by Alan Furst
In his heart he had to admit that he was happy in the work. He was slightly horrified to find it so, but there was no denying what he felt. The incessant groveling of his job as a waiter had begun to grate on him, and he could foresee a time when he would come to hate it.
Aleksandra noted the change immediately—her barometer was perilously accurate. “You seem awfully pleased these days,” she remarked, head canted at an inquisitive angle. “Perhaps you have another lover? Surely her bottom is cuter than mine.” Such impossibilities were duly and demonstratively denied, but she’d sensed that something was going on. “I am thinking of starting a business,” he told her. Oh? Did he think that rubbing shoulders with café society made him one of them? No, no, nothing like that. He wished to better himself. “Ah,” she said. She believed she had some facility in the making of fashionable chapeaux, perhaps a small store, in a reasonably good neighborhood, where she could set up as a milliner. Her chum Liliane had done that very thing, her friend had arranged it. The bookstore was boring. The beards breathed Marxist endearments in her face. It was dusty among the shelves. She sneezed. Her wage was a humiliation. A business would get them out of this room into something more suitable. She would learn to cook. She would have a fat bébé. In no time at all, they would be the most grands of bourgeoises.
At which point she laughed wildly and grabbed the tip of his nose so hard in her savage little fist that his eyes wept and he knocked her hand away. “What are you doing, petit chou?” she asked, hard as nails and smart as a whip. “Money,” he said, “it concerns money.” She lit a cigarette and turned away. “Well, then,” she said. But he knew she meant to find out the truth of it.
There were four couriers moving from the Soviet embassy to the Floriot gold repository. They had no schedule, though charts were endlessly drawn up that clocked them and their visits. The operation seemed to him a hurried one. That made sense. What with Stalin and Yezhov attacking the Kulaks, the ongoing purges turning up treasure troves in walls and chimneys, and the infusion of Spanish bullion, there was a great deal of gold that needed converting.
The observers were extremely faithful. Pazar sat by the hour in his cab, even when customers in the rain beat on his doors with umbrella handles and called him every sort of scoundrel. Justine shopped herself to exhaustion, wearing out two pairs of shoes but never once complaining. Old Ivan bought coffees for his cronies in a café across the street until he had to submit a plea for funds—and what oceans of l’express did to his digestive system a gentleman would not care to describe. They called the couriers A, B, C and D.
B was a sad-looking fellow, with heavy jowls and downcast eyes, nicknamed Boris by the observers. He seemed to all of them so terribly unhappy, as though someone he’d loved had died. He stared at the ground as he carried his satchel through the streets, apparently caught up in a dialogue that went on in his mind. Sometimes his lips actually moved. To test his personality, Khristo ran a prostitute at him one afternoon on the Rue de la Paix, as he returned from making a drop at Floriot. But Boris merely snarled under his breath and avoided her with a wide swerve.
Apparently, the job would have to be done right on the street. The couriers were chained to their satchels, but a small channel-lock bolt cutter could sever the chain quickly enough.
Otherwise, things went more or less well. There were the normal irritations, of course, especially the grave communications problem they experienced. Khristo determined, at that point, that one simply could not be any sort of spy in France because it was impossible to use the telephones. But, all in all, there was nothing very troubling—unless you counted the ham sandwiches. They all had to eat while on the job, and soon discovered that the grand establishments of l’Opéra itself would quickly deplete the operations fund provided by Omaraeff. But Pazar found a family café hidden away in a side street where a reasonable ham sandwich could be obtained—eaten on the premises or carried away. Khristo had lunch there, in the second week of April, and the proprietress made an offhand remark that rang a bell. “Suddenly all the world eats ham sandwiches—one can hardly keep the stuff in stock anymore.” Someone else, it seemed, was eating ham sandwiches.
But he couldn’t spot them, though he gave it a try, and he hadn’t the personnel to run surveillance on the gold repository and the café, so he gave up and left it a question mark. Since the intelligence craft ran so close to life, it was subject to life’s coincidences, thus one had to be a good soldier and march ahead, no matter how the hair on the back of the neck might rise.
Spring came the third week in April. Blue rain slanted against the building façades and water streamed down the gutters, the parks smelled of earth when the sun came out for a moment, and a great unvoiced sigh seemed to rise from the city as a green cloud of buds appeared on the trees lining the boulevards. Aleksandra took her entire two-week salary off to the pawnshop and emerged with a radio that worked, like a bad mule, if you beat it. The radio stations competed with one another to intensify the seasonal torment, sending out the saddest songs imaginable from Piaf and the other café singers. Khristo discovered one station that played, sometimes, American jazz, and they listened to Billie Holiday and Teddy Wilson’s “I Must Have That Man” and Artie Shaw’s sinuous “Begin the Beguine.” Such music made both of them feel sexy and ineffably sad in the same moment and they made love like lovers in gothic novels. Meanwhile, the city’s deep political malaise, its sense of doom, was now conjoined with the pangs of April and some were overheard to call this time our final spring.
In the mornings, Khristo smoked Gitanes and collated observer reports to the sound of the pattering rain. He could find no firm structure in the courier system. They were never together. They took the same route from embassy to repository and home again. The walk took about fourteen minutes. Once at the Floriot repository, the couriers were held up for twenty minutes or so for the inevitable clerical ceremonies—a highly developed French specialty—then took another fourteen minutes to return. During the forty-eight-minute round trip, other couriers sometimes started off on their routes, but all four had never yet operated simultaneously. He studied the covert photographs his operatives had taken. Four unremarkable men in baggy suits. Probably armed. To take one of them would not be too difficult—a kidnapping off the street by hooded toughs. If they found a safe place to hold him, they might reasonably wait the remainder of the forty-eight minutes to see if another courier started out, but each variation on the theme would, of course, substantially increase the danger. There would be police, a lot of them, and they would arrive quickly.
For the finale of the surveillance, old Ivan was sent to the top floor of the building with a pair of gold candlesticks while one of the Russians was subjected to the clerical hocus-pocus. Ivan attempted to haggle over the price and made a thorough pest of himself for a time sufficient to observe an exchange through the security grille, then took his candlesticks and went off in a huff. The banknotes were delivered en paquet, but the Russian—the sorrowful Boris, as it happened—insisted on counting the money, and Ivan had silently counted right along with him. It came out to more than ninety thousand francs. At the equivalent of $14.28 U.S. an ounce, the European standard, he had converted almost twenty pounds of gold.
One wet afternoon, Khristo walked with Omaraeff in the Parc Monceau—two black umbrellas moving slowly along the graveled path—and reported to him at length. Gave him a summary of his findings and a set of photographs. After some desultory conversation, they shook hands and parted. At the gate to the park a blind veteran, the breast of his old corporal’s tunic covered with medals, stood silently in the drizzle holding a mess-kit plate before him. Khristo put a one-franc coin in the plate and the man thanked him solemnly in an educated voice.
He had an hour before work, so he bought a Figaro and stopped in a café and ordered a coffee. He put a sugar lump on the miniature spoon, lowered it just beneath the layer of tan foam, and watched it break into tiny crystals. He was glad the business for Omar
aeff was done with; he believed he’d carried it off reasonably well, without getting his hands too dirty. From here on, they were on their own. The surfaces of the café windows were steamy, people going by in the streets looked like shadows.
The front pages of Le Figaro were dense with reports of a world in flames: Japanese bombers taking a terrible toll of the Chinese population in Manchuria, the Spanish city of Guernica virtually obliterated by the German pilots of the Condor Legion, Nazi storm troopers in Berlin, standing outside Jewish-owned department stores with rubber stamps and inkpads and forcing shoppers to have their foreheads stamped. Mussolini had made a major speech in Libya, voicing Italian support for Islamic objectives. Bertrand Russell had advised the British public to treat German invaders as tourists, stating, “The Nazis would find some interest in our way of living, I think, and the starch would be taken out of them.”
The local news concentrated on the particularly horrible murder of an Austrian refugee up in Montmartre. The refugee, Hugo Leitzer, had been a resident of one of the cheap hotels in the district used almost exclusively by prostitutes. At four in the afternoon he was seen to stagger through the lobby with an icepick driven fully into his chest. He had managed to run out into the street, where he’d collapsed to his knees and pulled the weapon out as cars swerved around him. A “heavy man in his forties, wearing a sailor’s sweater,” had run out of the hotel, retrieved the icepick, and stabbed Leitzer “at least six times” before the eyes of horrified onlookers. By the time police arrived, the man had disappeared and Leitzer had bled to death.
The story was accompanied by a passport photo of Leitzer. It was Kerenyi, the blond Hungarian from Esztergom known as Plow-boy, who had trained with Khristo at Arbat Street.
He was exhausted when he got back to the room the following morning. He peeled off his clothes and dropped them on a chair, then slid carefully under the covers so as not to wake Aleksandra. But she was only pretending to sleep.
“You are so late,” she said. “I fell asleep waiting.”
“It’s madness there. Everyone orders champagne at dawn. With strawberries. Of course the old man doesn’t chase them away—he shakes them by the ankles to make the last sou fall out.”
“Strawberries? In April?”
“From a greenhouse.”
“Like roses.”
“Yes. The price, too, is like roses.”
“Did you bring me some? You may feed them to me in bed.”
“Sorry. The patrons ate every last one.”
“Swine!”
“They pay the rent.”
“Little enough. They live like kings—we crawl in the dust.”
“Aleksandra …”
“I’ll say anything I like.”
“Oh yes?”
“Yes.”
“Final warning.”
“I tremble with fear.”
“You shall.”
“No! Get your—”
“Bad … little … girls …”
“Help! Stop!”
He very nearly did. Would have, had she not let him know, silently, that she wished to be courteously ravaged. How she owned him! He marveled at it. Rejoiced in it even as their mood, their simultaneous appetite, began to shift.
Next, she was hungry. It meant they had to get dressed all over again and go out in the rain, joining the early workers in the café on the corner. Every eye went to Aleksandra as they entered. She peered out at the world from beneath a yellow straw hat—a “boater,” with circular crown and flat brim—wore a green wool muffler looped around her neck, and was lost in the immensity of Khristo’s sheepskin jacket while he made do with a heavy sweater. To top it off, she was smoking a thin, gold Turkish cigarette. The workingmen in the café acknowledged her entrance with great affection. She was so titi— the classic Parisian street urchin, given to storm-blown passions yet impossibly adorable—towing her coat-less lover into a café so early in the rainy morning, so delighted with her own eccentricity yet so vulnerable—blond shag hanging down to her eyes—that every one of them felt obliged to desire her. For she was, if only for a moment, some girl they’d once loved.
Khristo and Aleksandra seated themselves at a small table by the window, shivering as the warm air drove out the chill, inhaling the luxurious morning fog of strong coffee, tobacco smoke and bread.
“Two breakfasts, please,” Khristo said to the owner when she came out from behind the bar.
She was back in a moment with bowls of milky coffee, a flute— the slimmest loaf with the most crust—cut into rounds, and saucers of white butter and peach jam. It took both hands to hold the coffee.
They polished that off in short order and ordered two more. “Pauvres!” said the owner from behind the bar, meaning you poor starving things, a fine Parisian irony twinkling in her tight smile. It was her divine right as propriétaire of the café to make fun of them a little—I know why you’re so hungry.
To the second breakfast she added, unbidden, two steaming bowls of soup. Last night’s, no doubt, and all the better for having aged. When these did not appear on the bill, Khristo began to thank her but she tossed his gratitude away with a flip of the hand. It was her right to feed them, to play a small role in their love affair. These were some of the sacred perquisites of the profession, to be dispensed at her whim.
Aleksandra took his hand on the way back to the room, tugged him off in a new direction just before they reached the door of their building. Steered him to a small park in the neighborhood, but it was too wet to sit down.
When he pointed this out, she accused him of being unromantic. He sighed and went off to a tabac and returned with a newspaper, which he divided and placed on the wet bench. She took his hand again as they sat with the rain misting down on them. “We will certainly catch cold,” he said.
“Lovers don’t care about a little rain,” she said.
He turned her face toward him and kissed her on the lips. “I am in love,” he said softly, sliding his arm beneath the sheepskin coat and circling her waist, “but I am getting wet.”
“Some ferocious Bulgar you turned out to be. Whose ancestors rode the steppes.”
“Those were Mongols.”
“Oh? Well then, what did the ferocious Bulgars do?”
“Stayed dry,” he said, “when they could.”
Back in the room, they rubbed each other dry with the rough towels the landlady provided for a few francs extra each week. Khristo looked up as heavy footsteps moved down the corridor past their door. “Who is that?” He was used to the light step of the spinster, a retired piano teacher, who had rented the room at the end of the hall.
“A new tenant,” Aleksandra said. “Mademoiselle Beckmann has gone to join her sister in Rennes.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. Madame told me yesterday when she came for the rent. The new lodger is called Dodin. I saw him move in.”
“He walks like an ox.”
“He looks like one as well. He is broad, wide as a door. And he has big red hands, like a butcher. He tipped his hat to me.”
“He sounds strange.”
She shrugged. “Sit down and I will dry your hair. God made you too tall.” He sat on the bed while she rubbed his head with a towel. “He is just a man who lives in rooms,” she said.
“So do I.”
“Well, he is the sort who does, I mean. You just happen to.”
“Perhaps we should find another room.”
“Because of Dodin?”
“No, not exactly. A change of scene, perhaps.”
“I like it here,” she said. “It is ours.”
“As long as he doesn’t bother you.”
“Don’t worry about that.” She adjusted his head by pulling on his ears. “I am used to big oxes.”
She had small breasts, they moved as she dried his hair and he touched them. “Be good,” she said, wriggling away from his hands. But he pulled her down on the bed next to him and, when she began to say the sort of things tha
t always provoked him, when she began to tease him, he stopped her and made love to her in a way that was not their usual fashion. He made love to her from the heart, and when it was over she had tears in her eyes and he held her so tightly that his hands hurt.
On the first day of May the weather sparkled, bright blue and perfect, a day just barely warm enough to leave one’s coat at home. Ivan Donchev set his homburg at the proper angle and gave the bottom of his vest a final tug. In the hallway mirror, his image was precisely as he wished: an older gentleman but well kept, shoulders set square, chin held high. He had only a minor role in the day’s drama, but he meant to play it flawlessly and with style. Outside his apartment building, he stopped at the flower cart and bought his usual rosebud, white for today, and adjusted it carefully in his buttonhole.
He considered a taxi, but it was May Day and many of the drivers would be marching. Huge demonstrations and parades were expected in central Paris, busloads of police had been drawn up since before dawn in the side streets off the Rue de Rivoli. So he walked. It took him more than two hours but he enjoyed every minute, flirting with the passing ladies, patting the occasional dog, swimming easily in the stream of city life as he had done for forty years. He barely remembered Sofia, where he had grown to manhood, yet distance and time had somehow contrived to strengthen his patriotism. Besides, one could not exactly say no to Omaraeff. When something went awry in the émigré community, Djadja was the court of last resort and almost always found a way to put things right, thus he was not a man to be casually turned aside.
Just after 3:00 P.M., Ivan Donchev took up his position on the Place de l’Opéra, in front of Lancel, its windows superbly decorated with gold and silver and Bakelite jewelry nesting among dozens of spring scarves. When the door opened, one could smell perfume. He quite loved this store, though its merchandise was well beyond his means. The women who swept in and out of its doors were delicious, he thought, each one showing off her own special flair. He was, for women in general, a very good audience, offering now and again an appreciative nod and a tip of the hat, which sometimes drew a smile in return.