by Alan Furst
The Tatra accelerated, then turned right at the end of the bridge. Helst snatched the radio handset from beneath the dashboard and reached another unit almost immediately. “For you, my friend,” he said in a low voice, “a Tatra headed south on Dvorakovo.”
“I’ll go see to the other one,” Geiske said, hauling himself out of the car. He trotted toward one of the side streets and, sure enough, here came the second one, right on schedule. Geiske didn’t want him in the square. The Wehrmacht clods in their armored car at the other end of the bridge would likely shoot him, and he didn’t want him shot-not just yet. “Run!” he called out. “There’s been a shooting.”
But the second man was as much of a fool as the first, for he went charging off into the square without hesitation. Geiske shrugged and let him go, stepping back into a shadowed doorway and waiting to see what would happen. But the Wehrmacht boys held their fire, simply squawked at him over their loudspeaker and tried to pin him down with a searchlight. Lately, he had noticed, they were all teenage recruits, green as grass and barely trained. He breathed a sigh of relief as the man came back out of the square in a hurry. Perhaps not such a fool after all.
Geiske counted slowly to sixty, then sauntered on after him. He had little hope of being able to follow the man for very long-not alone, not in a city where the streets veered and twisted in a devil’s maze-but his professional instincts were challenged and he decided to give it his best effort. Helst would understand, you had to take chances now and then, and he was extremely curious about this one, about where he might be headed. He could have arrested him on the spot, but these bastards worked on a certain principle: if I don’t come back on time, they’ve got me. That made it damned difficult to find their friends, no matter how hard you worked in the cellar.
But Geiske was lucky. The man ahead of him appeared to be in some sort of daze. He just went slogging along for a time, street after street, taking no elusive action at all. There was one bad moment, when he climbed down a ladder onto a disused spur of railroad track that headed out into the factory district, but Geiske counted again and climbed down after him, then followed at a distance, picking his way along the track among the weed-choked ties. The man in front of him never stopped dead, never turned around, seemed to believe he was alone in the world. Geiske gave himself a bit of credit for that-he could walk like a cat when he had to. But it was the man himself who made the pursuit possible. When Geiske halted for a moment to listen, the sound of his footsteps never faltered. Geiske the sergeant was delighted by such stupidity, though Geiske the hunter, he admitted to himself, was perhaps a little disappointed.
As he entered the factory district at the eastern edge of the city, the smoke and fog seemed especially thick and, at the point where the man ahead of him suddenly left the tracks, the smell of burning was particularly bad. They were really catching it tonight, Geiske thought, up north on the Oder where the Russians were working their massed artillery. The entire eastern border was likely on fire, judging from what drifted south. Worse yet, he was below a loading dock that served some sort of warehouse and the stench of rancid oil in the burnt air very nearly made him gag. He patted a row of cigars in his breast pocket, but of course that was out of the question. The sound of footsteps had disappeared, subject having entered said warehouse. The warehouse part was very encouraging, however, so Geiske tried to take shallow breaths and concentrated on great caches of Czech hams and automobile tires. That would make the whole business quite worthwhile.
He stood at the base of the loading dock for a time and listened carefully to the silence. Now he missed his partner. He was going to have to go groping around in there alone and he didn’t look forward to it. He took a moment to steady his nerve-he’d done this sort of thing many times before. If you kept your wits about you, nothing much could go wrong. He unholstered a Walther automatic and worked the slide, made sure of the pen flashlight in the pocket of his coat, then vaulted up onto the dock.
Getting in quietly turned out to be easy: a sliding door had been left partly open. And, once inside, he realized that finding the man wasn’t going to be a problem either. The first floor of the warehouse was empty-apparently the place was no longer in use-and a faint glow at the far end indicated a candle burning behind a windowed partition in what must have once been the shipping office. But, candle or not, a sea of darkness lay between him and his quarry and he would have to cross it blind-a flashlight in this black hellhole would shine out like a beacon.
He decided to have done with the whole nasty business and walked forward across the warped floorboards at a normal pace. The man in the office might come out at any moment, he too might have a flashlight and a weapon, and Geiske could move quickly as well as silently.
There was no warning. One moment he was walking, the next he was in space, falling head first, arms flailing. At the basement level, his head struck a charred beam-end that before the fire had been part of the flooring. The blow reversed his rotation so that when he hit the concrete subbasement he landed full on his back. He never screamed, though it took a long second to fall thirty feet, but when he hit the concrete the force of landing blew the breath from his lungs and made a sound like the roar of an animal in an empty cavern. He understood what had happened, understood that a fire had caused the warehouse to be abandoned, had burned through the first floor and the basement, and he called himself several kinds of fool just before he died.
“And did you think, perhaps, that just because I let you play between my legs that I was not a patriot?”
Magda did not look at him, her eyes never left the mirror as she prepared to go to war. She had arrayed, on the dressing table, every weapon in her armory: paints, powders, creams, brushes, pencils, tweezers, miniature bottles of scent, and a frightful device that curled her eyelashes upward. Hands darting here and there, she worked like an artist in a frenzy of creation. “That I might refuse you this? That I even could?” she went on. She pressed the end of her finger against the mouth of one of the scent bottles, made a dot on her wrist, shook her arm in the air, sniffed herself, waved some more, sniffed again, made a face, then went on to the next bottle and began the process all over again. “Whatever else you may be, you are a thorough idiot about women,” she said, pausing to color an eyelid blue, “about Czech women certainly.”
He had stood outside Magda’s flat in the early hours of the morning. Her husband, she had once told him, was a postman. When he saw a postman-a strutting little man with a cavalry mustache, something of the old Austro-Hungarian bureaucrat about him-march off to work, he’d taken the chance and knocked on her door. Explained to her what needed to be done, telling her as little as possible about himself, but insisting on the danger of it. “You could regret it,” he had said.
She was affronted that he did not know she would do what he asked of her. As would her friends. A neighbor boy had been dispatched with what amounted to a queen’s message to her most favored ladies-in-waiting. When the boy returned, to accept a half-crown piece and a kiss that widened his eyes, the answer was yes in every case.
At which news she turned to him triumphantly and said, “So!” Gimlet-eyed, cheeks rouged in circles, lips carmine, something like a witch in a pageant, he thought, she announced, “Now you see what we are made of!” When her hair was brushed out in a wild blond spray, she began the lengthy process of pinning it up, driving each hairpin home with a determined thrust of her index finger. Next she ran about in her underwear, rummaging through her wardrobe, a final show for him before he left Prague. No matter what else might be going on, she wanted him to suffer a little for giving her up.
They gathered at midafternoon on March 25, a strange exfiltration team indeed, he thought, Uta and Erma and Marie and Bibi-he never knew which one was which-in a staggering variety of feathers and scarves and little hats and tail-biting fox furs slung carelessly around their powdered necks, and the little balding cab-driver called Rudi, who was already drunk and lurched between hysterical lust,
surrounded by so much delicious flesh, and quaking terror, in contemplation of what he was about to do. His taxicab was a modified Skoda-a barrel of kerosene mounted on struts where the trunk had once been, a pungent black cloud boiling from the exhaust pipe when he started the thing up.
Because the taxi had no trunk, they put Khristo on the floor in front of the back seat, covered their laps and him with a giant eiderdown quilt, and rested their feet on his back. Thus he went to Bratislava.
They had told him, in Bari, that he should get out if he thought the Germans were on to him. “You might last a week,” they told him, “on the roofs and in the alleys, but it’s just a matter of time.” They had told him, if he was betrayed or identified or under suspicion, to go south to the Tatra Mountains, to join a partizan group and wait for Patton’s Third Army.
Well, Bratislava was south, at the foot of the Little Carpathians. And Voluta had died because there was more to the message than could be written on a slip of paper, so he had to ask himself what it might have been that could not be committed to writing. A request, he thought, please do this. And doing this did not just mean passing the information on to an intelligence service. Voluta, he believed, had been in Poland. When the Russians took over-people in Prague had spoken of it with fear in their eyes-he’d had to run. There was no plan, no technical arrangement, for him to go from Warsaw to Prague-the old escape route for Protestants fleeing religious persecution, across the Krknose Mountains in northern Czechoslovakia. He had just set out to walk it. And the Russians had got onto him. It was not the Gestapo in the automobile he had seen driving away from the bridge, of that he was sure. Then, there were the mechanics of the meeting itself-poorly planned, the work of a sick, exhausted man. He realized that Voluta, a lifelong craftsman of clandestine practice, had acted, in his last hours, like an amateur. No matter. Voluta, through his friends, had contrived to give him his freedom from prison and, years later, had died trying to tell him, tell him, in human words and not in secret notes, that Sascha Vonets had to be collected.
He could, perhaps, defend the decision to terminate FELDSPAR. The man who had fallen into the subbasement had been an SS Sturmscharfuhrer, a Gestapo sergeant. He would do as a reason if reasons were, sometime, to matter. And, somewhere, well back in the chain, was Ilya Goldman-for who else could have reached down into the Gulag system? BF 825 had finally become real, had taken on a life of its own, and he was now a prisoner of its obligations. That did not much worry him. What did was that Voluta had known where he was. The system that had contrived and supported the FELDSPAR mission had been somehow penetrated-by a friendly service, it was true, but who in turn might have a view of their operations? They were brave, the Americans, and ingenious to a fault, but they neither liked nor understood security. That took an iron fist, and they and their forefathers had fled the iron fists of the world since the beginning of their country.
He did not know what the OSS would think about it, would think about some colonel who said he would be in Sfintu Gheorghe on 12 April with what he claimed to be depth intelligence on NKVD personnel and actions. There were a million pieces of information every day in a war, like fish in the sea. Which one is the right fish? Someone, somewhere, would make a decision, a practical decision, a logistical decision, a political decision, finally, based on who had what power at any given moment, based-because the USSR was an ally-on the levantine politics of alliance, based on the positions of the planets and the stars. If it were one sort of a decision, they would be at Sfintu Gheorghe.
If not, not.
In the mad taxi, the first bottle of plum brandy was long gone by the time they got to Vlasim, the second well down before they reached Brno. German roadblocks stopped them every few miles because they were headed east, headed straight into the war, headed into Malinovsky’s Second Ukrainian Front that had swept up from the Danube and fought its way across the Dukla Pass in the Carpathians to attack the town of Nitra, only forty miles north and east of Bratislava.
Magda, in the front seat next to Rudi, took charge at the roadblocks. “We are on our way to a party, to see our Wehrmacht friends in Bratislava.” One last bash, apparently. The Germans saw no good reason to stop them. Khristo lay beneath the eiderdown and listened to the exchanges, his nose full of the mingled aromas of powder, scent, sweat and the alcoholic fume of the brandy. Driving away from the roadblocks, Rudi’s taxi left a pall of kerosene smoke as it went weaving back and forth across the road, making Khristo slightly seasick with unexpected swerves he could not balance against. Time and again, German military trucks and tanks drove them off the pavement while the women screamed with laughter at all the bouncing and jouncing and Rudi swore like a little madman.
Encountering them, some of the German sentries laughed wildly and shouted their approval in very graphic terms. They knew that Malinovsky was coming, they knew what would happen to them, yet behold these bosomy Czech girls, off to ficker their German boyfriends one last time. Twilight of the gods-spring, 1945. It appealed to their sense of doom.
Waved through the roadblock, the Skoda sputtered to life and off they went again, the women screaming at Rudi, insulting or praising his manhood. Rudi drove the taxi and they drove Rudi, singing dirty songs and working their way through a third bottle, pouring some down the driver to keep his courage afloat as the road began to curve and climb.
At one of the last sentry posts, a hand reached in through the back window and lifted the edge of the quilt where it lay over the knees of the woman closest to the door. Khristo froze, stopped breathing as the upper corner of his hiding place was peeled back. Then came the sound of a hand being slapped, six inches from his ear, followed by a raucous bedroom chuckle. “Bad Fritzi!” said a voice above him. “Trying to look up my dress? Shame on you and your naughty eyes, what would your dear Mutter say if she knew? ” There was more laughter, both within and without the car; the window was rolled back up and the taxi rumbled off, swerving back and forth across the road to Bratislava.
In Bratislava, they had boys strung up on the lamppost standards. These were not the old-timers, the ones who’d been in Russia and learned to survive anything; these were conscripts, sixteen and seventeen, and they’d faced the Russian guns and realized that Hitler was finished and nobody wanted to be the last one to die in the war. So they’d scampered over the nearest hill, planning to live in the woods like boy scouts until all the scary stuff was over and they could go home. The Gestapo caught most of them. Bound them hand and foot and hung them on short ropes from the lamppost standards, their shoes only six inches from the ground, each one wearing a hand-lettered paper sign around his neck on a string: Der Uberlaufer, “I am a deserter”-in the same way they used to make them wear the I am a dunce sign in school. Their eyes were wide open.
What worried Khristo in Bratislava was being dragooned by the Wehrmacht, given a rifle, and told to hold a position. His papers might be good here if he talked fast and convinced somebody that he didn’t need a travel pass outside Prague, but he wasn’t willing to chance it. They were getting ready to die in Bratislava and it had made them very serious. The city was much too quiet. He found an alley behind a bombed-out house, crawled down a hole into a watery basement, and waited until after midnight to move any farther.
The city was blacked out and deserted. Now and then he could hear the whine and rumble of tanks changing positions; the Second Ukrainian Front was shelling Nitra, forty miles away, coloring the night clouds with a reddish cast, but that was all, even the insects were silent here. He worked his way through the darkness, past German street patrols, and discovered an abandoned shed at the western edge of the docks where he had a clear view of the river.
By a slight shimmer of moonlight he could see the slow eddies and whorls the river made when the current ran full in the spring. This was the Czech Dunaj; it would be the Hungarian Duna in a few miles, then the Dunav in Yugoslavian Serbia, the Dunarea in Romania, then the Dunaj again, in Bulgaria, but it was all the same river, the Danube.
He recognized this water, the rhythm of its slow, heavy course, the way it gathered the night’s darkness and ran black. For a long time he leaned against a wooden beam in the shed and watched it flow past him.
He was isolated-for the first time in a very long time, he realized. The J-E radio he had destroyed according to specifications-smashed to bits and distributed piecemeal along a mile of canal in Prague. For the moment, Magda and her friends knew where he was, but he would leave here soon, and then no one would know. He needed a boat-the low shapes of hulls along the dock were just visible in the quarter moon-almost anything would do. He would make it, he told himself. He knew the river and, if he survived the initial part of the journey, he would know people along the river. He was a thousand miles from Sfintu Gheorghe; he had seventeen days to get there. He checked the current again, watched the white curl of water at the foot of a pier stanchion. A spring current. He could do it.
He would have to cross the Russian lines, would have to go through the white water at the Iron Gate, where the Duna came crashing down onto the Wallachian plain to form the border between Romania and Bulgaria. He would have to negotiate the delta, up in Bessarabian Romania, a thousand square miles of meandering, reed-choked channels. He would have to go past Vidin, past his mother and father and sister, if they were alive, without seeing them. For their own safety he would have to do that. But from the river he would send his spirit to see them; it was something, better than nothing. Probably, he thought, I should not permit myself to feel this way, to feel this hope. There were German soldiers hanging from lampposts in the streets of Bratislava, and the outlines of the riverport cranes were broken, twisted skeletons from the American bombing, but he knew this river, he had left a part of himself with it all these years, and he was surprised to find that it was still there waiting for him.