Blood of Victory

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.

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 of 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.

“Terrible about Goldbark,” he said.

“It is. And nobody really knows why it happened.”

“It happened because it happened. Next it will happen to me and, you know what? I wouldn’t care.”

“Don’t say that, Boris.”

“Send the crate of eggplants. I’ll tip the deliveryman.”

Serebin laughed. “You’ll survive. Life will get better.”

“We hardly have heat. My daughter is seeing a German.” He frowned at the idea. “Last year she had a Jewish boyfriend, but he disappeared.”

“Probably went to the Unoccupied Zone.”

“I hope so, I hope so. They’re going to do to them here what they did in Germany.”

Serebin nodded, the rumors were everywhere.

“Better not to talk about it,” Ulzhen said. “When’s the magazine coming out?”

“As soon as I do the work. Maybe after Christmas.”

“Be nice for Christmas, no?”

“I suppose.”

“Got anything special?”

Serebin thought it over. “About the same.”

“It’s good for morale, what with winter coming. Not much festive, this year. So, at least a few poems. What about it?”

“I’ll try.”

“I’d be grateful if you would,” Ulzhen said.

“Boris, I want to get in touch with Ivan Kostyka. I called at the office on Montaigne but they said he wasn’t in Paris.”

For a long moment, Ulzhen didn’t answer. “What do you want with him?”

“It’s business,” Serebin said. “I met somebody in Istanbul who asked me if I could contact him. If Kostyka likes the idea there might be a little money in it for me.”

“You know what he is?”

“Everybody knows.”

“Well, it’s your life.”

Serebin smiled.

“Let me see what I can do. Maybe stop by tomorrow, or, better, Thursday.”

“Thank you,” Serebin said.

“Don’t thank me, it’s not free. You have to try to get some money for us. We’ve got to do Christmas baskets, a hundred and eighty-eight at last count.”

“Jesus, Boris—so many?”

“Could yet be more. Now, I have a friend I can call, but, if Kostyka agrees to see you, you have to take that filthy sonofabitch by the heels and give him a good shake.”

“I will, I promise.” Serebin glanced at his watch. “Look, it’s almost one o’clock, let me buy you lunch.”

Ulzhen shook his head. “Save your money.”

“Come on, Boris, I’m serious. Black market lunch.”

Ulzhen sighed. “Three-thirty, I have to be at the store.”

9 December. Dinner at Chez Loulou, deep in the medieval lanes of the 5th Arrondissement. Before the war, a mecca for the daring American tourist: checkered tablecloths, candles in wine bottles, expensive food, nasty waiters, bohemian adventure thick in the air. And not much had changed. Here was Leutnant Helmut Bach, of the city’s most recent tourist invasion, arriving for dinner with a black turtleneck sweater beneath his satin-collared overcoat and a beret set at a rakish angle on his Teutonic head.

“Ilya! Am I late? I’m so sorry—the Métro...”

No, Serebin was early. And, not incidentally, two pastis to the good.

Beneath the Pigalle apache costume was a Saxon in his early thirties. Pale brown hair—cut close on the sides, wispy on top, blue eyes, brass rod for a spine, and an air of quivering anticipation, expectancy; something wonderful must happen, soon. A functionary in the diplomatic administration—it had to do with protocol, official visitors—Bach had come looking for Serebin not long after the combat Wehrmacht had been replaced by an occupation force. Serebin couldn’t help liking him, and the biography of Rilke was real, an autographed copy on Serebin’s bookshelf.

“Lately I’m working on Rimbaud. Ach, freedom. In the words, in, the veins. You don’t read it, Ilya, you breathe it in.” His eyes were wounded, a rose flush across the tops of his cheeks. “Why are we Germans not like that?”

So you can love that. But Serebin didn’t say it. After all, this was only dinner talk, and not so bad. It went reasonably well with the pâté of hare, with the duck aux olives and cabbage fried in the dripping, with the pear tart. Helmut Bach snowed ration coupons, and ascended to fierce courtesy when Serebin tried to produce his own. Look, he was damned sorry that his unromantic countrymen had beaten the French army and taken Paris but really what the hell could either of them do about that?

Serebin liked the dinner, and he ate with pleasure, except for a few moments when the conversation scared him. Maybe scared wasn’t the word, alerted might be better. In fact, he was only just beginning to understand what his affiliation with Polanyi was going to mean.

“You know, Ilya, I’m trying to teach myself Russian—the only way to understand why Russians love Pushkin, so they say. Would you be offended if I asked you to help me out? A word or a phrase, now and then? A rule of the grammar?”

That wouldn’t have bothered the old Serebin, but now he wondered what, if anything, it might mean. Just as it wouldn’t have bothered the old Serebin to ask Ulzhen a favor, because the old Serebin wouldn’t have lied to a friend about what he was doing. But he had lied, and he didn’t know exactly why. To protect Boris Ulzhen. Did it? Really?

And there was worse to come.

“So then, you must tell me about your journey to decadent Bucharest.” Were the papers correct, the accursed Ausweis, all that kind of thing? To think, that a man had to get permission—to travel!

He hadn’t stayed long. Went on to Istanbul.

“Ah. And did you see your friend, your woman friend?”

Had he told Bach about Tamara? Well, maybe. He had all his life told all sorts of people all sorts of things. They crossed his mind like shooting stars, were said, forgotten. Could there be people who remembered, everything? God, he hoped not.

Bach’s voice was delicate. “Her condition, is improving?”

“Actually, it’s not so good. One can only hope for the best.”

“Not so good, Ilya?”

“No.”

“You must not think me intrusive, but there is a famous doctor in Leipzig, an old friend of my family. He is known to be the most brilliant internist in Europe, with access to every kind of specialist, no matter where—Leipzig, Heidelberg, Berlin. As a favor to me, he will see her.”

“Very kind of you, Helmut.”

“What friends do! You could bring her to Leipzig, everything would be arranged.”

“Well...”

“Please, Ilya, think seriously about this. You might be asked to give a brief talk—with a translator, of course. Just coffee and cakes, a few of your admirers. Small price for a friend’s health, no?”

Serebin nodded slowly, feigned uncertainty, a man not entirely sure of what he ought to do. The kitchen door thumped open and shut as a waiter came out with a tray. Bach threw his hands in the air, his face lit with excitement.

“Ilya! Tarte aux poires!”

14 December. The evening train to St. Moritz had only three cars and stopped at every mountain village, one prettier than the next. Strings of lights glistened on the snow, the harness bells of a horse-drawn sleigh jingled in the frozen air. Once, amidst the rhythm of the idling locomotive, Serebin could hear an accordion in a tavern by the station, where a Christmas wreath with a burning candle hung in a window. When the train left, crawling slowly around the long curves, there was moonlight on the forest. Serebin shared the compartment with two Luftwaffe officers, their skis and poles standing in the corner. In silence, they stared out the window.

From Paris to the eastern border, the towns were dark, streetlamps painted blue—landmarks denied to the British bomber squadrons flying toward Germany. There’d been a long stop at Ferney-Voltaire, the last German passport Kontrolle in France, while Gestapo officers searched the train, looking for people who were not permitted to leave. Then another stop, even longer, at the border contrôle in Geneva, while Swiss officers searched the train, looking for people who were not permitted to enter.

Serebin dozed, tried to read a short story submitted to The Harvest, the IRU literary magazine, found himself, again and again, looking out at the night. He’d met the infamous Ivan Kostyka on four or five occasions, over the years. The first time in Odessa—a story assigned by Pravda on the visit of “the renowned industrialist.” So, they’d wanted something from him, and sent Serebin along as a token of their high esteem. Then, in Paris, during a cultural conference in 1936, a lavish party at Kostyka’s grand maison in the 8th Arrondissement. Next, a year later, in Moscow, where Serebin was one of twelve writers invited to an intimate dinner, essentially furniture, as Kostyka met with captains of Soviet industry. Finally in Paris, the spring of 1940, Kostyka embracing his Russian heritage at the IRU Easter party and making a donation that was just barely generous. But then, Kostyka was known to be a genius with numbers, especially when those numbers counted francs or roubles.

Or dollars, or pounds, or drachma, lei, or lev. By then, Kostyka knew who Serebin was, or, at least, the people around him did. Claimed he’d read Serebin’s books and found them “stimulating, very interesting.” It was possibly the truth. One of the versions of Kostyka’s life had him born in Odessa, to a Jewish family, poor as dirt, called Koskin. However, cosmopolitan figures who moved in powerful circles were often believed to be Jews, and Kostyka had never revealed the secret of his birth. Another version had him born Kostykian, in Baku, of Armenian descent, while a third favored Polish origins, Kostowski, somewhere near the city of Zhitomir.

But, anyhow, Russia, on that point at least the mythologists agreed. He was said to have run away from home and poverty at the age of fourteen, making his way to Constantinople, where he joined the tulumbadschi, the firemen, a gang that had to be bribed to extinguish fires, which, at times, when business was slow, they set themselves. From there, he graduated to brothel tout, then used his commissions to play the currency markets in the Greek kasbahs.

As a young man he’d gone to Athens, where he’d used every penny he’d saved to buy good clothing and an extended residency at the Hotel Grande Bretagne. He next contrived to court, then wed, a Spanish heiress. By this time he’d become Ivan Kostyka, accent on the first syllable, which either was, or was not, his real identity, depending on which of the stories you chose to believe. As for the truth, none of the newspaper reporters who tried to follow the trail in later years ever found a trace of him. Some people said that there had actually been someone with that name but, if he’d lived, he no longer did and any record of him had disappeared as well.

In Athens, Kostyka became intrigued by the potential of the Balkan wars and, speaking at least some of the languages, became a commission salesman for the Schneider-Creusot arms manufacturer of Lille. Selling cannon turned out to be his métier, and he discovered that the greatest profit was to be had by selling them to both sides. Kostyka prospered, having learned to use what was known as the Système Zaharoff, or Système Z, named for its originator, the greatest of all the arms merchants, the Russian Basil Zaharoff. The Système Z called for, first of all, the flattery of political leaders—“If only the world knew you as you really are!” Then for a passionate appeal to patriotism, the same in all countries, and, finally, a reminder of the prestige that the possession of bigger and better armaments brought to statesmen of all nations.

But the key element in the success of the Système Z was the operation of a private intelligence service. This was crucial. Kostyka, and other powerful men, men of the world, had to know things. Who to flatter, who to bribe, who to blackmail. Mistresses had to be watched, journalists paid off, rivals destroyed. This was expensive, private detectives and bureaucrats and policemen cost money, but, if you could afford it, worth the expense.

Kostyka made millions. Had castles, paintings, lawyers, stories in the newspapers, had pretty much everything he wanted and, by 1937, Ivan Kostyka had become Baron Kostyka. But it was a Baltic barony, bought from an émigré Lithuanian, and bought in anger. He had, in the 1930s, lived in London, and faithfully served British interests, hoping for a K, hoping to become Sir Ivan Kostyka.

“But then,” Polanyi said in a Turkish whorehouse, “he got into trouble.”

16 December. It was almost noon, Serebin shivered in his overcoat, the alpine sunlight sparkled on the ice of the St. Moritz municipal skating pond. The skaters were almost all women, slow and sedate as they circled the frozen pond. Serebin sat on a wooden bench, Ivan Kostyka at his side.

As Kostyka’s mistress skated past, in fur hat and long fur coat, a silky little terrier in her arms, Kostyka gave her an indulgent smile and a discreet wave, a Swiss wave, and mouthed the words “Hello, darling.”

When she’d gone by, he turned to Serebin. “Who wants to know?”

“A small enterprise,” Serebin said. “To stop this war.”

“From?”

“Britain.”

“Not France? Free France, as they call themselves?”

“No.”

“Perhaps you know the expression ‘false flag.’”

“I’ve heard it. But, in this case, it doesn’t apply.”

“You give me your word.”

“I do.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Perhaps I can, but not today.”

“I give you time, then. But, if you want my cooperation, I must have a signal.”

Serebin agreed.

“I will have nothing to do with the USSR—or anyone else. Understood?”

“Perfectly.”

“My heart is with England, you see.”

He meant it. At seventy, he was bulky and short, had gray hair, brushed back from his forehead in little waves, and a face carved in pugnacious lines, chin and brow and nose thrust out into a world he didn’t like. “These places,” he said, his voice a mixture of sorrow and contempt. “These Monte Carlos and Portofinos. Vevey, whatnot...”

Poor soul.

It was very quiet, the skates made a soft hiss on the ice. Once again, the woman with the terrier came around the circle, this time gliding to a stop in front of the bench. “Good morning,” she said to Serebin. Then, to Kostyka, “Take him, would you? He’s getting restless.”

Kostyka accepted the dog, which sat on his lap, then yipped and trembled as the woman skated away. “Shhh, Victor. Be nice.” He patted the dog with a big hand but he wasn’t very good at it. “Oil,” he said. “Not for me.”

“Risky, I expect.”

“Not even the word. And the men who run it, my God. You know what Gulbenkian said about oilmen? He said they were like cats, that it was hard to know from the sound of them whether they were fighting or making love.”

Serebin laughed.

“Give me a steel mill,” he said. “Or a railroad or some guns. I’ll show you how to make money.”

“Well, the Germans need oil.”

“Oh yeah, oil and wheat, oil and wheat. Why didn’t he just take Roumania and leave the rest of the world alone? Nobody would’ve cared, you know.”

“Hitler wants more.”

Kostyka snorted at the idea. “He’ll have shit.”

“So then, you’ll help.”

No answer. Kostyka looked at Serebin for a moment, but whatever he saw there wasn’t interesting, so he turned and watched the women as they skated and made a face like a man talking to himself and, Serebin felt as though he could almost hear it, almost see it, whatever machine was running in there was big and powerful and very fast. Eventually he said, “You’ll take lunch with us.”

Oh the mistress. At the grand Hotel Helvetia, lunch was set out on the balcony of Kostyka’s suite by two waiters, who were tipped, then waved away. Kostyka, his mistress, and Serebin sat around the table and speared chunks of raw beef with their forks and cooked them in a chafing dish of bubbling oil. “Fondue,” Kostyka said. It was like a eulogy for his life.

Kostyka’s companion, introduced as Elsa Karp, was no powder puff. Not at all what Serebin would have expected. She was easily forty, and heavy, wide at the hips, with copious brown hair, a beak nose, a sullen, predatory mouth, and a sexual aura that filled the air and made Serebin almost dizzy. Or maybe that was the altitude, but he certainly felt it as he watched her eat, sitting across the table from him in front of an alp.

“Monsieur Serebin is from Odessa,” Kostyka said.

“We’ve been there,” Elsa said. “It was...”

Kostyka dabbed his cooked beef in a dish of béarnaise sauce. “Summer. A year ago? Two years?”

“Not last summer. The one before.”

Kostyka nodded. That was it.

“We stayed at the Czar’s palace.”

Serebin was puzzled. “Livadia palace?” That was in Yalta, at the southern end of the Crimea.

“We stayed a night there, darling,” Kostyka said. “In Odessa we stayed with General Borzhov.”

“Oh yes, you’re right. Mischa and Katya.” She looked at Serebin and said, “Do you know them?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“She plays the violin.”

Odessa was elegant, she thought. Italian. White and southern. The famous steps. Eisenstein. The baby carriage. She was from Prague, near Prague. She found it much too gray there, too much Mitteleuropa. She loved their house in Paris, he must promise to come and see them. She was going to have it redone, but then, the war. Now they would have to wait. Of course, for a city, well, London, of course.

“For every man there are three cities,” Kostyka said, quotation marks in his voice. “The city of his birth, the city he loves, and the city where he must live.”

Elsa Karp was animated. “We loved the dinner parties, even with our poor English. Everyone so, brilliant. So clever, the way they, they make you talk.”

Band concerts. Bookstores. Eccentricity. The gardens! Kostyka’s face froze, he was almost in tears. This was, to Serebin, extraordinary, a paradox of human nature—there were people in the world who lived brutal lives, yet, somehow, their feelings stayed close to the surface.

The beef was taking too long to cook. The three of them peered beneath the dish and Elsa Karp adjusted the wick, but the flame remained pale blue and unsteady. Kostyka was annoyed. “Jean Marc!”

Jean Marc appeared from another room. A French aristocrat, a pure type that Serebin easily recognized—tall and slightly stoop-shouldered, with dark hair, his face vain and watchful.

“My homme de confiance,” Kostyka said. Confidential assistant, but much more—the title meant absolute discretion, absolute fidelity, the sacrifice of life itself when necessary. He is armed, Serebin thought.

Jean Marc turned the wick up as high as it would go, but it didn’t help. “It lacks oil,” he said. “I shall call the waiter.”

Kostyka sighed, sat back in his chair, gave Serebin a certain look. You see? How it is with us?

By wireless telegraph:

17:25 16 December, 1940

Hotel Helvetia / St. Moritz / Suisse

Saphir / Helikon Trading / Akdeniz 9 / Istanbul / Turquie

Principal requires London confirmation here soonest

Marchais

18 December. The Geneva/Paris night express was almost empty, only a few passengers leaving Switzerland for occupied France. Serebin took a stack of manuscripts from his briefcase and, with a small sigh, for himself, for the universe, began to work. The Harvest would not appear for Christmas, but maybe it could be done before the New Year. New Year also needed a boost for morale, didn’t it? Of course it did, and their émigré printer was an angel sent from heaven, explicitly, Serebin thought, for the salvation of editorial souls.

Anyhow, he reminded himself, he liked working on trains. Here was Kacherin, “To Mama.” Oh Jesus. The man never gave up—this poor sweet lady cooked potato pancakes, sat in a chair by her sleeping son, three or four times a year. Love rhymed with above, also with stove, well, it almost did. But then, what the hell, this wasn’t The Resounding Shell, or any of the powerful Russian quarterlies. This was The Harvest, it had no Blok, no Nabokov. It had Kacherin and his sugar bun for mama. Who was Serebin to deny him his thirty-six lines? Fix it! Serebin went for the pencil, determined compassion burst like a bomb in his heart. Even in an imperfect world, bedizened didn’t have to rhyme with wizened.

The pencil hovered, and died in his hand. He had no right to do this. Use it as it was, or leave it out. But then, Kacherin’s dues paid for The Harvest, was it not just to include him? Not really. He put the poem aside—maybe in, maybe out, he would wait and see if they had room. And, if they didn’t, and Kacherin didn’t get published, he would at least get a banana.

Serebin carried a handsome check drawn on Kostyka’s Paris bank, but the shaking-by-the-heels hadn’t been easy. To Kostyka it was all the same, donating for Christmas baskets was no different than buying a lead mine, it was investment, and it demanded negotiation. How many baskets? What, exactly, was in these baskets? Serebin improvised. Cheese, a sausage, Ukrainian sweet bread, chocolate, every sort of festive delicacy. Kostyka looked grim. That was all well and good, but what about oranges? What about bananas?

Such things existed in Paris, Serebin admitted, but had to be obtained from German sources or on the black market—either way, very expensive. Kostyka didn’t care, these were now his Christmas baskets, and his Christmas baskets would have an orange and a banana. Understood? Agreed? For a moment, Serebin was afraid he was going to have to sign something, but Kostyka stopped short of that. So, they’d find a way to buy the fruit. They had better, Serebin realized, because Kostyka would not forget their contract and would make it his business to find out if the IRU had met its obligations.

Serebin returned to work. He had a story from Boris Balki, called “Tolstoy’s Lizard.” This was good, and definitely in the winter issue. Balki was an émigré who worked as a barman at a Russian nightclub, the Balalaika, up in the tough Clichy district. He didn’t much like Balki, who he found ingratiating and sly, and always up to something, but he wrote clean, steady prose. “Tolstoy’s Lizard” was a retelling of a true story about Maxim Gorky, who habitually followed people, secretly, in order to use them in his fiction. That was nothing new, Balzac had confessed that he did it all the time. Gorky, the story went, had once followed Tolstoy in the forest of Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy had stopped in a clearing to watch a lizard lying on a rock. “Your heart is beating,” Tolstoy said to the lizard. “The sun is shining. You’re happy.” Then he became sorrowful, and said, “I’m not.”

The train slowed suddenly, then jerked to a stop. Serebin looked up from the manuscript. Now what? They were only twenty minutes from the Kontrolle at Ferney-Voltaire, certainly not scheduled to stop at some village. Serebin peered out the window but there was only the dark station and the frost-whitened fields of the countryside. He put the manuscript aside and opened the door of his compartment in time to see three men in suits, speaking German in low, excited voices, hurrying toward the end of the car. Two of them carried small automatic pistols, barrels pointed safely at the floor. Gestapo? What else.

When they left the train, Serebin followed them to the door, stepped cautiously outside, saw that a few other passengers had done the same thing. Up beyond the locomotive, at the far end of the station, he could see flickering orange light. Serebin took a step along the platform, then another. Somebody said, “What’s the problem?” Nobody knew. Slowly, they all walked toward the fire—nobody had said they couldn’t.

Just beyond the end of the platform, an old Citroën had been pushed across the track and set on fire. Why? The three Germans returned, pistols now put away. One of them waved the crowd of passengers back toward the train. “Don’t worry,” he said in French. “Go back to your seats, please.”

“What happened?”

“As you see.” He laughed. “Some idiot threw a match in the gas tank. They’ll have to wait for it to burn out before they can move it.”

“Sabotage?”

The German, still amused, shook his head. “Folie,” he said, and shrugged. French madness. Who could say what these idiots might do next?

By post:

Drake’s

8 Grosvenor Square

London S.W. 1

18 December, 1940

The Right Honourable the Baron Kostyka

Hotel Helvetia

St. Moritz

Switzerland

Sir:

I write at the direction of Sir Charles Vaughn to offer our most sincere regrets that your name was erroneously omitted from the club’s published list of members for the year 1940. You may be sure that this oversight will be corrected on the 1941 list.

Sir Charles hopes you will accept his personal apologies, and that you will agree to be his guest for dinner as soon as you are able to return to London.

Yours most respectfully,

J. T. W. Aubrey

Secretary

Come home, all is forgiven.

27 December.

The Parisian French had a grand passion for institutes, where people were known to be clever, and well-dressed, and subtly important, their offices located in fine, antique buildings in the fancy neighborhoods. The Institut National de la Recherche Pétrolière was a champion of the breed, the windows looked out over the bare trees of the Jardin du Ranelagh, just across from the Bois de Boulogne, on the majestic border of the 16th Arrondissement. “We interest ourselves in numbers here,” Mademoiselle Dubon told Serebin. “Economics. We don’t actually touch the filthy stuff.” Her smile was tart and sunny, as was Mademoiselle Dubon.

From the moment they met, in her office on the top floor, Serebin thought of Mademoiselle Dubon as a nun. Of a certain age, she was conventionally dressed for business, a somber suit, a green scarf hiding her neck, but she wore nun’s eyeglasses—delicate, gold spectacles, her fair hair short and severe, her rosy face innocent of makeup. There was, as well, a certain biting innocence in her manner—all sins known to her, and all forgiven. At least in the business of oil, but, Serebin suspected, perhaps well beyond that. “So, monsieur,” she said, “you are an old friend of the baron’s.”

“We’ve met, here and there, over the years. Moscow, Paris. A conference, a dinner party.” Oh, you know.

She knew. “I’ve had a note from his Paris office, hand-delivered, that suggests someone like you would call, and that I am to be, informative.” A dark cloud passed in front of the sun. “So I shall be. But, monsieur, if you are not discreet, we shall both be shot, or whatever it is that the Boche do these days. Beheading, is it?”

“So they say.”

“Well, I’d prefer that mine stay where it is, if it’s all the same to you.”

Serebin’s smile was meant to reassure. “I wonder if you could tell me,” he said, “what happened to him, in London?”

“Nobody knows, not really. He was forcing his way up the ladder, as always, but it’s thought he pushed a bit too hard, perhaps bested somebody who was better left unbested. They have rules there—they don’t tell you what they are, but they have them. And, if you break them, doors close, people are out when you call, invitations don’t come. A summer frost, it’s all quite magical.”

“Nothing like Paris, of course.”

The irony was clear, but she said, “We’re perhaps more tolerant here, but you may be right. In any event, the British find themselves in difficulty, and perhaps not so particular about their friends. That’s also in the rules, no doubt.”

“A footnote. But they will prevail, in the end.”

“God and Roosevelt willing, they shall. And sooner would be better. Now, that said, how can I be of service to you?”

“Friends of mine have an interest in the disruption of Roumania’s oil exportation to Germany.”

“Oh do they? Well, I suppose it can be tried. Again.”

“If it will end the war it has to be tried, no?”

She thought for a moment before she answered. “Oil is critical for Germany, especially in time of war. So, it excites them, inspires them to heroic effort. For example, during the evacuation of Dunkirk, the British bombed the oil storage facilities near Hamburg. The hits were not direct, but the tanks were punctured, and three thousand tons of oil leaked out. Almost all of it, however, was recovered, pumped back into the tanks. That, monsieur, that level of determination, is what your friends ought to be thinking about.”

“We know this, in Russia. The last, oh, three hundred years or so, when the moment was right, we would invite them to come over and help us out.”

She knew the history. “National character,” she said. “They fix things. For example, the last time the British went after Roumanian oil, they were quite successful. Have you ever heard the name Empire Jack?”

“No.”

“Colonel John Norton-Griffiths, member of Parliament, no less, and one of those delicious madmen produced by a rather sane race of people. Griffiths showed up in Bucharest in 1916, just ahead of the German cavalry. He came from Russia, in a two-seater Rolls which carried him, his valet, and several crates of champagne. He got the Roumanians to agree that the Ploesti oil fields had to be destroyed and, under his direction, they wrecked. I mean, they wrecked. Blew up the derricks, plugged the wells, broke into the pipelines, flooded the fields with oil and set it on fire. Griffiths worked alongside them, lit off the gas in an engine house and was blown out the door with his hair on fire. Didn’t stop him for a minute. He got hold of a sledgehammer and went for the derricks and the pipes like a demon. In the end, they smashed seventy refineries, burned up eight hundred tons of crude oil and petroleum products. The flames didn’t die down for weeks.”

Serebin acknowledged the magnitude of the adventure but could sense the ending, the homily.

“But, by 1918, the Germans had production back up to eighty percent of the 1914 level.”

“Still, two years.”

“Oh yes, it hurt them. When the war ended, Ludendorff was headed for Baku after Caspian oil, with Turkey, Germany’s ally, trying to break in from the south. At that moment, the army had only a two-month supply, the defense industries were out of lubricants, and the navy was barely able to function.”

“It worked.”

“With Roumanian help, I emphasize that, it did. The Allies held a conference, about ten days after the armistice, where a man named Bérenger, a French senator, made a speech that we don’t, in this building, tend to forget. Oil, he said, ‘the blood of the earth,’ had become, in war, ‘the blood of victory.’”

“A dramatic image.”

“The Germans certainly thought it was. ‘Of course he’s right,’ they told each other. ‘So now we’ll find a way to make our own oil.’”

“Synthetics.”

“The hydrogenation of German coal. The process developed by Bergius in the 1920s, acquired by IG Farben in 1926. Bergius got the Nobel Prize in chemistry, Farben sold a share of the process to Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Germany had oil. Some of it, anyhow. At the present moment—and here I remind you of that man in the top hat, raising his axe—the Bergius process provides ninety-five percent of the Luftwaffe’s aviation gasoline. Still, they must have Roumanian oil. At the moment, they import a high volume from Russia but, if that should stop, they’ll need Roumania. Even with fourteen synthetic fuel plants at work, the Ploesti field would account for fifty-eight percent of the German oil supply. Thus the Blitzkrieg: rapid invasion, no long-term demand for fuel. But, even if the Russian imports end, and even if the tanks stop, down on the roads, Germany can fight the air war, can bomb Britain every night.”

Mademoiselle Dubon studied the look on Serebin’s face—it was not, apparently, unamusing. Her tone was gentle: “You may say merde, monsieur, if you wish.”

“Merde.”

“And I agree. For war in these times, only partial solutions, and not very satisfying. Nonetheless...”

Serebin rose, walked to the window, looked out at the cold, empty park. Before the war, he would have seen British nursemaids and two-year-old French aristocrats, but they’d gone away. When he lit a Sobranie, Mademoiselle Dubon produced an ashtray.

“Have you met the tempestuous Elsa?” she said.

“I have. But no tempests, at least not while I was around.”

“They occur, I’ve heard, but Kostyka is smitten, she can do no wrong. And, adding spice to the gossip, there are those who say she is a Russian spy.”

Serebin returned to his chair. What would that mean? “Is she, do you think?”

“Who knows. A man like Ivan Kostyka serves a life sentence of suspicion, he must assume that everyone he meets is trying to get to him. Sex, love, friendship, gratitude, respect, you name it—those are the tools of the trade. So, if she is a Soviet agent, he suspects it, he goes to bed with it, and worries about it in the morning.”

She paused to let that sink in, then said, “And, speaking of Russia, you should keep in mind the events of last May and June. When Roumania chose Germany over Russia as her patron state—she had to pick one or the other—Stalin became very irritated and took Roumania’s provinces of Bessarabia and the northern Bucovina. That made Hitler nervous, it put the USSR just on the doorstep of ‘his’ oil. So, don’t be surprised if Hitler goes east, maybe sooner than you think.”

“Let’s hope he does, because that will be the end of him.”

“Likely it will, but you can’t count on it. Now, you must be aware of what the British have already tried.”

“Some, certainly not everything.”

“In the fall of 1939, Britain and France offered the Roumanians money, as much as sixty million dollars, to destroy the oil fields, but they could never settle on a price. Then, that same winter, the British secret service sent a force of men from the British navy, posing as art students, up the Danube, to sink a line of barges and block the river. Since almost all Roumanian oil is barged to Germany, a logical solution.”

“That was in the newspapers. A loud snicker from Dr. Goebbels.”

“A justified snicker. The Germans fooled them—got them to go ashore, then stole their fuel. A débâcle. And there were other attempts; a plan to bribe fifty river pilots, to disappear, and murder the other ten. A guerrilla raid on the Tintea field, which is the high-pressure field, thwarted by diplomatic concerns. Some other plot, betrayed by an oil executive in London. There may have been more, that I don’t know about and never will, but the lesson is clear, this is harder than it looks.”

“Encore merde?”

“With pleasure, a Wagnerian chorus of it.”

“And, when they’re done, I have a rather simpleminded question.”

“Ask.”

“Why don’t the Germans simply double their synthetic output?”

“Certainly there is such a plan in the economic ministry, and if they could wave a magic wand, they would. However, these plants take time and resources to build, and the Bergius process demands an extraordinary tonnage of coal—you don’t want to starve the Krupp forges. No guns if you do that. They will certainly build more refineries, but they will also lose capacity to British bombing. So, today, they must have the Roumanian oil. And, tomorrow. And, I believe, for a long time to come.”

“Mademoiselle Dubon. Tell me, what would you do?”

She thought it over for a time, then said, “Well, I leave the miserable details to you and your friends, but there are only two possibilities, as far as I can see. If this is to be a secret operation, sabotage, then there must be, at some level, Roumanian complicity. The only other choice is waves of British bombers, willing to accept an obscene casualty rate from the antiaircraft protection. It took Empire Jack and his Roumanians ten days to do their work, so the small-unit commando raid isn’t an option. And then, you are surely aware that the Roumanians and their German friends know you’re coming. They are waiting for you, my dear.”

There was a silence when she stopped talking. He could hear typewriters in other offices, a telephone rang. Finally she said “So,” raised an eyebrow, and left it at that.

“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 smuggled 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 time 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.

No evidence of that in Bucharest, at least not right away. It was dawn when they arrived at the Gara de Nord and took a taxi through the empty streets to the Athenée Palace on the strada Episcopiei. The city’s grandest hotel, infamous for having cards on its dining room tables that forbade political discussion, and much loved by cartoonists, whose spies peered out from the potted palms, at slinky seductresses and confidence men and cigar-smoking tycoons.

But, too early for them to be out at that hour. There were only maids, plodding down the endless corridors, and one yawning room service waiter, with a tray of glasses and whiskey bottles, for some guest determined not to let the night end just yet. Serebin and Marie-Galante unpacked and fell into bed and made love, made love like lovers, the slow, affectionate, and tired version of the thing, then slept like the dead until the winter sun lit the room and woke them up. “So now,” she said, “we will order coffee. Then we must go to our hideout. A breath of fresh air for us, and some leisure for the Siguranza to search the luggage.”

They walked a few blocks, to the strada Lipscani, then down a lane to a small building in the Byzantine style—lime green stucco, with a steep roof covered in fish-scale slates. Some Ottoman bey lived here, Serebin thought. Inside, it smelled of spice and honey and mildew, and there was a cage elevator—a gold-painted coat of arms mounted atop the grille—that moaned like a cat as it crept slowly to the fourth floor.

The apartment was almost empty. On yards of polished teak floor stood three narrow beds, and a marquetry chest filled with Swiss francs, gold coins, Roumanian lei, a map of Roumania, a map of Bucharest, two Walther automatics and two boxes of ammunition, valerian drops, rolls of gauze bandage, and a horrible knife. There was also a large Emerson radio, with an antenna cable run through a hole in a window frame and out into the thick ivy that covered the wall above a tiny garden.

“This is the safe place to talk,” she said. “Don’t say too much in the hotel room—keep it down to a whisper—and for God’s sake don’t say anything in the lobby of the Athenée Palace. It has one of those acoustic peculiarities; what you say in one corner can be clearly heard in the opposite corner.” She sat on the edge of a bed, produced five sheets of paper from her purse, and handed them to Serebin. It was a typewritten list of names, numbered 1 to 158, with a few words of description by each name:

Senior official, Defense ministry

Private investigator

Sofrescu’s mistress

Assistant manager, Bucharest branch of Lloyd’s Bank, Hungarian

Former ambassador to Portugal, silk stockings

Siguranza, financial specialist

Colonel, General Staff, ordnance acquisition

Publisher, friend of the playwright Ionesco

Journalist, gossip and blackmail

A hundred and fifty-eight times.

Some of the entries had numbers beside them, a price quoted in Swiss francs.

“The British,” Marie-Galante said, “call this an Operative List of Personalities.”

“A kind of poem,” Serebin said. “The way it runs down the page.” He couldn’t stop reading.

The idea amused her. “Called?”

“Oh, how about, ‘Bucharest’?”

Now she was amused. “Don’t kid yourself,” she said.

They needed to know, she told him, who would work for them, which meant who would work against German interests in Roumania. Before the war, the operation had been run as the Roumanian branch of a Swiss company—DeHaas AG—with a local representative, who paid people and accepted information, but it was known that DeHaas AG was Ivan Kostyka. “The network has been dormant since ’39,” she said. “It’s our job to see if any of it can still be used.”

Visit a hundred and fifty-eight souls?

“Not in this life,” she said. “We know who we want to contact. And for God’s sake don’t say what we’re doing.”

They talked for a time but didn’t stay long, it was not a comfortable place to be. Out in the street he noticed a man walking toward them, who met Marie-Galante’s eyes for a moment, then looked away. In his late twenties, with the straight back of a military officer and, Serebin thought, perhaps a Slav, maybe Czech, or Polish.

“Someone you know?”

They turned off the strada Lipscani and headed for the hotel. “We’re not alone here,” she said. “That’s not the way it’s done.” They walked in silence for a few minutes, then she said, “And if by chance you should see Marrano, pretend you don’t know him.”

“Anyone else?”

“Not right now, that you need to know about. Maybe later, we’ll see.”

10:30 P.M., the Tic Tac Club, in a cellar on the strada Rosetti. By the doorman—in a uniform that made him at least a general in that army—a signboard with glossy photographs of Momo Tsipler and his Wienerwald Companions, and the local songstress, Valentina—“the toast of Bucharest!” Also playing: the comedian Mottel Motkevich, of whom the Zagreb Telegraf said “Kept us in stitches!” And, “Special every night—those naughty Zebra girls!”

The maître d’ bowed at the money Serebin put in his hand, and Marie-Galante, in clouds of Shalimar, with hair in a French roll, and evening makeup, took every eye in the room as they were shown to the large table in the corner with a card that said Rezervata. Somebody said “Ravissant!” as they walked by, while Serebin, at the rear of the procession, produced a rather compressed public smile.

Onstage, the Momo Tsipler nightclub orchestra, five of them, including the oldest cellist in captivity, as well as a tiny violinist, wings of white hair fluffed out above his ears, Rex the drummer, Hoffy on the clarinet, and Momo himself, a Viennese Hungarian in a metallic green dinner jacket. Momo turned halfway round on his piano stool, acknowledged the grand entry with a smile, then nodded to the singer.

The sultry Valentina, who rested her cigarette in an ashtray on the piano, where the smoke coiled up through the red spotlight, took the microphone in both hands, and sang, voice low and husky, “Noch einmal al Abscheid dein Händchen mir gib.” Just once again, give me your hand to hold—the first line of Vienna’s signature torch song, “There Are Things We Must All Forget.”

Valentina was well into her third number, Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love,” when Colonel Maniu—senior official, national gendarmerie, and his wife joined the party at the corner table. She dark and taut and bejeweled, he handsome and imposing in evening clothes. Craggy and leonine, he would play the king, not the prince. They came to the table as “Argentines, without means,” did it—their arrival accompanied by a small commotion in whispers.

“We’re so pleased...”

“Madame Marchais, Madame Maniu.”

“Enchanté.”

“Colonel, come sit over here.”

“Madame Maniu, allow me.”

“Why thank you.”

“My pleasure.”

“We’ve just come from the opera!”

“What was it?”

“Rigoletto.”

“Good?”

“Long.”

Serebin and Marie-Galante were drinking Amalfis—the choice of tout Bucharest—vermouth and Tsuica, the national plum brandy. The colonel ordered expensive scotch, and Madame a glass of wine, left alone after one sip.

For a time they smoked and drank and listened to Valentina; another throaty Viennese love song, then, as finale, Piaf’s “L’Accordéoniste.” This drew immediate and thunderous applause in the crowded cellar. It was clearly sung as a political anthem, for love of that cruelly occupied city nearest the Roumanian heart. Serebin looked over at Marie-Galante, who stared fiercely at the stage, eyes shining, close to tears. On the final note, Valentina put a hand to her heart, the drummer beat a military flourish, and the audience cheered.

Serebin the romantic was moved, Maniu the policeman was not. “Nightclub patriots,” he said.

“And tomorrow?”

Maniu shrugged.

Madame Maniu gave him a look.

“Well, colonel,” Marie-Galante said, “you know the people here, but I think she meant it.”

“She certainly did,” Madame Maniu said.

“May I invite her over?” the colonel said. “You would enjoy meeting her, and she knows all sorts of interesting people.” He took a card from a leather case, wrote on the back, summoned a waiter, and told him what to do. Then he said, “So, how is our mutual friend?”

“As always. He doesn’t change,” Serebin said.

“And he gave you my name? Personally?”

“He did.”

“Why would he do that, if you don’t mind my asking.”

“He’s a good friend of ours—we share an interest in how life will go here.”

“It will go very badly, as it happens. The legionnaires—the members of the League of the Archangel Michael, called the Iron Guard—will fight Antonescu, and his German allies. To the death.”

“They are madmen,” Madame Maniu said.

“For them,” the colonel said, “Antonescu and Hitler are insufficiently fascist. The Legion is drunk with some kind of national mystique, and their position reminds one of the Brown Shirts in Germany, in 1934, who were so crazy, who were such, well, idealists, that Hitler had to destroy them. When Codreanu, who originally organized the Legion—and he was known as ‘God’s executioner’—was killed in ’38, with thirteen of his acolytes, the legionnaires took to wearing little bags of dirt around their necks, supposedly the sacred earth on which their leader fell. And some of the peasants believed, truly believed, that Codreanu was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.”

The Companions of the Wienerwald began to play a kind of drunken elephant theme, which signaled the appearance of Mottel Motkevich, who, to a series of rim shots from the drummer and an expectant ripple of laughter, staggered to the middle of the stage. The spotlight turned green, and for a time he stood there, swaying, his flabby face sweating in the overheated room. Then he closed his eyes and shook his head, clearly overwhelmed by it all—I just woke up in the maid’s bed with the world’s worst hangover and somebody pushed me out on the stage of a nightclub.

He peered out at the audience for a time, then said, “Where am I, Prague?”

“Bucharest!”

“Hunh.” He sighed, then said, “All right, Bucharest. Say, know where I was last week?”

A different volunteer: “Where?”

“Moscow.” He rolled his eyes at the memory. “Oi vay.”

Laughter.

“Yeah, you better laugh. Did you know, by the way—and this is actually true—they have a perfume factory there, and they make a scent called Breath of Stalin.”

Laughter.

“Can you imagine?” He gave them a moment to think about it. “So, of course, when you’re in Moscow, there’s always a parade. That’s fun, no? Hours of it. When they come to the end, they run around the back streets and march again. Anyhow, I’m standing there with my old friend Rabinovich. Rabinovich is no fool, he knows where his bread is buttered, if he had bread, if he had butter, and he’s holding up a big sign. ‘Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for my happy childhood.’ So, time goes by, and a couple of policemen come over and one of them says, ‘Comrade, it’s a swell sign you got there but tell me, how old are you?’ ‘Me?’ Rabinovich says. ‘I’m seventy-five.’ ‘Well then,’ the policeman says, ‘I have to point out to you that when you had the happy childhood, Comrade Stalin wasn’t even born.’ ‘Sure,’ Rabinovich says, ‘I know that. That’s what I’m thanking him for.’”

It went on. Russian jokes, Polish jokes, Hungarian jokes. Maniu had another scotch. A police car went by in the street, its high-low siren wailing, and Mottel Motkevich paused for a moment. Then, as the routine neared its end, he looked: offstage, gaped in mock horror, and held his hands to the sides of his face—if you could see what I see!

“Now the fun begins,” the colonel said.

“Thank you, Prague!” Mottel called out, and waddled off to the elephant theme as Momo Tsipler clapped and said, “Let’s hear it for Mottel Mot-ke-vich!”

As the applause died away, Colonel Maniu said, “Well, what’s going on here is not so funny.”

Serebin ordered another Amalfi.

“My advice to you,” the colonel said, “is, stay out of the way.”

“Oh,” Serebin said, “we just want to talk to people, people who’ve helped in the past.”

“Surely not the same thing, not now. That was just, business. Commercial information, a little money in the right hands. I don’t think anybody really cared—it’s a way of life here.”

“What’s so different?”

“Everything.”

The old cellist lit a cigarette, holding it with thumb and forefinger, and smoked blissfully, leaning back in his chair, off in some other world. Serebin thought about what to say next. Do the best you can, Marie-Galante had told him on the train. You’ll just have to get your sea legs.

“We are realists,” Serebin said. “And we know it’s not the same, we know that some of the sources are no good now. And you’re right, colonel, this isn’t commerce, it’s politics, and that’s always been dangerous. But we do have money, and we will take good care of the people who help us. As you know, in times like these, money can mean, everything. So, if it used to be, say, five thousand Swiss francs, now it’s fifteen, or twenty.”

Momo Tsipler hit a dramatic chord on the piano and the Companions swung into the Offenbach theme, the Mitteleuropa version, clarinet leading the way, but emphatically the cancan. “Animierdamen!” Momo sang out—nightclub girls. “Die Zebras!”

A dozen women came prancing and neighing onto the stage, then out into the audience. They were naked, except for papier-mâché zebra heads and little black and white shoes made to look like hooves. They went jiggling among the tables, playing with the patrons—a pat with a hoof, a nudge with a muzzle—whinnying from time to time, then galloping away.

The colonel’s voice rose above the hilarity. “Yes,” he said, “for some, perhaps, that would be sufficient.”

Madame Maniu leaned toward the colonel and spoke briefly in Roumanian.

Maniu nodded, then said, “I trust you understand our position in this. We will, of course, do whatever needs to be done.” His tone had stiffened, as though he were defending his honor.

“Well, yes, of course,” Serebin said.

One of the zebras came bounding to their table and, as she bent over the colonel and began to unknot his tie, Serebin found himself staring at an excessively powdered behind, which waggled violently and threatened to upset his Amalfi. Maniu smiled patiently, being a good sport his only option, while Serebin whipped the glass away and held it safely in the air. He was unaware of the expression on his face, but Marie-Galante watched him for a moment, then burst into helpless laughter. The zebra finally got the tie off and went cantering away with it, held high like a prize.

Marie-Galante wiped her eyes and said, “Oh dear God.”

The colonel persisted. “What I was going to say, was that we are very much indebted to Ivan Kostyka, but it has nothing whatever to do with money.”

In the center of the room, a great commotion. A zebra had snatched a pair of eyeglasses from a very fat man with a shaved head, who turned pink and tried desperately to look like he was having fun. And while he was perhaps too embarrassed to try to retrieve the glasses, his wife clearly wasn’t. She ran shrieking after the girl, who danced away from her, then climbed up on a table, put the glasses on the zebra head, and did a vivid dance on the general theme of myopia. Meanwhile, the Companions played away at full volume, the clarinet soaring to its highest register as the crowd cheered.

Maniu started to speak, but his wife put a hand on his arm, and they all sat back and watched the show. In time, the zebras went prancing off and, a few minutes later, a waiter appeared at the table, bearing Colonel Maniu’s tie on a silver tray.

“Our local amusements,” Madame Maniu said.

“Not so different in Paris,” Marie-Galante said. “It takes people’s minds off their troubles. Do you suppose that poor little man got his glasses back?”

“I expect he did,” Madame Maniu said.

“I promise you he did,” the colonel said. “That poor little man is something or other in the German legation.”

“Always politics,” Serebin said.

“Well, here anyhow,” Madame Maniu said.

“No, it’s everywhere.” Serebin finished his drink and looked around for a waiter. “Maybe time for the desert island.”

“I’ll go with you,” the colonel said. “But we better learn to speak Japanese.”

“You were telling us a story, colonel,” Marie-Galante said.

“Yes,” Maniu said, a sigh in his voice. “I suppose you should hear it. What happened to us was this: in the spring of ’38, Codreanu and his followers were arrested. Codreanu himself had murdered the prime minister, at the railway station in Sinaia, and he and his thugs were plotting to overthrow the king and take the country for themselves. So, certain trusted officers, and I was one of them, one of the leaders, managed this arrest, done in such a way that there was no violence. But the Iron Guard wouldn’t go away. Cheered on by their supporters—philosophy professors at the university, civil servants, just every sort of person, they assassinated Calinescu, the prime minister who’d ordered the arrest. Six months later, as the uprising continued, somebody lost patience with the whole business and Codreanu and his followers were executed. ‘Shot while trying to escape.’ Now that’s the oldest story in the world, and for all I know they may actually have been trying to escape, but true or not doesn’t matter. Codreanu was a threat to the state, so it was either that, or have him as dictator.

“The Iron Guard vowed revenge, it was like somebody had knocked down a hornets’ nest. One of their responses was to let it be known that I was involved in the original arrest. They didn’t come after me—maybe more couldn’t than didn’t, I was very careful—but our two daughters, in school in Bucharest, were harassed. By schoolmates and, far worse, even by some of the teachers. I mean, they spit on them, on children. When Kostyka found out about this, he arranged for them to go to boarding school, in England, where they are now. I suppose we could have gone as well, but I wasn’t going to be thrown out of my own country, you understand, not by these people. So, you see, our friend helped us when we were in trouble, and paid for it. Now, if we’re needed to do this work again, we’ll do it. But please, for God’s sake, be careful.”

“For now,” Serebin said, “we need only to know who we can trust.”

“For now?” The question mark was barely there—Maniu’s irony well tempered by courtesy.

“We’ll have to see,” Serebin said. “There may...” He stopped short as he saw the singer Valentina, working her way toward them through the crowd.

A waiter brought two chairs, and they all squeezed in together. The second chair was for the singer’s gentleman friend, gray and diffident, older—maybe fifty to her thirty, with stooped shoulders and a hesitant smile. “Gulian,” he said, introducing himself with a nod that passed for a bow, and said little after that. Across the table, Valentina was not much like the typical chanteuse. A studious girl, beneath the rouge and mascara, soft and pretty, probably Jewish, Serebin thought, and conservatory-trained, working as a nightclub singer because she needed the money.

Serebin ordered champagne, and Marie-Galante proposed a toast to Valentina. “To thank you for your song,” she said. “I am Parisienne.”

“Piaf is inspiring,” Valentina said. Like most educated Roumanians, she spoke reasonably good French. “I heard her in Paris. Twice. Before the war.”

“We’re at the Athenée Palace,” Serebin said. “Buying folk art for our shop on the rue de Seine.”

“Yes? That must be interesting.”

They managed to make small talk, just enough, Marie-Galante coming to the rescue each time it faltered, then Valentina excused herself—she must have a few minutes before the next show started.

When they’d gone, Serebin said, “Who is he?”

“A businessman,” Maniu said. “Very rich, one is told. And very private.”

Conversation continued, but Serebin’s mind wandered, here and there. The evening was winding down, he could feel it. Madame Maniu glanced at her watch and Colonel Maniu mentioned that he had a car and driver and offered them a ride back to the hotel, but Marie-Galante caught Serebin’s eye and he declined. Not long after that they said good night, and Serebin asked for the check.

As they headed for the door, Serebin looked back at the table. The waiter had collected what remained of the bottle of champagne, and the half-empty glasses, and was carrying them, very carefully, back to the kitchen.

It was long after midnight when they left. Snow was falling, soft and heavy in the night air, and the street lay in the still silence that comes with snow. A trasuri, a horse-drawn cab, stood alone in front of the Tic Tac Club.

Serebin helped Marie-Galante up the step. “The Athenée Palace,” he told the cabman. They sat close together on the old cowhide seat, and Marie-Galante rested her head on his shoulder. The cabman, in heavy mustache and crushed hat, flicked the reins and they moved off down the street.

It was so quiet they did not speak. The cold night smelled good after the smoky cellar. Serebin closed his eyes and, for a time, there was only the squeak of the turning wheels and the steady trot of the horse on the snow-covered pavement. When the horse slowed, abruptly, Serebin looked up to see where they were. They had come to an intersection, where the strada Rosetti met the Boulevard Magheru. Not far from the hotel, he thought. The horse went a little further, then stopped, its ears pricked for a moment, then flattened back against its head. Now what? The cabman made a clicking sound but the horse didn’t move, so he spoke to it, very gently, a question. Suddenly, Marie-Galante’s hand went rigid on his arm, so tight he could feel her fingernails, and he smelled burning. In the distance, a muffled snap, then another, and a third.

The cabman turned and looked at them. Calmly, Serebin waved him on, saying “Just go ahead” in French. The cabman called the horse’s name and it took a few steps, then stopped again. Now the cabman spoke to them. They didn’t understand the words but they could see he was frightened—of what lay ahead but, also, of disobeying well-dressed people who came out of nightclubs. “It’s all right,” Marie-Galante said. “It’s all right.”

He tried once more, this time cracking a green leather whip above the horse’s withers. The horse lowered its head and moved off at a fast trot. A minute went by, maybe whatever was going on, a few blocks away, was over. But it wasn’t. Somewhere in the next street, a sharp crack and a rolling echo, cut by the rhythmic thump of a machine gun, followed by shouted orders. The air above the cab sang for an instant and the horse twisted in its harness and reared up as the cabman fought the reins. The cabman’s eyes were wide when he turned around. “Va rog, domnul,” he pleaded. Serebin knew at least this much Roumanian, it meant “please, sir.” Up ahead, Serebin saw two shadows, running low from one doorway to the next. “Va rog, domnul,” the driver said, pointing to his horse. He repeated it, again and again, and Serebin could see he was crying.

“We have to get out,” Serebin said.

He climbed down, and helped Marie-Galante, who tried a few steps in the snow, then took her shoes off and walked quickly beside him. Behind them, the cabman turned the trasuri in a wide circle, then disappeared back down the street.

“I hate Bucharest this time of year,” Marie-Galante said, breath coming hard.

“Are you all right?” he said.

“For the moment.”

“Over there,” he said, heading toward the arched entryway of an apartment building. The arch covered a porte cochere, which ran some thirty feet back to a massive door with a griffon’s head on the iron ring that served as a handle. Serebin tried the handle, then pounded on the door.

He gave up, after a while, and they settled against the wall that supported the arch, deep in shadow. “I better put these back on,” Marie-Galante said, hanging on to Serebin and forcing one wet foot at a time into the suede heels. There was a brief silence, then the machine gun started up again, a series of three-round bursts that went on and on, and were joined first by scattered rifle shots, then a second machine gun, sharper and faster than the first.

The smell of fire intensified until Serebin’s eyes began to water, and a drift of black smoke floated over the snow. Across the street, a window on the top floor was cranked open, the creak of rusty metal absurdly loud against the background of gunfire. A silhouette with rumpled hair thrust itself out the open window, shook its fist, and shouted angrily. A second voice, a woman’s voice, shouted even louder, the silhouette disappeared, and the window was cranked shut.

Serebin laughed. Marie-Galante said, “And don’t ever, ever, let me catch you doing that again!” Then, a moment later, “You don’t suppose it’s going to be a long coup d’état, do you?”

“What we want now is daylight, that usually makes a difference.” He looked at his watch. “Almost two, so...”

“Three hours. Want to beat on the door again?”

“No.”

“Sing ‘Frère Jacques’?”

A beam of yellow light appeared on the street. It swept from one side to the other, returned, and went out. From the same direction, back toward the nightclub, came the irregular beat of an old car engine. “Merde,” Marie-Galante said. “We’re on the wrong side of this thing.”

The car crawled toward them, they pressed themselves against the icy stone wall beneath the arch, as far as possible into the shadow. “Don’t cross over,” Serebin said.

The car came into view, then stopped almost directly in front of the entryway. Painted on the door was a fiery crucifix crossing a dagger. “The Iron Guard cavalry,” Serebin said.

“Shh.”

The searchlight was mounted on the roof. As the car idled, it snapped on, probed the entryway, crept up the side of the building, then went off.

“They know,” Serebin whispered. The door. A telephone call.

The car door opened, the dome light went on, somebody swore, and the door slammed. They heard footsteps crunching in the snow.

He was sixteen, Serebin thought. With a strange, elongated face—something wrong with him. Hair cut high above the ears, armband with symbol. He carried a rifle and, when he saw them, he lazily pointed it at Serebin’s heart and spoke a few words, his voice edgy and tight. They raised their hands. He beckoned, they stepped toward him, and he backed up until all three were just under the edge of the arch.

He stared at them for a moment, swung the rifle back and forth, from one to the other, then worked the bolt.

“’Bye, ours.”

The boy spoke again, irritated. And again.

“What’s he want?” Marie-Galante said.

Serebin had no idea.

Pointed to his eyes, then away.

“He means,” Serebin said, “don’t look at me while I do this.”

“Fuck him.”

A voice from the car, a question.

An answer, fast, thick with tension.

Again, the voice from the car.

The boy with the rifle answered, querulous this time.

The car door opened, then slammed shut. Somebody spoke, and the searchlight hit Serebin full in the face. He had to close his eyes.

But he’d seen that the second one was older, and had a pistol of some sort in his hand. That meant command. “Lei,” the man said. “Francs, pounds.”

Serebin thought of saying “Reichsmarks,” which would save their lives, but he didn’t have any. Instead, he reached slowly into his pocket and threw money, mostly lei, on the snow. Marie-Galante took off her watch and her necklace and dropped them on the money. The man pointed to her hand, she added her wedding band.

“Passportul.”

Serebin produced his passport and tossed it on the ground. Marie-Galante searched her small evening bag, swore, mumbled something about the hotel room, then found hers. The older man picked them up, along with the money and the jewelry. He paged through the passports, saw the Ausweis and other German documents, then said “Franculor,” French, and tossed them away.

He spoke to the boy with the rifle. It sounded like a man talking to someone he knows is crazy—soothing, but firm. The boy lowered the rifle. The commander turned to Serebin and Marie-Galante, said, “Hotel,” and jerked his head in the direction they’d been going in the cab. When he saw that Serebin understood, he said, “La revedere, domnul,” good evening, and the two returned to the car. The searchlight went off, the car turned around and drove away.

Serebin saw the boy again, a few days later. Or maybe not, there was no way to be sure. He’d been hung from an iron bar that held the sign for an umbrella shop, and the face was quite different, but Serebin rather thought it was him.