Blood of Victory (25 page)

He spent the morning pretending to be busy, seated in front of a stack of problem papers—letters to be answered, forms to be filled out—that he shared with Boris Ulzhen, but mostly thinking about things that were bad for him to think about. Then the telephone rang, and a man called out, “Ilya Aleksandrovich? A call for you.”

“Who is it?”

After a moment, the man said, “Madame Orlov.”

The name meant nothing—
another lost soul.
Serebin hesitated, he was tired of the world, of people who wanted things. Finally, he lost the battle with his conscience and walked over to the desk. “Yes?” he said. “Madame Orlov?”

“Hello,
ours.
”

Four-thirty,
she’d said.

But by five-thirty she still wasn’t there. Serebin waited, looked at his watch and waited. Sometimes he stared out the window, at people passing by on the street in front of the hotel. Sometimes he tried to read, gave up, walked around the room, went back to the window. So she’s late, he told himself, women do that in love affairs, it’s nothing new. But this was an occupied city, and sometimes people didn’t show up when they said they would. Sometimes, it turned out, they’d had to stand on line at a passport
contrôle,
and sometimes they were taken away to be questioned. And, sometimes, they just disappeared.

Then, after six, he heard footsteps in the hallway, almost running, and waited by the door until she knocked. She was breathless and cold, said she was sorry to be so late, put a chilled glove on his cheek and, eyes closed, lips apart, waited for him to kiss her. He started to, then didn’t. Instead, from the curve between her neck and shoulder he inhaled a great, deep breath of her—perfume, plain soap, the scent of her skin, and, when he exhaled, it was audible; half growl, half sigh, a dog by a fire.

She knew what that meant. Held him tight for a moment, then said “God, it’s freezing in here,” and ran for the bed, shedding her coat and kicking her shoes off on the way, burrowing under the covers and pulling them up to her nose. He sat beside her, and she gave him her jacket and skirt, then her sweater and slip. A brief struggle beneath the blanket produced first an oath, then a stocking.

“How long?” he said.

She handed him a second stocking. “The weekend. Labonniere’s in Vichy, at the foreign ministry. So...”

“Are you...is it work? For us?”

She wriggled briefly beneath the covers and gave him a garter belt. “No, love, it isn’t.” She unhooked her bra, put it on his lap with everything else, then slid her panties off, reached out from her den and, turning them upside down, pulled them over his head.

“I dread going back there,” she said later. They were warm beneath the snarled covers, the room dark, the city silent. “Awful place, the Trieste. One of those border towns where everybody’s got it in for everybody else.”

“It’s not forever,” he said.

“Mean and dreary, and it rains.”

“But”—he paused—“you have to stay.”

She yawned and stretched, pulled the blankets around them. “Don’t tempt me,
ours.
Really, don’t.” He had the BBC on the radio, tuned low for caution—it was against occupation law to listen to it—and a tiny symphony played away on the night table. “I’ve convinced myself that it matters, what I do there.” She didn’t sound convinced. “Salon intelligence, so-called. Poor Madame X, how she pines for her
friend,
the Minister of Y, off in frigid Moscow for a week. Labonniere’s pretty good at it.”

“You’re careful, of course.”

“Oh yes, very. But...”

She didn’t like talking about it, didn’t want it in bed with them. She traced a finger down his back, began, lazily, to make love to him.

“Maybe better, in the spring.”

She put a finger to his lips.

“Sorry.”

She rolled delicately over on top of him so that her mouth was close to his ear and said, in a voice so quiet he could only just hear her, “We will survive this,
ours,
and then we will go away together.”

Only when morning came and they were dressed could he bring himself to tell her what happened at the café. “Strange,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t like saying this, but, if they’d really wanted to do something, they could have done it.”

“I know.”

“Maybe they were just trying to frighten you. A warning.”

“Maybe. Still, whatever it was, Polanyi should hear about it.”

“I can manage that,” she said, “when I get back.” She put on her coat, they were going out for coffee. “By now, you know, Polanyi and the people he works for, and the people
they
work for, have all got themselves committed to this.”

For a moment, they were silent.

“So,” she said, “it’s too late to stop.”

Very unwise to be seen together at the Gare de Lyon but he wouldn’t let her leave him at the hotel. They looked for a taxi, but there was none to be found, so they leaned against each other on the Métro, then got off a stop before the station, found a café, held hands across the table, and said good-bye.

20 March. The parks still brown and dead, branches bare and dripping, rain cold, light gone in late afternoon, and hours and hours until the dawn. Yes, the last days of winter, the calendar didn’t lie, but up here it died hard and took a long time doing it. On the Pont Royal, the émigré writer I. A. Serebin leaned on a balustrade and stared pensively down into the Seine.

Writing lines on a reluctant spring? Lines for a lover in a distant city? The river was flat, and low in its banks, it barely moved. Or was it, perhaps, just beginning to swell, just beginning to grow, from thawed fields and hillsides in the south? He couldn’t tell, didn’t know, was ignorant of water. All those years of idle staring at the stuff, the very essence of everything, and he knew nothing about it. Nonetheless, he studied the river and tried to read it because, if the spring tide had started to run here, it was running also at another river, south and east of here, at the Stenka ridge, at kilometer 1030. Certain individuals, in Istanbul and London, had to be gazing at their own rivers, he suspected. So then, where were they?

He needn’t have worried.

When he left the bridge he walked over to the IRU office, then, eventually, back to the Winchester, and then, as was his custom, to a small restaurant in the quarter, where his ration coupons allowed him a bowl of thin stew, turnips and onions and a few shreds of meat, and a piece of mealy gray bread. Which he ate while reading a newspaper, folded by his bowl, to keep him company. He moved quickly past the political news—Hitler had issued an ultimatum to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia—to “The Inquiring Reporter.”
Yesterday, our question was for men with long beards: Sir, do you sleep with your beard on top of the blanket, or beneath it?

“Monsieur?”

Serebin looked up to see a woman in a black kerchief and coat. A plain soul, small and compact, unremarkable.

“All the tables are taken, would you mind terribly if I joined you?”

Why no, he didn’t mind. All the tables were not taken, but why fret over details. She ordered a small flask of wine and the stew—there was nothing else on the blackboard—handing over her own coupons. And, when the waiter left, said, “I believe we have a friend in common, in Istanbul.”

In the valley between winter and spring, old friends often reappeared. Maybe chance, or the stars, or ancient human something, but, whatever the reason, it was especially so that year. Helmut Bach, for instance, had left two messages at the IRU, the first week in March, and two more at Serebin’s hotel, the second a brief note. Where was Serebin? Bach very much wanted to see him, they had some things to talk over. So, please get in touch. At this number, or at this one—the protocol office of the German administration—he was sure to get the message.

Des choses à discuter.
A German writing in French to a Russian—what couldn’t go wrong! But friends—even “friends,” a cloaked term for a cloaked relationship—did not have “things to talk over.” That was a threat. A warm little threat, maybe, but a threat nonetheless. Bach had invested time and concentration on him, now it had to pay off. The moment had come, was, likely, past due, for Serebin to give the occupation authority what it wanted—“a talk,” or appearance at a cultural event, whatever might imply approval of the new German Europe.

That was to look on the bright side.

Because it did occur to Serebin that these affections from his German pal might have been provoked by the same source that had sent Jean Marc to buy him drinks. Not a direct denunciation to the Gestapo, merely a word with a diplomat or an urbane, sympathetic Abwehr officer. Because this wasn’t force majeure, this was its close cousin,
pressure.
Which meant, to Serebin, that the unseen hand—mailed fist in a velvet glove—was, for some complex reason, working cautiously.

He thought.

Polanyi’s courier had left him a perfect set of documents for departure from Paris on 25 March. A new name—a Russian name, and a new job: director of the Paris office of a Roumanian company, Enterprise Marasz-Gulian, who was approved for travel to Belgrade, on business, via first-class
wagon-lit.
This meant two things: Serebin did not have to apply for permission to leave the occupied city—it crossed his mind that they might well be waiting for him, at that office—and, with his train leaving in four days, he could probably avoid responding to Helmut Bach.

Four days. And premonitions. He found himself taking inventory of his life at the Winchester, his life in Paris. Poking through notes and sketches for unwritten work, addresses and telephone numbers, books, letters. He’d known, when the Germans had marched into Paris nine months earlier, that he might not stay there forever. So he’d been rather Parisian about the occupation; try a day of it, see if you survive, then try another. Sooner or later, the French told each other, they’ll go away, because they always did. And he’d imagined that, if it happened that he was the one who had to leave, he would be able to make a civilized exit.

But now he had a bad feeling. Clearly, Bach, which meant the Third Reich, was not going to leave him in peace, they were going to make him pay to live in their city. So, as the French put it,
fini.
That was that. He found himself anxious to see, one last time, certain places; streets he liked, gardens, alleys, a few secret corners of the city where its medieval heart still beat. It would be a long time before he saw them again.

Two sad days. The photograph of Annette,
Mai ’38
scrawled on the back, taken in the garden of a house by the sea. A print dress, a pained smile—
why must you take my picture?
A letter from Warsaw, dated August of ’39, mailed just before the invasion by a Polish friend from Odessa. A photograph of his father as a young man, hair like brushed wheat, standing stiffly beside an older, unknown, woman. The only picture of him that survived.
Put it all in a box and find a place to hide it.
He almost did that—he found a good box, from a stationery store, but he was too late.

When he entered the lobby of the Winchester, just after seven, box in hand, the clerk beckoned to him. This was the same clerk, an old man with white hair, who had watched as he’d led Kubalsky upstairs. Now, when Serebin reached the desk, he said, “Ah monsieur, some good news for you.”

“Yes?”

The other clerk behind the desk, a heavy man with a dark, lustrous pompadour who kept the hotel books, looked up attentively, it was always interesting to hear about good news.

“Madame at the
crémerie
—in the rue Mabillon? Has a grand Cantal. If you go over there you can still get some.”

Serebin thanked him. Nothing like this had ever happened before, but the French character was dependably eccentric and sudden changes of weather were no surprise. He started to turn away from the desk, headed up to his room, when the man grabbed him by the wrist.

“Now, monsieur. Right away. For the Cantal.” The clerk’s hand was gripping him so hard it trembled.

Serebin went cold. The envelope from the courier was in the inside pocket of his jacket. To carry two identities was a cardinal sin of clandestine practice, but Serebin had meant to hide the envelope at the IRU office.

“Now, please.” A glance and a nod at the ceiling
—they’re up in your room.

A few feet away, the bookkeeper put his hand on the telephone—the one used to call the rooms. The clerk saw him do it, turned toward him, and, for a long time, the two men stared at each other. This was nothing less than a struggle for Serebin’s life, and Serebin knew it. A fierce, silent struggle, no sound in the lobby, not a word spoken out loud. Finally, the bookkeeper cleared his throat, a small self-conscious gesture, and took his hand off the phone.

“I’ll show you where it is,” the clerk said. “The
crémerie.
” He let go of Serebin’s wrist and walked around the end of the desk. Turning to the bookkeeper, he said, “Keep an eye on things, will you?” Then added, “Monsieur Henri.” His first name, spoken in a normal tone of voice, dry and pleasant, but there was anathema in it, clear as a bell.

The clerk took Serebin by the elbow—he’d fought for this prize and he wasn’t going to let it get away—and walked him to a door that led off the lobby and down a stairway to the cellar of the hotel. This was bravado, Serebin thought, profoundly French bravado. The old man knew the bookkeeper wouldn’t pick up the phone once he’d left, and so virtually dared him to do it.

At the foot of the stairs, a dark passage, past ruined furniture and abandoned trunks, past carriage-horse harness and a rack of unlabeled wine bottles sealed with wax, the Winchester’s private history. Another stairway led up to street level and a heavy door. The clerk took a ring of keys from his pocket, asked Serebin to light a match, finally found the right one, and opened the door.

Outside, an alley. Serebin could see a street at the far end.

“Take care, monsieur,” the clerk said to him.

“Who were they?”

A Gallic gesture—shoulders, face, hands. Meaning
who knows,
to begin with, but more than that:
they are who they always are.
“Three of them, not in uniform. One in your room. Two nearby.”