Blood of Victory Read online

  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 prec
isely 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.

  They were right. Serebin tossed his valise in the back of the cab and climbed in after it. “In the rue Dragon,” he said. “Number twenty-two.” As the driver started the engine, a woman came to the passenger side window. A Parisian housewife, she wore a wool scarf tied over her head and the ubiquitous black coat, and carried a string bag of battered pears and a baguette. She broke an end off the bread and offered it to the dog, who took it gently in his mouth, dropped it between his paws, and looked up at the driver before licking the crust. “You are very kind, madame,” the driver said gravely, putting the car in gear.

  He drove off slowly, down a street with a few people on bicycles but no other cars at all. The taxi was a gazogène, a tank of natural gas mounted upright in the lidless trunk, its top rising well above the roof. Gasoline was precious to the Germans, and the allocation for occupied countries was only two percent of their use before the war.

  Across the Pont d’Austerlitz, then along the quai by the river, low in its walls in winter, the water dark and opaque on a sunless afternoon. For Serebin, every breath was gold. This city. The driver took the Boulevard St.-Germain at the Pont Sully. “Come a long way?”

  “From Istanbul.”

  “Bon Dieu.”

  “Yes, three days and nights.”

  “Must have been a pleasure, before the war.”

  “It was. All red plush and crystal.”

  “The Orient Express.”

  “Yes.”

  The driver laughed. “And beautiful Russian spies, like the movies.”

  They drove very slowly along the boulevard, through the 5th Arrondissement and into the 6th. Serebin watched the side streets going by; rue Grégoire de Tours, rue de Buci—a shopping street, rue de l’Echaudé. Then the Place St.-Germain-des-Prés, with a Métro station and the smart cafés—the Flore and the Deux Magots. Then, his very own rue du Dragon. Cheap restaurant with neon signs, a club called Le Pony—it was clearly a nighttime street, with the usual Parisian tenements crowded together above the sidewalk.

  “Here we are,” the driver said.

  The Hotel Winchester. Le Vanshestaire, a hopeful grasp at English gentility by the owners of 1900, now run-down and drifting just below quaint. Serebin paid the driver and added a generous tip, took his valise and briefcase, and entered the musty old lobby. He greeted the propriétaire behind the desk and climbed five flights to his “suite”—two rooms instead of one and a tiny bathroom.

  In the bedroom, he went directly to the French doors that served as windows, opened them, and looked out into the street. His red geraniums, the famous Roi du Balcon, king of the balcony, had been dutifully watered during his absence but they were fast approaching the end of their days. In the room, a narrow, creaky bed with a maroon coverlet, an armoire, things he liked tacked to the wall—a Fantin-Latour postcard, an ink drawing of a nude dancer, an old photograph o
f the Pont Marie, an émigré’s watercolor of the Normandy countryside, a publicity still from a movie theatre, Jean Gabin and Michelle Morgan in Port of Shadows, and a framed Brassaï of a pimp and his girl in a Montmartre café. He had a telephone, a clamshell used as an ashtray, a Russian calendar from 1937.

  Serebin looked out at the wet cobblestone street, at the half-lit windows of the shops, at the gray sky and the falling snow.

  Home.

  8 December. The social club of the International Russian Union was on the rue Daru, a few doors down from the St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, the Russian Orthodox church in Paris. Inside, a few men played cards or read and reread the newspaper.

  “I can’t believe you came back.” Ulzhen looked gloomy, a Gauloise hung from his lips, there was gray ash on the lapels of his jacket.

  Serebin shrugged.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I had to leave, but I didn’t like it where I went, so I came back.”

  Ulzhen shook his head—who could talk to a crazy man? Boris Ulzhen had been a successful impresario in St. Petersburg, staged ballets and plays and concerts. Now he worked for a florist on the rue de la Paix, made up arrangements, delivered bouquets, bought wreaths and urns from émigrés who stole them from the cemeteries. His wife had managed to smuggle jewelry out of Russia in 1922 and by miracles and penury they made the money last ten years, then tried to go to America but it was too late. Ulzhen was also the director of the IRU in Paris, nominally Serebin’s boss but, more important, a trusted friend.