by Alan Furst
“Please,” said Szara, standing back.
“I insist,” Maltsaev said, a parody of aristocratic courtesy.
They both hesitated. To Szara, a long moment. He waited for Maltsaev to climb the stairs but the man stood there, smiling politely; apparently he had all the time in the world. Szara took the gun out and shot him.
He expected a huge, ringing explosion in the confined space of the stairwell but it did not happen that way. The weapon snapped, something fizzed-it was as though he sensed the path of the bullet-and he could smell burned air.
Maltsaev was furious. “Oh you didn’t,” he said. He started to take one hand out of his pocket but Szara reached over and grasped him by the wrist. He was curiously weak; Szara held him easily. Maltsaev bit his lip and scowled with discomfort. Szara shot him again and he sat down abruptly, his weight falling back against an iron rung of the stairway. He died a few seconds later. By then he just looked melancholy.
Szara stared at the weapon. It was the blued-steel Steyr that Vainshtok had carried. Why had he given it up? Why had he not defended himself? Szara found the safety device, then put the automatic in the side pocket of his jacket. He listened hard, but there was no running, no commotion above him. The shots had not been heard. Perhaps the powder load in the bullet was minimal; he really didn’t understand. He pulled Maltsaev’s hand free of his pocket and went looking for the weapon he knew was there, but he didn’t find it. Nor could he find it anywhere else. That meant Maltsaev’s crew, perhaps the same one that had finished Abramov, was nearby. Maltsaev wasn’t a murderer, Szara reminded himself, he was an arranger of murders. Szara found a car key in an inside pocket and a set of identity papers. Running his hands down the overcoat, he discovered a flap sewn into the sleeve that held a sword and shield NKVD pin in a soft pigskin bag with a drawstring. There was also a wallet with a thick sheaf of roubles, zlotys, and reichsmarks. Szara put everything in his own pockets. Next he grabbed Maltsaev’s ankles and pulled. It was difficult, he had to use all his strength, but once he got the body moving, the smooth wool overcoat slid easily across the floor. It took at least two minutes to drag Maltsaev down the hall and into the unlocked room, and the trip left a long maroon streak on the tile. The lock on the door was simple enough, it worked on a lever. Szara thumbed it down and pulled the door closed until he heard it click.
At the foot of the iron stairway he paused, retrieved both ejected cartridges, then climbed, shoes in one hand, gun in the other; but there was no one waiting for him on the landing and he dropped the weapon into his pocket and hopped on one foot to put his shoes back on. The lobby was as he’d left it; people milling about, affable confusion, a line working its way up to the table. “Well,” said the Spanish official who’d shared the sunporch with him, “your friend has finally made it out of here. It’s given us all hope.”
“He’s known to be clever-and lucky,” Szara said, clearly a bit envious.
The Spaniard sighed. “I’ll be going back to Warsaw eventually. As you know, Germany is exceptionally sympathetic to our neutrality. Perhaps it won’t be too long.”
“I hope not,” Szara said. “Such disorder helps nothing.”
“How true.”
“Perhaps we’ll dine together this evening.”
The Spaniard inclined his head, an informal bow of acceptance.
Szara used a wall mirror to assure himself that the observer was still at the table, then avoided his line of vision by taking a back door, walking behind the kitchen area where the two young Polish women were preparing beets over a wooden tub, saving every last peeling in a metal pan. They both smiled at him as he went past, even the shy one. He entered the sunporch by a side door and looked out through the screen. There were two black Pobedas parked in the gravel semicircle. One was coated with road dust and grime, the other spattered with mud and clay. Recalling what Maltsaev had said about Soviet armor on the roads, he decided to try the latter. He picked up his valise, took a deep breath, and walked off the sunporch onto the lawn. He nodded to a few diplomats strolling along the paths, then slid into the front seat of the muddy Pobeda as though it were the most natural thing in the world for him to do.
The car’s interior smelled strongly: of pomade, sweat, cigarettes, vodka, mildewed upholstery, and gasoline. He put Maltsaev’s key into the ignition and turned it, the starter motor whined, died, whined on a higher note, produced a single firing of the engine, sank to a whisper, suddenly fired twice, and at last brought the engine to sputtering life. He wrestled with the gearshift-mounted on the steering column-until it went into one of the gears. Through the streaked panel window on his left he could see the diplomats staring at him: who was he to simply climb into a car, valise in hand, and drive away? One of them started to walk toward him. Szara lifted the clutch pedal-the car lurched forward a foot and stalled. The diplomat, a handsome, dignified man with gray wings of hair that rested on his ears, had raised an interrogatory index finger-oh, just a moment. Szara turned the ignition key again and the starter motor whined up and down the musical scale as it had before. When the engine at last fired he blinked the sweat out of his eyes. “Un moment, s’il vous plait,” the diplomat called out, only a few feet away. Szara gave him a tight smile and a shrug. The gears meshed and the car rolled forward, crunching over the gravel. Szara looked in the rearview mirror. The diplomat was standing with hands on hips, the caricature of a man offended by simply unspeakable rudeness.
There wasn’t a road sign left in Poland-Vyborg’s colleagues had seen to that-only a maze of dirt tracks that ran off every which way. But he had walked the route to Lvov and that was the one direction he knew he had to avoid. Maltsaev’s assistants could well be waiting for him there, by the side of the road, just conveniently out of sight of the diplomatic corps at the spa.
There was a much-used map of eastern Poland on the floor of the car, and the sun, at six-twenty on an afternoon in late September, was low in the sky. That was west. Szara kept the sun on his left side and headed north, managing some ten miles before dusk overtook him. Then he backed off what he believed to be a main road onto a smaller road and turned off the engine. Next he took a careful inventory: he had plenty of money, no water, no food, the best part of a tank of gasoline, six rounds in the Steyr. It was, he now saw, an M12, thus a Steyr-Hahn-Steyr-with-hammer-stamped o8 on the left-hand surface of the slide, which had something to do with the absorption of the Austrian army into the German army after 1938, a mechanical retooling. Exactly what this was he could not remember; a rue Delesseux circular unread, who cared about guns? He also had three sets of identity papers: his own, Maltsaev’s, and the Jean Bonotte passport in the false bottom of the valise, bound with a rubber band to a packet of French francs and a card with telephone numbers written on it. In the trunk of the Pobeda was a full can of gasoline and a blanket.
Enough to start a new life. Many had started with less.
“The wind and the stars.” Whose line was that? He didn’t remember. But it perfectly described the night. He sat on the blanket at the foot of an ancient linden tree-the road was lined with them, creating an avenue that no doubt wound its way to some grand Polish estate up the road. The night grew chilly, but if he pulled his jacket tight he stayed warm enough.
He had thought he’d sleep in the car, but the smell of it sickened him. Not that he wasn’t used to what he took to be its various elements. Nothing new about vodka or cigarettes, his own sweat was no better than anyone else’s, and all Russian cars reeked of gasoline and damp upholstery. Something else. To do with what they’d used the Pobeda for, perhaps a lingering scent of the taken, the captured. Or maybe it was the smell of executioners. Russian folklore had it that murder left its trace: the vertical line at the side of the mouth, the mark of the killer. Might it not change the way a man smelled?
A former Szara would have turned such light on himself, but not now. He had done what he had to do. “Let those who can, do what they must.” Thus Vainshtok had saved his life. Because he
would not, or could not, use the weapon himself? No, that was absurd. Szara refused to believe it. There was some other reason, and he had to face the possibility that he might never find out what it was.
There was a great deal he didn’t understand. Why, for instance, had they sent Maltsaev after him? Because he’d disappeared from view for several days? Had they found out what he’d done in Paris with the British? No, that was impossible. Of all the world’s secret services it was the British the Soviets truly feared. Their counter-intelligence array-Scotland Yard, MI 5-was extremely efficient; Comintern agents trying to enter Great Britain under false identities were time and again discovered, for the British maintained and used their files to great effect. As for MI6, it was, in its way, a particularly cold-blooded and predatory organization. A consequence of the British national character, with its appetite for both education and adventure, a nasty combination when manifested in an intelligence service. Szara could not imagine the problem lay in that direction. Fitzware, for all his peculiarities of style, was a serious, a scrupulous officer. The courier, then, Evans. No. It was something else, something in Russia, something to do with Abramov, Bloch, the Jewish khvost. Perhaps Beria or his friends just decided one morning that he’d lived long enough. But Andre Szara had made his own decision, at some point, that he would not be one of those who went meekly into captivity, carving za chto into the stone of a cellar wall. Now a single act, the pulling of a trigger, had freed him. Now-a Jew, a Pole, a Russian-he had no country at all.
“The wind and the stars.” Strange how he couldn’t stop thinking it. He wondered how long he might live. Probably only a little while longer. Just after dark a car had rumbled down the road he’d left. Then, an hour later, another. Was it them? They would certainly be looking for him. And they’d never stop until they found him; that was the rule of the game and everybody understood it. Ah but if this were to be his last night on earth how he would treasure it. A little breeze blowing steady across the Polish farmland, the grand sky- that immense and perfect and glittering mystery. There were frogs croaking in the darkness, life all around him. He didn’t have much of a plan, only to try and get across the Lithuanian border to the north. After that he’d see. Possibly Sweden, or Denmark. So far he’d stolen seven hours of existence; every hour was a victory, and he had no intention of going to sleep.
Szara was later to put it this way:
“If ever the hand of God guided my path it was when, from the twentieth to the twenty-third of September, 1939, I drove from southern Poland to Kovno, Lithuania, in a stolen NKVD automobile. Clearly there was a tragedy taking place in Poland; I saw the signs of it, I walked in its tracks, and I fear that it may have contributed to my escape, for it absorbed the energies of all Soviet security forces. Finally I do not know for certain, and I can only say that I survived. This was, equally, an accident of geography. Had I been thirty miles to the west, NKVD officers or political commissars serving on the front line surely would have arrested me. I believe they knew who I was, what I had done, and had a description of the car I was driving. In the same way, had I been thirty miles to the east, I would have been arrested by the NKVD of the Soviet Ukraine or murdered by the Ukrainian bands, who were then very active. But I was in the middle, in an area behind the lines but not yet secured by the apparat. Those who may have experience of a zone in which Soviet troops are maneuvering, not fighting, will know what I mean. I moved among lost units hampered by poor communications, amidst confusion and error and inefficiency, and it was as though I were invisible.”
Well yes, true as far as it went, but not the whole story by any means. He was able, for instance, to choose an identity suitable to the moment. Confronted by a Soviet patrol at dawn on the twenty-second, he produced Maltsaev’s NKVD badge, and the officer waved him ahead and cursed his troopers when they didn’t get out of the road quickly enough. But in a shtetl village in the middle of nowhere, he became Szara the Polish Jew, was given a bench in the study house to sleep on, and fed by the rabbi’s wife. Meanwhile, the remarkable fact of the Pobeda was ignored by the villagers. He drove it into a muddy, unfenced yard full of chickens and there it sat, safe, and invisible from the road, while he slept. Later, when it suited his purpose, he presented himself as Andre Szara, Soviet journalist, and, later still, Jean Bonotte of Marseille, a French citizen.
It took him some twenty hours to negotiate almost three hundred miles to a point just short of the border with Lithuania. The first night, moved by some obscure but very powerful instinct- “the hand of God”?-he drove away from his refuge at midnight and continued on the same road, north he hoped, for some six hours. He feared he would be unable to cross the many rivers that lay across his path but, as it turned out, the Poles had not blown the bridges. So the Pobeda rattled over the loose boards of the narrow structures spanning first the Berezina, then the Belaja. Just beyond the former he came to a cobbled road, heading east and west, flanked by birch trees. He knew, just for that moment, precisely where he was, for those cobblestones had been laid by the Emperor Napoleon’s Corsicans in 1812, a solid foundation for wheeled guns and ammunition carts, and it led off in the direction of Moscow. Szara drove across it, heading due north.
Somewhere near Chelm, just before dawn, his path was blocked by a train of cattle cars standing idle at a crossing. Uniformed NKVD soldiers were guarding the train, and in the darkness he could just make out the barrel of a machine gun, mounted on top of a freight car, as it swung to cover the Pobeda. One of the sentries unslung his rifle and walked over to ask him who he was and what he was doing there. Szara was about to reach for the badge, then didn’t. Something told him to leave it where it was. Just a Pole, he said. His wife had gone into labor and he was off to fetch the midwife. The soldier stared. Szara could hear voices inside the cattle cars, speaking Polish, pleading for water. Without further conversation, Szara put the car in reverse and backed up, his heart pounding, while the soldier watched him but did nothing-a potential problem was simply removing itself. When he was out of sight of the train, he rested his head on the steering wheel for a time, then turned the car around, backtracked a few miles, picked a road at random, and, an hour later, after several turnings, drove over the tracks at a deserted crossing.
Passing a farm early in the morning, he heard the drawn-out lowing of unmilked cattle and the frantic barking of deserted dogs left at the end of their chains. At another railroad crossing there was a wooden cattlegate blocking the road and when he got out to open it he saw something yellow on the ground and bent down to see what it was: it turned out to be a scrap of paper bound to a small stone with yellow wool, perhaps unraveled from a shawl. Unwinding the wool, he found a note: Please tell Franciszka Kodowicz that Krysia and Wladzia have been taken away in a train. Thank you. The wind blew at the piece of paper in his hand. He stood by the car for a long time, then carefully wrapped the paper around the stone and rebound it with the yellow wool, placing it back on the ground where it had landed when the girls had thrown it from the moving train. He was, he noted dispassionately, now beyond vows or resolutions. He slid into the front seat of the car, holding his breath as the musky scent of pomade and sweat assaulted him, forced the gearshift lever down, and drove north. That was his resolution, that was his vow: to exist.
On the third night, having swung west to avoid the market town of Grodno, he saw from the map that he’d entered the country of the Pripet marshes. He suspected the Russian line of advance had not yet reached the area, its northern flank held up for some reason, for he could find no evidence of an occupying force. He stopped the car and waited for morning, telling himself to remain awake and alert. He woke, again and again, when his chin hit his chest, finally fading away altogether into the blank sleep of exhaustion. The next time he came to it was daybreak, and he saw that he was surrounded by marshland that ran to the low horizon, a plain of swaying reeds and long reaches of flat water colored by a gray, wind-swept sky. The land was ancient, desolate, its vast silence punctuated by t
he distant cries of waterfowl.
He walked around for a time, trying to get his bearings, washing his face and hands in the chill, dark water of the marsh. He searched the sky but there was no sun-he had no idea where he was, or which way was north. And he didn’t care. That was the worst part, he truly did not care. His resolve had flowed away like sand on the outgoing tide. He sat on the running board of the Pobeda, slumped against the door, and stared out over the gray ponds and blowing reeds. He had somehow come to the end of his journey, the future he’d held out to himself no more than a trick of the illusionist, the self-deluded survivor. Against the vast background of the deserted land he saw his insignificance only too clearly-a vain, petty man, envious and scheming, an opportunist, a fraud. Why should such a man remain alive? Get in the car, he told himself. But the willful interior voice sickened him-all it knew was greed, all it did was want. Even here, at the end of the world, it sang its little song, and any gesture, no matter how absurd, would satisfy it. But the only act he could imagine called for removing the Steyr from beneath the driver’s seat of the automobile and relieving the earth of an unneeded presence-at least an act of grace. Did he have the courage to do it? Surprisingly, he did. What had he done with his life-other than seek a transient peace between the legs of women. He had, in order to live another day, and then another, served the people who now did what they did and who would, he knew for a certainty, do what they would do. And to put a good finish on the history of his particular life, the time and place were perfect: ironically, he was only a few miles from the safety of the Lithuanian border. He looked at his watch, it was sixteen minutes after nine. The sky shifted across his vision, a hundred shades of gray, drifting and rolling like battlesmoke blown by a wind off the sea.
What saved him-for he was very, very close to it-was a vision. Of this he was not to write; it was not germane, and there may have been other reasons. Well down the long, straight road ahead of him appeared the silhouette of a hunter; a man stepped out of the reeds, a shotgun, the barrel broken safely from the stock, riding his forearm. A spaniel followed, stood at the side of the hunter and shook a fine spray of marshwater from its coat. Then the man walked across the road, the dog trotting ahead, and both vanished.