by Alan Furst
The clothing had been packed on top, folded loosely but perfectly, as though by someone with a long history of military service, someone to whom the ordered neatness of a footlocker was second nature. It was good clothing, carefully preserved, often mended but terribly worn, its wear the result of repeated washings and long use in hard country. Cotton underdrawers and wool shirts, a thick sailor’s sweater darned at the elbows, heavy wool socks with virtually transparent heels.
The service revolver dated from prerevolutionary days, a Nagant, the double-action officer’s model, 7.62mm from a design of 1895. It was well oiled and fully loaded. From certain characteristics, Szara determined that the sidearm had had a long and very active life. The lanyard ring at the base of the grip had been removed and the surface filed flat, and the metal at the edges of the sharp angles, barrel opening, cylinder, the trigger itself, was silvery and smooth. A look down the barrel showed it to be immaculate, cleaned not with the usual brick dust-an almost religious (and thereby ruinous) obsession with the peasant infantry of the Great War-but with a scouring brush of British manufacture folded in a square of paper. Not newspaper, for that told of where you had been and when you were there. Plain paper. A careful man.
The books were also from the time before the revolution, the latest printing date 1915; and Szara handled them with reverence for they were no longer to be had. Dobrilov’s lovely essays on noble estates, Ivan Krug’s Poems at Harvest, Gletkhin’s tales of travel among the Khivani, Pushkin of course, and a collection by one Churnensky, Letters from a Distant Village, which Szara had never heard of. These were companions of journey, books to be read and read again, books for a man who lived in places where books could not be found. Eagerly, Szara paged through them, looking for commentary, for at least an underlined passage, but there was, as he’d expected, not a mark to be found.
Yet the most curious offering of the opened satchel was its odor. Szara could not really pin it down, though he held the sweater to his face and breathed in it. He could identify a hint of mildew, woodsmoke, the sweetish smell of pack animals, and something else, a spice perhaps, cloves or cardamom, that suggested the central Asian marketplace. It had been carried in the satchel for a long time, for its presence touched the books and the clothing and the leather itself. Why? Perhaps to make spoiled food more palatable, perhaps to add an ingredient of civilization to life in general. On this point he could make no decision.
Szara was sufficiently familiar with the practices of intelligence services to know that chronology meant everything. “May God protect and keep the czar” at the end of a letter meant one thing in 1916, quite another in 1918. With regard to the time of “the officer,” for Szara discovered himself using that term, the satchel’s contents offered an Austrian map of the southern borders of the Caspian Sea dated 1919. The cartography had certainly begun earlier (honorary Bolshevik names were missing), but the printing date allowed Szara to write on a piece of hotel stationery “alive in 1919.” Checking the baggage tag once again, he noted “tentative terminal date, 8 February 1935.” A curious date, following by two months and some days the assassination of Sergei Kirov at the Smolny Institute in St. Petersburg, 1 December 1934, which led to the first round of purges under Yagoda.
A terminal date? Yes, Szara thought, this man is dead.
He simply knew it. And, he felt, much earlier than 1935. Somehow, another hand had recovered the satchel and moved it to the left-luggage room of a remote Prague railway station that winter. Infinite permutations were of course possible, but Szara suspected that a life played out in the southern extremity of the Soviet empire had ended there. The Red Army had suppressed the pasha’s risings in 1923. If the officer, perhaps a military adviser to one of the local rulers, had survived those wars, he had not left the region. There was nothing of Europe that had not been packed on some night in, Szara guessed, 1920.
That the satchel itself had survived was a kind of miracle, though presently Szara came upon a rather more concrete possibility-the stitching on the bottom lining. This was not the same hand that had lovingly and expertly crafted the seams. The reattachment had been managed as best it could be done, with waxed thread sewn into a cruciform shape anchoring each corner. So, the officer carried more than books and clothes. Szara remembered what Renate Braun had said in the lobby of Khelidze’s hotel: “It is for you.” Not old maps, books, and clothing certainly, and not a Nagant pistol. What was now “his” lay beneath the satchel’s false bottom in a secret compartment.
Szara called the desk and had a bottle of vodka sent up. He sensed a long, difficult night ahead of him-the city of Prague was bad enough, the officer’s doomed attempt to survive history didn’t make things any better. He must, Szara reasoned, have been a loyal soldier in the czar’s service, thus fugitive after the revolution in 1917. Perhaps he’d fought alongside White Guardist elements in the civil war. Then flight, always southeast, into central Asia, as the Red Army advanced. The history of that place and time was as evil as any Szara knew-Basmatchi, the marauding bandits of the region, Baron Ungarn-Sternberg, a sadist and a madman, General Ma and his Muslim army; rape, murder, pillage, captives thrown into locomotive boilers to die in the steam. He suspected that this man, who carried a civilized little library and carefully darned the elbows of his sweater, had died in some unremembered minor skirmish during those years. There were times when a bullet was the best of all solutions. Szara found himself hoping it had been that way for the officer.
The vodka helped. Szara was humming a song by the time he had his razor out, sawing away at the thick bands of crisscrossed thread. The officer was no fool. Who, Szara wondered, did he think to deceive with this only too evident false bottom contrivance? Perhaps the very densest border patrolman or the most slow-witted customs guard. The NKVD workshops did this sort of thing quite well, leaving only the slimmest margin for secreting documents and disguising the false bottom so that you really could not tell. On the other hand, the officer had likely done what he could, used the only available hiding place and hoped for the best. Yes, Szara understood him now, better and better; the sewn-down corners revealed a sort of determination in the face of hopeless circumstances, a quality Szara admired above all others. Having cut loose the final corner, he had to use a nail file to pry up the leather flap.
What had he hoped to find? Not this. A thick stack of grayish paper, frayed at the edges, covered with a careful pen scrawl of stiff Russian phrases-the poetry of bureaucrats. It was official paper, a bluntly printed letterhead announcing its origin as Bureau of Information, Third Section, Department of State Protection (Okhrannoye Otdyelyenye), Ministry of the Interior, Transcaucasian District, with a street address in Tbilisi-the Georgian city of Tiflis.
A slow, sullen disappointment drifted over Szara’s mood. He carried the vodka bottle over to the window and watched as a freight train crawled slowly away from the railway station, its couplings clanking and rattling as the cars jerked into motion. The officer was not a noble colonel or a captain of cavalry but a slow-footed policeman, no doubt a cog in the czar’s vast but inefficient secret police gendarmerie, the Okhrana, and this sheaf of misery on the hotel desk apparently represented a succession of cases, a record of agents provocateurs, payments to petty informers, and solemn physical descriptions of Social Revolutionary party workers in the early days of the century. He’d seen this kind of report from time to time, soul-destroying stuff it was, humanity seen through a window by the dim glow of a street lamp, sad and mean and obsessed with endless conspiracies. The thought of it made you want to retire to the countryside with a milk cow and a vegetable patch.
Not a military officer, a police officer. Poor man, he had carried this catalogue of small deceits over mountain and across desert, apparently certain of its value once the counterrevolution had succeeded and some surviving spawn of the Romanovs once again sat upon the Throne of All the Russias. In sorrow more than anger Szara soothed his frustrated imagination with two tiltings of the vodka bottle. A pape
r creature, he thought. A uniform with a man in it.
He walked back to the desk and adjusted the gooseneck lamp. The organization Messame Dassy (Third Group) had been founded in 1893, of Social Democratic origin and purpose, in political opposition to Meori Dassy (Second Group)-Szara sighed at such grotesque hair-splitting-and made its views known in pamphlets and the newspaper Kvali (The Furrow). Known principals of the organization included N. K. Jordania, K. K. Muridze, G. M. Tseretelli. The informant DUBOK (it meant “little oak” and had gone on to become the name for a dead-drop of any kind) enrolled and became active in 1898, at age nineteen.
Szara flipped through the stack of pages, his eye falling randomly on summaries of interviews, memoranda, alterations in handwriting as other officers contributed to the record, receipts for informer payments signed with cover names (not code names like DUBOK; one never knew one’s code name, that belonged to the Masters of the File), a change to typewriter as the case spanned the years and reports were sent traveling upward from district to region to central bureau to ministry to Czar Nicholas and perhaps to God Himself.
Szara’s temples throbbed.
Serves you right! What in the name of heaven had he expected? Swiss francs? Perhaps he had, deep down. Those exquisitely printed passports to anywhere and everything. Idiot! Maybe gold coins? The molten rubies of children’s books? Or a single pressed rose, its last dying fragrance only just discernible?Yes, yes, yes. Any or all of it. His eye fell in misery on the false plate lying on the floor amid a tangle of cut-up thread. He’d learned to sew as a child in Odessa, but this was not the sort of job he could do. How was he to put all this back together again? By employment of the hotel seamstress? The guest in Room 35 requires the false bottom sewed back on his suitcase-hurry woman, he must cross the Polish frontier tonight! A victim of betrayed imagination, Szara cursed and mentally called down the apparat as though summoning evil spirits. He willed Heshel with his sad little smile or Renate Braun with her purse full of skeleton keys, or any of them, gray shapes or cold-eyed intellectuals, to come and take this inhuman pettifoggery away from him before he hurled it out the window.
In fact, where were they?
He glanced at the bottom of the door, expecting a slip of paper to come sliding underneath at that very moment, but all he saw was worn carpet. The world suddenly felt very silent to him, and another visit with the vodka did not change that.
In desperation he shoved the paper to one side and replaced it with sheets of hotel stationery from the desk drawer. If, in the final analysis, the officer did not deserve this vodka-driven storm in the emotional latitudes, the anguished people of Prague most assuredly did.
It was midnight when he finished, and his back hurt like a bastard. But he’d gotten it. The reader would find himself; his street, his neighborhood, his nation. And the hysteria, the nightmare, was where it belonged, just below the horizon so you felt it more than saw it. To balance a story on “the people” he’d have to do one on “the ministry”: quote from Benes, quote from General Vlasy, something vicious from Henlein, and the slant-since the country had been created a parliamentary democracy in 1918 and showed no sign of yearning to become a socialist republic-would have to serve Soviet diplomatic interests by fervid anti-Hitlerism. No problem there. He could file on ministries with one eye shut and the pencil in his ear, and it would mean just about that much. Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus: the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said.
Then, as always happened after he wrote something he liked, the room began to shrink. He stuffed some money in his pocket, pulled up his tie, threw on his jacket, and made his escape. He tried walking, but the wind blowing down from Poland was fierce and the air had the smell of winter, so he waved down a taxi and gave the address of the Luxuria, a nachtlokal where the cabaret was foul and the audience worse, thus exactly where he belonged in his present frame of mind.
Nor was he disappointed. Sitting alone at a tiny table, a glass of flat champagne at his elbow, he smoked steadily and lost himself in the mindless fog of the place, content beneath the soiled cutout of yellow paper pinned to a velvet curtain that served as the Luxuria’s moon-a thin slice, a weary old moon for nights when nothing mattered.
Momo Tsipler and his Wienerwald Companions.
Five of them, including the oldest cellist in captivity, a death-eyed drummer called Rex, and Momo himself, one of those dark celebrities nourished by the shadows east of the Rhine, a Viennese Hungarian in a green tuxedo with a voice full of tears that neither he nor anyone else had ever cried.
“Noch einmal als Abschied dein Handchen mir gib,” sang Momo as the cello sobbed. “Just once again give me your hand to press”- the interior Szara was overjoyed, this horrid syrup was delicious, a wicked joke on itself, an anthem to Viennese love gone wrong. The title of the song was perfect: “There Are Things We Must All Forget.” The violinist had fluffy white hair that stood out in wings and he smiled like Satan himself as he played.
The Companions of the Wienerwald then took up a kind of “drunken elephant” theme for the evening’s main attraction; the enormous Mottel Motkevich, who staggered into the spotlight to a series of rimshots from the drummer and began his famous one-word routine. At first, his body told the story: I just woke up in the maid’s bed with the world’s worst hangover and someone pushed me out onto the stage of a nightclub in Prague. What am I doing here? What are you doing here?
His flabby face sweated in the purple lights-for twenty years he’d looked like he was going to die next week. Then he shaded his eyes and peered around the room. Slowly, recognition took hold. He knew what sort of swine had come out to the nachtlokal tonight, ah yes, he knew them all too well. “Ja,” he said, confirming the very worst, his thick lips pressed together with grim disapproval.
He began to nod, confirming his observation: drunkards and perverts, dissolution and depravity. He put his hands on his broad hips and stared out at a Yugoslav colonel accompanied by a well-rouged girl in a shiny feather hat that hugged her head tightly. “Ja!” said Mottel Motkevich. There’s no doubt about you two. Likewise to a pair of pretty English boys in plus fours, then to a Captain of Industry caught in the act of schnozzling a sort of teenage dairymaid by his side.
Suddenly, a voice from the shadows in the back of the room: “But Mottel, why not?” Quickly the audience began to shout back at the comedian in a stew of European languages: “Is it bad?” “Why shouldn’t we?” “What can be so wrong?”
The fat man recoiled, grasped the velvet curtain with one hand, eyes and mouth widening with new understanding. “Ja?” You mean it’s really all right after all? To do just every sort of thing we all know about and some we haven’t figured out yet?
Now came the audience’s great moment. “Ja!” they cried out, again and again; even the waiters joined in.
Poor Mottel actually crumpled under the assault. A world he presumed to love, of order and rectitude, had been torn to shreds before his very eyes and now the truth lay bare. With regret, he bid all that fatuous old nonsense adieu. “Ja, ja,” he admitted ruefully, so it has always been, so it will always be, so, particularly so, will it be tonight.
Just then something extremely interesting caught his eye, something going on behind the curtain to his right, and, eyes glittering like a love-maddened satyr, he bequeathed his audience one final, drawn-out jaaa, then stomped off the stage to applause as the Companions struck up a circus melody and the zebras ran out from behind the curtain, bucking and neighing, pawing their little fore-hooves in the air.
Naked girls in papier-mache zebra masks, actually. Prancing and jiggling among the tables, stopping now and again to stick their bottoms out at the customers, then taking off again with a leap. After a few minutes they galloped away into the wings, the Companions swung into a sedate waltz, and the dancers soon reappeared, without masks and wearing gowns, as Animierdamen who were to flirt with the customers, sit on their
laps, and tickle them into buying champagne by the bottle.
Szara’s was heavy-hipped, with hair dyed a lustrous, sinister black. “Can you guess which zebra was me? I was so very close to you!”
Later he went with her. To a secret room at the top of a cold house where you walked upstairs, then downstairs, across two courtyards where cats lived, finally to climb again, past blind turns and dark passageways, until you came to a low corridor under the roof gables.
“Zebra,” he called her; it made things simpler. He doubted he was the originator of the idea, for she seemed quite comfortable with it. She cantered and whinnied and shook her little white tummy-all for him.
His spirit soared, at last he’d found an island of pleasure in his particular sea of troubles. There were those, he knew, who would have found such sport sorrowful and mean, but what furies did they know? What waited for them on the other sides of doors?
The Zebra owned a little radio; it played static, and also a station that stayed on the air all night long, playing scratchy recordings of Schumann and Chopin from somewhere in the darkness of Central Europe, where insomnia had become something of a religion.
To this accompaniment they made great progress. And delighted themselves by feigning shock at having tumbled into such depths where anything at all may be found to swim. “Ah yes?” cried the Zebra, as though they’d happened on some new and complex amusement, never before attempted in the secret rooms of these cities, as though their daring to play the devil’s own games might stay his hand from that which they knew, by whatever obscure prescience, he meant to do to them all.
Warm and exhausted at last, they dozed off in the smoky room while the radio crackled, faded in and out, voices sometimes whispering to them in unknown languages.
The leaders of the Georgian khvost of the NKVD usually met for an hour or two on Sunday mornings in Alexei Agayan’s apartment on Tverskaya street. Beria himself never came-he was, in some sense, a conspiracy of one-but made his wishes known through Dershani, Agayan, or one of the others. Typically, only the Moscow-based officers attended the meeting, though comrades from the southeast republics stopped by from time to time.