Blood of Victory (32 page)

He sent a mechanic off to get Serebin a flying jacket and goggles—he would fly in the cockpit, for gunner or bombardier, behind the pilot.

“You have to fight with what you have,” Draza said. “Anyhow, the same Englishman that sold us the planes helped us with the coup. So, I leave the judgments to others, but that’s the way the world is, right?”

Serebin put on his flying gear and climbed up into the gunner cockpit behind Draza, who turned and handed him a road map of Yugoslavia and Macedonia. “Change of plan,” he said, “you’re going to Thassos.”

“In Greece?”

“Sort of. An island, smugglers’ paradise. The Adriatic’s no good now—too much fighting; Luftwaffe, RAF, Italian navy. It’s crowded.”

The mechanic pulled the blocks from the wheels, then spun the single propeller, which produced coughs and smoke and backfires and, eventually, ignition. The Hawker bumped across the rutted field, lifted with a roar, flew over the Srbski Kralj and waggled its wings, then, bouncing up through the thermals, climbed to five thousand feet and turned south. In a bright blue sky, above fields and forests, sometimes a village. Captain Draza turned halfway around in his seat, shouted “Mobilization,” and pointed off to the east. Extraordinary, to see it from above. At least a thousand carts, drawn by plodding teams of oxen, long columns of infantry, field guns on caissons. Draza turned round again, and, with a broad grin, made the victory sign.

3 April. London. It was a long ride by tube to Drake’s club, on Grosvenor Square, so Josef the waiter always left home early to make sure he wasn’t late to work. Now and then, when his line had been hit the night before, he had to walk, and sometimes, going home after work, he had to make his way through the blackout, or wait in an air raid shelter until the all clear sounded.

Still, he didn’t mind. A cheerful soul, with a game leg and merry eyes, who’d lost his hair in his twenties—“from worrying,” he liked to say—he’d snuck out of Prague in April of ’39, after the Germans marched into the city, and, with wife and baby, somehow made his way to London. The young men who’d worked at the Drake had gone to war, so new service staff had to be hired, but the management was more than pleased with Josef.

Josef with a hard
J,
to the spruce types who stopped at their club for drinks or dinner. He worked hard at being a good waiter—he’d been a good teacher of mathematics—doing his best meant something to Josef and the club stewards knew it. Now that his wife was pregnant again they let him do all the work he wanted, and often sent him home with a little something extra in a napkin. Life wasn’t easy, with rationing, for a family man.

So they let him work private dinners, which got him home after midnight, but every little bit helped. The private dinner on that April night was given in honor of Sir Ivan Kostyka, and went pretty much like they all did. A dozen gentlemen, and rather elegant, even for Drake’s—Lord this and Colonel that, another known as Pebbles. Josef overheard what was said without really listening to it. Two or three speeches, one of them in a distinctly foreign accent, with words like “appreciation” and “gratitude.” For? Well, Josef didn’t know—the speakers didn’t precisely say, and his English wasn’t all that good anyhow.

He did, however, notice that, like the man with the foreign accent, some of the men were not native to Britain; one with a white goatee, another with a vast stomach and a rumbling laugh. Foreigners like him. Well, not much like him.

Josef had cleared the dessert, and was preparing to serve the port, when Sir Ivan stood and thanked the men at the table for honoring him. He was sincere in this, Josef could see, even moved. One of the men said “Hear, hear,” then they all rose, as if to propose a toast. Josef waited patiently, but it wasn’t exactly a toast. What happened next was unusual, but, he thought,
well done,
as the spruce types had said more than once during the dinner. Well done because it was from the heart, and they all had the sort of self-confidence that allows men to sing without fussing overmuch about carrying a tune. It was, anyhow, an easy tune to carry:

For he’s a jolly good fellow,

for he’s a jolly good fellow,

for he’s a jolly good fell-ow,

which nobody can deny.

Which nobody can deny,

which nobody can deny,

for he’s a jolly good fell-ell-ow...

which nobody can deny!

29 July.

Serebin woke up long after midnight, tried to go back to sleep, then gave up and climbed out of bed. No point tossing and turning—especially on a hot summer night. Summer nights were famously hot in Istanbul but it was more than that. It wasn’t the heat that woke him, he thought, it was a cricket on the terrace, the soft air, the sense of a summer night of life going by.

The floorboards creaked as he walked down the hall to the white room. Plenty of paper and pencils there. He’d never told Marie-Galante that Tamara had meant the room as a writer’s cell, but it had taken her about ten minutes to figure it out. “We’ll put you in here,” she’d said. So, mornings, there he was. It was hard, with war everywhere, to figure out what he ought to say, or who might want to hear it. Still, he kept at it, because he always had.

As for her, she’d done exactly what she said she would, and so they
ran away together.
Not far, only to Besiktas and the little house above the sea, but, nothing wrong with that. She’d bought new towels and sheets and tablecloths, marshaled the Ukrainian sisters in a magnificent French campaign of waxing and polishing, so that now everything smelled like honey and glowed like gold.

Out on the Bosphorus, a dark ship with a long, white wake, headed up toward the Black Sea. Maybe to Bulgaria or Roumania, he thought, but not much farther, unless it was a supply ship—German, Italian, or neutral. One place it wasn’t going was Odessa. They were fighting there now, the city besieged by Roumanian armies, the defenders wildly outnumbered, but holding on, refusing to surrender. Stories of heroism every day in the newspapers, which they clipped, at the IRU office, and pinned to the bulletin board. Serebin went in from time to time, offering to help out, to do whatever he could. So, a new
Harvest,
but the émigré writers here weren’t as good as the ones in Paris. Patriotic now—it was Russia fighting, not the USSR, Stalin had said that and everybody believed him. On the Danube, the oil barges moved upriver to Germany, day and night.

They followed the war, Serebin and Marie-Galante, in the newspapers with their morning coffee, on the radio when they had afternoon drinks, and with people they sometimes saw in the evenings. Marie-Galante could not be in the world without invitations. The precise nature of the social chemistry eluded him, but somehow people knew she was there and invited her places, and sometimes she accepted, and so they went.

They had one that evening—he thought it was that evening, he’d have to make sure. Some kind of dinner at the yacht club, a beautiful invitation, on thick, cream-colored stock with an elaborate crest on top. Given by people he’d never heard of, for, apparently, some couple connected with the Norwegian royal family, now in exile in London. What were they doing in Istanbul? Well, what was anybody doing. Waiting, mostly.

In the same post there’d been a note from Polanyi. He hoped they were well, perhaps he would see them at the royal dinner. “Someone I want you to meet,” he’d said. Marie-Galante had stood the invitation on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, which was what she did when something appealed to her, so, clearly, they were going. It was—something to do. Not that they were bored, or anything like that.

He opened the drawer of the table, found a Sobranie and lit it. Turn the light on? Work for a while? No, he wanted only to watch this summer night as it went by. The ship was almost out of sight now, so he stared at the dark water, finished his cigarette, and walked back to the bedroom.

Too warm for a sheet or a blanket. He watched her for a moment as she slept, then lay down carefully on the bed.
Wouldn’t want to wake her up.
But she slid back against him, her skin silky and cool, even on a hot summer night.

“Where were you?” she said, not really awake.

“Just walking around.”

“Oh
ours, mon ours,
” she sighed. “What is to become of us.”

Silence, only the beat of waves at the foot of the cliff.

“No, no,” she said. “
Beside
that.”

READ ON FOR AN EXCERPT FROM

MISSION TO PARIS

BY

ALAN FURST

PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE

I
N
P
ARIS, THE EVENINGS OF
S
EPTEMBER ARE SOMETIMES WARM, EXCESSIVELY
gentle, and, in the magic particular to that city, irresistably seductive. The autumn of the year 1938 began in just such weather and on the terraces of the best cafés, in the famous restaurants, at the dinner parties one wished to attend, the conversation was, of necessity, lively and smart: fashion, cinema, love affairs, politics, and, yes, the possibility of war—that too had its moment. Almost anything, really, except money. Or, rather,
German
money. A curious silence, for hundreds of millions of francs—tens of millions of dollars—had been paid to some of the most distinguished citizens of France since Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933. But maybe not so curious, because those who had taken the money were aware of a certain shadow in these transactions and, in that shadow, the people who require darkness for the kind of work they do.

The distinguished citizens, had they been willing to talk about it, would have admitted that the Germans, the political operatives who offered the bounty, were surprisingly adept. They knew how to soften a conscience, presented bribery as little more than a form of sophisticated commerce, of the sort that evolves in
salons
and offices and the private rooms of banks—a gentleman’s treason. And the operatives could depend on one hard-edged principle: that those who style themselves as
men of the world
know there is an iron fist in every velvet glove, understand what might await them in the shadows and so, having decided to play the game, they will obey its rules.

Still, human nature being what it is, there will forever be
somebody
, won’t there, who will not.

One such, on the fourteenth of September, was a rising political star called Prideaux. Had he been in Paris that evening, he would have been having drinks at Fouquet with a Spanish marquis, a diplomat, after which he could have chosen between two good dinner parties: one in the quarter clustered around the Palais Bourbon, the other in a lovely old mansion up in Passy. It was destiny, Prideaux believed, that he spend his evenings in such exalted places. And, he thought, if fucking destiny had a shred of mercy left in its cold heart he would just now be hailing a taxi. Fucking destiny, however, had other things in mind for the future and didn’t care a bit what became of Prideaux.

Who felt, in his heart, terribly wronged. This shouldn’t be happening to him, not to
him
, the famously clever Louis Prideaux,
chef de cabinet
—technically chief of staff but far more powerful than that—to an important senator in Paris. Well, it had happened. As
tout Paris
left for the August migration to the countryside, Prideaux had been forced to admit that his elegant world was doomed to collapse (expensive mistress, borrowed money, vengeful wife) and so he’d fled, desperate for a new life, finding himself on the night of the fourteenth in Varna, the Black Sea port of Bulgaria.
Bulgaria!
Prideaux fell back on his lumpy bed at a waterfront hotel, crushed by loss: the row of beautiful suits in his armoire, the apartment windows that looked out at the Seine, the slim, white hands of his aristocratic—by birth, not behavior—mistress. All gone, all gone. For a moment he actually contemplated weeping but then his fingers, dangling over the side of the bed, touched the supple leather of his valise. For Prideaux, the life preserver in a stormy sea: a million francs. A soothing, restorative, million, francs.

This money, German money, had been meant for the senator, so that he might influence the recommendation of a defense committee, which had for some time been considering a large outlay for construction on the northern extension of the Maginot Line. Up into Belgium, the Ardennes forest, where the Germans had attacked in 1914. A decision of such magnitude, he would tell the committee, should not be made precipitously, it needed more time, it should be
studied
, pros and cons worked through by technicians who understood the whole complicated business.
Later
, the committee would decide. Was it not wise to delay a little? That’s what the people of France demanded of them: not rash expenditure, wisdom.

All that August, Prideaux had temporized: what to do? The suitcase of money for the senator had reached Prideaux by way of a prominent hostess, a German baroness named von Reschke, who’d settled in Paris a few years earlier and, using wealth and connection, had become the ruling despot of one of the loftiest
salons
in the city. The baroness spent the summer at her château near Versailles and there, in the drawing room, had handed Prideaux an envelope. Inside, a claim ticket for the baggage office at the Gare de Lyon railway station. “This is for you-know-who,” she’d said, ever the coquette, flirting with the handsome Prideaux. He’d collected the suitcase and hidden it under a couch, where it gave off a magnetic energy—he could
feel
its presence. Its potential.

The senator was in Cap Ferrat, wouldn’t return until the third of September, and Prideaux sweated through hot August nights of temptation. Sometimes he thought he might resist, but the forces of catastrophe were waiting and they wouldn’t wait long: his wife’s ferocious lawyer, the shady individuals who’d loaned him money when the banks no longer would, and his cruel mistress, whose passion was kindled by expensive wines with expensive dinners and expensive jewelry to wear at the table. When unappeased she was cold, no bed. And while what happened in that bed was the best thing that had ever happened to Prideaux, it would soon be only a memory.

He had to escape before it all came crashing down on him.
Take the money
, Prideaux’s devil whispered. The Germans have more where that came from. Go to, say, Istanbul, where a perfect new identity could be purchased. Then, on to exotic climes—Alexandria? Johannesburg? Quebec? A visit to a travel agency revealed that a Greek freighter, the
Olympios
, took on a few passengers at the Bulgarian port of Varna, easily reached by train from Paris. Stay? Or go? Prideaux couldn’t decide but then, after an exceptionally uncomfortable telephone call from one of his creditors, he took the money and ran. Before anyone came looking for him.

But they were looking for him. In fact, they’d found him.

The senator had been approached on September fifth, in his office. No, the
package
hadn’t arrived, was there a problem? His
chef de cabinet
was up at Deauville, he had telephoned and would return in a few days. The committee meeting? The senator consulted his calendar, that would be on the eleventh. Surely, by then …

In Berlin, at von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry, the people at the political warfare bureau found this news troubling, and spoke to the bribery people, who were very troubled indeed. So much so that, just to make sure, they got in touch with a dependable friend, a detective at the
Sûreté Nationale
—the French security service—and asked him to lend a hand. For the detective, an easy job. Prideaux wasn’t in Deauville, according to his concierge, he was staying indoors. The concierge rubbed her thumb across the pads of her index and middle fingers and raised an eyebrow—
money
, it meant. And that gesture did it. At the Foreign Ministry they had a meeting and, by day’s end, a discussion—
not
at the ministry!—with Herbert.

——

Slim, well-dressed, quiet, Herbert made no particular impression on anybody he met, probably he was some kind of businessman, though he never quite got around to saying what he did. Perhaps you’d meet him again, perhaps you wouldn’t, it didn’t particularly matter. He circulated comfortably at the mid-level of Berlin society, turning up here and there, invited or not—what could you do, you couldn’t ask him to leave. Anyhow, nobody ever did, and he was always pleasant. There were, however, a few individuals in Berlin—those with uncommonly sharp instincts, those who somehow heard interesting things—who met Herbert only once. They didn’t precisely avoid him, not overtly, they just weren’t where he was or, if they were, they soon had to be elsewhere and, all courtesy, vanished.

What did they know? They didn’t know much, in fact they’d better not. Because Herbert had a certain vocation, supposedly secret to all but those who made use of his services. Exceptional services: silent, and efficient. For example, surveillance on Prideaux was in place within hours of Herbert’s meeting with his contact at the Foreign Ministry, and Prideaux was not entirely alone as he climbed aboard the first of the trains that would take him to Varna. Where Herbert, informed of Prideaux’s booking on the
Olympios
, awaited him. Herbert and his second-in-command, one Lothar, had hired a plane and pilot and flown to an airfield near Varna a night earlier and, on the evening of the fourteenth, they called off their associates and sent them back to wherever they came from. The Greek freighter was not expected at the dock until the sixteenth and would likely be late, so Prideaux wasn’t going anywhere.

He really wasn’t.

Which meant Herbert and Lothar could relax. For a while, at least, as only one final task lay ahead of them and they had a spare hour or two. Why not have fun in the interim? They had a contact scheduled at a local nightclub and so went looking for it, working their way through a maze of dockside streets; dark, twisting lanes decorated with broken glass and scented with urine, where in time they came upon an iron door beneath a board that said
UNCLE BORIS
. Inside, Herbert handed the maître d’ a fistful of leva notes and the one-eyed monster showed them to a table in the corner, said something amusing in Bulgarian, laughed, made as though to slap Herbert on the back, then didn’t. The two Germans settled in to drink mastika and enjoy the show, keeping an eye on the door as they awaited the appearance of their “brute,” as they playfully referred to him. Their brute for
this
operation, Herbert rarely used them more than once.

Lothar was fiftyish, fat and jolly, with tufts of dark red hair and a red face. Like Herbert, he’d been a junior officer during the Great War, the 1914 war, but they never met in the trenches—with five million men under arms an unlikely possibility—but found each other later, in one of the many veterans’ organizations that formed in Germany after the defeat of 1918. They fought a little more in the 1920s, after joining a militia, killing off the communists who were trying to take over the country. By the early 1930s Herbert had discovered his true vocation and enlisted Lothar as his second-in-command. A wise choice—Lothar was all business when it mattered but he was also good company. As the nightclub show unfolded, he nudged Herbert with an elbow and rumbled with baritone laughter.

In a space cleared of chairs and tables, a novelty act from somewhere in the Balkans: a two-man canvas horse that danced and capered, the front and rear halves in perfect harmony. Done well, this was by itself entertaining, but what made it memorable was a girl, in scanty, spangled costume, who played the accordion as she stood center stage on a pair of very sexy legs. The men in the club found them enticing, bare and shapely, as did the canvas horse, which danced nearer and nearer to the girl, the head lunging and feinting as though to nuzzle her thighs, then turning to the audience:
Shall I?

Oh yes!
The shouts were in Bulgarian but there was no question of what they meant. “Will it have her?” Herbert said.

“I should think so,” Lothar said. “Otherwise people will throw things.”

The one-eyed monster brought fresh mastika, the shouts grew louder, the accordion played on. At last, the horse found its courage and, having galloped around the girl a few times, stood in back of her on its hind legs with its hooves on her shoulders. The girl never missed a beat but then, when the horse covered her breasts with its hooves, and to the absolute delight of the audience, she blushed, her face turning pink, her eyes closing. As the horse began to move in a rhythmic manner familiar to all.

A little after ten o’clock, a white-haired man with a skull for a face entered the nightclub and peered around the room. When Herbert beckoned to him he approached the table and stood there a moment while the attentive one-eyed monster brought a chair and an extra glass. “You would be Aleksey?” Herbert said. “The Russian?”

“That’s right.” German was the second language of eastern Europe and Aleksey seemed comfortable speaking it.

“General Aleksey?”

“So I’m called—there are many other Alekseys. How did you recognize me?”

“My associate in Belgrade sent me a photograph.”

“I don’t remember him taking a photograph.”

Herbert’s shrug was eloquent, they did what they wanted to do. “In security work,” he said, “it’s important to take precautions.”

“Yes, of course it is,” Aleksey said, letting them know he wasn’t intimidated.

“Your contract with us calls for payment in Swiss francs, once you’ve done your job, is that right?”

“Yes. Two thousand Swiss francs.”

“If I may ask,” Herbert said, “of what army a general?”

“The Russian army, the Czar’s army. Not the Bolsheviks.”

“So, after 1917, you emigrated to Belgrade.”

“ ‘Emigrated’ is barely the word. But, yes, I went to Belgrade, to the émigré community there. Fellow Slavs, the Serbians, all that.”

“Do you have with you … what you’ll need?”

“Yes. Small but dependable.”

“With silencer?”

“As you ordered.”

“Good. My colleague and I are going out for a while, when we return it will be time for you to do your work. You’ve done it before, we’re told.”

“I’ve done many things, as I don’t care to sweep floors, and Belgrade has more than enough émigré taxi drivers.” He paused a moment, then said, “So …”

From Herbert, a nod of approval. To the question he’d asked, an oblique answer was apparently the preferred answer. As General Aleksey poured himself some mastika, Herbert met Lothar’s eyes and gestured toward the door. To Aleksey he said, “We have an errand to run, when we return we’ll tell you where to go. Meanwhile, the floor show should start up again any time now, you may find it amusing.”