreds of troops and the doughnuts were trucked in from commercial bakeries in Long Island City.

  But Muriel Friedman had been telephoned the night before by her USO supervisor and told that the next day's arrival, the Skögstaad, would be disembarking only four or five passengers, to go ahead and buy a few boxes of doughnuts at the store, for which she would be reimbursed. She could have gone up to Gristede's and bought box doughnuts, but she had decided to do something a little grander than that and absorb the cost herself. The money didn't matter. Vanity Frocks, her husband Mort's company, was once again manufacturing dresses, having spent most of the war producing uniforms for the army. A jelly doughnut baked that morning was a much friendlier greeting to a returning serviceman than a plain old box doughnut and, in Muriel Friedman's view of the world, such small gestures were important.

  The Skögstaad was an old Norwegian freighter caught by the outbreak of the war in the Spanish port of Algeciris and used as a Liberty ship thereafter, successfully making the convoy run from American harbors to Murmansk—the chief supply port of the Soviet Union—many times during the war. Now she was nearing the end of her days. She'd carried a cargo of Jeeps and medical supplies from Baltimore to Athens, then called at Istanbul for a load of jute destined for rope factories in the southern United States, stopping at several ports on the way home to take on a few military passengers as well as sixty coffins—fallen American servicemen whose families had requested they be re-interred in military cemeteries in their homeland.

  In the back of the cab, Estelle Kleinman glanced at the two Cake Masters boxes tied with string and lifted an eyebrow. “Cake Masters?” she said.

  “A few jelly doughnuts,” Muriel said. “The world won't end.”

  Estelle's disapproval was silent, but Muriel didn't care whether she liked the idea or not. Estelle Kleinman disapproved of almost everything, and it was much too nice a morning for an argument. Riding down West End Avenue, Muriel could see it was the first real day of autumn, the sky was bright and blue and the wind off the Hudson River made the city streets seem clean and fresh. When the driver took them up on the elevated West Side Highway they could see the river, sun sparkling on the water, surface ruffled by the wind.

  They paid off the cab at Pier 48 and busied themselves in the USO office with a large coffee urn that had to be coaxed into action. A bridge table was carried out to the street entrance of the pier by a burly longshoreman w
ith U.S. Navy tattoos on his forearms. He pinched his finger setting the thing up and swore under his breath, then declined the quarter Muriel offered. The jelly doughnuts were laid out on paper napkins in front of the coffee urn and the two women waited patiently for the ship, sharing a few bits of gossip about friends in the neighborhood.

  At 12:30, the Skögstaad was just docking, the river tugs that had hauled her up past the Statue of Liberty nudging her gently against the old wooden pier. There was a pause, perhaps a half hour, while customs officials boarded the ship, then, at 1:15, the handful of passengers began to appear. A naval ensign exclaimed over the jelly doughnuts, and both Muriel and Estelle flirted with him in their own particular way while he sipped a mug of coffee and kept an eye on the street, apparently waiting for someone. Two businessmen, perhaps Turkish, declined the jelly doughnuts with elaborate courtesy, then hurried off toward the rank of taxicabs that waited at the docks. An army major ran right past them, swept up in the arms of a blond woman and an old man—wife and father, Muriel thought. Then, finally, one last passenger appeared, walking slowly from the great dark structure that covered the pier and blinking at the bright sunlight.