by Alan Furst
Some blocks away, in the direction of the Rue de Rivoli, he could hear snatches of song and the occasional roar—quite muted by the time it reached his ears—of a huge crowd. Now and then, the high-low song of a police siren cut through the low rumble of the marchers. Omaraeff had, he was certain, chosen to act on May Day for two reasons: the evident symbolic value, as well as the fact that police cars would be well snarled up by the demonstrations. He strolled back and forth in front of the store, glancing at his watch, a man anticipating the reappearance of a woman occupied with shopping. He looked about him, discreetly, but could identify none of his confederates. That was all to the good, he thought, it indicated a professional approach to the matter.
At sixteen minutes past the hour, the man he awaited came toward him from the Rue de la Paix. His mouth grew dry, and he felt his heart accelerate. Be calm, he told himself. What he had to do was simple, there was no question of making a mistake. The man with the black satchel moved at the pace of pedestrian traffic. He seemed, as always, terribly morose. He slumped, his shoulders sagged, his jowls drooped, his eyes were lost behind thick, ill-fitting eyeglasses. Well, he would be even less happy in a moment, Ivan thought.
As the courier walked past him, Ivan gathered his wits and rehearsed himself one final time. He let the man go by, waited as he gained some small distance, then ran after him at a trot. “Wait a moment!” he called out in Russian, waving his hand. The man hesitated, paused, then looked over his shoulder at Ivan, hurrying to catch up with him. “Please, sir, a moment,” Ivan called. From a taxi parked by the curb and from the doorway of a restaurant, two men appeared. He had never seen them before but there was no mistaking their trade. They were thick, bulky men who moved gracefully. One of them grabbed the courier’s left arm. The courier swung his satchel. A woman screamed. Several people started running. The other man grabbed the satchel but the Russian was strong and swung him around. Ivan stood motionless, watching the drama. The three men struggled for a moment, all tangled up with one another, it seemed. A loud voice demanded that the police appear at once. A woman coming out of Lancel lost a shoe, then stood hopping on one foot, trying to put it back on. From the driver’s seat of the taxi a hand appeared, holding an automatic pistol. There was a flash and a crack, then another, then three or four more in rapid succession. The courier leapt into the air as Ivan watched, transfixed. Then a bee stung him in the armpit and he began backing away hurriedly. What a moment for such a thing to happen! He saw the courier on the sidewalk, a handful of pamphlets sprayed across his chest, his satchel gone. The other two men were disappearing into the taxi as Ivan turned away and trotted off. A siren approached in the distance.
He was, at this point, supposed to go home. But he didn’t feel well. His left arm was numb, and he had now come to realize what had happened to him. Still, it couldn’t be terribly serious, and the most pressing need at the moment was to remove himself from the immediate area. There was a small cinema just off the avenue and he paid and went in, letting the usher guide him to a seat on the aisle and remembering to tip him.
Of the movie he could make little sense. A man and a woman lived in poverty on a barge that sailed up and down the river Loire. They were lovers, but the anguish of the times was driving them apart. The girl was called Sylvie. She had hooded eyes and a down-curved, unhappy mouth. When she lit a cigarette, she watched the match burn almost to her fingertips before blowing it out. This she did continually. Her lover was called Bruno—was he German?—a rough sort who wore a sleeveless undershirt and a neck scarf. Only one thing interested him, that was clear. But he was too much the primitive for Sylvie, a barbarian who thought himself clever.
Ivan kept moving about in the seat, trying to get comfortable. His skin felt clammy and there was a hot point beneath his shoulder blade that seemed to move about, as though the bee had burrowed well in and was now building a hive. He checked his watch. Amazing! Only fifteen minutes since he had hailed the courier. Much too soon to be out on the street. He settled himself back in the seat and tried to concentrate on the film. A vagabond, a stooped old man with a wild beard, had joined the couple. Sylvie kept staring at him from a distance, as though she had encountered him in a past life. Bruno noticed this but said nothing about it. He drank wine with the vagabond, who began to tell a story about a traveling circus.
The movie was definitely making him drowsy. A dog at the edge of the river barked at the moon. The vagabond cleaned his nails with a long knife. Bruno grabbed Sylvie by the arm and the camera showed his fingers pressing into her skin. It didn’t matter much to Ivan. His chin kept dropping onto his chest, then he would snap awake. The idea of an old man sleeping in a movie house in the middle of the afternoon was very depressing, simply not the sort of thing he would do, but there seemed to be no way to avoid it. They didn’t find him until after midnight, when an usher came down the aisle to wake him up and couldn’t.
On his way to work, Khristo saw the headlines:
DIPLOMAT SOVIET ASSASSINÉ
LA MORT A VISITÉ L’OPÉRA!
JOUR DE MAI EST JOUR DE MORT POUR DIPLOMAT SOVIET
There were photographs. It took him a moment to recognize “Boris,” a dark shape tossed carelessly on a gray pavement. He stood in a small crowd in front of the kiosk and read the secondary headlines and lead paragraphs. Trotskyist pamphlets had been found on the body of Dmitri Myagin, assistant cultural attaché at the Soviet embassy. Ivan Donchev, a Bulgarian citizen but long a resident of the city, had been discovered dead of a gunshot wound in a movie theater near the site of the assassination. The DST, the French internal security service, was treating the death as associated with the Myagin shooting. All émigré groups in the city would be questioned regarding the incident. An anarchist splinter party, LEC (Liberté, Égalité, Communité), had claimed credit for the action. The Soviet ambassador, in a written statement, had decried violence and murder in the streets, and lawlessness in general, as maladies of an oppressive capitalist system. What would be said to the grieving widow? The fatherless children?
Khristo, standing in the sunlight, went cold. Fools. Who could not accomplish a simple street robbery without killing. And old Ivan—what in God’s name had Omaraeff been thinking of, to permit an innocent like that in the vicinity of an action? The assassins reportedly fled in a taxi. Was that Pazar? In his own taxi, perhaps? It was unspeakable. Nobody could be that stupid. There had been a good chance that a simple, quiet robbery might not even have been reported by the Russians—one little crime was nothing compared to their obsession with gold—for it would have imperiled the operation at Floriot. But murder, in front of witnesses, in the middle of the afternoon, in a good neighborhood, with obvious Balkan overtones—that would stir up the newspapers for weeks and the police would be forced into making a serious effort.
And the searching finger, he knew, would be scratching at his door soon enough.
The Russians would find a way to break into the investigation—the Paris NKVD residency surely had its friends in the DST Perhaps his passport photo was being studied by the police right now. His assumed identity would not hold up under scrutiny—Omaraeff had seen through it easily enough.
In addition, the death of Kerenyi on a Montmartre street still gnawed at him. He wasn’t at all the type to look for a fight in a whorehouse. He too might have defected—from Spain or wherever they had sent him after Arbat Street—and hidden out in Paris. If the man who’d killed him was a Spetsburo assassin, evidence pointed to a desire for publicity. An icepick. The Russians knew all about newspapers. Perhaps they were sending a message, trying to panic other fugitives in Paris.
Perhaps they had succeeded.
He was ice cold, but a droplet of sweat ran down his side, and there was a claw in his stomach. He had money, hidden in the light fixture in the hallway outside his room. Perhaps they could run. Where? Into Germany? Into Spain? That was madness. Holland, then, or Belgium. Very well, then what? They would have to work soon enough. That meant per
mits, and police, and no Omaraeff to smooth the way. But if the murder of Kerenyi had been NKVD work—and the more he thought about it the more he knew he had to make that assumption—it was intended to flush the game, to make the rabbits run. Thus, if he ran, he was playing into their hands. They would snap him up.
And he knew what came next.
By the time he was pounding up the Rue du Bac, a few blocks from Heininger, the blackness had come down upon him hard. Everything he had so carefully pieced together, from love and work and a few tenuous dreams, was trembling in the wind. How flimsy it was, he thought. Built on sand. How he had deluded himself, that he could make what he wanted out of his life. It wasn’t so.
“Dear boy.”
He stopped dead and looked for the voice. It came from an open two-seater, a forest green Morgan parked at the curb. Recognition arrived a moment later—the reddish hair swept across the noble brow, cool eyes shadowed with dark makeup. The man who had given him his card at Winnie Beale’s birthday party on the Rue de Varenne.
“ ’Lo there, Nick. Come sit with us a minute, will you?” It wasn’t precisely a request. He walked around the back of the car and climbed in. The upholstery on the bucket seat was worn smooth with time and care and smelled like old leather.
“Roger Fitzware. Remember me?” They shook hands.
“Yes,” he said. “At Madame Beale’s house.”
“You were going to come ’round and get your picture took, you bad boy.”
Khristo shrugged. “I am sorry,” he said simply.
“No matter, no matter. Everybody’s so blasted busy these days. Even old Nick, eh?”
“Yes. Even now, I was going to work.”
“Oh let’s steal a minute, shall we? First of all, you must say ‘congratulations.’ ”
“Congratulations, Mr. Fitzware.”
“Plain Roddy, dear boy. And I thank you. Seems I’ve got me a job. Of all things! The old family back in Sussex would absolutely perish from the shock if they heard, but there it is.”
“I am glad for you.”
“Thank you, thank you. Sort of a society column kind of a thing, it seems, fellow wasn’t all that clear about it. ‘Just a few tidbits, dear boy,’ he says. ‘The odd item, y’know, who’s been with who and what did they do and what did they say and so on and so forth.’ You know the sort of thing? ”
“Yes, I think so. Tid, bits.”
“That’s it!”
“And from me you want … ?”
“Tidbits, dear boy. Just as you said. You’re in the way of finding out all sorts of things, aren’t you. One goes here and one goes there and one finds old Nick choppin’ up a salmon, eh? It’s a natural, that’s what I say. Here you are, having to listen to every sort of prattle all day and half the night, now here’s the chance to make the odd franc at it. Oh say yes, Nick, I’d be truly grateful.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Fitzware. I must not do such things. My job….”
“Dear boy! Don’t even think it. You must, y’know, really you must.”
Khristo—not Nick the waiter at all—gave him a long look. Fitzware sat casually, half turned, at the wheel of the Morgan, his dark blue blazer—double-breasted and stoutly made—hung perfectly, and the striped tie meant something, though Khristo wasn’t sure exactly what. A man who had everything he wanted, yet his face was tense and pale, in fear, evidently, that he would receive no tidbits.
“I must?”
“Yes, well, damn it all, Nick, there it is. You must.”
“Be your spy, you mean.”
“Dear boy, such language.”
“But that is what you mean. Who goes in bed with who. What people say when they drink too much. Who doesn’t pay their bill at the restaurant. That is what you want from me. And you will pay for it.”
Fitzware, in one fluid motion, produced a thin pack of hundred-franc notes from somewhere, laid it on Khristo’s knee, and patted it twice. “Smart lad,” he said, in a voice entirely different from the one he always used.
Khristo picked up the banknotes, wet the tip of his thumb, counted them—there were twenty—folded the sheaf twice, to make it a thick wad, then reached across the car and stuffed the money in the breast pocket of Fitzware’s blazer.
“Well. Now you’ve surprised me, Nick. And you can’t imagine how difficult it is to surprise me.” His eyes were wide and unmoving, like an insulted cat.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Fitzware. But I must go to work now.”
“Last thing. Have a look in the glove box, will you?”
Khristo turned the knob and the wooden panel fell open. There was an envelope lying flat on the felt interior. He opened it up and looked at the photograph. Saw himself sitting on a wooden bench, wearing only a towel, with a naked boy on his knee.
“Shocking, eh? Not to worry, Nick. Your little secret is safe with me. Honi soit qui mal y pense and all that, love makes the world go round, variety the spice of life. Dear boy, one couldn’t guess what goes on in wicked old Paree.”
Khristo smiled. Stopped himself just short of open laughter. “Omaraeff is yours? ”
“Oh, who is anybody’s anymore, really. Just that friends do each other favors now and again. Makes the wheels run smooth.”
He handed the photograph to Fitzware. “To remember me, you keep this, dear boy,” he said.
“Don’t you realize … ?”
“This trick works, Mr. Fitzware, only if there is somebody to show the picture to. Who will you show? Omaraeff? Papa Heininger—what would he think of you, to take such a picture?—or perhaps my lover? She would be surprised, perhaps, or a little sad maybe, or she might laugh. With her, you see, it’s hard to tell. Good-bye.”
He got out of the car and closed the door carefully. Walked away leisurely down the street.
“Damn your eyes,” he heard behind him. Again, not the usual nasal whine, not at all. Real British fury—a voice he’d never in fact heard before. The heat of it surprised him.
At Heininger, a few minutes after five, he saw Omaraeff enter the restaurant, a newspaper folded under his arm. His face was rigid. Khristo stared at him, but he refused to make eye contact. The regular patrons, who filtered in just before midnight, were excited by the news of the moment and the waiters found themselves momentary celebrities. “Uh-oh, here comes Nick. Quick everybody, under the table!” He grinned at them tolerantly and shook his head—these grinning aristocrats who kidded him with their hands formed into children’s revolvers. In honor of the assassination they called out “Nazhdrovia!” as they guzzled their champagne and tried on a variety of Eastern European accents for his benefit. Omaraeff stood at attention before the roast with a long knife, directing an assistant to wrap up a nice fatty rib for the deerhound of a favored customer, and accepted the tireless joshing with a thin smile. Later that night he sliced his thumb to the bone and had to be taken off to a doctor.
As Khristo hurried to and from the kitchen, his mind wandered among the small, insignificant events of the past week. Simply, there were too many of them—he felt like a blind man in a room full of cobwebs. There was Dodin, the new lodger. The blind veteran in the Parc Monceau with an educated, cultured voice—wearing a corporal’s tunic. Small things, ordinarily not worthy of notice. The death of Kerenyi. Sad, surely, and perhaps without meaning. The clumsiness of the gold theft. Ineptitude could be, he knew, an effective mask for intentions of great subtlety. He feared that something was gathering around him, strand by delicate strand, and that, when its presence was at last manifest, it would be one instant too late to run for freedom.
At three-thirty in the morning he went home, walking quickly, head down. Reaching his building, he felt a stab of panic—foreknowledge—and rushed up the stairs to the room. He threw open the door to find darkness and silence. He was silhouetted, framed in the doorway, and he flinched, moved sideways against the wall just as the timed light in the hallway went off with a pop. In total blackness, he closed his eyes in concentration and raised his hands befor
e him. He could hear, faintly, the sound of labored breathing. A match flared and a candle came to life. Aleksandra, dark-under-white skin glowing amber in the tiny flame, moved toward him in a trance. A piece of rope was knotted low on her waist. She stared at him blindly, lips drawn back, teeth exposed. As in a dream, her hand reached out, fingers curved into talons, and she spoke very slowly, in English shaded by the harsh accents of the Balkans. “Velcome to my castle,” she said.
Later, as he lay awake in the tangled bedding, he heard the heavy footsteps of the new lodger as he walked down the corridor.
The next day, and for a week thereafter, in the section of Le Figaro where various Bureaux de Matrimonie listed the virtues of their clients, the following advertisement appeared:
#344—Monsieur B.F., a prosperous gentleman owning 82.5 hectares of farmland in the Haut-Vienne, wishes to meet a woman of honesty and sincerity. Monsieur B.F. is recently widowed and quite youthful in appearance, and will treat all enquiries with discretion. Please write, describing desirable arrangements for meeting, to #344, Bureau de Matrimonie Vigeaux, 60 Rue St.-Martin.
He received four responses. The first three were handwritten notes on inexpensive formal paper. Annette scented hers with eau de violettes and would meet him for tea at the house of her mother. Françoise, age thirty-nine, wrote in purple ink, including precise directions to her family home near Porte d’ Ivry. Suzi suggested dinner at any restaurant “of good standing” he might choose. The fourth letter was typed. “Iliane” would be pleased to meet him on the third Sunday in June, at 2:00 P.M., at the Père Lachaise cemetery, by the crypt of Maria Walewska—Napoleon’s Polish mistress.