by Alan Furst
The blond girl colored and looked down at her shoes. The dark one found him a tiny cup and filled it with coffee, adding a shapeless chunk of sugar from a paper sack. She offered him a piece of twig to use as a stirrer, explaining, “They have locked up the spoons somewhere. And of course there is nothing to pay. We share with you.”
“You are kind,” he said. The coffee was sharp and hot and strong.
“There is only a little left,” the dark girl said. “You won’t tell, will you? “
“Never. It’s our secret.” He drew an X over his heart with one finger and she smiled.
The symphonic music faded away, replaced by a voice speaking Russian: “Good morning, this is the world news service of Radio Moscow.”
Szara looked at his watch. It was exactly five-thirty, that made it seven-thirty Moscow time. The announcer’s voice was low and smooth and reasonable-one need not concern oneself too much with the news it broadcast; somewhere in the Kremlin all was being carefully seen to. There was a reference to a communique, to a meeting of the Central Committee, then the news that some forty divisions of the Red Army had entered Poland along a five-hundred-mile front. In general they had been welcomed, there was no fighting to speak of, little resistance was expected. Foreign Minister Molotov had announced that “events rising from the Polish-German war have revealed the internal insolvency and obvious impotence of the Polish state.” There was great concern that some “unexpected contingency” could “create a menace to the Soviet Union.” Molotov had gone on to say that the Soviet government “could not remain indifferent to the fate of its blood brothers, the Ukrainians and Byelorussians inhabiting Poland.” The announcer continued for some time; the phrasing was careful, precise. All had been thought out. War and instability in a neighboring state posed certain dangers; the army was simply moving up to a point where the occupation of contested territory would insulate Soviet citizens from fighting and civil disorders. The announcer went on to give other foreign news, local news, and the temperature-forty-eight degrees-in Moscow.
Later that morning news came from Lvov that the Germans were preparing to leave the city. A great wave of excitement and relief swept over the population of the Krynica-Zdroj, and it was determined that a column would be formed-Ukrainian bands continued their offensive; several travelers were known to have disappeared-to make the journey into town. A light but steady rain was deemed to be of no importance; the spa had an ample supply of black umbrellas and these were distributed by the smiling caretaker, Tomasz. The diplomatic corps made every effort to appear at its best-men shaved and powdered, women pinned up their hair, formal suits were dug out of trunks and suitcases. The procession was led by Tomasz, wearing an elegant little hat with an Alpine brush in the band, and the commercial counselor of the Belgian embassy in Warsaw, carrying a broomstick with a white linen table napkin mounted at one end, a flag of neutrality.
It was a long line of men and women beneath bobbing black umbrellas that advanced down the sandy road to Lvov. The fields were bright green and the smell of black earth and mown hay was sharp and sweet in the rainy air. The spirit of the group was supremely optimistic. Prevailing views were concentrated on the possibility of a diplomatic resolution of the Polish crisis as well as on cigarettes, coffee, soap, perhaps even roast chicken or cream cake; whatever might be had in newly liberated Lvov.
Szara marched near the end of the column. The people around him were of various opinions about the Soviet advance, news of which had spread like wildfire. Most thought it good news: Stalin informing Hitler that, despite their expedient pact, enough was enough. It was felt that a period of intense diplomacy would now take place and, no matter the final result of the German invasion, they could go home. To Szara there was something infinitely Polish about the scene, these people in their dark and formal clothing marching along a narrow road in the rain beneath a forest of umbrellas. Toward the end of the six-mile walk, some of the diplomats were tiring, and it was determined that everybody should sing- “The Marseillaise” as it turned out, the one song they all knew. True, it was the national anthem of a recently declared belligerent, but they were advancing under a white flag, and for raising the spirits on a rainy day there simply wasn’t anything better. Vainshtok and Szara marched together; the former, his shoulder holster abandoned for the journey, thrust his clenched fist into the air and sang like a little fury in a high, wavering voice.
Szara didn’t sing. He was too busy thinking. Trying to sort a series of images in his mind that might, if he found the organizing principle, come together to form a single, sharp picture. Beria’s ascension, Abramov’s murder, the suicide of Kuscinas, the Okhrana dossier, Baumann’s arrest: it all ended with forty Russian divisions marching into Poland. Stalin did this, he thought. Stalin did what? Szara had no name for it. And that made him angry. Wasn’t he smart enough to understand what had been done? Maybe not.
What he did know was that he had been part of it, witness to it, though mostly by accident. He didn’t like coincidence, life had taught him to be suspicious of it, but he was able to recall moment after moment when he’d seen and heard, when he’d known-often from the periphery but known nonetheless-what was going on. Why me, then? he demanded of himself. The answer hurt: because nobody took you very seriously. Because you were seen to be a kind of educated fool. Because you were useful in a minor but not very important way, you were permitted to see things and to find out about things in the same way a lady’s maid is permitted to know about a love affair: whatever she may think about it doesn’t matter.
What he needed, Szara thought, was to talk it out. To say the words out loud. But the one person he could trust, General Bloch, had disappeared from his life. Dead? In flight? He didn’t know.
” ‘Aux armes, citoyens!’ “ Beside him, Vainshtok sang passionately to the cloudy Polish heavens.No, Szara thought. Let him be.
In the city, people stood soberly in the square that faced the ruined railroad station and watched in silence as the Wehrmacht marched west, back toward Germany. It was so quiet that the sound of boots and horses’ hooves on the cobblestones, the creak of leather and the jangle of equipment, sounded unnaturally loud as the companies moved past. Some of the infantrymen glanced at the crowd as they went by, their faces showing little more than impersonal curiosity. The diplomats stood under their umbrellas alongside the Poles and watched the procession. To Szara they seemed a little lost. There was nobody to call on, nobody to whom a note could be handed; for the moment they had been deprived of their natural element.
The normal progress of the withdrawal was broken only by a single, strange interlude in the gray order of march: the Germans had stolen a circus. They were taking it away with them. Its wagons, decorated with curlicues and flourishes in brilliant gold on a dark red field, bore the legend Circus Goldenstein, and the reins were held by unsmiling Wehrmacht drivers, who looked slightly absurd managing the plumed and feathered horses. Szara wondered what had become of the clowns and the acrobats. They were nowhere to be seen, only the animals were in evidence. Behind the bars of a horse-drawn cage Szara saw a sleepy tiger, its chin sunk on its forepaws, its green-slit eyes half closed as it rolled past the crowd lining the street.
Toward evening, the diplomats walked back down the sandy road to the spa. Two days later, a Russian tank column rolled into the city.
Behind the tanks came the civil administration: the NKVD, the political commissars, and their clerks. The clerks had lists. They included the membership of all political parties, especially the socialists-Polish, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Jewish. The clerks also had the names of trade union members, civil servants, policemen, forestry workers, engineers, lawyers, university students, peasants with more than a few animals, refugees from other countries, landowners, teachers, commercial traders, and scores of other categories, particularly those, like stamp dealers and collectors, who habitually had correspondence with people outside the country. So the clerks knew who they wanted the day they arrived a
nd immediately set to work to find the rest, seizing all civil, tax, educational, and commercial records. Individuals whose names appeared on the lists, and their families, were to be deported to the Soviet Union in freight trains, eventually to be put to work in forced labor battalions. Factories were to be disassembled and sent east to the industrial centers of the USSR, stores stripped of their inventories, farms of their livestock.
Special units of the NKVD Foreign Department arrived as well, some of them turning up at the spa, their black Pobedas spattered with mud up to the door handles. The diplomats were to be sorted out and sent on their way home as soon as the western half of Poland conceded victory to Germany. “Be calm,” the operatives said. “Warsaw will surrender any day now, the Poles can’t hold out much longer.” The Russians were soft-spoken and reassuring. Most of the diplomats were relieved. A registration table was set up in the dining room with two polite men in civilian clothes sitting behind it.
Szara and Vainshtok waited until five o’clock before they joined the line. Vainshtok was philosophical. “Back to dear old Berlin.” He sighed. “And dear old Dr. Goebbels’s press conferences. How I’ve lived without them I don’t know. But, at least, there’ll be something for dinner besides beets.”
Vainshtok was skinny and hollow-chested, with thin, hairy arms and legs. He reminded Szara of a spider. “Do you really care so much what you eat? ” Szara asked. The line moved forward a pace. “You certainly don’t get fat.”
“Terror,” Vainshtok explained. “That’s what keeps me thin. I eat plenty, but I burn it up.”
The man in front of them, a minor Hungarian noble of some sort, stepped up to the table, stood at rigid attention, and, announcing his name and title, presented his diplomatic credentials. Szara got a good look at the two operatives at the table. One was young and alert and very efficient. He had a ledger open in front of him and copied out the information from documents and passports. The other seemed rather more an observer, in attendance only in case of some special circumstance beyond the expertise of his partner. The observer was a short, heavy man, middle-aged, with wavy fair hair and extremely thick glasses. As his junior questioned the Hungarian in diplomatic French-“May I ask, sir, how you managed to find your way to this area? “-he put an oval cigarette in the center of his lips, creased the head of a wooden match with his thumbnail, and lit the cigarette from the flare.
Where? Szara asked himself.
The Hungarian’s French was primitive. “Left Warsaw on late train. Night in eight September …”
Where?
The observer glanced at Szara, but seemed to take no special notice of him.
“Stopping in Lublin …” said the Hungarian.
“I don’t feel well,” Szara said confidentially. “You go ahead.” He turned and walked out of the dining room. Maneuvered his way through the crowded lobby, excusing himself as he bumped into people, and took the passageway that led to the hydrotherapy pool and the treatment areas in the basement. The spiral staircase was made of thin metal, and his footsteps clattered and echoed in the stairwell as he descended. He took the first exit, walking quickly through a maze of long tile halls, trying doors as he went. At last one opened. This was a water room of some sort; the ceiling, floor, and walls were set with pale green tiles, hoses hung from brass fittings, and a canvas screen shielded a row of metal tables. The screen had a series of rubber-rimmed apertures in it-for arthritic ankles to be sprayed with sulfurous water? He hiked himself up onto a metal table, took a deep breath, tried to calm down.
Where, he now realized, was in some lost Belgian mining town the night that Odile was debriefed after she got off the train from Germany. The observer was the man with the gold watch; Szara remembered him lighting a cigarette off a match flare, remembered him asking a single question: “Is that your answer?” Some such thing. Intimidation. A cold, watery stare.
And so? So he’d turned up at the Krynica-Zdroj, sitting behind a table with a ledger on it. So? That’s probably what he did with his life. Szara resisted a shiver. The little room was clammy, its air much too still, a cavern buried in the earth. What was wrong with him, running away like a frightened child? Was that all it took to panic him, two operatives sitting at a table? Now he’d have to go back upstairs and join the line; they’d seen him leave, perhaps it would make them suspicious. See how you incriminate yourself! No, there was nothing to fear. What could they do, surrounded by a crowd of diplomats. He hopped off the table and left the room. Now, which hallway led where.
He wandered a little distance toward where he thought the exit was, stopped dead when he heard footsteps on the staircase. Who was this? A normal, deliberate descent. Then Vainshtok, nasal and querulous: “Andre Aronovich? Andre Aronovich!”
Vainshtok, from the sound of it, was walking down the corridor at right angles to where he stood. “I’m over here,” Szara said.
Coming around the corner, Vainshtok signaled with his eyes and a nod of the head that someone was behind him, but Szara could see no one. “I’ve come to say good-bye,” he said, then reached out suddenly and took Szara in his arms, a powerful hug in the Russian style. Szara was startled, found himself pulled hard against Vainshtok’s chest, then tried to return the embrace, but Vainshtok backed away. Two men turned the corner into the hallway, then waited politely for farewells to be said. “So,” Vainshtok said, “let those who can, do what they must, eh?” He winked. Szara felt the bulging weight between his side and the waistband of his trousers and understood everything. Vainshtok saw the expression on his face and raised his eyebrows like a comedian. “You know, Szara, you’re not such a snob after all. You’ll come and see me when you get to Moscow?”
“Not Berlin?”
“Nah. Enough!”
“Lucky for you.”
“That’s it.” His eyes glistened.
He turned abruptly and walked away. When he reached the end of the corridor, he turned toward the staircase, followed by one of the men. A moment later Szara heard them climbing the stairs. As the other man came to join him, Szara saw that it was Maltsaev, dark and balding, wearing tinted eyeglasses and the same voluminous overcoat wrapped about him, his hands thrust deep in the pockets. He nodded at Szara with evident satisfaction. “The wandering troubadour-at last!” he said merrily.
Szara looked puzzled.
“You’ve given Moscow fits,” Maltsaev explained. “One moment you’re landing at Warsaw airfield, the next, nothing, air.”
“A detour,” Szara said. “I was, how shall I put it, escorted by Polish military intelligence. They picked me up at a hospital in Tarnow, after a bombing on the rail line, and drove me to Nowy Sacz. Then we couldn’t get through the German lines. Eventually, I managed to cling to the platform of a train that was going to Lvov. Once I got there, a policeman sent me out here to the spa, with the diplomats.”
Maltsaev nodded sympathetically. “Well, everything’s going to be fine now. I’m up here on some liaison assignment with the Ukrainian apparat, but they wired me in Belgrade to keep an eye out for the missing Szara. I’m afraid you’ll have to go into the city and tell some idiot colonel the whole saga, but that shouldn’t trouble you too much.”
“No, I don’t mind,” he said.
“Your friend Vainshtok’s going back to Moscow. Probably you won’t have to. I would imagine you’d prefer to stay in Paris.”
“If I can, I’d like to, yes.”
“Lucky. Or favored. Someday you’ll tell me your secret.”
Szara laughed.
Maltsaev’s mood changed, he lowered his voice. “Look, you didn’t mind, I hope, the last time we spoke, at the station in Geneva …”
Szara remembered perfectly, a remark about Abramov: his parents should have made him study the violin like all the rest of them. “I understand completely,” he said. “A difficult time.”
“We’re none of us made of iron. What happened with Abramov, well, we only wanted to talk with him. We were certainly prepared to do more, but
it would never have come to that if he hadn’t tried to run. We couldn’t, you understand these things, we couldn’t let him disappear. As it was, I got a thorough roasting for the whole business. Any hope of getting out of the embassy in Belgrade-there it went. For the near future certainly. Anyhow, what I said at the station … I hadn’t slept, and I knew I was in trouble, maybe a lot of trouble. But I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”
Szara held up a hand. “Please. I don’t hold a grudge.”
Maltsaev seemed relieved. “Can we go back upstairs? Maybe get you a decent dinner in Lvov before you have to see the colonel? I’d rather not try the Polish roads in the dark if I don’t have to. Driving through the Ukraine was bad enough, especially with Soviet armor on the roads.”
“Let’s go.”
“It smells awful down here.” Maltsaev wrinkled his nose like a kid.
“Sulfur. Just like in hell.”
Maltsaev snorted with amusement. “Is that how they cure you! Sinner, cease your drinking and depravity or here’s how it will be.”
They walked together along the corridor toward the stairway. “Your friends are waiting for us?” Szara asked.
“Fortunately, no. Those guys make me nervous.”
They came to the spiral staircase. “Is there a subbasement?” Maltsaev asked, peering down.
“Yes. There’s a pool in it, and the springs are there somewhere.”
“Just every little thing you’d want. Ah, the life of the idle rich.” He gestured for Szara to precede him up the steps.