by Alan Furst
Blood of Victory
( Night soldiers - 7 )
Alan Furst
Alan Furst
Blood of Victory
A CALL TO ARMS
On 24 November, 1940, the first light of dawn found the Bulgarian ore freighter Svistov pounding through the Black Sea swells, a long night’s journey from Odessa and bound for Istanbul. The writer I. A. Serebin, sleepless as always, left his cabin and stood at the rail, searched the horizon for a sign of the Turkish coast, found only a blood red streak in the eastern sky. Like the old saying, he realized-red sky at morning, sailor take warning. But, a private smile for that. So many ways, he thought, to drown in autumn. The Svistov creaked and groaned, spray burst over the bow as she fought the sea. With cupped hands, Serebin lit a Sobranie cigarette, then watched the dark water churning past the hull until the wind drove him back to the cabin.
As he pulled the door shut, a soft shape stirred beneath the blanket. “Ah, mon ours,” she said. My bear. A muffled voice, tender, half asleep. “Are we there?”
“No, not for a long time.”
“Well then…” One side of the blanket rose in the air.
Serebin took off his shirt and trousers, then his glasses, slid in beside her and ran an idle finger down the length of her back, over the curve, and beyond. Smooth as silk, he thought, sleek as a seal. Bad poetry in bed, maybe, but she was, she was.
Marie-Galante. A fancy name. Nobility? It wouldn’t shock him if she were. Or not. A slumflower, perhaps. No matter, she was stunning, glamorous. Exceptionally plucked, buffed and smoothed. She had come to his cabin, sable coat and bare feet, as she’d promised at dinner. A glance, a low purr of a voice in lovely French, just enough, as her husband, a Vichy diplomat, worked at conversation with the Bulgarian captain and his first officer. So, no surprise, a few minutes after midnight: three taps, pearlescent fingernail on iron door and, when it opened, an eloquent Bonsoir.
Serebin stared when the coat came off. The cabin had only a kerosene lantern, hung on a hook in one corner, but the tiny flame was enough. Hair the color of almonds, skin a tone lighter, eyes a shade darker- caramel. She acknowledged the stare with a smile- yes, I am — turned slowly once around for him, then, for a moment, posed. Serebin was a man who had love affairs, one followed another. It was his fate, he believed, that life smacked him in the head every chance it got, then paid him back in women. Even so, he couldn’t stop looking at her. “It is,” she’d said gently, “a little cold for this.”
The engines hammered and strained, the overloaded steamship-Ukrainian manganese for Turkish mills-was slow as a snail. A good idea, they thought, lying on their sides, front to back, his hand on her breast, the sea rising and falling beneath them.
Serebin had boarded the Svistov at the Roumanian port of Constanta, where it called briefly to take on freight-a few crates of agricultural machinery cranked slowly up the rusty side of the ship-and a single passenger. The docks were almost deserted, Serebin stood alone, a small valise at his side, waiting patiently in the soft, southern dusk as the gangway was lowered.
Earlier that day there’d been fighting on the waterfront, a band of fascist Iron Guards pursued by an army unit loyal to Antonescu. So said the barman at the dockside tavern. Intense volleys of small arms fire, a few hand grenades, machine guns, then silence. Serebin listened carefully, calculated the distance, ordered a glass of beer, stayed where he was. Safe enough. Serebin was forty-two, this was his fifth war, he considered himself expert in the matter of running, hiding, or not caring.
Later, on his way to the pier, he’d come upon a telegraph office with its windows shattered, a man in uniform flung dead across the threshold of the open door, which bumped against his boot as the evening wind tried to blow it shut. Roumania had just signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany, political assassinations were daily events, civil war on the way, one poor soul had simply got an early start.
Dinner, in the freighter’s wardroom, had gone on forever. The diplomat, Labonniere, a dry man with a fair mustache, labored away in university Russian- the weather, quite changeable in fall. Or the tasty Black Sea carp, often baked, but sometimes broiled. The Bulgarian captain did not make life easy for him. Yes, very tasty.
It had been left to Serebin to converse with Madame. Was this on purpose? He wondered. The wife was amusing, had that particular ability, found in Parisian women, to make table talk out of thin air. Serebin listened, spoke when he had to, picked at a plate of boiled food. Still, what could any of them say? Half of France was occupied by Germany, Poland enslaved, London in flames. So, all that aside, the carp. Madame Labonniere wore a cameo on a velvet ribbon at her throat, from time to time she touched it with her fingers.
On a shelf in the wardroom was a green steel radio with a wire mesh speaker at the center shaped like a daisy. It produced the transmissions of a dozen stations, which wandered on and off the air like restless cats. Sometimes a few minutes of news on Soviet dairy production, now and then a string quartet, from somewhere on the continent. Once a shouting politician, in Serbo-Croatian, who disappeared into crackling static, then a station in Turkey, whining string instruments and a throbbing drum. To Serebin, a pleasant anarchy. Nobody owned the air above the sea. Suddenly, the Turkish music vanished, replaced by an American swing band with a woman singer. For a long moment, nobody at the dinner table spoke, then, ghostlike, it faded away into the night.
“Now where did that come from?” Marie-Galante said to Serebin.
He had no idea.
“London? Is it possible?”
“A mystery,” Serebin said.
“In Odessa, one never hears such things.”
“In Odessa, one plays records. Do you live there?”
“For the moment, at the French consulate. And you, monsieur? Where do you live?”
“In Paris, since ’38.”
“Quelle chance.” What luck. For him? Them? “And before that?”
“I am Russian by birth. From Odessa, as it happens.”
“Really!” She was delighted. “Then you must know its secrets.”
“A few, maybe. Nobody knows them all.”
She laughed, in a way that meant she liked him. “Now tell me,” she said, leaning forward, confidential. “Do you find your present hosts, congenial?”
What was this? Serebin shrugged. “An occupied city.” He left the rest to her.
7:20. Serebin lay on his back, Marie-Galante dozed beside him. The world winked at the cinq-a-sept amour, the twilight love affair, but there was another five-to-seven, the ante meridiem version, which Serebin found equally to his taste. In this life, he thought, there is only one thing worth waking up for in the morning, and it isn’t getting out of bed and facing the world.
From Marie-Galante a sigh, then a stretch. Fragrant as melon, warm as toast. She rolled over, slid a leg across his waist, then sat up, shook her hair back, and wriggled to get comfortable. For a time she gazed down at him, put a hand under his chin, tilted his head one way, then the other. “You are quite pretty, you know.”
He laughed, made a face.
“No, it’s true. What are you?”
“Mixed breed.”
“Oh? Spaniel and hound, perhaps. Is that it?”
“Half Russian aristocrat, half Bolshevik Jew. A dog of our times, apparently. And you?”
“Burgundian, mon ours, dark and passionate. We love money and cook everything in butter.” She leaned down and kissed him softly on the forehead, then got out of bed. “And go home in the morning.”
She gathered up her coat, put it on, held the front closed. “Are you staying in the city?”
“A week. Maybe ten days. At the Beyoglu, on Istiklal Caddesi.”
She rested her han
d on the doorknob. “Au revoir, then,” she said. Said it beautifully, sweet, and a little melancholy.
Istanbul. Three-thirty in the afternoon, the violet hour. Serebin stared out the window of a taxi as it rattled along the wharves of the Golden Horn. The Castle of Indolence. He’d always thought of it that way-melon rinds with clouds of flies, a thousand cats, rust stains on porphyry columns, strange light, strange shadows in a haze of smoke and dust, a street where blind men sold nightingales.
The Svistov had docked an hour earlier, the three passengers stood at the gate of the customs shed and said good-bye. For Serebin, a firm handshake and warm farewell from Labonniere. Sometime in the night he’d asked Marie-Galante if her husband cared what she did. “An arrangement,” she’d told him. “We are seen everywhere together, but our private lives are our own affair.” So the world.
So the world — two bulky men in suits lounging against a wall on the pier. Emniyet, he supposed, Turkish secret police. A welcoming committee, of a sort, for the diplomat and his wife, for the Bulgarian captain, and likely for him as well. The Surete no doubt having bade him good-bye at the Gare du Nord in Paris, with the SD-Sicherheitsdienst-and the NKVD, the Hungarian VK-VI, and the Roumanian Siguranza observing his progress as he worked his way to the Black Sea.
He was, after all, I. A. Serebin, formerly a decorated Hero of the Soviet Union, Second Class, currently the executive secretary of the International Russian Union, a Paris-based organization for emigres. The IRU offered meetings, and resolutions-mostly to do with its own bylaws-as much charity as it could manage, a club near the Russian cathedral on the rue Daru, with newspapers on wooden dowels, a chess tournament and a Christmas play, and a small literary magazine, The Harvest. In the political spectrum of emigre societies, as mild as anything Russian could ever be. Czarist officers of the White armies had their own organizations, nostalgic Bolsheviks had theirs, the IRU held tight to the mythical center, an ideology of Tolstoy, compassion, and memories of sunsets, and accepted the dues of the inevitable police informers with a sigh and a shrug. Foreigners! God only knew what they might be up to. But it could not, apparently, be only God who knew.
The Hotel Beyoglu, named for the ancient quarter in which it stood, more or less, was on a busy street, just far enough from the tumultuous Taksim square. Serebin could have easily afforded the Pera Palace but that would have meant people he knew, so he took one of the chill tombs on the top floor of the musty old Beyoglu. Home to commercial travelers and midday lovers, with twelve-foot ceilings, blue walls, the requisite oleograph of Mustafa Kemal, oil-printed in lurid colors, hung high above the bed, and, in the bathroom, a huge zinc tub on three claw feet and a brick.
Serebin undressed, shaved, then ran a bath and lay back in the tepid green water.
There are leaves blowing on the road now, there are people you don’t see now.
Late October in Paris when he’d written that. He’d waited patiently for the rest to appear but it never showed up. Why? Autumn had always been kind to him, but not this year. It’s the city. Paris had died under the German occupation, the French heartbroken, grieving, silent. In a way, he hated them. What right did they have to it, this soft, twilit despair? Like some rainy image floating up from Verlaine. In Russia they’d gone through nine kinds of hell, got drunk on it and sang their hearts out. Famine, civil war, bandits, purges, the thirty-nine horsemen of the Apocalypse and then you stopped counting.
So, he’d come to Istanbul. Couldn’t breathe in Paris, fled to Bucharest, that was worse. Got drunk, wandered into a steamship office. Oh, he had reasons. You had to have those. Some IRU business, and a letter from Tamara Petrovna. Of course I want to see you. One last time, my love. So you can tell me not to think such things. They’d had two love affairs; at age fifteen, and again at thirty-five. Then Russia had taken her, the way it took people. The letter mentioned money, but he didn’t have to come all the way to Istanbul for that, the bank in Geneva would have taken care of that.
The life of Istiklal Caddesi drifted in the open window-braying donkey, twittering birds, a car horn, a street musician playing some kind of reedy clarinet. Go back to Odessa. Oh, a fine idea, Ilya Aleksandrovich. That would finish his poem. Some of the emigres tried it, more often than anyone would believe. Off they’d go, deluded, fatalistic, hoping against hope. Their friends would wait for a letter. But, nothing. Always, nothing.
Serebin dried himself off, put on his other shirt, fresh underwear, and socks, then peered at himself in the steel mirror. Lean and dark, average height-maybe a little less, black hair, thick enough so that he could wear it hacked off short by whoever had a scissors-Serebin hated barbers-a muscle in the jaw that sometimes ticked. Tense, restless eyes. Pretty? Maybe to her. “Clearly,” a lover in Moscow once told him, “there is something on fire inside you, Ilya. Women know this, dear, they ‘smell something burning,’ and they want to put it out. Though there will be one, now and again, who will want to throw oil on it.”
Carefully, he tied his tie, took it off, threw it on the bed. Left the top button closed, looked like a Greek communist, undid the button, let it go at that. Poetic license. Put on his brown tweed jacket. Made in London, it endured, withstood restaurant adventures and nights in railway stations, would surely, he thought, outlive him.
His other side was not to be seen in the mirror. His grandfather, the Count Alexander Serebin, had died in a duel in a St. Petersburg park in 1881. Over a ballerina, the story went. Serebin unbuttoned a second button and spread the vee of his shirt. Now you look like a Lebanese raisin salesman. That made him laugh-a different man! He fixed the shirt, left his hat and trench coat in the armoire, and went downstairs to find a taxi.
In front of the hotel, the same driver who’d brought him to the Beyoglu was busy with a rag, polishing the dents and gashes in his old Fiat taxi. “Effendi!” he cried out, delighted at the coincidence, and opened the rear door with a flourish. Obviously he’d waited at the hotel for Serebin to reappear; a commercial instinct, or something he’d been paid to do. Or told to do. So the world. Serebin showed him an address on a piece of paper and climbed in.
The house he’d bought for Tamara was in Besiktas, a summer resort just north of the city. It was after five when Serebin’s taxi crawled through the old village, the muezzin’s call to evening prayer sharp in the chill air, long red streaks in the sky above the domes and minarets, as though the sun were dying instead of setting.
The driver found the address easily enough, an ancient wooden summer house, a yali, painted yellow, with green shutters, on a cliff above the Bosphorus. Tamara was waiting for him in the little garden that looked out over the water. Instinctively he moved to embrace her, but she caught his hands and held him away. “Oh I am so happy to see you,” she said, eyes shining with tears of sorrow and pleasure.
His first love, maybe the love of his life-sometimes he believed that. She was very pale now, which made her jade eyes bright in a hard face, the face of the bad girl in an American gangster movie. Her straw-colored hair looked thin, and she wore it shorter than he remembered, pinned back with a pink barrette. To give her color. She had dressed so carefully for him. There was a vase stuffed with anemones on the garden table, and the stone terrace had been swept clean.
“I stopped at the Russian store,” he said, handing her a box wrapped in colored paper.
She opened it carefully, taking a long time, then lifted the lid to reveal rows of sugared plums. “From Balabukhi,” he said. The famous candy maker of Kiev.
“You will share,” she said firmly.
He pretended to hunt for one that especially appealed to him, found it, and took a bite. “Also this,” he said. A bag of dry cookies with almonds. “And these.” Two bracelets of ribbon gold, from a jewelry store near the hotel. She put them on and turned her wrist one way, then the other, so that the gold caught the light.
“You like them? Do they fit?”
“Yes, of course, they’re beautiful.” She smiled and shook her head in
feigned exasperation- what is to be done with you?
They sat together on a bench and looked out over the water. “Forgive me,” he said, “but I must ask you how you are.”
“Better.”
“All better.”
“Much better. Good, really. But, you know, the chahotka.” Wasting away, it meant, the Russian word for tuberculosis.
In 1919, during the fighting between Bolshevik and Czarist forces, she had served as a nurse in a Red Army medical unit and treated the sick and dying villagers in the shtetls of Byelorussia. She had not been ordered to do this, she had done it on her own. There was no medicine for the illness, all she had was a pail of heated water and a cloth. But, cold and wet, exhausted from advancing, retreating, working day and night, she persisted, did what others feared to do, and the chahotka came for her. She spent eight months in bed, thought the illness was gone, and went on with her life. But in the bad winter of 1938, it returned, and Serebin had arranged her departure from Russia and installed her in the house in Besiktas.
“You see the doctors,” he said.
“Oh yes. Spending money like water.”
“I have money, Tamara.”
“Well, I spend it. I rest till I can’t stand it anymore, eat cream like a cat-your ladies don’t leave me alone for a minute.” He had found two sisters, Ukrainian emigres, to live in the house and care for her. “Are you happy in Paris?” she said. “Very adored, I suspect.”
He laughed. “Tolerated, anyhow.”
“Oh yes. Tolerated every night-I know you, Ilya.”
“Well, it’s different now. And Paris isn’t the same.”
“The Germans leave you alone?”
“So far. I am their ally, according to the present arrangements, the Hitler-Stalin treaty, and a literary celebrity, in a small way. For the moment, they don’t bother me.”
“You know them?”
“Two or three. Officers, simply military men assigned to a foreign posting, that’s how they see it. We have the city in common, and they are very cultured. So, we can have conversation. Always careful, of course, correct, no politics.”