Blood of Victory Read online

  “You’ve been very helpful,” Serebin said. She didn’t, he could see from her expression, especially believe it.

  A man appeared in the doorway, a dossier under one arm. “Ah, excuse me,” he said, “I’ll...”

  Serebin stood up. Mademoiselle Dubon said, “You can come in, Jacques. This is Monsieur Blanc from the finance ministry, he was just leaving.” Over the man’s shoulder, as he shook hands with Serebin, she mouthed the words bon courage.

  29 December. When Serebin returned to his hotel, in late afternoon, there was a letter waiting for him at the desk. When he saw the Turkish stamps and the handwritten address, each letter carefully drawn in blunt pencil, he knew what it meant. He took the letter up to his room and sat on the bed and, after a time, he opened it.

  “Gospodin, I am grieved to tell you that Tamara Petrovna was taken to the hospital. Doctor says it will only be a few days.” Serebin looked at the postmark, the letter had taken three weeks to get to Paris. “She wanted me to write that she says farewell to you, that you must take care, that you are right in what you do.” The words Tamara had spoken were underlined. The letter went on. Could they stay at the house, for now? They must look for work. This was life. God watched over them all.

  That same afternoon, in Istanbul, on the second floor of a waterfront lokanta called Karim Bey, Janos Polanyi ate a bland stew of chicken and tomatoes. Seated across from him was an English businessman, long a resident of the city, who owned entrepôts in the port of Uskudar, on the Asian shore. The Englishman was known as Mr. Brown. He was fattish and soft-spoken, a slow, comfortable man who smoked a pipe and wore, against the chill of the harbor, a slipover sweater beneath his jacket. When he spoke, his French was steady and deliberate, a fluency that, Polanyi thought, one wouldn’t have predicted on first impression. “Something’s needed right away,” he said.

  “It’s always like that,” Polanyi said.

  “Well, yes, I suppose it is. Still, it’s what they want.”

  “We’re doing our best.”

  “Naturally you are. But you will have to do it quickly.”

  “You know what happens, when one does that.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re not sure of Kostyka’s people—it’s been two years since he used them.”

  “Who are they?”

  “All sorts. Iron Guard and communist. Army officers, intellectuals. Jews. Café society. It wasn’t built for politics, it was built for business, for information and influence.”

  “Will Kostyka involve himself?”

  “No.”

  “A list, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ask him?”

  “Indirectly. Serebin talked to him in Switzerland, then Marrano met with the homme de confiance, who gave him the list.”

  “Annotated?”

  “Here and there. But very briefly.”

  “You may as well give me our copy.”

  Polanyi handed it over. Brown looked at it briefly, then put it in the inside pocket of his jacket. “How did you get it here?”

  “By hand. With Marrano—he flew from Zurich.”

  “We’ve offered you a w/t set. A suitcase.” He meant wireless/telegraph.

  “We’re better off without it. The German goniometry, their radio location, is too good, over there. And the Turks wouldn’t care for it here.”

  “Put it out in the country.”

  “Maybe on a boat, but not yet. We’re not so concerned about interception, with the Emniyet, they like to know what’s going on, and we try not to offend them. Modus vivendi.”

  “We protect you here, you know, and the rest doesn’t matter, so you needn’t be dainty about it.”

  “I will lose people.”

  “One does.”

  “Yes, but I try not to.”

  “Try what you like, but you can’t let it interfere.”

  Polanyi looked at him a certain way: I’ve been doing this all my life.

  “We are losing the war, Count Polanyi, do you know that?”

  “I know.”

  “Hope you do.” Mr. Brown’s chair squeaked as he moved it back.

  He rose in order to leave, dismissed the food with a glance, then began to relight his pipe. He met Polanyi’s eyes for an instant and, through teeth clenched on the stem, said “Mmm” and strolled toward the door.

  30 December. Ulzhen and Serebin went up to the edge of the 9th Arrondissement to collect the winter issue of The Harvest from the saintly printer. They were not alone—always lots of volunteers, at the IRU. Russians liked to go someplace new and do something different, it didn’t especially matter what it was, so there were three men and two women—“We can push as well as you can”—in the cinder yard behind the printer’s shop, along with a porter and handcart that Ulzhen had hired. In a slow, winter rain, they bundled The Harvest into stacks and tied them with cord, then set the bundles in the cart and covered it with a tarpaulin. They all shook hands with the printer, who had worked through the night, wished him novym godom and novym schastyem—best wishes and happy new year—and headed slowly down a narrow street toward the rue Daru, more than a mile away.

  The Parisian porter wouldn’t let them help, so they ambled along behind the barrow on the wet, shiny street. “One place I never thought I’d be,” Ulzhen mused.

  “The rue Trudaine?”

  “The nineteenth century.”

  One of the Russians had an extra Harvest, some of the pages bound upside down. He’d rescued the journal from a stack of spoiled copies, telling the printer that someone would be glad to have it. He thumbed through the pages, then began to recite. “‘In Smolensk.’” He paused to let them think about the title. “‘In Smolensk, the gas lamps warmed the snow/Petya held a pitcher of milk/We could see the white breath of a cab horse/And the beggar by the church who played the violin/Played the wolf’s song from Prokofiev/Played all that February evening/When we had nothing to give him/But some of the milk.’”

  “Not so bad.”

  “It’s good.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Vasilov.”

  “Vasilov the taxi driver?”

  “No,” Serebin said. “He works at Renault.”

  “‘The penal colony!’” The émigré name for the huge Billancourt plant.

  “May he burn in hell,” one of the women said, meaning Louis Renault. “My poor brother-in-law died out there, worked to death.”

  “How old?”

  “Thirty-eight. After six years of it, travail à la chaîne.” Work on the assembly line. “Like prison, he said.”

  “He was right, rest in peace.” The man who’d read the poem made the sign of the cross. “I tried it. You’re photographed and fingerprinted, the timekeepers watch every move you make and, when they can’t see you, they have spies in the cloakrooms, spies in the lavatory.” He spat into the gutter.

  They were silent for a time, in memory. At the rue Blanche they had to wait, a German military policeman had halted traffic while a convoy of trucks rumbled past. After a minute or so he held up a white-gloved hand, the trucks stopped, and he waved the porter and his helpers across. “Allons, mes enfants.” Go ahead, my children. The porter jerked the handles of the cart and the Russians followed him across the street into the rue Ballu.

  The man with The Harvest looked through the issue, now and again reversing the journal when the pages were upside down. “‘Italian Influence on Three Paintings by Watteau.’”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “You’re getting it wet, you know.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t care. How about...rhymed quatrains from Romashev?”

  “No!”

  “Very well, the parliament votes no. All right, then...Babel!”

  “What? He gave you a story?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Ulzhen stared at Serebin. “Babel?”

  “It’s never been published,” Serebin said. “An Odessa story. Somebody was handed a manuscript copy, he smug
gled it out when he emigrated and gave it to me for safekeeping. I thought, well, nobody’s read it, so, let it be in The Harvest for the New Year. Babel is in heaven. Believe me, if he’s looking down he won’t mind.”

  “‘Froim Grach.’” They clustered around the man and slowed down. The porter looked over his shoulder, shrugged, and kept pace with them.

  In 1919 Benya Krik’s men ambushed the rear guard of the White Army, killed all the officers, and captured some of the supplies. As a reward for this, they demanded three days of “Peaceful Insurrection,” but permission was not forthcoming, so they looted the goods in all the shops on Alexandrovski Avenue. After that they turned their attention to the Mutual Credit Society. Letting the customers enter ahead of them, they went into the bank and requested that the clerks put bales of money and valuables into a car waiting on the street. A whole month went by before the new authorities started shooting them. Then people began to say that Aron Peskin, who ran a sort of workshop, had something to do with the arrests. Nobody quite knew what went on in this workshop. In Peskin’s apartment there was a large machine with a bent bar made of lead and the floor was strewn with shavings and cardboard for binding books.

  The procession crossed into the elegant 8th Arrondissement, although for a time it was like the 9th, everything grimy and poor, with Gypsy fortune-tellers and private detectives and shops that sold cheap clothing and pots and pans. The porter stopped for a rest by the Gare St.-Lazare Métro and they gave him a cigarette and a drink of marc from a tin flask. Gathered around the cart, it was easier to listen to the story.

  Peskin is murdered, then chekists come down from Moscow and shoot the killers, except for one who flees to the house of the bandit called Froim Grach.

  Froim Grach was alone in his yard. He was sitting there without moving, staring into space with his one eye. Mules captured from the White Army munched hay in the stable and overfed mares with their foals were grazing in the paddock. Coachmen played cards in the shade of a chestnut tree, sipping wine out of broken cups. Hot gusts of wind swept the limestone walls, and the sunlight, blue and relentless, poured down over the yard.

  Then, Froim Grach goes to the Cheka and asks them to stop shooting his men. The Moscow chekist is very excited, and rounds up all the interrogators and commissars to tell them who has come to see them, who is inside the building at that very moment.

  Borovoi told them it was the one-eyed Froim not Benya Krik who was the real boss of Odessa’s 40,000 thieves. He kept very much in the background but it was the old man who had masterminded everything—the looting of the factories and the municipal treasury in Odessa, the attacks on the White and Allied troops. Borovoi waited for the old man to come out so they could have a talk with him, but there was no sign of him. He went through the whole building and finally out into the yard at the back. Froim Grach was lying there sprawled under a tarpaulin by an ivy-covered wall. Two Red Army men had rolled themselves cigarettes and were standing smoking over his body.

  The story ended soon after that, with a hint of regret, the twenty-two-year-old chekist from Moscow forced to admit that the old man was “worthless to the society of the future.” The porter finished the cigarette and took up the handles of his cart and they moved off again, walking slowly in the rain toward the office near the cathedral on the rue Daru.

  Serebin was wet and tired when he returned to the Winchester late that afternoon. There had been an impromptu party to celebrate the publication of The Harvest. Several bottles of cheap wine were bought, the journal was toasted many times, and people stopped by to get a copy and stayed to talk and laugh and drink wine.

  On the top floor, Serebin found the door of his room unlocked, the light was on, a small valise stood by the window, and Marie-Galante was lying on the bed reading a fashion magazine. She looked up from the magazine and, after a moment, said, “Hello, ours.” It was tender, the way she said it, he could tell that she knew about Tamara. “You don’t mind, do you? The manager let me in.”

  No, he didn’t mind. Heartsore as he was, it was good to have her there, propped on an elbow on his pillow, a little worried, and caring for him. For whatever reason, dark or sweet, caring for him.

  He took off his wet overcoat and hung it in the armoire to dry. Then leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. The magazine was open to a photo of three models in tall, outlandish hats, the Paris chic answer to occupation.

  “I was in Stockholm,” she said. “So I’ve been on the trains for—days. Felt like it, anyhow.”

  “A wagon-lit?”

  “Coach, ours. Second class. And crowded, people everywhere—it’s a busy war.”

  “Well, consider yourself at home.”

  She relaxed. “You’re gracious,” she said. “You don’t have a bathtub, do you.”

  “There’s a salle de bains for the rooms on the floor below, but it’s, it’s better to use it on Mondays, after the maid cleans. Otherwise, there’s a basin under the sink, you’re welcome to that.”

  “Maybe later, I need to do something.”

  “You have an apartment here, no?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Out in Neuilly.”

  “I thought you did.”

  She paused, then said, “Can’t go there right now.”

  “Oh.” Of course. He understood. Say no more.

  “No, no.” She laughed at him. “It’s not that, such things do not keep Marie-Galante from her tub. It’s little men with mustaches, you know? Waiting on the corner? All day? Mostly one ignores them, but not right now. Right now it’s better not to be in two places at once, so, I’m not in Paris. I’m in—Polanyi-land.”

  Oh.

  “Where you are in high regard. The gentleman was pleased, as much as he ever is, with your approach to the terrible Kostyka, so I come bearing, among other things, his gratitude.” She swung her legs off the bed, stood up, and stretched. “All right,” she said. “Whore’s bath.”

  She went into the bathroom, undressed, started to wash. Serebin took off his tie and jacket and lay down on the bed.

  “Know what?” she called out.

  “What?”

  “We’re going to Bucharest.”

  “We are?”

  “Tomorrow morning. Gare de Lyon.”

  Serebin waited.

  “Isn’t that exciting?”

  “Very.”

  “I knew you’d think so.” She ran the water for a moment. “It’s almost warm, ours.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  “Absolutely you can. You’re going to buy folk art. For your little shop on the rue de Seine, in arty Faubourg St.-Germain. And you’re bringing your wife along. Difficult, the wife. Doesn’t like the idea of your being footloose and fancy-free in sexy Bucharest.”

  “Folk art?”

  He could hear her sloshing water around, wringing the cloth out. “Little wooden animals. Corn-silk dolls. Embroidered Gypsy shirts. Maybe, if you’re lucky, a saint painted on a board.”

  “Is there really such a shop?”

  “Of course! Who do you think we are?”

  “Am I me?”

  “Heavens no.” She emptied the basin into the sink. “Ours?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m going to put on clean underwear and sleep in your bed. You don’t mind do you?”

  “No, not at all.” Then, after a moment, “It doesn’t matter, but I wondered...”

  “What?”

  “On the boat? The first time?”

  She laughed at him. “Oh no! Was I told to do that? No, only to talk to you, the rest was my idea. I’m not—I’ve had lovers, ours, but not so many. I just, liked you, and, if we’re being horribly honest, I liked also the boat, the night at sea, maybe the weather. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now that we’ve settled that, could you, maybe, go out and find us something to eat?”

  “There’s a restaurant nearby, not so bad.”

  “Better not. One thing about Polanyi-land, one does spend ti
me indoors.”

  “Bread and cheese, then. Wine?”

  She came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her clothes in hand. “Whatever you can get. And I think I saw a pâtisserie out on the boulevard and, unless it was a mirage, there were, in the window, éclairs.”

  Just outside the railyards of Trieste, the night frozen and black and starless, it turned 1941. The engineer sounded the train whistle, more lost and melancholy than usual, the way Serebin heard it, and Marie-Galante looked at her watch and kissed him. Then they held on to each other for a long time—for hope, for warmth in a cold world, because at least they weren’t alone, and it would have been bad luck not to.

  They shared a first-class compartment, on that part of the journey, with a sallow young man reading an Italian book, dense and difficult by the look of it, who waited until they parted, then said, “Please allow me to wish you both a happy and prosperous New Year.” They returned the Italian salutation in French, everybody smiled, life was bound to get better.

  And maybe it would but, for the moment, they traveled incognito.

  A month earlier, in the hours before he left the city of Izmir, Serebin, following the written instructions he’d found in his room, had two dozen passport photos made, then left at the portrait studio to be picked up later. Now he understood why. Marie-Galante had brought him a new identity, the passport of Edouard Marchais, well-used, with several stamps from here and there, an Ausweis permit for travel to Roumania, and various other documents Marchais would be expected to have. Marie-Galante, newly Madame Marchais, was dressed for the part in a black, belted overcoat, cut in the latest Parisian style, and a brown beret. On the subject of new identities she was exceptionally casual—paper was paper, it could be made to appear when you needed it. So, now that all he wanted was to be invisible, he could be whoever he liked.

  They had to change trains in Belgrade, and waited for hours in the station, where they found, left on a bench, a Paris Soir, with the headline CIVIL WAR IN ROUMANIA? This did not sound like life getting better, unless you believed in question marks.