Blood of Victory (7 page)

“Humpf, harumpf.”

“Just that?”

“Drink liquids.”

“Do you?”

“What else to do with them? You can have a cigarette if you like, clearly you want one.”

“In a while. I’ll go outside.”

“No, have one here and now. And give me one.”

“Oh sure.”

“I’m serious.”

“Tamara, behave.”

“Tired of behaving. And, anyhow, it doesn’t matter. Now give me a cigarette or I’ll send my ladies out to get them the minute you leave.”

“Who says I’m leaving?”

“Don’t torment me, Ilya. Please.”

“You are impossible.” He lit a cigarette and handed it to her. She inhaled cautiously, suppressed a cough, lips tight together, then closed her eyes and blew the smoke out, a blissful smile on her face.

“Very well, you’ve had your way, now give it back.”

Slowly, she shook her head. She was, he knew, afraid of infecting him.

“So,” he said, “it’s only you who gets to say the hell with everything.”

“Only me.” She tapped the Sobranie on the edge of an empty glass on her bedside table. “Why did God make us love so much what we mustn’t do?”

He didn’t know.

She sighed. “Do you leave soon?”

“In a while. The police don’t really want me here.”

“They told you?”

“Yes.”

She inhaled once more, then put the cigarette out in the glass. “Did they mean it?”

“A suggestion, for the moment.”

“So you could stay, if you wanted to.”

“Maybe, yes. It would take, some work, but I probably could.”

“You can’t do what you’re doing now, Ilya.”

“I can’t?”

“No.”

He was tempted to ask her what she meant by that but he knew what she meant.

“It’s,
there,
” she said, “this terrible war. It will come for you.”

After a moment he nodded—he didn’t like it, but she wasn’t wrong.

“So,” she said.

They were silent for a time, the wind rattling the windows, the sea in the distance. “When France fell,” he said, “that day, that day I was Parisian, more than I’d ever been. We all were. Exiles or born in the 5th Arrondissement it didn’t matter. Everyone said
merde
—it was bad luck, bad weather, we would just have to learn to live with it. But we would all stay the same, so we told each other, because, if we changed, then the fascists would win. Maybe I knew better, in my heart, but I wanted to believe that that was enough: hold fast to life as it
should
be, the daily ritual, work, love, and then it
will
be.”

“That is sweet, Ilya. Charming, almost.”

He laughed. “Such a hard soul, my love.”

“Oh? Well, please to remember who we are and where we’ve been. First you say you’ll pretend to do what they want, then you do what they want, then you’re one of them. Oldest story in the world: if you don’t stand up to evil it eats you first and kills you later, but not soon enough.”

“Yes, I know.”

“So now, tomorrow, next day, you’ll find a way to fight.”

“Is that what you want?”

“No, never. I fear for you.”

He stood up and walked to the window. Tamara yawned, covered her mouth with her hand. “We weren’t meant to live long lives, Ilya.”

“I guess not.”

“I don’t care so much. And, as for you, you will die inside if you try to hide from it.”

“It?”

She gave him a look. “You’re the writer, go find a name.” She was silent for a time, he came back to her and sat on the end of the bed, she turned on her side and rested her head on her arm. “Do you know what matters, these days?”

He spread his hands.

“You did love me, Ilya. I wasn’t wrong about that, was I?”

“With all my heart.”

She smiled and closed her eyes. “Women like to hear those things. Always, I think. It always makes them happy, God only knows why.”

SYSTÈME Z

REPUBLIC OF TURKEY
MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR
BUREAU OF STATE SECURITY

Special Investigation Service

DATE:
2 December, 1940

TO:
Major H. Y. Iskandar

FROM:
M. Ayaz—Unit IX

Subject: I. A. Serebin

At 10:35 on 30 November, Subject left Hotel Beyoglu and proceeded by taxi to the Beyazit district, exiting in front of the Hotel Phellos and proceeding on foot to 34 Akdeniz street, taking the stairway to the second floor where he entered the office of the Helikon Trading Company. He remained at that office until 11:25. Subject returned to the Hotel Phellos where he took a Number Six tram to the Beyoglu district and checked out of the Hotel Beyoglu. Subject proceeded by taxi to Sirkeci station, purchasing a first-class ticket to Izmir on the Taurus Express, Istanbul–Damascus. Subject boarded at 13:08, sharing a compartment with two unrelated travelers. Subject got off the train at Alsancak station, Izmir, at 23:40 and took a taxi to the Club Xalaphia, a brothel, in Hesmet street off Cumhuriyet square.

Subject remained at Club Xalaphia until 01:55, when he checked into Room 405 in the Palas Hotel. Six other clients were on the premises during the time that Subject was there:

R. Bey and H. Felim—Cotton brokers, from Alexandria

Name Unknown—Reputedly a trader in pearls, from Beirut

Z. Karaglu—Mayor of Izmir

Y. Karaglu—His nephew, director of Municipal Tax Authority

W. Aynsworth—British subject resident in Izmir

At 00:42, a taxi entered the courtyard of the club, but no passenger was observed. The taxi left at 01:38, without passengers. The driver, known only as Hasim, is to be interrogated by Unit IX personnel from the Izmir station. The proprietor of Club Xalaphia, Mme. Yvette Loesch, states that Subject visited the room used by S. Marcopian, where he remained for thirty minutes.

Respectfully submitted,

M. Ayaz

K. Hamid

Unit IX

The ceilings in the Club Xalaphia were lost in darkness, so high that the lamplight never reached them. The walls, a color like terra cotta, were covered in frescoes, painted a century ago, he guessed, when the city was still Smyrna. The dreamer’s classical Greece: broken columns, waterfalls, distant mountains, shepherdesses weaving garlands. The madam liked him—he felt himself subtly adopted, lost soul in the whorehouse. “I am French,” she explained, speaking the language, “and German, but born in Smyrna.” Then, for a moment, melancholy. “This was a grand restaurant, owned by an Armenian family, but then, the massacre in 1915. They disappeared.”

So, now, it was what it was. In the still air, heavy perfume and sweat, soap, jasmine, tobacco, garlic, disinfectant. “You are welcome here,” she told him. “And, whatever you can think up, of course...”

Serebin knew that.

She rested a hand on his arm. “Don’t worry so,” she said. “She’ll come back.”

The girls liked him too. Lithe and merry, veiled and barefoot, they teased him from a cloud of musky scent, wobbling about in gauze balloon pants. The
harem
. With a trio of musicians, in costume, sitting cross-legged behind a lattice screen. Two Eastern string instruments and a sort of Turkish clarinet with a bulbous end, like the horn played by a snake charmer in a cartoon.

A strange way to go to war.
He’d returned to his hotel after three, tired and sad, certain that morning sun would burn off the midnight heroism but it didn’t. So he stood at the window. In the light that covered the sea, the white gulls wheeled and climbed.
You can talk to Bastien,
he’d thought. Talk is cheap. See what he has to say. Thus, later that morning, Helikon Trading, a young Lebanese in a dark suit, a phone call in another room, an address in Izmir.

“Sophia,” the girl said, pointing to herself. “Sophia.” She sat on his lap.
Soft.
Across the room, seated in a grandiose leather chair, a man wearing a tarboosh gave him a knowing smile and a raised eyebrow.
You won’t be sorry!
Perhaps a Syrian, Serebin thought, Kemal had outlawed the hat for Turkish men.

“He will find you there, or along the way,” the Lebanese had told him. Excellent French, conservative tie. And what did Helikon Trading trade? That wasn’t evident, and Serebin didn’t ask. No trumpets, no drums, an office on Akdeniz street. But it had never been dramatic, this moment. Never. In 1915, age seventeen, a newly commissioned sublieutenant in the Russian artillery, his father had simply shrugged and said, “We always go.” Next, the revolution, his regimental commander requisitioned a passenger train and took the regiment to Kiev. Then, inevitably, civil war, and he joined the Red Army, setting off drunk with two friends from the Odessa railway station. He was twenty years old, what else? 1922, the war with Poland, ordered to serve as a war correspondent by the office of the commissar. And, finally, Spain. A spring afternoon in 1936, the editor of
Izvestia
taking him to a
valuta
—foreign currency—restaurant in Moscow. “Have whatever you want,” he’d said. Then, “Ilya Aleksandrovich, I have to send you to Spain, and you have to go. How’s your Spanish?”

“Nonexistent.”

“Fine. This will give you objectivity.”

Gone, two years later. Worked to death in a gold mine.

The girl snuggled up to him and whispered Turkish words in his ear. Ran a finger, slow and gentle, back and forth across his lips. “Mmm?” Then she slid from his lap, pale and succulent beneath the gauze, and walked, if that was the word for it, toward the staircase, looking back at him over her shoulder. But his smile of regret told her what she needed to know, and she went off to another room.

Serebin closed his eyes. Where Tamara was waiting for him. He was never going to write stories in the white room. Eight years earlier, it was she who had left him. She’d become involved with somebody else but that wasn’t the whole story and maybe he was, at the time, not all that sorry when it happened. But she was still in the world, somewhere, and that was different. That was different. He heard the sound of an automobile, the engine stuttering and grumbling, somewhere nearby. It idled for a moment, then died.

A few minutes later, the madam appeared at his side. “Your friend is waiting for you,” she said. “Upstairs. The door is marked number four.” No more the lost soul. Business now.

At the top of the stairs, a long, crooked corridor, like a passageway in a dream. Serebin peered at the numbers in the darkness—behind one of the doors somebody, from the sound of it, was having the time of his life—and found Room 4 at the very end. He waited for a moment, then entered. The room was heavily draped and carpeted, with mirrors on the walls alongside colorful drawings, lavishly obscene, of the house specialties. There was a large bed, a divan, and an ottoman covered in green velvet. Bastien was sitting on the ottoman, in the process of lighting a cigar.

Serebin sat on the divan. He could hear music below, the horn mournful and plaintive. From Bastien, a sigh. “You shouldn’t do this, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“It always ends badly, one way or another.”

Serebin nodded.

“Not money, is it?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. What then?”

“Somebody told me what I already knew, that I had to get in or get out.”

“‘Get out’ means what?”

“Oh, Geneva, perhaps. Somewhere safe.”

Bastien spread his hands, cigar between two fingers. “What’s wrong with Geneva? Courteous people, the food is good. Quite a stylish crowd there, now, they’d be glad to have you. I’m sure you hate fascism, as only a poet can. A place like Geneva, you could hate it from dawn to dusk and never get your door smashed in.”

“Not to be.” Serebin smiled. “And you’re not in Geneva.”

Bastien laughed, a low rumble. “Not yet.”

“Well...”

For a few moments Bastien let the silence gather, then leaned forward and said, in a different sort of voice, “Why now, Monsieur Serebin?”

That he could not answer.

“Surely they’ve recruited you.”

“Oh yes.”

Bastien waited.

“It goes on all the time. Six months after I settled in Paris, I was approached by a French lawyer—would I consider going back to Russia? Then, after the occupation, a German officer, an intellectual who’d published a biography of Rilke. ‘The Nazis are vulgar, but Germany wants to save the world from Bolshevism.’ On and on, one after the other. Of course, you aren’t always sure, it can be very oblique.” Serebin paused a moment. “Or not. There was a British woman—this was in Paris, in the spring of ’39—some sort of aristocrat.
She
was direct—dinner in a private room at Fouquet, came right out and asked. And it didn’t stop there, she said she could be ‘very naughty,’ if I liked that sort of thing.”

“Lady Angela Hope.”

“You know.”

“Everybody knows. She’d recruit God.”

“Well, I declined.”

Bastien was amused, some irony afoot that Serebin didn’t understand, at first, but then, a moment later, he realized precisely what the smile meant:
that was Britain, so is this
. “Sometimes it doesn’t happen right away,” Bastien said. “Takes—a few turns of the world.”

Serebin wondered if he meant time or politics. Maybe both.

“People who trust you will get hurt,” Bastien said. “Is a dead Hitler worth it?”

“Probably.”

They were silent for a time. Somebody was singing, downstairs, somebody drunk, who knew the words to the song the musicians were playing.

“I don’t worry about your heart, Ilya. I worry about your stomach.”

Holding a cupped hand beneath the gray ash on the cigar, Bastien walked over to a table beside the bed and took an ashtray from the drawer. Then he settled back down on the ottoman and leaned forward, elbows on knees. “So now,” he said, “we will put you to work.”

The train rattled along through the brown hills, the sky vast and blue and, to his eyes, ancient. They had talked for a long time, in Room 4, the life of the Club Xalaphia all around them; banging doors, a woman’s laughter, a heavy tread in the corridor. “I will tell you some truth,” the man on the ottoman said. “My real name is Janos Polanyi, actually von Polanyi de Nemeszvar—very old Magyar nobility. I was formerly Count Polanyi, formerly a diplomat at the Hungarian legation in Paris. I got into difficulties, couldn’t get out, and came here. A fugitive, more or less. Now, for you to know this could be dangerous to me, but then, I intend to be dangerous to you, perhaps lethal, so a little parity is in order. Also, I don’t want you hearing it from someone else.”

“Can one be a former count?”

“Oh, one can be anything.”

“And the Emniyet, do they know you’re here?”

“They know, but they choose not to notice, for the moment, and I’m careful to do nothing within their borders.”

“What about, well, what we’re doing here?”

“This is nothing.”

Polanyi, then. With a few questions, he’d led Serebin back through his life: his mother, fled from Paris to Mexico City in 1940, now waiting for a visa to the United States. His younger brother, fourteen years his junior, always a stranger to him and everybody else, a cosmetics executive in South Africa, married to a local woman, with two little girls. His father, returning to the army in 1914, taken prisoner, it was reported, during the Brusilov offensive in the Volhynia in 1916, but never heard from again. “Too brave to live through a war,” his aunt said. Thus the history of the Family Serebin—life in their corner of the world spinning faster and faster until the family simply exploded, coming to earth here and there, oceans between them.

As for his mother’s sister, Malya Mikhelson, a lifelong chekist. Her last letter postmarked Brussels, but that meant nothing.

“The INO, one would assume.”
Inostranny Otdel,
the foreign department of the secret services. “Jews and intellectuals, Hungarians, foreigners. Not in the Comintern, is she?”

He didn’t think so. But, who knew. He never asked and she never said.

They stared at each other, sniffing for danger, but, if it was there, they didn’t see it.

“And money?”

God bless his grandfather, who had foreseen and foreseen. Maybe, in the end, it killed him, all that foresight. He had prospered under the Czar, selling German agricultural equipment up and down the Ukraine and all over the Crimea. “Paradise, before they fucked it,” Serebin said. “Weather like Provence, like Provence in all sorts of ways.” Old Mikhelson felt
something
coming, cast the Jewish tarot, put money in Switzerland. A Parisian office worker earned twelve hundred francs a month, Serebin got about three times that.

“Can you invade the trust?”

“No.”

“Ah, grampa.”

And the Germans? Was he not, a
Mischlingmann,
half-Jewish?

No longer. His German friend had arranged for a baptismal certificate, mailed to the office of the Paris Gestapo from Odessa.

“You asked?”

“He offered.”

“Oh dear,” Polanyi said.

Serebin spent all day on the train, after a few hours of bad dreams at the Palas Hotel. There’d been a room reserved in his name. “We will help you,” Polanyi said, “when we think you need it. But Serebin you have always been, and Serebin you must remain.”

On 5 December, 1940, the Istanbul–Paris train pulled into the Gare de Lyon a little after four in the afternoon. There had been the customary delays—venal border guards at the Yugoslav frontier, a Croatian blizzard, a Bulgarian cow, but the engineer made up time on Mussolini’s well-maintained track between Trieste and the Simplon tunnel and so, in the end, the train was only a few hours late getting into Paris.

I. A. Serebin, traveling on the French passport issued to the
étranger résident,
paused for a time outside the station. There was snow falling in Paris, not sticking to the street, just blowing around in the gray air, and Serebin spent a moment staring at the sky. The first driver in the line of waiting taxis was watching him.
“Régardez,
Marcel,” he said. “This one’s happy to be home.” Marcel, a lean Alsatian shepherd, made a brief sound in his throat, not quite a bark.