by Alan Furst
Hlava was employed as chief bookkeeper in a factory that repaired shot-up Messerschmitt fighter planes. Now and then they were able to meet in a situation where actual conversation was possible, and Hlava revealed himself to be a man who told a certain kind of joke. “Three Czechs-a Bohemian, a Slovakian, and a Moravian-meet in heaven. The first one says …” He never laughed at the jokes, simply gazed at Khristo, awaiting a reaction, his breath rasping in and out in a slow, methodical tempo.
There were, at any given time, about a dozen other agents. Khristo spent his days bicycling around the city, hard-pressed to make his treffs-as the Russians called clandestine meetings. There was a violin teacher whose pupils were mostly the children of German officers, and she had a way with papers-letters, reports-left lying atop desks in studies. There was a police detective, apparently enough trusted by the Germans to see marginal intelligence distributions. Four or five factory workers, a factory physician, a clerk in the electric utility who fed him data on the daily rise and fall of power usage in certain industrial facilities critical to the German war effort.
But then, on March 20, he was offered information of a very different sort. It reached him in bed, amid a jumble of sweaty blankets in a hotel room that rented by the hour, reached him as he smoked a cigarette and stared at the waterstained ceiling above him, numb and mindless for the moment, in a blank daze that passed for tranquillity.
Magda, she was called, buxom and fat-hipped and exceptionally pink, with a thick yellow braid that fell to the small of her back. Had his controllers known about her, they would have told him he was signing his own death warrant. And she was not the only one; there were others, who drifted into his life, then disappeared: one was dark and looked like a Gypsy, another was very young and brought him small gifts. There was a seamstress who scented herself with lilac water, and a soldier’s widow who dressed all in black.
Together, they constituted yet another step into the forbidden zone. Like the burned-out factory where he slept. Like the pistol beneath the horsehair pillow on the hotel bed. He’d been driven to it, somehow, he did not understand why, but something had its fist in his back and forced him into acts which, in his particular circumstances, amounted to dancing blindfolded at the edge of a cliff. The women he knew were not prostitutes, they simply needed money and needed to make love and weren’t averse to going to bed with a generous man. And he was generous. “Here,” he’d say, “make sure and eat a good dinner tonight, you look worn out.” He knew that he was calling attention to himself, easily the worst thing he could do, but he couldn’t stop. Maybe, he thought, his nerve really had slipped. Or was it, perhaps, some premonition about the future that compelled him to a kind of greed, compelled him to take from life anything it might give him. Christ, he thought, you are acting like Sascha Vonets.
“Hey you, dreamer,” said Magda, rolling onto her ample stomach and propping her chin on her hands. “I met an old friend of yours. He said, ‘That black-haired fellow you see, we used to be pals.’ “
Magda was much given to fancy, he didn’t take it too seriously. “Oh?” he said. “What did he look like, then?”
“Mm, like Death in a play.”
She was evidently going to spin a tale. Amused, he turned on his side to see her face. “How strange. He carried a scythe, perhaps?”
“No, you stupid man. He was thin as a skeleton, with staring eyes and long, bony fingers. A scythe indeed! I was at the Novy Bor restaurant, at the buffet. He just came right up to my table and spoke to me. ‘Say hello to him for me,’ he said.”
She moved her face close to his. “Now give me a great big kiss,” she said.
The truth of it began to reach him and his body tensed. “What are you saying?” he asked, eyes searching her placid face.
She made popping noises with her lips. “Kissy,” she said, running a fingernail down his flank.
“Is this true? What else did he say?” His voice was quite different now.
She pouted for a moment and rolled her eyes-she’d gotten his attention, but it wasn’t the sort of attention she’d wanted. “Some silliness about a postal box. B, F, uh, eight something. I don’t remember. But there is no such address in Prague. We don’t use the alphabet, just numbers. One of your black market friends, no doubt. Now, ungrateful man …”
“That’s it, all of it?” he said, every nerve in his body humming.
“Yes, my little king,” she sighed, sorry now that she’d bothered to bring it up, “that’s all of it.” She snuggled against him and cooed on his chest, her hand walking on two fingers down his belly.
He made himself respond, and the cooing became mock-surprised, then appreciative. “Witch!” he said softly by her ear, “you turn a man into a tomcat.” He reached across her shoulder, pressed his cigarette out in an ashtray on the bedside table, stroked her back. Novy Bor restaurant, he thought, at the buffet.
“Meow,” she said.
Lunch and dinner at the Novy Bor on March 21.
A long, narrow room, windows white with steam so that people in the street passed like ghosts, black and white tiles of the floor awash with water from muddy boots, over a hundred people talking in low voices, the clatter of trays, a portrait of Hitler on the yellow wall above the bubbling tea urn.
And again on March 22, this time aborting a pass from Hlava scheduled for noon.
A pass successfully managed at the fallback location on the morning of March 23, a page torn from a copybook pressed into his hand:
New plant directives specify that workers absenting themselves from the factory for any reason shall be charged with economic sabotage against the Reich and hung without trial, such hangings to take place directly outside the factory as example to all workers.
Two N40 milling machines down after gears sabotaged with emery grit.
Repair of six ME-109 fuselages delayed by oxyacetylene shortage. Resupply promised for week of 9 April. Old-fashioned metal brazing techniques used instead of welding and parts shipped.
ME-110 wing trucked in on 18 March appears to have taken intensive ground fire from small-bore weapons. Number 770 j-12 on wing.
Lunch on March 23 at Novy Bor. Khristo sat against the wall opposite the buffet counter. As he was stalling through the last of his beer, Josef Voluta appeared at the table with a bowl of soup on a tray. Almost immediately after he sat down, two old men joined them at the table.
“Salt, please,” Voluta said, handing him a slip of paper beneath the table. Khristo passed him the salt.
“Thank you,” Voluta said.
Khristo waited a few minutes and sipped his beer in silence, then rose from the table and went into the toilet, locked the door, and read the small slip of brown paper. When he emerged, Voluta was gone. He sat back down at the table and finished the beer before leaving.
Could this be the man, he wondered, that he had known at Arbat Street? His face was gray and lean, features sharpened, eyes too bright. The backs of his hands showed patches of glossy red skin, the mark of recently healed burns. He had eaten his soup hunched over, face close to the bowl, holding the spoon in his fist, moving with a steady, constant motion-a man servicing a machine. Khristo fought the sudden urge, nearly a compulsion, to find a mirror and look at his face.
On one edge of the message from “An NKVD Colonel” a different hand had written the word Sascha. In writing that Khristo took to be Voluta’s, a message had been penciled on the back of the paper: Jiraskuv bridge, March 24, 8:05 P.M., then 9:1 j, then 10:20. If not, good luck. The message was written in Russian.
My God, Khristo thought. Sascha.
On the night of March 24, 1945, a De Havilland Mosquito circled at 35,000 feet above the city of Prague. All armament had been removed from the airplane, marginally increasing its range. Even so, the plane would land at the OSS field at Bari with its fuel tank nearly empty, the round trip between the two cities barely within its capacity. The pilot and navigator wore fur gloves and sheepskin jackets and breathed from an oxyge
n tank-their problem was altitude, not hostile antiaircraft fire. Even if the Germans could hear them, they couldn’t see them that high up.
A four-minute message from the FELDSPAR operative, crouching somewhere on a roof down below, was recorded on a wire-spool machine and flown back to OSS headquarters in Bari. The FELDSPAR committee, responsible for oversight of the operation, was waiting anxiously for the recording. They spent fifteen minutes discussing the information, then sent it on to the typists and clerks. Data on German war production capabilities in Occupied Czechoslovakia was immediately prepared for distribution to various analysis groups. A rather peculiar addition to the message, concerning an NKVD colonel offering material on Soviet intelligence operations in exchange for exfiltration from someplace in Romania, was only briefly discussed. Someone said it sounded like a provocation, somebody else wondered what the hell the FELDSPAR operative was doing with stuff like that-who was he talking to?
The Soviet contact was something of a sore subject, because the OSS had had its problems with the NKVD. In 1943, they had made attempts to cooperate with their allied service, sending them cryptographic materials, miniature cameras, miniature microdot-manufacturing devices, microfilm cameras and projectors, as a gesture of good will. But the good will was not returned. On a trip to Moscow in 1944, General Donovan, head of OSS, had been prevented from leaving the USSR for ten days. In the first months of 1945, reports from intelligence officers in Bucharest, Sofia, Warsaw and other territories recently occupied by Soviet armies indicated that the NKVD was hard at work against its Western allies. Then, in response to a broad pattern of Soviet actions, Donovan had proposed to the Roosevelt administration that the United States continue to maintain an intelligence agency after the war. But J. Edgar Hoover-Donovan’s mortal bureaucratic enemy in Washington, D.C.-had learned of this proposal and leaked word of it to several newspapers that shared his views and the American people had been informed, in banner headlines, that a postwar “American Gestapo” was under consideration. There were those in the OSS who now believed-correctly, it turned out-that the agency had received a mortal wound, and the time of its dismantling was only months away.
Information relevant to Soviet intelligence operations was therefore handled by a special committee, so the FELDSPAR product was duly forwarded amid the daily traffic of memoranda, reports, personnel actions, requests for clarification of policy, and proposals for new operations originated by the Bari station.
As for the FELDSPAR operative himself, the March 24 message was his final transmission. Mosquito missions were flown above Prague on March 29 and on April 4, 5, and 6, but he was not heard from on those dates and the mission was therefore terminated with the notation that the agent had been neutralized-believed killed or captured by the enemy. The FELDSPAR committee ceased to meet, its members assigned to oversee new operations. It was considered a lousy break. The FELDSPAR operative had been erratic at times, but during his active period he had furnished significant product to the intelligence effort and those who had known him personally had generally liked him.
In Prague, the night of March 24 was cloudy and overcast and there was no wind to stir the dead air. Moving through the blacked-out city, Khristo found it difficult to breathe. Coal smoke poured from the chimneys of the ceaselessly operating factories and hung in the streets like a fog. There was other burning as well: two hundred miles to the north the Russian armies were massed for an assault on the eastern borders of Germany, firing twenty-two thousand field guns in barrages that lit up the evening sky and set whole cities on fire. The distant rumble could be heard all night long and a haze of acrid smoke drifted south, covering Central Europe and blackening the roofs of Prague with a fine, sooty layer of ash. People scrubbed themselves with lye soap but the grime was stubborn and would not leave them, so they tried to live with it, spitting incessantly when the taste of the war in their mouths grew too strong to bear.
The 7:50 P.M. radio transmission from the roof of the warehouse had cost Khristo his first opportunity to meet with Voluta, but there was nothing to be done about that. He just barely managed to make the 9:15, trudging along the winding streets like a tired man on his way to work, but Voluta did not appear. Khristo moved away from the bridge, found an unlocked door, and settled down to wait in the narrow hallway of an old tenement, listening to a loud argument in the apartment on the other side of the wall. It was a mother-daughter fight, something to do with money, punctuated by banging and bumping as the two women cleaned the house while they fought.
Heading toward the 10:20 meeting, he found the streets nearly empty-Occupation rules of curfew specified that only those with stamped permits could be on the street after 9:00 P.M. As he walked, a Tatra automobile slowed to have a look at him. Gestapo, he thought. He came almost to a halt and stared apprehensively at the car, like a man about to have his papers checked. This tentative act of submission apparently satisfied the Germans, because the Tatra accelerated and drove off toward the river.
At the edge of the small square that faced the Jiraskuv bridge, he heard running footsteps and moved quickly against the wall of a building, fingers touching the outline of the pistol in his belt. A heavy man, panting hard, came jogging around the corner and stopped dead when he saw Khristo, his eyes lit with fear. “Run!” he whispered, waving him away with both hands. “There’s been a shooting.”
Khristo ran forward into the square, peering into the darkness. There was something midway across the bridge-a dim shape wedged between the roadway and the sidewalk, a man, he realized, sprawled face down in the gutter, the soles of his shoes resting together at an angle, one arm flung forward, the hand white against the gray pavement.
Across the river, a car without lights raced south on Dvorakovo Street, its engine noise rising as it gained speed.
He took a deep breath, then sprinted across the open square, the pounding of his boots echoing against the building facades. Suddenly, a pair of headlights turned a corner at the other end of the bridge, the beams narrowed and intensified by blackout slits. Light fell on the man lying in the street and Khristo knew it was Voluta. The vehicle-he could see it was a Wehrmacht armored car-rolled to a stop and a searchlight mounted atop the roof probed at the body. Khristo heard himself make a wordless exclamation, a small sound of disappointment. He simply stood there for a moment, frozen, unable to think. The shape on the bridge lay still in the spotlight. Finally, he turned his back and walked away, not bothering to run until a static-laden voice crackled from a loudspeaker on the armored car across the bridge and a white beam swept across the deserted square.
As master sergeants, SS Sturmscharfuhrers, Geiske and Helst did the work while the officers took the credit. That was generally the way of the world, and certainly the way of the Gestapo, so you lived with it and kept your mouth shut. There were compensations. In 1934, when they’d joined the Nazi party, they’d been poor men. Now they had a little put by-there were ample opportunities in counterintelligence work, it only remained to have the courage to take advantage of them. The war, they acknowledged, was the best thing that ever happened to either of them. Sturmscharfuhrer Geiske had been a prison guard in Leibnitz when he got the call, while his partner Helst had worked on the Hamburg docks; they’d both risen quite a way up in the world since then. They were heavy, well-fed men; dark and stolid, and they both smoked cigars, so that when they sat side by side in the black Borgward the car sank low on its springs and the interior turned blue-gray with smoke. Their particular war-interrogation cellars, executions-tended to smell bad, and the cigars were a common man’s way of dealing with that. The worst corpse in the world hadn’t a chance when Geiske and Helst lit up.
The battle between the Gestapo and the Czech resistance had been a savage one, and they’d both played a role in its major actions. In 1942, Geiske had taken part in the pursuit of the assassins Gabcik and Kubis-parachuted in by British MI6-who had murdered Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Gestapo intelligence service, by rolling a hand grena
de under his car. Heydrich had survived the initial wounds-fragments of leather upholstery and uniform buried in his spleen-then died of gangrene. Geiske had helped to organize payment of the $600,000 bounty to the Czech who had betrayed the assassination ring, while Helst had assisted in the interrogation of the young man whose confession had ultimately led to its capture-the boy’s collapse under questioning having been facilitated by the presentation of his mother’s severed head. The Gestapo had staged a strong reprisal for Heydrich’s murder, arresting ten thousand people, executing the entire population of Lidice, then leveling the town with explosives.
From their Borgward, parked discreetly just off Jiraskuv Square, Helst and Geiske had observed with interest the unfolding of events on the night of March 24.
A man had loitered briefly on the bridge just before the 9: 00 p.m. curfew, then melted away quickly into a side street.
A second man had walked into the square at 9:15, looked about, then retreated much as the first one did. “Better and better,” Geiske remarked. Patiently, they waited for the fallback meeting. Entirely unprofessional to have it at the same location, but the two sergeants had seen stranger things in their time. Perhaps a poorly contrived black market exchange, perhaps a situation where extreme necessity had outdistanced caution. Either way, a plus for them.
Geiske grunted with satisfaction when the first one showed up again at 10:10.
This time he walked onto the bridge with great determination, ignoring the fact that he was alone and there were no crowds to protect him, carrying it off as best he could. Then the Tatra appeared, moving slowly into the square. Geiske and Helst sat forward expectantly-the chemistry of the situation had altered with the addition of the car. “Ah,” Helst said, “he gets in.” But he did not. The Tatra slowed to a crawl as it reached the man on the bridge, someone in the back seat rolled a window down an inch or two. The man on the bridge glanced at the Tatra and there was a muffled report inside the car and he collapsed, falling forward. He made no move to shield himself as he fell; the marksman had been perfect.