by Alan Furst
“With Great Britain and France. And, sooner or later, America. We’ll surely win that one.”
“You forgot Russia,” Polanyi said. “How’s your chicken?”
“Very good.”
Polanyi took a moment, using a knife to pile a small mound of sauerkraut atop a bite of frankfurter on his fork, then added a dab of mustard. “You don’t mind the Poles, do you, Nicholas?”
“Not at all.”
“Lovely countryside. And the mountains, the Tatra, sublime. Especially this time of year.”
“So it’s said.”
“Nicholas!”
“Yes?”
“Can it be possible that you’ve never been there? To the majestic Tatra?”
A memorandum on his desk at the Agence Courtmain requested that he have a look at the file on Betravix, a nerve tonic made of beets. And there he found a postcard of a wild-eyed Zeus, beard blown sideways by a thundercloud above his head, about to ravish an extraordinarily pink and naked Hera he’d got hold of by the foot. On the back of the card, a drawing, in red crayon, of a heart pierced by an exclamation point.
He sat through a meeting with Courtmain, then, back in his office, found a second message, this one scrawled on a slip of paper: Your friend Ilya called. M.
He walked down the hall to her office, a glassed-in cubicle by a window. “I liked your card,” he said. “Is this the sort of thing that goes on when you take Betravix?”
“I wouldn’t, if I were you.” The late afternoon sun slanted in on her hair. “Did you get your telephone message?”
“I did. Who’s Ilya?”
“A friend, he said. He wants you to meet him.” She thumbed through a stack of notes on her desk. “For a drink. At the cafe on rue Maubeuge, across from the Gare du Nord. At six-fifteen.”
Ilya? “You’re sure it was for me?”
She nodded. “He said, ‘Can you tell Nicholas.’ “
“Is there another Nicholas?”
She thought about it. “Not in this office. He sounded nice enough, very calm. With a Russian accent.”
“Well, who knows.”
“You’ll go?”
He hesitated. Unknown Russians, meetings at station cafes. “Why did he call you?”
“I don’t know, my love.” She looked past him, to her doorway. “Is that it?”
He turned to see Leon with a sketch of a woman in a fur stole. “I can come back later, if you’re busy,” Leon said.
“No, we’re done,” Morath said.
For the rest of the day he thought about it. Couldn’t stop. Almost called Polanyi, then didn’t. Decided, finally, to stay away. He left the office at five-thirty, stood for a moment on the avenue Matignon, then waved at a taxi, intending to go back to his apartment.
“Monsieur?” the driver said.
“The Gare du Nord.” Je m’en fous, the hell with it.
He sat in the cafe, an unread newspaper beside his coffee, staring at people as they came through the door. Was it something to do with the diamond dealer in Antwerp? Somebody Balki knew? Or a friend of a friend-Call Morath when you get to Paris. Somebody who wanted to sell him insurance, maybe, or a stockbroker, or an emigre who needed a job. A Russian client? Who wanted to advertise his … shoe store?
Anything, really, but what he knew it was.
Morath waited until seven, then took a taxi to Mary Day’s apartment. They drank a glass of wine, made love, went out for steak-frites, walked home, curled up together under the blankets. But he woke up at three-thirty, and again at five.
And, when the phone rang in his office on Monday morning, waited three rings before he picked it up.
“My apology, Monsieur Morath. I hope you will forgive.” A soft voice, heavily accented.
“Who are you?”
“Just Ilya. I’ll be, tomorrow morning, at the open market at Maubert.”
“And this concerns-?”
“Thank you,” he said. In the background, somebody called out “Un cafe allonge.” There was a radio playing, a chair scraped a tile floor, then the phone was hung up.
A big market, at the place Maubert, on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Cod and red snapper on chipped ice. Cabbages, potatoes, turnips, leeks, onions. Dried rosemary and lavender. Walnuts and hazelnuts. A pair of bloody pork kidneys wrapped in a sheet of newspaper.
Morath saw him, waiting in a doorway. A spectre. Stared for a moment, got a nod in return.
They walked among the stalls, breaths steaming in the cold air.
“Do I know you?” Morath asked.
“No,” Ilya said. “But I know you.”
There was something subtly mismade about him, Morath thought, perhaps a trunk too long for the legs, or arms too short. A receding hairline, with hair sheared so close he seemed at first to have a high forehead. A placid face, waxy and pale, which made a thick black mustache even blacker. And in his bearing there was a hint of the doctor or the lawyer, the man who trained himself, for professional reasons, not to show emotion. He wore a sad old overcoat, olive green, perhaps a remnant of somebody’s army, somewhere, so soiled and frayed that its identity had long ago faded away.
“Did we meet, somewhere?” Morath asked him.
“Not quite. I know you from your dossier, in Moscow. The sort of record kept by the special services. It is, perhaps, more complete than you would expect. Who you know, what you earn. Political views, family-just the usual things. I had a choice of hundreds of people, in Paris. Various nationalities, circumstances. Eventually, I chose you.”
They walked in silence, for a time. “I am in flight, of course. I was due to be shot, in the purge of the Foreign Directorate. My friends had been arrested, had vanished, as is the normal course of things there. At the time, I was in-I can say, Europe. And when I was recalled to Moscow-to receive a medal, they said-I knew precisely what medal that was, nine grams, and I knew precisely what was in store for me before they got around to using the bullet. So, I ran away, and came to Paris to hide. For seven months I lived in a room. I believe I left the room three times in that period.”
“How did you live?”
Ilya shrugged. “The way one does. Using the little money I had, I bought a pot, a spirit stove, and a large sack of oats. With water, available down the hall from my room, I could boil the oats and make kasha. Add a little lard and you can live on that. I did.”
“And me? What do you want of me?”
“Help.”
A policeman walked past, his cape drawn around him for warmth. Morath avoided his glance.
“There are things that should be known,” Ilya said. “Perhaps you can help me to do this.”
“They are looking for you, of course.”
“High and low. And they will find me.”
“Should you be out on the street?”
“No.”
They passed a boulangerie. “A moment,” Morath said, entered the shop and emerged with a batard. He tore a piece off the end and handed the rest to Ilya.
Morath chewed on the bread for a long time. His mouth was very dry and it was hard to swallow.
“I’ve put you in danger, I know,” Ilya said. “And your woman friend. For that I must apologize.”
“You knew to call me through her, where she works?”
“I followed you, monsieur. It isn’t so very hard to do.”
“No, I suppose it isn’t.”
“You can walk away, of course. I would not bother you again.”
“Yes. I know.”
“But you do not.”
Morath didn’t answer.
Ilya smiled. “So,” he said.
Morath reached in his pocket and handed Ilya whatever money he had.
“For your kindness, I thank you,” Ilya said. “And, for anything more, if God wills, please keep in mind that I don’t have very much time.”
Morath took Mary Day to the movies that night, a gangster film, as luck would have it, detectives chasing a handsome bank robber down alleys in the rain. A noble
savage, his dark soul redeemed by love in the previous reel, but the flics didn’t know that. The little scarf in his hand when he died in a puddle under a streetlamp-that belonged to dear, good, stunning, tight-sweatered Dany. No justice, in this world. A covert sniffle from Mary Day, that was all he got. When the newsreel came on-coal mine cave-in at Lille, Hitler shrieking in Regensburg-they left.
Back on the rue Guisarde, they lay in bed in the darkness. “Did you find your Russian?” she said.
“This morning. Over in the Maubert market.”
“And?”
“A fugitive.”
“Oh?”
She felt light in his arms, fragile.
“What did he want?” she said.
“Some kind of help.”
“Will you help him?”
For a moment he was silent, then said, “I might.”
He didn’t want to talk about it, slid his hand down her stomach to change the subject. “See what happens when I take my Betravix?”
She snickered. “Now that is something I did see. A week after I was hired, I think it was. You were off someplace-wherever it is you go-and this strange little man showed up with his tonic. ‘For the nerves,’ he said. ‘And to increase the vigor.’ Courtmain was anxious to take it on. We sat in his office, this green bottle on his desk, somewhere he’d found a spoon. I took the cap off and smelled it. Courtmain looked inquisitive, but I didn’t say anything-I’d only been there a few days and I was afraid to make a mistake. Well, nothing scares Courtmain, he poured himself a spoonful and slugged it down. Then he turned pale and went running down the hall.”
“Betravix-keeps you running.”
“The look on his face.” She snorted at the memory.
The Ides of March. On the fifteenth, German motorized infantry, motorcycles, half-tracks, and armored cars entered Prague in a heavy blizzard. The Czech army did not resist, the air force stayed on the ground. All day long, the Wehrmacht columns wound through the city, headed for the Slovakian border. The following morning, Hitler addressed a crowd of Volksdeutsch from the balcony of Hradcany Castle. Over the next few days, there were five thousand arrests in Czechoslovakia and hundreds of suicides.
Two weeks earlier, Hungary had joined the Anti-Comintern Pact-Germany, Italy, and Japan-while simultaneously initiating a severe repression of Fascist elements throughout the country. We will oppose the Bolsheviks, the action seemed to say, and we can sign any paper we like, but we will not be ruled by Nazi surrogates. In a certain light, a dark, tormented kind of light, it made sense. Even more sense when, on 14 March, the Honved, the Royal Hungarian army, marched across the border and occupied Ruthenia. Slowly, painfully, the old territories were coming back.
In Paris, the driving snow in Prague fell as rain. The news was alive on the streets. Under black, shining umbrellas, crowds gathered at the kiosks where the headlines were posted. BETRAYAL. Morath could feel it in the air. As though the beast, safely locked in the basement at the time of Munich, had kicked the door down and started smashing the china.
The receptionist at the agency answered the phone while dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. A subdued Courtmain showed Morath a list of younger men in the office who would likely be mobilized-how to get along without them? In the hallways, conversations in urgent whispers.
But, when Morath left the office at midday, nobody was whispering. In the streets, at the cafe and the bank and everywhere else, it was merde and merde again. And merdeux, un beau merdier, merdique, emmerde, and emmerdeur. The Parisians had a lot of ways to say it and they used them all. Morath’s newspaper, violently pessimistic about the future, reminded its readers what Churchill had said in response to Chamberlain’s peace-with-honor speeches at the time of Munich: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.”
On 28 March, Madrid fell to Franco’s armies, and the Spanish republic surrendered. Mary Day sat on the edge of the bed in her flannel nightshirt, listening to the voice on the radio. “You know I once had a friend,” she said, close to tears. “An Englishman. Tall and silly, blind as a bat-Edwin Pennington. Edwin Pennington, who wrote Annabelle Surprised, and Miss Lovett’s School. And then one day he went off and died in Andalusia.”
For Morath, at work that morning, a petit bleu, a telegram delivered via the pneumatic-tube system used by the Parisian post offices. A simple message: NOTRE DAME DE LORETTE. 1:30.
The church of Notre Dame de Lorette was out in the scruffy Ninth Arrondissement-the whores in the neighborhood known as Lorettes. In the streets around the church, Ilya would not seem especially noticeable. Morath’s best instincts told him not to go. He sat back in his chair, stared at the telegram, smoked a cigarette, and left the office at one.
It was dark and busy in the church, mostly older women, that time of day. War widows, he thought, dressed in black, early for the two o’clock Mass. He found the deepest shadow, toward the back, away from the stained-glass windows. Ilya appeared almost immediately. He was tense, the small bravado of the Maubert market was no more. He sat down, then took a deep breath and let it out, as though he’d been running. “Good,” he said, speaking softly. “You are here.
“You see what happens in Prague,” he said, “and next is Poland. You don’t need me to tell you that. But what is not known is that the directive is written, the war plan is made. It has a name, Fall Weiss, Case White, and it has a date, any time after the first of September.”
Morath repeated the name and the date.
“I can prove,” Ilya said, excited, losing his French. “With papers.” He paused a moment, then said, “This is good Chekist work, but it must go-up high. Otherwise, war. No way to stop it. Can you help?”
“I can try.”
Ilya stared into his eyes to see if he was telling the truth. “That is what I hope.” He had enormous presence, Morath thought. Power. Even battered and hungry and frightened, he had it.
“There’s somebody I can go to,” Morath said.
Ilya’s expression said If that’s what I can get, I’ll take it. “The Poles are in the middle of this thing,” he said. “And they are difficult, impossible. In the five-man junta that runs the country, only Beck and Rydz-Smigly matter-Beck for foreign policy, Rydz-Smigly for the army-but they are all Pilsudski’s children. When he died, in 1935, they inherited the country, and they have the same experience. They fought for independence in 1914, and got it. Then they beat the Russians, in 1920, before the gates of Warsaw, and now they want nothing to do with them. Too many wars, the last hundred years. Too much blood spilled. There’s a point where, between nations, it’s too late. That’s Russia and Poland.
“Now, they think they can beat Germany. Jozef Beck’s background is in clandestine service-he was expelled from France in 1923 when he served as Polish military attache, suspected of spying for Germany. So what he knows of Russia and Germany he knows from the shadows, where the truth is usually to be found.
“What the Poles want is alliance with France and Britain. Logical, on the surface. But how can Britain help them? With ships? Like Gallipoli? It’s a joke. The only nation that can help Poland, today, is Russia-look at a map. And Stalin wants the same thing the Poles want, alliance with Britain, for the same reason, to keep Hitler’s wolves away from the door. But we are despised by the British, feared, hated, Godless communists and murderers. That’s true, but what is also true, even more true, is that we are the only nation that can form, with Poland, an eastern front against the Wehrmacht.
“Chamberlain and Halifax don’t like this idea, and there is more than a little evidence that what they do like is the idea of Hitler fighting Stalin. Do they think Stalin doesn’t know it? Do they? So here is the truth: If Stalin can’t make a pact with the British, he will make one with Germany. He will have no choice.”
Morath didn’t answer, trying to take it all in. The two o’clock Mass had begun, a young priest serving in the afternoon. Morath thought he would hear about bloody crime
s: famines, purges. Ilya wasn’t the only defector from the Russian secret service-there was a GRU general, called Krivitsky, who’d written a bestseller in America. Ilya, he assumed, wanted protection, refuge, in return for evidence that Stalin meant to rule the world.
“You believe?” Ilya said.
“Yes.” More or less, from a certain angle.
“Your friend, can approach the British?”
“I would think he could. And the papers?”
“When he agrees, he’ll have them.”
“What are they?”
“From the Kremlin, notes of meetings. NKVD reports, copies of German memoranda.”
“Can I contact you?”
Ilya smiled and, slowly, shook his head. “How much time do you need?”
“A week, perhaps.”
“So be it.” Ilya stood. “I will go first, you can leave in a few minutes. Is safer, that way.”
Ilya headed for the door. Morath stayed where he was. He glanced at his watch, followed along with the priest’s Latin phrases. He’d grown up with it, then, when he came home from the war, stopped going.
Finally, he rose and walked slowly to the back of the church.
Ilya was standing just inside the door, staring out into the rain. Morath stood beside him. “You’re staying here?”
He nodded toward the street. “A car.”
In front of the church, a Renault with a man in the passenger seat.
“For me, maybe,” Ilya said.
“We’ll go together.”
“No.”
“Out the side door, then.”
Ilya looked at him. They’re waiting at only one door? He almost laughed. “Trapped,” he said.
“Go back where we were, I’ll come and get you. Just stay where people are.”
Ilya hesitated, then walked away.