Night Soldiers ns-1

by Alan Furst

  “When you are done living for yourself, only then do you learn that living for others is the privilege,” Renata said at one point.

  They turned a corner.

  “I think that is what I believe,” Faye said. “I think. But perhaps not. Sometimes I feel I’m like a …” She stopped. Moved to the parapet of cracked plaster that closed in the roof. Stared out across the city. Renata caught up and stood by her side.

  “Isn’t that strange,” Faye said.

  “What is?”

  “Perhaps it is a lover’s signal.”

  “What?”

  “The blue glow. Over there. Across the street, then one, two, three blocks-no, two blocks, three streets.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Here, look, squint your eyes and follow my finger.”

  “God in heaven,” Renata breathed, then turned away quickly, calling “Felix” in a loud, urgent stage whisper.

  He arrived at a trot, sorrowful eyes peering from beneath a wool muffler knotted around his head. Renata spoke to him in rapid French, then pointed. He said a few words back. She gave him what sounded like an order and he turned on his heel and left in a hurry. “I have sent him for the street map,” she explained.

  The blue light moved suddenly, then came to rest in a new, more visible, position. It disappeared for an instant, as a shape moved past it, then glowed again.

  “There’s somebody there,” Faye said.

  “Yes, there is. Have you your pistol?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give it to me.” She thrust out a hand.

  “We’ll go together.”

  “No! The post may not be abandoned-it must be two to work the gun. Listen, please. When Felix returns, you must remain here. I will go and see about this light. Now please, the pistol.” Her eyes intense behind the gold spectacles, she wiggled her fingers impatiently.

  Faye got angry. “You’re the one on guard,” she said, voice rising. She glanced at her watch, a tiny thing her grandmother had brought from Russia. “It is two-twenty,” she said triumphantly. “And I’m the one who’s going.”

  “Faye, no!” Renata shouted and hurried after her.

  Faye opened the door to the hatch, started to climb down. Renata held the door and watched her descend. “Amen, then,” Renata said. “Be careful.”

  The door clicked shut and she was in darkness. It gave her heart a twinge. She’d expected Renata to argue further, finally to insist on going along. Holding the revolver tightly so that it wouldn’t fall through her waistband, she galloped down the marble staircase. As she reached the door, she heard Felix running down the hall, somewhere above her.

  Lieutenant Drazen Kulic, Second Section, Fourth Directorate (Special Operations), NKVD, had waited three days for the thunderstorm in the Guadarrama. With the lightning as cover, he intended to make a great flash of his own. Without the storm, the great flash would bring down Nationalist units from everywhere, there would be a ratissage-literally “rat hunt,” a counterinsurgency sweep-and he had little confidence in his guerrilla band’s ability to elude it. They were not mountain people. They were railroad workers and boilermakers and machinists, UGT communists to a man and very brave, but they did not know this terrain. If they had to move too quickly through the forests there would be lost weapons, excessive noise and sprained ankles. Those who could not keep up would have to be sacrificed and, worse yet, it would have to be done by hand, since a pistol shot was unthinkable. He’d seen townspeople attempt to fight in the mountains of Yugoslavia, and he was damned if he was going to add one more ghastly scene to the tragicomedy of the Spanish war.

  Earlier that day, he’d sent his least valuable man down the road. Disguised as a cripple-they’d cut him a primitive crutch from a tree branch-he’d walked up to the roadblock carrying a newspaper packet of dried beans. They’d done the thing right-it was even a Nationalist newspaper, ABC, the Monarchist daily-but to no avail. The sentries at the roadblock wanted a password. They were very sorry, they knew how bad things were in the village, that his poor sister needed the habichuelas, but-no password, no going down the road. They took the beans, saying they would take them to the sister, but they hadn’t even asked her name.

  The convent schoolhouse in the village was being used as a Nationalist armory, logistical support for the Falangist columns in their advance on Madrid. The radio message sent to Kulic’s group in the Guadarrama from the Soviet base in Madrid had been specific: Take the armory. Well, he couldn’t take it, with twenty machinists, but he could blow it up, and that he intended to do.

  He had fourteen time pencils-virtually the same explosive device that had accidentally killed T E. Lawrence’s lover and bodyguard, Dahoud, as he tried to blow up a train. After Arbat Street, Kulic had attended a special school deep in the Urals, and he’d had to read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom very thoroughly. What Lawrence did to the Turkish supply columns in World War I, he was now trying to do to Franco’s fascists. With time pencils manufactured in 1914. No matter. He would find a way once they broke into the armory. Theoretically, you could sink a battleship with a candle. Theoretically.

  But first he had to get his people down a road. For that, he needed to steal the password. Thus, at 4:00 P.M., as the mountain skies darkened and the wind blew hard from the west, they’d set up their own roadblock two miles east of the Nationalist sentries. Along came two Guardia in a small truck. Kulic’s men, acting like normal sentries, had demanded the password. “Rosas blancas” came the answer. White roses, a Carlist symbol of purity.

  At 10:30 P.M., with the storm very close, a light rain pattering down on the road, they marched to the roadblock, gave the password, and walked into the village. A company of Navarrese infantry was assigned to hold the area and protect the armory, but the rain had long since driven them back into the Convent of the Sacred Heart, where they were billeted. Kulic set up his machine gun facing the doors of the convent and sent a small ambush team back down the road to wait for the sentries, in case they returned once the gunfire started. A shipfitter, an agile little spider of a man accustomed to riveting in the steelwork of half-built freighters, climbed a drainpipe to the roof and set the convent on fire by dripping gasoline down the chimney. As the soldiers ran out-the sixteenth-century abbot who designed the place knew that the greatest security lay in a single access point-they were killed. Those who remained inside died in the fire.

  The convent schoolhouse-a separate building-was piled to the rafters with rifle and machine-gun ammunition, but what most gladdened Kulic’s heart were eighty cases of artillery shells for the Nationalists’ 105 mm field guns. He now had the power for the explosion, but no lightning. A few minutes after 11:00 P.M., there was gunfire on the road and the ambush team returned, having chased the Nationalist sentries into the forest. At 11:30, the thunder and lightning finally started. By 12:05, after four failures with the time pencils, Captain Drazen Kulic had his big flash. A burning school desk spun brilliantly through the rainy air, high above the village, trailing smoke and sparks before it fell to earth and disappeared from view. Kulic and his band vanished into the mountains. A number of villagers died in the explosion. It couldn’t be helped.

  Faye Berns moved through the dark streets of the city, hemmed in by buildings that rose steeply above her, like a corridor in a dream. A small wind, suddenly warm, touched her face. A dog was barking some distance away. She could tell it had been barking for a long time-its voice was almost gone. But, she realized, it doesn’t know what else to do, so it barks. A sense of infinite, indescribable loss rolled in from the night and filled her heart.

  If I were Catholic, I’d cross myself.

  She did it anyhow, quickly, a rapid figure-four in the style of the Spanish women. There was something malefic in Spain, that she knew for a surety, and it was out that night. From the apartments high above her came a sense of restless sleep, disturbance, unquiet, as though every man and woman dreamed they heard a door click open. Spirit wanderers are out, s
he thought, who cannot find their way home. Perhaps her own ancestors, burned alive in the Inquisition. The blood carried more than oxygen, more than anyone knew and, once the streets were dark and deserted, the bad memories of this place returned. Too many terrible things had happened here. Walking in the center of the narrow street, she could hear water running in the drains, and with every breath came the chill odor of anciently decayed masonry.

  Three streets. Two blocks.

  From down here, she would never find the blue light, it was like being in a deep canyon. But she would find it. She listened to her footsteps, tried to walk more softly. Her fingers crept beneath the sweater and touched the butt of the revolver. She seemed alone in the world, but maybe that wasn’t so bad. The Republican Checa-modeled on, and named after, the Soviet intelligence Cheka-often roamed at night through the neighborhoods. It was better not to meet them.

  Calle de Plata.

  Where the medieval silversmiths had kept their workshops. Her cousin Eric, who graduated third in his class at Erasmus High, took jewelry-making at the Art Students League. Now he was a communist. Like Renata and Andres. Was she one too? No, she didn’t think so. She was a passionate idealist, in love with the idea of democracy. Certainly she dreamed, like Andres, of a world without oppression and cruelty. She had come to Spain to put one more hand on the wheel that turned toward justice. Were all Jews communists? Hitler said so. Her father grimaced at Hitler’s name. “Why don’t you kill him?” he asked the sky. Jews hated injustice, that was what it was. Fania Kaplan, a Jewish girl not much older than herself, with family in Brooklyn, had shot Lenin through the neck because he betrayed the Revolution. But Lenin survived. She would like to shoot Hitler through the neck. They would, she knew, march her in glory up Flatbush Avenue if she did that. Even Mr. Glass, of Glass Stationery, and he was a Republican.

  Avenida Saldana.

  There was a big market here on Thursdays. An old lady with a mustache gave her something free every time-radishes, parsley. The fishstall man had once picked up a red snapper and bobbed it up and down as though it swam toward her, and everyone had laughed and made Spanish jokes. Now the street was deserted. On the roof of one of the buildings across the street, she had seen a blue light. She had come here to find it. Of course, she could turn around and go back and tell Renata that she couldn’t find it. Nobody would be the wiser. In all likelihood, the light didn’t mean anything at all, simply one more inexplicable event in this inexplicable country. So go home.

  No.

  Well, perhaps. But at least, she told herself, examine the buildings.

  The numbers ran differently here, but the third one from the corner, 52 Avenida Saldana, roughly corresponded to 9 Calle de Victoria. That meant she might be on the wrong street, because 52 Avenida Saldana was a two-story factory where they made wooden chairs.

  54 Avenida Saldana. That was a possibility. She counted up six stories.

  Number 56 was not a possibility. An old hotel for commercial travelers, it had a steep roof sheathed with green copper. Number 58 was a rather smart private house, with little balconies and French windows, three stories high.

  It had to be 54.

  That’s good, Faye, you figured it out. Now go home. Report the incident to the Checa, let them worry about it.

  She crossed the street. Avenida Saldana was a bit fancier than Calle de Victoria, narrow sidewalks ran along its edges. She stood at the base of the building and stared straight up. No blue light. But on the top floor, just below the roof, a window was open a few inches and, very faintly, she could hear a woman singing. She had heard the song before, mothers sang it to babies to put them to sleep.

  Good, darling, very good. Her upbringing came through loud and clear. And brave? In the middle of the night. In Madrid. All alone.

  With only Nana’s watch and a big Spanish gun. Such a gun. Myself, I’d be afraid to touch it.

  Which was probably why, more or less, she simply went into the building and up to the roof. Because the blood did carry more than oxygen. Because there was something there that-when it was crystal clear that retreat with caution was the only sensible path-took the first step and the second step and all the rest of the steps. She had some help, on the order of I’m an American and I can go anywhere I want, but she had something a little older than that as well. It didn’t precisely have a name, or maybe it had too many names, but it got her up to the roof. And, surprise of surprises, at a time when so much bravery bled itself out into nothingness, it turned out to matter a great deal that she went there. It saved lives.

  First she removed her boots. Leaning against a cold wall in the dark hallway, she worked them off and tied the laces together and hung them around her neck. Drew the pistol from her waistband, cocked it, held it before her with a finger hooked securely around the front of the trigger guard. Put her left hand on the wall and walked slowly in her socks up the stairs to the roof, the sound of the lullaby getting closer as she climbed.

  The door to the roof was chained and the chain was padlocked.

  Breathing hard from the climb, she stood there frozen, so deeply enraged that her cheeks were hot. After all that!

  She’d seen her friend at Pembroke, Penelope Hastings of Hyde Park, New York, fiddle a lock with a hairpin. Two problems. She didn’t have a hairpin. And it wasn’t that kind of lock. It was like a bicycle lock, with a combination. Olive green. Scratched and worn as though it had been well used: first to lock up a bicycle, perhaps at a place like a college where unlocked bicycles were frequently “borrowed,” then to secure a big trunk, which had to travel aboard a transatlantic liner to Europe. That sort of lock.

  The sort of lock that, if you turned four right, sixteen left, and twenty-seven right, snapped open, though it took one last little jiggle, requiring a practiced twist of the hand, to make it spring cleanly.

  It was, she was sure, her very own lock, which she’d put in the back of a drawer some months earlier, thinking it was something that she didn’t need then but would desperately want the minute after she threw it away. She was shocked to find it, but there was something much too eerie to contemplate in such a coincidence and she had no time to think about it anyhow. Explanations would have to wait.

  In the silence at the top of the stairs, she could hear the singing woman one floor down. A child coughed. The woman murmured in Spanish. Then began humming softly, a song without words made up as she went along.

  Faye put the lock and the gun between her feet. Slipped one hand beneath the chain, drew it slowly, link by link, across her palm until it was free of the door handle, then laid it silently on the floor, kneeling slowly. Retrieved the gun and held it in her right hand, then put the lock inside one of the shoes hanging around her neck. Took a breath, and pushed gently against the door with her left hand.

  The door made one small squeak as it opened. The humming stopped. Faye took a step onto the roof.

  She was wound tight as a spring, but not frightened. She didn’t think it through, but some part of her mind was trying to let her know that when a door is chained and padlocked on one side, there is rarely anybody on the other side. At least not anybody who wants to be there.

  The roof was deserted.

  On one wall stood a blue lantern. A device used, perhaps, on a ship or in a railroad yard. She could see the shape of the flame burning behind the blue glass. She went up to it. Opened the little door. And blew it out.

  Squinting against the darkness, she peered out over the intervening rooftops but could not make out her own building. Then, close to where she thought it might be, a match flared. The flame lingered for an instant, then disappeared.

  Renata!

  No signal had been arranged, but she knew absolutely that Renata had been watching the blue light, had seen it go out, and had contrived to make a visible acknowledgment.

  Now she flew.

  Lantern swinging from her left hand, gun clutched in her right, shoes banging against her breasts, she ran down the stairs and ou
t into the street. Her socks got wet and her feet hurt but she wasn’t going to stop for anything. Pumping her arms, hair flying, she tore down the side street, past Calle de Plata, into Calle de Victoria, almost slipping as she went around the corner, into the building past her bomb shelter alcove, up the stairs, up the ladder, onto the roof, rushing into Renata’s arms and yelling at the top of her lungs, yelling with triumph.

  In Seville, it was the custom of Hauptmann Bernhard Luders, of the Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion, always to have a woman the night before he flew a mission. Such sport maintained the traditions of that city, where Don Juan had been born and raised and where, as a young man, he had observed with horror that the corpse in a funeral procession was his own, and resolved to fight death with lust from that day forth.

  It cooled him, Luders said. Left him calm and level-headed for work the following day. It gave him, also, a reputation, and that he enjoyed immensely. He was twenty-one years old, with a small angry face and a small transparent mustache. At his direction, Feldwebel Kunkel, his batman, would sit in a gilded, red plush chair outside the room at the Hotel Alfonso XIII, an apparent guardian of lovers’ privacy but in fact an advertisement for the heated Wurstverstecken (hide-the-wiener) games being played on the other side of the door.

  After midnight, when the officers came upstairs from drinking in the hotel bar, they would nod to Kunkel. He would rise and salute. “He is in tonight?” someone would always ask. “Yes sir,” Kunkel would answer, “but he flies tomorrow.” Ahh, they would nod approvingly, aware of his custom, then add the obligatory joke: “We shoot by night that bomb by day.”

  In response to the joke, Kunkel, a man who understood loyalty at its root, would offer the obligatory response: a slow raising of the hands and eyes to heaven. What lovers these pilots!

  Luders’s latest was sixteen.

  Evangelina. Evangelina. To Luders, even her name reeked of Spain, of Catholicism, of darkness, ignorance, superstition as black and wild as the unruly bush between her marble legs.

  She drove him insane.