by Alan Furst
“And then …,” he said.
She took a breath, raised the hem of her slip up and over her head, then folded it beside her dress. She had on a one-piece undergarment of glossy silver satin that went from the top of the breast to mid-thigh, where garters held up her stockings. His eyes moved up and down her profile, finding small breasts, the beginning of a tummy, and a derriere rather more splendid than he had imagined.
Now he stood, placed his hands on her bare shoulders, and was about to kiss her when he saw two tears rolling slowly down her cheeks, her mouth compressed in the manner of a woman who is about to weep but doesn’t want to. “I’m sorry,” she said, so quietly he could barely hear her. “I can’t. Not now …”
He took her hand and led her back to the sofa. She said, “I wanted to, I imagined we would …”
“Don’t worry, the first time doesn’t always go easily.”
She wiped at her eyes, he gave her his handkerchief and said, “Here.”
“Oh dear,” she said. “What have I done?”
“In time we’ll get around to it, there’s no rush, let’s just sit here, talk a little, be friends …”
“Thank you,” she said.
On 16 May, Ferrar took a train down to Lisbon, boarded the Pan Am flying boat, and was in Manhattan on the evening of the following day. The desk clerk welcomed him back to the Gotham and, not nearly ready to sleep, he took a walk down Fifth Avenue. On a warm night in May, New Yorkers strolled along the avenue, looking at the displays of spring fashion in the windows of the department stores. To Ferrar they seemed confident and relaxed, and the phrase taking it easy came to mind. Yes, among the crowd were faces taut with worry—New Yorkers were good at worrying—but what was missing here was the undercurrent of tension that he’d grown used to in Paris. When Ferrar reached Thirty-Seventh Street he paused, for a moment wanted to turn east, toward Delaney’s Bar and Grill in the Murray Hill neighborhood. In fact, being in Manhattan reminded him too much of Eileen Moore and he didn’t want to make it worse, so he walked back to the Gotham. That part of his life was over.
In the morning he was at Coudert for meetings, which lasted all day. He sat at conference tables and contributed what he could, much of the legal work concerned the coming war, especially so now that the law firm represented the French arms-buying commission. At six-thirty he took a taxi up to Park Avenue—one of the senior partners, Hugh Courtney, had kindly invited him to “a home-cooked dinner.” They had chicken and string beans and mashed potatoes, then angel cake and coffee for dessert. After dinner he sat with Courtney, now in shirt and loosened tie, his wife, Faye, and Courtney’s oldest son, who was at Princeton. The host poured scotch for everybody and they settled down to talk.
“We look for Hitler to start it in ’forty-one or, at the latest, ’forty-two,” Courtney said. “He’ll have all his planes and tanks by then. One thing about Coudert, you are in touch with people from industry and government who have a real grasp of the future.” Courtney sat forward in an easy chair, elbows on knees, both hands holding his highball glass. “Meanwhile, the newspapers are filled with local scandals and baseball.”
He was going to continue, but Faye Courtney said, “Tell me, Cristián, do you have family in Paris?”
“I’m not married, but my parents and grandmother, a sister and a cousin, all live a few miles away, in a town called Louveciennes.”
Courtney Junior spoke up and said, “There’s a really good Pissarro painting of Louveciennes.”
“I know the road he painted,” Ferrar said. “It’s on the way to the house.”
“What will your family do if there’s a war?” Faye Courtney said. “Have you made provision for them?”
“I’ve thought about it,” Ferrar said, guilt in his voice. “But the idea that they’d have to go somewhere new …”
“Paris will be bombed,” Courtney Junior said. “Just like Spain was, Life magazine had photographs.”
“Yes, I suppose it will,” Ferrar said.
“Then you must do something about that,” Mrs. Courtney said. “Really, Cristián, you must.”
“What do you suggest?” Ferrar said, meaning it.
Thus Ferrar left the office early the next day and, accompanied by the Courtneys, found himself at a tall apartment house on West End Avenue.
“Of course you have a choice,” Faye Courtney said, “but the people coming out of Europe now are taking apartments up here. So your family would be with other refugees.”
“Yes, you’re right, Faye. They are isolated in Louveciennes.”
Led by the owner of the building, who spoke English with a thick German accent, they looked at several vacant apartments—big apartments with plenty of room, the Ferrar clan would need at least four bedrooms. On the third try he found one he liked, airy, with high ceilings, that looked out on a courtyard formed by three sides of the building. The owner said, “Is this one right for you, Mr. Ferrar?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“There’s a doorman and an elevator man,” the owner said. “The rent is sixty-eight dollars a month.”
“You can afford it,” Hugh Courtney said. “Money well spent.”
“Then I’ll take it,” Ferrar said. “They might never come here, perhaps the future will turn out differently in Europe.”
“A future to hope for,” Faye Courtney said. “But, better safe than sorry.”
As Ferrar was renting an apartment, Max de Lyon was in a brothel in Istanbul. Not the worst he’d seen—two floors in a lime-green building that looked out over the Golden Horn, with the Bosphorus in the distance. De Lyon had taken a girl, and her room, for the night. The girl had the stomach of a belly dancer, round and firm, and sat naked on the bed, content and peaceful, repairing a ripped stocking with a needle and thread, awaiting the pleasure of her customer.
De Lyon had worked hard on his contacts in Paris, a city rich in Russian émigrés; some had fled the revolution in 1917, others had reached Paris in 1920, as the White Army was beaten by the Bolsheviks. Eighteen years had passed, yet certain of the émigrés, using clandestine methods, had managed to stay in touch with family and friends in the USSR. De Lyon had handed out a lot of money to various taxi drivers and nightclub doormen and dishwashers, some of them terribly poor, all of them eager to help de Lyon, who always paid generously for information. But, in the end, the man with the information wasn’t poor at all; he owned a garage in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, he was rich, and deeply interested in politics. That interest was not comfortable for de Lyon—politically active émigrés drew secret police like flies—but the garage owner’s contacts were up-to-date and he himself was from Odessa which meant, as he pointed out to de Lyon with some vigor, that he was not Russian, but Ukrainian. Still, he knew the gangs and claimed his information was current. “Bratya?” he said. “That’s not a man’s name, it means ‘cousins,’ the name of a gang, and they are all, every one of them, in Siberia or in the ground.”
The best of the gangs, whatever that meant—fiercest? richest?—had no name for the NKVD to file and was led by a man named Vadik, short for Vadim. Could the garage owner arrange a meeting? Anywhere outside the USSR? He could. De Lyon tried to pay him but he held up a stiffened hand. “If it works, a favor some day when I need it.” Which made de Lyon even less comfortable, he didn’t like owing favors, returning a favor could be dangerous, whereas money was money, but the garage owner was emphatic.
So then, Vadik. The belly dancer looked up now and then to see if her customer might be ready to have what he’d paid for, but de Lyon just smiled and the belly dancer smiled back; they had not a word of any language in common. From the garage owner, de Lyon knew that Vadik would have to spend a good day and a half on a freighter steaming down the Black Sea coast to Istanbul, so he had offered to pay for the meeting. But he would have to pay Vadik directly. When he’d suggested a payment in advance, the garage owner had wagged his index finger, naughty boy, and said, “No, no, can’t send money.”
At three-thirty in the morning, two light raps on the door. De Lyon was relieved, he’d begun to think that Vadik wouldn’t show up and, at that time of night, the belly dancer was looking better and better. She woke from a doze and opened the door to reveal two individuals; one thin and dark with watchful eyes who remained in the hall, a guard; the other, entering the room, was a broad-chested man in the shapeless suit favored by Soviet apparatchiks. His gray hair was cut short, he had a bullet head, high, Slavic cheekbones, and the stocky, round-shouldered build found in exceptionally strong men. He was in fact handsome, with a face made to smile.
“You are de Lyon?” he said.
“Yes, and you must be Vadik.”
“None other. Let’s send the girl away.”
Vadik said a few words in Turkish and, as the girl left the room, bottom wobbling as she walked, he gave her some Turkish lira as a going-away present.
Both men watched her leave and, when he’d closed the door, Vadik said, “Not so bad.”
De Lyon agreed.
“You speak good Russian,” Vadik said.
“I was born there and left as a kid, but it stays with me.” He reached into the inner pocket of his tweed jacket and handed Vadik a thick envelope holding five thousand dollars in roubles. Vadik put the envelope in his pocket; he didn’t open it, didn’t count it, anyone who did business with Vadik knew better than to steal from him.
Vadik sat on the rumpled bed and leaned against the headboard, de Lyon remained in his chair. Vadik said, “Care for a cigarette? I could offer you the Russian kind, makhorka, black tobacco. I carry it with me, just in case, but I expect you’d prefer one of these.” He offered de Lyon a pack of Chesterfields, de Lyon lit one with his steel lighter. Vadik said, “All right, Max, you paid to talk, so let’s talk.”
“I’m working for the Spanish Republic, and we’re looking for Soviet anti-aircraft ammunition. Some of these guns are mounted on ships, so, we thought, Odessa …”
“The naval base?”
“There must be an armoury at the base where the ammunition is stored.”
From Vadik, a single bark of a laugh. “You’re serious, aren’t you.”
“I am.”
Vadik looked dubious. “I don’t know … damn … what haven’t I stolen; furs, jewels, trucks, horses, caviar, machinery, money … eggs, when I was a kid robber, but never anything like that.”
“Always something new,” de Lyon said.
Vadik thought for a time, then scratched his head. “And how do you come to have this job?”
“I worked for an arms merchant, when I was in my twenties, then I ran the business for a time. I never liked it—selling to both sides, making money from slaughter—but when Franco started his war I volunteered to help the Republic.”
“For money?”
“No, they pay me a little, but no. I’d seen the fascists at work, it did something to me.”
“You want to be a hero? Heroes die, Max.”
De Lyon shrugged. “Everybody dies, eventually.” He paused, then said, “What’s your feeling about this job? Do you think you might take it on?”
“I don’t know … yes, no, maybe. I have about forty men, most of them are brave and determined, and skilled at what they do. Still … this is no bank robbery, walk in, shoot your way out, you can’t do that on a naval base.” He thought for a moment, then said, “Tell me about the money.”
“On the munitions market, seventy-six-millimeter shells cost about nine dollars and forty-seven cents apiece. We need fifty thousand, which is four hundred and seventy-three thousand dollars, so let’s call it five hundred thousand.”
“Let’s call it six hundred thousand, Max.”
“Agreed. Half to start with, the rest when we receive the ammunition.”
“Fair enough. If all goes well, you’ll receive it in Odessa. After that, it’s up to you.”
“How do you want to be paid?”
From Vadik, a faint scowl. “Now that is forever the fucking problem—even if you could buy all those roubles, the NKVD would hear about it.”
“Do you have a bank account? A foreign bank account?”
Vadik laughed. “I don’t make deposits in banks, only withdrawals. And, as for a foreign bank account, I can’t do anything like that.”
“We can. A bank account in Switzerland, anonymous, just a number.”
“I’ll have to think about it,” Vadik said. He stifled a yawn and looked at his watch—a cheap watch made of steel, likely USSR manufactured. “It’s four-thirty, can we get some air?”
“There’s a kind of porch on this floor, down the hall.”
Vadik nodded and rose from the bed. Outside the door, the guard was leaning against the wall, and de Lyon saw that he held a sawed-off shotgun beneath his jacket. Vadik spoke with him for a moment, in a language de Lyon didn’t recognize. “That was Armenian, in case you wondered. Joe is Armenian.”
“Joe? An Armenian name?”
“He got it from the cowboy movies.”
Heading for the porch they heard, as they passed one of the rooms, the rhythmic creak of bedsprings and, from the floor below them, somebody said good night in German. “It’s quiet for a brothel,” de Lyon said.
“This place is for foreigners—a real Turkish whorehouse is a lot noisier.”
Down the hall, an open door led to a narrow porch with an intricate wooden balustrade. From here, they could see a docked freighter with hamals—Turkish stevedores—bent under the weight of huge, burlap-covered bales as they climbed a gangplank. A few trucks, headed to the open markets, rattled along the rough road past the dock. Vadik gave de Lyon another Chesterfield and, as de Lyon lit it, said, “I’ve never seen a lighter like that.”
De Lyon snapped it shut, said, “It works in the wind,” and handed it to Vadik. “This is for you, Vadik, a gift.”
Vadik said thank you and put the lighter in his pocket. De Lyon said, “When will you know whether or not you can do this?”
“I’ll have to figure out the details, which means watching the armoury, talking to the sailors who work there, then I can tell you yes or no. It won’t be right away, maybe two weeks, maybe more.”
“Once you’re back in Russia, is there some way we can communicate?”
“I have a contact in Paris, a confidential agent called Morand—he used to have a Russian name but he changed it. He’s dependable, a tough guy, though he doesn’t look it—he looks like Hardy, in the Laurel and Hardy movies. Also, he’s clever, he found a safe way to get messages in and out of the USSR. So, when you return to Paris, look him up.”
“I found you through a man who owns a garage north of the city.”
“No, no, he just contacts Morand. A big talker, better you don’t see him again, he can’t be trusted.”
“Is a telephone call possible?”
“Yes, but we’ll have to use fake names, you know? Say things like ‘the machinery’ and ‘the delivery.’ And if we take the job we’ll have one more meeting here.”
They leaned on the balustrade and watched the lights on ships making way through the Bosphorus channel. “I’m getting hungry,” Vadik said. “There’s an all-night kebab place near the dock, you can get a plate of soup, good soup.”
They left the brothel, the Armenian guard a few paces behind them. On the way to the dock they passed a parked Opel, and the young woman behind the wheel exchanged glances with Vadik.
When Ferrar returned to Paris from New York, he found that Count Polanyi had telephoned him and was expecting to be called back as soon as possible. Perhaps the love letter had done its job, Ferrar hoped it had, because he wasn’t really sure what to do if it hadn’t. Reached at the Hungarian embassy, Polanyi asked if they could speak in person. “Of course,” Ferrar said.
“Tomorrow is Saturday, do you go into the office on Saturdays?”
“From time to time, when it’s necessary. Usually I go riding on Saturday morning, I could stop by the embassy on my way there.”
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“Riding? In the Bois, I suppose.”
“Yes.”
“Would you mind company?”
“Not at all. We can rent you a horse at the stable by the Long-champ racetrack. Do you ride often?”
“Not now, I’m too old and fat for it, but I did my military service as a cavalry officer, so I think I can manage a bridle path.”
It rained at dawn on Saturday, then cleared to a sunny, windy May morning. Ferrar wore a sport coat with scarf and gloves, jodhpurs, and boots. Polanyi’s outfit was tight on him but he rode easily and, since both men were mounted on the Selle Français, the muscular and responsive breed preferred by almost all French riders, they moved along at a slow trot and, side by side, were able to talk. The Bois de Boulogne forest was at its spring best; birdsong everywhere, the chestnut and oak trees in new leaf, light green, that danced prettily in the breeze.
“Lovely day,” Polanyi said. “I wish I had good news to go with it.”
“Well, we tried,” Ferrar said. “What happened?”
“Nephew Belesz telephoned from Budapest, he wanted to laugh at me in person—which is typical nephew.”
“He actually laughed?”
“A sort of theatrical snarl, not a real laugh. ‘Ha-ha, Uncle’ was the way he put it.”
“Oh.”
“Then he said, ‘What do you take me for? A fool?’ Which I was tempted to answer but didn’t. He went on and on, he did. It seems the lovely Celestine could never write such a letter, or any letter, but he had a pretty good idea who had written it.”
“And you said?”
“Naturally I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Did somebody write you a letter?’ I was terribly confused, and that made him mad, and he actually sputtered.” Polanyi was amused at the recollection. “Then he raved for a while, at one point he used the word ‘chicanery,’ and slammed the telephone down.”
“Time for a new approach,” Ferrar said. For a few minutes they rode in silence, the horses’ hooves clopping softly on the packed dirt. Ferrar was thinking hard, he had to come up with something.
Finally, Polanyi said, “The letter was a fiasco, no doubt about it, but I think I learned something we might use. Yes, he was angry, but there was more to it than anger, and after he’d hung up I found myself thinking, He’s scared. That I had tried to attack him and would again. It was somewhere in his voice, you know how some people are? They get frightened and they cover fear with bluster.”