by Alan Furst
“Soon they were in business. They found a family that made strong gloves from uncured hides to sell to the Greek dockworkers, and bought the business from them. They prospered. Avram went to school, then to university in Istanbul, later in Athens. He became a draftsman and an engineer. Then, in 1922, it happened again. The Greek-Turkish war, and Smyrna was burned to the ground. Almost the entire Greek population was massacred. Avram rushed home from Athens, where he had a job as a clerk in the office of the civil engineer. But he could not find his mother. She was gone. The house was gone. There was nothing. In despair, he returned to Athens.
“He was a lonely young man. He did his work and lived in a room. One day, he went to a Communist party meeting-it was a way to meet people. In time, he discovered he had a new family, a family that loved and sheltered him but, most important, a family that did not suffer injustice meekly. At party direction, he took a new job, working for a British company contracted to improve the water system in Baku. At this time, Baku was a British enclave protected by Czech mercenaries and White Guards-an imperialist island in a sea of revolution. The British could not resist Avram-his softness, apparent softness, appealed to the bullying side of their nature. He rose within the firm, and reported to the Cheka. There was, on his part, never a moment of hesitation. Spying came to him as making love comes to other men. It is his belief, in fact, that his father may have had relations with the Okhrana, the czar’s intelligence service, though his murder by the Turks was haphazard-simply one act in a village slaughter. But Avram knew them, whether they were Turkish Aghas or British officers, he always understood how they worked, where their vulnerabilities lay. Thus he was able to penetrate the Falange-simply by saying the right things to the right people, being patient, waiting for them to come to him. And thus he will find his way among the Germans. That is, if we do not kill him first.”
At first, Khristo did not entirely trust his voice. All through the history of Roubenis there were edges that cut sharply against his own life. He felt ambushed, as though the story had come out of the night and attacked him. There were people in Vidin who had lived under Ottoman rule-and it was something they simply did not speak of. And he had seen his brother die under the boots of the fascists. Poor Nikko. Poor sad, stupid Nikko and his big lip that called the world’s bluff. And when the dirty work was done, and the blood long since washed into the earth, both he and Roubenis found themselves in the service of Russia, and that was a locked room-once you were inside. Back in Moscow they had quite a taste for suffering. How well they understood it, used it, made great profit of it. Unconsciously his left hand moved from the steering wheel and traced the outline of the white pawn in his pocket. Poor Ozunov, he thought, this piece of painted wood perhaps his only estate, all that remained of his existence.
Finally, Khristo rose to the baits Sascha had strung for him all day long: “Why on earth would we kill Andres?”
Sascha laughed, a shrill, violent laugh. “God in heaven cover your ears and hear no more of this!” he cried out. “This Bulgarian dolt has been with us two years and more, yet he has seen nothing, heard nothing, learned nothing. He still thinks-this trusting child-there must be reasons.”
Then the hell with you, Khristo thought and bit his lip to keep the thought from being spoken aloud. He was tired of Sascha, of webs and coils and plots, of lies that sounded like truths and truths used to prop up the lies. He was tired of being afraid. His heart ached terribly and he wanted to go home.
They came to the main road, two lanes wide, that ran along the floor of the valley between the railroad tracks and the river, and turned east toward Tarragona. Khristo drove fast; the hard-sprung Citroen bounced over potholes and cracks, sometimes edging right when a car or truck came toward them. Little towns on their way were dark, though sometimes a cantina was open, light spilling from its windows onto the cobbled streets. The road veered and cornered in the towns, and Khristo downshifted aggressively, making the engine race and sing, making car music in the night. Outside Ribarroja de Ebro, there were dancing lights spread out before them and the red glow of a fire, and Khristo slowed. Then, in the middle of a long curve, a man appeared on the road, and Khristo rolled to a stop when he was clearly in the beams of the headlights.
From Sascha’s side of the car came the little popping sound made by disengaging the button and grommet that held a holster flap in place. “Just let him come,” Sascha said, fully awake and not at all drunk.
But the man stayed where he was, swaying back and forth, his palms held toward them in the universal stop command. The more Khristo stared at him, the less sense he made. He wore a khaki uniform, in the style of Republican officers yet not the same, and he had no insignia at all. His feet and lower legs were wrapped in dirty white bandages that threatened to unravel and his face was webbed with dried trails of blood that seemed to have come from a wound just above the hairline.
“Sorry, gents,” he called out, “there’s no way through.”
Khristo put his head outside the window to see better. “English?” he asked.
“American,” the man said, squinting in the light.
“What is the matter?” Khristo asked. Phrases from the tattered book came back to him.
“There’s bodies and railroad cars all to hell up there. Just before dusk, the Nazis bombed a train. Hit the engine and we went off the tracks.” He pointed at his bandaged feet and said, “Hospital train.”
“What is it?” Sascha said in Russian. “He said a bomb?”
“A hospital train was blown up.”
“Ah. That explains the bandages. He is American?”
“Yes. He must be with the International Brigade. Are we supposed to talk to them?”
“No, but we are here.”
The man hobbled over to Khristo’s window. “You’re Russians?”
“Yes,” Khristo answered.
“And you speak English?”
“A little, yes.”
He smiled. By the light of the headlamps Khristo could see that his eyes were gray and his face was young and pleasant. “My name is Robert King,” he said and stuck out a hand. Khristo shook it, reaching over the edge of the rolled-down window.
“How do you,” Khristo said. “I am Captain Markov.” He had, like all NKVD officers in Spain, a nominal cover supported by one or two documents, a nom de guerre meant only for superficial deception.
“Russians. I’ve met Italians and Germans and Danes and a Hungarian, but you’re my first Russians.”
“Do you need aid?” Khristo pointed at King’s forehead.
The man touched the place, winced, looked at his fingers. “No. Seems to have clotted up. But if you want to help, move on ahead. Go slow, it’s pretty bad up there.”
“What does he want?” Sascha asked.
“They need help.”
“Drive slowly.”
As they moved forward, King stepped aside and saluted with a clenched fist and a smile. Khristo returned both.
Sascha took a small notebook and a stub of pencil from the glove compartment. “He said his name was King?”
“Yes. K-i-n-g I think, like the ruler of Britain.”
“Ah, of course. I remember. And his patronymic?”
“Richard.”
Sascha paused in his writing. “You’re sure that’s it?” “Yes, I’m sure,” Khristo said.
They worked until dawn. It was hard, dirty work, illuminated by torches and flashlights, amid the drifting smoke of small field fires started by the bombing and a ground mist that rose like steam from the river and its banks and blew gently across the road where they labored.
To avoid the consequences of the periodic flooding of the Ebro, the builders of the railroad had designed an earthen ridge for the tracks. The embankment wasn’t very high, perhaps eight feet, but it had added to the velocity of the plunging train and sent the engine and half the cars down onto the road in a tangle of splintered wood and bent iron.
At the start of the bombing run,
the train’s engineer had two choices: stop the train and have everybody run for the fields or, on the theory that a target in motion is harder to hit, give it full throttle. The engineer had taken the second option-from pure instinct for flight, no doubt-and had been wrong. He’d had no way of knowing that motion in a train is completely predictable, and even less could he have been aware of how moving trains excite bomber pilots, who usually can see little but a column of smoke for their efforts.
But it was most of all, Khristo thought as he heaved on the end of a railroad tie pressed into service as a lever, an intelligence failure. Someone, not knowing the range of the German bombers, had decreed that trains could run during daylight. And here was the result of such ignorance. As they took the wreck apart, pulling away boards, manhandling cast-iron wheel carriages and axles, they came upon the bodies. Most of them, like the American on the road, already wounded and bandaged. Now and then they found one still alive and carried him down to the road, to be taken back to Tarragona by a fleet of private cars and taxicabs called in from surrounding towns. But mostly these wounded, who had expected to live, who had had the luck to survive gunfire or artillery bursts, were dead, twisted into impossible positions by the force of the wreck.
From the survivors, who worked along with local policemen and firemen, Khristo learned they had been fighting against the Asensio column to the west of Madrid, and it had been a nightmare. They had retreated from Navalcarero, across the Guadarrama River, all the way back to Alorcon. They had been, like Republican forces throughout Spain, very brave but poorly armed. The Nationalist field guns had chewed them up from a distance, and forays against the gun emplacements brought them into enfilading machine-gun fire, which mowed them down in long lines. A company of miners from Asturias had arrived to fight by their side, but they had no guns whatsoever and fought with dynamite. When civilians took the field against organized forces, Khristo realized, they learned the simplest tactical truths at brutal cost. And they lost. Lives, armaments, strategic support, positions, and ground-everything. Like the Crusaders of old, they believed the justness of their cause would somehow protect them, and they were equally wrong.
The rescue effort was led-brilliantly, Khristo thought-by the chief of police of Ribarroja de Ebro, who had made his way to the scene in pants, boots and pajama top. He was a tall man with a pitted face, and he seemed to be everywhere at once. Directing, encouraging, ordering, in total calm and with total authority. When Sascha had tried to explain, using his garbled Spanish, that their mission precluded any possibility of helping in the effort, the man nodded in sympathy and, saying “Si, si, si, si, si,” had taken him by the arm and led him around the Citroen to the trunk. How like those in Moscow, Khristo thought, to teach you French and English and then send you to Spain. When Sascha had refused to open the trunk, the policeman had patted him on the shoulder and, his face full of apology, called for “una barra”-a crowbar. At that point Khristo stepped in and opened the trunk. The policeman, knowing what he wanted, dug down through the Fundador bottles, Degtyaryova machine pistols, and debriefing notebooks and came up with the car jack and its handle and held them up to Sascha. “Esta la hora a salvar los vidas,” he said. “Los procedimientos deben es-
perar.” It is time to save lives-procedures will have to wait. Then, summoning the words carefully from a very limited supply of English, he had added, “You watch or you help-a mi es lo mismo.” Sascha stared at him. The policeman, to drive home the point, picked up a notebook between his thumb and forefinger and dropped it back on the pile of bottles and guns. Sascha went pale. Khristo, in response, took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, and was rewarded with a policeman’s smile.
Three boxcars of live steers had traveled with the train, en route to the markets of Tarragona, and a number of animals had been injured in the wreck. Some of them had managed to make their way into the fields, where they lowed ceaselessly with pain and terror, drawn-out pleading calls from the darkness. The policeman tried to ignore it but he could not and finally, to everyone’s silent relief, a detail of surviving wounded had been given pistols and sent off, limping and shuffling, wandering through the mist and smoke, to find the animals and put them out of their misery. Thus there were shouts and pistol reports throughout the long night.
Toward dawn, a train from the east had passed slowly on the remaining track, reinforcements headed for the Madrid front. All wore red scarves. They stuck their heads out the windows and gave clenched-fist salutes to the workers on the road, called out “No pasaran” and other slogans. In one car they were singing the “Hymn of Riego.” Khristo had observed this before-a train of wounded passing a train of new volunteers-and he did his best, with shouts and salutes and smiles, to help them not see what was on the road.
At daybreak they were relieved by a company of infantry quartered nearby and the two collapsed against the side of the car, sitting in the weeds by the side of the road. Khristo stared sorrowfully at his hands, black with axle grease, soot, and dried blood, two nails split all the way to the base, a slice across the palm that had bled itself dry. It had been a long time since he’d really worked, every muscle in his back told him that. He sat quietly, in a kind of stupor, hypnotized by light as the first sun found the river. He watched the mist burning off, the pale green water moving lazily in its autumn flow. It looked so clean to him, the way it changed itself instant to instant, brushing along its banks, running to the sea. He wanted to go up next to it, put his aching hands in for as long as he could stand the cold, but he was too exhausted to move. By his side, Sascha picked with great difficulty at the sealing tape on the neck of a brandy bottle.
“Surely,” Khristo said, “there will be trouble over this.”
“Oh yes,” Sascha answered. “Our orders are clear. Do not meddle, do not become involved, NKVD business precedes all else. For me, of course, it no longer matters, so I shall take the brunt of Yaschyeritsa.”
“Sascha, please, for once be real. Truly you are leaving?”
“Recalled,” Sascha said. The word seemed to hang for a long time. ” ‘Recalled to Moscow.’ That is the phrase.”
He put the bottle down, reached over and tore up a handful of weeds. “Let me see, we have here hemlock and wild mustard, chicory, allium, and here is the legendary asphodel, a wildflower of great antiquity. I took a year of horticulture in university. With the famous Academician Boretz. See over there? Those are crown daisies, there is fennel I think, and field marigolds. Good old Boretz, never hurt a fly, couldn’t walk without bumping into the ground. But a Trotskyite, or worse. So, that was Boretz. They are going to kill me, Khristo.”
He went back to work on the bottle, at last getting it open and taking a few delicate sips, then offering it to Khristo. The brandy tasted like fire, but the bitter strength of it kicked some life back into him.
“Why do you not run away?” Khristo asked quietly.
“Yes, it occurs to one. But it would be futility itself to try. They hunt you down, my friend, they always hunt you down. And before they dispense with you, they make you sorry you ran. They brought one fellow back to Moscow and let us see him in the morgue, just his face, mind you. One would not think it physically possible to open a mouth that wide.”
Khristo watched him carefully, but his face, coated with oily dirt, was empty. “What has happened,” he said, “is that Yagoda is finished. Now it is Yezhov, the dwarf, who runs the service. Yagoda has been accused of murdering the writer Maxim Gorky by spraying poison on his walls. Also, he is accused of complicity in the affair of Kirov. Rumor has it that the scythe is out in Moscow for real-this one will make the events of ‘34 seem like the nursery. So, fine fellow, what you’ve seen of Sascha’s useless life is what there will be.”
Khristo tried to take this in. The utter lack of drama in Sascha’s demeanor somehow acted to balk understanding. “A dwarf,” Khristo said.
“Yes. The Great Leader exceeds himself in whimsy.”
“My God.”
“The curious part is that I don’t care. Oh, later on, in the Lubianka, I shall kick and scream and plead for mercy-hug their boots and all of it. It is expected of one to do that-they demand their theater. But now, right now, I feel nothing at all.”
“Sascha, this cannot be.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll await you in hell. There we will keep track of the devils-who works, who doesn’t, who makes secret plots with angels. You shall see, it won’t be as bad as you think.”
At last the old Sascha. He was relieved. “Those devils must be watched-they stab the Revolution in the back! Perhaps I should accompany you?”
Sascha smiled gently at his efforts to play along with the mood. “Application refused,” he said, “reapply in thirty days.” He thought for a moment. “Thirty days in truth, Khristo Nicolaievich. I am only the first to go-there will be others. Many others.”
“You are serious?”
“Yes. In their eyes we have been ruined, you must understand. We have seen the world, and we must not be allowed to tell others what we have seen. Or perhaps we have consorted with the enemy. Who among us has remained pure? Impossible to know, so safety lies in throwing out the whole batch and starting anew.”
Khristo felt his pulse quicken. This was not Sascha the mad poet spinning dreams. This was the Sascha who told the truth. He turned to look back at the river for a moment but heard an odd noise and saw that Sascha was crying, hiding his face in his hands. Beyond him, out on the road, the policeman was watching them. His eyes met Khristo’s and he shook his head, slowly, back and forth. He did not understand them, or the world, or the carnage on the road. Nothing.
“You have achieved virtually nothing, Lieutenant Stoianev.”
Colonel General Yadomir Bloch-Yaschyeritsa-touched the tip of his index finger to the end of his tongue and turned the page. It was brittle, transparent paper that crackled as he smoothed it down on the left side of the file folder.