by Alan Furst
“How do you know?”
“I know.” And, a moment later, “Don’t you?”
He did. He couldn’t say how he did, it was just, there. But then, he thought, that’s why they’d hired him. I. A. Serebin-Minor Russian writer, emigre.
After midnight, in the room in the hotel, Serebin stared up at the ceiling and smoked a Sobranie. “Are you awake?” he said.
“I am.”
“Just barely?”
“No, I’m up.”
“Want me to turn on the light?”
“No, leave it dark.”
“Something I want to ask you.”
“Yes?”
“Did DeHaas actually do something? Or did it just, exist?”
“I believe they were in the business of building steam mills. Flour mills.”
“Were they built?”
“That I don’t know. Probably the office functioned, sent letters, telegrams, talked on the phone. Maybe they built a few mills, why not?”
“But these people, Maniu, the lawyer, they knew what they were doing.”
“Oh yes.”
“And Troucelle, of course he knew. And he knows what we’re doing now, and that it has to do with Roumanian oil-all that business about Ploesti.”
“Yes, the instinct of the agent provocateur. ‘And, they’re going up to the oil fields, why not arrest them there?’”
“So?”
“So it’s a problem, and it has to be solved. He may just want to be bribed, and, if that’s it, we’ll bribe him. Or, he may go to the Siguranza, but that’s not the end of the world. You see, Polanyi calculated that we’d talk to the wrong person, sooner or later. But he counted on two things to keep us safe, two forms of reluctance. If Troucelle turns us in, like a good little Vichy fascist, he turns himself in as well. Why do these people, who want to spy on Roumania, come to him? Because he used to spy on Roumania himself. Oh really, they’ll say, you did? When? What did they pay you? Who else did it? You don’t know? Sure you know, why won’t you tell us? Clearly, he’d best think things through very carefully before he goes singing to the Roumanians.
“And then, the second kind of reluctance is in the Siguranza itself, up at the top. They’d better have a meeting, because they’d better talk about how it’s going to go here. Today’s enemy may be tomorrow’s ally, then what? Seven months ago, Germany wouldn’t dare attack the mighty French army behind its impregnable Maginot Line. Seventeen months ago, Germany wouldn’t dare to attack Poland, because the Red Army would go to war against them and in six months the Mongolian hordes would be fucking the Valkyries in the Berlin opera house. The world has come undone, my love, and this thing isn’t over, and, when it is, quite a considerable number of people are going to discover they jumped into the wrong bed.”
“All right. But what if he goes to the Germans?”
“Well, a lot depends on which Germans he goes to. If he’s best pals with the chief of Gestapo counterintelligence in Roumania, that’s the end of us. With the others, the SD or the Abwehr, it’s not so bad. They’ll watch and listen and wait-they’ll want more, there’s always more. And, the way Polanyi has it planned, we have a good chance to disappear while that’s going on. As it is, we’re only here for a few more days, then out. If you don’t have time to do it right, Polanyi figured, do it wrong, do it fast and ugly, break all the rules, and run like hell. That’s why you’re called Marchais, my sweet, so you can return as Serebin.”
“Well, it sounds good,” Serebin said. “Safe in bed, it sounds good.”
“Polanyi is a kind of genius, mon ours, dark as night, but what else would you want? He’s done these things all his life-that’s all he’s done. He once told me that he’d been taken to some kind of lawn party, at the Italian legation in Budapest, where he made his way to a certain office and stole papers from a drawer. He was, at the time, eleven years old.”
“He went with his father?”
“He went with his grandfather. ”
“Good God.”
“Hungarians, my sweet, Hungarians. Swimming for ten centuries in a sea of enemies-how the hell do you suppose they’re still there?”
Readily enough, the Princess Baltazar agreed to receive the friend of Monsieur Richard in Paris. As though, he told Marie-Galante, such calls were commonplace. The house was not hard to find, a white, three-story frosted cake, with turrets and gables, overlooking the botanical gardens. Once upon a time he had played on a beach in Odessa, and a little girl had taught him to take liquid sand from the edge of the sea and drizzle it through his fingers to decorate the top of a castle. The house of the Princess Baltazar reminded him of that.
She was somewhere beyond forty, blond and curly, pink and creamy, with a bosomy decolletage on a purple dress just tight enough to suggest the elaborate and complicated flesh beneath it.
“Monsieur Richard,” she said. “With the pince-nez?”
Who else?
“Such a brilliant man.” Would Monsieur care for coffee? Something to eat? There was a bit of Moldavian Swiss roll, she thought, or was it just too close to lunch?
“A coffee,” he said.
She left the room, haunches shifting high and low, and he could hear her making coffee in a distant part of the house. No maid? The tabletops in the parlor were covered with little things; china cats and porcelain dairymaids, demitasse cups and saucers, bud vases, ashtrays. And photographs in standing frames: Princess Baltazar with King Carol, Princess Baltazar with various significant men-minor royalty, chinless aristocrats, and two or three nineteenth-century types with grandiose beards and decorations.
“So many friends,” he said, when she returned with the coffees and thick slices of the dangerous-looking Moldavian pastry.
“What other pleasures in this life?” she said, sitting next to him on the couch. “Will you relent on the roll, monsieur?”
Serebin smiled as he declined. “And who is this?” he said, pointing at one of the photographs.
“Ah, if you were Roumanian, you would not have to ask,” she said.
“A well-known gentleman, then.”
“Our dear Popadu, the economics minister, a few months ago, and a great friend of Elena’s.” She meant Lupescu, the former king’s mistress. “I am told he is lately in Tangier.” Sad for him, to judge from her expression.
“And this?” The man he pointed to looked like a Ruritanian minister in a Marx Brothers film.
Why that was Baron Struba, the well-known diplomat. “Poor man. He was on the train with Carol and Elena, and he was shot in the-well, he couldn’t sit down for a month.” Serebin knew the story. When Carol had abdicated in September, he’d had a train filled with gold and paintings, even his collection of electric trains, then made a run for the Yugoslavian border. Along the way, units of the Iron Guard had fired on the train and, while Lupescu, a real lioness, had remained resolutely in her seat, Carol had gone into exile cowering in his cast-iron bathtub.
“You seem to know,” Serebin said, “everybody.”
The princess was demure on that point, eyes lowered, saying volumes with a modest silence. When she looked up, she rested a hand on the couch by his side. “And what brings you to Bucharest?” she said. Her smile was inviting, her eyes soft. He was, if he let on that he was rich or powerful, going to be seduced.
“I am here to buy art,” he said.
“Art!” She was delighted. “I can certainly help you there. I know all the best dealers.” He could return to Paris, he realized, with a trunkful of fake Renoirs and Rembrandts.
“Then too, I wanted to do a favor for a friend of mine, who used to work for a Swiss company here. Called, what, DeHaas, I think, something like that.”
Her eyes changed, and there was a longish silence. “What sort favor?” Her French was dying.
“To see old friends. Get back in touch.”
“Who are you, monsieur?” she said. She bit her lip.
“Just a Parisian,” he said.
Her eyes gli
stened, then a tear rolled down her cheek.
“I will be arrested,” she said. She began to cry, her face contorted, a thin, steady moan escaping her compressed lips.
“Don’t, please,” Serebin said.
Her voice rose to a tiny, choked-back wail. “The matrons.”
“No, no, princess, no matrons, please, don’t.”
She began to fumble with the back of her dress, her face had turned a bright red. “I will please you,” she said. “I will astound you.”
Serebin stood. “I am so sorry, princess.”
“No! Don’t go away!”
“Please,” he said. “It was a mistake to come here.”
She sobbed, her face in her hands.
Serebin left.
Outside, as he walked quickly away from the botanical gardens, he realized that his hands were shaking. He headed for a cafe on the Calea Victoriei, sat on the glass-enclosed terrace, thought about a vodka, ordered a coffee, then took a newspaper on a wooden dowel from a rack by the cash register-a copy of Paris Soir, the leading Parisian daily.
Reading the paper did not make him feel better. The German propaganda line was not overt, but it was everywhere: we are crusaders, out to rid Europe of Bolsheviks and Jews, and, regrettably, have been forced to occupy your country. Please pardon the inconvenience. Thus twenty minutes of Paris Soir gave Serebin a bad case of traveler’s melancholy-what one learned not to see up close was unpleasantly clear from a distance. Life in Paris, said the paper, had always been amusing, and it still was. There were reviews of films and plays-romantic farce much the current taste. Recipes for stewed rabbit and turnips with vinegar-it may be all there is to eat, but why not make it delicious? Interviews with “the man on the street”-what ever happened to plain old common courtesy? There was rather hazy news of the campaigns in North Africa and Greece, with expressions like “mobile defense” and “strategic readjustment in the battle lines.” And news of Roosevelt, urging Congress to loan money and ships to Britain. Gullible people, the Americans, how sad.
And so on. From local murders, robberies, and fires, to indoor bicycle racing, and, finally, the obituaries. Which included:
The artistic community of Paris has been saddened to learn of the death of the Polish sculptor Stanislaus Mut. Turkish papers reported yesterday that his body had been found floating in the Bosphorus, death having occurred from unknown causes. Istanbul police are investigating. Born in Lodz in 1889, Stanislaus Mut lived much of his life in Paris, emigrating to Turkey in 1940. Two of his works, Woman Reclining, and Ballerina, are on display at the Art Museum of the City of Rouen.
Serebin recalled meeting Stanislaus Mut, who’d been courting a Russian woman at the cocktail Americain on Della Corvo’s yacht. What happened? An accident? Suicide? Murder? Did his presence at the party make him an associate of Polanyi’s? Serebin returned the paper to its rack and paid for his coffee. Fuck this day, nothing’s going to go right.
But maybe it was only him. Back at the Athenee Palace, Marie-Galante had good news. She had visited with a professor of botany at the university. “He will do anything,” she said. “We have only to ask.”
“What can he do?”
That she didn’t know.
Well then, why was he there in the first place?
“He said he reported to DeHaas on developments in Roumanian science and technology.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t look at me like that. What happened with Princess Baltazar? Were you charmed? Were you-naughty?”
Serebin described the meeting.
“Maybe I should have gone with you,” she said, slightly deflated.
“You think it would have made a difference?”
She hesitated, then said, “No, probably not.”
The next two days were a blur. Life got harder: a number of calls went unanswered, and a few of the people who did answer spoke only Roumanian, managing an apologetic word or two in English or German, then hanging up. The heat went off in the Lipscani house, Serebin and Marie-Galante worked in their coats, breath steaming. The eight German names on the list were not telephoned. A police detective threatened to arrest them if they came anywhere near his house, while three people didn’t know a single soul in Paris or in France for that matter yes they were sure.
The wife of a civil servant thought they were selling bonds, which she made it very clear she didn’t want to buy. At the hotel desk, no contact from Troucelle, which was either good or bad, they couldn’t be sure. An accountant, from an office that worked on the books of the oil companies, said, “I cannot meet with you, I hope you will understand.”
“If the question is,” Serebin said to Marie-Galante, “can Kostyka’s intelligence apparat be brought back to life, perhaps we have an answer.”
“Don’t give up,” Marie-Galante said. “Not yet.”
Through the concierge at the Athenee Palace they hired a car and driver to take them up to Brasov, in the foothills of the Carpathians north of the city. “Dracula country,” Marie-Galante said. “Vlad Tepes and all that, though these days it’s mostly ski resorts.” And antique shops, where peasant arts and crafts were for sale. Serebin understood that Monsieur and Madame Marchais, having come to Roumania to buy folk art, had, eventually, to go and buy it. Still, he did not look forward to the excursion.
The driver told them his name was Octavian. A candidate, Serebin thought, for the oiliest man in Bucharest, which was no small distinction. His mustache was oiled to sharply pointed ends, oily curls sprang loose from his hair. Octavian welcomed them to his humble car-an old but highly polished Citroen with a plume of rich, blue smoke throbbing from its tailpipe, rubbed his hands like a concert pianist, grasped the wheel firmly and, after a moment of meditation, began to drive.
The road to Brasov took them through Ploesti, as it happened, where army officers manned checkpoints and demanded a special pass, required to enter the city, which they did not have. Octavian went off for a private chat with the commanding officer, then returned to the car and told Serebin what it cost. Could it be that much? Marie-Galante shrugged. Roumanian army officers were paid a daily wage of thirty lei, about six cents in American money, so bribery was a way of life. It had always been a poor country, too often conquered, too often plundered. The Russian General Kutuzov, preparing to invade Roumania in 1810, said of the Roumanians that he “would leave them only their eyes to weep with.”
Driving through Ploesti they could, now and again, get a view of the oil fields in the distant haze: the tops of the towers, and the natural gas flares, seen as wobbling air against a pale sky. A mile further on they reached the final checkpoint, at the northern edge of the city, with the usual crowd of Roumanian soldiers supplemented by two German SS officers. The Germans were curious, took the passports and examined them at length, made notes in a ledger, asked what brought them this way, and why no pass. Better not to have it, Serebin realized. Better to be hapless art dealers, confused and uncertain when it came to official papers and difficult things like that. The taller of the SS men was affable enough, until he asked Serebin for his wife’s maiden name. Serebin laughed nervously, then gave the name that Marie-Galante had insisted he memorize. “So,” she said as they drove away, “now you see.”
The road narrowed after Ploesti and wound through woods and farmland, the Carpathians looming high in the distance. Serebin’s spirits rose, it always surprised him how much he needed fields and trees. A city dweller, he thought himself, craving places where they kept cafes and conversations and books and love affairs. But he did not take sufficient account of his Odessan heart, eternally warm for a city that had, with its dirt streets and wild gardens and leaning shacks overgrown with vines, its own heart in the countryside. Marie-Galante felt his mood change, and took his hand in both of hers. At which moment Octavian met Serebin’s eyes in the rearview mirror and gave him an immensely oily and conspiratorial smile. Women, always women, only women.
Brasov was a small city, still, at its center, more
or less in the thirteenth century. “See there,” Octavian said. “The Black Church. Very famous.” It was black, an ashy black, like charcoal. “Toasted by the Austrians in 1689,” he explained, his French failing him for a moment.
In a narrow lane behind the church they found a row of antique shops, the owners, not expecting much business in January and civil war, called down to do business by Octavian shouting in the street. Serebin and Marie-Galante bought a large wooden trunk plastered with the labels of long-vanished steamships, then looked for folk art to pack inside, Octavian sometimes signaling to them with agonized glances when the price was too high.
Serebin bought toys. A wooden ball bound to a stick with a cord-though how a child would contrive to play with such a thing was completely beyond him, and a variety of spinning tops. Also wood carvings: a hut, a sheep, a few saints, and several hounds, some lying with crossed paws, others bounding after prey. Marie-Galante added embroidered vests, wooden and ceramic bowls, and a set of woodworker’s tools that could have been centuries old, then bought a Persian lamb hat for herself. She tried it on, setting it at various angles, as Octavian and the shopkeeper and Serebin looked on, and asked them did it look better like this? Or this?
Serebin had called the number earlier, with no success, and drawn a line through the entry: Gheorghe Musa-senior civil servant. On the right-hand side of the page, no indication of payment. Now, the morning after they returned from Brasov, he tried one last time. Dialed, then stared out the window and waited as the double ring, a dry whispery vibrato, repeated itself again and again. It would, he knew, never be answered.
But it was.
“Yes? Who’s calling, please.” It was the voice of an old man. Perhaps, Serebin thought, an old man whose phone had not rung for a long time.
“I hope I’m not intruding,” Serebin said.
“No, sir, you are not.”
“My name is Marchais, I happen to be in Bucharest, and I’m calling at the suggestion of a friend in Paris.”
“Marchais.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
In the silence on the telephone Serebin could hear the silence of the old man’s apartment. He knows, Serebin thought. Knows perfectly well what kind of telephone call this is, and he’s thinking it over. At last, a voice. “How may I help you?”