Blood of Victory (20 page)

He was infuriated, could see the hat lying forlorn in the street, was barely able to keep himself from retrieving it.

Across the boulevard, some fifty or sixty men, marching in formation with rifles held across their bodies. They sang well, Serebin thought, liked doing it and were good at it.

The song stopped. Replaced by the throb of a heavy engine and clanking treads. The reaction was immediate; frantic, chaotic. And, Serebin thought, comic—
the Men’s Chorus of the Iron Guard run for their lives.
The riflemen broke ranks and fled into a narrow street off the boulevard. But not quick enough—the tank jolted to a halt and the turret traversed as the cannon tracked the running shadows. The professor said, “My God.” Serebin threw himself on the snow. A long flame lit the street, and the flat
crump
deepened as it rolled back to them off the sides of the buildings.

Serebin shouted, “Get down.”

The professor wasn’t so sure. He wore a good tweed overcoat, there would be hell to pay if he ruined it. Compromise: he dropped to one knee and rested the briefcase by his side.

In silhouette, the hatch on the top of the turret was flung open and a man with a submachine gun began to work the street, the flare at the barrel flickering on and off with each burst. The cannon shell had meant nothing, zooming away into an unlucky wall, but now the legionnaires were in trouble, and pinpricks of light sparkled from the doorways. Serebin heard it, the air ripped like cloth above his head and he burrowed into the snow as a sliver of brick stung him on the neck and flew away.

Suddenly, the machine gun went silent. Serebin looked up and saw only darkness above the open hatch. The cannon fired again, and again, right and left, broken glass showered down from the windows and a shop began to glow with orange light.

The rifle fire from the legionnaires thinned, then stopped. Serebin managed to get himself turned around so that he could see the professor. He lay on his back, one leg folded beneath itself. Serebin slid closer, but there was nothing he could do. The man had a red hole beneath one eye, the other stared up at the falling snow.

Why wouldn’t you lie down?

Serebin heard the tank move off down the boulevard and, very slowly, got to his feet. The man’s arm had jerked savagely when he’d been hit and his briefcase had come open and stood on end. Inside, there was only a newspaper.

All night long the Black Bell rang as Serebin worked his way across the city, the smell of burning stronger and stronger as the hours passed. At one point, the air-raid sirens went off, whining up and down for an hour. He walked, mostly, sometimes ran, and crawled when he had to. Once down a street where the twelve-story telephone exchange faced an eight-story apartment building, the former occupied by the Legion, the latter by the army and police. In between, the bodies of three legionnaires who’d tried to rush the army position. He waited as they fought, exchanging fire window to window, the ricochets singing off into the night, then circled through a park where two soldiers were carrying a third to a taxi with a red cross painted on its side. He was not alone, he saw others, caught out in the storm, bent low, running from cover to cover, trying to go home.

There was no sunrise. The street simply turned gray, the low sky heavy with winter cloud. He was then at a large square, the piata Obor, and not far from the apartment. He started to cross, then thought better of it and slid beneath a car. The square was held by men wearing the green armbands of the Legion. They had a Model A Ford pickup with a machine gun mounted on a tripod, and had built a barricade of overturned cars and buses, dressers, desks, and beds, across one end of the square. Two of the men sat on a red couch.

Which way to go?
Back out, try another street.
He was almost finished, he thought, exhausted and soaked and cold, and he had to wait for a minute and gather his strength.

Before he could leave, the barricade was smashed open by a huge tank with a swastika on its side. The tank was followed by an armored car, the commander standing behind the driver, a pair of binoculars hanging down the front of his leather coat. He raised his arm and waved it forward, and a motorized Wehrmacht unit advanced into the square and sealed off all but one street.

The legionnaires thought the Germans had come to help them, and shouted,
“Sieg Heil”
and
“Heil Hitler”
and
“Duce! Duce!”
but the Germans did not respond. When the square was fully controlled, the commander shouted an order and, after a few moments of shocked silence, the Legion began to leave, walking slowly away down the open street.

When Serebin finally turned his key in the door, the woman who owned the apartment was sitting in her bathrobe, listening to the radio. She leapt up, a hand pressed to her heart, threw her arms around him and wept. When he’d put on dry clothes, she told him the news. The Legion had held the city all night, had murdered hundreds of Jews, at the Straulesti abattoir and in the Jilava forest, and looted and burned the Jewish quarter. Then, at dawn, Antonescu’s forces, supported by German units, had beaten them back; had retaken the radio station, the palace, the railyards—all of Bucharest.

“It’s over,” she said. “The Legion is finished. I cannot believe my own words, but, for this night at least, thank heaven for Adolf Hitler.”

At nightfall on 22 January, Serebin took a train to Giurgiu and crossed the river into Bulgaria.

POLANYI’S ORCHESTRA

IN BULGARIA, they called Russia Uncle Ivan and he was their favorite uncle, because he’d rescued their Slavic souls from the Ottoman devil in 1878 and they never forgot it. So the French journalist who boarded the Danube ferry in Roumania became, when he reached the Bulgarian port of Ruse, the Russian émigré I. A. Serebin, who, glancing back toward the far shore with evident distaste, earned from the customs officer a fraternal slap on the back.

They were pleased to see him, at the border post, where they’d had a steady stream of Roumanian refugees all night long and didn’t really know what to do with them. “A writer?” the officer said, looking at his papers. “You ought to go up to Svistov.” Where, it was explained, they had a museum dedicated to the memory of the assassinated poet Konstantinov, his pierced heart exhibited in a glass box. “It will inspire you,” they said.

There was not a room to be had anywhere in Ruse but, for one of Uncle Ivan’s wandering lads, a nearby hotel had a bowl of soup, an army blanket, and a couch in the lobby where he was guarded the long night through by the hotel dog. In the morning, he wired Helikon Trading and received his answer
poste restante
by the end of the day.
Arriving Central Station Edirne 17:25 on 24 January.

Serebin spent a long day with the Bulgarian railroad, crossed into Turkey, walked around Edirne for an hour, and entered the railway station waiting room just after five, where Polanyi’s assistant Ibrahim found him and took him off to a caravansary hotel by the Old Mosque.

Polanyi had taken care to make things nice for his returning warrior. There was a crackling blaze in the fireplace, a plate of things on toasted flatbread, a bottle of Polish vodka. Serebin was surprised at the depth of gratitude he felt. “Welcome home,” Polanyi said. “How bad was it?”

Bad enough. Serebin described his time in Bucharest, Polanyi listened carefully and, now and then, took notes. “It’s no surprise,” he said, rising to put a fresh log on the fire. “We thought they would support Antonescu. It’s basic German policy, they’ve certainly said it often enough. ‘Peace and quiet in the raw material zone.’ Stability is what they want, and they couldn’t care less about Roumanian politics, to them it’s comedy, farce. They want the oil and the wheat, forget the ideology. And no Balkan adventures.”

“They are there in force,” Serebin said. “Tanks, armored cars, everything.”

“And more to come, as they get ready to attack Russia.”

“Will they?”

“They will. And soon, likely after the spring floods.”

The prediction wasn’t new. A drift in war conversation since Poland in ’39, and Serebin saw always, when it came up, the same images. A thousand Ukrainian villages, shtetls, peasants, who had no shoes, who, some days, had nothing to eat, nothing. And
then
the soldiers came, as had Serebin,
then
the huts and barns burned and the animals died. To Polanyi he could only say, “Poor Russia.”

“Yes,” Polanyi said. “I know. But the divisions are moving east, in Poland, and, soon, in Roumania. Bulgaria will sign up with Hitler—Czar Boris will, at any rate—and he already has Hungary, as much as anyone can ever have it, including the Hungarians. Britain has offered to send troops to Greece, but they’ve refused. For the moment. Right now, they think they can chase the Italian army all the way back to Rome, but Hitler won’t allow it. By spring, you’ll see the swastika flying over the Acropolis, and southern Europe will be essentially secured.”

“Except for Yugoslavia.”

“A thorn in his side. And the Serbs never go quietly.”

“Will he invade?”

“Well, he won’t sneak in. Coup d’état, more likely.”

Polanyi settled back in his chair and took some time to light a cigar. “So, Ilya,” he said, “tell me how you propose to halt oil shipments to Germany and bring an end to this wretched war.” The edge of amusement in his voice wasn’t subtle—caught in a hopeless cause that couldn’t be abandoned, one had better be amused.

“Blow up the river,” Serebin said. “Or block it.”

“How?”

“Not like the British in '39.”

“Meaning?”

“No commandos.”

“What then?”

“Plausible accident.”

“Ten days. Maybe two weeks.”

“Then another.”

Polanyi sighed. “Yes, if you can’t attack the fields, you have only the transport system. We’re all agreed about that.”

“Marrano?”

“Everybody. My last two people should be out by the end of the week.”

“How many were there?”

“Ilya, please.”

Serebin laughed. “Sorry.” Then he said, “It doesn’t have to be forever, does it?”

“No. We don’t have to win, we have to play. Slow him down—an inevitable problem with supply. Make him think about timing, with his Russian invasion, wait for the Americans, or maybe he’ll choke on a cauliflower.”

For a moment, they watched the fire.

“Who could ever have imagined,” Polanyi said, “that the man who came to burn down the world would be a vegetarian.”

“We’ll need people in Roumania,” Serebin said.

“We have them. Just barely, but we do.”

Serebin didn’t believe it.

“We didn’t fail in Bucharest,” Polanyi said. “Not quite.”

Lunch was ordered in the room. Polanyi and Serebin went round and round, what and how and when and back to what. No final conclusion—the gods on Olympus would have to be consulted—but plenty of false trails pursued to the end.
What Can’t Be Done,
that dreary epic, written this day in the form of notes by Count Janos Polanyi. Eventually, for Serebin, an assignment in Paris,
thank God,
and, finally, parting gifts. Balkan Sobranies, sugared plums from Balabukhi—just as he’d given Tamara Petrovna—and, for the long ride west, a copy of Lermontov,
A Hero of Our Time.

Was this a shrewd choice, Serebin wondered, or the only Russian book in the store?
Maybe shrewd,
he thought, as the train clattered toward Sofia. Lermontov had been banished from the Guards Hussars, after writing a poem that attacked the Russian oligarchy for the death of Pushkin, and exiled to the Caucasus as a regular army officer. Was there cited for bravery, in 1837, but the Czar refused him the medal. Eventually, he was killed in a duel, as witless as any in literary history, at the age of twenty-six. A disordered life, in detail not anything like Serebin’s, but chaotic enough.

“Have you spent long in Cechnia?”

     “I had about ten years there with my company in a fort near Kamenny Brod. Do you know it?”

     “I’ve heard of it.”

     “Ah, those cutthroats gave us a time of it! They’re quieter now, thank heavens, but once you went a hundred yards from the stockade there’d be some shaggy devil on the lookout, and you’d only to blink an eyelid and before you knew where you were you had a lasso round your neck or a bullet in your head. Grand chaps!”

He looked up to see a girl with a basket waiting for the train to go past. Well, whatever else might be true, Polanyi had chosen a book that every Russian had read, but that every Russian liked reading again. And, by the time he reached Subotica, in Yugoslavia, the Balabukhi plums were more than welcome, to Serebin and his fellow travelers, since there’d been practically nothing to eat at the station buffets where the train stopped.

28 January. In Istanbul, Janos Polanyi sat at a table on the second floor of a waterfront lokanta called Karim Bey. He drank a glass of raki as he waited, staring out at a long line of Turkish porters, struggling up the gangplank of a freighter beneath immense burlap sacks.

He was not at all pleased to be there, and he did not look forward to lunch—with the fattish and soft-spoken Mr. Brown and his relentless pipe. His infuriating pipe, a device used to stretch silent pauses out to uncomfortable intervals where disapproval hung in the air amid the fruity smoke. Polanyi unfolded his napkin and refolded it, he was tense and apprehensive and he didn’t like it. What he had to offer Mr. Brown was the best that could be offered but he feared, expected, the usual reaction: a cold, tolerant silence seasoned with contempt. For who he was, for what he did, and for the quality of his proposals. As a social attitude it was, of course, beneath him: an aristocrat from a thousand-year family need not concern himself with the Mr. Browns of the world. But, applied to secret work, this contempt could kill.

Polanyi had always suspected that Mr. Brown was an
amateur
of chess. That he saw a world of pawns and bishops and helpless kings. But the people who did what Polanyi asked of them were not pawns. They lived, Serebin and Marrano and Marie-Galante and the rest, and he meant for them to keep living. But it would better suit Mr. Brown, he believed, if he could be made to suppress this instinct and sacrifice the occasional pawn for a stronger position on the board.

Polanyi was on the verge of making himself really angry when Mr. Brown approached the table. Fortunately for everyone, perhaps, he was not alone. “This is Mr. Stephens,” he said.

Polanyi stood up and, as they shook hands, the man said, “Julian Stephens.”

A first name! A minor adjustment in the introduction, but it implied a change of style, a change of attitude, and Polanyi’s spirits rose. Stephens took the floor immediately. He was pleased to meet him, had heard such good things about him, was anxious to work with him, Istanbul was an extraordinary city, was it not, and so forth, and so on. Social talk. But, as he spoke, Polanyi began to understand who he was.

A man of some depth, and some cruelty. No, not quite, more the capacity for cruelty. He was maybe thirty-five, a boyish thirty-five, pale, with thin lips and straight hair, straw-colored, cut short above the ears and combed back from a part on the side. And there was something in his manner that brought to mind a story Polanyi had heard long ago, to do with savage contests of intellect that took place at high table at Oxford. No quarter asked and none given, a reputation made or ruined, in a world where reputation meant everything. Had he, in fact, come from the university? Not really any way to know that. Law, or banking, or commerce, the possibilities were endless but, whatever it was, he had been to the wars, and, Polanyi sensed, won them.

“I believe,” Mr. Brown said, “that the two of you will get on well together.”

“I would think so,” Polanyi said.

“What we’ve done,” Mr. Brown said, “is to create a new and different kind of office. At the direction of the prime minister himself, I should add. That will specialize in operations meant to damage the enemy’s industry—particularly war-related industry, his transport, and communications.”

“An office for sabotage,” Polanyi said.

“Yes,” Stephens said. “With the kind of technical support that will make it work.”

Polanyi nodded. This was a good idea, if they meant it. “In the Balkans?”

“Everywhere,” Stephens said. “In the occupied countries.”

“So Switzerland will be left alone.”

“For the moment,” Stephens said, with a thin smile.

“My office will continue as it always has,” Mr. Brown said. “But we will deal strictly with intelligence. In that regard, you and I may work together again, but, for the present, Mr. Stephens is your man.”

Mr. Brown rose and offered Polanyi his hand. “I will leave you to it,” he said. His demeanor was amiable enough, but Polanyi wasn’t persuaded. Whatever else this was, Mr. Brown took it as defeat. Somewhere, in some distant office in the green and pleasant land, there’d been a battle of meetings and memoranda, and Mr. Brown’s side had come off second best.

Stephens watched as his colleague left. Then he said, “So then, here we are. I’d better tell you right away that I’m new to this, ah, this sort of thing. I expect you know that. But, I tend to learn quickly, and the people in London will let me do pretty much whatever I want. For the time being, anyhow, so we’d best take advantage of the honeymoon, right?” He opened the menu and peered at it. “I suppose we should order lunch.”

“Probably we should.”

He read down the page and closed the menu. “Haven’t the faintest idea what any of it is, would you order for me? Nothing too ambitious, if you don’t mind.”

“Perhaps a drink, to start.”

“I daresay. What are you having?”

“Raki.”

“Is it very strong?”

“It is.”

“Splendid.”

Polanyi signaled to the waiter, standing idle in the corner. “And then, lamb?”

“Yes, lamb, good.” He folded the menu and placed it beside him, then took a pen and a small pad from his pocket, unscrewed the top of the pen, and opened the pad to a clean page. “Now,” he said, “on the way down here I had an idea.”

A quiet afternoon in January. The Parisian weather, lately come to its senses, cloudy and gray and soft. One of the city’s favored weathers, this gloom, good for making love, good for idle speculation and small pleasures. This was at heart a southern city, a Latin city, its residents forced to live in the north, between Englishmen and Germans, energetic souls who liked bright sunshine and brisk mornings. Well, they were welcome to it. The true Parisians, and Serebin was one of them, woke happily to damp twilight and, even in an occupied city, believed that anything was possible.

In a narrow street by the Place Bastille, the elegant Brasserie Heininger was closed on Mondays, its red and gold affluence lost in darkness, its gallant waiters home with their wives, its glorious platters of
langouste
and sausage only aromatic memories in the still air. At the infamous Table Fourteen, where a bullet hole in the mirror served as memorial to a Bulgarian headwaiter assassinated in the Ladies WC, the chairs leaned forward, propped against the table. All was silent, waiting for Tuesday.

But not quite. The kitchen was alive. By some vaguely defined
droit de chef,
the talented but fulminous Zubotnik served Monday lunch, a banquet of leftovers, to his émigré friends. Zubotnik had never actually
thrown
his cleaver at anybody but he shook it, often enough, and screamed in six languages. He had ruled the kitchen at the Aquarium restaurant in St. Petersburg, made his way to Paris in 1917, worked as a sous-chef for a month, then, when the incumbent chef fled to Lyons, crying out as he went through the door, “No human man can turn that color,” had, at a horrendous rise in salary, agreed to replace him. Papa Heininger had regretted that decision for twenty-three years but Zubotnik was a genius and what could you do.